The settlers sustained heavy losses of equipment at the Southern Hemisphere decoy sites and in the anti-aircraft positions. Within the first six hours of battle, the entire Southern Hemisphere defensive network had fallen. All of the decoy operators had managed to escape out the “back door” and none had been captured. The conquest of the Southern Hemisphere had been expensive for the Swordsmen, but it had been successful. All the decoy sites had been neutralized.
The attack developed along the pattern Sebastian recognized as typical of Swordsman strategy. They attacked the smaller outposts first. Isolated farms were the first targets. The farm houses had been built with deep basements which were originally intended as storm shelters. Most of these had been expanded to storerooms because that was the only way to keep the home-coons from raiding the stored foodstuffs. The home-coons had thwarted every other tactic to keep them at bay. The entrances to these store rooms remained a single tightly locked trap door because intense storms did occasionally rip houses off their foundations and the store room was the only place where the family could be sure of being safe. Undefended farms were firebombed by air from the helicopters. Those residents who were hidden in their shelters generally survived the attack with the sacrifice of their house and barns.
Where the residents had resolved to fight to defend their property, they were slaughtered wholesale often in face-to-face combat and their buildings burned to the ground. Lacking a good surface to air missile, the settlers could only use small arms fire and lasers against the rampaging helicopters. Even the most powerful rifles were unable to penetrate the armored bottoms of the combat helicopters. The ravaging forces leveled everything in their path. They were not stopped by moats full of flammable liquids or by camouflaged pits filled with sharp sticks. Man made avalanches slowed them down, but they climbed over the bodies of their dead comrades like ants in pursuit of chocolate. The subsonic transducers mounted on the rock walls of the mountains, intended to take advantage of the ability of certain sub sonic frequencies to induce unreasoning fear worked, but only for a short time. More like locusts than humans, they advanced with a determination borne of zealotry. Those families that hid in the shelters survived. Those that stayed above ground did not.
Doug Marlin had volunteered to operate one of the Southern Hemisphere positions. When the assault began, he waited as he’d been instructed until the Marines had disembarked from the transports and were well within range before opening fire. His lasers and remote control automatic weapons were brutally effective but still the Marines advanced walking over the bodies of their dead colleagues. They kept coming and coming. Helicopters repeatedly swarmed overhead. Doug hit a few of them as they threw missiles at the decoys intended to divert them from his real position. Almost by accident, one of the missiles found the real window that afforded him the view of the battle. It blasted right through. Doug saw it coming and had barely cleared the rear exit when it struck sealing the exit behind him. The Swordsman Marines continued their assault for another two hours as the automatic weapons continued to fire until they finally blasted their way into what was left of the control room where Doug had long ago fled. Stunned by the concussion, Doug would take two days to reach the place where his supplies were stashed. By the end of the ordeal he had almost come to like the taste of the water that dripped off the rocks in the passage.
The former pirate, “Prince” Albert, had built an impressive castle out of rock and brick. Believing in his paranoia that the settlers were out to kill him, he had added layer after layer of brick and concrete to his original stone framework. He and Vladimir’s crew of former pirates who made their stand with him survived the initial helicopter attacks. Swordsman Marine paratroopers surrounded the fortress and pummeled it with small artillery. Albert and his friends gave as good as they got. Remote controlled mines scattered around the property and controlled from inside the building killed dozens of Marines. Automated lasers mounted on the roof raked the access routes until the helicopters destroyed them. The Marines finally deployed four track-mounted mobile artillery vehicles and concentrated their fire on what appeared to be the entrance. Alternating between their cannon and flame throwers, they breached the wall ten hours into the battle. Night had fallen when the section of wall collapsed under the continued barrage from the cannons. Once the wall was breached, the Swordsmen sprayed flammable liquids into the structure and then fired an incendiary round into the hole. The resulting explosion disabled all four of the Swordsman armored vehicles, but by that time the defenders were already safely in their escape tunnel.
Sebastian’s Northern Hemisphere decoys and defenses fell one by one. When a position became indefensible, those settlers who did not have shelters and were able to do so had been instructed to abandon their positions and retreat into the forest and find cover. The Swordsmen had left the two original settlements, the largest inhabited communities on the planet, for last. Once the Marines started attacking his home base, Sebastian knew for certain the rest of the planet had fallen. What he had done had worked. There just had not been enough of it. The Swordsman losses exceeded the settler losses by huge margins, but the weight of the Swordsman force was too great. Sebastian wondered how long they could hold out. Even with their frequent need to refuel and their limited range, the helicopters were devastatingly effective.
Timmy and his three sons had previously herded the cattle and the buffalo into the valleys formed by the tributaries of the river that fed the lake around which the settlers had built their first settlement. Sebastian had guessed that the Swordsmen would attack from the river’s delta and would walk across the flat flood plains leading to the main settlement. Timmy planned to stampede the cattle into the Marines. The stampeding animals would then run over and crush as many of the Marines as possible. Timmy’s three sons worked with him. Sebastian had been skeptical of the plan. He wondered if it would work but lacking too many better ideas, he agreed that Timmy should try. Even if it only partially worked, every Marine slowed down or stopped was one fewer that would reach the defenders. The Marines came up river in their boats as Sebastian had predicted. They disembarked on the flat areas of the flood plain as Sebastian had expected they would and when the Marines reached the places were Timmy felt they were most vulnerable, Timmy and the boys started the stampedes. Timmy and his three sons stampeded the cattle with the bulls leading the charge into the approaching Marines. The Marines turned their machine guns on the cattle and mowed them down. Not long after the cattle approached within firing range there were no cattle left. The Marines had killed them all. They called in the helicopters and the helicopters sought out Timmy and the boys. Recognizing their danger in time, Timmy and the boys retreated into the forest. Their plan had failed and they barely escaped with their lives. They ran as hard as the horses would carry them as far as they could go until night fell and they sought refuge in one of the mountain valleys.
In one sense, the Swordsmen launching their attack in the winter did work to Sebastian’s advantage. He could stage the shuttles and the cargo tug at frozen lakes in the Northern Hemisphere instead of in the South. This put them closer to the settlements where he correctly assumed the heaviest fighting would take place. Painted white to camouflage them against the ice and snow, the three aircraft waited for Sebastian’s call.
Sebastian had assumed, again correctly, that by the time he needed the aircraft, all his radio towers would be gone. Communication with the aircraft was to be accomplished using sub-sonic pulses. There were only two potential messages. The first was to call them into action at which point they were on their own. The second was to stand down because they would not be needed. Sebastian seriously doubted he would send the second message, but there was hope that the Swordsman Marine force might be small enough for it to be overcome by his ground defenses.
The three crews sat in their cockpits listening to the radio chatter. Only the cabin heaters drew energy from the idling reactors. The Swordsmen were making no attempt to conceal their activitie
s. Their radios were not encoded or scrambled and their transmissions were on standard frequencies. The flight crews listened as the defensive positions fell one at a time. They listened to the carnage as entire companies of Marines fell in battle. They waited. They hoped on one hand to be called soon and on the other to not be called at all.
When it became obvious that the Marines were advancing on the initial settlements, they knew that the call would come shortly. Sebastian delayed as long as he could before calling in the aircraft. He knew that by calling them he was sealing their fate. His wife and daughter were in one of those aircraft. He hoped that they could survive long enough to crash land somewhere, but that hope was slim.
Blondie and Brownie launched first. The shuttle was heavily loaded with volatile incendiary liquids in its cargo bay and batteries of lasers under its wings. The lasers fired both forwards and back, but did not aim independently of the aircraft. There had not been time to build servos and controls so the lasers were mounted to fire parallel beams forward and aft.
Katherine and Sam followed once the air had cleared of the snow Blondie’s ship had stirred up. The cold, dense air provided ample lift for the shuttles to fly and they became airborne more quickly than they would have in the tropics. Like two lumbering condors, the shuttles clawed for air as they rose over the landscape. As soon as they were airborne, they folded the giant propellers and switched to the turbines.
Helen and Colleen followed last in the cargo tug. They needed the shortest runway and carried the lightest load. The tug was only armed with lasers. The hope was that it could stay at a high enough altitude that it could hit the helicopters and stay out of range of the missiles.
When Blondie arrived at the battle, she could see waves of Marines advancing across the flat area leading to the initial settlement. Prior to entering the battle, both shuttles shut down the reactors relying solely on the liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen in their tanks for fuel. Blondie’s first pass was fast and low. The shuttle was capable of great speed, but it was not very maneuverable. If the Swordsmen had launched jet fighters, the shuttles would have been worthless. They never would have made it to battle. Blondie’s first run was straight in off the ocean at minimum height. Since there was no sense in saving the lasers, Blondie turned them on as soon as she thought they might do some good. She saw troops ahead of her fall to the ground as the lasers hit them. They opened the drains on the tanks in the cargo bay and the incendiary liquids poured out of the open cargo bay door. Lasers pointing backwards ignited the liquid and fire rained down from the sky. Turn about was fair play. The Swordsmen were known for their use of incendiaries on innocent people. It was time they were used on combatants. A swath of Marines fifty meters wide fell in the inferno. Others stepped up to take their place. Blondie pulled into a steep climb and turned for a second pass.
Where on the first pass they head come in from over the water, this time they came from over the land headed out to sea. The second pass started like the first. Midway into the pass, a helicopter appeared in the path and launched a single missile before the shuttle’s lasers chopped the helicopter in half. That one missile struck the shuttle midway out on the starboard wing severing it. If the shuttle had been higher, or moving faster, Blondie might have been able to rescue it, if she had had a runway on which to put it down. She looked over to Brownie. “We’re going in,” she said.
“I love you, Blondie,” Brownie replied.
“And I love you.”
Both pilots were glad that they had made the decision to shut down the ship’s reactors. The reactors were designed to withstand a crash without detonating if they had been shut down in time. A nuclear explosion this close to the settlement would kill all the Marines but it would also kill everyone they were trying to save. Standing the shuttle on its port wing, Blondie wing slipped down into the advancing troops. At the last possible second, Brownie blasted the crew escape module away from the rest of the shuttle, hoping that they had enough inertia to land in the water and enough height that the parachutes might work. Penned in by the mountains on both sides and unable to escape, many Marines died in the conflagration as the shuttle broke up cart wheeling across the battlefield spreading its incendiaries in a wide spray. Thanks to the precautions, the ship’s reactors survived the crash intact. Had they been breached, the resulting explosion would have cleared several kilometers of the terrain including the settlement they were trying to defend.
From his observation position Sebastian could not tell if the escape module had separated from the shuttle. He feared the worst and grieved at the loss of Blondie, Brownie and their shuttle as he watched Katherine approach for her run. Katherine initially focused her attention on the helicopter launching pads out on the water. Katherine’s attack run diverted the Swordsmen’s attentions enough for Blondie and Brownie to safely sink below the waves in their escape module. They could survive for weeks in the module. Rescue could come later. Katherine’s high speed as she advanced over the water gave her some tactical advantage. She was able to destroy some of the launching pads before the Swordsmen concentrated enough helicopters defending the pads to convince her to move elsewhere. Katherine turned her attention to the troops advancing on the second settlement, the one the women rescued from the pirates had originally occupied. She roared in low off the water as Blondie had done.
She made her first pass successfully and turned for her second pass. Mid way into the second pass, a lone marine on top of one of the mountains fired a shoulder mounted heat-seeking missile. It followed the flaming incendiary fluid into the cargo bay of the aircraft. It exploded amid the tanks and the shuttle broke up in a spectacular ball of fire in mid air. The flaming debris incinerated attackers in the air and on the ground. Sebastian saw the escape module break free, but did not see any parachutes.
As they had been instructed to do, Helen and Colleen stayed above missile range and fired their lasers at the helicopters. They were able to shoot down a few before a group of helicopters trained their lasers on the tug. The helicopters were designed to fire on targets that were either below them or at their height. To fire at something above them, they had to point the craft up and climb toward the target. Climbing and firing turned out to be a difficult task. The tug was able to avoid most of the shots. Some did get through and hit the tug. Eventually, the tug sustained enough damage to its flight control surfaces that it could no longer stay aloft. Helen pushed the tug as high as she dared to escape the helicopters and then dove away as fast as she could. Once she was beyond the horizon from the helicopters’ view, she turned back around and crash-landed the tug in a mountain lake not far from their home. Helen and Colleen survived only by Helen’s skill piloting the tug for so many years. She carefully crashed the cargo tug into a lake in the bottom of a canyon protected by mountains on three sides. They swam to shore protected from the freezing water by their flight suits.
Within two hours of entering the battle, all of the defenders’ aircraft were gone. They had taken their toll on the Swordsmen, but there were still plenty of Marines left advancing on the defenders’ positions. Sebastian wondered how long they could hold out against the onslaught. His only comfort was in knowing that all his people were stationed in warm hardened defensive positions, and the Swordsman Marines were advancing in the cold.
Night fell, and the helicopters ceased operations. The Marines continued to move and consolidate their positions, but they did not attack in the darkness. Had these been Federation Army Rangers, night vision equipment would have allowed them to continue the fight. Sebastian feared the coming of the dawn for he knew that in spite of the fact that they had significantly improved the odds against them, too many helicopters and armored land vehicles remained for him to think he or any of his people would survive to see night fall again.
HOMESTEAD - CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
AS ADMIRAL DAVIDSON HAD PREDICTED, the Swordsman space fleet had been completely destroyed, but the ground battle continued with the coming of daylight.
Greg and Rachel parked in low orbit. With their sensors set to maximum sensitivity they scanned the planet’s surface as dawn moved slowly across the part of the planet they had inhabited. Every settlement on the planet had been attacked with incendiaries. Many still burned. The only structures left standing were in the area of the original settlement. Large numbers of Swordsman Marines were digging in around it. The final battle was not long away. Whole forests had been burned. Entire herds of animals had been mowed down like grass in the field. Getting the harvest in before the attack had been a good idea. Fields which had recently held crops were blackened. The level of destruction was mind-boggling. Several of the beaches were littered with bodies of dead Marines. Remnants of inflatable boats floated among them. Sebastian had been right. The plan had been to drop large numbers of the Marines in the ocean off shore and have them motor to the shore in the boats. They had not counted on the voraciousness of the indigenous marine life.
The razor wire stretched across the mouths of most of the streams and rivers had stopped some of the boats. The wire had been cut and moved out of the way. Most of the boats managed to get through and lay abandoned on the river banks.
The shuttles had apparently been able to drop incendiaries of their own. Greg and Rachel flew over valleys full of the charred bodies of Marines. They found the wreckage of Blondie’s shuttle. It was unlikely that anyone had survived the crash. Wreckage was spread over a kilometer of hillside. It had touched the ground and cart wheeled as it disintegrated. A pocket of scorched ground told the tale on the other shuttle. Greg surmised it must have broken up in mid-air. Helen’s tug was floating upside down on one of the lakes. Heavily damaged, the landing appeared to have been a controlled crash. Greg and Rachel feared that their friends were dead.
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