“We do,” the Battalion XO confirmed. “There are pockets of what appear to be power and atmosphere, but most of the station is a dead hulk. I’m dropping you your objective markers—you’re landing closest to the main command center, which looks like it still has power and atmosphere. One of the blast sites is on your way; we want you to check it out before you hit the command center. We don’t know enough about what happened here.”
“Understood, sir,” Edvard replied. “We’ll play tourist on our way over.”
Brahm made a repressive clucking sound but didn’t directly respond.
“Be careful,” he said after a moment. “Just because the place looks dead doesn’t mean there aren’t Marines playing dead—hell, in that kind of environment, a Navy puke with the right control panel could wipe half your company.”
“Wilco, Major,” Bravo Company’s commander told him. “Making contact now; will report when we reach the blast site.”
Brahm signed off with a click, almost lost in the vibration and thump of the assault shuttle contacting the station.
A flash and a bang announced the application of the shuttle’s breaching system—followed by the access hatch springing open to reveal the gaping hole into the ship.
“Go! Go! Go!” Edvard snapped over the channel, waiting for his Alpha Platoon to enter the station before following them in. Procedure dictated he couldn’t go first, but he’d let the Starless Void eat him before his headquarters section went last.
He drifted across the gap easily, then triggered the electromagnets in his boots—without power feeding to the exotic-matter coils of the station’s mass manipulators, there was insufficient gravity to walk in, and what gravity there was wasn’t aligned with silly things like floors.
“Waypoints on your implants, people,” he told his Alpha Platoon troopers. “Move out!”
Battle-armored troopers obeyed with a will—the lack of gravity and manipulation of armor thrusters allowing them to progress through the station in massive leaps, their weapons tracking corners and crannies as they moved.
Two hundred meters and two levels passed surprisingly quickly, and Lieutenant Major Edvard Hansen arrived at the shattered piece of the station where some kind of explosive had gone off, to find his people already establishing a perimeter—and stringing a line to enable the company to cross the gaping void the blast had left.
“What have we got?” he asked Alpha Platoon’s heavy weapons sergeant.
The demolitions expert shook his head, eyeing the roughly spherical section they were standing on the edge of.
“Radiation count is high but fading fast,” he noted. “Schematics say that one of the main network hubs was there.” The sergeant waved an armored hand in the direction of the upper section of the void. “Sending all of the data back to Chimera for analysis to get a hard answer, but if you want my gut feeling…”
“I asked for a reason, Sergeant,” Edvard pointed out.
“You’re looking at a laser-initiated micro-fusion device,” the sergeant said flatly. “No radioactive materials, no exotic matter coils. Small, easy to conceal, difficult as all hell to manufacture, low yield—but still a nuke. These stations have a lot of internal reinforcing.” He gestured at the hundred-and-fifty-meter void they stood next to. “That was a ten-kiloton charge at least. Could be as high as twenty-five, given that they vaporized an armored network hub.”
Edvard whistled in his helmet, making sure no one could hear him, then reopened the channel.
“That’s damned impressive. Where would they have got those?”
“Fyr Special Ops,” the noncom replied instantly. “Scary, scary, scary fuckers. With nukes.”
“It seems they opened the doors for us,” Edvard agreed. “I’m not complaining. But…yeah. Scary.”
#
“Chimera’s first-cut analysis confirms Sergeant Sato’s assessment,” Brahm told Edvard. “That one was an MFC. It looks like the saboteurs—personally, I agree that it’s likely they were Fyr Spec Ops—didn’t have very many of those. A few key points on each platform got micro-fusion charges; most of the rest were ‘just’ high-yield chemical explosives.
“We’re finding a lot of bodies,” the Major continued. “You’re on track to get to the command center before anyone else reaches survivors on this station. See if they’re willing to play nice—at this point, I’d honestly rather not have to shoot anybody. They’ve had a bad-enough day.”
“Roger, Major,” Edvard replied. “Knock first. I’ll be in touch.”
This close to the command center, the station was in an incredible amount of disarray. They hadn’t crossed any more nuke sites, but a lot of smaller charges had been used to cripple internal systems and cut the command center off from the rest of the platform. The floor was impassable as often as not, though thankfully usually either a wall or a roof was available for Bravo Company to traverse.
It took longer to cross the hundred meters from the nuke site to the main command center than it had taken to reach the blast site itself. Eventually, Edvard’s people reached their objective, and he carefully made his way forward to join his Alpha Platoon Lieutenant at the door.
“It’s an emergency airlock,” the Lieutenant told him. “We can blast through, but they’ll lose atmo instantly. Close-range scanners figure between forty and fifty people—probably the command center night shift.”
“We’ve got supplies for just that,” Edvard noted. They’d carried the pieces of an emergency replacement airlock and emergency survival bubbles from the shuttle. “That said, let’s see if they’ll talk. Can we splice me into the local intercom?”
“Give me a minute,” one of his headquarters section replied, the trooper producing a complex-looking electronic toolkit from a panel on her suit. She wired it into the shattered exterior panel and worked on it in silence for a little over two minutes—and then a new icon popped up in Edvard’s implant.
“You’re linked in, sir,” she told him. “Can’t guarantee they’ll listen.”
“That’s my job, Lance-Corporal,” he replied. “Well done.”
Inside his helmet, Edvard sharply shook his head to kick his brain into gear, then thought-clicked the icon.
“Hello? Is anyone in there?”
There was no response for several seconds, then a voice came back—an older male with a distinctly crisp Terran accent.
“This is Captain Xolani Bhuku,” he answered Edvard. “Commanding Officer Zion K Three Oh Four. Are you the rescue party?”
“Not exactly,” Edvard replied. “This is Lieutenant Major Edvard Hansen of the Castle Federation Marine Corps. I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask for your surrender.”
Bhuku laughed, a deep infectious chuckle that almost made Edvard smile back despite the circumstances.
“Son, you may be officially a boarding party, but as far as anyone left alive on this dead hulk is concerned, you’re the rescue party,” he told Edvard. “I will gladly surrender whatever remains in my authority in exchange for making certain my people are extracted alive.”
“It’s always nice to talk to someone reasonable,” Edvard replied. “I accept your surrender, Captain Bhuku. I’ve got enough survival bubbles out here for about a hundred people. Shall we see about getting you off this station?”
“Lieutenant Major, right now I am looking forward to your POW camp. Let’s see what we can do.”
08:30 March 24, 2736 ESMDT
DSC-078 Avalon, Captain’s Breakout Room
“We are now fully in control of Fyr orbit,” Rear Admiral Alstairs announced to her captains and CAGs.
Nobody quite cheered—but Kyle could pick up the general feeling of relief even through the holograms he was seeing of the rest of Seventh Fleet’s captains.
“Brigadier Hammond’s people have done a superb job of securing the stations. Brigadier, if you can fill the Captains in on what you found?” Alstairs asked.
Hammond took half a second to glance around the captains, the s
tocky bald man apparently reminding himself of who the captains were before speaking. As the senior of the three Marine Brigadiers, he was equal or senior to everyone on the conference except Alstairs herself and the two breveted Force Commanders.
“All four Zions were very neatly, professionally, and completely disabled,” he said crisply. “We have confirmed the use of two laser-initiated micro-fusion bombs on each platform, plus several dozen more conventional explosives. All appear to have been smuggled aboard the stations and detonated upon confirmation of the arrival of Alliance forces.”
“Do we know who?” Kyle asked.
“We suspect Fyr Army Special Operations,” Hammond said calmly. “I am preparing my men to deploy to the surface and have reached out on certain frequencies the Fyrans provided us prior to the invasion. My understanding is that we have received several data packets in return—targeting locations for drops and kinetic bombardments.”
“I have summoned the planetary forces to surrender,” Alstairs noted. “They have half an hour to comply. If they haven’t by then, the Brigadiers have a go for their landings.”
“What is the status of our fighter wings?” Force Commander Aleppo asked quietly. “I know my own are…gone. But…”
“Our casualties were lighter than we had any right to expect,” Stanford replied. “Ozolinsh’s people were clear before the missiles impacted, and the Terrans self-destructed the second salvo to avoid risking damage to the ejected pods.”
“She still lost fifteen people,” Avalon’s CAG—Seventh Fleet’s senior starfighter officer—said quietly. “My own losses were heavier. With the violence of the engagement, we had a low ejection percentage. Out of sixty-seven lost ships, only nine pods were launched. With injuries and radiation damage aboard the pods, we lost a hundred and eighty people.”
“Vice Commodore Ozolinsh’s actions were unacceptable,” Lord Captain Anders snapped. “To abandon her starfighters in the face of the enemy like is pure cowardice!”
Kyle kicked Stanford under the table before his CAG could reply, leaning forward himself to speak more calmly than he suspected Stanford could.
“What would you have had her do, Lord Captain?” he asked bluntly. “My personal assessment is that the presence of human pilots and gunners would have enabled her to destroy perhaps another five hundred missiles—still leaving three or more weapons for every single ship she had. Once their missiles were away, there was no point in sacrificing her flight crews against a salvo they could not stop.
“Polar Bear and Culloden’s starfighters were doomed as soon as the Terrans decided to concentrate their fire on only one fighter formation,” he continued. “That Vice Commodore Ozolinsh held her people on long enough to launch not just one salvo but all of their missiles in the teeth of their annihilation speaks to a rare level of courage.”
He carefully did not look at Stanford—or Ozolinsh—as he continued.
“That said, I agree that the Vice Commodore’s actions need to be assessed,” he said very calmly. “Admiral, I do not believe we have a choice but to field a Board of Inquiry.”
“In theory and per the letter of the Federation Articles of Military Justice, you are correct, Force Commander,” Alstairs told him. She did look directly at Gabrielle Ozolinsh, a sallow-faced black-haired woman who looked even more exhausted that the rest of Seventh Fleet’s senior officers. “However…faced with the constraints of Operation Rising Star, the strict letter of the law will not serve us today.
“Vice Commodore Ozolinsh, how long will it take you to get your fighter wings back to combat-readiness?” she asked sharply.
“We can pull replacement fighters from the logistics ships, though that will reduce the value of the fighter platforms we were reserving to protect Via Somnia,” Ozolinsh said slowly. “To get the starfighters set up, re-linked to my pilots, and run both the ships and my people through at least basic exercises to make sure we are combat-ready…three days. We’ll still be short four ships for lost crew. I could replace those crews, but it would take even longer.”
“Vice Commodore Stanford, your wings’ status?” Alstairs asked crisply.
“We have sufficient spare starfighters aboard the freighters to provide new ships for our surviving flight crews,” Stanford said slowly, slightly calmer now. “But neither I nor my Royal compatriots”—he nodded to the two Phoenix CAGs— “are in a position to replace our lost crews. Accounting for that, we will be combat-functional within thirty-six hours.”
The Admiral turned back to Ozolinsh.
“Vice Commodore, I don’t think we have time for the Board that, yes, should be convened on your actions,” she said bluntly. “The Ops plan for Rising Star calls for us to move on Huī Xing and Via Somnia in four days. Are you prepared to continue doing your duty, being aware that a Board may still need to be convened once Rising Star is complete?”
Implicit in that, of course, was that her actions in the rest of Rising Star would heavily slant the results of that board. It wasn’t quite a complete approval of her actions—but it was a safe way out for everyone involved, inside the spirit if not the exact letter of the Articles.
“I am, Admiral Alstairs,” Ozolinsh confirmed slowly.
“Is that sufficient for you, Force Commander Roberts?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Kyle agreed instantly. By putting forward the demand for a Board himself, he’d given the Federation control over whether Ozolinsh would be punished—and rendered Lord Captain Anders’ opinion of the decision mostly irrelevant.
Surprisingly, though, the Imperial Captain nodded his own acceptance of the decision and leaned back in his chair.
“It appears Fyr Special Operations has helped open the door to their homeworld,” Admiral Alstairs told them all. “Brigadier? Are the Marines ready to act on the intelligence they’re providing?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said calmly. “Chimera and Manticore currently have drones sweeping the target locations they provided to confirm their data, and Pegasus is preparing the bombardment. We have received no response from the Terran surface commander. We are ready to go as soon as the deadline expires.”
“Good luck, Brigadier,” she said quietly.
09:10 March 24, 2736 ESMDT
AT-032 Chimera Landing Group, Assault Shuttle Four
“Watch your fucking flight zones!”
Edvard Hansen winced as the bellow came over the shuttle channel. As a company commander, he was an eavesdropper on the channel for the landing group. He wasn’t sure who had shouted—he suspected it might even have been his pilot—but he definitely sympathized.
In that moment, a pillar of white light lit up the sky barely a hundred and fifty meters from his shuttle, as another of Pegasus’s “rods from God” blasted past. That was six by the Lieutenant Major’s count—six within visual range of his shuttle.
“Please tell me this is worth it,” he snapped at the pilot.
“Unless you want a close personal introduction to a terawatt-range air defense laser, it’s definitely worth it,” the pilot replied. “Now, sir, shut up and let me fly.”
As a seventh kinetic projectile blasted past—this one much closer! —Edvard obeyed the junior officer.
The problem that the 103rd and the other two brigades were facing was simple: the Terran Commonwealth Marine Corps had dug in hard around Landning City. Dozens of mobile and immobile space defense units, prefabricated fortifications, the works.
Edvard’s impression was that they’d been holding the capital city hostage as a lever to try to keep a planet of notoriously stubborn Viking descendants from exploding on them. It also, apparently, had given the TCMC General in charge of the planet a feeling of invulnerability—if the Alliance took the time to bombard the space defense units, he could relocate his HQ and ground positions, giving them a giant headache when the Marines landed.
Unless, of course, the Castle Federation Marine Corps decided to land while bombarding the space defense units. It was perfectly safe—assuming
the shuttles didn’t diverge from their planned courses and none of the gunners firing one-tenth-kiloton kinetic weapons slipped.
“We’re dropping you in forty-five seconds,” the pilot announced. “Did one of you people volunteer to go into the heaviest fire on the planet?”
Edvard smiled without responding, sending nonverbal orders for his people to check their systems.
As it happened, he had volunteered to be one of the companies hitting the main command center—but he wasn’t going to admit that to the pilot.
#
The shuttle never even touched the ground. It came blasting over the reinforced concrete walls of the fortress above the Terrans’ command center at three times the speed of sound, dropping a swarm of smart munitions and spraying seventy-millimeter cannon fire across the open interior.
The interior had been a vehicle park, with a dozen or so formal-looking vehicles on one end and six medium tanks on the other. One of the dozens of tenth-kiloton weapons dropped by Pegasus had been aimed at the tanks, however, and the interior was mostly crater at this point.
“Drop!” Edvard ordered as they hit the seconds-long window, and his people obeyed — the speakers on their suits amplifying and projecting their wolf howls as they plummeted from the passing shuttle and slammed into the broken mud and concrete.
The sensors in his battle armor were already sweeping for targets—not least because he knew how Castle Marines would have handled the situation. Terran Marines, it turned out, ran on a very similar playbook.
Bravo Company had barely hit the ground when the shuttle passed over the other side of the compound’s wall—and chameleon-coated battle armor suits boiled out of the exits of the underground facility.
Edvard had been expecting it. His heavy-weapons troopers opened fire even before the doors finished opening, bolts of superheated plasma blowing entrances wide open before the Terran Marines could exit them. Miniguns, barely portable even in suits of battle armor, began to chatter, spraying the emerging Terrans with dozens of penetrators.
Battle Group Avalon (Castle Federation Book 3) Page 17
