“Ouch. That hurt,” said Master Chief Ryan O’Leary. “Who’s driving this bus?”
“Not sure,” said First Lieutenant Paul ‘Night’ Train. “I think it’s that German guy, Oberleutnant Hohen-something. I can never remember how to pronounce it.” He thought about it a second and then said wryly, “I’m sure the landing looked really impressive to the lizards.”
“Refresh my memory,” said O’Leary as the boarding ramp started coming down, “why didn’t we just land on top of them? Why’d we have to go through this whole charade?”
“I’m impressed,” said Night with a grin. “Who knew you had words like ‘charade’ running around in your vocabulary?” Master Chief frowned, and Night continued, “The reason we’re doing it is that the disrupter field around the base will mess up the electronics in the shuttle’s engines. Me, I don’t want to be next to an antimatter reaction that goes out of control. Do you?”
“Not particularly sir, no,” replied O’Leary. Standing up, he yelled over the implant frequency, “What the hell are you waiting for? An engraved invitation? Let’s GO!” The Space Force jumped up and stormed out the back of the shuttle.
Ground Force, Tau Ceti ‘d1’, May 25, 2019
The Ground Force was much quieter as their shuttle came down to the west of the lizard base. The shuttle had used the terrain to block the lizard’s radar, and the soldiers immediately went invisible to most sensors as they cloaked coming out the shuttle. Although unseen by the lizards, the members of the squad were able to ‘see’ the locations of the other members of the squad on their displays through a laser uplink to the Vella Gulf and downlink back to the suits. By using the laser link, they were able to maintain radio silence, yet still communicate with each other. Having received a green flag from all of the troops, Master Sergeant Aaron ‘Top’ Smith gave the signal to advance, and they all bounded off.
Between the light loads they were carrying and the lower gravity of the moon, the troops were able to use the suits to ‘bounce,’ where each step covered about 15 feet. Once the troops were up to speed, they covered the ground at just over 15 miles per hour in an easy lope that used no more energy than an easy jog in shorts and a t-shirt back home. They had practiced this many times on the Earth’s moon and had no problems staying in formation as they rapidly covered the distance to the base.
Crossing the disrupter shield, Calvin felt a slight electrical current like static electricity, which caused the hair on his arms to rise slightly. The electronics of his suit were hardened against the effect and survived the crossing without any problems. Full of energy, they unconsciously sped up, covering the next nine miles in just under 30 minutes. The base was located in the middle of a two mile wide crater, and they reached the edge of the crater ten minutes ahead of schedule.
Calvin watched on his tactical screen as the Space Force made it to the opposite rim of the crater. With his augmented vision, he could look across the crater and see them easily. As they came into sight of the base, its defenses sprang to life. Pop-up laser turrets deployed from hidden sites, fired a volley of shots at the troops and then closed again before the troops could target them. Anti-personnel rockets launched from a number of sites near the base, only to be shot down by the lasers of the Vella Gulf, in orbit over the moon. Anti-ship radars and lasers tried to target the Vella Gulf, only to be slagged by the ship’s counter-missile lasers as soon as they became operational. Two additional missiles launched at the ship but were shot down by the ship’s defenses within seconds.
As the Space Force began taking laser fire, they hunkered down on the ridge of the crater, happy to stay under cover and shoot down into the valley with their lasers and tridents. Although under cover, they quickly found that they were not invulnerable as Sergeant Ed ‘Shadow’ Pesik took a glancing laser shot, which burned a two inch hole through the arm of his suit. As the suit started to deflate, he deftly pulled out a patch from one of his leg pockets and slapped it into place, something the squad had practiced hundreds of times. The adhesive on the patch melted to the suit, closing the hole and sealing the majority of the pressurization loss. He commanded the suit’s nanobots to finish the repair and was back in the fight, firing a line of antimatter grenades from his trident across the laser site that shot him.
The laser site saw his movement, and it popped back up to fire at him again. It had just reached its firing position when it was bracketed by two grenades that were set at triple the strength of a normal hand grenade. It was destroyed in the resulting double explosion.
Seeing the Space Force was heavily engaged, Top gave the signal, and the Ground Force sprang into action, jumping off the edge of the 20’ high crater wall. With a running start, they could have traveled a long distance in the reduced gravity; even from a standing start they still covered over 50 feet in their initial leap. As they touched down in the crater floor, they immediately bounced back up again. Each succeeding bounce had a lower trajectory, and the squad began picking up speed. By the time they covered the first quarter mile, they had their heads down and were into a full-on sprint.
Calvin was happy he had taken the time to do some running over the last six months. As the squad charged ahead, he was able to keep up with the advance, even if he did trail the other members slightly. His pride kept him going as the squad’s speed topped 30 miles an hour. His suit continued to scan in front of him. So far, the defenses on this side of the facility hadn’t seen them; either they were fooled by the suit’s camouflage, or they were being operated manually.
That changed as they got within a quarter of a mile of the base, where some of the defenses were seismically activated and radar-controlled. As the members of the squad stepped on pressure plates, the pop-up lasers began deploying and firing at them, guided by a radar attached to the weapon. Simultaneously, mines began launching into the air, where they exploded at an altitude of about six feet. Calvin saw that it would only take the squad 30 seconds to cover the final bit of no-man’s land, but that last piece had a lot of defenses.
Bad Twin was the first to get hit. Whether slower than the rest of the squad, or just unlucky, one of the lasers shot through his left leg at the top of a bounce. As he came back down on it, the leg refused to bear his weight, and he crashed forward to tumble to a stop. He lay motionless, although Calvin could see on his display that he still had strong vital signs.
Seeing Bad Twin go down, the platoon’s medic, Sergeant ‘Hacksaw’ Liu, tried to go back to the wounded soldier. As he stopped his forward motion, he was a sitting target, and the laser that brought down Bad Twin reoriented on Hacksaw. It fired one long bolt that went through Hacksaw’s heart. He slowly toppled over, dead before he hit the ground.
Bad Twin began to struggle to get back up, and the laser turret started to reorient itself on the fallen soldier. Before it could do so, his brother landed next to the turret and slashed at the wires running down the side of it with his combat knife. Deprived of power, the turret turned off and dropped back beneath the surface of the moon with Good Twin still on it. The cover plate closed above him before he could get back out of the hole.
The next turret in line had chosen Havildar (Sergeant) Rajesh Patel as its target. The radar had locked on him and he saw the turret turning toward him. Before it could fire, he gathered himself and bounced as high as he could. The radar continued to track him on the way up, and the laser began firing. Although the first laser bolts missed him, each succeeding bolt got closer and closer to him as he ascended. A bolt singed the bottom of his boots, and then the turret hit its gimbal stops and couldn’t aim any higher. Patel did a somersault with a twist over the top of his jump and came down behind the turret. Drawing his knife with a flourish, he severed the cords running to the laser, rendering it inoperable. As he stuck his knife back in his belt, the turret dropped with him on it, and the lid closed over his head.
As Calvin was trailing the rest of the group slightly, he was able to alter his next bounce and came down in a perfect landing nex
t to where Bad Twin lay. Gathering him up, he pushed off with both feet, bouncing past the last row of lasers. Although the squad was momentarily safe, they had one soldier dead and another injured, and they were now split up.
Calvin thought that the assault couldn’t have been going much worse...until he heard the call about the stargate’s activation.
Bridge, TSS Vella Gulf, Tau Ceti System, May 25, 2019
“Gate activation,” said Steropes calmly. “The first ship is a battlecruiser. Multiple activations...I have a second battlecruiser...now a third battlecruiser. That appears to be it. Three battlecruisers entering the minefield...I don’t show any shield emanations from the first! The second one’s shields are down too!
* * * * *
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Bridge, Wanton Killer, Gliese 832 System, May 25, 2019
“30 segments to gate activation,” called the helmsman.
“Shields up!” ordered Captain Sssseth.
“You don’t really think there are enemies in the Tau Ceti system, do you?” sneered his executive officer. “The other ships didn’t activate their shields prior to going through the gate. You’re not afraid, are you?”
Captain Sssseth bristled. “I don’t have time to kill you now, but if you call me ‘afraid’ again, I will make the time.” There was no worse slight for a warrior than for someone to say that he was a coward. Obviously, morale was slipping badly if his XO was not afraid to challenge him on his own bridge. Sssseth made a mental note to fix that at his earliest opportunity. “The other ships can do as they please, but regulations state that shields are to be raised before passing through a gate. The officers on the Emperor’s Sword were probably drunk and forgot to do so, and the idiots on the Bloody Dagger followed suit so that they wouldn’t look bad. We, however, will follow regulations and raise our shields. Shields UP!”
“Shields are up, sir!” replied the shield technician.
“Activation!” called the helmsman.
As the Wanton Killer emerged, and the systems recovered from transit, Captain Sssseth looked out into a scene from the third level of hell. The Emperor’s Sword was in three pieces and was spilling crewmen and systems from all three of them. The Bloody Dagger had a gaping hole near its engineering section and was venting atmosphere and fluids. It didn’t appear to be mortally wounded...until another 215 megaton mine blew up next to its ammunition storage. The blast from the mine, in conjunction with the secondary explosions from the ammunition detonating, broke the ship in half. It was finished too.
215 megaton mines? Where in the seventh hell had they come from? Before he could say anything, the screen dimmed as a mine blew up alongside the Wanton Killer, shaking the ship like a dog with a bone. Although he knew that the ship was damaged, it was not as bad as it could have been; had the shields not been up, they would now look like the Sword and Dagger.
“Move closer to the Emperor’s Sword and continue in the path they were heading,” ordered Ssseth.
“The area is mined!” the executive officer screamed. “We have to go back!” He looked around the bridge to gather support from the other members of the bridge crew.
“No,” replied Sssseth walking behind the XO, “we have to do our jobs. It is obvious that the scientists are under attack, and we must go to their aid. We will follow the path of the Emperor’s Sword and hope that they cleared a path through the mines.”
“But it’s too dangerous...” the XO’s sentence stopped as nearly a meter of steel erupted from his chest.
“I should have done that a long time ago,” muttered Sssseth as he slid his former first officer off his sword and onto the deck. He looked around the bridge. “Anyone else want to turn around and run?” he asked. All of the bridge crew found something interesting to look at on their screens. “Good,” said Sssseth. “Someone get this traitor off my bridge.” He paused, as if in contemplation. “If nothing else, it looks like we’ll have fresh meat tonight.” A small cheer greeted his words; it had been a long time since they had fresh meat.
The Wanton Killer sidled over to the remains of the Sword and then began to move forward again. As the Killer moved past the Sword, Sssseth saw at least three bodies and a large piece of what looked like an anti-ship missile bounce off their shields. The enemy would pay for this, Sssseth thought.
“Contact!” yelled the sensor operator suddenly. “There is a ship orbiting the moon of the fourth planet!”
“Let me guess,” said Sssseth, “it is of Eldive origin?”
“Our classification system shows that...yes, it is of Eldive origin,” agreed the sensor operator. “It is a heavy cruiser of the Falcon class. The records...” The sensor operator’s voice was lost as the power went out, and the Killer rocked as a mine detonated close aboard. The bridge went pitch black.
After a few seconds, the emergency power kicked in, and a dim light suffused the bridge. “Mine detonation off the starboard stern,” said the damage control technician. “Both engines went offline in automatic shutdown. We also lost our aft sensors, and I am showing faults on missile stations 20-26, lasers 40-52 and our aft countermeasures stations.”
“How long until we have main power back?” asked Sssseth, mad enough to spit.
“Engineering says they need one cycle to ensure that there’s no damage before they restart the engines,” replied the technician.
“They have half a cycle,” the commanding officer noted, “and then I want the engines back online. If they can’t do that, I’ll have their hearts for dessert.”
“Engineering says they’ll be able to meet your time frame,” said the technician after a moment’s discussion with the engineering officer.
“I thought they might,” replied Sssseth. He was not known for making idle threats.
* * * * *
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Bridge, TSS Vella Gulf, Tau Ceti ‘d1’ Orbit, May 25, 2019 “The first two battlecruisers have been destroyed,” reported Steropes. A small cheer went up on the bridge. He continued, “The third one has sustained damage to its engineering section. Power levels indicate that it is operating on emergency power only.”
“Any idea if they’ll be able to get the main power back?” asked Captain Deutch.
“It is not possible to know,” replied Steropes. “They had their shields up, which minimized the force of the blast. The mine operated as designed and detonated near the ship’s engines. It was successful in knocking them out, but the lizards might be able to get them back at any moment.”
“So going out there to finish them off might not be the best idea?” asked Deutch.
“I think that it would be ill-advised. The Emperor’s Sword-class battlecruiser is nearly twice as long as the Vella Gulf and can out-accelerate us by about 115 G’s. We have 18 missile tubes; they have 44. They have a similar advantage in lasers, plus theirs are bigger. They also have more counter-missile missiles and lasers than we do. In a stand-up fight at full strength, the Vella Gulf would be destroyed before we even breached its shields. They might not be a full battleship, but as far as we are concerned, they completely outclass us. It is my opinion that it would be better to rearm the Vipers for an anti-ship strike prior to attacking the battlecruiser,” replied Steropes. “That’s the only place where we have an advantage.”
The CO turned to Bullseye, who was sitting in the air wing commander’s chair. “Rearm the Vipers and prepare to attack the battlecruiser.”
“Aye aye, sir!” said Bullseye, who immediately began comming orders to his troops.
Under the Ssselipsssiss Base, Tau Ceti ‘d1’, May 25, 2019
As the platform descended, Havildar Rajesh ‘Mouse’ Patel came face to face with a Ssselipsssiss. The lizard technician had received a fault warning on the laser and had come to fix it; he was unprepared for the short, dark human riding down on it. As the maroon lizard recoiled from him, the Indian shot him through the head with his laser. The Ssselipsssiss fell to the ground, twitching.
Trained
at the Indian Army’s elite Counter Insurgency and Jungle Warfare School in Mizoram, Patel wasn’t scared; he had extensive guerilla training, and he was in his element. A veteran of over ten years of guerilla warfare against a number of militant Communist groups, he was an expert at reconnaissance, gathering intelligence and tunnel warfare. The seven foot tall lizard didn’t frighten him; at just over five feet tall, he was used to everyone being taller than he was.
He fired another bolt into the lizard to ensure it was dead and, as it stopped twitching, he looked around at his surroundings. The laser turret had dropped down into a long, five foot wide tunnel that had turrets placed every 100 feet or so. The laser turrets formed a defensive ring around the base, so the tunnel curved out of sight in both directions. Seeing movement from the next turret down from him, he leveled his laser but held his fire when he saw the movement corresponded to the icon of Good Twin.
“Top, Mouse,” he commed over the squad network. “I’m good in the tunnel. One hostile killed. I’m going to link up with Good Twin, and we will advance from down here.” As he finished transmitting, Good Twin jogged up.
“Roger that Mouse,” Top replied. “We’ll link up inside the base.”
“Let’s go,” Mouse said over a private link to Good Twin. “I’m used to tunnels. I’ll lead.” The two soldiers started down the tunnel.
“Dude,” Good Twin replied, “do you know where you’re going?”
“I know where the base is,” said Mouse, “we’ve just got to find the cross tunnel. As the lizard I killed was a little closer to the left side, the odds are that he came from that direction. It’s a 50/50 chance either way.”
Theogony 1: Janissaries Page 28
