Heart of Steel: Book II of the Jonathan Pavel Series (6 page)

The Carriers combat wing was fully airborne with two full squadrons, twenty- four fighter bombers were on an attack run, while a single squadron of interceptors held back in case LP-115 launched any fighter craft. Morris didn’t have any fighters, but he did have something almost as good.

Morris watched as the Colonials crossed the farthest point he could engage them. He did nothing and slowly as the minutes ticked by they drew in closer and closer. One of the bomber squadrons broke off and headed for the laser relay. The other stayed squarely focused on LP-115’s main hanger.

“Fire the drones in 3...2...1..,” Morris said.

At his command, six hatches popped open around the crater and four magnetic catapults pointed skyward from each. In a split second, a simple drone craft was launched into space speeding off of Dawson’s surface as fast as the magnetic catapult could propel it in low gravity before firing its own micro fusion engine and acquiring a target. The Colonial fighter bombers moved to intercept the squadron headed toward the laser relay, turning to help their comrades while the interceptors moved in.

Lights began to twinkle as the Colonial FB-17
Cavalier’s
chin mounted tri- barrel lasers winked to life. In the first three minutes, twenty-four drones were swatted from space, but every thirty seconds the robotic arms lifted another drone from the rack, loaded it onto the launcher and hurled it skyward. So it didn’t matter that 24 drones had been knocked down, because another 144 had been launched. The drones were not big,  measuring no more than six feet long, with four stubby winglets used to mount maneuvering jets. They were fast though, and their heads were packed with explosives. From the moment of their launch, their tiny computer brain told them they had one task - seek and destroy. Seven Colonial fighter craft went down as the drones smashed into them exploding on impact. Four of the pilots ejected, three used their maneuvering rockets to come to a safe landing on Dawson’s surface. One miscalculated and slammed into the surface dying on impact. The drones gave the bailed out crews a wide berth, this was a civilized war after all.

The Colonial fighter craft retreated losing two more as they did so. The drones now numbering close to 200 followed, but Morris discontinued the launch. Each hatch held a rack of 400 drones, 2,400 in all, but there was no need to waste them. The drones signatures winked out one by one as they followed the fighters into the Colonial defense envelope. Missile interceptors and point defense lasers worked equally well on drones. The Colonials, seeing this would be no easy raid, moved in full force. Their destroyers joining the fore to add their firepower to that of the heavier ships. This was precisely what Morris had wanted. He couldn’t hold off the attack, but he was going to take some of those Colonial bastards with him.

“Order OD batteries to open fire, rail guns and hyper velocity missiles both to target the destroyers with everything you’ve got,” Morris commanded.

As the technician hit a switch, sixteen rail guns of the same make normally found on heavy cruisers, and eight hyper velocity missile batteries slid from beneath their camouflage around the rim of the crater.

If space wasn’t a vacuum, the roar from their fire would have sounded like the dying moan of a god. The rail guns’ three hundred pound, depleted uranium slugs sped toward the Colonial ships at a quarter the speed of light. Six missed, ten impacted. At that range, there was little the Colonial kinetic barriers could do. The slugs tore into four of the destroyers. One only suffered a glancing blow, two received critical hits to their forward sections losing crewman, weapons, and defenses. The damage was mitigated though, because the slugs were so heavy they actually passed through the ships, the resulting damage coming from the kinetic force of their passing. The final destroyer the
Leon,
though, suffered a catastrophic hit. It
took two slugs just feet apart and when the slugs struck the ship, through an act of random chance, the slugs actually collided inside the ship. The resulting release of energy was like a nuclear explosion. The
Leon
was gutted internally, her hull buckling out. The ship’s inner decks collapsed on themselves until they finally reached the rear section. The
Leon’s
auxiliary control and engineering survived, but of her 326 crew 276 were killed, smashed into human paste by the collapsing bulkheads and buckling decks.

LP-115’s first salvo of railgun slugs was followed quickly by 32 hyper-velocity missiles
.
The ship killers fared worse than their larger slug brothers since they were more susceptible to the Colonial defense screens. Twenty missiles died before they could impact, but twelve got through. The hyper-velocities were the worst combination of the advantages of missiles and rail guns. Fired at incredible speeds, when they struck they released the raw kinetic energy of 1,200 pounds of TNT, and once they burrowed into the ship their warheads exploded, compounding the damage they had already done. One missile struck the bridge of the Colonial destroyer
Liger,
killing all hands. Three more went off target and struck Tango-2 the Cruiser
Chevalier.
Two wasted themselves on her barriers, and a third got through and caused moderate damage neutralizing a plasma cannon. The remaining eight missiles expanded themselves on the undamaged Colonial destroyers, inflicting damage and causing casualties, but none succeeded in knocking another ship out of the fight.

In the control room Morris gripped the spine of the chair in front of him as the Colonials released their reply. The barrage was fearsome. The Solarian OD positions were armoured shielded, but nothing was impenetrable.

Reluctantly, Morris ordered the batteries to switch to the heavier Colonial ships. The duel raged for a solid half hour both sides inflicting damage on one another. The
Chevalier
suffered several serious hits and needed to withdraw, but the
Bruix
and her other consorts knocked out fully a quarter of LP-115 batteries. The Colonial destroyers guided missiles also found one of the drone hangars and began searching for the rest, forcing Morris to launch all his remaining drones in a swarm attack. The Colonials moved their fighters to intercept, and reinforced by their defense screens the drones were massacred, only managing to knock down two more Colonial fighter craft. They did, however, screen a volley of hyper-velocity missiles which slammed into the
Bruix
causing sever damage to her port side secondary batteries, and knocking one of her rail gun turrets offline. It didn’t matter though,
Bruix
had eleven other turrets and 33 other rail guns, even though she could only bring half of them to bear at any given time. With the drones neutralized, the Colonial Planetary Assault ships began launching their ground troops.

The drop pods of the first wave blasted toward the Rock. As they approached, LP-115’s final line of defenses, her chain guns and AA missile pods, opened up. Six drop pods were shot down, but thirty fell outside the crater’s rim. Once they were ground side, each one spat out a Platoon of elite Colonial Marines in full Combat Armour. Seven also opened to reveal Multi-purpose Combat Vehicles. MCVs, more popularly known as Walkers, were bulky ten-foot, two legged vehicles equipped with missile pods and rail guns. The Colonials began approaching the defense positions they’d tagged from orbit. The automated chain guns began to shift their target toward the ground troops. From bunkers around the rim of the crater, firing ports slid open and Solarian Navy personnel began to fire. The Solarian Marines had pulled back, leaving the Navy personnel in their thin suits alone, but in their reinforced bunkers all they had to do was point and shoot.

Colonial casualties were heavy.  One hundred-twenty Marines fell before they reached their objectives, along with two of the MCVs. In the vacuum of space on Dawson’s rock, death was not quick nor was it pleasant. Mens’ blood boiled, their eyes melted in their broken helmets, the lack of air was the only thing that suppressed their screams. One by one though, the Solarian AA batteries and chain guns fell silent as the Marines destroyed them. This cleared the way for the Colonial fighter bombers and cruise missiles. The Solarian Navy men retreated from their bunkers deeper into the base as their Orbital Denial defense died behind them. Then a Colonial MCV got through the kinetic barrier, and knocked out one of the projectors. With one projector gone, the others followed quickly. The barrier was gone, and the Solarian base was open to attack. With that, the Colonial gunships launched from their Planetary Attack ships. Soon, the entire inner surface of the crater was covered with Colonial troops. Each Planetary Attack ship held a brigade worth 5,000 men in total. There was no way 250 Solarian Marines and the surviving Navy personnel could defeat that many. Of course Colonel Talbot didn’t intend to defeat the Colonials, but he did intend to make them pay. After some effort, the Colonial ground troops blasted into the hangar bay. As their lead forces entered the darkened bay, they found it empty except for the six shuttle craft the Solarian’s
had sabotaged to prevent them from falling into Colonial hands. The Colonial unit at the vanguard, the first and second companies of the Army battalion, the 131st Novi Virou Rifles moved cautiously into the interior of the base. The Colonial Marines, most of whom were still at the rim of the crater, had kept the heavy combat armour for themselves. The Colonial Army grunts wore ‘light’ vacuum armour. These were space suits with reinforced plates and heavy kevlar. It offered much less protection than the plated combat armour. They carried M-22 laser rifles with grenade launchers,  and those were augmented by rocket launchers and tripod mounted light rail guns touted by their heavy weapons platoons. Behind them were 1,200 other army grunts similarly equipped from their own battalion, and the 311st Lome Grenadiers. They were nervous, but confident. The Solarians were proving as tough as everyone had said they were, but they couldn’t have much left at this point. That of course was going to prove to be a miscalculation. From the hangar bay, the Colonials entered a large open and empty storage bay, which was the only way into the large base. It had one entrance and one exit, both were airlocks though it was currently depressurized. The Colonials fanned out and began moving toward the base entrance their weapons ready. As they approached the large bay door on either side storage doors slid open revealing a full 250 Solarian Marines in full combat armour. Or as the Solarian Marines prefered to call it
Testudo
armour. Each Marine was essentially a walking tank fully protected from anything short of a rail gun, and equipped with a standard .50 caliber cannon, retrofitted with a magnetic trigger to fire in the vacuum. They also each carried a grenade launcher and a heavy weapon, rail guns, missile pods, combat claws, and a few touted viro swords - massive tungsten carbine blades, a few molecules thick capable of slicing through battle steel.

The lead Marine, Colonel Talbot, wielded one such sword. He raised it as he stepped forward, and broadcasting in a clear frequency so every radio in the system could hear him he bellowed,

“FOR THE REPUBLIC!!!”

“THE REPUBLIC!!!” his men echoed charging into the exposed Colonials.

It was a massacre.

The Colonials fired in vain, but the Solarian Marines closed within seconds. With their computer assisted targeting, each time their shoulder mounted .50 caliber fired, another Colonial dropped with a bullet through his head. Those were the lucky ones. Viro blades slashed men in half and combat claws crushed them or tore through their helmets leaving them choking in in vacuum. The Colonials weapons were less effective. The laser shots glanced off the Solarian plate armour. The only thing which proved effective were the shoulder mounted rockets, and tripod rail guns and those were the first thing the Marines targeted. The Colonials fell back to the hanger bay loosing 300 men, while the Solarians had lost six. It was a stunning defeat, but it couldn't last. The Marines, having sprung their ambush, now fell back and dug in behind steel blast plates, while the Colonials brought up reinforcements including their own combat armoured Marines. The fighting was brutal and went own for nearly eight hours. Men died from sword wounds, from suit breaches, laser fire, rockets, and gun shots. Finally,  the Colonial engineers widened` the doorway enough for a MCV to break through, backed by Colonial Marines and Army troopers touting shoulder rockets, the last fifty Solarians fell back into the base. They left 200 of their number behind, including Colonel Talbot. Around their fallen comrades lay more than 1,000 Colonials. Another three hundred Colonials had been lucky enough to survive their suit punctures and resulting wounds. If lucky was what you could call men who lost limbs from glancing blows, or were rendered brain dead by lack of oxygen. In vacuum combat, it was a zero sum game - you killed or were killed.

LP-115 fell three hours after the Marines fell back. The Colonials suffered more losses as they swept their way through the rabbit warren of the bases tunnels, but the remaining Solarians mostly Navy personnel with BG-150 laser carbines were little match for the Colonials. Morris Yung died in the control room, where he was gunned down with Lt. Jackson Sung and the three technicians who stayed at their stations. None of them were armed. After shedding so much blood to get through the front door, the Colonials were not in the mood to take prisoners. All told, only 76 Solarian Navy personnel and two Marines survived, and that was only because sixteen were the staff of the medical bay and the rest were their patients. Even they only survived because of the intervention of a Colonial officer, who just barely managed to restrain his men. In the heat of battle, the Colonials had neglected to disable the Solarian lasercom transmitter. All throughout the battle it had been broadcasting to a series of relay satellites, which had been beaming the information to the rest of the Solarian space. In addition to the sensor data the broadcast had included every scrap of data from LP-115, personal transmissions to families, closed circuit security footage including images of the Marines heroic stand and Colonial troopers seeking retribution.