To Challenge Heaven, page 10
“For the record, now that their navy’s out of the way, I’d like nothing more than to be able to convince them to roll over with a few demonstration K-strikes on empty planetary real estate somewhere out in the middle of Shongaru’s Bumfuckistan. Sort of a way of saying ‘Look, we could do a Thikair on you if we really wanted to. Don’t make us do it for real.’ But it looks like we can’t do it that way, after all.”
He shrugged.
“What the brainiacs are telling us now is that our Squids have clearly proven they can kick the Puppy Squids’ asses, but that’s not enough. They actually have to ‘feel the pain’—they need to see us breaking things and killing people; their soldiers, not their civilians, if we can help it—before they can honorably acknowledge defeat. So unless we want Admiral Mallard to unlimber those K-strikes and fire for effect, we—specifically, you, me, and the rest of our people—still need to face the Puppy grunts directly, what you might call mano a mano, and prove to both of us that they couldn’t keep us from killing their civilians in job lots if that’s what we choose to do. If we don’t show them that, as conclusively as possible, then they haven’t made us prove that we could. And until they make us prove that, they can’t surrender.”
He shook his head, his eyes grim.
“That means that to get them to surrender, we have to break into their habitat, fight our way through their infantry, and endanger the civilians behind them. All right, I accept that. But I don’t want to actually hurt any more of them than we can avoid, and you’re right, Alexandre. In an operation like this, especially given how we’re amending your ops plan, some of them are going to get hurt. Only certifiable idiots—not all of them civilians, unfortunately—would think we could execute this sort of ‘surgical’ strike and guarantee no civilian bystanders get caught in the gears. We all know that. But we need to hold those civilian casualties to an absolute minimum while demonstrating that we could kill all of them if we really wanted to. If that was what our mission orders called for.
“That’s what General Cantrell, Brigadier Ascaso, and I are looking for here,” he continued. “We’ve got a day or two to tweak our existing ops plan, and while you do that, remember Can Opener is a test case. We’re still trying to get a really solid grip on the Puppies’ psychology on this point. We hope we’ve got it now; we can’t be sure we do till we test it, and we need to be positive we understand it before we go after the planets. The habitats offer us our best laboratory for that, so First Brigade will conduct the aforesaid ‘surgical strike.’” He looked at Colonel Dvorak, whose battalion had been tasked to lead the attack. “You’ll whip out your chainsaws and break through their defenses with an old-school ‘shock and awe’ attack designed to penetrate to the habitat rings where their civilians are sheltering. While executing this attack, I expect you to maximize the shock factor you apply to the defenders—we want to scare the shit out of them when they realize what we could do to their civilians—but at the same time, you have to pull up short of actually inflicting any humanly avoidable civilian casualties. No one expects that to be easy, but you’re Space Marines—my Space Marines—which means I know you can do it, anyway.” He cocked his head. “Is that clear?”
“Well, Colonel?” It was Ascaso’s turn to look at Dvorak. “Your people are carrying the spear on this, so do you want to take that one?”
“Aye, aye, Ma’am.” Dvorak stood and faced Wilson.
“I believe the correct response is crystal clear, Sir,” he said, then turned to the audience.
“You heard the General, people,” he said. “We will overwhelm the Puppy defenders with a massive offensive strike that penetrates to the civilian enclave but does not actually breach it and kill anyone inside it. We will hammer them on the way through, so there’s no question in their minds about our capabilities. No question that they’ve ‘made’ us prove we can kill them anytime we want and they can surrender honorably under their Jukaris code.” He gazed penetratingly at his company commanders and senior enlisted. “That means we need your people to be as violent as possible, but under control at all times, so that when you get to the civilians, you can turn it off again.”
Dvorak looked back to his uncle. “Does that sound about right, Sir?”
“It does,” Wilson replied, and Dvorak nodded and sat back down.
“You heard the Colonel,” Ascaso said with a crooked smile. “We’ll spend the next couple of hours tearing the existing plan apart, looking for ways to punch up those aspects. I want the General’s ‘tweaks’ integrated by the end of the day. Tomorrow, we’ll run through it in the simulators. I don’t expect we’ll need to make any enormous changes. It’s going to be more a matter of emphasis than anything else, I suspect, but let’s make sure of that. And then let’s make sure everyone in your units understands the revised plan and the rules of engagement we’ll be operating under. Dismissed!”
HABITAT ONE,
SHONGARU PLANETARY ORBIT,
SHONG SYSTEM,
241.5 LY FROM EARTH,
APRIL 30, YEAR 41 TE.
“The brief really doesn’t prepare you for the actuality of the thing,” Major Robert Read said from his station at the back of the Starfire assault shuttle’s cockpit. “I mean, sure, the Relentless is bigger, but as a target to assault … it makes me glad I’m not a Space Marine.”
“You should see it out the front canopy,” the lead pilot, Colonel Jeff Payton, replied. “It looks even bigger in real life.”
Read switched to the view from one of the drones. The station was immense. A spindle and ring construction, it had a fifteen-kilometer-long central “spindle” portion with twelve spars, each about three hundred meters in diameter, that extended out to the two habitat rings. The inner edges of those rings were five and a half kilometers and seven kilometers, respectively, from the spindle. Each of them was half a kilometer across, and the pressurized spars extended through them, coupling them together so they rotated at the same rate. The rings completed about a third of a revolution a minute; the Puppies in the outermost ring experienced a homeworld-normal 1.0 g, while those in the inner ring experienced only about 0.79 g.
The spindle itself—aside from the band to which the spars mounted—didn’t rotate. It was also three kilometers in diameter and held all the habitat’s zero-g and microgravity industrial processes. The power generation and repair shops for the rest of the habitat were also located there, but recycling, hydroponics, and water purification were dispersed throughout the habitat rings. No one wanted the critical life systems concentrated in one spot where a single accident could have unfortunate consequences.
The spindle also held the habitat’s hangar/shuttle bays, one of which was the Starfires’ target. Permanently depressurized, the bays were fitted with “boarding tubes” that mated the incoming transports to the station’s entrance galleries, the same way human airports of the previous century had used motorized walkways that extended to the aircraft once they’d parked, although these boarding tubes could be pressurized. The station also had larger, pressurizeable hangars designed to allow “shirtsleeve” maintenance work, but the assault hadn’t targeted them, since explosively decompressing them would have caused unnecessary damage and wastage of equipment.
“Of course,” the copilot, Major Stan Jacobsen, noted, “if you look out the side windows, we have an awful lot of combat power headed toward it. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this many Starhawks in formation before.”
“Or this many Starfires, for that matter,” Payton added.
Read nodded to himself. Each of the Expeditionary Force’s five infantry brigades had been permanently assigned five of the massive assault craft—three to carry each of its three infantry battalions into combat, one to transport its attached drone battalion, and a spare. Because even the PAF’s equipment still breaks sometimes, especially once the troops get hold of it, he thought. Of course, our stuff doesn’t break very often, anymore, but it does happen. And even if it doesn’t, there’s always enemy action to worry about.…
This was the closest he’d ever seen to having all twenty-five of Brigadier Ascaso’s First Brigade’s birds deployed at the same time, though. Twenty-two of the craft were currently in space: fifteen loaded with infantry, five loaded with the specialized drones designed for combat inside spacecraft and habitats, plus two spares. According to plans, only two of 1st Brigades’ battalions would be committed to the initial attack; the others were there for support, to reinforce if they turned out to be needed, and to execute what General Wilson had dubbed Operation Woodpecker if and when it was needed. If it turned out Woodpecker wasn’t needed to support 1st and 2nd Battalion, the other battalions could be released for additional preplanned attacks, if they were required.
At the moment, all of them held station, well beyond the habitat’s limited defensive envelope, waiting for orders from Hawk One, the Oracle-class Starlander conversion configured to serve the old AWACS function for the Planetary Union Armed Forces.
“All units, Hawk One.” Major Branson Gillespie’s “voice” came over the circuit, transmitted direct to the flight crews’ minds with the preposterous clarity possible only with neural links. “We are go for Can Opener. All Hawks, execute Iron Hand.”
“Iron Hand Leader copies.”
The response came back with the same crystalline clarity and the massed Starhawks headed toward the target, opening a gap between them and the assault force.
Read watched the link as the fighters neared the massive habitat. Although no one really expected the Puppies to send their assault shuttles out to play with the Terrans—especially after the pasting the defensive platforms had taken from Admiral Mallard’s attack—that hadn’t stopped the fighter pilots from hoping they would.
But the Starhawks—to their pilots’ presumed annoyance—made it almost the entire way to the habitat without encountering a single Puppy shuttle. Which wasn’t to say there was no resistance, however. Unlike the system defense platforms, Habitat One mounted no offensive weapons, but it did have a variety of short-range “sprint mode” point-defense missiles, autocannon, and lasers to protect it from meteorites, space debris, and any stray ordnance that made it past the defense platforms.
That was why Starhawks—like Starfires—carried drones, though. They were waiting, and as the facility’s defensive stations illuminated the incoming fighters, the drones detected the emitters, localized them, and then destroyed them—and the weapons they controlled—with a combination of railgun, laser, and missile fire. The defensive systems had never really been hardened against attack, since they were purely secondary “insurance” for the real defenses aboard the defense platforms, and the entire “Iron Hand” flak suppression mission took barely ten minutes from the moment the first system spun up. Then, their mission complete, the Starhawks retreated to a safe distance to provide overwatch for the incoming Starfires.
“Hawk One, Iron Hand,” the strike leader announced. “The road is clear.”
“Hawk One copies,” Gillespie acknowledged. “Break. Can Opener One, you are cleared to begin your run.”
“Can Opener One copies, clear to begin our run,” Payton replied, then looked over his shoulder with a tight grin. “Well, Rob, looks like it’s our turn,” he said. “You ready?”
Ready? I haven’t been this scared since my first flight in the simulator doing emergency procedures training, Read thought.
One of the “goods” of being the shuttlewing commander’s favorite weapons system operator was getting to go cool places with him. One of the “bads” was that it also meant being the lead Starfire in any assault, as Payton was very much a “lead from the front” kind of officer.
“Uh, yes, Sir,” he said. Then he added, his voice a little stronger, “I’m all set; let’s do it!”
“Here we go then,” Payton said, and keyed his link to the Oracle. “Can Opener One is rolling,” he announced, and pushed the throttles forward to their maximum.
“Hang on,” he said over the intercom to the troops in the back. “We’re making our run.”
The lead Starfires surged forward, and Read steered one of his drones to take a peek at the target hangar bay as the last Starhawk moved out of the way. Not surprisingly, it was empty; they’d already known the station had sent the majority of its shuttles to the planet to keep them out of the inevitable human assault’s path. The ones that remained—due to either maintenance issues or simply running out of time—had been pulled to the back of the hangar to give the defense teams clear fields of fire.
One of the Puppies manning a crew-served weapon pointed at the drone, and his team tried to take it under fire, but Read jerked it out of the way and then locked it to the skin of the station out of the defenders’ sights for the moment. He’d gotten what he needed: high-quality imagery of the interior of the hangar bay.
“Looks like four—no, make that six—defensive stations inside the back of the hangar bay,” he said, eyes closed as he digested sensor data over his neural link and his computers updated the wire diagram of the bay with threat icons. “I make that as four infantry autocannon and two heavy machine guns. Two of the cannon are mounted on what would be the ‘ceiling’ as we approach.”
The concepts of floor and ceiling were tactically meaningless in micro gravity, but they still offered a useful means of orientation.
“I don’t think the machine guns can crack our armor,” Payton said. “The autocannon, though.…”
“Yeah, they have to go,” Read agreed. “I’ll get them first.” He sent the targeting commands. “Drones are out, positioned, and targeted. Ready, sir!”
Read glanced at the link again. Any sense of apprehension was gone. He was too busy to be scared as the assault shuttles surged toward their target. They continued to maintain good positioning on the approach, although twelve of the shuttles would halt just outside the inner zone, waiting to see how 1st and 2nd Battalions’ attacks went. His attention rotated back to his mental display of his target—the closest hangar, which was slowly coming into view as they rounded the spindle. The computer models assured him he had it timed right and would get there exactly on schedule.
“Coming up on braking maneuver … now!” Payton called.
“Beginning the assault,” Read replied, even as Starfires flipped end-over-end, facing away from their destination, and decelerated at almost two hundred gravities. A perceived three gravities got through even human-tweaked inertial compensator fields, and Read grunted as it hit. But his concentration, totally focused through his neural link on controlling the drones, never wavered.
He sent the attack signal, and three of his prepositioned drones lifted off the skin of the facility and threw themselves into the hangar bay.
“Firing!”
The first two drones launched missiles at the autocannon hanging from the “ceiling” while the third dashed in to assault the concentration of defenders on the “floor.” It launched one of its missiles then the picture from it went blank as one of the autocannon pounded it to scrap. The other two drones died almost as quickly, but both of them got their second missiles launched before they were destroyed.
He got his first direct look into the hangar as Payton flipped the Starfire once more and hit the bow thrusters hard to kill the last of their velocity and spin them toward the entrance. The assault shuttle’s chin railgun was already tracking to starboard as they actually entered the hangar bay, and the shuttle quivered as Read triggered a five-round burst of 20mm high-explosive rounds. His flight computers automatically used the Starfire’s normal-space drive to compensate for the cannon’s recoil, and his fire pulped the Puppies manning the last machine gun.
Their pieces floated away from the remains of their weapon, and he swept the targeting scope around all five sides of the hangar bay.
“Clear!” he announced. “Move ’em out!”
“Yes, Sir!” Payton said and called to the troops in the back, “Ten seconds! Ramp’s in motion!”
Pink! Pink! Pink! Pink!
What sounded like hail on a tin roof echoed through the Starfire as it touched down, and Payton locked the struts to the deck of the hangar bay.
“All ashore who’s going ashore,” he called. “Watch out for several shooters with small arms scattered throughout the bay.”
There wasn’t much Read could do with the Starfire attached to the deck, but he swung the craft’s railgun back and forth, looking for targets as the troops in the back—the battalion’s infantry weapons company—engaged their boots’ magnetic soles and pounded down the ramp in their M4 “Bangalore” suits. Configured for close assault—typically, breaching operations like this one—the Bangalores’ armor was much heavier and more difficult to penetrate than a standard Heinlein. They were equipped with heavier weapons, as well, which, combined with the Bangalore’s greater weight and more robust built-in jets, drove up the suit’s power requirements. That resulted in a significantly shorter time between power cell replacements—less than eight hours in combat like that in which they were engaged—but for all intents and purposes, Bangalores were the next best thing to vampires for invulnerability.
Motion caught Read’s eye as a door opened and a space-suited Puppy popped out of it with a shoulder-fired rocket launcher. Read swung the gun around, already firing, and walked it across the defender. When he released the trigger, he winced; there was nothing left but mist.
“Empty!” Jacobsen called. “Ramp’s coming up!”
“We’re out of here,” Payton said. The Starfire lifted and surged backward toward the hangar bay exit on a heavy burst from the bow thrusters.
Below them, a rocket zipped out from one of the passageways to slam into one of the advancing M4s. The rocket hit the trooper in the chest and blew him backward to bounce off the wall. Read shook his head, sure that he’d just seen the first casualty of the assault, but then the suit’s jets came on. The trooper stabilized, latched his boots back onto the deck, and fired his 25mm Naja railgun. The rocketeer was torn to shreds.
