Brink of Destruction, page 11
The assault shuttle landed with a soft surge of deceleration, the drives spooling down. Draven was already unstrapped and moving toward the ramp in the low gravity, his rifle in his hands, hardly daring to believe they’d landed.
No resistance. No ambush on the drop zone. No mines—at least not so far.
He reached the bottom of the ramp just as it settled into the dust, sending a puff of brownish orange into the void above the surface. Atavisa IV had had an atmosphere sometime in the past, though it couldn’t have ever been much of one. The chemical compounds that coated the entire surface were all that was left.
The assault shuttles had landed in formation, the drives dying as the dust began to settle. Draven activated the enhanced vision in his helmet, scanning the low hills in the distance as well as the nearby ground, looking for thermal or magnetic signatures that might indicate enemy presence.
The Mytunese had been ahead of the Zolarians every step of the way on Dina Chandra. It was hard to believe they hadn’t predicted this landing zone and prepared for it.
Yet only desolation and dust met his eyes and his hardsuit’s sensors. No sign of any Mytunese presence or traps.
More of the platoon bounded down the ramp behind him, spreading out as Sergeant First Class Somon barked at his squad leaders—not all of whom had actual combat experience—and got them spread out into a viable defensive perimeter.
Only as the dust continued to settle, leaving the shuttles standing quiescent against the pitch-black sky, lit by the nearby sun, did Draven finally start to accept that they might have actually gotten ahead of the Mytunese for once.
He stood and turned toward the ramp. “Get the crawlers down here and get a peeper up over that horizon.” Looking toward the same horizon, he kept scanning. “Maintain security. They might not have hit us yet, but this is just getting started.”
***
There were times when Draven felt vindicated when it turned out that he was right. This was not one of those times.
This time, he just felt tired.
There was a new set of problems when fighting on an airless moon that humanity’s ancestors on Earth would never have necessarily thought of. Long-range, fast strikes were limited to either ballistics or actual orbital bombardment. Over a body the size of Atavisa IV, low orbit could be very low indeed, allowing an attacker to appear over the horizon already in a position to strike, but still rarely as low and terrain-hugging as an aircraft could do in atmosphere.
The Mytunese, however, elected to stay on the surface. It was how they did it that caught many of the Zolarians by surprise.
There were doctrines for ground attack, most of them coming from common sense and experience. Those that were the fruit of bright ideas hatched in political corridors far from real battlefields—often by those with no common sense or experience—tended to get soldiers killed, and were justifiably discarded, if they had to be attempted at all.
Most of those doctrines called for fire and maneuver, careful use of cover, and a certain deliberateness, even in a high-speed offensive, such as that executed by tanks with full anti-drone and starfighter cover.
The Mytunese, however, had gambled and thrown the doctrine aside. And it almost worked.
Wheeled, unarmored buggies, bristling with weapons, came screaming out of the dusty badlands, moving far too quickly to properly support each other, but also so fast that the Zolarians weren’t really ready for them, even with security set—which it should have been around every assault shuttle.
Instead of a deliberate attack, the Mytunese plunged into the Zolarian landing zone, fire spitting from every weapon as they came.
It was suicidal—or it should have been.
“Get some fire on those vehicles!” Captain Breck was already aboard the command crawler, but he had control of every individual comm in the company with the command override. Even as his orders went out over the company network, the gunner opened fire from the command crawler.
Draven was already moving, ducking into Sergeant First Class Somon’s crawler, all but shouldering the gunner out of the way. The young woman wasn’t on the controls yet, so he took over.
Only to discover that the Mytunese hadn’t been quite as insane as he’d thought when they’d launched this attack.
The assault buggies were spitting fire, punching craters in assault shuttle armor, smashing bullets into vulnerable interior spaces as they shot through open ramps, and blasting hardsuited Zolarian soldiers off their feet, the dead or wounded—few of the latter in vacuum—drifting to the ground in slow motion in the low gravitation. But the Mytunese buggies were right in the middle of the formation, and return fire was sporadic and hesitant. None of the crawler gunners wanted to risk hitting their friends or their shuttles.
Draven swiveled the turret toward the nearest buggy, but found himself caught in the same dilemma. There were two assault shuttles just beyond it, and even if his marksmanship was perfect—difficult at best in unfamiliar gravity against a fast-moving target—the cannon’s high-velocity rounds would blow right through one of those unarmored buggies almost without slowing down.
He had a desperately small window, and as the buggy raced and bounced past the nearest assault shuttle, he took it.
The cannon thumped three times over his head. The first and last shell missed.
The second slammed into the buggy just behind the front wheels.
Fragments flew and part of the drivetrain came apart as the projectile nearly blew the vehicle in half. A body in a hardsuit went flying over the front of the buggy, flipping head over heels with a limpness that spoke of violent death.
More fire poured into the buggy as it crashed to the ground, the suspension coming apart even more with the impact. Draven’s shot had not only shown that it could be done, but it had slowed the Mytunese attack.
More weapons fire stitched across the damaged buggy, throwing more dying Mytunese into the reddish dust. Draven kept pivoting the turret, looking for the next target. The Mytunese were still fighting, though at least two of the buggies had slowed at the death of the first. Draven got the targeting reticle right on another, just before a burst of point defense fire from one of the assault shuttles tore into it from above, punching glowing holes in the structure and cutting one of the Mytunese soldiers in half. Blood sublimated into the void as the upper half of the body tumbled away from the wreckage.
Then the rest of the group of buggies was past and out of the Zolarian perimeter, quickly ducking around a low outcropping, their clouds of dust obscuring any targeting from ground level. Some of that dust flared with eye-searing green light as more of the assault shuttle point defenses fired at them regardless.
Draven panned the turret around, scanning the landing zone. The Mytunese buggies hadn’t been carrying much in the way of heavy weapons, but as the dust settled, it became clear that they’d done enough damage to throw the entire assault force into disarray.
Captain Breck wasn’t going to let this turn into a repeat of the attack on FOB Defender. “Able Company, I want everyone mounted on the crawlers and ready to move out. Casualties back to the assault shuttles, but everyone still on their feet needs to be ready to fight.”
For a moment, Draven thought back to the landing zone on Dina Chandra, and he felt a surge of anger, though he fought it down. He knew why Breck had made that call, the lightning assault that had blundered into a secondary Mytunese ambush and gotten dozens of Able Company soldiers killed. He also knew that, because he’d done it to try to save lives, not because of his own thirst for glory, Breck wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice.
“Ten minutes. Then I want a staggered spearhead formation right on those tracks.”
As Breck continued to give his instructions, effectively sending out a hasty operations order, a small light blinked in Draven’s visor. He brought up the message, which was an even hastier concept of operations that Breck had drawn up, knowing his first sergeant would object to what he thought was a half-baked plan.
It was sound. The captain recognized what had just happened; the Mytunese on this outpost were probably outnumbered and outgunned, and it was possible they’d launched this attack precisely as a spoiler to buy themselves some time. It was likely that a base this far out from the primary target in this system was little more than a bare-bones outpost, not a fortress expecting to defend against a spaceborne assault. They had probably been hoping that the starships that had come over the gas giant’s pole were going to be able to keep the Zolarians off, but now that there was a strike force on the ground, they needed time.
Captain Breck was determined not to give them that time.
Draven stayed where he was for the moment. With the captain taking command over the comms, and in a more direct way than most Zolarian officers, he had little to do but watch and supervise, though he didn’t give up the turret to the young gunner behind him. The last few years—which should be some of the last of his career—had put him in a position of becoming less and less comfortable with stepping aside and letting the younger soldiers take the risks. There wasn’t much risk involved in handling a remote turret, but it was a symptom of a deeper problem that he knew he was going to have to deal with.
He had lost enough young troopers that he dreaded losing more, and that had translated into not trusting them to do the job. He wanted to step in and take care of it himself, even though that should no longer be his role.
With the likes of Captain Thill, he hadn’t had much choice. He’d had to quietly make sure that things were being done right, because there was never enough time to handle things properly, teaching the younger soldiers and letting them proceed and learn. Thill’s refusal to share information and his ill-considered field decisions hadn’t allowed for it.
With Captain Breck, maybe he could finally step into the role that was supposed to be a first sergeant’s.
Under different circumstances, he might have started to hope that he could retire after the deployment to Herulean. But he knew that was hardly likely, as war with the Corvanites loomed ever closer.
He stayed on the gun as the crawlers made their way around the stricken Mytunese buggies, moving toward the edge of the perimeter where the attackers had disappeared into the dust.
He’d continue to lead from the front, at least for now.
CHAPTER 15
Early saw the counterattack coming almost at the same instant his own ship-killer ignited its drive. The Mytunese commander must have been expecting a follow-on strike once the Zolarian ships had gone into orbit over the gas giant, and when that strike had become visible, he’d kept a backup.
Unfortunately for the Mytunese, they simply didn’t have the numbers to be able to afford to split their fighter forces like that. Even as the newer fighters hit their drives as their thrusters pushed them around the starships, they were still outnumbered, outgunned, and at a delta-v disadvantage.
That didn’t make them any less dangerous to Early and his attacking squadron.
The Mytunese fighters poured energy weapon fire at the oncoming Zolarians as soon as they cleared the ships they’d been using as cover. The computer could barely keep up with the sweeping fire cones in his display, and his fingers danced over the controls to input a new, more violent evasive thruster program, even as he tried to return fire. The optical tracker’s stabilizers were hard-pressed to keep up as the thrusters threw the Raptor into a series of violent, unpredictable jukes, but he kept trying to target that one wedge-shaped fighter that was moving around the nose of the starship he’d targeted with his ship-killer.
A laser pulse hammered at his ship’s nose, a brilliant spot of light appearing on the armor, the ceramic spalling off as Early punched in the manual thrusters to spin the ship and get the compromised armor tile away from the enemy. He shot back, his first pulses going wide as both he and his antagonist maneuvered. His trajectory had shifted in the last few minutes of the main drive burn, putting him arrowing toward Atavisa IV’s horizon, where the moon’s gravity would slingshot him around and back toward the Zolarian task group’s orbit. That complicated the firing solutions even without the constant thruster firings that moved the two ships erratically on multiple axes.
He knew he’d gotten at least one solid hit, but the enemy fighter seemed to soak it up without taking any serious damage. Two more laser pulses blew more armor off his ship, disrupting his own evasive pattern, but that seemed to help more than hurt, as it made his movements even less predictable. With the computer in evasive mode, it wouldn’t try to correct for the extra movement, but just continued its own program.
Making sure it didn’t throw off his overall course too much was Early’s job.
He was trying to get another ImageRec missile lock, but at this range and with their conflicting trajectories, interception was going to be difficult. The missile packed a lot more punch than his lasers did, and stood a better chance of blotting that Mytunese fighter out of the sky.
It nagged at him that he really should be hanging back and directing the fight, but it was far too late for such doubts. He was in the furball, as the ancients used to say, and he had to concentrate on his own fight if he was going to survive.
A trio of laser pulses rocked his ship again. That Mytunese fighter had him dialed, despite the trajectory difference and the cloud of electronic warfare turning space to invisible static all around them. If he didn’t change something fast, one of those laser pulses was going to find a weak point and hit something vital. If that happened, the best case was that his power plant detonated and ended it quickly. The other alternative, that his ship would be disabled while still on course, cruising unpowered out into the dark, probably lost until he ran out of oxygen and suffocated, didn’t bear thinking about.
Suddenly disabling the evasive program, Early took full control from the computer, slewed his fighter around, and punched the main drive, accelerating straight at the Mytunese starfighter.
This was not the way he’d been trained as a pilot. The intricacies of thrust and orbital dynamics made it inadvisable—at best—for a pilot to try something like the maneuver he was doing. There were too many things that could go wrong. The pilot was supposed to work with the computer, making the major decisions while the computer adapted to the changing vectors far faster than any human could.
But he’d needed to do something, and as the drive slammed him deep into his acceleration couch, he flew with one hand and ran the targeting with the other. It was far from ideal, but he put the aiming reticle on the tiny wedge shape of the enemy starfighter and dumped all of his laser capacitors in succession, rotating through all six emitters as fast as the system would cycle.
His sudden burst of thrust had thrown the enemy fighter pilot off. The cascade of high-energy collimated light went wide, even as his own beams slammed into the other ship’s hull. He cut thrust again after a few seconds—he already knew he was going to have to readjust his trajectory to keep from slamming into the moon’s surface below—and reinitiated the evasive program as he pivoted his ship’s nose to better target the Mytunese fighter, while continuing to cycle through his lasers.
An overheat alarm lit up on one of them, one close to a hit he’d already taken. The weapons weren’t meant to cycle that fast.
He caught the enemy starfighter with a flurry of laser pulses in the next second, and the enemy hull flared with green light before something gave and the entire starfighter came apart, the drive—still lit—exploding spectacularly and leaving little more than a spray of incandescent fragments that Early was barely able to evade, even at distance.
Alarms were screaming and alerts were flashing in his displays, telling him that he was going to crash into Atavisa IV within three hours if he didn’t immediately take corrective action. Finally bringing the flight computer back into the loop, he tapped in the corrective burn, knowing that he was going to be vulnerable as soon as the drive kicked in.
Only then did he really have a chance to survey the surrounding space and take stock of the fight.
The Mytunese had been capable, but they simply hadn’t had the numbers. Of the survivors of his squadron, none had been destroyed, though several showed damage.
The ambushing Mytunese squadron had been completely destroyed. Most had been reduced to sprays of fragments as their active drives had lost containment. The few that had remained mostly intact were still tumbling, unpowered and obviously so badly damaged that they were no longer able to fight.
He let his computer take control, and the drive lit at the base of his spine, slamming him into the cushions again as the fighter tumbled to point its tail at the surface, correcting for his earlier powered dive and lifting his orbit higher to miss the limb of the reddish moon below.
Right at that moment, the ship-killers hit.
Not all of them had made it, intercepted by point defense lasers or sand canisters. But at the range they’d been launched, with the amount of acceleration each was capable of, it had made it much harder for the defensive systems to determine their courses and intercept them.
Three of them slammed into the flank of the target ship he had launched on. Eye-searing flashes nearly blotted the rounded shape out, and when the lights faded, the ship was coming apart, its semi-spherical forward hull peeling away as the forces unleased on the starship’s structure by the warheads and the impacts twisted it apart.
The last he saw of it, as more bright flashes heralded the deaths of still more Mytunese ships above Atavisa IV, it no longer even appeared to have ever been a starship, but merely a stretched-out, twisting mass of debris that would continue to orbit Atavisa for a very, very long time.
CHAPTER 16
Red dust billowed into the airless sky, disappearing against the rising face of Atavisa before drifting into the blackness of the sky above. The light reflecting off the gas giant’s clouds had blotted out the stars. There was only the red dust of the moon, the purplish clouds of the gas giant, and the blackness of the void beyond.
