A second cruiser exploded, then the third, both the victims of Thunderer’s guns.
“What’s our ammunition level?” Now that Orion’s mauled flank was protected by Thunderer’s armored bulk and the most immediate threats had been eliminated, Sato could turn his attention to the ship.
“Twenty-two percent for the main guns, sir. If we maintain our current rate of fire, we’re going to be out in another ten minutes.” The tactical officer paused. “We’re at fifty-seven percent for the secondaries, but that includes the guns on the port side that are out of action. I’m having the ammunition from their magazines shifted to the starboard guns, so we should be in good shape for at least another thirty minutes, even maintaining the current rate of fire.”
“And Thunderer?”
“She reports thirty-two percent for her forward main guns; the aft guns are out of action. Forty-three percent for her secondaries.”
Sato pursed his lips. He knew they could win this fight, but they’d be extremely vulnerable if additional Kreelan ships showed up. “Restrict main gun fire to cruisers or ships attempting to ram. Engage all smaller targets with the secondaries.”
“Aye, sir.”
On the tactical display, there were still six enemy cruisers and a dozen destroyers left in this group of enemy ships, but nearly all of them were damaged. They had stayed alive thus far by concentrating their efforts on the battleships’ escorts in a running fight astern of the big ships where they were comparatively safe from the battleships’ main guns and pulse cannons.
Zooming out, he saw that Monarch and Conqueror had mopped up the cruisers that had tried to attack the carriers, and that the ships from Home Fleet were getting the upper hand in the separate battle against the Kreelan ships on the far side of the planet.
Returning the view to the immediate surroundings and the desperate fight going on around them, he turned to Eldridge. For the first time, it looked like a ship he’d been aboard would not only survive, but emerge victorious from battle. Even at the steep price the ship had paid in the losses of Semyonova and the other members of the crew, it would have been a heady feeling were it not for the knowledge that Steph was dead. He couldn’t bring her back, but he could kill as many Kreelans as he could.
“Bring us about as tight as she’ll turn with Thunderer alongside. Tactical, stand by with the pulse cannon.” He paused, his dark eyes taking in the positions of the Kreelan ships. “Let’s finish this.”
* * *
“We’ve got to hurry.” Mills puffed as he jogged along the road, carrying Steph in his arms. Allison ran beside him, carrying the same sword she’d used to kill one of the guards. Valentina ran a few yards ahead of them, a Kreelan sword in its scabbard tucked into her combat harness and the sniper rifle across her shoulders.
After dealing with the Kreelans, Mills had run from the communications center to meet the trio. After lifting both Allison and Valentina off the ground in an unrestrained bear hug, he had quickly applied a combat dressing to Steph’s leg and gave her some painkillers. Then he picked her up and started off for the nearest Marine positions.
Ahead, the pillars of smoke rising from the fields marked the positions of dead ships and armored vehicles, just over the rise outside of town.
“Bloody hill.” Mills was struggling, every muscle in his body quivering from exertion as he forced his body up the incline.
Valentina kept an eye all around them, periodically running backward so she could look behind them and make sure they weren’t being followed. There wasn’t a single warrior in view. Good, she thought. “Come on. It’s not too much farther.”
“Steph, darlin’, you need to go on a diet.” Mills’s dirty, blood-spattered face crinkled briefly into a grin.
“Fuck you, Mills.” Steph gave him a weak hug, trying not to wince. Even with the painkillers, her leg hurt like the devil. She also didn’t tell him that her wound was bleeding again, the dressing separating from her skin from the rough treatment it was getting.
“Don’t let the commodore hear you propositioning me.”
Beside him, Allison rolled her eyes theatrically.
Valentina spun around again to check behind them, and stopped in her tracks, her eyes widening at what she saw. A cloud of black specks, just above the flat farmland beyond the town, was heading right for them.
Enemy attack ships.
“Down!” She grabbed Allison and threw her to the ground as Mills, not bothering to ask what Valentina had seen, dropped to his knees beside them, putting Steph down as gently as he could before covering her with his body.
The air was shattered by the screech of dozens of boats, larger ones than had attacked Sparks’s Marines earlier, flying over them. The ships were so low that they kicked up a huge cloud of dust and debris from the fields as they passed.
Wave after wave flew overhead. Mills looked up, and could clearly see the garish markings on the alien craft and make out every detail of their wasp-like hulls. While not as large as the assault boats the Marines typically used, he guessed they were still big enough to hold a couple hundred warriors each. Just the ones he counted after the first waves had passed would have amounted to nearly a division’s worth of warriors. And there were more, a lot more.
As they passed overhead, the ships climbed higher into the sky.
He glanced over at Valentina, who looked back. She shook her head, grimacing.
After the final wave finally passed over and the roar faded, Mills could hear the unmistakable thrum of gatling guns and the sharp crack of tank main guns firing.
“Come on.” Valentina helped him up, then made sure Allison was all right.
Picking up Steph, they walked the rest of the way up the rise to where they could see the battlefield where the Marines had annihilated the warriors earlier.
“Bleeding Christ.” Mills felt his hopes of rescue die as the scene came into view.
The landing zone the Marines had used earlier was a scene right out of hell. Hundreds of Kreelan assault ships flew through what looked like a solid flaming wall of defensive fire. Many of the ships began to stream smoke and crashed, while others simply exploded.
But most got through. Seconds later Mills saw the sky fill with clouds of warriors falling from the Kreelan ships.
Beyond them, he could just make out the glint of what must have been Confederation Navy boats, now caught in a brutal slugging match with the Kreelan ships.
“I guess we’re not getting out of here yet.”
Mills and Valentina exchanged a glance at Allison’s words.
“Looks that way, hon.” Mills knelt down, and Valentina and Allison helped him put Steph, unconscious again, carefully on the ground.
The big man was overcome by a wave of exhaustion, and nearly fell over before Valentina caught him.
“I’m fine,” he rasped, trying to push her away.
“No, you’re not, you idiot.” She undid his equipment harness and pulled his uniform tunic aside to look at the wound in his side from the battle earlier. “You’ve lost a lot of blood.”
“Give me a pint or two of beer to make up for it.” He tried to laugh, but it ended up little more than a cough. He felt Allison’s arms around his neck, hugging him tightly. “I’ll be okay,” he told her.
Valentina, frowning at his bravado, quickly did what she could for the wound, slapping a coating of the liquid bandage over it and hitting him with a painkiller and some stims while silently cursing Mills for not having done it himself earlier. “Idiot.”
Then she checked on Steph, noticing that her leg was bleeding again. She’d lost too much blood, and if they couldn’t get her to a corpsman or sickbay soon, she was going to die.
“What are we going to do, Mills?” Allison, her arms still around his neck, was watching the fireworks over the battlefield, her voice nearly lost in the booms and cracks that followed the explosions and gunfire.
“We're going to hope that General Sparks kicks their little blue arses. And soon.�
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CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE
After the fleet had informed him he could expect more Kreelans, Sparks had quickly gathered his staff officers and regimental commanders to his tank to regroup after the battle and get ready for the one that was yet to come.
“This is good ground, right here.” Sparks pointed to a spot on a laminated map he’d pulled out of a tube and unrolled on the back of his Wolverine’s turret. The location he was pointing to was a huge expanse of farmland that was only broken by a few scattered stands of trees. The farms around Breakwater were bordered fairly close-by with woods, but five kilometers from town, where Sparks was indicating on the map, the gently rolling farm land opened wide like a river delta.
“The main thing is going to be who gets here first, our reinforcements or theirs.” The operations officer looked up. “It’s going to be bloody close.”
“And we have no idea where the Kreelans are going to come from. It’s not like they have anyone left here to reinforce. They could approach however they please, so we don’t have a known axis of attack.” The intel officer’s observation failed to add any cheer to the conversation.
Sparks nodded. “That’s true, but the Kreelans seem to do things very direct.” He took a pen from his pocket and set it down on the map, near the margin, in the upper left corner. The tip pointed in the direction of the area where Sparks wanted to deploy, the imaginary line passing right over Breakwater. “The fleet intel pukes said the enemy boats were coming from roughly this direction, did they not?”
The intel officer nodded. “Yes, sir. Their approach vector is a steady one-four-zero degrees toward us. But they could break off at any point and encircle our position.”
“They could, but I don’t think they will. I think they’re going to come straight down our throats and play their favorite little air drop game.” Sparks took another pen and set it down on the map in the rough center of the open expanse of farmland, turning the point to face the direction of the Kreelans’ approach. “This is our center point and axis, ladies and gentlemen. I want our forces here, facing the enemy’s approach vector. It’s a risk, but we don’t have enough firepower to cover the entire LZ, we’re going to need to get the rest of our folks on the ground.”
“It’s going to be a madhouse.” The logistics officer shook her head. “Has anyone ever landed three divisions simultaneously?”
“At Kirov they landed six,” the operations officer replied. “But they had weeks to plan the op and there weren’t any Kreelan reinforcements inbound to screw things up.” He glanced skyward. “We’ve just got a big gaggle of boats coming down in a race to see who gets here first.”
Sparks looked at the logistics officer. “I want a straight up answer. Are you going to be able to get those boats down without making a big charlie foxtrot?”
The young woman returned his gaze evenly. Charlie foxtrot was the phonetic term in military-speak for a cluster-fuck, and she had served under Sparks long enough to know that he never tolerated bullshit. “Yes, sir. We can handle this. We’ll get them down.”
Satisfied, Sparks nodded. “Good. I want the center of the LZ to be right here.” He pointed to a small stand of trees on the map, and the logistics officer noted down the coordinates. “Any questions?” The young woman shook her head. “Then get in your track and get over there to set up the welcoming committee.”
“Yes, sir!” She climbed down the flank of the Wolverine, then ran to her own track, which was a field support vehicle based on the same tank chassis, but with a much larger superstructure and no turret. It was only armed with a gatling gun on the commander’s cupola. Shouting a warning to the nearby infantry, she climbed into the cupola and in a few seconds was off, the tank’s tracks throwing out big rooster tails of mud and dirt as it sped away.
“I want the rest of the brigade on this line here.” Sparks turned his attention back to the map, drawing a line along a slight rise that was perpendicular to the Kreelan’s approach vector. “Space out the two armored regiments evenly, and I want a company-size reserve...here.” He made an X near another stand of trees about two kilometers behind the main line. “I’ll be with the brigade on the center. XO, I want you with the reserve.”
His executive officer nodded as he jotted a note on his data pad.
Sparks turned to the man who was the commander of what was left of the Marine infantry. The brigade had started the day with two mechanized infantry regiments, but had lost over half their total strength in the first fight. The highest ranking officer who had survived was a captain, who stared at the map with bloodshot eyes.
“Captain, I want you to divide your Marines evenly along the line. Don’t worry about making it clean, just divide up your folks as best you can and get them moving, pronto. We don’t have much time.”
“If I may, sir?”
Sparks glanced at the intel officer, a young man who had graduated from college only six months before, but had already made two previous combat deployments. Sparks had given the youngster a hard time during training, but only because he had respected him and had great expectations for the him as an officer, assuming he lived long enough to make his next promotion. “Shoot, son.”
“If the Kreelans do try another one of their air drop runs, I’d suggest deploying some of the empty infantry combat vehicles forward of the main line…”
He took a pen and drew a line on either end of the line where Sparks wanted the armored regiments, forming a squared U shape with the open end pointing toward the Kreelans’ expected approach vector. “They can provide some flanking anti-air fire with their gatling guns, then pull back through these depressions here and here.”
Sparks looked up at his operations officer. “Thoughts?”
“I like it. Anything coming through that corridor would hit a solid wall of lead, and we’ve got plenty of empty ICVs.” He saw the Marine infantry officer wince. There were a lot of empty vehicles because so few of the infantry had survived the earlier attack. “Sorry, Hermann.”
The captain made a dismissive gesture with his hand, but said nothing.
“Agreed.” Sparks turned to the intel officer and nodded in approval.
“Anything else from anyone?”
There wasn’t. Sparks ran his eyes around the tight circle, meeting the gaze of each of his officers in turn.
“Good. But let me remind you of something, ladies and gentlemen. We are not retreating. Either we beat the Kreelans here or we die. Make sure your people know that.”
“With our shields or on them, sir?” The operations officer, who had a love of ancient literature, paraphrased Plutarch.
Sparks did something he rarely did in the field. He smiled. “Damn right. Now saddle up.”
* * *
Selan-Kulir stood silently next to the high priestess of the Nyur-A’il as their attack ship streaked through the sky toward where the humans awaited them. As tradition demanded, Selan-Kulir had offered to become the First to Ku’ar-Marekh when the priestess materialized on their ship. The priestess had declined her offer with no more than a shake of her head.
To some, it would have been a great dishonor to have been denied the duties of First.
To Selan-Kulir, it brought not shame, but relief. She had sensed the fate of Ri’al-Hagir, the echo of fear in the Bloodsong as her soul was cast into the pit of darkness. Esah-Kuran, who had followed in the ill-fated Ri’al-Hagir’s footsteps, had not long survived, but at least had met an honorable end in the great charge against the human warriors who had landed on this world, and against whom she herself would soon fight.
She glanced at Ku’ar-Marekh, who stood as still and cold as the stones of the Kalai-Il beside her. Her Bloodsong, as with all the priestesses, was strong, powerful. But instead of providing the warm fire that would ignite into flame during battle, it was a frigid wind that blew upon the souls of the peers.
Shivering involuntarily, Selan-Kulir returned her attention to the ship’s forward view port, looking beyond the craf
t’s pilot. Their ship led the entire formation, which stretched out for half a league on either side, and as much again behind them. She knew that the transport ships that had brought them had already been destroyed by the humans in orbit, and that while the battle still raged in space above, the Imperial warships were doomed to die under the guns of the human fleet.
This, too, brought no shame, for the warriors of the fleet had fought valiantly and well against a worthy foe, and had brought much glory this day to the Empress. Their deaths were merely the next step in the Way of Her Children. Death was a part of life, and for a warrior, to die for Her in battle was to have lived well, earning a place in the Afterlife, basking in Her love.
“That is what I, too, desire.”
Selan-Kulir snapped her head around to look at Ku’ar-Marekh, who was staring at her. Realizing the breach of protocol, Selan-Kulir lowered her eyes. “I beg your forgiveness, priestess.”
Ku’ar-Marekh went on as if she hadn’t heard, shifting her eyes to look well beyond the young warrior, to something only she could see. “To die with honor in Her glory, to awaken on the other side of death and join those who have gone before. To feel again, and be warm…”
Selan-Kulir bowed her head and saluted, mystified by Ku’ar-Marekh’s words. She had never known a priestess to act so.
Turning to look out the view port, Ku’ar-Marekh watched as the ship flashed up over a sharp rise. Off to their right, she caught a glimpse of four tiny figures collapsing to the ground as the landing force passed overhead. She sent forth her second sight to confirm her suspicion, and a moment later a cold smile graced her lips, revealing her ivory fangs.
It was her humans, the ones she wished to face in personal combat. They had survived.
“Good,” she murmured to herself. She would attend to them soon.
Ahead, she could see the positions the force of human warriors had taken along a slight rise in the terrain. Beyond them was a cloud of human assault ships, racing in to land.
With a last glance at Selan-Kulir, she turned to the warriors gathered in the hold of the ship. “Prepare yourselves!”
In Her Name: The Last War Page 106
