One Good Soldier (37 page)

"Watch your backside, Deuce," Skinny's voice buzzed.

Deuce dropped and spun as best she could manage, but a tree trunk caught her in the side of her torso, sending her flying across the battlefield and down. The enemy tankhead was good and managed to keep her too busy to go to offense. Every instant required her to make a new block or dodge.

"Jump up, Deuce!" Skinny shouted. "He's got help coming in on your seven!"

"Warning, enemy targeting lock imminent! Warning, enemy targeting lock imminent!" said her Bitchin' Betty.

"Shit, I'm locked up!" Deuce jumped and went full throttle, but she didn't jump away from the enemy tanks. Instead, she attacked the wingman of the one that had just locked her up. Her bot-mode mecha propelled full-force into the enemy tank as it fired its cannons at her. Several rounds splashed against her hull, and a few of them actually tore through her wing. She tackled the tank at the shoulders, spinning it around. His wingman hesitated at that point, which was just enough time for her to push off the tank she had tackled and run into the mix of Army tanks and Marine FM-12s to break up his lock. Or so she thought.

"Warning, enemy missile lock! Warning, enemy missile lock!"

The Arcadian tankhead fired a mecha-to-mecha missile that was locked on her. The missile twisted through the traffic and caught her square in the back as she pulled the ejection handle. Her ejection seat shot out of the explosion at a low angle up through the trees, pounding into them and flipping end over end. Several large tree limbs broke off into the seat and Deuce's body until the seat cleared the tree canopy on a ballistic trajectory that then fell right back through the trees. This time the tree limbs were a blessing, as they slowed her descent, but they weren't blessing enough. Deuce came to a stop against a giant boulder near the river, her neck broken and her heartbeat failing.

I'm a goner, Bobby.

Just rest, Caroline. I'm administering immunoboost, stims, and pain medication.

Oh, God
.

I've triggered the beacon. Help will be here soon.

It was great serving with you, Bobby.

The honor has been mine, Colonel
.

Deuce flatlined, but the suit managed to bring her back.

Stay with me, Caroline.

As she tunneled out for the last time, she was blinded by a brilliant white light.

"We're all stop, CO! Approximately three astronomical units from Arcadia out of the ecliptic," Nav announced.

"Good job, Penny!" the admiral replied. "XO, COB, get my ship back in order."

"Aye, sir."

"Air Boss, how is the QMT of the fighters coming?"

"We'll be at one hundred percent within the minute, sir."

"Good. As soon as that is done, have the wounded QMT protocols sped up. I don't want to lose a good soldier because we couldn't get them to sickbay in time."

"Aye, sir."

Wallace scanned the ship in his DTM, trying to figure out his next move. It wouldn't take long for the Seppy ships to figure out where they were. The interesting thing would be to see if they attacked them there, or if they took the QMT facility back, or if they'd try to protect the QMT control facility on the planet below at Capitol City.

Whatever the Seppy bastards did, he needed a new strategy. Casualty reports from the first wave were huge. The
Lincoln
was dead in the water, and the
Tyler
had lost Aux Prop and several DEG batteries. The
Roosevelt
and the
Madira
were in the best shape, but they were limping a bit.

"CO! CDC!"

"Go, CDC!"

Shit, what now?
he thought.

I'm detecting seven hyperspace jaunts, sir. I'm sure it's that,
Uncle Timmy replied.

"Sir! We just detected seven hyperspace jaunts. Five from the previous engagement zone and two from the enemy vessels that were waiting in reserve out by one of the moons," the combat direction center officer explained to him. Wallace didn't like what he was hearing. That was seven ships; they were coming to finish them off.

"Roger that, CDC." Admiral Jefferson turned back to his XO. "Larry! We've got incoming. Let's get ready for it."

"Aye, sir!"

Sound the call, Tim.

Aye, sir
.

"General quarters, general quarters, prepare for incoming attack. All hands, all hands, man your battlestations. Prepare for incoming attack. All hands, all hands, man your battlestations," Uncle Timmy announced again over the intercom and to all AICs.

The bosun's pipe sounded throughout the ship, sending a chill over the already overworked crew. Considering that the day started with wargames in the desert of Mars and then wound up across the stars in a real shooting war, the admiral realized that his crew were performing like superhuman heroes. Sometimes, that wasn't enough. But according to his orders from the president, it had to be.

"CO, the ships are coming out of jaunt near us at the following coordinates, sir. Uh, only one of them is coming out close to us. The others are a tenth of an AU off," the STO shouted over klaxons that started up. Wallace had his AIC turn the annoying things off.

"Roger that, STO."

"CO! CDC!"

"We've got the ships coming out of hyperspace, CDC."

"Uh, yes, sir. But, sir, we're picking up EM disturbances near the planet that would suggest QMT jumps."

"Keep me posted, CDC. I hope that's our backup."

"Aye, sir."

"CO! That Seppy hauler is on a collision course for the
Lincoln
!" the Nav shouted.

"I'm detecting activated gluonium, Admiral!" the STO added. They sure as hell didn't need to be around if the Seppies fired off a gluonium bomb that close.

"Shit! Kamikaze, Admiral!" the COB shouted.

"Helm, emergency jaunt away from here now!" Wallace sounded an alarm across the fleet ships and opened a channel. "Evasive jaunts immediately! Gluonium Kamikaze!"

"Emergency jaunt, sir!" Helmsman Lieutenant Junior Grade Cindy Lewis frantically punched in the commands for an emergency jaunt. It would take the hyperspace projector a few seconds to spin up the quantum vortex required to pass out of normal space. Who knew if they had time?

Wallace sat calm for the few seconds as they passed. The enemy hauler pulled in closer to the
Lincoln
and opened fire on it. All of its missiles, DEGs, and railguns poured into the wounded supercarrier's sections that housed the jaunt system. The Seppy ship moved closer and closer to the
Lincoln
, and Wallace could see that there was nothing he could do for them.

"Goddamn those bastards!" He slammed his fist down against his chair arm. Just as the hyperspace vortex whirled around them and they blanked out of normal space, the Seppy kamikaze ship exploded. The
Lincoln
was vaporized instantly.

A few seconds later, as the
Madira
popped out of hyperspace, the admiral managed to relax long enough to breathe. His DTM dinged in the updated blue-force tracking signals showing that the
Tyler
and the
Roosevelt
had managed to jaunt away before the hauler had exploded. The three U.S. supercarriers were battered and badly outnumbered. Or at least they had been. His blue-force system showed four new U.S. supercarriers: the USS
Ronald Reagan
, the USS
Barack Obama
, the USS
Zachary Taylor
, and the USS
Andrew Jackson
. There were still eight Seppy ships, but only four of them were supercarriers, and one of those supercarriers had taken a good bit of damage. The other four Seppy ships were battle cruiser class—about two-thirds the size of a supercarrier. Seven supercarriers to eight Seppy ships; finally some decent odds.

"CO
Madira
, CO
Obama
!"

"Goddamn, I'm glad to hear from you, Johnny!" Wallace answered Captain Johnny Practice's hail. He opened a channel to all the fleet ship captains. "I'm glad to see all four of you. Be advised. We just lost the
Lincoln
. She was totally destroyed. Her pilots and groundpounders are on the surface of Arcadia near the governor's mansion in the center of Capitol City. Our intel has determined that is where the QMT controls are. So do not destroy that mansion! In the meantime, we're a bit surrounded over here and could use a hand. We also need to put a couple ships on the planet to support the fight there. Carla, you and Johnny take the
Obama
and the
Jackson
down. Felix, you and Kiana form up on us here and see if we can't keep the Seppies away from our attack long enough to get that QMT system under our control."

"Aye, Admiral!"

Now things are gonna get a little better,
he thought.

Damn right, Admiral,
Uncle Timmy agreed.

"Admiral, the Seppy fleet is forming up on us. Looks like they brought their fighters with them, sir," the XO said.

"Well, that will help out downstairs. All right, let's prepare to take incoming!"

"Admiral, with that in mind, do we want to continue our plan to jaunt in two minutes back to the planet?" Commander Penny Swain, the nav officer, asked.

"Good question, Penny." Wallace thought briefly. They were still outnumbered up here and in a ball. He still liked the idea of going to a bowl and being able to support the troops on the ground better. "Yes. Our men and women down there need us."

Timmy, DTM the plan to the rest of the fleet.

Aye, sir.

"Joe! The SIF generators on the aft of the ship are down. There just aren't any other cooling systems to bring them down," Lieutenant Mira Concepcion shouted. The noise in the Engineering Room was a little too loud to talk at normal tones, and the stress from the ship being rocked back and forth didn't help.

"Well, it sure as hell didn't take long for the Seppy mothers to find out where we jaunted to," Petty Officer Andy Sanchez added.

"If y'all wanted peace and quiet you shouldn't have joined the Navy!" Joe scanned the three-dimensional diagram of the ship, looking at all the systems at once in detail all the way down to the nuts and bolts, transistors and integrated circuits, and quantum-fluctuation exciters and spacetime limiters. His problem right now was the universal one, one that caused almost all systems to end up failing: thermal management. Waste heat was the hardest goddamned problem in all of physics and engineering to deal with. And now that one SIF generator was down, he was having to spread the structural integrity fields thin from the others to cover that section of the supercarrier. That meant that other SIF generators were now working even harder. It was an avalanche of disaster that only needed one or two more snowflakes to trigger it.

I should've taken up business or marketing,
he thought.

Yeah, but then you'd be rich and would miss out on all this,
his AIC, Debbie, replied in his mindvoice.

"Too bad we can't just jaunt over the ice cap of this planet and cool the thing off," Andy said sarcastically.

"I don't think that would work, Andy," the technology officer shouted over his shoulder. He had a flashlight between his teeth, power cabling draped across both shoulders, and a multitool in each hand, working away at an overloaded control circuit for the QMT power supply. The specialist warrant officers were the experts on the quantum-membrane teleportation technology, but those guys still needed good old-fashioned power, and all that came from Engineering. And, from what Joe could tell, the QMT had been working overtime since the battle started. That meant there were heavy casualties and/or a lot of troop movement.

"Why not, Lieutenant?"

"Well, you'd have to get the cold air in contact with the hot coolant somehow. Not sure how you'd do that. Oh shit!" A spark flew across the panel he had pulled out, discharging several thousand volts across his fingers. "That fucking hurt," he said, dropping the multitools and shaking his hands.

"Watch yourself, Lieutenant. Do I need to get Andy over there to show you how to handle high voltage?" Joe laughed. Then, as he panned the three-D image by the flow loops between the aft SIF generator heat exchangers and the main coolant reservoir one deck below Engineering, it hit him. "Son of bitch, Andy! That just might work."

"What will, Joe?"

"Cold air." Joe continued moving the mindview diagrams around rapidly, looking for the one that would work. Then he found it. "There it is! The main coolant lines of damned near everything flow through the exterior bulkheads that aren't pressurized. Any cooling along the flow lines is purely radiative. Hmm . . ."