by Craig Allen
“That we did, and just in time.” Sonja jutted her chin through the canopy toward the sky. “Look what’s going on up there.”
Dozens of ships lit up on gravimetrics, ships that hadn’t been there before. With the facility down, they could no longer get telemetry regarding their surroundings. They had no choice but to shut down their Alcubierre fields just so they could see, and they had plenty to see.
A good two and a half million kilometers away, gravimetrics barely registered another set of signals, grouped between the planet and the sun. At least one warship was among them, the rest Cody wasn’t sure. The ships around the planet moved to engage the distant fleet. A lot of ships were there, but the Kali ships no longer had an advantage. Humans, however, had a great deal of experience when it came to war.
Sonja angled the hopper skyward, the throttle still slammed forward. “Now’s our chance. We can hide while the fleet takes out these guys.”
They rose into the sky at an alarming rate, the hopper vibrating as it left the yellow sky behind them and the blackness of space opened up. Gravimetrics showed a flurry of ship action, and even at such a great distance, they could see massive plumes blooming from the Kali vessels as they struggled to engage the fleet.
As he watched the battle, Cody could’ve sworn the fleet had had more ships. “Wonder where the rest of them are?”
“Probably just waiting.”
“For what?” Cody checked the sensors again. “The fleet is moving away. What are they running from?”
Sonja grinned. “You know, the things on this planet are smart, but they don’t have experience with combat on this scale. If they did, they wouldn’t fall for what the admiral’s planning.”
The fleet continued to move away as the Kali vessels grouped together. Some Kali ships launched tacs, which was a mistake. The distance was still too great, and the fleet easily picked the torpedoes out of the sky with point-defense grasers. So the Kali vessels accelerated toward the fleet as it accelerated away.
“Wait for it,” Sonja said.
Cody’s jaw dropped as Alcubierre signatures slid into the system at superluminal speeds. They surrounded the Kali vessels at all angles, boxing them in. The portion of the fleet already present spread out, completing the box and sealing the Kali ships into place. Torpedoes lit up the sky, all tracing toward the cluster of Kali vessels, which had nowhere to go.
“Basic tactics,” Sonja said.
Cody counted ships in the fleet, noting that some were still unaccounted for.
~~~
Kali ships filled the main holoview as gravimetrics picked up at least twice as many ships as Jericho had with him in system, but at least they could see their enemies.
“Well I’ll be goddamned,” Jericho said. “The Olympus Mons did it. All ships, fire as you have solutions.”
Icons representing torpedoes, from human ships as well as Spican ones, rocketed across the holoview toward the Kali vessels, who in turn attempted to knock them down with point-defense grasers. Many more Kali ships were there than Spican and human ships combined but only for the moment.
“Send the signal,” Jericho said.
Seconds later, two battle groups appeared from behind the moon and proceeded to flank the approaching Kali ships. A smile crept onto Jericho’s lips.
“Contact!” The lieutenant called it out as if they weren’t expecting it, though Jericho was. “Multiple tac signals inbound.”
“Understood,” Jericho said. “Let the destroyers handle the tacs. Have the Odin, Shiva, and Rama move in to back them up.”
Jericho watched calmly as each of the three cruisers, one from each battle group, moved in to assist the multitude of destroyers, which were maneuverable enough to handle the tacs. The warships could have handled the incoming torpedoes, but he wanted them focusing their big guns on the main enemy vessels.
One of the battle groups consisted of only Spican ships. Just watching the spindly ships moving in gave him chills. To be fighting alongside them was almost unimaginable.
And they fought—like mad. Fortunately, they stuck to the plan. Jericho was half afraid they’d just charge in, heedless of any other ships. If they had, they would have impeded the human ships from engaging with tacs. Convincing the Spicans of that had taken some doing, but they kept their distance, launching their own torpedoes into the fray.
“Contact!” the lieutenant shouted again. “Two eight zero by three three zero.” His voice rose in pitch. “Again at zero eight two by zero four zero.”
“Understood. It’s what we expected.” Jericho added the last part hoping it would calm the crew down. “Contact the remaining reserves and have them rendezvous.”
Jericho watched the viewing globe patiently while the comms officer contacted the reserves, sitting twenty AU out. The bridge-comm would cross that distance instantly, instead of taking hours in normal space.
The two fleets of Kali ships approached from both sides of the planet, one from the northern hemisphere and one from the southern. Both battle groups were retracting their Daedalus struts as they maneuvered to aid their brothers. That complicated things, and if any more Kali vessels arrived, the fleet would be in a lot of trouble.
“Have the Joan of Arc and the Hannibal focus their point defense on the battle groups approaching from Kali,” Jericho said. “The Churchill and Lincoln are to assist. Soften them up until the reserves arrive.”
The commands were carried out while Jericho held his chin in his hand. Things were going well—too well. The denizens of Kali were acting predictably, and that bothered him. They were naïve but not stupid. They had to have learned something from their mistakes two months before.
He drummed his fingers on the command desk. Maybe they did?
“Comm,” Jericho said. “Put me in touch with the Berlin.”
~~~
Cody had felt utterly helpless when the new groups of Kali vessels appeared from around different sides of the planet. To Cody, the entire battle looked like complete chaos. Fortunately, the Kali ships completely ignored their tiny hopper, which was still far away from the main battle.
Sonja aimed the hopper toward the southern hemisphere. “We should wait on that shelf underwater.”
“Or with the fliers,” Cody said. “Maybe we should contact them. We could bring a few on board with us for safety.”
“We’d need hundreds of hoppers to get them all, though. I think they’re safe on the island for now.” Sonja smiled. “You know, I like these guys, but they stink.”
“I’m sure they think the same about us.”
Cody checked the main battle. The Kali vessels were putting up a hell of a fight, but their numbers were dwindling. A part of Cody wanted to do something besides run, but Sonja was right—they really could do nothing. They had two nukes whose launch tubes were still under repair by the hopper’s automated systems, but even if they got them up and running, they were just nukes. Against a battle cruiser like the Kali, it’d be like firing a coil pistol at a full suit of power armor. Sure, the shooter might get lucky and hit a vital system, but then he’d get annihilated seconds later.
Sonja dove into the atmosphere so quickly the outer edge of the hull glowed. In about a minute, they were three thousand meters over the surface.
Sonja switched to atmospheric flight mode. “I’m going for the water. We can check on the fliers later in case—”
A graser lock-on warning sounded. Sonja’s side of the hopper glowed brightly for a split second, then the side door ripped away. All the air rushed through the opening as Sonja’s whole body stretched toward it, her seat straps tearing. All the while, she screamed, but Cody couldn’t hear it over the rushing air.
“Sonja!”
Cody grabbed hold of the grip handle on the front of her suit and held on for dear life, for her life. The actuators on his suit rose to maximum as he struggled to keep her from flying out into the poisonous air of the planet. Even the actuators in his hands struggled to maintain the grip. Al
arms went off on his suit, showing actuator failure was imminent. His grip slipped.
No. No, God damn it!
The hand actuators failed, and he lost his grip completely just as the blast plate dropped into place.
The hopper continued to angle downward but with no thrust. They had ceased to be a flying craft and had become, officially, a brick, but Cody didn’t care about that at the moment.
He pressed his faceplate against Sonja’s. “Baby, can you hear me?”
Her eyes fluttered as he pulled her toward him, and then he saw it. Her suit had sealed up automatically where it had torn, covering the place where her right arm had once been.
Jesus.
“Cody.” She mumbled more words that didn’t make sense.
The explosion had severed her arm, splattering blood over her seat and the canopy—a lot of it. The shattered door probably sliced off her arm before the piece of the door, and her arm, flew out of the hopper. She was in shock. He needed to get her into the med bay in the back of the hopper, but the proximity alarm sounded on his console.
“Shit.” He set her back down gently and jumped back into his seat. Two hoppers showed up on gravimetrics several thousand kilometers behind them, but they weren’t firing. Why weren’t they firing?
Outside the canopy, the ground was visible, then a few seconds later, Cody saw the sky. A few seconds after that, the ground appeared again. They were in free fall, spinning end over end. From the damage they’d suffered, the enemy hoppers probably assumed they had taken out the pilot or the control system. They were waiting for the impact.
Gravimetrics showed the two hoppers bunched up to the east, flying in formation less than a hundred meters apart. On top of that, Cody had maybe a minute before the hopper shattered against the landscape. He was certain he could recover and level out the hopper, but the nearby hoppers would know he wasn’t dead. All he had to fight with were grasers, and he had no combat training.
An indicator on the fire control lit up. Repairs completed. A schematic showed the nukes, highlighting repaired sections in green.
He had a chance.
Cody activated fire control. The goal was to launch the nukes and get the hell out before they decided to grase him, but they’d have to contend with the nuke first, and grasing a nuke at a range that close was problematic. Fortunately, he didn’t have to hit the hoppers directly. He just had to get close, and the shockwave would do the rest.
Unfortunately, he had only one chance, and on the high-g world of Kali, the ground was getting closer quickly.
Chapter Twenty-seven
Admiral Jericho nodded, grim. “That’s what I thought.”
The Kali vessels that had appeared from the far side of the planet moved to engage the reserve fleet that had jumped in to meet them but not before disgorging at least a hundred hoppers.
A dozen or so Kali vessels were still left, and they were proving resilient. With the destroyers focusing on taking out the incoming tacs, the cruisers and warships, including the Tokugawa, focused on ramming as many tactical torpedoes down the remaining ships’ throats as they could. The enemy hoppers presented an additional problem, though.
A hopper carried four tactical torpedoes in a standard configuration. However, they could be configured to carry up to ten full-sized tacs. The hoppers were too far away to determine on lidar if that was how those hoppers were configured, but given how they maneuvered and the fact they were spreading out to surround the fleet, he was sure they were loaded to the brim with torpedoes.
That presented another problem. Targeting that many hoppers at that range was like killing mosquitoes with a grenade. Sure, it could be done, but too many were out there, and they were too maneuverable for torpedoes to truly make a difference.
Unless, of course, one had his own mosquitoes.
Jericho gave the command. “Give the command to the Berlin to launch hoppers and engage. Ontario, Congo, Missouri, and Amazon are to join in and engage the enemy hoppers.”
The orders were passed down at once. The Berlin hovered a good ten thousand kilometers closer to the planet than the rest of the battle group. It disgorged its complement of eighty-four hoppers. All things being even, Jericho would have bet the skilled pilots of his eighty-four hoppers could outperform a hundred of theirs without a problem, but betting during war could come at a high cost.
The hoppers immediately moved to engage, with the four destroyers approaching nearly as quickly. Tacs had already been deployed and were being shot down by the hoppers and the destroyers.
A smile crept onto Jericho’s lips. Now it’s a fight.
~~~
Cody switched fire control to manual. On the HUD, the hoppers moved in closer when he was a little over a thousand meters from the ground.
They were still a good thousand meters away. Once he fired, he risked being caught in the blast. He’d have to aim behind the hoppers and hope they didn’t have time to avoid the explosion.
Only the internal gravity kept them from flying around inside the cockpit. The hopper kept spinning, which made aiming difficult, but he did his best to target a point between the hoppers and a few hundred meters behind them. Sonja lay still, her breathing shallow, but he couldn’t help her, not yet—not until he got them to safety.
When the hoppers were both equidistant to him, Cody fired. The torpedoes left the tubes at once and homed in.
Cody didn’t bother to track them. He brought up the pilot controls on his station and cycled through the menus, trying to remember where the automatic pilot was.
On his gravimetrics, the hoppers went crazy as the torpedoes homed in on the position he’d designated. They tried to open fire on them, but grasing torpedoes with a hopper in an atmosphere was harder than with a battle cruiser in space.
Finally, Cody found the autopilot. Frantically, he pulled up the coordinates for Monster Island and punched them in. He activated the autopilot just as the nukes detonated.
The shockwave rushed over the hopper, tossing it around hard enough that the internal gravity had trouble stabilizing. Cody struggled to hold Sonja in her seat until the hopper stopped shuddering seconds later.
He checked gravimetrics. Nothing, at least not in the immediate area. That meant the hoppers had been destroyed or had managed to get far enough away to not be a problem anymore.
He had his own problems, though. Red lights popped up on the HUD, pointing out damage to the hopper. Mostly, the damage was things he could live without. Grasers and tacs were offline. So were the Daedalus collar struts and life support, which was okay so long as his and Sonja’s suits held out. Even better, if he could transfer to the medical pod, she’d be more environmentally secure than he was in his suit.
The big problem was the landing gear. The cover concealing the starboard forward landing gear had fused with the hull. If it didn’t open, the hopper would be lopsided. That, or the computer might decide it had no reason to land after all.
He could do nothing, in any case. He let the hopper pilot itself toward the coordinates while he jumped out of his seat and picked up Sonja. He checked the vitals on her suit. She was still in shock but alive. Thank Christ. As carefully as he could, he carried her to the back of the hopper and activated the med pod while the hopper guided them in.
~~~
The number of enemy hoppers dwindled quickly. Once the destroyers started to fire upon and break up their clusters, the hoppers from the Berlin could pick them off. Once in close enough, the destroyers grased the enemy hoppers one by one. Their technology was more or less equal, but the humans’ training was superior.
The battle was over, and some Kali ships had realized it. They tried to run, only to get grased. Jericho had given that order to all ships before the battle started. The creatures of this world had no business holding on to space vessels. Extermination of every ship was the only option, even if the toads were being controlled by the reeds. Poor bastards. What the humans and Spicans had done was defeat a slave army, and that
grated at Jericho, but no other option existed.
“Admiral,” the Tokugawa’s captain said. “You may want to see this.”
An image appeared on Jericho’s command desk. A nuke had detonated in the upper atmosphere of the planet, somewhere over the southern hemisphere. “Do we have anyone there?”
“Negative, Admiral.” The captain joined Jericho at the command desk. “But have a look at this.”
The recording rolled back. Two hoppers had been where the nuclear explosion was, then they were gone seconds later.
When the flash of the detonation faded, another hopper tumbled through the sky, as if the pilot had just given up all hope of flying. It must have launched the nuke that destroyed both hoppers.
“Who the hell is that?”
The captain brought up a series of codes on the holovisual at the command desk. “Transponder signal is alien, but the Odin picked up something.”
An image of the hopper appeared over the desk, focused on the designation, Banshee Five One.
“Amazing.”
Jericho examined tactical. A ship that could initiate a rescue had to be available. No way were they going to leave people behind.
“Contact!” A new icon appeared on the globe as soon as the tactical officer spoke. “Looks like she’s rising out of the ocean.”
“Identify,” Jericho said, but as soon as he saw the ship’s cross section, he smiled. “Damn, they made it.”
~~~
An alarm sounded in the cockpit just as Cody sealed up the med pod. Sonja’s eyes closed as the pod medicated her. Her vitals stabilized in seconds.
Cody covered his mouth as he peered inside the pod. Stay with me, baby.
He dashed back to the cockpit just in time to see the island outside the canopy and a message flashing on the HUD. Landing gear nonstable. Aborting landing.
“No.” He pounded the console emitter. “No, God damn it, no!”
