Desolator: Book 2 (Stellar Conquest) (25 page)

“Roger sir. Oh, by the way, the Ryss call this ship
Desolator
. Butler out.”

On the screen Absen watched the long-range optical feed of the bogey –
Desolator
– spinning slowly along its main axis, the clear white glow of its fusion engine at the tail. Abruptly that light expanded in brightness, then winked out.

“Can we get more magnification?” Absen asked, and the image jumped to fill the screen. “I don’t see any sleds maneuvering around it. Why did the drive turn off?”

“Not known, Admiral,” the general rumbled. “No sleds detected.”

“Get me the channel again. Butler,” he said when he had it, “the drive is out. Do you know why?”

“No, sir,” Butler’s voice came. “We felt a shock, though, a big one. Maybe the Marines or the Ryss destroyed the drive.”

“Well no matter how it happened, that bought us time.” Absen turned to Khrom. “How long until planetfall, now that there is no acceleration?”

“Two hours twenty minutes,” he replied.

“You hear that?” Absen’s voice rose in intensity, and he enunciated clearly. “Tell Bull and Johnstone they have exactly two hours until you launch those sleds into space to evacuate. After that,
Desolator
will be nuked, rammed, or beamed until there’s nothing left. Got it? Be clear to them, Butler; I’m not going to sacrifice ten million people on the planet to save a few hundred troops and Ryss. You
have
to get them out on time.”

“Got it, sir, five by five. My boys will take off on time, with or without them.”

“Good man.”
Then why does it feel so bad?
Absen asked himself, but he’d made harder choices three years ago when they’d take the system. Still, it never got any easier. Some ancient warrior, he couldn’t remember who, had said it best: “To command, you must love. To command
well
, you must be able to kill what you love.”

To his left and right, Marines used the wash of green fire as cover, bobbing up to hastily launch anti-armor rockets at the automated guns pinning them down. They dropped back out of the line of fire, just in time for another return burst to cut the air above them.

“Dammit, who has a mine?” Bull yelled, but no one answered that particular question. He hadn’t really expected them to; the last explosive charge had been used up half an hour ago, and thirty minutes was forever in a battle. “Where’s that resupply?” He had sent four men back to the scenes of their earlier battles to scavenge dead Marines’ back-racks, but he suspected whatever they had recovered had been used up right away.

On his HUD he could see his forces surrounding and tightening the noose on Desolator’s vault from all sides, but the advance had stalled as they ran low on rockets and completely out of ten-kilo command-detonated mines.

Below and behind him the level had been cleared, and he had sent his remaining three semi-portable heavy lasers beneath the armored fortress that held the insane AI. They should begin burning their way in from the bottom any time now. It went against all his instincts, but perhaps he should just have everyone hold right here and let those weapons do their work.

Bull was about to give that order when explosions from below rocked him off the ramp. He fell fifteen feet and struck the deck below without much impact, since the gravplates had been shut off, leaving only the half-G from ship spin. Scrambling into the cover of the ramp itself, he saw a line of those damned shiny mini-tanks racing up the main corridor, firing as they came.

One of his semi-portables had been destroyed in the first volley, and another got blown up with its crew right in front of him, as the third team struggled to drag their weapon to face the threat. Its orange-red beam lanced out before it was fully aimed, slashing into a bulkhead, then cutting across the face of the shiny war drones.

The beam refracted and scintillated off the reflective surfaces, but the Marine gunner got the muzzle depressed enough to cut the wheels out from under two of the enemy drones. This was their most vulnerable spot to the heavy lasers, as the solid discs were not reflective and quickly fell apart under the coherent light beams. Since the enemy drones’ guns were not in turrets, but merely had limited traverse and elevation, a mobility kill often eliminated the danger of the gun as well.

Those guns roared, peppering the last crew with explosions, and the gunner sagged to the ground, falling out of the seat. Others in the crew returned fire with their PRGs, but the little railguns were no match for the drones’ armor.

Bull charged out of cover and triggered his Hippo-built plasma rifle on full continuous fire, exhausting its power in one burst, until recharge. The green glowing fog, hotter than the surface of the sun, melted more wheels to slag and heated enemy metal to a dull glow, but this did little to stop the mini-tanks.

It did give him time to hop into the last semi-portable’s seat. Bull aimed and fired with vicious glee.

With their armor hot and distorted, the surfaces of the war drones were no longer reflective, and this time the powerful laser beam sliced through the remaining four mini-tanks with loud hissing and popping sounds, until in turn each one’s ammo cooked off and blew it apart from the inside.

“Get the wounded to the infirmary,” Bull ordered, and his Marines bounded to their feet, carrying those too injured to fight back to the room they had set up for recovery. Hopefully their Eden Plague and nanites would get them back on their feet after some treatment and nutrition.

“Now get this semi aimed up at the ceiling, over there.” Bull pointed. “We have to cut through the floor as fast as we can. You, heavy crew, see if you can get one of the other lasers back in operation.” Bull didn’t think there was much chance of that, but it didn’t hurt to try. He switched channels. “Johnstone, come in.”

“Here, Bull.”

“We just got hit on the lower level by several mini-tanks. Sneaked up on us out of nowhere. I need you to take a look at the HUD and put a picket ring around us with your war-cars, so that we don’t get jumped again.”
My fault
, Bull thought.
Can’t expect even the best CyberComm officer to think tactically.

“Will do. How’s that cut-through coming?”

“We just lost two heavy lasers. It’s going to be slow.”

Bull’s suitcomm crackled, and Butler’s voice cut in. “Major, I just talked to the admiral. This ship is headed for a hard landing on the planet. Everyone has to be in the sleds for extraction exactly one hour fifty-eight from now,
mark
. No exceptions. If you miss the ride, you get nuked along with
Desolator
.”

“How did we –” He was going to ask how they got all the way back to Afrana in just a few hours, but he had bigger things to worry about now. “Understood. We’ll still try to complete our mission.”

Butler went on, “Major, this ship just lost its fusion drive engine. Even if you get in and kill the AI, the ship goes down. Why bother? Why not use the time to evacuate all the civilians? The admiral’s on his way in some Hippo ships; he’ll pick us up. We just need to get off this boat before it sinks.”

“Gentlemen,” Rick broke in, “sorry to disappoint you. I’ve been talking with Trissk. He believes
Desolator
is recharging its special drive. If it gets that working, there’s no telling what it will do, fusion engine or no fusion engine.”

Butler replied, “All the more reason to get the hell out. Who cares if it leaves the star system in its current condition? It’s a wreck.”

“Because we need that drive,” Bull snarled. “And we need the tech on this ship so when the Meme show up in force, we can beat the living shit out of them, then go wipe them out. We have to get control of this ship and save it. If it splashes down, or runs away, all of these dead Marines will have been for nothing!”

“Not nothing,” Rick reminded them mildly. “We will have saved the Ryss, and they can take data storage modules with them. We can replicate their technology.”

“Not enough,” Bull said grudgingly, “but that’s a good backup plan. Tell the Ryss to send their women and wounded to the sleds, and all their data. You take charge of that, Johnstone, and get our wounded there too. Don’t argue; this is a tactical decision. Butler, you hearing me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Butler, you leave on time, just like the admiral said. My Marines will stay as long as we can, and if we can’t get control of the ship, you take off, right on time. Right on time, you got me, Butler?”

“I got you, sir,” Butler replied stiffly. “I’ll do my duty; now with all due respect, sir, get back to doing yours.” With that, the pilot’s comm went dead.

Bull snorted, then heard Johnstone cut in on a private channel. “Bull, I have to stay here, both to translate, and because I’m the best man to assess what is going on with this AI when we get in. Detail some of your officers to take charge of the evacuation.”

“Fine,” Bull said. “Just tell your alien buddies to cooperate. Bryson, Curtin, get all wounded back to the sleds. They will be evacking in one hour fifty-five minutes. Send some squads to escort the Ryss there too, and get them loaded. Be nice to them, no matter what. I’m now in personal charge of the main effort here. Ben Tauros out.” He cut the transmission off before they could protest.

He turned to look at the laser boring its way into the overhead. The angle wasn’t ideal, so he had the men move the projector up more nearly under the hole they were cutting, and helped them elevate the muzzle by hand. Four Marines held the whole thing in place while the gunner, tilted far back in the chair, fired at the ceiling.

Fifteen minutes passed, then thirty, as the vault armor smoked and dripped molten metal. It looked like they were almost through the two-meter thickness, but it was difficult to be sure.

Checking his HUD and listening to the chatter with half an ear, Bull could see that Captains Bryson and Curtin were doing as he ordered; almost one third of his surviving Marines were aboard the sleds, and the countdown clock showed an hour and five minutes. Time slipped away.

Then all hell broke loose.

From air vents, niches and nooks came a sudden swarm of drones and robots, most with nothing more than blades and metal clubs. A few had welding torches, cutting lasers, or even Ryss masers in their manipulator arms. All seemed to have murder on their mechanical minds.

“Keep cutting!” Bull yelled as he swept the mob of machines with green plasma. The heavy laser crew around him, minus the gunner, fired their PRGs, hypervelocity bullets slashing through the unarmored drones. “They’re coming out of the woodwork!”

It was over in just seconds, leaving a steaming, smoking junkyard, while above him on the next level he could hear the sounds of heavy combat…and it was getting closer.

“Major,” came Sergeant Major McCoy’s voice, “The remaining war drones are making a push to get to you. We’re trying to hold them off but we’re all out of heavy explosives.”

“Roger, Smaj. Corporal,” Bull yelled at the semi gunner, “cease fire. Heavy section, rotate this thing around and back it into that corner.” He supervised as the Marines crowded the crew-served laser into a niche where it was sheltered from all attack directions except the front.

Two enemy spider drones smashed their way down the nearby ramp just as the heavy laser was emplaced. Its orange beam licked out, scattered here and there by the robots’ reflective surfaces. A deluge of PRG bullets and plasma rifle fire came next, chewing and burning their skins until the laser was able to bite past the mirror coating.

“Bugger all,” Bull complained as his plasma rifle finally went dead, empty of its charge. He groped for a power module but remembered that was the last one. Tossing the weapon aside, he picked up a fifty-kilo piece of broken strut and made ready to bash the things with cybernetic strength.

Despite their damage, the war drones fired their own plasma blasters, cutting down two of the heavy crew and the corporal in the gunner’s seat. The Marine laser beam flicked off, and Bull stepped forward to swing his piece of steel like a cricket bat at a descending razor-tipped limb. For long seconds he dueled with the thing like a knight of old, smashing at it and blocking its thrusts. Then he was thrown back by explosions that blew the legs and weapons off both spiders, leaving their round meter-diameter abdomens quivering limbless on the floor, functional but ineffective.

Rolling to his knees, he saw Ryss riding war-cars, whooping and screaming as they converged from several directions. The last to pull up held Commander Johnstone, who gave Bull a weary salute. “That looks to be the last of the resistance, Major.”

“I guess that was its final gasp.” Bull couldn’t think of what else to say, so he just ground his teeth and turned his attention to his casualties, checking for signs of life. There were none. He always hated the irony of battle: someone had to be the last to die in any fight.

Checking his HUD, he called, “All units sound off: accountability check, do it now.” While he waited for everyone to report up their chains of command to him, he grabbed the semi-portable and manhandled it into position to finish cutting through the overhead – the floor of the vault above. He sat down in the gunner’s chair and warned everyone out of the way with a wave.

The report came in just as the laser cut through: out of four hundred and two Marines, two hundred and six survived.
Fifty percent casualties and no hint of morale or discipline problems,
Bull thought. Good men, all veterans of the moon laser assault…and fewer of them each time they went into combat. It would be fifteen or more years before the first children were old enough to enlist. Until then, he had to face the certainty of more and more Marines, people he knew by face and name, friends, inevitably killed.

He hoped it was all worth it.

Triggering the laser in a last short burst, Bull cut away the plug in the ceiling. It fell with a clang, and he stood to stare upward at the meter-wide hole. Rick stepped up beside him, then other Marines and Ryss, all wondering what they would find inside.