Mavericks

by Craig Alanson

  “Ok, I see that. That is a hell of a risk to take with our airspace craft, based on a lack of footprints and one open hatch.”

  “That is not all, Colonel Perkins. As I said, the masers would be test-fired after components have been replaced. You can see here, on the hills to the south, scorch marks where maser beam struck. Those marks are still dark, indicating that turret was fired recently, and the maser fire must have come from the southern turret, because they would not have risked firing over the base. There are no scorch marks on hills to the north. We can’t absolutely verify condition of the northern turret because that data is behind their secure firewall,” Dahl’s antenna waved in agreement with that statement, “so we need to trust our own eyes.”

  “All right, Striebich, Bonsu, do you agree?”

  “Yes, Ma’am,” Irene nodded. “The three of us covered this last night. It’s doable.”

  “Those maser turrets are armored?” Perkins observed skeptically. “Your dropships aren’t.”

  “The turrets are armored, plus they have an energy shield,” Irene added with a frown. “And you’re right, our ships are vulnerable, but we have an ace in the hole. Part of the weapons load we brought down from the Toaster are anti-AA missiles, kind like of like the HARM system our Navy and Air Force uses.”

  “Those SEAD systems home in on active sensors, right,” Perkins noted. “Not on the antiair weapon itself. The Kristang must use a distributed sensor network.”

  “They do,” Irene groaned inwardly, wanting to avoid a long session of educating their commander about the finer points of Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses. “These Ruhar missiles are smart, they know Kristang antiair masers use a look-look-shoot pattern. Two low-powered beam bursts to track and confirm the target lock, followed by the kill shot. Each of the Ruhar HARMs deploys twenty eight submunitions that look for maser backscatter. Once they pinpoint the maser’s location, they kill it. Some of the submunitions fire their own maser countermeasures to scramble the enemy’s targeting data, while the others home in and kill the turret. Ma’am, in this case we have an advantage; we already know exactly where that turret is. We plan to launch our anti-AA missiles before we come over the ridgeline. We saturate their defenses, knock them out before exposing ourselves.”

  “The base doesn’t have any missile batteries?”

  “No. There is a site here to the west where they planned to install missiles, you can see where they bulldozed the site and installed part of this concrete pad, here.” On the display, Irene pointed to a broken concrete tile, half covered with drifting sand. “They stopped work on it. We know there are not any underground sensor feeds to that area.”

  “What about MANPADs?” Dave asked, peering over Perkins’ shoulder.

  “Man, pad?” Dahl asked, confused. He tapped his right ear. “My translator did not understand that reference.”

  “MAN Portable Air Defense,” Dave explained, miming that he held a missile tube on one shoulder. “A shoulder-launched antiaircraft missile, you know?”

  “Ah, yes,” the Jeraptha’s antennas bounced up and down. “Our military has such devices, though I have never seen them in action. Our pilots are warned to be very careful about such devices when used by the enemy, they can be deadly, even to our advanced airspace craft. But-”

  “Yeah, we know,” Irene forced a smile. “Your training is for Fleet service. Ma’am,” she turned her attention back to Perkins, “Tutula is right, this is doable. Air defenses are not the biggest problem.”

  That remark drew a raised eyebrow from Perkins, so Irene continued. “Hitting this base is a waste unless we recover data and hopefully samples from the research. From what we,” she pointed to Ernt Dahl, “have been able to get from hacking in, all that data is housed here, in the research complex in the center of the base. We can avoid damage to those buildings, but the defenders could trigger a program to erase all the data, or it might be set to erase automatically in the event that base is attacked.”

  “But you have a plan for that?”

  “Arlon Dahl has a plan, Ma’am.”

  The Jeraptha raised himself up on his back legs, before remembering other species were threatened by that posture, so he settled back down on all four legs. “The data connection between the research complex, and the security center where the guards live, is an underground cable here. For redundancy they should have multiple cables, I think the connection is limited to a single cable, because they are more concerned about their own people stealing data than about external threats. The cable is not deep, it is part of the original construction and the plans state it is only,” the translator stumbled awkwardly as it always did when converting measurements, “three point eight six five meters deep.” Dahl paused to see if Perkins understood, and she nodded.

  “Ma’am,” Irene picked up narrative. “We have missiles that can blow a hole deeper than that, a missile can cut the cable so the defenders can’t order the research core to erase its data. Other missiles will drop off drones that can orbit the area and jam any backup wireless connection to the research base.”

  “Which leaves only the problem of the research core detecting an attack and erasing itself,” Perkins shook her head. “I am not liking this plan.”

  “We have a plan for that also,” Dahl bobbed on his forelegs excitedly. “The research core gets data from the base sensor network, also from that single cable. The core may be programmed to erase itself in the event of an interruption in the sensor feed, and you can’t take that risk.” Perkins noted the Jeraptha had said ‘you’ rather than ‘we’. “While we have been unable to access the research core or the secure network, that cable also carries unsecure data, and there are buffers spaced regularly along the cable. We can hack into those buffers and plant false sensor data, so the research core will not know about our attack, until the buffers overflow.”

  “How long does that give us?”

  “Two minutes and forty eight seconds,” Dahl flashed a Jeraptha smile, which made Perkins shudder as it looked like a spider eating something.

  “Less than three minutes? That’s not much time, not enough to land a ship and get inside the research base to download the core.”

  “No,” Irene agreed. “In those hundred and sixty eight seconds, we need to cut the cable, then locate the cut end of the cable that leads to the research complex, and physically tap into it with a transmitter of our own that will keep feeding false sensor data,” she held up a small device that had a hole in it, for plugging in a data cable.

  “That’s a mighty tall order, Striebich. Any way we can get a missile to drop off a drone that can attach to that cable?”

  “We aren’t carrying any drones like that, Ma’am, and I wouldn’t want to trust a drone to dig in a blast crater to find a severed cable. One of us needs to do it.”

  “In a hundred sixty eight seconds, our missiles need to crest the ridge, sever that cable, then a dropship needs to fly there, slow down to land, and a team needs to dig down in a blast crater to find a cable?”

  “Yes. We need to knock out air defenses first,” Irene gritted her teeth.

  “I assume you have a plan to do all this?”

  “Yes, Colonel. You want to see our assault plan?”

  “Hell yes. Run through it for me.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Tutula’s fingers softly and expertly slid over the flight controls, making tiny adjustments to the aircraft’s relatively leisurely progress over the surface. The Ruhar controls had been designed to be used by four fingers and a thumb, making it somewhat awkward for the three-fingered Kristang, and the controls could only be modified to a limited extent. In that regard, the slow and primitive humans had an advantage over their Kristang comrades in arms, and Tutula was consoled by reminding herself she was superior in almost every other way. Her genetically-modified strength, speed, coordination and reactions made her physically far superior to any human, and awkward flight controls would be no obstacle to achieving her assigned mi
ssion. “Hawk Two in position and ready,” she announced as her dropship raced over an imaginary line on the hills below. She was flying the only fighter-dropship they had brought down from the Ruh Tostella, a craft the humans called a ‘Vulture’.

  “Standby, Two,” the voice of Lieutenant Colonel Perkins ordered, and Tutula did not react other than her pupils widening slightly, a sign of pleasure among her species. When Tutula’s people had first heard of the low-tech species who called themselves ‘Humans’, she feared their culture would be cruel and oppressive to their females, either by nature, or as distorted by the warrior caste of the Kristang. She had been extremely pleased to learn that human civilian and military organizations included females in positions of authority, even at the highest level. Perkins and General Bezanson were the two highest-ranking Humans that Tutula knew of, the fact they were both female was encouraging.

  “Hawk Two, you are ‘Go’ to proceed.”

  “Acknowledged, Hawk Lead,” Tutula responded and this time there was no mistaking her emotions, her lips pulled back in a toothy grin as she contemplated the prospect of striking a direct blow against the warrior caste. “Missiles on automatic,” she reported, seeing on a side display that the other dropship’s missile launchers had also been released to the auto-fire system. She advanced her throttles slightly to avoid losing airspeed as she pulled the nose up to crest the ridge of foothills, and begin climbing the tall mountains that ringed the valley where the research base sprawled across the dusty ground. When the navigation system determined she had reached a preset distance from the target, the Vulture’s missile bay doors snapped open and the rotary launchers spat out their deadly payloads, all of them. First in flight were the anti-AA missiles the humans for some reason called ‘Wild Weasels’, to scramble sensors and destroy the base’s air defense maser cannon. Right behind were general-purpose missiles with pre-selected targets, and finally a volley of missiles that could be retasked in flight as needed. This last group could extend their wings and loiter above the base for up to twenty minutes, but the attackers all knew the fight would be over in the first three minutes or not at all.

  With her ship’s entire missile payload expended and running on ahead in parallel with the other dropship’s warbirds, Tutula saw a blue light flash on her console and she reacted immediately, using a thumb to push the throttles to maximum. With missiles already approaching the mountain ridge, there was no longer a need to keep her speed subsonic. Shockwaves from the low-level passage of the missile formation were causing dust to swirl on the slopes of the mountains, the sonic boom of her passage would not be noticed in the chaos.

  With the corner of one eye she verified the enemy base defenses had not yet reacted. The previous day, the tiny drones planted by the attackers had begun intermittently jamming the base’s sensor network, turning the silent jamming on for brief periods. They knew from listening to the base communications system that the personnel there were angry and frustrated at what they assumed was an old and glitchy sensor network, and after fourteen hours, those Kristang had thrown up their hands and stopped trying to diagnose the problem. At first, they had put defenses on alert and sent teams out to scan for danger, but when nothing was found again and again, they decided to ignore the glitches and not waste time trying to fix an antiquated system on an uninhabited and useless planet.

  That was why the defenders did not react when the jamming started again just before the dropships launched their missiles. Actually, one of the defenders did react, but that reaction was an unhelpful gesture of slamming a rifle butt into the display screen of the sensor system when it apparently began glitching again. That move made the other guard on duty laugh, and delayed their reactions a half-second when more than two dozen missiles screamed over the ridge of mountains to the south and no one could be under the delusion that the base’s sensors merely had a glitch!

  Tutula’s ship was moving so fast, she had to roll it upside down and fire the belly jets as she passed over the sharp crest of the mountain ridge. The belly jets pushed the Vulture down so momentum did not carry it far out over the valley. Hanging in the sky on a high ballistic arc would not have been good for her survival, especially as her ship was momentarily lit by the sun that was just rising over the mountain ridge to the east. She grunted from the strain as she was squashed down in her seat, waiting so long to cut the jets and flip upright that her ship came heart-stoppingly close to scraping on the mountainside. Ignoring the G-force induced haze in her vision, she flipped up a switch to enable the ship’s maser cannons and searched for targets, even as she watched missile warheads exploding on the floor of the valley below.

  The personnel at the base, having no idea they were about to be thrust into the role of active defenders on a worthless planet that was unoccupied, were sooooooo bored and sick and tired and disgusted and generally pissed off that early morning. They were not entirely sure about the purpose of their mission, because the asshole scientists who were so important and smart as they huddled in their research compound, had not bothered to inform the guards about the experiments they were conducting. But the guards were sure the mission was over because the scientists and their staff and most of the primitive humans had already left the planet, yet the guards were still stuck there. Every single one of the guards had prayed for a serious accident to befall the dropship that had carried the scientists off the dusty surface, but their prayers had not been answered. Why hadn’t the guards and the last group of humans been lifted away from the nasty prison of a planet that was about to be abandoned? Insurance, that was the only reason they had been given. Their remaining on the planet was a form of insurance, just in case something went wrong with the mission and more experiments needed to be conducted. When the mission, whatever it was, had been successfully completed, then and only then would a ship come to pull the guards and the last surviving humans off the surface.

  More than a few guards had speculated there would not be a ship coming at all, except maybe for the purpose of pounding the base into a smoking crater from orbit. A handful of guards were not worth the expense of sending a ship such a long distance across the star lanes, not with Kristang society engulfed in yet another civil war, and not when that star system was going to be abandoned as it was now too far from effective military support. Fretting that they had been discarded, angry at their impotence to control their fate, not having any clan leadership supervision, and just by nature being hateful assholes, the guards had taken to culling the remaining humans one by one or in pairs, to use for sport.

  At first, they had dropped off humans on the other side of the mountain ridge, where the stupid humans in their own compound at the base could not see what was happening. The first hunt had been frustrating, the Kristang simply dumped the former soldier on the ground and told him to run, as they readied their hunting gear. That human evaded pursuit by unexpectedly going uphill and hiding in a shallow cavern, it was not until the next morning that the guards, having grown tired and frustrated and bored with the game, activated the tracking device they had injected into their quarry. At that point, angry they had been duped and had wasted most of a day looking in entirely the wrong place, they hammered the cavern with a missile, burying the human where he died.

  Subsequent hunts were scarcely more satisfying, as the star-blasted planet had no trees and their human prey had difficulty finding cover. Even arming the prey with primitive projectile pistols did not offer much sport, because being armed gave the prey a foolish sense of confidence and drew them out, where they were easily killed by the armor-suited hunters.

  After slaughtering four humans in hunts that were not much fun at all, the guards tried another game that offered much more sport; unarmed combat. Taking off their armored suits, a guard went into a makeshift sparring ring with a human and later, a pair of humans. Giving the humans short knives was necessary to make the combat interesting though even then, the Kristang usually quickly took away the knives and turned them on the prey. The games were j
ust getting fun, with two guards sustaining serious knife wounds, when their leader declared a stop to the games. They were running low on humans, so if the scientists ever did return and needed the humans for experiments, they would be extremely upset to find all the test subjects had been killed for sport. After the games were over, most of the guards had taken to sleeping late, since they had almost nothing to do other than making sure the remaining humans did not escape from their prison compound. Escape where? None of the native life was edible to humans, so other than a guard doing a remote headcount twice a day, they ignored the humans and spent their time struggling against boredom. The only mildly interesting thing that had happened for weeks was an intermittent sensor glitch that no one cared enough about to diagnose.

  So, when a cloud of missiles streaked over the mountain ridge followed by a pair of Ruhar dropships, the guards were caught completely by surprise. Most of them were asleep, with only two technically on duty in the base’s security center. Those two froze for crucial seconds, disbelieving the attack could be real. Surely it had to be a surprise exercise thrown at them by the base commander, who had grown disgusted by his men’s lack of discipline and the slovenly state of their quarters. The missiles had to be part of a simulation, and the guard who had smashed the glitchy sensor display was tempted to let the sim play out without reacting, so the base commander would not get the satisfaction of seeing his men racing around for nothing.

  Then the ground shook as an incoming missile was exploded by the one functioning maser air-defense cannon, and the two guards scrambled into action, triggering an alarm and powering up the defense shield that protected the control center. Raising that shield when the attack began might have been a good idea, but raising it as missiles were already impacting actually shortened the guards’ lives.