Conquest of Earth (Stellar Conquest Series) (25 page)

“Roger, Reap. We’re being hit all up and down the line, but there are some gaps and we’re pushing in between to flank. Bull out.”

Just then Massimo’s heavy railgun came up. The gunner with his chest and shoulders shoved into its controls brought the gimbaled mechanism around and stroked the trigger, sending a stream of one-gram bullets into the wall breach at fifty thousand meters per second. Scourgelings exploded everywhere the projectiles impacted, and when the heavy orange beam of the semi-portable laser joined in the creatures stopped up the entrance with hundreds of bug corpses. Pressure relieved, the firing line stabilized, armored figures firing steady bursts that cut down all who approached while the Recluses zapped leakers with their turreted lasers.

Repeth was about to declare a win and tell Massimo to get ready to advance when the mass in the breach exploded, flinging bug parts and gore in all directions.

Nightmare creatures followed, two huge warbots like larger, uglier cousins of the Recluses, big as heavy tanks.
Correction
, Repeth thought.
Not warbots: cyborgs
. She could clearly see a Scourge of some kind embedded in the center of the thing, controlling its super-sized limbs with its own.

Scourge Soldiers with small arms crawled and hopped between the things’ legs, and big and small, they came through firing, not at all discomfited by zero G. The cyborgs launched plasma packets, fireballs that kept their shape until they struck and then exploded, blowing whatever they hit to bits even as the targets cooked. The Soldiers added in lasers and bullets, and several Marines fell.

“Take cover,” Repeth called to the greener troops who seemed to want to stand in the open and deliver fire. That was all well and good when rushed by Scourgelings, but now they faced enemies comparable to themselves, and the battle turned into a bloodbath.

“Krebs,” Repeth called, “put a breaching missile into that opening,
now
.”

“You got it, Reap,” he said. The sled pilot closed the clamshell front petals and kicked his thrusters, lining the craft up on the hole. Breaching missiles were unguided, aiming straight forward. A blast of rocket exhaust obscured the nose, then another, and the chamber shook as the heavy weapons, intended to blow holes in capital ship armor, detonated near the cyborgs. The explosions flattened everything around them and the enemy fire slackened.

At that moment Recluses skittered forward, lasers slicing the stunned Soldiers. Behind them, some of the better Marines stood up and advanced to support. “Massimo, finish off those cyborgs.” Repeth pointed, directing the crew-served laser and railgun to blast and burn what was left of the heavies.

As often happened in battle, stark screaming terror turned to eerie calm like shutting off a light. Slapping Massimo on the shoulder, Repeth leaped forward to dig for the wounded with the rest of the line doggies. So many bug parts lay strewn around and piled up that she had to use her HUD to find suit transponders. Those still alive she and others carried back to the sleds, where medics went to work on triage.

“Rostov,” Repeth commed, “Stinson’s KIA. You’re this company’s CO now. You need to reorganize, redistribute ammo, and get attacking.”

“Sure, Smaj.” The woman’s tone was casual but she immediately began blistering her subordinates with a stream of focused invective that pulled them rapidly out of their post-battle adrenaline fog and into
get-shit-done
mode. Within one minute everyone had replenished ammo and power modules by taking them from the dead or raiding sled stores, and the company, now seventy percent effective, reported ready.

“Don’t wait for me, L.T.,” Repeth said to Rostov. “I’m just a humble sergeant major, not your commanding officer. I’ll be right behind you with the heavies.”

With a quirk of her lips at Repeth, the lieutenant ordered her company to move, and up and down the line, one hundred forty Marines and a hundred Recluses pushed through the bloody hole and into the interior of the mothership core.

Nervously he drummed his fingers on the armrest of his seat – or he seemed to, as his body was actually cocooned tight within a crash couch aboard
Conquest
.

When the idea of remoting the StormCrows had first been proposed, he’d strenuously objected. Fighter pilots should be
inside
their birds, not just controlling them from a distance, but the admiral had overruled him. For this mission, the fighters would stay within a few thousand klicks of the two ships, so the control signal delay was negligible. This setup also meant no pilot casualties, and if the dreadnought was forced to withdraw without recovering the Crows…well, Vango liked living as much as the next man.

Refueling completed with minutes to spare, Vango brought his wing around behind
Conquest.
Unlike a carrier, the dreadnought was armored like a super-battleship; its fighters were auxiliaries, not its main offensive weapons. The big ship would intentionally be the focus of the first, relatively small enemy swarm, buying time for the Marines to do their jobs. Vango’s wing of ninety-six, each strapped with twelve add-on multi-missile pods, would hopefully finish the extermination.

Vango sent his VR viewpoint forward to take a look at the oncoming ships, the remnants of the group that had run into the Meme blowtorches. From half a million in number, now only about twenty thousand Scourges remained, and many of those were clearly damaged. Running the numbers and expected kill ratios, the fighter pilot smiled, satisfied. This one would be easy.

The other swarm, with its half-million ships…that made him nervous.

Conquest
opened up with its awesome primary particle beams, deliberately spread cones of accelerated neutrons that slaughtered swaths of enemy fighters and gunships, incinerating them like blowtorches ignite paper flowers. In response, the dwindling swarm spread out further.

Overall enemy count dropped below nineteen thousand before they entered secondary range. Now hundreds of
Conquest
’s standard dual-purpose lasers, powerful enough to damage capital ships but nimble enough to target small craft, began nailing Scourges one shot at a time. They didn’t always hit, as the swarming craft dodged frantically, but the closing range made losses inevitable.

In the swarm’s place humans might have pulled back or tried some tactic such as moving to put the mothership core between the swarm and its tormenter, but these must have been ordered to return directly to defend the core, so they flew straight into Conquest’s cone of death.

Eighteen thousand, then seventeen, then sixteen, and the swarm closed in on
Conquest
. As it reached minimum range, the dreadnought’s forward add-on point defense lasers woke up to a target-rich environment. Over five thousand of the weapons, small in ship terms but large enough to knock down a fighter, began flailing at their enemies. Not particularly accurate, still so many shots were bound to hit
something
and the count fell to twelve, then ten thousand.

Five seconds from Arrow missile range, Vango dialed up his time sense by a factor of twenty. The hundred subjective seconds seemed to drag, but they allowed him to mark targets for his weapons just as the other pilots did. When the closest enemies crossed into range, he said, “All wing elements, Fox One.” He waited a moment, then called, “Fox Two,” and continued reciting numbers up to twelve.

Each order launched a bundled pod of a dozen Arrows, putting one hundred forty-four weapons into play for each of the ninety-six fighters. Thus, over fourteen thousand seeking fighter-killers now rocketed toward the faltering swarm.

Vango said, “Follow them in, boys and girls. Remember, you’re not really in your Crows, so crank up your time senses, shut down your interlocks, and we’ll tally the kills up at the bar.” Heeding his own advice, he slotted his Crow in tight behind his own missile cluster and began taking laser shots at anything that no one had marked.

For this mission, the flight deck crews had hastily installed auxiliary power generators into the empty cockpits, so Vango enjoyed a fifty percent faster regeneration rate on his centerline weapon. It still seemed slow, but was an improvement. He felt a slight lag, a stickiness in all of his actions from time it took for signals to make it from the chips in his head to the Crow and back.

As the universe around him slowed to a crawl, Vango watched as the Arrow salvo met what was left of the swarm. About half the missiles perished to enemy point defense fire, but the other seven thousand hammered home, spearing an equal number of fighters and gunships. Vango’s threat count dropped below three thousand, and then he was among them.

Three quick laser blasts knocked down three enemy fighters, and then he was out of main power. His wing weapons continued to pump out shots, but they did not have the punch to do more than inflict scattered damage on the heavy chitin sheathing of the swarm’s ships…and Crows began to go offline by ones and twos, then by tens. Within thirty seconds of realtime, all ninety-six EarthFleet fighters had winked out.

The VR cocoon shut down the link, dumping Vango’s mind back into his body with a sickening lurch. “No!” was his first strangled cry before reason took over. If he’d had his way and flown his own fighter, he’d be dead by now. Sure, he’d have played it differently and not driven in among the Scourges, but still…it was one thing to run the numbers, quite another to face thirty to one odds.

Turns out the kill ratios don’t take suicidal behavior into account
, Vango thought as he blinked in the dim light of his coffin. Then the lid popped open and a pretty biomed tech looked down at him from above. “You good, sir?” she asked brightly, handing him a drug cocktail. “Drink this.”

“Ugh,” he said, sitting up and taking the cup, downing the stuff in one gulp. The disorientation and VR-craving subsided as the brain-balancer took hold. “Twenty-second century and we still can’t make medicine taste good,” he grumbled.

Climbing out, Vango handed the cup to the tech and left her standing there with a wistful look on her face. He wasn’t in the mood for pilot groupies right now, especially young ones freshly recruited into EarthFleet. Besides, there was a fight going on and he wasn’t in it, which irked him. He slapped a few backs of other glum pilots emerging from coffins on his way to the medical station. “Can you put up a COP feed on the big screen?” he asked the tech sitting there.

“Sure,” the man said, and soon ninety-six pilots stood grouped around the display.

“The point defense is finishing them off,” one of them said wistfully.

“Wasn’t so tough,” said another with false bravado.

Vango made a strangled sound and waved for attention. “Actually, we screwed the pooch, and it’s my fault,” he said. “My fault,” he repeated, so they understood he wasn’t taking them to task. “I shouldn’t have led you guys in right after the missile volley. Thirty to one odds are stupid. I’d never have done it if we were inside the birds, and I just wasted ten billion credits-worth of high-tech fighters like a rookie in a video game.”

“It wasn’t entirely stupid, sir,” came a voice from behind him. He turned to see Michelle Conquest in her fresh new lieutenant’s uniform. “I got a lot of good, close-range intel data in the twenty-seven seconds the Crows survived. We have more birds for you. Next time you’ll do better.”

“Next time.” Vango snorted, aware that his pilots had fallen silent and watched the interaction. Many of them were still uncomfortable with the avatar, ignoring the fact that the ship around them was as much the AI’s body as this android. “The only way we’ll be of any use next time is to stay at extreme range and snipe at them. We can’t face that many.”

“You’re right. You can’t.” Michelle’s mouth turned up.

“But
you
can?” Vango snorted in derision.

“Not at all, sir. It’s simple physics. No pilot, no AI in the world can fight at such a disadvantage.”

Vango put his palms to his face and scrubbed at his eyes. “You came all the way down here in person to tell me we suck?”

“No, sir.” Michelle shook her head and looked around at the rapt crowd of crestfallen pilots. “I came all the way down here in person to tell you to stop beating yourselves up. Good day, ladies and gentlemen.” With that, she turned and walked off.

Flogging his brain, he tried to focus only on the big picture and not the casualty count or the intermittent bursts of chatter that brought the details of the fight right into his suitcomm. On his HUD he could see the assault taking shape as an expanding bubble occupying about a quarter of the circumference of the mothership core, a thousand meters wide and five hundred deep. The front lines described a jagged sine wave, and as he stared at it, something nagged at his tactical mind.

Why was the resistance so evenly spaced, so regular? Easier, harder, easier, harder…

Putting aside the
why
, he asked himself what Moshe Dyan would have done. The general had always been a hero of his, achieving stunning victories for Israel in the twentieth century against high odds by use of bold attacks and lightning operations tempo.

The soft spots might be a trick, might be a trap to sucker him into overextending himself – but EarthFleet was in a time crunch and he had to gamble. If they didn’t grab what they came for and get out, they were all in deep shit anyway.

All right, Bull. Time to place a big bet.