Assault: The Globur Incursion Book 6, page 24
Sanderson was almost glad he was not on one of those ships, remembering the heavy fighting on Valkyrie and the abattoir of the capital missile bay when they had finally broken the Globur force and gained the upper hand.
Sanderson was jolted out of his thoughts by James on the command channel for all the Marines in Alpha Company. “Alright, Meanies,” she snarled. “Timetable has been moved up. Looks like the boss is in a hurry. We will be deploying sooner and at a much higher velocity relative to the planetary surface. It is going to be a bumpy ride, people.”
Sanderson checked the navigation plot again for Patticake. They were on a new vector and still building speed. They could still hit their landings zone—probably. The release velocity relative to the surface would be a blistering 11,000 meters per second. The pods would not be subsonic until they were very near the surface.
The Marine ships would end up heading back toward the Fleet task forces at a much-reduced velocity. The missile salvo would catch them as they left the planet behind. At least no damaged ships would be caught in the planet’s gravity well.
All three Fleet task forces were now on converging courses, headed for Khan. They would meet the Marines’ transports after they had dealt with any missiles that got through the point defense. TF17 would arrive first, as planned.
Sanderson felt a slight shudder transmitted through the ship into his suit. The transports were about to hit the atmosphere. The atmosphere would decelerate them hard until they released their cargo and climbed back out into space. Sanderson was no engineer, but he doubted that the ships were really designed for this kind of punishment. They were not really designed for atmospheric operation at all. If the shields failed, an entire ship could be lost.
The counter Sanderson had thrown up on his display wound down. Beside the counter, it had another that showed relative velocity. Patticake was decelerating hard, and the friction from the atmosphere was helping. A third display estimated the velocity at launch. It currently was just falling through 14,472 meters per second. That did not bode well.
Sanderson commed James on a private channel. “Looks like we’re going in hot.”
James’s face appeared. “Yeah, figured that,” James said calmly. “I guess this is where we find out just how tough these new mark combat suits really are.”
“Thrilling,” shot back Sanderson acidly. “I almost wish I was back on Valkyrie. They didn’t get boarded. But no, here I am sealed in this big black egg, getting ready to be shot at a planet full of aliens that want to kill me.”
“Not just you, Sanderson,” James chuckled. “They’re after all of us—if they are even there.”
“Well, I heard the Marine garrison commander Blucher is a real badass. He must have one hell of a sergeant major. And they do probably need saving. That’s us! Heroes fired out of cannons in orbit!”
“See you on the other side,” replied James.
Sanderson felt the jolt as Patticake shot him out. His suit compensated for the g-load, just not enough. The rest of the battalion spat out of the ship as the launchers cycled through the huge black eggs like grenade launchers. Each egg contained a Marine locked inside their combat suit along with their weapons. Sanderson’s display was at zero, and the relative velocity was just shy of 13,000 meters per second, over 46,000 kilometers per hour.
Chapter 26
Rear Admiral Brown heard the alarms stop, so he retracted the armored bulkhead between the flag bridge and command bridge. Wallachia had been boarded. Its Marines were engaged in a desperate fight in various sections of the ship. Contact had been lost with the other ships, and they were unable to raise any of Wallachia’s hangar bays.
Brown watched as the Globur swarmed down the passageways like a living nightmare. Perhaps luckily, the Marines only had to defend one engineering space, since Wallachia was an older shield-class carrier, she only had one quantum generator.
He watched as the Marine perimeter quickly shrank under the relentless attack of the Globur. There was a pause now, but the Marine company assigned to Wallachia had taken significant losses. Things would have been worse if they had not constructed strong points and redoubts in order to defend the ship against boarders.
The automated defense systems had initially worked well, but the Globur had deployed their electromagnetic plasma grenades to good effect, knocking out defensive strong points and taking down Marines in the process.
Brown felt helpless, cut off from his task force, and able to communicate only with personnel near the bridge. Captain Kallow was on top of the damage-control efforts and closely monitoring the Marines as they fought to retain control of Wallachia and keep the Globur out of engineering.
“It looks like most of the pods came to Wallachia,” Kallow said when he noticed the armored bulkhead between the command and flag bridges recede.
Brown wore a frown of frustration. “We have to call for assistance, get through the jamming.”
Kallow shrugged, his armored form rippling and shimmering in the light of the bridge. “The enemy controls access to the outer hull. We can’t spare any Marines. They are organizing the crew into squads to supplement the Marines.”
“That’s not enough?” asked Brown, hardly daring to believe Wallachia might be lost.
“It’s their armor. It seems they’ve adapted, and so our weapons aren’t as effective as they once were. There has been a lot of hand-to-hand, but,” Kallow held up an arm, “crew augmentation does not include those wonderful blades the Marine suits have.”
Brown looked at his staff and pointed. “Are you trained in communications, Lieutenant?”
The young officer swallowed hard and nodded. “Lieutenant Emerson. Yessir, Admiral.”
“Can you boost a signal from the augmentation or something else? Enough to reach the other ships?”
The young lieutenant nodded. “I can, sir, but won’t help with the jamming.”
“It is local jamming,” Brown shot back. “What if you were outside the ship?”
“Yessir, I could put something together,” replied the lieutenant looking puzzled.
“Quickly? You can take and equipment you need from here.” Brown swept his hand around the flag bridge as he looked back at the flag plot, wondering how many ships were fighting for their lives and seeing the green stream of survival pods launched during the battle.
“Just give me two minutes, sir, and I can rig something up to boost a standard comm signal.” The young lieutenant replied as she warmed to the half-formed idea.
“Get the stuff together and then get in a survival pod,” ordered Brown. “We’ll launch it, and you can contact the other ships to give us some assistance. We will not lose Wallachia to those bastards.”
“Yes, sir!” replied the young lieutenant with enthusiasm.
The lieutenant used her enhanced strength to rip some components out of one of the bridge consoles and quickly wired them together. She wired a lead to the apparatus and jacked it to her hard dock. “I have power, and the amplifier should allow me to get through once I’m clear of the jamming, sir.”
Brown nodded. “Let them know we’re still in control of the ship, but we need help right away. We need more Marines!”
The young lieutenant nodded. “Yes, sir! I’ll get through.” The armored hatch for the flag bridge opened to let the lieutenant into the passageway beyond and the short distance to the survival pods. She climbed in, and once the pod launched, they lost contact almost immediately.
Brown pulled up the Marine command channel just in time to hear one of the platoon commanders put his last of his energy in a scream as he died. The MEF commander was giving orders to fall back to the next set of redoubts.
“Captain Kallow,” Brown said, looking back at his friend. “I think it’s time we got into this fight.”
“Yessir, I have ordered all crew not presently engaged in fighting with the Marines to assemble in the mess hall near engineering. We can seal the bridge when we leave.”
The armored forms of the bridge watch headed for the hatch to get into the fight to save Wallachia from the Globur.
Brown began to follow and paused, waiting for Wallachia’s captain. The armor felt strange. This was his first time using it since he had been augmented. He could see almost normally. When he thought he wanted some information, it appeared on something like a heads-up display in his field of view. He was breathing normally as well, but he knew the armor of his augmentation was covering him completely since, if it weren’t, he would be dead in seconds in the vacuum of the ship. The heaters were still on, but the air had been sucked out to prevent explosive decompression. Using the armor was disorientating at first, but he had quickly gotten used to it since they had been at battle stations for hours now, having given the order before they went into Qdrive.
His thoughts drifted to the weapons. He had tried them once, just to test his augmentation. They were impressively powerful. Not on the same level as the Marine assault rifles but certainly nothing to be trifled with. His augmentation AI dutifully informed him that his accumulator was at 100% and his weapons were on standby.
His staff would head to main engineering. Captain Kallow came up to the flag bridge once the command bridge was clear as Brown had known he would. They had been together for years.
“Bringing up the rear?” Kallow nudged Brown, and he barely felt any of the force through his armor.
“Last out,” Brown nodded as the flag bridge sealed itself. Only the right ID would open it, and the ID was part of the augmentation. Impossible to spoof, at least as far as anyone knew. It was specific to the augmentation and the user’s DNA. The last part also needed verification that the ID holder was alive from the augmentation’s AI.
Brown’s thoughts went to where the Globur were, and he was immediately linked to the scanners in the ship. He could see the Globur coming up the passageway. He felt the gravity cycle off. It was a trick that had been passed on from other fights. Some of the Globur floated off the deck or bulkhead, and Marine weapons chewed into them. Brown was surprised to see some laser bolts simply deflecting off the Globur. Grenades turned the view onto a strobing nightmare of thrashing Globur as the huge Marine combat suits withdrew to the next redoubt.
His AI showed him that the Globur were not very far from main engineering. There were only four more lines of defense until they would be defending engineering itself. Brown shivered involuntarily as the scene from the scanners cleared to show floating Globur body parts before the gravity slammed everything messily back to the deck.
“I guess we’re about to find out why Jones and Pang have those dead eyes.” Brown motioned for his captain to follow him to engineering to join the crew in their first fight against the Globur. If they lost engineering, the Globur would overload the reactor and immolate the ship.
The deck trembled as somewhere close by as a Marine grenade salvo tore into the Globur.
***
The brand-new Marine planetary assault transports screamed through Khan’s atmosphere as they punched out their cargo of Marines.
The atmosphere above the drop zone was full of debris as the pods shedded skin after skin. Each one was a meteor bringing death incarnate to the surface of Khan. Eight thousand streaks of fire surrounded by clouds of burning debris made it hard to pick out any single pod.
The question of whether or not the landing would be opposed was quickly answered as missiles rose from the planet's surface. The pods had been released in a dispersal pattern to avoid clustering, a good precaution as Globur fusion warheads lit up the upper atmosphere.
Beams lanced from the surface, searching for targets. They were attenuated by the clouds of debris, their targeting systems could not determine where or whether a pod would take a hit.
Sanderson felt his pod pushed hard, yawing away from a warhead detonation. He watched the incoming enemy fire intently. His suit had an upgraded command scanner suite, and he could see better than most, though all the Marines would be able to see what was happening as the Marine pods blazed through the atmosphere, trading speed for heat as they slowed.
Khan’s atmosphere was slightly denser than the norm, and Sanderson could see that it was dropping his speed quickly. It was unclear if it would be quick enough. His scanners were predicting he would miss the drop zone, especially after the last detonation had given him a push off course. It actually looked like the entire drop would miss the drop zone. All they could do now was ride it out.
Sanderson felt an intense buzzing and his skin tingled as his pod was struck by a Globur beam. They were still high in the atmosphere, and some of the sting had been taken out of the beam. Thanks to the research team, the buzzing and tingling were all he felt. The pods were modeled on the material that made up the hull of Globur ships—or at least a human approximation of it. The dielectric properties, along with the heat resistance, made them able to take hits without harming the Marine inside. Lower in the atmosphere with a lot more layers burned away, it might be a different story. Right now, it brought a smile to Sergeant Major Sanderson’s face.
The smile was short-lived as his view recorded one of the assault transports take several hits and break in half. The Globur missile salvo had caught up with them, and the missiles from the surface were also targeting the transports. At least the marines had already been launched from the ships.
The transports had not dropped the Marine's supplies and other large containers since they would have been prime targets for ground defenses. That had been a solid call. No one expected the landing to be uncontested. The Globur were simply too aggressive for that.
Once the landing zone was secured, the surviving transports would be able to make the second drop. Sanderson had a suspicion his Marines would miss the heavy weapons well before the second drop. He was approaching 5000 meters in altitude and was only supersonic now.
The beams stabbing into the mass of Marine pods, and their clouds of debris, were constant now. The number of shots per second had ramped up considerably. The Globur probably figured out we are the most vulnerable just before we hit the ground, Sanderson thought grimly.
Sanderson saw that the ground was coming up fast. Too fast. He was supposed to eject from his pod between 500 and 1000 meters above the ground, but he saw that even at 500 meters, he would barely be subsonic. There was no way his grav field would slow him enough for a comfortable landing. His AI told him that staying in the pod was survivable. He saw a wide grassy plain spread out below him as the pod finally went subsonic as he overloaded the small grav generator in the pod.
Another beam weapon grazed his pod. Some of the suit's systems switched to backups. There was little time to consider that as the ground rushed up to meet him.
Marine combat suits, particularly the new mark Marine combat suits, were designed to take a lot of punishment. That meant protecting the occupant from impacts. Having the occupant with active armor augmentation helped as well.
Sanderson’s pod hit the ground hard and bounced, skidding along the ground through the tall, broad-leafed grass. The grass was almost two meters high, and the pod dug into the soft earth beneath, throwing up dirt and steam from the heat. The black smoking egg lurched to a halt. The air around the pod shimmered as the waves of heat rose into the air.
Some of the nearby grass began to smolder in the moment of silence before the pod blew apart, and Sanderson leaped out, drawing his assault rifle. The combat suit stood tall over the waving plain of grass. The sunlight penetrated the debris in the atmosphere in spots. It was blocked more often by the rising smoke from the smoking grass. The sun glinted weakly off the mirror-smooth suit.
Sanderson noted absently that the grass had not caught fire, and that surprised him, given the temperature readings from his suit around the smoking pod he had just left. The smoke was marring visibility in the normal spectrum. Sanderson saw what were obvious landings not far away from his current position. The closest cluster was just over two klicks. His scanners showed the immediate vicinity clear.
The soil was churned up around the path his pod had taken to come to a stop. It was a deep red color and seemed densely packed. He noticed his suit only sank into the ground a few centimeters. It seemed the rest of the plain he was standing on had a similar composition, and the tall grass stretched all the way to the horizon.
His AI told him he had hit the ground at 136 meters per second, and all systems were nominal. He was only 80 klicks from where he was supposed to land. His command view told him that his Marines were spread all behind the drop zone near him in a long ellipse. All had survived the fiery plunge to the ground.
Sanderson looked up and zoomed in on a large fire trail streaking across the sky. The remains of an assault transport broke up in the atmosphere. It was not Patticake. He knew the crew from the transport would likely have been able to eject and were probably in their suits bound for the surface to join the rest of the Marines. In the Corps, everybody was a Marine first.
The loss of a single transport was better than any of their projections before the battle. Sanderson rested his assault rifle across his chest. So far, there was no sign of the enemy, but he was experienced enough to know that the Globur would hit them hard - and soon.
He picked up the beacon from James, set to rally the company, and a snarling smile spread across his face. Outstanding, that is a good start. All this and combat pay, too. Time to go to work. “Blue Meanies! Assemble on the skipper! Move it, people!”
Sanderson’s suit moved in long strides, allowing him to keep close to the ground. He could make long leaps but hanging up in the air was an invitation to take a hit. That was a rookie mistake, and Sanderson was glad to see very few Marines trying to get to their rally beacon quicker by using their grav field to take those leaps. The beam weapons on the way in made it clear that the Globur had a lot of beam weapons ready to pick off anything that gained any height at all.
