Primary Targets (Earth at War Book 2) Read online

  Chapter Two

  The hangar bay on the Jambo was huge. It had to be: the shuttles were each the length of a football field and we carried ten of them. It was also one of the few places on the ship big enough for the whole Ranger detachment to fit and I had to admit that the whole three hundred of them armored up and formed into neat lines was impressive.

  I could hear Brooks before we cleared the last shuttle, giving one of her traditional pre-battle inspirational speeches, punctuating every other sentence with “hoo-ah,” the all-purpose Army motivational grunt. I had to admit, it was a useful thing. It could an interrogative, an exclamation, a confirmation, a battle cry or an adjective, as in “look at all this hoo-ah bullshit.” It was nearly as useful as the word “fuck,” and the two were frequently paired, as in “fucking hoo-ah, sir!”

  “…this operation is vital to securing HUMINT assets in the struggle to come,” Brooks said, doing an admirable job of projecting her voice enough for all three hundred of her Rangers to hear it without using her suit’s PA gear. “With the help of Helta intelligence reports, we were able to settle on the world they call Wellspring as a target. It was never more than a small mining facility and the Helta didn’t have any real defenses to oppose the Tevynians when they took it over.”

  “Ma’am?” A hand went up near the front rank and I recognized the voice even before Brooks called on the man.

  “Yes, Corporal Quinn?”

  “If it’s so worthless, why did the Tevynians bother to occupy it?”

  “Because they’re not completely rational,” she said, repeating the explanation we’d been given by the Helta. I wasn’t sure I bought it. “Their society was fairly primitive when the Helta raised them up to spaceflight technology. They barely had the scientific method and about an 18th century level of industrialization, and if you can try to imagine giving the British Empire of the 1700s starships and beam weapons and setting them loose on the galaxy, that’s about exactly what happened here. They had no concept of population control and once they had the medical care to keep half their babies from dying before they reached adulthood, they wound up with more military-aged men and women than they knew what to do with.”

  Brooks swept a hand in the general direction of the planet we were approaching.

  “They took this world because they could and they hold it because they don’t know any better, because it’s theirs and up till now, no one has come along and taken anything back from them.”

  “Is that why we’re here, ma’am?” Randall Quinn wondered. “To teach them a lesson?”

  “Not yet,” Brooks said, the hint of a smile betraying her tacit approval of the idea. “At this point, we’d rather they not even know who we are, much less that we’re allied with the Helta. We’re here for intelligence. We need live enemy prisoners to question, and we need to do it somewhere they can’t report back about who attacked them and they can’t counterattack before we get the prisoners back to our ships. Which makes this place perfect. It’s mostly water and there’s no huge land mass, which should funnel the forces they do have onplanet into a limited killing ground so we can take them down without our own troops getting strung out or entangled on too many different battlefronts. We’re going to try to confine this engagement to the general area of the refinery we’re landing at. And remember, the object of this battle isn’t to hunt down every single one of the enemy: it’s to acquire EPWs.”

  She stabbed a finger at one of the company commanders. The man’s buzzcut and sharp-edged face were the only things visible beneath his raised visor.

  “Spires, when we hit the ground, your people are going west to get between the enemy forces and any shuttles they may still have left on the ground.” She turned to the other company. “Freeman, you’re heading straight at the refinery. They’re going to have a bunker system and we’re going to try to take out as much of it as we can from the air, but you know how these things go. If they didn’t need boots on the ground, they wouldn’t have the Rangers on this boat.”

  “Hoo-ah, ma’am!” Freeman barked, though I thought I caught a hint of playfulness in her eyes, as if the enthusiasm was a game she had to play.

  “Hey Colonel!” The voice came from behind us and I had to turn my whole body to see it, since my neck’s range of motion was limited by the armor. A Space Force officer in a flight suit , leaning against a hydraulic strut of a hammerhead shuttle with the sort of casual coolness only a pilot can manage. “If you guys are done with your little pregame pep rally, we’d like to get the birds loaded and get some open space between us and the Jambo.”

  Brooks scowled at him, and if there’d been more time, she might have launched into one of her legendary ass-chewings. But instead, she waved in silent acknowledgment.

  “All right, Rangers!” she said, raising her rifle over her head, one-handed. “Get on board your shuttles and get ready to kick some ass! Hoo-ah?”

  “Hoo-ah!” The word was a thunderclap echoing off the bulkheads around us. “Rangers lead the way!”

  Pops was chuckling as they dispersed to the birds.

  “Were you ever that enthusiastic about a chance to get shot at, Pops?” I asked him.

  “Fuck if I know, sir,” he admitted. “I was a Ranger once, so I guess I must have been, but that was two divorces ago.” He squinted at the shuttles. “Which one of these damned things is our ride?”

  “This way.” I signaled to the rest of the ten-man Delta Force team. “We’re in front,” I added. “Because Rangers may lead the way, but I’m still a Marine, and we always hit the beach first.”

  ***

  This was not, as a matter of fact, the first time I had landed on another planet. Since Mars was now just a hop, skip and a jump away, the Space Force had a base there and we’d all trained at it. This was, however, my first landing under fire and, since I was a major and everything— with actual authority and people who had to do what I said—I invited myself into the extra acceleration couch at the rear of the cockpit, next to beside the crew chief.

  Originally, the acceleration couches hadn’t been large enough for our Svalinn armor—we’d been confined to special upright setups in the cargo hold. But I’d lobbied for a redesign and, since I knew the President and the guy who ran the company that built the shuttles, and had the Medal of Honor and some kickass press, I got what I wanted.

  Not that I was letting it go to my head or anything.

  “We got an even dozen bogies heading for an intercept,” the gunner announced.

  Actually, the role was a combination of a RIO (radar intercept officer) from a Navy two-seater, the navigator from an Air Force two-seater, the copilot from larger jets and the gunner from an attack helicopter. As I understood it, there’d been quite the power struggle when it came to what to name the position, and copilot had nearly won out, because most of the Space Force flight officers were former Air Force. But once training had begun and the officers assigned to the position understood how much of their job involved operating the radar and lidar gear and targeting threats, gunner had been the one to stick.

  Ours was a fresh-faced young first lieutenant named Mayfield who seemed cheerful about the whole thing despite the flight of Tevynian fighters heading our way. I couldn’t see shit on the screen except a few sensor blips climbing over the blue arc of the planet, but the blips were moving awfully fast. We were still accelerating at a full gravity, pushing us all into the seats with our normal, Earthside weights.

  “They’re launching on us,” Mayfield added. “Activating ECM.”

  “Roger that,” Captain Lee, the pilot, acknowledged. “Let me know if we need evasive.” His right hand came off the steering yoke long enough to touch a comm control. “Ranger Flight, those enemy birds have launched missiles. Recommend ECM and countermeasures.”

  If there was a reply, I wasn’t tuned in to hear it.

  “We getting any ground fire?” I asked, risking pissing off the flight crew. I was a ground-pounder and worse, a Marine, invadi
ng their territory. But If Lee minded the question, he didn’t show it.

  “Negative. Not yet, anyway. They’d risk taking out their own fighters. I think they’re taking some potshots at the Jambo with their orbital platforms, but she’s knocking ’em down about as quick as they’re firing.” He inclined his head toward the gunner. “What’s the ETA on those missiles, Jim?”

  “Ten seconds. Launching countermeasures.”

  The aerospacecraft shuddered as rocket-propelled flares erupted from batteries on either side of the central fuselage, spreading electrostatic chaff ahead of a thermite bursting charge. The shuttles had cutting edge Helta electronic jamming as well, and the missiles were Tevynian designs manufactured on Helta equipment because the Helta preferred energy weapons. I probably shouldn’t have been that worried about it, but I was anyway, since I didn’t have anything better to do.

  “We’re good,” Mayfield announced, then turned back to me, grinning through the open visor of his helmet. “They only shot like three of ’em at us, anyway.”

  “We in range yet?” Lee asked him, laconic and clipped off.

  We were closer now and the sensor blips were black dots against the endless ocean of Wellspring, arrayed in a diamond cluster.

  “Getting’ there. Arming the coil guns.” The gunner traced a pattern across a dozen different controls, then leaned in over a targeting screen, his right finger hovering over a glowing red button. “Gimme a lock, sir.”

  The coil guns were heavy weapons built into the nose of the shuttle and just like the impulse gun, the only way to aim them was to point the bird at what you wanted to hit. Lee nudged the control yoke just a hair and the targeting reticle on the cockpit screens danced left, shimmied up and then down before it locked in place.

  “Guns,” Mayfield announced, touching the red firing control.

  The shuttle lurched backwards as if Lee had hit the brakes, the abrupt deceleration force from the recoil of the electromagnetic weapons throwing me against my seat restraints until the ship’s boost pushed me back again. We were still dozens of miles from the target and the tungsten darts took long seconds to reach the fighter, but they were damned hard to track and, by the time the radar or laser signal bounced back, it was way too late.

  I couldn’t see the lead fighter disintegrate, couldn’t even see the flash of an explosion at this distance, but the sensor reading flashed red and then winked out.

  “Retargeting,” Lee said, but we weren’t the only shuttle up here and no one wanted to miss out on the first outer space dogfight in human history.

  The shots from the coil guns on the other birds were as invisible to us as they would be to the enemy fighters, but their effects were obvious. One Tevynian bogie after another winked out of existence on the screen, and by the time the last one erupted in flames, we were close enough to see the white globe of fire. If the fighters had any weapons besides the missiles, they’d never had the chance to use them.

  It was enough to make me overconfident and I had to remind myself that the Tevynians hadn’t expected to need to defend this place against anything. They’d had a handful of slower-than-light patrol boats and a squadron of fighters against two cruisers and six heavily-armed shuttles. Still, I couldn’t help the feeling of satisfaction at pulling off something the Helta never could.

  “All enemy air cover is down,” Lee announced, maybe to the other pilots or maybe to the Jambo. “We’re heading in. Everyone hold on back there and keep those airsick bags handy.”

  I’d taken an anti-nausea pill as a precaution, even though I never got motion sickness, because now would be a damned inconvenient time for that to change. It still felt like Lee left my stomach somewhere in the upper atmosphere when he opened up the throttle and dove into Wellspring’s atmosphere at close to nine g’s. He never actually reached it because I didn’t black out, and I would have. But he got close because my field of vision narrowed, dark walls closing in on every side, everything squeezed into a tunnel of blue directly in front of me.

  “SAMs launching.” Mayfield’s voice sounded normal despite the high-g boost and annoyance wrestled with envy beneath the enormous pressure pushing on my chest. I don’t know how the hell he did that. “ECM jamming still up. Countermeasures in ten.”

  Surface-to-air missiles were kind of a home-brew Tevynian weapon too, and the only likely reason for them using SAMs as their primary planetary defense was that the Helta hadn’t bothered to install any ground-based lasers or rail guns—or they’d sabotaged beyond repair before the Tevynians had forced a landing. They still worried me more than the fighter-launched air-to-air missiles because you could squeeze a lot more engine and warhead into a ground-based weapon, and the shuttle wasn’t a cruiser and didn’t have defense shields.

  It would have been nice if I could’ve followed the course of the missiles, but it was all I could do to stay conscious. I almost believed Lee was getting even with me for inserting myself onto his cockpit by trying to make me pass out. Mayfield was still talking but his voice was a buzz in my ear, unintelligible. He might have been reporting we’d cleared the missile spread or praying for our souls with his last breath and I wouldn’t have known any better.

  The weight on my chest lifted and I sucked in a deep breath, then had to clamp my mouth shut so I didn’t puke.

  “Feet dry in ten seconds,” Lee said, his voice as even and steady as if he hadn’t been diving toward the ground at eight g’s and change for the last two minutes, or two hours, or whatever it had been. Feet dry meant we’d be over land, and given how small the land masses were on Wellspring, it wouldn’t take that long from feet dry to the LZ.

  “What’s our ETA?” I asked, once I was sure the words could leave my mouth without being accompanied by my lunch.

  “Three minutes. You gonna head back with your operator buddies?”

  I almost laughed. Lee sounded eager for me to be gone.

  “Naw, I want to get eyes on the target. I’ll stay up here while you do a gun run.”

  “You’re the boss, Major.” And I could believe that as much as I cared to. “Feet dry. Taking us down to one hundred meters.”

  The featureless blue of Wellspring’s ocean disappeared behind us, replaced by black, volcanic sands and what couldn’t be anything but Earth palm trees. It was surreal, seeing them here, so many light-years from home. It was one thing to know on an intellectual level that most of the life out here had been transplanted from home eons ago, but it was another to have it rubbed in my face, like the Elders of the Helta legend were staring at me from whatever version of heaven they’d retreated to, laughing at my bewilderment.

  The sand gave way quickly to grassland, the grassland to trees, some palms but mostly inland growth, and hints of habitation began to pop up beneath us, starting with a dirt road leading inland.

  “What do they need roads for?” Lee asked, glancing back at me. “Don’t they have antigravity or some shit?”

  “If they had antigravity,” I said, patience fraying at the edges, “don’t you think we’d have asked to get it in these shuttles? They have artificial gravity, which isn’t the same thing at all.”

  “What’s the difference?” Mayfield wanted to know.

  “Do I look like a physicist to you?” I waved a hand at my M900 rifle. “Don’t you think if I knew how their gravity control worked, I’d be doing something more complicated than shooting guns at the bad guys?”

  He shrugged, still seeming unsatisfied. Honestly, I didn’t know much more than I’d told him except that the gravity control worked on the same principle as the warp units that powered their hyperdrive and sublight engines, and they didn’t work at all inside a planet’s gravity well.

  So, roads were still a thing, and so were wheels, though Helta wheels looked more like furniture casters. A cargo vehicle of some kind had been pushed off the road not too far from the beach, its metal hull charred and blackened. Probably destroyed and left to rot when the Tevynians had taken the colony, since our enem
y weren’t much into recycling unless it was something they could use as a weapon. I caught hints of square structures at the edge of the viewscreens, but we were going too fast for me to make sense of what they were or if they were occupied.

  I wondered briefly if we were going to see any Helta at all, but then the road turned from packed dirt to some sort of shiny, black pavement and clusters of buildings popped up across the horizon, one row after another. Tiny figures were pouring out of the structures, putting their size into some perspective. I figured the buildings had to be fifty or sixty feet tall, maybe fifty yards wide on average, all of them with the utilitarian lines of warehouses or factories, or the Helta equivalent. Not houses, not apartments, no sort of individual identity to them.

  “Those are Helta,” Lee said.

  I was about to ask him how he could tell when he put a zoomed-in picture on the screen that clearly showed the fuzz-covered, jowly faces of the bearlike Helta faces turned toward the approaching shuttles.

  “The Tevynians packed them into these buildings to control them,” I guessed. “But where are the guards?”

  “Probably getting ready to welcome you to their planet,” Mayfield replied with dry humor.

  A bolt of lightning pierced the sky, passing only a few yards wide of us, whiting out the screen and sending shudders through the aerospacecraft’s fuselage and through me.

  “And there they are now,” I said, trying not to let the fear eating at my gut make its way into my voice. “Crew-served laser, I think. Might want to take that out.”

  “Yeah, I’ll get right on that,” Lee drawled, throwing the shuttle into a bank to the left.

  And there was the refinery, so much bigger than it had looked in the orbital shots of the colony. The size of a Texas oil refinery, at the end of a maglev train track from the mining machinery further inland. But it was totally unlike any refinery I had ever seen, with equipment I couldn’t even describe, much less assign a purpose to, spires and globes and curves that didn’t seem to make any sense. Hell, I didn’t even know what they were refining here, though I knew it wasn’t oil or gas, because they didn’t use it.