Hero to the End (The Hunter Legacy Book 13)

by Timothy Ellis

  "Big ten four on that," said Dick.

  I shot him a glance, once again wondering what he was reading these days.

  Focus!

  Hammer had taken the first hit, and it had cost five percent of her shields. I’d been right on the hit size. Lacey and Bigglesworth were both suddenly nearly thrown out of their chairs, or would have been but for being buckled in. Orion's shields went down ten percent. They'd hit her twice, from different parts of the mass.

  WHAM, WHAM, WHAM. We took three hits one after the other. Shields down twenty percent. But half the mass was gone. The fleet fired everything it had, and kept on firing.

  A white dot winked out.

  "Guardian gone," said Jane quietly.

  "All Cruiser hulls leave now," I said into fleet coms.

  Our fire dramatically lessened, as ships left the firing lines.

  "Unassailable holed," said Jane barely two minutes later.

  "Battleships, go. Jane, move the Titans into point blank range. We have to take the heat off everyone else."

  "Confirmed."

  The three biggest ships moved slowly closer. Sceptre was down to sixty percent now, Hammer at seventy two, and Orion on sixty nine.

  I waited until everyone else was out of range.

  "Jane, cloak us and go."

  "Going."

  We shot off in different directions, all three narrowly missing being hit again.

  "You were right," said Patton. "I'm sorry I questioned you."

  "Ditto," said Jedburgh.

  Bigglesworth said nothing, just looked thoughtful.

  "I hate it when I'm right."

  For some reason, everyone thought it was funny. I looked around the CCC, and saw relieved faces. I wondered for a moment how relieved they were going to be when I eventually killed them all.

  The twins gave me identical strange looks.

  "Get out of my head," I thought at them, and went back to concentrating on the nav map and HUD.

  "Prepare for phase two," said Patton, and his hollo vanished.

  The three Titans formed up into line astern at our waypoint, and I headed us towards the planet. We had a day to wait for the aliens to be close enough to begin forming their disk. A day to prepare.

  "Everyone to the Armoury," announced BA. She looked at me. "You too boss, just in case."

  "I have the con," said George forcefully.

  I gave him the look, thought better of it, smiled, and climbed down. For the rest of the day, BA had us drilling in the new combat suits. We weren't going to be with the ground troops, but we were listed as a reserve force. There were also brand new giant suits, and we all watched as BA activated the first one.

  "Yes!" she said triumphantly, and shields came on around the suit.

  "Where's mine?" asked Agatha, and one walked forward a step.

  BA hastily dropped the shields on hers before someone walked into them. There was a stampede towards the giant suits, and I stood there in my new custom fitted combat suit, and watched them while they mounted up.

  "No Jon," thought Amanda. "You've never used one before. Now's not the time to learn."

  "Spoilsport!"

  "Who is?" asked BA.

  "Nothing," I said.

  The twins laughed inside my head.

  By the end of the day, we'd mastered the new equipment, and ended by walking the suits into Gunbus, through an airlock I hadn't previously used in Gunbus' actual docking bay, which was a full station sized lock. They still had to duck the giant suits in through the opening, and there wasn’t a lot of room left inside Gunbus' Cargo Bay by the time all of Team One had lined up ready to deploy if we had to.

  My gut said we had to. I told my gut to get lost, and we all enjoyed dinner together. It was nice to have things back to normal.

  We all slept late the following morning. Grace had the CCC, and by lunch time, George had managed eight hours sleep as well. There was nothing to do but wait, so we took the extra time to rest. Well, maybe not just rest. I took back the CCC straight after lunch, and sent Grace off to bed. She wouldn’t get too much sleep, but any was a bonus. I could have ordered her to make sure she slept, but given what was coming, I knew she'd choose to be with us, so I let her decide herself. Team and all that.

  As it turned out, when they started building the disk, I'd picked the place pretty accurately. It wasn’t exactly hard to though, given how long I’d spent analyzing previous disks. It was just Jane and I at that moment, with Susan and Lacey. The four of us had ringside seats to disk construction 101. It was actually fascinating to see how they slotted the ships together. Each had a distinct place. They all touched in exactly the same place on each hull, and they appeared to be sharing power with each other.

  As the disk formed, we received a vid from the planet as well, showing the light vanishing. I pulled up a number of the other ones from the ground so we could see what was going on there. Around the planet were also a series of special comnavsats with abnormally sized generators, and suit belts for cloaking. The cams pointed down, and the cloak had just enough small holes in it to allow each cam to operate. Over the key areas of the planet, as if nature was co-operating with us, there were no clouds to obscure the view.

  There were no beans to be seen. All crops had long since been removed.

  The troops on the ground were ready. They'd constructed a walled city in a valley which hadn't been occupied before. It reminded me of medieval computer games, where you had to defend or storm a castle. Down part of the center was a castle like structure, with houses and buildings on either side, sloping down to open areas near the walls. Outside the walls was a wide killing ground. Every twenty meters or so around the wall was a heavy gun position, where the turret appeared to be melded to the wall. On the top of the wall stood giant suits, with standard combat suits between them. Well back from the walls were towers, designed to allow more defenders to rain down fire over the top of the wall.

  There was movement all around the city, as if most of the population unable to leave the planet had fled here in advance of the alien landings they knew were about to happen, and were still trying to go about normal lives.

  Looking down from above, it looked almost like a real city, except we hadn't used walls around cities in centuries.

  "How many troops are down there?" asked Dick.

  "Two divisions," said Annabelle. "The Americans have nearly twelve thousand on the ground, and the Germans almost ten thousand."

  "Are they all inside that city?" asked Amy.

  "No," answered BA. "They have core missile sites in a number of locations, and each site has troops to defend it. But the city is deliberately the main target."

  "So they won't be needing us," said Melissa.

  "One wouldn't think so," I said.

  "They didn't ask us," said Annabelle. "Do you think it's time BA?"

  "Time for what?" asked Dick.

  "Time for us to use the third CCC here," she responded with a smile.

  "Lead on boss," said BA with a hand wave.

  Both of them left, and took up the main chairs in the Marine CCC behind us. Hollo's popped up around Annabelle, notably Patton, Wellington, O'Neill, Mills, and several other Colonels. A dozen SM's appeared around BA.

  With a grin at me, the twins left to join them, and very soon it was just Jane, George, Dick, Amy, and Melissa, left with me. I looked at George, who had the expression of someone who also wanted to change locations, but he saw me looking, and shook his head. We were team, but the ship needed us first. Angel, who'd been sleeping on the console up until now, since nothing interesting, for her, was happening; rose, stretched, and took her normal sitting position facing the view.

  Vonda Wellington popped up a hollo next to Patton and Bigglesworth, on Lacey's side of my HUD. It was Patton's show, but Vonda was running it. I checked to see where she was, and found her in the CCC of Gatherer, with Hobbs and a fairly large staff section. Patton was still on his station.

  The disk was nearly comp
lete now, the planet completely dark. Alien ships were nearly there.

  The stage was set, the orchestra tuned up, now to see if we could actually dance.

  Thirty Seven

  The first alien ship didn’t hesitate. It dived straight into the atmosphere and headed for the ground. Within minutes, thousands were following it. I wondered about their ship design for a moment, since they still didn’t have shields, and the reports from the techs who'd pulled apart the ships we'd salvaged showed nothing special in the way of protection. No obvious heat shield or special hull material. No protection for the pilot. Yet the ships dived into the atmosphere as if they were immune to heat. None of them burned up. None of them lost control.

  "I wonder," said Dick.

  "Wonder what?" asked George.

  "If our inability to figure out why those ships aren’t the death traps they appear to be, is why we can't beat them?"

  There was no answer to that, but I had been thinking the same thing. For all we were technically a lot more advanced than the aliens, we still had no understanding of their tech at all.

  "Welcome mat," said Vonda.

  Missiles launched all around the planet, as if it was midnight on New Year's Day, and the whole planet was firing off the traditional fireworks at the same moment. Not something we did at home of course, but for much of the human race, especially in the American sector, it was a tradition which endured.

  "Wow," said Dick, Amy, and Melissa together.

  "What's wow?" asked Grace, walking in still toweling her hair. "Oh. Wow."

  She took the Helm chair, and settled in to watch the show. Jeeves came in and put drinks in front of each of us, and munchies in front of Grace. She threw her towel at him, and he snatched it out of the air before it covered his head.

  "Hey," said Melissa. "Where's my munchies? This is almost worthy of popcorn."

  "Popcorn my Lord?" asked Jeeves.

  "I can't stand popcorn," I said. "But if the peanut gallery wants popcorn, let there be popcorn."

  "Yes my Lord."

  Sometimes I found it hard to figure out if he was really that serious, or not.

  Popcorn and other munchies appeared. Missiles launched. Aliens exploded. The novelty wore off. The numbers of aliens diving on the planet increased exponentially, as did the number of missile launches.

  "How are they launching so many missiles?" asked Dick.

  "It's an adaption of the Mosquito system," said Jane. "Patton finally bit the bullet, and they bought a dozen high end AI's, and installed them in sites all over the world. Each one is controlling several thousand launch sites, each of which has a much bigger launcher than any ship can mount. Other than the Titans. They're using clones like I do, so each missile is targeted to an alien ship individually."

  "That’s a lot of missiles," said Amy.

  "They've been building them for this battle, since Patton returned from Gaia. A good chunk of the industrial might of the sector has gone into missile production alone. Both for ships, and this land battle."

  It was an impressive sight. So far, not a single alien had landed on the ground. It begged a question.

  "Jane, check for live aliens on the ground please."

  "Confirmed."

  A screen popped up and the images raced across it too fast to make out. It vanished again. And reappeared immediately, showing an alien gliding towards the ground from a thousand meters up. It was rotating slowly, and its lower body seemed to act like a natural parachute. I shuddered. It looked way to familiar, even though the scale was significantly bigger.

  "Confirmed. There are several thousand aliens on the ground."

  "How?" asked Amy.

  "General Wellington," I said, getting her attention. "You have aliens on the ground."

  "How?" she asked, echoing Amy.

  "Survivors of crashed ships," said Jane, "and some which seem to have bailed out before their ship was destroyed. Some of them are badly injured, but all of them are mobile. More and more are raining down with the debris."

  "Where?"

  Jane sent her a map.

  "All commands prepare for incoming," said Vonda. "No ships have landed, but we have aliens converging on our positions."

  And as if to claim a lie to the statement, the first ship landed intact not far outside the wall of the city. It was quickly followed by another. And then hundreds. The aliens were arriving now, faster than we had missile capacity to take them out. In minutes, there were thousands down outside the city alone.

  The guns in the walls opened up, lobbing Cruiser sized pulses into the middle of the ship parking zone. Aliens raced towards the wall. More guns opened up from the wall, lobbing different sized pulses into the oncoming mass.

  "Stand ready on the wall," said Vonda, and combat suits raised their guns.

  "Someone remind me why we aren't down there?" asked Aline.

  "We've done our bit, apparently," said Annabelle. "I had to insist they add us to the reserve list."

  "We could have just gone," said Agatha.

  "True," agree Alana.

  "No," I said. "It's not the right time for us."

  "Why not?" demanded BA.

  "This isn’t the shit end of this op."

  Amanda laughed. One by one they all joined in.

  The center of the city was clearing. More and more combat suits appeared on the walls, until there no longer was any space on the walls in any direction. Behind the walls, units formed up ready to fill any breach, or deal with an alien dropping into the middle of the city from above.

  "Isn't that the problem with using walled defenses?" asked Dick.

  "Lack of depth?" I asked him.

  "Yeah. The wall is only so wide, and there's a limit to how many people you can get on them, and still be able to fire effectively."

  George was looking at both of us alternately.

  "Huh?" he said.

  "How many defenders are opposite the place where the aliens are attacking?" I asked him.

  "Few thousand?"

  "If that," said Dick. "I'd say only sixty percent of them can fire effectively as it is. And that’s a fraction of two divisions. The rest around the wall are wasted, or maybe just reserves for later."

  "Not for long," said Jane.

  An arrow appeared on the opposite side of the city.

  "Thanks Jane," said Vonda. "Flanking maneuver in progress. All wall defenders stand ready."

  Within an hour, the wall was being attacked along its entire length. The missile systems were still exacting a heavy toll on the incoming ships, but the entire city was now completely surrounded by parked ships, and aliens were now attempting to climb the walls.

  "Jane, are they trying to eat the walls yet?"

  She blurred images again.

  "Confirmed."

  "Buckle up everyone," I said into ship coms.

  Susan and Lacey repeated the command on their own ships.

  "Vonda?" I asked.

  "Bring the light," she said.

  "Jane, drop our cloaks, and fire everything."

  "Confirmed."

  The other two Titans became visible, and fire from all three ships converged on the disk, carefully spread so we hit more than half of it with the first shot. The disk shattered completely.

  "Move us and re-cloak!" I yelled.

  Each ship shot off in a different direction, and seconds later, were invisible to anything but mass detectors.

  The planet remained dark. Alien ships changed course from all directions to converge where the disk had been, and groups of them started firing at where we'd been, and all around it. None came close, since they were underestimating our speed. A few minutes later, we formed up at our waypoint.

  The first alien made it to the top of the wall, and a giant suit fired straight into its head, blowing it clean off. Another one took its place.

  "Tactical!"

  A navmap portion popped up, showing the sun, the planet, and the position of where the disk had been. An arrow was movi
ng ever closer to the planet.

  "Prepare for light," said Vonda.

  And suddenly, the city lit up with normal daytime sunlight.

  Everywhere at once, the aliens stopped.

  "Bring the pain," said Vonda.

  Everything outside the city exploded.

  Thirty Eight

  The aliens on the walls were quickly dispatched, and the fighting stopped. The missiles kept launching though, and new alien ships started looking for somewhere to land.

  But not all of them. One of them slammed into the middle of the city as fast as it could come down. Part of the castle disintegrated. More followed it.

  "Jane, take us in."

  "In?" said Dick "What do you mean in?"

  "We need to be an umbrella over the city?" asked Jane.

  "Yes."

  "Confirmed."

  Dick looked at me with his eyes losing focus.

  "You're serious?"

  "Do I look like I'm serious?"

  He didn’t answer. But he unbuckled, and rose.

  "Where are you going?" asked George.

  "To quote one of those square screens you're both so fond of: to find a pub!"

  He walked out. He wasn’t going to find one, and he knew that, but the bar in the Mess was fully stocked. Maybe he was the only person in this system who was thinking clearly.

  The city was fighting back now. Almost every gun was pointing upward, and alien ships were being shredded. Some large shapes had risen within the city, and the debris was being pushed sideways by grav plates, so it fell outside the walls.

  But it was a losing strategy. More and more aliens began landing again.

  "Go faster," I said to Jane.

  Another screen popped up, showing a different part of the planet. The kill zone had been detonated there as well.

  "Confirmed."

  We went faster, moving up to our full speed.

  George took in the look on my face.

  "Problem boss?"

  "Do we hold our cloaks and just sit there taking the impacts until the cloak fails, or do we uncloak and use the guns?"

  "Guns," said Grace.

  "Why?" asked George before I could.

  "They're going to detect us anyway."

  "How so if we're cloaked?" asked Melissa.