by C H Gideon
“Fortunately, I am,” Guan replied measuredly. “They would have sent dozens of warships here if they viewed this situation as one of vital interest to their security. They send a single Claw of Talons, which means either their strangely feudal society failed to muster sufficient resentment to the human presence here or, more likely, that this engagement is designed to inform their decision how to proceed with regard to the Terran Republic.”
“They want to see how things unfold before committing?” Jenkins asked.
“Essentially,” Guan agreed. “They are a purely carnivorous species, Colonel, and as a result view all engagements as one of two things: territorial disputes or hunts. A territorial dispute requires an overwhelming show of force to ensure success, while a hunt is conducted more methodically and with greater caution. It would appear that they consider this to be the latter, so they have sent a scouting party to make a raid while the rest of the flight looks on.”
“Which suggests,” Jenkins mused, “that they might not take too kindly to the Red Hare reinforcing the Legion forces already on the planet?”
Guan laughed, stroking his immaculate beard as he did so. “You do not understand. The purpose of the raid is to determine our response. They likely view the Red Hare’s arrival as part of your original plan, which means you will earn greater respect if you can successfully overcome their efforts. There, look,” he urged, gesturing to a tactical representation of the planet’s surface. “They are already flexing their western line in preparation for a flanking attack precisely like the one we discussed an hour ago.”
Jenkins smirked. “Who’d have thought I’d end up being a gunpoint diplomat instead of a soldier?”
“To the Finjou,” Guan observed. “those personae are one and the same. You must communicate to them in no uncertain terms the Terran Republic’s ferocity and, perhaps more importantly, our resolve to complete what we begin. To fail on either count will make them view us as prey who stand ripe for the slaughter. Only after demonstrating our determination will we be able to negotiate. Only after defeating this raiding party can we depart this star system in peace.”
Jenkins nodded in approval. “I can see you and I are going to have a lot to talk about, Captain Guan.”
“Indeed,” Guan agreed, inclining his head and giving a final stroke to his beard before clasping his hands behind his back and moving through the CAC to accept the reports of his various department heads.
Jenkins knew that men like Guan didn’t grow on trees (although they probably did grow in cans) and he also knew that he was lucky to have access to his knowledge.
He suspected that before the day was out, he would be equally fortunate to have him covering Clover Company from orbit.
“I’m glad to have you here, Lieutenant,” Styles greeted him after Podsy had helped unload the mission-critical equipment from the Zero, which had torn up the Gash’s southern slope. The sight of the mighty war machine was enough to send chills down Podsy’s spine, and he knew that with Havoc covering the north face, Dragon Brigade would be well-protected on all sides. “The civvies know their gear, but they’ve been skittish since the nukes went off. We should have been through the last few hundred meters, but they slowed things down out of caution, and our primary focusing emitter cracked before we could cross the finish line. I’m hoping you can get this thing back up.”
“I’m glad to be able to help, Chief,” Podsy said truthfully from within his envirosuit. The suits were slightly claustrophobic, with only a small viewing window directly in front of the heavy helmet. “Let’s get these replacements installed and punch through the remainder of this rock.”
Styles led a team of the civilian excavators who carefully manipulated the replacement primary emitter pieces down the slope toward the giant beam emitter. Set on the stone of the Gash’s floor, the drill assembly was a massive multi-emitter laser assembly. Stationed nearly two hundred meters from the point of entry, the system measured fifty meters long in all and looked far too delicate for Podsy’s liking. Powered by a pair of fusion generators with maximum rated outputs of ten megawatts each, the drill was easily the highest-tech Terran laser system ever devised.
The primary emitter melted the rock and broke it into smaller boulders, which were then individually superheated by secondary emitters until the stone was liquefied. At that point, it flowed down the aggressively-angled tunnel, which pitched upward at just under twelve degrees. When the system was operating at full efficiency, over thirty cubic meters of molten stone flowed from the tunnel each minute. There was simply no better way, using Terran technology, to drill such lengthy passages into solid stone.
This particular tunnel measured two meters in diameter, although at the mouth, it was nearly twenty meters from top to bottom due to erosion from the passing, molten stone. The tunnel already stretched nearly thirty-five kilometers into the planet’s crust and, at last estimate, was less than a kilometer from the end of the dig. During the first few kilometers of digging, there had been some fear that they would miss the target or, even worse, that there was nothing awaiting them in the subterranean target zone. But after five kilometers of seemingly natural stone had been cleared away, the composition of the rock wall became markedly different and clearly unnatural. At that point, they confirmed that the target information had been correct.
Huge excavators dug troughs that diverted the molten stone down the Gash and away from the dig site. While the system was digging, a team of workers had erected a giant set of scaffolding to create a ramp leading from the Gash’s floor to the tunnel mouth. The scaffolding was ninety percent complete, but it could not be finished until the molten rock ceased to flow.
Podsy assisted Styles in directing the drill team to install the replacement primary emitter, which took surprisingly little time. The emitter assembly was open and easy to access for maintenance, with the old emitter having already been pulled. Replacing the system’s beating heart took less than thirty minutes from start to finish, and soon the primary emitter was ready to fire. Throughout the replacement process, the secondary emitters had continued pulsing up the tunnel, keeping the temperature in the passage high enough for the molten stone to flow out onto the Gash’s floor.
“Emitter diagnostics are green across the board,” reported Mrs. Baldwin, the drill team leader. “We’re ready to resume, Mr. Styles.”
“Do it,” Styles urged, and Podsy watched with no small measure of appreciation as the powerful laser system whined to life. The thin air around his suit crackled and popped as the primary emitter’s invisible beams stabbed into the rock wall, each pulse accompanied by a perceptible thrum that faintly vibrated the ground beneath Podsy’s feet.
Perfectly attenuated and aimed, the beam pulses struck the target patches of rock up the tunnel with surgical precision. Despite the secondary lasers’ efforts, some of the flowing rock had cooled and slowed its descent through the tunnel during the primary emitter’s downtime, but that rock was re-melted by the primary beam as it cleared the tunnel while continuing its work.
After a few minutes of the primary’s operation, blobs of molten rock began to burp out of the tunnel. Burps grew into short-lived gushes, which in turn lengthened in duration until a continuous stream of molten rock once again flowed from the tunnel’s two-meter-wide, twenty-meter-tall mouth forty meters above the Gash’s floor.
“Crank it up, Baldwin,” Styles urged. “The rangefinders show we’ve only got another five hundred meters of rock before we reach our objective.”
“You heard the man,” Baldwin barked. “Let’s knock it out!”
The machine’s whine grew to a steady roar, and the pulses burned so frequently that Podsy was unable to distinguish the individual bursts from a continuous beam of energy. The flow of rock was deceptively consistent, if anything slowing as the drill bored farther into the Brick’s skin. But that was a simple matter of physics; it would take nearly an hour for the rock from the farthest end of the tunnel to flow down into the Gash.<
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Right on schedule, an hour after the drill had resumed its work, the flow of molten rock sharply increased. The monitoring equipment showed twenty-five cubic meters of material flowing out of the tunnel every minute, and the excavation’s support teams began working furiously to keep that molten rock flowing away from the tunnel with smaller plasma burners to further liquefy the waste material, and remote-operated mini-dozers to continually build up berms of slowly-solidifying rock that kept the channels flowing down the Gash and away from the dig site.
It was a smooth operation. Men and women like this were largely responsible for the Terran Republic’s survival after the wormhole gates collapsed. Their fierce determination and single-minded focus on their craft, even with enemy warships circling overhead, was enough to make him proud to know he was their fellow Terran.
Three hours of steady digging, and finally the primary emitter’s near-continuous pulses began to slow until they were firing no more than twice per second.
“The far wall gave out,” Baldwin declared. “We’ve achieved penetration into a cavern of some kind.”
“Good job, Mrs. Baldwin,” Styles congratulated her. “Sergeant Major Trapper, bring our rides.”
“The tunnel won’t be safe to traverse for another twenty hours,” Baldwin warned, “and that’s assuming you brought along heat-resistant gear.”
“We won’t be hoofing it, Mrs. Baldwin,” Styles assured her before turning to Podsy and switching to a secure suit-to-suit link. “The general gave orders that you were to accompany the insertion team.”
Podsy’s brows rose in surprise. “I wasn’t aware of that.”
“You can verify the orders,” Styles handed Podsy a hardened slate, and sure enough, Podsy found the general’s orders that he was to accompany Chief Styles and a hand-picked quad of Trapper’s best people. “The general must like you,” Styles said with open amusement.
Podsy grinned. “To send me thirty-five klicks down a hot tunnel? It might not be the best thing to be on his good side. I think I gave him cover to do what he wanted to do all along, which was come down here and dig his heels in against the enemy. I don’t think Colonel Li appreciated it. That sounds like two strikes.”
“For every friend made, an acquired enemy,” Styles snickered. “He’s a big boy. He’ll get over it.”
“I hope so,” Podsy said sincerely as Sergeant Major Trapper’s people drove an APC down to the dig site. The APC was far too large to fit into the tunnel, but when its rear door opened Podsy was unable to resist a smile from spreading across his face.
Six identical vehicles appeared—honest-to-God motorcycles, albeit heavily-modified ones.
“Graphene-reinforced tires and a shielded undercarriage will protect them from the occasional brush with liquid rock.” Styles chuckled as Podsy moved to inspect the sleek low-profile vehicles, which featured flat cone-shaped windshields that stretched back, “and heat-resistant two-piece containment pods that will protect us from the heat while we ride. The capacitors are good for twenty hours of continuous max-output operation, and these things are capable of two hundred kph at full throttle.”
“These things must cost more than I’d make in a lifetime,” Podsy said in unvarnished awe, sliding his gloved hand over one of the bikes’ sleek chassis as Trapper’s people produced the second part of the bikes’ containment pods, to be installed after a rider mounted the bike.
“It’s a safe bet,” Styles agreed as Trapper and his four hand-picked men appeared. Armed to the teeth, they stood in stark contrast to Styles, who checked a pack full of comm and data-processing gear that rested inside the APC, but it was clear from his dress and pose that Trapper would not be accompanying them up the tunnel. “The crew should have the tunnel cleared of molten debris in the next hour and a half, and the ramp should be done about fifteen minutes after that.
The sergeant major gestured to Podsy’s sidearm. “I’d recommend a little more weight, Lieutenant.” One of Trapper’s men retrieved a rifle from the APC and handed it to Podsednik.
Podsy nodded, accepting the weapon before checking it under the watchful eye of Sergeant Major Trapper. What would have taken a Pounder four-and-a-half seconds took Podsy seven, but when he was finished he saw a satisfied smirk on Trapper’s face through the other man’s visor.
“The rust comes off with a little practice,” Trapper told him.
Just under two hours later, with the flow of molten rock now a trickle and the ramp finished, two of Trapper’s men took point while Styles and Podsy assumed the third and fourth slots in the six-man-formation, which was brought up by the third and fourth of Trapper’s men. The bikes surged up the blistering perfectly-cylindrical tunnel in a race to retrieve whatever it was they had come for.
Which, as far as Podsy was concerned, was still a complete mystery.
15
Shots Fired
“Shots fired!” the Red Hare’s Sensor operator reported in a raised but steady voice. “Finjou warships have engaged the Dietrich Bonhoeffer with direct energy weapons.”
Jenkins’ eyes snapped up to the tactical display, which showed three Finjou warships in a classic offset-triad formation. Their direct energy weapons were high-powered lasers, and they were stabbing into the Bonhoeffer’s robust armor as the Metal Legion flagship returned fire with railguns and a swarm of missiles.
The Red Hare’s status screen, a three-dimensional image of the warship set beneath the main tactical viewer, suddenly flared to life. Its forward armor began flashing yellow rather than its previous serene pale-blue.
“Two direct hits, Captain,” Red Hare’s Damage Control reported as the flashing yellow stabilized into solid yellow. “Forward armor is holding; moving replacement panels into position.”
Jenkins’ brows rose. Captain Guan noticed his surprise. “This ship features two armor-compensation systems, Colonel,” the ruddy-faced officer explained. “The first is a standard emergency system that floods the damaged armor compartments with mimetic gel. The second is more proactive and allows us to replace individual panels, which are nearly all of a modular design.”
As he spoke, a holo-image of what looked like two crab-shaped drones appeared on a magnified view of the Red Hare’s forward hull. Each drone carried a two-meter-thick panel of composite armor, which was the best defensive system presently available to the Terran Republic. The crab-drones replaced two of the worst-damaged panels on the Red Hare’s armored prow. The old panels were ejected into the void less than a second before the new panels were slotted in place and secured via spring-bolts.
“Impressive.” Jenkins nodded approvingly. “More gifts from the Vorr?” he asked pointedly.
“No.” Guan chuckled, stroking his beard haughtily. “These are the work of Terra Han’s finest engineers. They are prototypes, of course,” he added with a mischievous grin, “and must undergo rigorous testing before my world presents them to the Terran Fleet.”
Jenkins nodded in complete understanding. The more he learned about Terra Han, the more concerned he became about its standoffishness when it came to the rest of the Terran Republic.
“Time to effective firing range on Talon Four?” Guan asked languidly, referring to the lone Finjou warship which had flanked out for one-on-one combat with the Red Hare.
“On our current trajectory,” Tactical replied, “Red Hare will not achieve an effective firing solution, Captain.”
“Most unfortunate,” Captain Guan said with patently false concern, relishing the moment. The men and women around the CAC leaned imperceptibly into their workstations in eager anticipation. “Then we have no choice but to improvise. Tactical, you are authorized to deploy the Starburst system. Helm, cease braking thrust and come about in Starburst maneuver.”
“Starburst maneuver, aye,” acknowledged the neural-linked pilot of the ship, and the warship gently spun around them. The CAC was situated almost precisely at the ship’s center, which made the apparent rotational forces much less than those closer to
the outer hull. The severity of the maneuver was still enough to give Jenkins a brief bout of vertigo.
“Starburst deploying,” Tactical acknowledged with gusto as soon as the ship had reoriented, and the Red Hare’s holoimage underwent a radical change to its stern section. Twelve huge sections of the hull folded outward like the petals of a flower unfurling to greet the morning sun, and a dozen distinct launch tubes suddenly flared into being behind those panels. “Starburst system online, Captain,” reported Tactical. “Talon Four targeted. Awaiting firing order.”
Captain Guan replied with a heavy sigh as he assumed his command chair, “Full salvo. Fire.”
“Full salvo, aye,” acknowledged Tactical, and the dozen previously-hidden launch tubes flickered green as giant missiles appeared within them. “Firing!”
As one, the twelve missiles fell away from the ship, seeming to drift outward in a perfect circle before their thrusters ignited and they burned toward the lone Talon-class warship that had fired on the Red Hare.
The missiles surged forward as one, moving faster than any similar Terran platform with which Jenkins was familiar could have. The enemy warship, Talon Four, opened fire and scrubbed two of the twelve missiles with precise laser strikes.
