Starship Liberator Page 12

  Zaxby returned a gaze consisting of two polite eyeballs, keeping the other two on his board. “Not before we reach the Hok heavies in front of us.”

  “Can you do as well against those Hok heavies?”

  “There is no reason to think otherwise, Admiral, as long as I am allowed to fire the entirety of our complement of mines.”

  “How many do we have left?”

  “Sixty-seven, sir. We achieved an approximate hit ratio of fifty percent on the enemy light squadron. If we can match that percentage, we should expect to render approximately one quarter of the enemy combat-ineffective, and another quarter will be significantly degraded.”

  Braga sat back and took a deep breath. “Leaving about a dozen undamaged Hok heavies… Let’s be conservative and say they have eighteen in fighting shape. What does the SAI simulator say in a straight-up fight?”

  “Our combined fleet should win comfortably, sir, with you in command,” said Zaxby.

  “And how long until we can hope to get fifty percent hits on the Hok heavies in front of us?”

  “Assuming they remain stationary… We can strike seven hours from now, sir.”

  “Why wouldn’t they remain stationary?” Braga asked.

  “No reason, sir. Likelihood approaches one hundred percent that they will assume our mine strike was due to a cleverly laid field rather than a railgun launch.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  “What would you yourself conclude, Admiral,” Zaxby asked, “if you were in their place?”

  “I’d be looking for every rational explanation and making sure I wasn’t caught napping. Speaking of that, pass orders to maintain routine randomized evasions as we travel.” Braga rubbed his neck. “Downey is due to arrive in just under eight hours. Verdura, you have the fleet. I’ll take some rack time and relieve you in four hours. Zaxby, you get some rest too.”

  “But sir—”

  “Do as you’re told, Lieutenant. I want you fresh for when you launch our next mine strike.”

  “Aye aye, sir.” Zaxby headed for his quarters, looking forward to getting out of his water suit and soaking in his hydro-tank.

  Several hours later, Zaxby returned and took his station. He relieved the Second Weapons Officer and pointedly stared at Stiles, who studiously ignored him.

  It appeared to Zaxby he’d scored a social victory to match his military triumph. Perhaps that would reduce the crew’s obvious ape-bigotry toward octopoids. After all, nothing else explained their clear antipathy toward someone so obviously superior. Now, they could not fail to appreciate him. He felt sure they’d soon be “singing his praises,” as the admiral liked to say. Zaxby had looked up the phrase and added it to his repertoire of idioms.

  After checking and rechecking all of his calculations and programming, Zaxby used the admiral’s codes to access the shipnet chat logs of everyone aboard and found some shocking violations of verbal protocol. He amused himself by composing multiple negative reports on his crewmates.

  These, being so honest, sincere and accurate, would undoubtedly endear him to everyone from the lowest rating to the most senior officer. After all, they couldn’t help but appreciate anything that improved the efficiency of the fleet, and thus their survival expectation, could they?

  “You ready, Zaxby?” asked Admiral Braga.

  “Of course, sir.”

  Captain Verdura punched up a private channel to the admiral, which Zaxby tapped into using the convenient codes he’d acquired. After all, his efficiency could only be improved by remaining well informed.

  “Sir,” Verdura asked, “why are we timing the mines to hit the enemy almost two hours early? Wouldn’t it be better to put them in a state of confusion just as our fleets arrive?”

  The admiral replied, “Because they won’t sit there until the last moment. They’re likely to get ready, begin evasive maneuvers and so on, perhaps an hour prior. Even weapons testing might shift their positions enough to make the mines miss.”

  “Understood, sir.” Verdura closed the private channel. Zaxby found it odd that she’d bothered to make this private contact. Wouldn’t the crew have benefitted from their commanders’ insights? It must be more ape-culture, something to do with embarrassment, he surmised.

  “You may fire when ready, Zaxby,” said the admiral.

  “Naturally, sir.” Zaxby rechecked the computer-initiated launch timing for the fifth time, and then waited until the chrono read zero. “First salvo of mines away. Nine railguns failed.”

  “Why so many?” Braga demanded, frowning.

  “Firing the first salvo put great wear on them, you will remember. Each is likely to fail after 2.43 shots.”

  “2.43, hmm? Not, say, 2.44?”

  “No, sir,” Zaxby said. “2.43, rounded to two places. Firing second salvo. Fourteen more railguns failed, seven remaining. Third salvo. Four failures, three remain.”

  “Cease fire.”

  “Sir—”

  Braga growled, “I said cease fire, dammit! We might need a few railgun batteries for something, even launching a last-minute mine. We don’t want to have them all down. Verdura, double up on our engineering crews working on repairs.”

  Zaxby’s limbs twitched in irritation. “The salvos are, of course, timed to arrive simultaneously. It took a serious effort utilizing my deep understanding of four-dimensional calculus to—”

  “Thank you, Lieutenant.”

  “And—”

  “Shut up,” said Verdura. “The admiral can’t hear himself think.”

  Zaxby choked off another reply. He was bound to stay quiet by the direct order, but he wondered to himself how one could hear thinking in the first place.

  “Now we wait,” said Braga.

  Zaxby silently put up the impact countdown, reading nearly an hour.

  Propelled by the railguns, the mines flew ahead of the cruising squadron, underway for their secret rendezvous. The tension on the bridge built, broken only by frequent randomized evasive maneuvers in case of something unexpected.

  However, as the five-minute mark approached, the sensors officer sang out, “I have sidespace incursions, multiple ships.” The man turned toward the admiral. “Sir, it’s the heavies, appearing at optimum position.”

  “Damn it all to hell!” Braga roared. “Downey, the one time I needed you to be your same old slowpoke self, you hurry! Pass to the fleet: all ahead flank, minimum time course. Weapons, engage at extreme range.”

  As soon as Zaxby had coordinated with the other weapons officers, his sense of self-satisfaction deflated. He watched with horror as the Hok fleet ambushed Downey, accelerating away from their static positions toward the nearby just-arrived dreadnoughts and super-dreadnoughts.

  Unfortunately, that meant his carefully launched formation of mines, for which the fleet had paid in broken weapons, would have zero chance of striking the enemy.

  The Hok launched a full spread of shipkiller missiles, expensive and deadly, but compared to railguns and beams, slow and easy to counter.

  Easy to counter when prepared for battle, anyway. Downey’s heavy squadron, arriving by ones and twos and out of formation, could establish no coordination, no teamwork. Flights of missiles overwhelmed individual ships’ countermissile abilities; or if they did not, then the hard-driven Hok beams and railgun projectiles slipped by the saturated defensive nets to pound the big ships with impact, energy and radiation.

  But these were enormous vessels, thick with energized armor that was reinforced by conformal defensive fields. They didn’t die easily.

  Zaxby watched as Niagara lasted far longer than expected, twisting savagely with brutal, graceless overloading of her fusion engines and impellers, smashing back at her tormenters. But eventually she tumbled, broken, through the void.

  Saxon and Kinshasa drew together and seemed to stand back to back until finally overrun by eight enormous enemies, ramming one at the last to swallow three in a colossal explosion.

  Spirit of Manchester,
Downey’s flagship and pride of the fleet, managed to hold off the attacks long enough to gather three, four, then five sisters around her and mount a networked defense. For ten full minutes the ether blazed with stupendous energies thrown back and forth with profligate abandon at point-blank range.

  The Hok assembled half their force to face Downey’s reduced group, while more Hundred Worlds ships arrived over a space of long minutes at random points. This had the effect of allowing the Hok to concentrate at odds of two or three to one against each. Even given the Hundred Worlds edge in individual ship strength, this was a losing proposition.

  Zaxby was amazed anything could live through such a point-blank battle of titans. Electromagnetic pulses from fusion warheads overwhelmed Vigilant’s sensors for a time, and when it cleared, those on the bridge let out groans and gasps of horror. All of Downey’s ships had been reduced to hulks, except for three that had managed to escape back into sidespace.

  All eyes turned to Admiral Braga. Bleak-faced, the commander opened his mouth to speak when Vigilant shuddered under a heavy impact. Alarms blared and gravity rippled as power fluctuated.

  “What the hell was that?” he said into the noise of shouted orders and the sound of breaking metal.

  “A missile, sir,” said Zaxby, immediately synthesizing this deduction from all available data flowing across his console. “They must have cold-launched them, running them on impellers. As you know, impellers have no discernible emissions, and at flank acceleration as we are, any weapon we detected would have been unavoidable. If we hadn’t been making routine evasive maneuvers, we probably would have been destroyed outright.”

  “How bad off is our remaining flotilla? Operations?”

  The ops officer replied, “Eight ships are still effective. Five have working sidespace drives.”

  “Vigilant?”

  The officer shook his head. “Only Keegan, Coriol, Turlock, Grizzly, and Mauberge retain sidespace capability.”

  Zaxby watched Admiral Braga’s face crumple. While the nuances of humans’ language sometimes escaped him, he had learned to read their expressions quite well. Zaxby felt himself mimicking it as similar feelings coursed through his expansive brain, a brain that right now stuttered, trying to find some way out of their situation.

  Braga said, “Order all ships to escape and evade. Those with sidespace engines head for the nearest friendly worlds, but separately, to ensure somebody survives to report this trap… this debacle.”

  The operations officer nodded and relayed his orders. “And those without sidespace, sir?”

  “Tell them to spread out and try to run in normal space until repairs can be made. How are we?”

  The ops officer looked pointedly toward Verdura, and after a moment, so did Braga.

  Verdura said, “We’re on a ballistic course that will take us near the battlefield. Fusion engines and most of our weapons are down, though we do have impellers. I’ve ordered maximum lateral acceleration, but I think…”

  “Go on.”

  “If they want to match courses and board to capture,” she said, “we’re easy meat.”

  Zaxby watched Braga search the faces of the crew around them. He sensed this was not the time to offer an opinion. The admiral was a sensible human. He would choose the only logical course.

  Braga said grimly, “Rig for self-destruct. I won’t let them take her, but I’m not going to ask you to sacrifice yourselves. We’ll abandon ship in the boats and pods and try to evade them. Several moons in this system are marginally habitable, and Hundred Worlds forces may be able to return and retrieve us eventually.”

  The crew on the bridge hung their heads, and Zaxby couldn’t help imitating them, even if it was not a standard Ruxin physical response. In fact, he felt like wrapping his head in his arms and hiding from the world. His superior intellect had failed him. He should have predicted the impeller missile trick, as he’d pulled something similar on the pursuing enemy with the mines.

  In fact, he did indulge in head-wrapping during the long lonely days in the escape pod after Vigilant vaporized herself. By the time the Hok picked him up and threw him into a thankfully damp cell, he’d come out of his funk and resolved to face his penance with as much fortitude as he could muster.

  Chapter 13

  Light infantry tactics are offensive in character, even during defensive operations. Light infantrymen do not hold a line. Light infantry tactics follow the principles of maneuver warfare, attacking by infiltration and defending by ambush. It uses ambushes on the offensive as well, by ambushing withdrawing or reinforcing enemy units, sometimes deep in the enemy’s rear. Light infantry applies an ambush mentality to both planning and execution.

  -The History of Light Infantry; The 4GW Counterforce by William S. Lind and LtCol Gregory A. Thiele, USMC.

  Planet Corinth, Helios city.

  Straker and his two remaining men dodged back among the buildings, naturally gravitating toward the taller structures at the city’s heart. It seemed an immutable law of planetary economics that each colony’s starting city would grow to overpopulated extremes. Eventually, the downtown real estate grew expensive enough to build farther and farther upward. Tramways and hovercars increased accessibility, but the most valuable commodity of all was skilled personnel, and those individuals needed the ability to meet and work together, quickly and efficiently. Inevitably, tall buildings sprouted at every capital city.

  Virtual reality, despite its promise, had turned out to be a poor substitute for human-to-human contact. Business at the top was always done better face-to-face, where all the players could be confident they weren’t being fooled by overlays or false data feeds. Netlinks were left to the drone workers in their warren of cubes, but even they needed to unplug and socialize in the break rooms and cafeterias. Those who could afford it met in restaurants and gallerias.

  All that workspace was deserted now as Straker, Paloco and Chen swerved left and right, deliberately avoiding the razor-straight roads and winding footpaths of the city. Instead, they spread out and angled across parks and cut through intersections. They leapt over sheds and outbuildings, using the tall structures to their advantage by hugging them, reducing by half the vertical angle of potential attackers.

  Kinetics fell from the sky, slamming into concrete or turf. They spitted geysers of either dirt or shards of concrete and rocks, always leaving behind deep smoking craters. With no explosives, the spikes damaged what they struck, but little else, the better to preserve the city for its eventual conquerors. The Hok were still betting on precision to take down the defending mechsuiters.

  Beams also lanced down from the skies to set the ground afire with tuned spectra, flash-heating anything that would burn. Some were pure infrared lasers, cooking the surface of whatever they touched. Others were gamma-ray lasers—grasers—their X-rays reaching deep inside all but the densest materials.

  Mechsuits were built to resist both of these, but they weren’t impervious. Each strike peeled a little more protection from every man’s armor, degrading more of their systems by thermic shock or electromagnetic overload.

  What really worried Straker were the capital-class ships with their particle beam cannon. Used mostly in the vacuum of space, they could be employed for brute-force application against ground troops once a besieging fleet achieved total space supremacy. This was wildly inefficient, as much of the beam’s punch would be absorbed by any planetary atmosphere, but whatever reached the ground transferred so much energy to its target that it simply exploded on contact, like a tiny nuclear detonation.

  Mechsuiters included.

  He hoped the Hok remained unwilling to wreck their prize, but as he’d learned early in his career, hope was not a plan.

  Two spikes fell nearby, bracketing Chen front and back. A moment later a graser tore a piece out of a building near Loco.

  “Chen, keep up your lateral dodging,” Straker ordered, “vary your pattern every one to two seconds.”

  “Aye aye, sir
.”

  “We’re almost there.”

  “Yes, sir!” Chen said as he dodged a fresh fountain of brown earth and smoke.

  “BOHICA!” cried Loco suddenly.

  “Damn,” Chen said, “would you please shut up, Loco?”

  “Not a chance. If I ever stop talking, I’m dead.”

  “Seems like a fair trade.”

  Straker had picked out a building for his ambush point, one built with a partially open first story designed for groundcar parking beneath its structure. As they approached, he saw most of the vehicles had departed, evacuating. That was a break, for sure.

  “There, that one,” Straker said, designating his goal. “Get under it. It’s a financial complex. They won’t want to destroy the computers and networking gear.”

  “Yeah, because they love alien porn on the hard drives,” said Loco.

  “If they do try, at least we’ll have sixty stories of skyscraper above us,” Chen said.

  “Or sixty thousand tons on top of us,” Loco said.

  “Exactly. Call it top cover.” Straker got there first, diving headfirst into the garage like a goalkeeper trying to block a shot. Immediately he rolled to his feet and crouched. He couldn’t quite stand, but the mechsuit cared less than his body, masking any strain on his muscles with biofeedback links. The other two made it into the spacious interior a moment after.

  Straker eyed the ramps leading down to the parking sub-levels, but it looked like those had been built to minimum height, less than three meters clearance. A mechsuiter could barely crawl into a space that tight.

  “Take cover behind a corner,” he said, pointing. The building stood atop five pillars, four at the corners and one larger for access in the center, holding lift systems. “They’ll do their best to track us, but as long as they’re trying to limit collateral damage, we’ll be all right.” He said it with more confidence than he felt.

  “How’s Tactical looking?” Chen asked. Only the squad leader had access to the higher-order battlenet, the better to ensure line troopers concentrated on their own affairs. It was easy to get so lost in the godlike overviews that you didn’t pay enough attention to the details.