Starship Liberator Page 5

  Never repair the unbroken, he told himself.

  Examining his screens, Braga noted that the mechsuit regiment had reached the ground with only two put out of action, completing his first objective. Unlike conventional forces, which must be brought by landers to the surface of any planet, mechsuiter organic insertion was relatively easy. He should be thankful.

  Phase Two was always harder, though—holding the skies and space above the battlefield. Ensuring a win required orbital supremacy, or at least superiority. Once he cleared the enemy from orbit, his destroyers and frigates could drop low and slam ordnance into the enemy ground forces from above, guaranteeing victory.

  If he couldn’t gain superiority, parity would have to do, with each space fleet canceling the other. That would allow the ground forces to duke it out. The mechsuiters would still win—he’d never seen them lose a battle outright—but the cost would rise precipitously, and the Hok seemed to have endless divisions to throw at the Hundred Worlds, while the Hundred Worlds operated under a heavy and constant resource strain.

  What we couldn’t do with a thousand systems worth of production, Braga mused, but that was mere fantasy. We’ve got what we’ve got, and not only do we have to win, we have to do it without losing too much materiel.

  “First Squadron, tighten up above Helios, standard geocentric formation,” he said, touching screens to define his desired area of operations. His command staff sitting around him at their bolt-down consoles, hastily added to convert the battlecruiser into a flagship, relayed his orders in more detail.

  His four battlecruisers, including the one in which he sat, adjusted positions and continued to exchange fire with the three Hok battlecruisers and nine heavy cruisers trying to drive him off.

  Six heavy cruisers joined the Hundred Worlds battlecruisers, making the fight almost even. His ships had the edge in crew training and technology, while the Hok had the numbers, as usual.

  Braga didn’t bother to issue specific orders for the dozen destroyers in First Squadron. Two had been lost already, and eight of them had been assigned to shadow his cruisers, covering their vulnerable stern arcs against leaker missiles while adding their lighter railguns and lasers to the firepower mix. The other two destroyers, all Braga could spare right now, rolled inverted and concentrated on supporting the ground battle.

  “Second Squadron will advance to envelop the enemy,” he ordered.

  That section of his fleet was composed of all ten of his light cruisers, units fast enough to turn the corner and powerful enough to smash any corvettes, frigates, or destroyers in their way, with sufficient firepower to damage heavier ships if they could sneak behind to target their more vulnerable sterns.

  Like most naval battles close to a planet, this one had a floor defined by the atmosphere and the desire of both fleets to stay close to their ground forces. Otherwise, they would have simply stood off in space and fought in all three dimensions.

  Standard tactics would seem to dictate gaining the “high ground” above, but if either side did so, they would be allowing the enemy temporary aerospace superiority above the planetary battle. Therefore, the engagement tended to be fought in two dimensions, as if the combatants sailed the surface of a spherical ocean.

  In response to Braga’s order, Second Squadron’s light cruisers raced ahead on the right flank while First Squadron furiously held the line against the heavier Hok vessels.

  In response, the Hok shifted lighter units to screen their bigger ships.

  Soon… soon… Braga forced himself not to micromanage. Second Squadron’s commander was a good officer, a veteran of many such battles. He was stringing them out, setting them up…

  As one, the ten light cruisers turned to port, describing a perfect inward-curving line with all forward weapons pointed at the enemy’s flank and rear. This concavity naturally concentrated their firepower. They launched a heavy salvo of shipkiller missiles while opening up with their centerline railguns, much larger cousins of a Marksman’s fire-support weapon.

  Each railgun projectile streaked past the intervening enemy escort vessels to target one of the three Hok battlecruisers, aiming at its vulnerable stern area. Though still heavily armored, the back end of each ship housed its main fusion engines, the openings of its exhaust ports exposed.

  Yes, ships could maneuver on reactionless impellers alone, but only sluggishly, at perhaps one-tenth acceleration. To fight effectively, their fusion engines needed to expel high-speed streams of reaction mass.

  Three of the ten projectiles slammed into the battlecruisers. Two gouged impressive but largely meaningless chunks out of the Hok ships’ armor, but one caught the inner edge of an engine port and tore into the interior, causing an enormous secondary explosion as at least one fuel tank ruptured.

  Braga could imagine the hell inside the enemy ship, contained by blowout panels and damage control systems but undoubtedly killing everyone within the engine and engineering sections. His heart burned with satisfaction as he contemplated the aliens’ incineration.

  With their main guns waiting on a slow recharge—the inevitable downside of putting such heavy weapons on smaller ships—Second Squadron’s light cruisers drifted to their flanks and engaged the Hok destroyers and frigates with their secondaries. Profligate missile use and a superior suite of close-in lasers tore through the enemy escorts. This was classic cruiser work, its cut and thrust so different from ponderous capital-ship battles, and a joy to behold.

  As usual when facing superior firepower, the Hok shifted to near-suicidal tactics, closing to point-blank range and aiming to ram their ships into their enemies. Orbital space was wide enough that, in most cases, they didn’t actually strike home, but their suicidal runs evened the odds as the smaller vessels gained effectiveness at hull-scraping range, shooting past the Hundred Worlds ships to end up in their rear arcs, trying to rake their sterns.

  In response, Braga’s light cruisers were compelled to swing and follow their enemies, turning a set engagement into a swirling dogfight of smaller ships. Braga wished he had attack craft to send along with his light cruisers, but carriers were too slow to keep up with the fast task force he’d been forced to assemble.

  One of his own battlecruisers and two heavy cruisers took severe damage and were forced to fall back, while the Hok lost two more heavy cruisers of their own.

  The effectiveness of the damaged Hok battlecruiser dropped to almost nil. It still fired its weapons at a high rate, but its targeting systems seemed to have been degraded to the point most of its weaponry hit nothing but empty space. This victory alone made his flanking gambit worth the risk.

  Agonizing minutes passed before Second Squadron gained the upper hand, finishing off the enemy escort units. Eight of the original ten light cruisers showed combat-effective, while two limped away on curving courses designed to rejoin First Squadron. Hopefully their damage control would restore them enough to allow them to snipe with their main guns.

  Now, though, came the decisive moment. Braga leaned against his restraints as if that would help him better see the screens and displays. His eight light cruisers slid into salvo formation, one in the middle and seven in a circle around, and aimed all their now-recharged capital railguns at one of the two undamaged Hok battlecruisers.

  Without harassment to spoil their aim, six of eight rounds smashed into the enemy, despite evasive maneuvers. At least one of the projectiles found a vulnerable area, and the Hok battlecruiser staggered, venting gas and plasma. It ceased to return fire.

  “All units, concentrate on the third battlecruiser,” Braga ordered. “If we knock him out, the rest will have to retreat or die.”

  He watched as the last of his fleet’s shipkiller missiles volleyed in a wave designed to overload the enemy’s countermeasures. Such weapons were usually the first to run out, unless specialized missile cruisers or ordnance tenders could be brought along, but he’d held one salvo in reserve for just such an opportunity.

  Without further orders,
his ship captains timed their railgun and laser strikes to support the missiles, distracting and blinding enemy cruisers that tried to thin out the salvo and relieve pressure on the battlecruiser. Once it became clear that at least half the volley would slam home, the Hok cruisers turned to charge the Hundred Worlds ships, repeating the tactics of their lighter units in hopes of doing as much damage as they could and, Braga inferred, delaying Hundred Worlds space superiority over the battlefield as long as possible.

  “Yes!” Braga cried as the Hok battlecruiser crumpled under the impact of at least one nuke. His staff and the battlecruiser’s bridge officers cheered. It was rare for a capital missile to actually strike a ship; most of the time their proximity sensors triggered detonation at the closest point of approach, but such had been the concentration of firepower that they’d achieved a contact strike, the holy grail of every launch officer.

  However, Braga’s exultation was short-lived as his sensors officer barked, “New fleet contacts, bearing one-eight-zero mark neg-nine.”

  Well versed in astrogation, Braga instinctively recognized that heading meant something approaching from directly astern and low… from behind the planet of Corinth.

  Horror blossomed in the pit of his stomach as Braga saw an intact, undamaged Hok flotilla, including at least nine battlecruisers, emerge over the horizon, heading straight for his battered command.

  Chapter 5

  In close, light infantry can exploit its small arms skills while denying the enemy effective employment of his superior firepower. Light infantry hugs the enemy and forces him to fight at short ranges on its terms.

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

  Planet Corinth, at the edge of Helios city.

  Straker aimed the mechsuit’s force-cannon with his right forearm and triggered it. Inside, two volatile metals and a surge of energy combined to launch a bolt of superheated plasma. Contained within an invisible tube of magnetic force, the bolt pierced the nearest Hok heavy tank. It impacted precisely where he wanted, at the weak joining between turret and hull, and the turret blew sky-high with the detonation of ordnance within.

  Immediately he threw himself sideways and rolled, the fifty-ton mechsuit mimicking his body’s movements perfectly via his neural link. In a ballet of death, Straker opened up with the gatling in his left arm, tiny super-dense needles of collapsed duralloy lancing out in a fan as he swept right to left, mowing down battlesuited enemy infantry.

  Those soldiers, humanoid but not human, seemed to be moving in slow motion compared to Straker. They died like bugs sprayed by pesticide as he hosed them with deadly projectiles. Their armor didn’t save them.

  I’m the best mechsuiter ever born, he told himself, and believed it might be true.

  He needed all that confidence as four heavy tanks advanced against him and Loco, firing. Their railguns gouged his outer layer of armor with grazing strikes or missed entirely as he dodged. His accelerated time sense and the processors in his suit allowed him to see the turret snouts and predict the exact trajectory of the enemy projectiles. His task was simply to make sure these lines never met.

  To the Hok it must seem like magic, but it wasn’t. It was superior genetics, training and technology, combined with a desperate need to protect the Hundred Worlds. Humanity, despite its advantages, was losing. They had been losing for quite a while now.

  All the more reason to fight hard and kill everything in sight, Straker told himself.

  It was time to use his overhead assets. He uploaded a data packet, feeling the battlenet reach out, and then followed it up with the required verbal backup call. “Engels, fire mission! Heavy tanks in the open, azimuth zero-eight-five, danger close.”

  “Roger, Straker. Shot, over.”

  “Shot, out.”

  A column of cyan appeared. The railgun penetrator moved so fast it could only be seen by its glowing trail through the atmosphere. One of the heavies vanished, smashed into the ground like a bug under a fist, transforming into a ball of blazing fuel that swept outward, and then rose to form a tiny mushroom cloud.

  The others spread out and fired patterns of obscurant grenades in hopes of hiding from the godsfire above. The ninety-three second recharge time of the Marksman’s weapon granted the enemy temporary salvation.

  Two hovers swept around Straker’s flanks, their autocannon a greater threat than the harder-hitting tank guns. More shells meant more incoming to track. Given enough enemy fire, even an expert mechsuiter could make a mistake, or be boxed in so tight that there was nowhere to go, no way to dodge.

  The key to battle was not to get hit, Straker recited to himself like a mantra. If I don’t get hit, I don’t get damaged. If I don’t get damaged, I don’t get killed. If I don’t get killed, I kill Hok and live to fight another day.

  The streams of smaller shells tracked him as he triggered the boosters in his feet and threw himself flat along the ground, the arc of his dive taking him over a slight rise and then into the hollow below. Loco did the same twenty meters over. When the hovers came around the tiny hill, he blew one to smithereens with his force-cannon while Loco shredded the skirts of the other with his gatling.

  Its air cushion lost, the vehicle slammed into the churned-up dirt of the battlefield and ground to a halt, still firing. The mobility kill had disrupted its crew’s aim, though, allowing Straker time to shift his own gatling and chew through its light armor.

  A warning signal told him six guiders were inbound, volleys from the Hok missile tanks farther back. They had his and Loco’s general location now, and the seekers on the warheads were discriminating enough to guide on the mechsuits if they got close enough.

  “Incoming!” he warned, and Loco grunted in response.

  Straker only had to form a thought, and the clear crystal lenses on top of his helm and shoulders blazed with laser light, cued by the active radar system built into the skin of his armor. The coherent beams speared the missiles, not powerful enough to destroy them, but blinding and burning out their seeker heads. The weapons impacted nearby with powerful concussions, but mechsuiters could shrug off anything less than direct hits.

  Straker used the cover from the spewing dirt and swirling dust to move to his left. His battlenet showed Orset close by, and he used his comrade’s presence to secure his flank while he set up an ambush. Loco turned to engage another enemy platoon, thereby keeping Straker’s six clear.

  When four heavies churned over the slight hill, assaulting toward Orset, Straker drove a force-cannon bolt into the side of the closest where he knew the armor to be weak.

  Plasma vomited from every one of the tank’s joints. The crew inside was flash-cooked. He waited for a secondary explosion, but it didn’t come. The enemy vehicle’s suppression system had done its job, preserving the equipment for salvage, but not the lives.

  Three surviving tank guns slewed toward him, and he moved again, hiding behind the gutted heavy. He brought up his battlenet view provided by a combination of a cloud of friendly insect-sized drones blanketing the battlefield and by the regiment’s dropships above. With this real-time targeting intel, he launched one of his precious antitank missiles.

  It leaped vertically off the recessed slot in his back and arced over the barrier he crouched behind. When it destroyed its target heavy, Straker moved again, circling farther to his left, using the explosion as cover in hopes it had overloaded the enemy sensors.

  A railgun dart passed so close it wiped off a line of Straker’s sensors. The shockwave within the atmosphere stripping adaptive nano-camo from his skin. A centimeter closer and he might have been put out of action, his arm torn off.

  With a surge of cold anger, Straker charged forward to get too close to the enemy for their main guns to follow. Automated secondaries opened up, antipersonnel rounds chattering against his skin, but he shrugged off the high-velocity slugs. His mechsuit weighed as much as a Hok light tank, but kilo for kilo had far better
armor, with overlapping duralloy plating reinforced by superconducted conformal fields.

  Now he was close enough to grab the relatively delicate barrel of the heavy tank’s railgun and, like a man with one horn of a steer, he used his grip as leverage. Placing a foot on the turret, he bent the tube to uselessness, and then released his hold to throw himself backward onto the ground.

  Ducking the aim of the final enemy, he set himself, grabbing the lower edge of the vehicle he’d just disarmed. Servos whined and feedback against his body showed he was nearing the physical limits of his mechsuit as he lifted the heavy tank from the side and rolled it. He pushed and shoved, pushed and shoved again, forcing it to continue its motion, top-side, bottom-side, juddering toward the last enemy.

  Able to see the final tank’s railguns pointed to his left, Straker stepped to his right and, before the gun could traverse, fired a precise bolt of metallic plasma into the nose of the turret. It didn’t penetrate the main armor, but the big gun softened and sagged at its base from the intense heat.

  The tank reversed and began a frantic withdrawal, escaping before Straker’s force-cannon could recharge. He chose to save his missiles and let it go. With no main gun, it was out of the battle.

  “First Squad, SITREP!” he called into the brief pause he’d earned. Checking the battlenet was all well and good, but the man in the suit was always his best source of information.

  “Gatling’s jammed up good, no surprise,” Paloco said. “With my luck, I’ll probably lose my force-cannon soon and have to withdraw. There’s too many of them. I’m trying to back up toward you, but I’m pinned by enemy fire.”

  Straker located Paloco on his tactical display and surged into a run, staying low. The quickest way to a hero’s grave was by bounding too high and presenting his mechsuit as the target for multiple enemy guns and missiles.