Star Strike

by Ian Douglas

  He stayed focused on his link, however. They were still flying, so he ignored the impact, figuring that there was nothing he could do about it except to keep doing his job, which was to try to track incoming missiles or armored enemy troops or gun or sensor emplacements on the monitor’s hull and knock them out with hivel cannon fire.

  The ship’s AI had already highlighted the turret that had loosed that slug. He dragged his mental targeting cursor over the dome and thought-clicked the number two gun starboard, sending a stream of high-velocity rounds slashing through the turret in great, pulsing gouts of white heat before it could fire another shot.

  As it neared its objective, as the Rommel loomed huge in his downloaded mental vision, the Ontos’ hull began morphing into its landing configuration, wings and weapons outstretched, clawed legs extended, blast head forward and down, seeking contact.

  Then the Ontos was on the monitor’s hull with a heavy, ringing thud, its ugly blast head extending and dropping to bring a torch of plasma energy, as hot as the core of a sun, into contact with the monitor’s armor cladding.

  Under that searing assault, the outer nanolayers rippled and flowed as they tried to distribute the heat, then burst away in clouds of vapor, exposing the tender ceramics and alloys beneath. The Ontos’ claws dug in and held, as the current of vaporizing metals and composites howled past like a hurricane wind, expending itself in vacuum. A crater formed, then deepened, widening, as the Ontos thing continued to eat its way through the skin and into the heart of the enemy ship.

  The Rommel carried fighters—not as many as the Lejeune, but enough to provide some measure of close defense against such tactics as the Ontos was now employing. His AI warned of two bogies swinging up and around over the horizon of the monitor’s hull, identifying them as PanEuropean Épée fighters—robotic craft that were exceptionally fast and maneuverable because they had no flesh and blood on board to coddle.

  Warhurst was screaming as he brought both starboard-side guns to bear on the stooping targets….

  18

  0112.1102

  SAP 12

  PanEuropean Monitor Rommel

  Puller 695 System

  2004 hrs GMT

  Garroway had been wondering if any of the SAPs were going to make it across the gulf between Samar and the Rommel, as pod after pod was struck down by the enemy point defenses, but then a fresh wave of blasts flashed and pulsed across the monitor’s hull, targeting the point-defense turrets and fire-control sensors. Morrigan was now concentrating all of her fire against the PanEuropean monitor, attempting to screen the Marine assault wave, giving them a precious few seconds to complete their run, and a number of aerospace fighters had closed enough of the gap to pour concentrated devastation into the shuddering hull of the huge enemy ship. Although he hadn’t seen them, the tacsit feed also showed three MCA–71 Ontos transports had touched down on the monitor’s hull, and were busily tunneling into thick armor. Another nuke, one of a salvo fired from the Thor, got through a moment later, flaring with dazzling incandescence against the night.

  But the Rommel was still very much in action. In seconds, three more SAPs vaporized in white-hot flashes of energy…and the tacsit showed enemy fighters as well, rising from the monitor to engage the incoming pods.

  But by now the PanEuropean monitor was looming huge just ahead, its surface rushing up to meet Garroway’s incoming capsule. The guiding AI, Garroway noted with an almost detached interest, was directing his pod into a gaping crater blown open moments before by the plasma blast head of an MCA–71. An instant later, and despite the inertial damping, Garroway felt the savage shock as his SAP slammed into the wreckage of what had been the Rommel’s hull at that point.

  The SAP’s squared-off prow was designed to collapse against whatever it struck, releasing a ring of nanotech disassemblers programmed to ignore the pod, but to eat through hull metal or composite with which it was in contact. As the pod slipped deeper into the PE ship’s armor cladding, the SAP’s entire outer surface turned gelatinous with nano-D, eating away at the metal and lubricating the pod’s movement. Vanishing into the ship’s hull, the pod continued burrowing forward, dissolving wreckage and armor, until sensors within the drilling head detected an empty space beyond.

  When that happened, nano-disassemblers halted their eating, then converted to sealant, fusing pod to hull, and the leading end of the assault craft flashed from solid to gas in a savage liberation of raw energy.

  Garroway was waiting, gulping down air, heart pounding, the flamer mounted on his 660-battlesuit’s left forearm already aimed and armed. As the bow of the assault pod exploded into gas, he followed up with a burst from the flamer, sending a fireball searing into the Rommel’s interior.

  He was right behind the dissipating fireball, allowing the pod mechanism to propel him forward and through the breach into the monitor’s hull as the dampening gel around him flashed into harmless vapor.

  What followed next was pure training. Rommel possessed an artificially generated gravity field, set to about three-quarters of a gravity—roughly equivalent to the gravity of Aurore. He was entering the monitor from an unusual angle, coming down through the overhead of one of the interior decks, and the local gravity field grabbed at him as he fell through the opening.

  There’d been no good way to predict where he would come out, or what the local gravity would be like. Part of his brain registered the fall, and long hours of training took over. He twisted as he fell, landing catlike, if heavily, on his boots, his left arm already sweeping up and around to engage any targets that might present themselves. His helmet sensors gave him a 360-degree view in a side mental window, but he pivoted in any case to see for himself, checking both ways.

  Several bodies of the ship’s crew lay on the deck both ahead and behind, within a passageway choked with an impenetrable fog of smoke and a near-total darkness relieved only by his battlesuit’s shoulder-mounted lights. Whether they’d been killed by external fire, by the blast as the SAP opened up, or by his flamer, there was no way of knowing.

  Nor was it important. A Marine assault was built around one simple concept—the employment of extreme and sudden violence to overwhelm local defenses and secure the battle initiative.

  And to keep the initiative, he needed to keep moving. If he stopped, if he went on the defensive, he would in minutes be isolated, surrounded, and killed. Two of the ship’s crew appeared from a side passage just ahead; he triggered his flamer and saw the two writhe and struggle and then wilt in the torchblast. Neither had been wearing armor, though both were carrying mag-pulse rifles. In another second, both were dead…probably irretrievables.

  “Green one, one-two!” he shouted into his helmet pickup. “On board! Request orienteering fix!”

  “One moment,” the voice of the platoon AI said. Then a window opened in a corner of his mind, showing an animation of the corridor he was in now, and a flashing pointer showing which way he needed to go.

  That way. Strange. His instincts and his implanted hardware both had been suggesting the other way…but he was feeling a bit disoriented both by the shock of landing and the drop into the Rommel’s local gravity.

  But if Achilles said go that way, that was the way he would go. The animation also showed the ghosted-out shadows of other passageways around him, and moving green blips representing other Marines. The sight was deeply reassuring; he was alone in that corridor, but he could see other Marines appearing one after another in other, nearby compartments and passageways, all of them moving in the same general direction.

  A monitor was a huge ship, a veritable city wrapped in thick cladding, and enclosing a maze of passageways and compartments designed to house several thousand crew members. A few hundred Marines—to say nothing of however many members of the 55th MARS had actually survived the passage from Samar—could not hope to kill or overpower the entire crew, especially when a number of those enemy personnel would be PE armored marines trained to combat just such an assault as t
his.

  The Commonwealth battle-command AIs had already identified the key objectives within the Rommel, using available schematics and ship plans from Intelligence, as well as sounding information being gathered from robotic probes already burrowing into the ship’s thick hull. The combined information, transmitted back to Samar and the Lejeune, allowed Achilles and the AIs within the Combat Command Center to build up a coherent picture of the Rommel’s interior, and to know exactly where each Marine was at the moment in relation to a list of possible objectives. A handful of Commonwealth Marines wandering around on their own would have been lost in moments, easy targets for the enemy’s counterattack. Under Achilles’ guidance, however, they could be sure they were moving as a unit, with common purpose.

  Garroway’s primary objective was a command-and-control center buried in the Rommel’s core. To get there, he needed to follow this passageway for about 20 meters, then locate a maintenance shaft in the starboard bulkhead, a broad, open tunnel plunging into the monitor’s core.

  “Here,” Achilles said in his mind, highlighting a section of the passageway’s bulkhead in red. “There is an access tube just beyond that partition.”

  “Got it,” he said, and he turned his mag-pulse rifle on his right arm on the bulkhead, slamming a rapid-fire stream of slugs into the wall. Metal and ceramplast shredded, and then he could see through the hole and into a black emptiness beyond.

  He used a personal drone to check the far side, tossing the fist-sized robot sensor through the hole and watching the feedback on a helmet display. The maintenance shaft was a broad but narrow space descending relative to the local gravity field. There was no artificial gravity, but his armor thrusters ought to get him where he needed to go.

  Just behind him, the overhead suddenly bulged, then exploded as another SAP broke through. Garroway decided not to wait for a possible volley of friendly fire, but he tagged the opening with a small transponder that would show the bulkhead breach to anyone following him, then plunged through himself.

  The shaft interior was in complete darkness, but his armor’s shoulder lights illuminated his surroundings in harsh, shifting patterns of white light and black shadow. A moment later, he became aware of other lights above him, as other Marines broke through into the shaft and began the descent into the monitor’s core.

  He was no longer alone…a very good feeling indeed.

  Kicking off from the entrance breach, he drifted down several meters—“down,” of course, being a relative term in the sudden falling emptiness of microgravity. He triggered his suit thrusters and moved more quickly, using his hands to guide himself along the piping and tightly tied bundles of fiber optics lining the shaft walls.

  He moved through the shaft for what seemed like hours, though his implant timer insisted it was only three minutes. At last, though, Achilles highlighted an area of tunnel wall just ahead. “There,” the AI told him. “That will give you direct access to your objective.”

  The tacsit feed continued to give him a ghosted overlay of what was behind the surrounding bulkheads. Pulling himself up short alongside the indicated section of the tunnel, he hung in emptiness for another few seconds until five more Marines reached him, snagging hold of conduits and coming to a halt at the designated level.

  An armored form bumped against him, steadying itself on a conduit. The 660-armor’s surface Nanoflage made the figure almost ghostly in the tunnel’s gloom, but a transponder-relayed ID appeared on Garroway’s helmet display—Gunnery Sergeant Ramsey. Garroway felt an almost overwhelming sense of relief, so much so he could feel his knees trembling. He’d not wanted to go through that bulkhead alone.

  “Hey, Gunnery Sergeant,” he said. “I guess this is it.”

  “Looks that way. Wait until the others get here.”

  Three more armored figures arrived down the shaft in short order—Sergeant Richard Chu, Corporal Marin Delazlo, and PFC Sandre Kenyon.

  “Okay, people,” Ramsey told them, pulling a breaching charge from an external suit pouch. “We breach and we go through, standard one-by assault. Everyone set?”

  “Ready, Gunnery Sergeant,” Garroway said. He was focusing on damping down the fear.

  “Fire in the hole!” Ramsey announced, slapping the self-sticking breaching charge to the sealed hatch. The Marines rolled away, and an instant later an intense gout of white-hot metal erupted from the charge, as a nano-D thermal-decoupler turned titanium alloy to a spray of liquid and gaseous metal. The spray grew brighter, expanding into an oval patch roughly 2 meters high…and then the metal burned through with a brilliant flash.

  Ramsey was the first Marine through the still-hot opening, but Garroway crowded through just behind him. Both Marines tumbled once more into gravity, this time within a large and circular chamber filled with control consoles, work stations, and a number of men and women in PE uniforms, reclining on link couches as they directed their side of the battle through the ship’s Net.

  Operating under Achilles’ instructions, Ramsey turned his pulse rifle against one particular bank of instrumentation, slamming it into junk. The salvo seemed to shock the reclining enemy officers, as their link with the Rommel’s AI net was broken and they were dropped out of their command virtual reality.

  Achilles identified one threat—an armored Marine standing near the compartment’s single hatch. The guy’s armor would be proof against flamer fire. Instead, Garroway triggered a burst from his mag-pulse rifle, the stream of high-velocity slugs catching the enemy marine high in the chest and slamming him backward into the hatch.

  The other Marines were coming through the opening into the compartment as well. One of the enemy officers pulled an ugly handgun from a holster and fired from his couch; the round ricocheted off Ramsey’s helmet. Chu took three steps and placed the black muzzle of his flamer against the man’s skull. “Drop it, monsieur,” he growled.

  The chances were good that the language spoken by Rommel’s crew was Deutsch, not Français, but the message was unmistakable. The man, eyes bulging, dropped the pistol and raised his hands. Other men and women in the room were already doing the same.

  Other Marines, guided by Achilles, were attaching nano-D charges to specific consoles and link stations, and Ramsey was jacking a small, heavily armored box into a particular computer access relay. Garroway and Chu, gesturing with their weapons, herded the PanEuropean personnel off of their link couches and across the compartment, lining them up on their knees, facing an empty bulkhead, their hands behind their heads.

  This compartment, Garroway knew, was one of three auxiliary control rooms buried within the Rommel. Some of the others might be destroyed, or isolated by damage, or Marine assault squads might already be breaking into them.

  All they could do now was wait. Garroway kept the POWs covered, while Ramsey worked his computer link and the other three Marines kept their weapons trained on the sealed hatch. They wouldn’t fire the nano-D charges unless they absolutely had to. The idea was to capture the monitor, not junk her…but they would render the huge ship harmlessly inert if they couldn’t force her to surrender.

  “Okay,” Ramsey said after a few moments. “Achilles has interfaced with Rommel’s AI suite. We’re in.”

  “Ooh-rah!” Garroway cried, and several of the others joined in. Sandre Kenyon was, by chance, standing close by. Keeping his weapon still trained on the kneeling POWs, Garroway reached out and gave Sandre an awkward one-armed hug, their black armor clashing as it came together like a pair of colliding tanks.

  “It’s gonna be close,” Ramsey said a moment later. He was getting things on his tactical feed that weren’t funneling through to the rest of the squad. “We have three more enemy ships arriving from in-system. Another destroyer…and it looks like a couple of light escort cruisers, Pegasus…and Sagitta. Our fighters are reforming to meet them.”

  His momentary rush of enthusiasm cooled, Garroway stood, covering the prisoners, and waited. Rommel, apparently, was still in the fight, though only in
termittently now as more and more of her Net circuitry was shut down or compromised. Garroway tried to figure out what was going on through the platoon tacsit feed, but gave up after a few moments. The tangle of ships out there was hopelessly confused, now, with no fewer than thirteen major warships and well over a hundred fighters from both sides, plus Marine Ontos transports and shuttles, robotic sensor craft, and hundreds of circling, target-seeking missiles. Nukes were going off every few moments, and each blast tended to blank out the data transmission with momentary storms of white-noise static.

  Someone was at the hatch. Garroway heard the thump, followed by a mechanical-sounding clank. Chu, Kenyon, and Delazlo hunkered down behind consoles and link couches, their weapons aimed at the hatch. Ramsey continued working with the computer feed relay. By now, a small army of artificial intelligences were being beamed across from the Lejeune and the Samar, downloading themselves into the Rommel’s computer net. If they could capture the electronic high ground in time….

  “The hatch may be a diversion,” Achilles whispered in their minds. “I am detecting suspicious noises here.” The AI highlighted a section of bulkhead at right angles to the bulkhead containing the hatch.

  “Right,” Chu said. “Kenyon! Keep covering the hatch! Laz, with me!”

  Chu and Delazlo shifted positions to cover the new threat. A moment later, the hatch flared with a dazzling white light, metal dissolving under a high-energy assault of nano disassemblers. Kenyon opened up with her pulse rifle as soon as the hatch started melting away and there was no longer a threat of own-goal riocochets in the compartment, sending a steady stream of high-velocity fire through the opening and into the compartment beyond.

  Five seconds later, a second gout of light and hot gases exploded from the other bulkhead, burning through a communications console. A heavily armored Sturmjäger appeared, stepping through the gush of incandescent gasses, his dark grey combat armor outwardly similar to the Marines’ 660-battlesuit, but with a flatter, more complex helmet and a different weapons loadout.