Alarm of War, Book II: The Other Side of Fear (50 page)

Sergeant Maimon called from the corridor.  “Got a Duck bot coming!”

Rafael took a deep breath.  He suddenly flashed to when he and Emily were being chased by grogin in the forest high above his home village. 
Stay focused, Raf.
  He thumbed his comm.  “Jumper One Actual to Tower, ETA on reinforcements?”

“Soon, Jumper One,” Colonel Tamari replied instantly.  “We’re trying to get the shuttles carrying the Marvins past the two Duck cruisers.  Soon.”

Rafael grunted.  Somebody else’s problem.  “Tower, Jumper One.  Get the boffins here and we can take out the cruisers!  But hurry, we are under heavy attack.”

“Jumper One, Tower.  Krait is five minutes out.”

Thirty miles away from the Dominion battleship
Vengeance,
Senior Pilot Stephanie Mastromonaco scanned the sensor display.  Dozens of small ships buzzed around the enemy cruisers, which sent up a hell-storm of anti-missile fire.  Fire from the battleship had stopped abruptly, which told her that the troops who had transported over earlier must have taken the key targets.  No one was painting her ship or seemed aware she was there. 

All to the good.  On board her krait she had twenty-one passengers, including twenty very frightened Victorian tech specialists trained on how to fly and fight a Dominion battleship.  They were not soldiers.  Every time a stray explosion made the ship lurch, they screamed and looked frantically up at the ceiling.  She shook her head in exasperation.  Didn’t they understand that if a missile hit them, they’d never even know what happened?

No matter.  Her job was to get in close to the
Vengeance
and beam the techs to the right room.  She goosed her thrusters and dropped closer to the battleship. 
Big sucker,
she thought, then blanched when a targeting sensor beam painted her.  “Enemy sensors!” Gertrude warned.  “Evade!  Evade!”

Without thinking, Mastromonaco dropped a hundred feet and shot sideways a thousand feet.  A small anti-missile missile sped past, streaming a red exhaust trail, missing her by no more than two hundred feet.  Mastromonaco dropped another thousand feet and jinked hard to the right, then climbed and jinked to the left.  She never saw it, but Gertrude screamed, “Laser beam!  Laser beam to port.”

“Gertrude, tell me where it came from!” Mastromonaco snapped.

A red circle appeared on the visual image of the
Vengeance.
  “Magnify!” Mastromonaco ordered, taking the ship into a tight spiral towards the battleship.  Another anti-missile missile sped past her. 
Keep on missing,
she pleaded silently. 
Keep on missing!

The image flickered and zoomed in.  On the hull of the battleship, two gun blisters sat side-by-side, one identified as an anti-missile turret and the other as a laser turret.  Somebody down there was firing on independent control, showing a little initiative. “Great, just frigging great,” she muttered darkly. “Don’t you guys know I am supposed to be stealthy?”  She couldn’t stay out here exposed for very long without getting tagged by one of those guns.  She scanned the battleship’s hull, which was cluttered with gun blisters, sensor bubbles, environmental controls and God knew what else.  Then she saw something that made her grin.  Half way down the hull there was a pair of stubby wings sticking out, not for flying, but as a platform for more sensor nodes.  Underneath those wings her little krait would be invisible to the two gun turrets that were causing her so many problems.

“Hang on, boys and girls!” she whooped, then plunged down toward the hull like a rocket, violently jigging side to side.  Three minutes later she flipped the ship upside down, slid sideways using the little docking thrusters and then clamped onto the underside of the wing.  She let out a breath she didn’t know she was holding. 
Safe
.  For the moment, at least, they were safe.

“Thank you for flying on Krait Airlines,” she said sweetly to her passengers, most of whom were vomit stained and shaken to their core.  “Now please get the hell off my ship and go win the war.”

The transporter operator, green with nausea, located the beacon from the Long Range Recon leader, calibrated the jump and pushed the initiation button, then slumped back in his chair.  “God’s Balls, I feel terrible,” he complained, then threw up for the third time.

A scant moment later a snow storm erupted on the
Vengeance’s
Combat Command Center.  Twenty-one human shapes appeared in the swirling, blowing snow, then solidified into real people.  Rather sad looking, ragged people, Rafael Eitan thought skeptically.  A few of the techs sagged to the floor, some dry heaving helplessly.  The rest just stood there looking dumb-founded.

Except for one.  “All right, people,” Emily Tuttle said cheerfully.  “We had a fun ride in, but now we have work to do!”

Rafael walked to her and saluted, then smiled.  “I’m glad to see you, Commander,” he said, trying hard to keep it formal and not entirely succeeding.  “But what we really need are some reinforcements.”

“About a minute behind me, Raf,” she said, smiling back at him.  Just for a moment her mind darted back to their night together on Atlas, then a tech standing near her dry heaved and collapsed to the floor, moaning.  So much for romance. 

“Raf, these are all tech boffins with no combat experience.  They just came into a hot landing and had their first transporter experience.  As you can see, they’re nauseous and dehydrated.  Do you have some water or even sweet tea we can get into them?”

Sweet tea?  Here?  Eitan started to look around, but Sergeant Maimon was at his elbow.  “I’ll take care of it, sir,” the Sergeant said briskly.  He glanced at Emily.  Whoever this Vickie Commander was, it was pretty obvious the Captain was rather smitten with her.  Sergeant Maimon, therefore, would make sure that the Captain looked like the most competent, efficient captain in the long and storied history of the Refuge Long Range Reconnaissance Force. 

That’s what sergeants do, or at least that is what sergeants do if they like their captain.

What was left of Ahmed Hameed’s Third Company staggered up to Deck Thirteen.  Behind them four armored combat bots slowly negotiated the stairs.  The soldiers of Third Company reached the top of the stairs and found themselves in a very long, open passageway lined with what looked like storage tanks on the left and right.  On either side, tucked in just below the ceiling, ran a long catwalk.  From the far end of the passageway, a white light blinked on and off, stopped, then repeated.  A voice spoke into his helmet speaker:  “Got you covered, Captain,” the voice said laconically.  “But it would be best if you moved ass.  Our Wasp says those damn bots are almost to the top of the stairs.”

Captain Hameed took a deep, shuddering breath.  “We’ve got friendly snipers up in the catwalks,” he shouted to his troops.  “Move out fast to the far end.  Nobody gets left behind!  Drop gear except for guns and ammo.  Go!” 

But they were not capable of speed.  Those who were not wounded were too tired.  Those who were not too tired helped the wounded.  They moved at a lurching, staggering shuffle, nervously looking over their shoulders at the bastard bots from hell that had already killed half their Company and just kept coming.  They kept coming with energy beams, projectile weapons and twice, when the bots had closed the distance enough, with flame throwers that had all but shattered the morale of the Third Company and sent men screaming in panic.

The first bot made it to the top of the stairs and turned to pursue them.  Seeing its prey, it opened fire with a laser beam, but then rocked backwards as a plasma pulse scorched its front sensors.  Its gyros compensated and the bot stabilized, then a second plasma bolt struck it, then a third.  As programmed, it fired all of its weapons, hoping to kill or at least suppress its unseen enemy.

Four more plasma beams struck its front panel in quick succession, finally burning through the armor and frying its internal circuitry. The bot stopped firing and just stood there, inert.

“Tough bastard,” Corporal Nur murmured, a little awed that it took seven plasma bolts to stop the damn thing.

“Not tough enough,” Private Amali grinned.  Around her the other snipers chuckled.   Amali glanced at her energy pack; still at ninety percent.  Smiling contentedly, she put the scope back up to her eye and settled into the simple pleasure of killing things at a distance.

“Here comes the next one!” The snipers went back to work.

* * * *

The first Dominion attack to take back the Command Center was rushed and the DID officer didn’t really have enough troops to pull it off.  He augmented his attack with two combat bots, using them as shock troops.  The bots were each seven feet tall, painted black with demonic scarlet ‘faces’ that leered at their prey, and bristled with weapons.  Hoping to shatter the resolve of the Vicky troops in the Command Center, the DID officer sent one of the bots forward to scout out the defenses and demolish them.

The combat bot moved silently, hovering four inches above the deck on an electro- magnetic cushion.  When it came in contact with the enemy it would start playing the discordant, frantic movement of ‘The Rite of Spring’ by Igor Stravinsky.  This had been selected by the Psy Ops researchers as the sound most apt to cause a human being to flinch and run.  It had certainly had that effect on audiences when The Rite of Spring first premiered on Old Earth.

The bot moved boldly down the corridor, passing side corridors and rooms with little more than a quick scan by its thermal sensors.  Up ahead five soft balls suddenly bounced around the corner, fixed on the bot and accelerated towards it.  The bot blasted them with shotgun pellets and needler weapons and the soft balls exploded harmlessly.  The bot paused, concentrating most of its sensors on the corridor in front of it.

Twenty feet behind it, Sergeant Maimon quietly opened a door and glanced outside.  Seeing no infantry support for the bot, he lobbed a plasma grenade underhanded and stepped back into the room.  The bot, sensing the motion, whirled about, opening fire with needlers, shotguns and even a laser that slashed left to right at knee height.

None of which affected the plasma grenade overly much. 

It blew up two feet away from the bot, encapsulating it with searing heat and slag.  It disrupted the bot’s electro-magnetic propulsion and the bot dropped to the floor, still upright, but immobile.  The blast also melted most of the bot’s sensors, leaving it blind, and melted its armor plate, closing or warping most of its firing tubes.  The bot still had energy, but it couldn’t move, see or fire any of its weapon systems.

Annoyed but undaunted, the DID officer sent in the second bot, this time heavily supported by some seventy soldiers.  They snaked down the main corridor and two side corridors, hoping to get close enough to the heavy blast doors at the Command Center to plant cutting charges on it.  Inside the Command Center, Eitan decided to leave the blast doors closed, but sent troops out the back and flanked the Ducks to harass them with sniper attacks and grenades.  This worked for about thirty minutes, until the DID officer stopped to consider just where these harassing attacks were coming from.  Some dogged reconnaissance revealed that the Vickies had blasted through the rear of the Command Center, so the DID officer moved the focus of his attack.  He left a light covering force on the blast doors and sent the rest around to the rear to press the attack there.

About this time Captain Hameed’s Company reached the Combat Command Center.  Although they were still short on ammo, his men’s morale had gotten a boost from seeing the Duck bots shot to pieces by the snipers.  Now Third Company wanted payback.  When they came around the bend and saw only six men covering the blast doors to the Command Center, they didn’t hesitate.  There was no fancy maneuvering, no clever plan; they just opened up with everything they had and mowed down the unfortunate Dominions.  In three seconds it was over.  Hameed’s soldiers looked at the bloody carnage they had wrought, and then nodded in satisfaction and smiled at one another.  It felt pretty good to be on the giving end for a change.

A speaker on the blast doors crackled to life.  “Ahmed, this is Raf. Nice job.  We are opening the doors.  Please come inside fast; our wasps tell us more Ducks are on the way.”

* * * *

Emily’s crew of specialists wandered around the Combat Command Center, cups of tea held in shaky hands, trying to find familiar equipment.  They had been trained on the equipment that Victorian spies had reported was on the bridge and Combat Command Center of Dominion battleships, but of course things were never quite the same in real life, and this was no exception.  One by one or two by two, they gradually found what they were looking for and sat down to get better acquainted with the controls.

Emily tried not to hover, but as the sounds of fighting outside intensified, she leaned over to the person at the weapons station.  “Fiona, how long before you can track a target and shoot?” 

Fiona Campbell pursed her lips in thought.  “Oh, Mum, I should think five or ten minutes, no more.  It is just like the simulators, isn’t it?”

“As fast as you can, Fiona,” Emily said.  From across the room, Rafael Eitan beckoned to her.   “What have you got, Raf?”

“Four shuttles just landed in one of the shuttle bays.”  He grinned at her.  “They’ve got ten Marvins and their controllers and they’re starting a sweep through the ship.  Three Marvins are coming here, two to Engineering and two to the bridge.”