Duty, Honor, Planet: The Complete Trilogy

by Rick Partlow

  * * *

  The Protectorate gunners were beginning to get the range, walking round after round in towards the CeeGee positions, and Shannon was about to admit to General Kage that he had been right and they were going to have to pull back, when it seemed like God Himself reached down and smote the enemy. Claps of thunder sounded as sonic booms echoed through the sky and trails of ionized vapor connected the heavens and the Earth for an eyeblink. The ground erupted across the road bridge, liberated kinetic energy turning the very air into a weapon as superheated gas turned to plasma and bathed the Protectorate lines in incandescent fire.

  Shannon knew she should be hugging the ground, but she couldn’t look away from the apocalyptic vision that stretched out before them, lighting up the night with a glow brighter than day. If the attack by the orbital defense satellites had been the terrifying hand of an angry deity, this was the very end of the world by comparison. She counted at least three dozen of the groundcar-sized projectiles fall, each taking out a handful of enemy vehicles in a splash of plasma and a mushroom cloud with an impact that shook and split the very earth beneath them. Men and women and biomech troopers lay helpless, unable to walk on the trembling ground.

  And then it ceased as abruptly as it had begun, leaving a preternatural silence that let Shannon hear the crackle of the flames and the pop-crack-boom of ammunition cooking off in the APCs that had been at the edge of the strikes and had only been set afire rather than being vaporized outright. An instinctive thought that didn’t reach her conscious mind made her turn and she gasped involuntarily at what she saw.

  Behind them, rising into the sky from a spot over five hundred kilometers away to the southeast, a crackling thread of ionized atmosphere marked the invisible passage of an incredibly powerful laser beam, fed by a dedicated fusion reactor. Designed to launch cargo capsules into orbit, it doubled as a defense system against orbital attack…and now it was being used against them by their enemies.

  “They have done what they can,” Kage said, eyeing the line of destroyed enemy vehicles; at least a third had been taken out in the attack. “Now, the rest is up to us.”

  “Ari, Tom,” Shannon broadcast on her team’s net. “Take them over the top. This is all the advantage we’re going to get. Let’s take it.”

  She picked up her carbine from where it had fallen and checked its load, focusing on the enemy…but she couldn’t help a glance up into the night sky and a hope that the Sheridan was still there.

  * * *

  Admiral Patel sighed with relief, settling back into his acceleration couch as the Sheridan headed away from Earth at one gravity. It had been way too close.

  “Damage report,” Nunez said, his tone normal but sweat beading on his forehead.

  “Captain Nunez,” Commander Devlin’s voice came over the bridge speakers, “we took quite a hit before the drive field came up. “Can’t tell without a survey flight, but we lost quite a bit of armor off the nose and there may be some damage to the laser emitters we’ve been using for gravimetic sensors. The sensors are still working, but I’m getting some feedback in the circuits. I don’t know how long they’ll hold out.”

  “Stay on top of it, Commander,” Nunez said. “We don’t have time for repairs right now…there are still dozens of Protectorate ships heading this way.”

  “Aye, sir,” the man acknowledged.

  “Any word on the lander?” Patel asked quietly. Nunez looked from him to Pirelli.

  She shook her head. “They entered the atmosphere before the laser fired,” she told them, “but then I lost it and we’re too far away now.”

  “The battle down there is out of our hands now,” Nunez said, crossing himself instinctively. “Our battle is out here. Helm, set course for the nearest formation of Protectorate ships.”

  “Aye, sir,” Lt. Ghent replied, linking his board to the Tactical sensors.

  “Sir…” Pirelli began hesitantly, frowning at her display. “We’re at pretty extreme range for the sensors we’ve rigged up, but I think I’m detecting an Eysselink drive field coming from the direction of the wormhole.”

  “Damn,” Nunez muttered, shaking his head. “More of those ramships?”

  “No, sir,” Pirelli said, her eyes widening. “Whatever this is, it’s much, much larger than that…”

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Valerie cradled Natalia in her arms, feeling the jerking sobs slowing, feeling the wetness of her daughter’s panicked tears soaking her blouse over her left shoulder. There were dirt stains on her skirt from sitting on the floor and she had to fight an inane impulse to brush at them. Instead, she drew her knees up and huddled in the corner of the cabin’s kitchen, trying not to stare. But there was so much to stare at…

  There was, to start with, Vice President Xavier Dominguez. She’d known the man for years, from before her father ran for President; he’d even been to their cabin a few times, been fishing with Glen in the lake. Now…now he was like a different person. His eyes were wide and red, like he was on something, and his skin was pale and clammy. He looked wired and terrified and giddy all at the same time, and it was scaring the hell out of her. He sat in a chair at the kitchen table, foot tapping out a haphazard rhythm on the wooden floor, eyes glued to the large tablet resting on the table in front of him, showing the tactical display from the orbital defense satellites.

  Dominguez had flown into a rage when the Sheridan had shown up and launched an attack on the biomech ground force, screaming curses as he tried to target the ground-based lasers in an attempt to destroy the ship. He’d pounded the table in frustration when she’d put up her drive field before the laser did any real damage, but now he was back to his keyed-up murmuring, ignoring everything else around him, including Natalia’s panicked reaction to his violent outburst.

  Then there were the half dozen mercenaries he’d brought with him. They were all cut from the same mold: hard-faced, hard-eyed men and women in nondescript grey fatigues and body armor, submachine guns strapped across their chests and sidearms at their hips. They were stationed in and out of the cabin, ever watchful yet ignoring her and her daughter except to make sure that neither of them made a false move.

  And of course, there was the platoon of biomechs that had flown in on a tilt-rotor transport just after the mercenaries had seized the cabin. They were all outside, but she could see them through the bay windows, patrolling robotically along the perimeter of the property, three of them stationed around the dock, barely visible in the glow of the exterior floodlights. Thankfully, their helmets hid their dead, black, shark’s eyes; but there was no mistaking their inhuman bulk or the graceless, mechanical precision of their movements. One of the mercenaries was their controller, she had deduced: a plain-faced blond woman who wore a backpack with a small transmission dish affixed to it, a control pad strapped to her left forearm.

  But the one thing she was trying the hardest not to stare at was Charlie Klesko’s body. He’d been killed by the mercenaries the minute they’d stepped out behind Dominguez, shot on the porch outside the back door of the cabin, and they’d left his body where it fell. The back door was clear transplas and through it she could see his sightless eyes staring at her, the blood pool beginning to dry under his body. Charlie had been a friend…

  She forced those thoughts down, not wanting to give them the satisfaction of seeing her cry. It was bad enough that they thought of her as helpless, a hostage. A surge of anger went through her, but she pushed that down as well. She couldn’t afford to give into rage any more than grief. She had to think of Natalia.

  She pulled the three-year-old away from her shoulder and looked her in the eye. Natalia looked just like the pictures she’d seen of her mother as a little girl, except that her hair was blond like her father’s. Right now, her cheeks were streaked with tears, her face red from crying, her lower lip quivering.

  “It’ll be all right, Natalia,” she said, trying to keep her voice calm and comforting. “Everything’s going to be fine. N
o one is going to hurt you.”

  She thought she’d been speaking softly, but apparently Dominguez heard her.

  “Of course no one is going to hurt you,” he said, his usual, smooth, politician’s tone contrasting sharply with his manic expression. His eyes flickered back and forth between them and the display from his tablet as he spoke. “You’re not a threat to us, and after this is all over, your father won’t be either. When we’re finished, we’ll leave you two here.” He attempted a smile, which was grotesque enough that Natalia buried her face in Val’s shoulder once again. “We’re not monsters, after all.”

  “Xavier…” She spoke hesitantly, afraid of what reaction she might get. “Do you remember what you used to be like, before?”

  “What do you mean, Val?” He appeared confused. “I’ve always been like this.”

  She didn’t say anything else, just let her head rest against the wall. The man was beyond brainwashed: he was hopelessly insane. There would be no talking her way out of this. She had to keep her eyes open for opportunity and hope that somewhere out there, someone was coming to help.

  * * *

  “Two minutes,” Esmeralda Villanueva announced from the cockpit, not glancing back, her eyes glued to her sensors. The lander was supposed to be nearly undetectable by radar or lidar, but the exhaust would still show up on thermal, and none of them wanted to think about what a kinetic kill weapon from one of the defense satellites would do to the aircraft.

  “Get into jump positions,” Vinnie ordered, raising from his seat and signaling for everyone to move to the rear ramp.

  McKay hit the quick release on his safety harness and waddled to the rear of the aircraft, burdened by nearly 80 kilos of armor, weapons and HALO gear, joining a double line of two dozen men and women hand-picked from the surviving Marine and Special Ops troops on the Sheridan for this mission. Jock was at the front of the right hand line, Sgt. Watanabe on the front of the one on the left.

  McKay moved to the rear of the left hand line, glancing around expecting to see Vinnie at the same position on the right…but Vinnie had moved up to the cockpit. McKay saw him thump Cal Orton, the co-pilot, on the shoulder, then lean over to touch helmets with Esme, sharing a private word that no one else could overhear. The sight made McKay feel disconnected, somehow, and apart from the others; he felt a surge of nostalgia for the days when he’d first been a First Lieutenant and all his problems had seemed simpler, if no less insurmountable.

  Vinnie moved back down the right side of the rows of seats, getting into position just before Esme warned “Thirty seconds!” McKay might have imagined it, but he thought something caught in her throat as she said it.

  “Opening the ramp,” Jock announced on the general comm channel.

  A mechanical hum filled the aircraft as the ramp slowly began to open, letting in a whistling blast of bone-chillingly cold and dangerously thin air. McKay barely heard the soft click in his helmet as it transitioned from filtering outside air to feeding him a supply of oxygen from his backpack’s small internal tank.

  “You’re seven klicks up and 80 out,” Esme reported. “This is as close as I can get before he’ll probably think I’m a threat and start dropping nasty big darts on me. I’ll circle around and land a hundred klicks out and wait for your word that you’ve secured the satellite controls.”

  “Go!” McKay heard Jock yell from the front of the line. “Go! Go! Go!”

  The line pushed forward as one after another of the group stumbled forward and soared off the end of the ramp into the darkness. McKay felt his stomach twist as he came closer and closer to the opening and the empty black beyond it---he wasn’t crazy about heights---but he kept moving anyway, walking down the ramp until the wind took him.

  Ignoring the instinctive panic of the fall, he touched a control at his left wrist and sent a current through the electrically activated polymer flaps that stretched from the harness of his HALO suit, expanding them into glider wings that sent him soaring forward as he fell. Ideally, they would be using powered flight packs for this, but there weren’t any in stock on the Sheridan; the HALO gear was standard TO&E for Marine drop troops for stealth insertion, but powered flight packs were specialized equipment too expensive for line units.

  That meant that they had to jump much closer to the target than he was comfortable with, given that Dominguez had access to real-time military satellite surveillance, but there wasn’t much of a choice. Shannon was down there with a few hundred CeeGee officer cadets and their training cadre, fighting an enemy force ten times their size with no air support and no heavy weapons and that thought made his insides curdle more than jumping into nothingness six kilometers high.

  The HUD in his helmet projected a map of the area and traced a line ahead of him, as well as the green dots that signified the rest of the jumpers. They were stacked in a staggered line, but all following the same heading.

  “General McKay,” he heard Esmeralda’s voice in his earphones, on his private channel, “I didn’t want to say this in front of Vinnie, but if things get bad, call me. I’ll try to give air support. I might be able to elude the kinetic weapons for a while.”

  “Commander,” he replied, ‘if things go bad, I want you to hit that cabin with a Bunker-Buster missile on my command.”

  “Sir,” she protested, “that much hyperexplosives will level anything within half a mile. You, your team, the Senator and her daughter…you’ll all die.”

  “We’re all going to do our damnedest to make sure that doesn’t happen,” he told her, “but in the end, we have to take out that controller. That army of biomechs could kill tens of thousands of people if they get to Capital City.”

  There was a long silence when all he could hear was the air whistling by outside his helmet and he thought she wasn’t going to respond. “Yes, sir,” she finally said, her voice resigned. “I guess that’s why you’re a General.”

  I’m a general, he reflected cynically and silently, because no one else wants this fucking job.

  * * *

  “Larry,” Joyce Minishimi said, a worried tone coming into her voice, “tell me what the hell that thing is.”

  Gianeto looked up from the Tactical display with a frown, still not comfortable with the slight differences between the Bradley’s bridge and the Decatur’s and very uncomfortable with the huge Eysselink drive field signature heading insystem from the enemy gate in the Belt at two gravities.

  The Bradley had been pursuing the next in a line of scattering Protectorate ships when the big vessel had come through and immediately activated its drive field. Now, they were on an intercept course for the thing at a sedate one gravity.

  “Captain,” he said hesitantly, “as near as I can figure, that is the drive field of a Republic cruiser. One of the newest ones, too.” He shook his head. “The problem is, there are only two ships with that drive signature. One’s the Sheridan and the other got blown up a few hours ago.”

  “Oh, shit,” Drew Franks muttered from behind her. Minishimi glanced back at him, trying not to glare.

  “Something, Lieutenant?”

  “Captain,” Franks said, a look on his face like he’d swallowed something distasteful, “we’ve found out that the Multicorps have been aiding the Protectorate unwittingly…Kevin Fourcade, a high up in Brendan Riordan’s staff, was a mole, working for Antonov.”

  “Yes, Lieutenant?” she prompted, straining to keep her patience in the face of total exhaustion.

  “The Multicorps have a contract to build one more Sheridan class cruiser, ma’am,” he expanded, nodding at the sensor display. “I’m just not certain who they built it for.”

  “Oh, my dear Lieutenant Franks,” Minishimi said quietly, shaking her head, “you share with Jason McKay an almost uncanny intuitiveness for the worst case scenario. But try as I might, I can’t think of any other reason a Fleet cruiser other than the Sheridan would be exiting the wormhole.”

  Bevins and Reno eyed the interplay uncertainly, both of the
m looking between her and Commander Lee, a fact that didn’t go unnoticed by Minishimi. It hadn’t been very comfortable relieving Lee of her newfound command, despite the fact that the woman had been very professional about it. She’d kept her on the bridge instead of sending her back to the auxiliary control room, counting on her to help smooth things over with the original crew. She’d sent Wolford to handle the XO position, replacing him with Gianeto, who had more experience and her unconditional trust.

  “What Lt. Franks is saying,” she interpreted for Commander Lee, “is that we are most likely looking at a Sheridan-class cruiser built by our own corporations for the enemy.”

  “And its current course is taking it straight for Earth orbit,” Gianeto added.

  “Dominguez has control of the orbital defense satellites,” Franks pointed out. “If that thing gets by us and makes it to orbit, it can sit back and nuke our cities.”

  “How the hell do we fight that, ma’am?” Lee asked, shaking her head in disbelief.

  “I’m open to suggestions. Engineering?” Minishimi called down to Commander Infante, “Have you been following this?”

  “Yes, Captain Minishimi,” Infante responded, her voice with that far-away tone of someone lost in thought. “I can tell you right now that the method of destabilizing the drive field using our sensor emitters isn’t going to work on them. The field on a ship that large is going to be too powerful for that. It’s certainly possible to make a gravimetic emitter powerful enough to destabilize a field on a cruiser that size, but I can’t rig it up from anything on this ship.”

  “What about a field intersect?” Franks asked. “The ramships managed to take out the field on the Decatur, right?”

  Infante hesitated for a long moment. “It would be close. I might be able to rig up a bypass that would keep our trunk line from exploding from the overload, but I guarantee the gravito-inertial load in a ship that large is going to cause one hell of a lot of structural damage.”