Drysine Legacy (The Spiral Wars Book 2) (44 page)

Out in the huge cavern, the space around the armoury was now a cluster of drones, a sensation like being inside an insect hive. Amongst them were dismembered steel limbs and other tumbling debris from the fight, glittering like Deliverance decorations scattered by a strong wind. Nearby, a knot of several drysines tumbled over and over about a common hulk they were busily dismembering — one of the deepynines, Trace saw, from the small remains that were left. This was the war, then. The great deepynine-drysine war — twenty five thousand years ended in the drysines’ favour, and now in this one little corner of the galaxy, very much back on. And it looked as though the genocidal hatred had not diminished one bit.

Missiles were incoming, and Trace hit the jets toward one of the massive steel cross braces, and a secure vantage from which to see. Explosions as the missiles hit supports or spiralled past without direction, Jalawi securing return-lock and marines returning fire with back-launchers. Trace jetted to a halt amidst the cross-beams, and saw in the forest of steel and shadows beyond the shipyard sard shuttles evasive, ducking for cover and firing again. Those missiles were no more effective — Styx was jamming them, but the marines’ fire wasn’t any better.

“They’re jamming us back,” Trace observed as her scan indicated that. “Rifle fire, aim your shots. Styx, see if you can find out what’s jamming us so we can kill it. How far to the core?”

“Nearly twenty kilometres.”
A bright flash erupted from several kilometres away.
“My drones in Sector Five have acquired a docked warship, we are employing weapons.”
More bright flashes, close-range ship defences engaging. Some fast blurs streaked the dark, and something exploded off a support nearby. Within the Tartarus’s open structure, weapons fire and shrapnel would travel a long way. Things were about to get very messy.
“They are regrouping, centring defences about the core.”

“I can see that.” Heavy gunfire ripped in from the shuttles, sparking and ricocheting off supports and slamming holes in the armoury. Marines returned fire, and one shuttle ceased fire and spun. Koshaims would put holes in heavier armour plate than shuttles possessed — using them to engage marines in firefights was very ill-advised. “We need to hit them before they get set. How wide is the uprising?”

“It is nearly universal. We are gaining ships, but in these facilities we cannot manoeuvre them, and will lose them quickly. I have lost all contact with the deepynine queen, all enemy transmissions have gone defensive. Deployment patterns suggest high probability of command presence neither deepynine nor sard.”

“Alo,” said Trace, diverting attention from the fireworks that lit the Tartarus interior before her to consider her tacnet. The scale of it was insane — she was a major, accustomed to a full company command at most. What she saw here required admirals and generals. But even if she had the rank and experience, she had no means of ensuring these troops would obey her command. Besides which,
no
human commander had ever seen anything like this. “These sard are delaying us, we must advance quickly.”

“My drones have captured multiple armouries about the middle-perimeter. We will have acquired sixty-percent armament in another two-point-five minutes. Anything less will be insufficient for a successful assault.”

“We’ll do a staggered advance,” Trace said sternly. “See this next ring of manufacturing facilities? Armed units must capture that first, units still-to-arm can follow behind. We must expect a deepynine counter-attack from the core and that inner ring gives us better position.”

Trace wondered what she’d do if Styx had other ideas. Tell Corporal Penn to threaten her? If these drones decided to protect their queen from the humans first, Charlie Platoon and Command Squad would last no more than a minute, if that. More explosions and shooting, close and distant — always disconcerting in vacuum as the mind instinctively braced for the huge, crashing noise that never came. A sard shuttle exploded, stubbornly insisting on a shooting-vantage. Heavy ship-fire tore through gantries from somewhere distant — drysine vessels employing main weapons at close range. Drysine drones were swarming from the armoury exits now, armed with their latest attachments — chain guns, launchers, close-range cutters, auto-cannon.

“You are correct. Human marines should act as fire-support, your tactics against deepynines are ineffective.”

Trace might have argued, for pride, but in this environment Styx had a point. “I copy, let’s flank these sard shuttles and move.”

E
rik pulsed as soon
as the shooting started, and
Phoenix
ripped out of hyperspace abruptly closing on the Tartarus. Scan called coordinates, and Arms shouted for permission to fire, as stationary firebases opened up on picket vessels that were suddenly too busy dodging and defending themselves to worry about
Phoenix
. One of them broke up on scan, then a firebase vanished, and fire ripped past them from somewhere as Karle and Harris tracked and returned fire on automatic.

“V downrange target!” Karle announced as armscomp highlighted a ship emerging from Tartarus docking along that huge circumference rim. “Confirmed sard warship!”

“Kill it,” Erik confirmed, and Karle fired. Even now the Tartarus was racing up, and Erik hit pulse once more to dump V at crazy close range, and came out tumbling purposely end-over to burn off the remaining V and make their approach evasive at the same time. Return fire ripped by,
Phoenix
autos detonated some more close-range, then a huge explosion turned an outer portion of Tartarus into a fireball as Karle’s sard target detonated from high-velocity fire.

“I’m going to get in close,” Erik told them as deceleration-V eased off, and he tumbled them beam-on for the gunners to get a view. Harris obliged by killing a docked sard freighter, its back breaking in high-mass slow motion. “The outer pickets won’t be able to shoot without hitting Tartarus.”

“Massive manoeuvres!” Shahaim said tersely, staring at the same combat scan that he did, a mass of swirling, evading ships as the pickets tried to avoid getting killed by their own firebases. “Operations approaching mark!”

“Operations stand by!” Erik told his shuttles, seeing nav tag the optimal release point as he corkscrewed their way in. Incoming fire came up from Tartarus, light and possibly no more than heavy infantry weapons. Harris pasted their locations with
Phoenix
’s close range armaments, and whole swathes of Tartarus steel cross-braces erupted in fiery bursts that killed anyone or anything not in armoured cover across several square kilometres.

“I’m getting a feed from Styx!” Shilu announced. “I’ve got marine tacnet, they’re all still there!” Erik felt wave of relief, but no great surprise — Styx and Trace were dropping the pretence and resuming combat communications. “They’re in a big furball at grid A-15, and we’ve got…” Shilu had to gasp to take it in, and Erik resisted the temptation to glance at marine tacnet, something the Captain had drilled into him he
never
had time for, “…we’ve got Tartarus-wide uprising, I’m reading
thousands
of drones on the move! They’re getting armed and they’re taking over docked drysine shipping!”

“Operations mark in five!” Shahaim announced. “Good luck girls.”

“You betcha,”
said Jersey.
“Tiffy, stick on my wing.”
And Operations showed them gone as the countdown reached zero, disconnected and racing toward the Tartarus’s fast-approaching surface tail-first and thrusters blazing.

Styx would be coordinating all of that, Erik realised. Trace retained command of
Phoenix
marines, but she had no facility to command anything on this scale, and the drones would not listen to her anyway. And so the balance of power shifted once more, terrifyingly… and yet they had no choice. An uprising of this scale was the only way they were going to get what they wanted and get out alive, and yet Styx now had exactly what Kaspowitz and others had argued she’d get — a drysine army, weapons and even warships. If she turned on Trace and
Phoenix
, they’d all be dead very quickly.

But then again, if Styx had simply wanted resources to restart the drysine race and then vanish into the void, she had all of that now… but was still here, and apparently fighting, or commanding all her newly acquired forces to fight. So whatever she was after, immediate escape was not it.

‘
H
ekgarh
’, Tif’s people called it. The hunter’s fear. Humans knew only one kind of fear, but kuhsi knew many. Too often in her life, Tif had known ‘muhkgarh’, the quarry’s fear. It came from helplessness, and was sometimes called ‘the woman’s fear’. ‘Muhkgarh’ was the fear of things you could not control. It was the fear of a game animal in the tall grass, the fear of a wife in violation of her husband’s command, the fear of a passenger in a burning aeroplane.

Tif had known muhkgarh when she’d run from her family estate in the Heshog Highlands as a youngster, to the great plain city of Regath. Her family had tried to kill her by the old laws of clan-right, but Lord Kharghesh’s agencies had stopped them, and punished several. Those were the new laws, Lord Kharghesh and his supporters’ invention, to give a new role to women in all the nation of Koth. Inspired, Tif had applied to an academy, and been accepted on aptitude.

There, for the first time, she’d learned hekgarh, the hunter’s fear. Hekgarh was the fear of warriors in battle, of hunters stalking their prey, of talented practitioners employing their skills in a dangerous field. The kuhsi doctors described it as a difference of adrenal glands, stimulating different portions of the brain. Many insisted that hekgarh was medically unknown to women, and claimed ‘science’ that proved it. But strapped tight into her cockpit on approach to a fight far crazier than Tif had ever imagined, she knew those old kuhsi doctors were frauds. She felt fear, yet unlike that fear of her youth, it did not make her wish to flee.
Phoenix
was her clan now, and in
Phoenix
’s fight she would charge, slash and kill her enemies. This hunter’s fear was an intensity unlike anything she’d known, and if only to spite her blood father, she could not think of any place she would rather be.

Lieutenant Jersey’s voice came in her ears, but past the engine roar and vibration, plus the crackle on the coms, Tif caught perhaps one word in three. Something about entry points and
Europa
’s location…

“Ree,” she said impatiently, “nav screen.” Because she and Ensign Lee had a system worked out, where any incoming commands that could be flashed to her screens would happen immediately, and save her the trouble of trying to figure out what was said. Between the words and the visual, she could usually figure it out in just a few seconds more than it would take a human pilot. For anything that required a faster reaction than a few seconds, she was on her own.

The nav screen flashed, and Tif’s blink transferred it to her visor — a plotted trajectory, with
Europa
’s position on the far end. In between, Jersey would take them down very low to the Tartarus surface, to avoid exposure to fire. Scan overlaid active data onto that course-plot, as
Phoenix
compiled as much data as it could gather from the battlespace, then fed it out to its pilots. And what it showed was crazy, drysine drones swarming in the Tartarus, sard warriors fighting back, and in all likelihood deepynine drones gathering forces near the core. Tif found a moment to be thankful Lisbeth wasn’t coming along on this one — the girl had a rough idea what she was doing, and probably some natural talent as well. But this was a place for warriors.

PH-3 and 4 hit the turnover point, cut deceleration thrust and flipped to face the target. The sheer size of it baffled the senses, a vast horizon of steel-grey beams and girders, creating odd patterns that reminded her for a crazy moment of the baskets her grandmother had once weaved from river reeds. But she had no time to ponder it, locking forward cannon to her visor with thumbs on the triggers. That weapon system she’d gotten good at. The others, she left to Lee in the nose seat.

Off to one side, a series of rolling fireballs across the steel horizon —
Phoenix
engaging surface targets in their path. Correction point arrived and she hit thrust as the lines matched, Gs slamming her down and rolling PH-4 about so she could see her course direction through the upper canopy. Then they were matching the Tartarus horizon, the steel whipping past a hundred meters below. Tif nudged them lower, heard Lee warn of debris ahead and gave them a little kick sideways to miss it. There were no big burns and big manoeuvres down this low — like the low altitude flying she’d learned on Choghoth in Lord Kharghesh’s academy, you kept your movements smooth and small, or you made a smoking crater in something hard.

More fire from
Phoenix
ahead, paralleling their course ‘above’ relative to Tartarus, and moving to put Tartarus between herself and those picket vessels. Something big blew up with the brightest flash Tif had ever seen, her visor blackening to save her vision. Steady chatter now on her coms — human chatter, far beyond her ability to understand, but she trusted that if she needed to know something, Lee would flash it to her screen or yell it at her in time. The flash died away — probably
Phoenix
had hit another sard ship. Tif could not help the surge of pride in her heart.
Phoenix
was a beast, a legend of the human war machine and as powerful as a squadron of ships in the meagre kuhsi fleet. That the scared little poor girl from Heshog should find herself
here
, a vital part of the
Phoenix
operation, would make the spirits of ten thousand ancestors rise from their graves to notice.

Jersey said something else, sounding alarmed, and Tif heard the word ‘escort’. Scan showed small marks approaching, and Lee was not tagging them as hostile, so she held course and swung the tail out for a light burn to keep her course circular, matching Tartarus’s curve as the base lacked the gravity to make a normal orbit. And then the marks on scan arrived, and Tif glanced out the canopy to see hacksaws off her wing, in flexible formation. She’d expected it, but still it was shocking to see them this close. They looked like dark-silver lobsters, bristling with limbs and bulky with modular weapons and thrusters that nearly doubled their size. In gravity they’d be nearly immobile, but out here a drone could act as a very small ship, though without the powersource to thrust for long before running out of fuel. Clearly these were drysine, given no one was dead yet. Their escort.

Course correction arrived, and Tif swung PH-4 tail-first and kicked the thrust at a full 4-Gs to slow them. It was unnerving, because slowing down would make them an easier target for an enemy shooting at them from the cover of Tartarus… which was where, at slower velocities, an escort would be useful, to spot and kill any threat before it could fire.

She reached nearly zero-V immediately over the lip of a cavernous shipyard. Within was chaos, several smaller ships ruined and floating free amidst the smashed debris of a recent fight. Tif cut thrust a moment to allow PH-3 to assume the lead — unloaded, PH-4 was a little more mobile, and she’d get ahead of Jersey if she wasn’t careful.

“Watch your V,”
Jersey said tersely as they powered inside, then cut thrust and swung to dodge the best course through the debris.
“Could run out of room real fast.”

Tif matched her lead — no more than two hundred kph in here, little more than a ground car on a big city freeway, but surrounded by things to crash into and with no direct line-of-sight to anything, it felt fast enough. Flying shuttles was nothing like driving cars or flying aeroplanes in atmosphere — those vehicles went where you pointed them. Shuttles in zero-G vacuum went with their momentum, like a puck sliding on ice, and in close proximity a pilot’s illusion of control could disappear real fast. To move she’d have to swing PH-4’s thrusters well out past where she wanted to go, which took at least several seconds’ advance planning. Shuttle pilots in proximity had to think and look well ahead of their immediate surroundings, like a racecar driver already plotting the apex of a corner three turns ahead. Reflexes helped, but if your fast evasion only put you smack on course to an even worse obstacle, reflexes alone could get you killed.

Tif swung and rolled her way through the moving debris field, giving repeated little kicks of thrust to change course, then a final big one past a large chunk of engine housing, tumbling with explosive scorch marks. Beyond was a much larger ship — a warship, Tif judged, though barely half the size of
Phoenix
. Hacksaw drones swarmed over it, even now Tif could see them disappearing into small holes torn in the midships hull.

“Looks like they’re still fighting in there,”
Lee observed.
“Probably sard warriors still inside.”
Only half of the drones appeared to be armed… but inside the close corridors of a ship, unarmed hacksaws could still be deadly.

“Big target,” Tif complained, thinking of those docked ships she’d seen
Phoenix
kill so far. “Draw big fire, we go.” Ahead, their thrust-equipped escort dove and skidded through a hexagonal gap and into the gloom beyond. Through the forest of pylons and supports, Tif could see a flashing red storm of tracer fire. She took a deep breath, swung PH-4 sideways, and kicked the thrusters to begin her first turn.

C
ommand Squad shot forward
on accumulated V, Trace hitting light thrust to edge closer to a massive support truss for cover, her local formation flexing to pass around it. About them, Charlie Platoon did the same, First Squad ahead, Second and Third on the wings, proceeding with depth and flexibility as they avoided the most deadly open space without losing formation.

Out to a kilometre ahead the shooting was intense, as armed drysines dodged and ducked through the Tartarus tangle in a silver swarm, coordinating cross-fires and zig-zags with their comrades amidst a rain of incoming and outgoing fire. That fire was going everywhere, already her marines had taken several hits, all thankfully stopped by armour with minimal damage so far. But Styx had been right — operating without cover was something best left to machines that could soak up damage and keep functioning at close to optimal. With limited cover, hacksaw warfare in Tartarus turned into a contest of fire volumes, and with most of the drysines’ immediate enemy being sard, it was a contest the drysines were winning.