Zero Star

by Chad Huskins

  “What’s their posture?”

  “Advancing speed, chevron formation.”

  “Are their engines hot?”

  “No, sir. They didn’t use FTL to get to us. Likely they were coasting out there in the darkness for a while, maybe using a plasma shield to blanket themselves.”

  Utica nodded. “They were here before us, they just didn’t attack because they wanted us to get cozy around Cryzek.”

  Erdwin, his XO, nodded. “That’s a good bet, skipper.”

  Utica switched channels. “Comms One, conn. Let me guess, we’re being jammed.”

  “We are, Captain.”

  “Then send a tightbeam to all commands, let them know what we’re up against.”

  “Sir!” the XO screamed. “Sensor room reports torpedoes in the water!”

  “Extend all fortified shield walls,” he said. “Send a pulse to Nuerthanc, pull his wings to cover starboard. Secure all hatches, give us maximum integrity—”

  “They’re not headed for us, sir,” Erdwin said. “They’re headed for Cryzek.”

  “Christ,” Utica breathed. “Tightbeam to all ’screamer squadrons and wyrm flocks! Tell two squadrons to intercept and shoot those things out of the vacuum, give me a flock doing hunter-seeker runs! Tell the others to stand by and prepare to defend the station!”

  THE SILAS D. REGINALD and its two companion ships entered directly into combat around Honagher, the smallest of Widden’s four moons. There were two Ascendancy castleships there in waiting. They must have pulled back just as Lord Ishimoto was coming in, keeping clear of the Pacifier. The castleships were parked on the dark side of the moon, quietly waiting for their moment, all while sending down drop pods that slammed hard into Honagher’s surface and spilled mechanicae troops that swarmed inside the helium-3 farms.

  Ascendancy castleships looked about like their namesake, not poined or chevron-shaped, not meant for atmospheric movement. They were mile-wide compristeel orbs, with large jagged spires sticking out of every hemisphere, their crenellations giving them the look of castle walls, and the massive tubes leading between them looking like portcullises.

  As soon as the Reginald saw them, the Ascendancy castleships spotted Reginald and her support craft, and the exchange began at once. From a distance of three thousand miles, they unleashed torpedoes, turrets, railgun rounds, and laserfire. The lasers were invisible, merely intensely-focused X-rays that could superheat the hull and melt the electronics insulated within. Reginald had no Pacifier, but it had twenty railguns that fired six-foot-long rounds of depleted-uranium at six percent the speed of light, as well as six rotating turrets. Its Diogenes supercomputer did the calculations for ideal targets, and hammered the castleships.

  But there was a problem. A serious one. The Ascendancy had some type of missile that was fast, nimble, and occasionally disappeared altogether from scopes. They proved impossible to target. Chaff barely affected their navigation, and nothing confused their targeting.

  It was seconds later that they received the update from Lord Ishimoto: THE ENEMY KNOWS HOW TO SPOOF FRIENDLY TRANSPONDER CODES.

  When the missiles hit, they lost arti-grav, and began floating within their seat restraints.

  One of the Ascendancy’s gauss rounds happened to breach CIC, taking the captain’s head clean off his shoulders. Emergency systems pumped Rescue Foam into the gap, and it froze instantaneously. While the captain’s lifeless body floated within his seat’s restraints, and his neck pumped out blood that swirled around itself and formed tiny blood-planets with tiny blood-moons, his XO screamed for them to to pull back. “Call for support! Have the Douglas deploy a Le Sage shadow to cover our escape!”

  Ten seconds later, the Korven Douglas, an old Katana-class, came to their rescue, all her guns screaming as the graviton barrel was deployed from her belly. The Le Sage shadow was not very big—usually, they were fired in combination with other interdictors, to make a much larger gravitational disturbance overall—but it was enough to cover one ship’s escape.

  Reginald’s XO, now in command, activated the plasma shield, which would make it impossible for them to be tracked, but it also plunged them into complete darkness.

  With the plasma shield enacted, no energy of any kind could cleanly penetrate the invisible bubble around Reginald, not even light. That meant it could not be painted with targeting sensors, which saved it from most of the incoming missiles, especially since the XO, now acting captain, had them activating OMS and conducting heavy evasive maneuvers.

  Seen from outside, Reginald appeared to be a wavering, black, cloudy blob. That blob retreated as its two companion ships laid down suppression fire for a retreat.

  There was no saving Honagher. The tiny moon was lost.

  WE JUST HAVE to hold this street while the other wings and drop ships wreak havoc elsewhere, Lyokh told himself, over and over, as he fired his Fell rifle until it was spent. He ducked back behind cover, spat out a magazine and slapped another one in place, then took up the firing line again.

  Explosions rent the air. One of the pyramids behind him had partially collapsed. Three dead bodies were behind him, two men and one woman he had gotten to know over the last few weeks of training. Two of their bodies were still in kneeling positions, still firing, their STACsuits and their deeply ingrained instincts keeping them in the fight.

  Though his head is cut off, he should not die.

  The enemy’s grasshopper drones continued forward, firing round after round into the hiding places where Devastator Wing had fled. Heeten had taken the battle to it, leading the other warhulks against it. Their massive arms grabbed at its legs, tried to topple it. Heeten used both hands to grip its barrel and aim it towards the sky. Once, when it seemed like it was cueing up to fire again, Heeten strained Susi to her maximum power, pointing the grasshopper’s barrel at its own people just in time, and it slew ten of them by mistake.

  Bullets smacked off Lyokh’s armor, and tinzer particle beams stopped an inch away from his plates, their power not diminished appreciably. Their beams took only a second to bore through the plasma shield of a STACsuit. A soldier’s plasma shield was not nearly as powerful as that of a Republican starship, it neither put them in a sphere of darkness nor blocked all energy, it merely provided save cover from low-level directed-energy weapons.

  Unless the beams hit him from the front, Lyokh didn’t know he was being hit at all, because it did not create an impact of any kind, it only heated and melted materials. The only way he knew he was in danger from a tinzer was when his HUD alerted him to a rise in suit temperature, and he would take cover from the tinzer beam.

  A muddled transmission hissed in his ear. “—re Wing Actual! Can’t keep up this pressure! Request…can’t…over!”

  Lyokh ducked behind cover, used NUI to pull up the pane showing live footage from Captain Ahlander’s helmet cam. The man looked like he was crawling—from an injury, or for tactical purposes, hard to say—and Lyokh saw mechanicae scrambling on the walls all around him while one of his people’s bodies was set ablaze by a tinzer beam.

  “Fire Wing Actual, this is Gold Wing Actual!” he shouted. “Get out of that alley! Lay down suppression with hulks and fall back by squads! Over!”

  “—can’t…” was all he got.

  Two more grasshoppers appeared at the end of the street, their railgun heads darting around like the heads of curious ducks, checking out this target and that. They each fired once at the Ravagers, who took the hits with equanimity and fired right back at them, taking one out. Three more grasshoppers appeared right behind it.

  Lyokh spied a squad of six mechanicae moving out from the cover of the grasshoppers and rushing for other cover behind a downed warhulk. His HUD marked them, tracked them. He took aim, the Fell auto-targeting, and squeezed off a few rounds, tagging the leader and the guy just behind him. The others returned fire with tinzers and he took cover just as the bus he was hiding behind started to melt and catch fire. He peeked around the corner, saw
Heeten still wrestling with the grasshopper, tearing off its head. Zooming in on the neck of the weapons platform, Lyokh thought he saw a thin, thin connection.

  On an open channel, he yelled, “Aim for the necks on those mobile platforms! Aim for the grasshoppers’ necks!”

  A few people heard and understood. Enough so that two of the grasshoppers’ heads quickly became crippled, their railgun heads rising and falling, sometimes misfiring into the ground at their feet.

  Lyokh saw forty or so more mechanicae pouring into the street, coming through the doorway of a large stepped pyramid up ahead. The first two or three floors of that pyramid were also occupied, by snipers and launchers, all of them using the high ground to start picking off Gold Wing.

  “Ravagers, this is Gold Wing Actual! Those windows! There, there, there!” he said, using tactical chops of his hands to send them the waypoints.

  Two seconds later, the Ravagers unleashed hell. The pyramid exploded as shell after shell hammered into it. Lyokh saw the upper portions of the pyramid sag slightly. He looked at the foot of the pyramid, and used a little-used program on his HUD. The environmental layout screen could estimate key structural points, typically only used by demolition squads. They had not been sent with demo missions in mind—they were supposed to be here ahead of the Ascendancy, and just providing patrols and supporting the local guard—so Lyokh might be the only one thinking this way.

  “Ravager One!” he said. “Target these exact spots I’m sending you now! Concentrate all fire! Give it everything you’ve—”

  Before he even finished, Ravager One pummeled the building with all its arsenal. It took ten seconds, but the already weakened structure finally collapsed, the top half pancaking into the lower, likely killing all mechanicae squads inside, as well as those that were currently using the ground floor to maneuver from one street over.

  Lyokh heard the guy next to him scream, “The wall! The w—”

  Half his face was melted off by a tinzer beam. Lyokh watched his body half collapse, then stand, and go staggering forward into battle, firing like a ghost that haunted the battlefield.

  No luck today, friend.

  As the walking corpse walked past, Lyokh snagged two unused magazines from its gear harness, reloaded his own, fired on another sixty or seventy or eighty mechanicae coming down the street, stepping out of the dusty cloud left by the collapsed pyramid.

  With an eye-flick, Lyokh opened a channel to all air support. “Gold Wing Actual to all Nova pilots listening! We need air support! Now! Not later! Now!”

  A staticky transmission was all he got.

  A flash-message twinkled in his periphery. He eye-flicked it, and read it:Shatterstar deployment successful. Advancing to bombardment posture. Drop ships incoming. You have help on the way.

  The best bit of news they had received yet.

  “Hoy up! We’ve got support coming! And orbital bombardment! Hang tight!”

  Then, here came a shadow again. Loykh did not need to look up, he knew the shape and maneuvering of the shadow.

  Thrallyin came swooping down, snagged one of the grasshoppers in its jaws and wrapped another on in its tail. It took off with them. Lyokh could see Artemis on the wyrm’s back, directing it by the reins while a single drone turret fired from its dorsal.

  For a moment, all the mechanicae turned their fire skyward. It was a mistake. One that lasted only seconds, but it was enough. “Move up!” Ten men went with him, as did a med bot. Lyokh moved out from behind the bus and dashed for the next bit of cover. Ahead of him, he saw Meiks running with three others, bolting across the battlefield like a madman without a plan, firing as they went. Trust Meiks to go full bore without thinking.

  A bomb landed just behind Meiks and his group, sending them all flying, and the debris and dust concealed Meiks’s body. Lyokh could not see if he had survived.

  No sooner had Lyokh and his ten followers found cover behind a large hunk of collapsed building than a railgun opened fire on them. “Ravagers!” he called. “We’re going to make a push up the street! Abandon the rear! Repeat, abandon the rear! Advance south, direct all fire on those grasshoppers! All units, lay down suppression and fall back by squads! Hulks at the rear, provide cover fire!”

  “We’re advancing?” someone shouted incredulously. “We’re not holding?”

  “We’re sitting ducks out here! We need to give them reasons to think twice about coming towards our street! And we need to create some space for our incoming friends!”

  “Copy that.”

  Lyokh waited for something—anything—to give him an opening. Another explosion. Another collapsed building. Another flyby by Thrallyin. Anything.

  Finally, he got the aerial support from the Nova pilot he had been waiting for. It was brief, just a strafing run that peppered the side of the street where the enemy was thickest, but it was enough.

  Lyokh ran for the next piece of cover, surrendering himself to death once again, knowing that each step could be his last, that he could be killed instantly and never know what happened, or who killed him, or what became of the three wings counting on him, or Widden, or the senator named Kalder, or any of it.

  But he made it to the next piece of cover, and fired at a squad of twenty mechanicae just thirty feet away. He killed one, maybe two. A third took a hit to his arm and went spinning to the ground. His fellows took out a couple, too, but the med bot was having to drag one of them. Lyokh hadn’t even known one of his own was injured.

  Thrallyin chased an Ascendancy drone over their heads, and three other wyrms joined him in tearing it apart. Thrallyin clutched some of the drone’s remains in its jaws, swept low through the street, and hurled the twisted metal at the mechanicae, crushing six or seven of them before he spread his wings and took off into the sky again, snakes of tracer fire chasing him.

  While this distraction had been going on, Lyokh took advantage again, rushing forward and ordering the launcher in his party to fire straight ahead. The explosion pushed them back. A bullet smacked into Lyokh’s shoulder, bouncing off and dropping him to one knee. His STACsuit helped him recover, its servos whining as he corrected his balance and advanced.

  Forward, forward, forward, always forward.

  The Ravager tanks were coming up behind him. He made way for them. Heeten came up behind Lyokh, literally stepping right over his head as she and two other hulks advanced on yet another grasshopper.

  A railgun round smashed into one of Lyokh’s fellows, just as they were taking cover, turning the upper half of his body to paste while the lower half, still controlled by the STACsuit, kept running like a pair of haunted pants throught the battlefield. Lyokh exchanged looks with the others. One of them actually laughed. Battle hysteria.

  They moved on, following behind the Ravagers, which had now advanced ahead of them. By the time they reached the next piece of cover, they were down to just five, including Lyokh. Ziir was one of them, and he had totally spent his rifle ammo. Looked like he’d lost his pulser, too. He now just had his field sword, clutched double-fisted, his face a mask of rage.

  “Hey, handsome!” a voice said into his ear. “Look up.”

  Lyokh did so.

  Angels from heaven.

  The drop ships were descending right towards them. Five of them.

  Then, farther south, in the direction they were heading, where the bulk of their resistance still lay, they saw blue-green streaks of light stabbing through the clouds. Shatterstar’s Pacifier. And there were burning fireballs coming down like rain.

  The orbital bombardment had begun.

  JUST AS LORD ISHIMOTO was coming around to the side of the planet where the main battle was taking place on, Shatterstar had passed through a debris field left by Xiyi Lang and was crossing over the planet’s terminator line, passing from day into night. Seconds later, Lord Ishimoto also crossed into darkness, and Captain Donovan listened as its hull cooled and popped.

  Right then, Shatterstar was engaged with two smaller Ascendancy
vessels, but both were giving her a hammering. Donovan had ordered solutions plotted, and fired all torpedoes currently in tubes. It looked like it did some good, most of them hit home.

  “XO, contact Shatterstar, ask the captain to connect his COR to ours, and we’ll coordinate against these bastards.”

  “Aye, sir!”

  COR, or coordinated override request, was a system embedded in every Republican ship’s main computer. It gave all control of the guns over to a military fire-control computer, allowing a single captain to direct the guns of all COR-active ships, concentrating all their firepower on a single target.

  “Shatterstar’s captain answers affirmative, Captain,” said Vosen.

  “Helm, draw us even with Shatterstar. Roll ten degress planetward and assume a support posture.”

  “Aye, sir,” said Cortez. “Roll ten planetward.”

  They opened fire simultaneously with Shatterstar, all their computers examining individual targets, as well as groups, and coordinating crossfire.

  Things had just started looking good.

  But even now, Donovan was seeing a turn. Ascendancy ships. Four of them. Two sub-capitals at Widden’s north pole and two at the south. Part of their mission here was to protect Widden’s infrastructure and economy, and so far they had gotten word through tightbeam transmissions that the installations at Honagher and Asteroid Cryzek were being compromised. Helium-3 from Honagher was responsible for a great deal of energy and starship fuel across Phanes, and if Cryzek could not produce the ice necessary to keep the mining operations in the asteroid belt going, the whole system’s support structure could collapse.

  “Conn, sensor room,” DeStren said.

  “Go ahead, sensors,” Donovan replied.

  “Captain, those ships above the poles are making deployments. They’re heading down to the water- and ice-mining facilities, all of which is automated, completely unmanned.”

  “How many drop pods are there?”