Direct Fire #4 Drop Trooper Page 10

  Most of the time, space battles, even the most pitched and violent ones I’d experienced, were spread-out affairs, with isolated skirmishes where a cluster of ships happened to emerge from T-space close enough to each other to use energy weapons but otherwise involving heavily-armored anti-ship missiles chasing down their prey while defensive weapons chipped away at their shields and sprayed ECM jamming their way.

  Not this time. I had never seen this many ships, not even in interactive military fiction ViR-dramas about daring, human captains fighting imaginary battles against overwhelming odds. These odds were overwhelming, and I didn’t know if our captains were daring, but they had more balls than I did if they could sail straight into this psychedelic vision of hell without running away screaming.

  There was not one speck of darkness in the sensor display that I could have pointed to and said, “there’s nothing there.” Everywhere there were ships, ours and theirs, spread around us in a globular formation, enough that I could have sworn the Iwo Jima was the center of it, but I knew that was an illusion, like the models that showed our galaxy at the center of the universe. It only seemed that way because there was so much around us that any one of the ships could have been the center.

  We weren’t at the rear of the Fleet formation; I knew that much from the op order and our briefings. As always, the carriers brought up the rear, farthest away from the action but closer now than usual. They would normally have sat the battle out near the edge of the system, at the farthest Transition Points, ready to pick up the surviving missile cutters and run like hell if things turned bad. This time, they’d emerged from Transition Space just a couple light-seconds behind us, squadrons of Search-and-Rescue craft clutching the thin docking spokes stretched between their twin, redundant saucer sections, standing ready to pick up survivors stranded in space in the wake of the battle. Their number was endless, more carriers than I’d ever seen in one place, and I wondered if, like the cruisers, we’d committed every single carrier we had to this battle.

  We were next, the troop ships, seven massive, bulbous cylinders, heavily armored and lightly-armed, riding flaring fusion drives inward toward Point Barber, their Marines strapped into drop-ships and ready to launch. I wondered if they felt as conflicted about it as I did, scared to be shed of the armor of the larger ship but eager to leave the huge targets before the Tahni anti-ship missiles had a chance to reach them.

  If anything could make me feel more confident about our chances, it was the cruisers. Each of them was a mountain carved into a fortress and sent a-sail with the power of a star harnessed behind them, the work of the gods, not of men. And there were eight of them, more than had ever been in once place at one time in the whole history of humanity, more raw, destructive power than had ever existed before.

  The missile cutters were mosquitoes flying around elephants by comparison, but there were clouds of them, uncountable. They popped in and out of existence like the subatomic particles in the quantum foam that I’d learned about in the physics annex I’d had to take for OCS.

  And yet, for all that, the enemy’s numbers were even greater.

  The destroyer was the largest class of military starship the Tahni had, nowhere near as large as our cruisers but more agile, able to jump in and out of Transition Space quicker, though still glacial compared to our missile cutters. There had been two or three around in every system we’d hit in the course of the war, whether the Tahni outposts we’d struck at or the occupied colonies we’d freed. There were dozens of them here at Point Barber, formed up in clusters like fighters, burning toward us at high-g boosts, their missiles outpacing them because they were accelerating faster than a living being could withstand.

  Their corvettes were slightly larger than our missile cutters, not quite as versatile, nowhere near as fast, but there were thousands of them; as many as the stars revealed by the infrared filters on the cameras. Their lasers and missiles crossed the silent blackness of the vacuum with the proton beams of our cutters, a spider-web pattern in the computer simulation, and people died. Not just a ship here and there, the two-person crew vanishing in a flash of vaporizing metal or a sphere of fusion fire, but dozens at a time, winking out of existence like bubbles popping as they floated into the sky and lost surface tension.

  How many of those men and women had been sure they were going to be the ones who survived? How many of the Tahni felt the same way? Or did they even think about that? For all our intelligence analysts had discovered about the enemy, one thing missing from every briefing I’d audited was how they faced death. They were certainly willing to die, to give up their lives in service to an immortal, spiritual Emperor who manifested himself in a series of physical hosts. Which seemed weird, but then again, every religion seems weird from the outside.

  Part of me wanted to think that any sexually-reproducing humanoid life form would be afraid of death, but I was about as far from a scientist as you could get without my knuckles dragging on the ground when I walked, so who was I to say? Maybe the Tahni threw their lives away and never had a doubt, never flinched. Maybe that’s why they’d come so close to winning this thing.

  But I could hear the Skipper’s voice in my ear, laughing with an amusement that came from having seen it all happen before, so many times.

  “It’s always the same story,” he would have told me, had told me or one of the other platoon leaders before during one of our company professional development sessions. “In every war, one side wants to paint the other as having some special fortitude, some fearlessness or fanaticism unheard of before in history. It’s a way to make us feel better about ourselves, to explain why we haven’t already won, why when we do, we’ll have accomplished something incredible. So, if it’s any comfort, feel free to imagine they’re thinking the same thing about us.”

  The only thing that would have given me comfort was for all those damned red icons in the threat display to go away.

  “Come on, Fleet,” I muttered, careful to make sure my mic was cold. “Make yourself useful for once.”

  As if they’d been listening, the cruisers went into action. Their beam weapons spoke first, the raging flood of protons simulated by the white lightning discharge they would have shown in an atmosphere. That wasn’t strictly necessary, I knew. The tactical computer systems could just as easily have made the cannon strikes checkered threads of white or yellow or crimson, but those wouldn’t have been as dramatic, and this simulation was meant to invoke an emotional reaction as much as it was meant to convey the tactical situation. The crews watching their outgoing fire would feel more confident if their shots were the bolts of Zeus thrown down from Olympus.

  And to the Tahni corvettes in their way, they might as well have been. Each bolt struck two or three of the smaller craft, erasing them from existence, a giant swatting at flies. More of them fell to point-defense Gatling laser turrets and pulse torpedoes and if all the fragments of ships could have been arranged into a solid surface, I might have been able to walk to Point Barber from here.

  The Tahni forces saw the cruisers as well as I did, and their destroyers reacted with the glacial response time of capital-ship crews everywhere, waiting a solid thirty seconds before the first wave jumped in, a micro-Transition across a few light-seconds. Micro-Transitions were something that Attack Command pilots liked to brag about in the bars after a battle, telling the locals how dangerous they were, how hard it was to keep your lunch down when you hopped in and out of Transition Space with just a half second between the jumps. They went on and on about how the missile cutters were the most agile and versatile starships around because they could make multiple micro-Transitions in a fight.

  The Tahni must have heard about the brag, because a hundred destroyers micro-jumped from hundreds of thousands of kilometers away to only a thousand kilometers in front of the formation of cruisers in the space of a second. I heard a gasp and realized it must have come from me, sheer disbelief at the audacity, the risk…the cost. At least a dozen of the ships
collided, jumping out within a few hundred meters of each other, and I was absolutely sure I’d seen at least two pairs of them try to emerge into the same spacetime, all four disappearing into bursts of pure energy, not a speck of matter left of the ships.

  But the rest…

  Dozens of anti-ship missiles leapt out from launch bays, each the size of an assault shuttle, raging on plumes of annihilated antiprotons, defended by centimeters of boron honeycomb armor and its own deflector shield. What happened next was almost impossible for me or any other human to follow, and I wondered how advanced the targeting systems on the cruisers had to be to handle it. Lasers and proton cannons and pulse torpedoes fired almost nonstop, from the cruisers and from wave after wave of missile cutters popping in and targeting the enemy anti-ship missiles with their own, wasting weapons designed to blow up the destroyers to take out the biggest threat to the cruisers.

  Then the cruisers opened up with their main guns, the massive railguns on spinal mounts, as if the flying mountains had been built around the guns. They weren’t conventional railguns, or so I’d been told over and over by the Skipper, who seemed to have an appreciation for the weapons. The longer the conductive surface of the rails, the more velocity the shot had. So, the engineers who’d built the cruiser’s spinal guns had worked out a system where ionized gas was ejected from the muzzle of the railgun before each shot and ran an electrical charge through it. The charged cylinder of gas added velocity to the shot like an afterburner and, more importantly to us grunts watching the show, it was a yellow lance of flame extending out from the nose of the cruiser, a fireworks show in the vacuum.

  Where they struck, destroyers were ripped apart, cored lengthwise, their reactors spewing plasma into the vacuum in their dying spasms, just one more flash in a web of chain lightning stretching from one side of visible space to another as far as the sensors could see. It was simultaneously awe-inspiring and terrifying and my breath caught in my throat. It was thousands of kilometers away, but it seemed close enough for me to feel the heat through my armor.

  I happened to be looking straight at the Salamis when she exploded. The cruisers were so huge, even the multi-megaton warhead from a Tahni anti-ship missile couldn’t vaporize one completely. What was left of the ship looked like a half-burned log in the remnants of one of the bonfires the squad would make on Hachiman back when I’d been an NCO, the front half burned away, glowing at the molten edges of the hull armor. Nothing had lived through the blast, though. Even if the crew had been dressed in pressure suits and the vacuum hadn’t killed them, the heat and radiation surely would have.

  Talons twisted inside my gut at the thought of a thousand crewmembers burned to ash in a half a second. We Marines gave the Fleet a ration of shit for sitting back safe in their ships while we waded in the dirt and got shot at, but as many Fleet spacers had just died in the space of a heartbeat as Marines had died in any battle fought so far. They’d never had a chance, had nowhere to hide, no warning. They were just gone. And somewhere, a thousand casualty notification teams were going to have to find their next of kin and deliver the news in person, and a thousand families who never even thought of death as a possibility would have it delivered to their doorstep.

  I tried to imagine how it would feel for them, but I couldn’t manage it. Death had always been a reality for me.

  “That’s the first cruiser we’ve lost since the Battle for Mars,” Bang-Bang said, this time remembering to keep it to our private net.

  “It might not be the last.”

  The missiles were still coming in, so many of them I couldn’t keep track of whether there were enough ships to intercept them all. And they weren’t all aimed at the cruisers. One was easier to track, on an arcing trajectory around the cruisers, heading right down our throats.

  The alarm wasn’t one I’d heard before except in the drills we rarely practiced, the announcement that followed it tinged with real panic absent from those drills, which had been conducted with bored obligation.

  “All drop ships!” the flight ops officer of the Iwo Jima yelled as if he had to pitch his voice loud enough to carry through the hangar bay instead of just over the intercom. “Launch now! Emergency launch! All hands to escape pods! Launch! Launch! Launch!”

  Acceleration slammed me back into the padding of my armor and the view through the tactical display hookup went dark as it cut off.

  “Shit!” I didn’t know who had said it, couldn’t focus on the readout in my Heads-Up Display with the pressure, but they summed up my own opinion perfectly.

  Six gees, I thought. We had to be boosting at six gees, at least. No more than eight, because I was still conscious, but enough that I felt as if my ribs were about to give way, despite the padding inside the Vigilante battlesuit. I couldn’t lift my chin off my chest and taking a breath seemed to require every bit of energy I had. I clawed at the controls positioned around my left hand and managed to switch the comm input to the drop-ship external cams.

  It was a peek out a window compared to the feed from the sensor suite, but at least I wasn’t stuck in the darkness of my helmet. Point Barber filled the view, a kaleidoscope of blue, green, and brown, and a muscle spasmed in the web of my thumb as I switched to the rear feed, needing to see what was happening behind us. The Iwo Jima seemed farther away than I would have thought possible from just a few minutes of boost and I could see her from bow to stern, her nose slowly lifting on a flaring maneuvering thruster as she tried to change course, a desperate and pointless move. She was built for cargo capacity, not speed and agility, and it would take her a solid five minutes to swap end for end.

  The missile hit two minutes later.

  A new sun swallowed up the ship, and I imagined I spotted the center of it, that one exact second when the fusion warhead ignited, a kernel of starfire at the heart of the Iwo Jima. It was a fantasy, an illusion of my fevered imagination and the pressure squeezing oxygen away from my brain. The fusion explosion was near instantaneous and it took a fraction of a second for the ship that had been my home as much as any other place for the last three years to vanish, disassembled on an atomic level, what wasn’t ripped out of existence burned to vapors.

  The Iwo Jima was gone. Everything I owned was gone with her, everything squeezed into a tiny locker built into the bulkhead of my compartment now just floating gas bound someday to fall into the atmosphere of Point Barber. The crew, the flight officers, the maintenance techs. They were dead.

  And if the reality of that hadn’t yet hit me, it was only because we were burning through the biggest space battle in the history of humanity in a lightly-armored drop-ship and very likely to join them any second.

  11

  “Kovacs,” I said, remembering that First Platoon was sharing the drop-ship with us. Which wasn’t as easy as it sounded. At the moment, I was so damned scared, I could barely remember my own name. “You hearing me, Francis?”

  “Y…yeah.” I didn’t know if the hesitation was because of the pressure from the acceleration or from flat-out fear, and for once, I wouldn’t have blamed Kovacs for either one. “I’m here, Cam.”

  I wanted to laugh but lacked the spare breath. He almost never used my first name, calling me Alvarez with the sort of disdain only an Academy ring-knocker could put into the word when speaking down to an OCS grad.

  “Did you see the Iwo go up?” Which was sounded like a dumb question but wasn’t. I’d been watching out the back cameras, but he might not have had time to switch before the blast.

  “Yeah. Shit, Cam, do you think anyone else made it?”

  Now that sounded like a dumb question too, because how the hell would I know? But again, it wasn’t, because I could find out.

  “Hold on,” I told him, then switched my comms to the drop-ship crew’s net. “This is Lt. Alvarez. Do you have IFF on any other drop-ships?”

  Their answer took a moment, and I wondered if they were too shocked by the destruction of the troop ship to bother answering me, but finally, someo
ne did.

  “Alvarez, this is Lt. Abanks.” Abanks sounded almost normal despite the pressure of the boost, inured to it by experience, I suppose. “We have positive IFF transponder readings on nine of the twelve drop-ships from your battalion, plus another six from Force Recon.” He hesitated. “And twelve of twenty assault shuttles on launch prep when the…,” he trailed off. “When the missile hit. According to the troop manifest, the full complement of Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta and Echo companies launched and are under boost.”

  I frowned. That was all of us, wasn’t it?

  “Who didn’t make it, then?”

  “Battalion Headquarters and staff.”

  Shit. Colonel Voss, Major Anderle, her XO. Sgt.-Major Martelle. All the staff, all the communications gear and drones.

  “Do you have comms with any of the other birds?” I was sure of the answer, but I had to ask anyway.

  “Negative. Even if there wasn’t active jamming, there’s so much ionization, particulate scatter, and radiation out here, no one could get a signal through.” A pause. “I’ll let you know if I hear anything.”

  “Thanks, sir.” It took me a second to remember to add the honorific, not that he would care. Fleet lieutenants were the equivalent of a Marine captain, which was confusing and based on a fixation on tradition that I didn’t understand. I switched back over to Kovacs. “Delta is good to go,” I told him. “The other companies too. But we lost Battalion.”

  “Oh, man,” he hissed. “Does that mean the Skipper is in charge?”