The Black Ships (28 page)

He looked again at the shuffling figure.
“Sir, we need you to convince them to drop their shields and surrender the
vessel.”

The translator looked like he might be over
eighty years old, but he was alert and calm. Nodding, he shuffled over to the
one alien who’d been stalking back and  forth in front of the others as
they worked. Two SAS troopers held the alien firmly and the elderly interpreter
headed straight for him. He leaned over to press his helmet, visor to visor,
against the enemy officer’s helmet so sound could travel through without having
to find a compatible channel.

The translator’s helmet had been left on
proximity mode and everyone in the room could hear the conversation. Though
nobody could understand the ancient language, it was clear that the enemy
officer was viciously angry.

The translator straightened up slowly and
turned to Märti. “He tells me that his republic and its triumvirs have decided
that Earth must be brought into their dominion. He will take no actions that
betray his orders and promises that our species risks complete annihilation if
we don’t disengage immediately and surrender our ships.”

“
Sheisdreck
,” grumbled Sgt. Dreher.
“You don’t make fancy speeches when you have a gun to your head; we need to
show this little
souhund
who’s in control!” He walked over to the group
of prisoners in the corner. “C’mere you little
arschloch
.” He pulled one
of the prisoners out of the group and, before Märti had any idea of what he
planned, ripped off the alien’s helmet before kicking him to the floor in front
of the enemy officer.

“I do hope that isn’t the engineering
officer,” Kennedy murmured quietly as the enemy captain struggled against the
two humans holding him. “It certainly has made an impression on our little
friend.”

Märti wasn’t sure if he detected a note of
censure in Kennedy’s voice.
I should care but I’m having a hard time feeling
sorry for these invaders.
He knew that it was wrong to use prisoners in
such a way, but he also knew how that rule had been ignored by every military
in history when need arose. The Allied Forces had been known to gun down German
prisoners on D-Day because they couldn’t spare the manpower to guard them.

Not when their toe-hold was still so
tenuous.

The small enemy on the deck finally ceased
his thrashing, his disturbingly familiar face had turned an almost blue color.
Märti looked at the translator, nodding over at the shocked prisoner that they
assumed to be the captain. “Ask him again.”

With surprising force for such an old man,
the translator grasped the throat of the ancient enemy and shoved his head back
against the glass wall, pushing his own visor forward to touch. His words
carried more force this time and the enemy’s tone showed the first cracks of
defeat. They argued back and forth for a few minutes until Dreher pulled
another prisoner from the group. That settled matters. The translator turned
and held out his hand to Dreher.

“Stop,” he said softly. “They will
surrender the ship.”

~*~

M
ike frowned at his screen. With nothing else for him to do until
ground operations began, McCutcheon had him tracking the ORBAT or Order of
Battle statistics. His monitor showed both a blue side and a red. The blue
represented friendly forces and it wasn’t a pretty sight. The one functional
enemy ship had struck the
Sun Tzu
, breaking the cruiser into three large
pieces which went on to cripple two of the frigates that followed her.
  

The enemy’s second shot was also cleverly
aimed and plowed straight through the centerline of the
Yalu,
carrying
debris and plasma onto the
St. Lawrence,
stripping away almost all of
her sensor gear. By that time, rounds from the fleet were almost on top of the
enemy and she raised her shields.

In two minutes, one enemy ship had removed
one cruiser and four frigates from the fight. Added to that were the loss of
the
Cu Chulainn
and the
Yangtze
, both taken out of the fight
before they even reached orbit. That meant that they had lost almost forty
percent of their total combat power before even starting to fight. Now they had
settled into a stalemate. Sporadic fire from the Human fleet kept the enemy’s
shield up but no progress was being made.

Mike felt a chill.
Was the other
operational ship within communication range of the mother ship?
He pulled
up a sensor screen. He directed a part of the sensor array towards where the
two ships had been as the fleet had hurtled past on their way to the
atmosphere. “Shit,” he blurted.

McCutcheon was down in the CIC so Mike
leaned over and yelled his news. “Zulu Alpha One is still active and heading
our way. ETA ten minutes.” He looked up at the overview screen that showed the
fleet-wide coordination of data. His new contact had been sent to the fleet
almost immediately.

“All ships, this is Admiral Gao,” the
second in command stated calmly, using the fleet circuit. “We don’t want to
fight two of these things at once if we can help it. The
Achilles
is in
a perfect position to open the door on Zulu Alpha Three. All vessels direct
your fire on the bow of the enemy ship and we’ll get him to drop his shield.”

“If any ship isn’t following that order,
I’ll want to know the reason why,” Towers called up into the hole.

Wes was expanding a unit-stats screen and
he scrolled through the list quickly. “
Mississippi, Mekong, Zambezi, Saladin
and the
Hermann
are all firing.
The
Styx
and the
Arjuna
are both maneuvering to comply,” he called down to the admiral. “The
Achilles
is accelerating straight down the enemy’s throat, he must plan on forcing them
to fire.”

“Fire control, if we change our angle, can
we get more Vulcans working?” Towers asked urgently.

“Six more guns sir,” came the quick reply,
“but we would lose some of the aft 105mm guns.”

“Do it,” he snapped. “We can put out a
better screen with those six Vulcans in action.”

With nothing to do, Mike pulled up a visual
of the attack. The
Achilles
was slowly gaining steam as she closed on
Zulu Alpha Three, spitting a hail of metal in front of her. It was becoming
obvious that the only way for the enemy to stop her was to fire her rail gun.
Their maneuverability would not be enough to get them out of the way at such
close range. The entire region of shielding in front of the enemy bow was
orange with impacts and the area in front of the gun was red from the
concentrated fire.

“They have to fire now or deal with the
impact.” Wes was leaning over to look at Mike’s screen, his white-knuckled
hands gripping the armrests. “He’s going to have to time it right, and he’s
going to need a hell of a lot of luck to get out of this.”

Wes was proven right as soon as he had
spoken. The orange aura at the bow disappeared as the shield dropped and the
bow started to take damage. There was a brilliant plume of exhaust plasma similar
to before but an even brighter flash occurred at the bow of the enemy ship. The
Achilles
continued in one piece but her entire front half was shrouded
in plasma and debris for a few heartbeats.

The enemy shield came back up, trapping
much of the explosion inside. The entire forward third of the ship lost its
hull plating and the bow of the ship forced its way out through the shield in
several directions as it was split down the middle. The shielding was either
too weak to deal with the intrusion or its generator had been destroyed by the
contained force and it went down for good.

“Fleet wide,” Towers bellowed. “All ships
cease fire. The
Achilles
is danger close. I say again: all ships cease
fire.”

The
Achilles
continued to drift
towards the stricken enemy. “She’s lost her bow thrusters,” Wes yelled down
into the CIC. “She can’t avoid collision.”

Mike watched in horror as Gao’s cruiser
ploughed into the mangled enemy ship. Her full armament, including her four
250mm forward guns, continued their silent fire in a desperate attempt to
soften the ground before impact. The
Achilles
buried the first hundred
feet of her six-hundred-foot hull into the wreck of the enemy ship. A series of
secondary explosions rippled silently through the dorsal surface of the enemy
vessel before she finally settled into sullen quiescence. Vented gas and
drifting debris surrounded the two hulks like a slow-motion storm.

“Fleet wide,” Towers ordered. “All ships,
this is Admiral Towers. Converge on Zulu Alpha One. Concentrate fire on the
rail gun muzzle.”

McCutcheon drifted back up into the hole,
nodding to Mike. “Good job catching Zulu Alpha One’s approach, Mike.” He
grabbed a chair-back to stop himself. “That and the brave souls over on the
Achilles
kept us from getting wiped out. It’s a damn good thing she was built later than
the
Hermann
or her magazine would have been directly behind the 250’s.”
He looked over at Sgt. Davis. “Wes, lend me your screen for a minute.” He
touched the screen and opened his own folder, selecting a file. “I was trying
to collate some data from the boarding parties and I want you to take a look.”

A screen opened showing an isometric
drawing of the enemy ship. The surfaces were transparent. Davis leaned in,
dragging a part of the image to enlarge it. “Shield generator?” He looked back
at the colonel. “This is nowhere close to the impact or even the secondaries
that we saw. Could explain why it’s still up.”

He squinted at the screen. “There’s
something worth looking at.” He turned to Mike. “Can you replay the ten seconds
leading up to the failure of their shields?”

Mike brought it up. They watched as the
massive sections were forced through the shield. “Stop right there.” Wes
reached over and zoomed in on an area near where the bow used to be. One small
beam was sticking through the shield which showed as a yellowish haze for a few
feet around it.

Wes leaned back and looked at the two men.
“I think we can penetrate those shields if we apply a slow steady force.” His
face showed his excitement. “Artillery comes in too fast, but I bet a shuttle
could gently push through just the way this debris did.”

“And if we can squeeze a shuttle inside…”
the colonel ventured with a wolfish smile.

“Then we can take them out without losing
another cruiser,” Wes finished.

“Our last cruiser,” Mike amended as he
fished out a bag of cold coffee. “We’re down to 34% combat effective.”

Tharsis Region, Mars

March 12
^th
, 2028

“P
lease tell me that wasn’t one of ours,” Gus breathed as he watched
the brilliant flash begin to dissipate in the sky above. “Something big just
happened folks. Hopefully it’s in our favor.”

“Gus, you have another hour before the
radiation levels start coming back up again,” Jennifer warned. “Morning is on
its way.” Without a planet wide magnetosphere  or even much of an
atmosphere, solar radiation on the day side was several times the exposure in
Earth orbit. It could spike to dangerous levels without warning.

“I think everyone in there should start to
suit up,” Gus replied, still staring up at the sky but seeing nothing. “There’s
no telling what the plan might be. We might see a rescue operation at any
moment and they may not have a lot of time to sit around and wait for us to
pack.” He felt a shiver run up his spine. He’d been a fighter pilot before
becoming an astronaut and mission commander. He had been nervous when first
learning about the responsibilities that would face him at Vinland Station.

It was one thing to be responsible for a
multi-million-dollar aircraft, it was quite another to find himself appointed
as a military governor, responsible for the safety and conduct of civilian
colonists. Their time in hiding had stretched everyone to their limits. The
shelter had more room per person than they were accustomed to but they had no
work to keep them occupied. Their surveys of the region couldn’t proceed with
hostile patrols searching for them.

He still felt as though he were constantly
being tested, keeping the unbalanced team together. More than half of the
colonists had been killed or taken away during the initial attack and the
remaining group no longer had the carefully-designed balance that it had
started out with. The sooner he could get these people off the planet and hand
them over, the better.

Mars Orbit

March 12
^th
, 2028

“L
ooks like she’s coming straight for us and I’m reading a full charge
on her main armament.” Wes leaned over in his seat to call down into the CIC.
“They don’t seem to see the shuttles as a threat.”

The three shuttles, approaching from both
flanks as well as the dorsal surface of the enemy, were almost there. An orange
glow showed at their bows as they began to push against the shield. Mike drew a
zoom window around the bow of one of the shuttles and watched intently. “No
penetration yet and the fleet is almost too close,” he announced.

“Powering up to thirty percent.” The young
operator at shuttle control sounded far too dispassionate about the situation.
Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of lives depended on the next few minutes and,
given the enemy’s current course, the
Ares
would be the first victim of
failure.

How do you teach that?
Mike wondered.
How do you train someone to disassociate himself
from the threat of imminent death?
He leaned forward, an ancient reflex
that made the image in front of him no clearer. “Wes, do you see that?” he
asked in a low voice, as though speaking aloud would somehow reverse what was
happening.

“The shuttles are pushing through,” Wes
answered in the same quiet voice. “The shuttles are pushing through,” he called
down into the CIC, breaking the spell, but the shuttles still continued in
their progress through the shield. The orange glow closed behind the first one
and then faded to nothing.

“Nothing happened,” Mike exclaimed in
shock.

Wes shook his head as he stared at his
screen. “As long as one of the shuttles is still passing through the shield, we
have an open link with all three.” He rotated his view, picking up a new angle
from the
Arjuna’s
sensor feed. “The last one is almost there, so we…”

His sentence never reached completion. As
the shield closed around the stern of the last shuttle, the signal from the
Ares
was lost. No longer receiving the command to hold their firing circuits open,
the five W87 thermonuclear warheads in each shuttle fired their detonators,
each touching off a 475-kiloton explosion. It was a brutally elegant solution,
using the shield to initiate the blasts as well as contain it against the enemy
hull.

Mike watched in fascinated horror as more
than seven megatons of explosive power completely obscured any view of the ship
within the wedge of destruction. Within a few heartbeats, the blast was set
free and expanded quickly towards them. Though he knew they had ample
protection from radiation due to the ship’s exterior carbon hydrogen matrix,
Mike flinched as the shock wave rushed towards him.

Everyone lurched forward in their seat as
the wave struck. Below, an unfortunate crewman drifted into view and crashed
into the back of the navigator’s seat. The screens faded to a fine gray static.
The ship shuddered as the shock wave moved past and then it grew still. The
screens slowly flickered back to life.

At first, Mike thought the sensors were
still down but he could make out the night-side curve of the planet on the
right edge of the screen. “There’s nothing left,” he said, stunned. “Not even
debris.”

“They rely more on their shields,” Wes said
quietly. “Remember the damage they took when they fired earlier; their hulls
are just there to hold the atmosphere in and keep the crew from falling out.”
He nodded at the screen. “Their shields are strong, too,” he shook his head.
“They held in seven megatons right up until the shield generator was turned to
vapor.”

“The fleet has reported in, sir,” the operations
officer announced. “No serious damage from the nukes. All report ready for
phase two.”

“Very well,” Towers acknowledged with
relief. “Gentlemen,” he announced to the room in general, “we have achieved
orbital superiority.” The tension finally broke as the bridge crew cheered
themselves hoarse.

Wes slapped Mike on the back. “Looks like
we might just get home in one piece after all!”

“My mortgage company will be so glad to
hear it,” Mike answered with a grin.

Tower’s voice reminded them that they still
had work to do. “Ops, line ‘em up. McCutcheon, start passing out ground
targets.”

The colonel came up into the hole. “Mike,
release the ORBAT file for team access.” When it was updated, he turned to Sgt
Davis. ”Wes, run the target allocation macro and send it out.” The targets had
been identified during the flight to Mars. Combat installations such as troop
barracks, armored vehicle parks and aircraft landing zones were considered
priority targets. The macro would assess the combat capabilities of the fleet
from the ORBAT file and assign a list of targets to each remaining ship.

“Macro is on its way.” Wes leaned back in
his seat as he watched the planet come into view on his screen. “How many crew
do you figure were on that thing?”

“It probably had as many people aboard as
this ship does,” McCutcheon answered firmly. “And don’t ever lose sight of
that, Wes. They were waiting for a chance to use that rail gun on us and your
idea saved a lot of our people, myself included.”

“Operations,” Towers called across the CIC.
“Start the recall. I want every available pair of boots brought back from the
captured ships and organized for planetary deployment. I want them ready to
fight before the enemy realizes we own the sky.”

The rumble of mixed gunfire began anew. It
seemed less urgent to Mike, now that there was no danger of incoming rounds.
The heavy artillery was silent. Only the 105mm guns and the 30mm Vulcans had
the specially coated ‘carbon carbon’ tungsten ammunition. A
carbon-fiber-reinforced carbon shell coated each round, giving it the ability
to survive the heat of its high-speed passage through the atmosphere. Each
round took over four minutes to reach the target but struck with incredible
force.

Mike opened a new set of menus on his
screen. The landing sites had already been selected by operations officers
based on a terrain analysis that Mike had prepared. Now, he had to fine-tune
that analysis to include the waypoints that the infantry would use when they
hit the ground. Without those waypoints, the infantry would choose their own
path and, though they would be able to make progress on foot, their small,
wheeled logistical vehicles might not be able to follow.

They could easily get bogged down in the
wrong soil type or simply not have enough room between the boulders of the
rocky terrain. Without those vehicles, it would be extremely difficult to
resupply the troops or evacuate their wounded and the advance, coordinated to
employ speed and aggression, would grind to a halt. It was important to ensure
the various avenues of approach allowed for logistical support and that was
Mike’s main reason for being on this ship.

~*~

M
ärti unlatched his harness and stood up in the back of the Osprey as
the overhead light went green. He reached up just in time to avoid crashing
into an overhead tray that carried cables and wiring along the upper part of
the payload compartment. He had grown quickly accustomed to the gravity of the
enemy ship and had forgotten that there would be none back on the hangar deck
of the
Ares
.

A chorus of angry curses in three languages
proved that many of his men were also caught off guard. Though they operated in
English, they still tended to react in whatever language they spoke at home. He
heard one of the men retching inside of his helmet.
Probably ‘Von’ Gunten,
he
thought. The young man had not earned points with his conscript class by
remarking that someone of his pedigree should be an officer rather than a
grunt.

Gunten (the family had formally given up
the
Von
with the abolition of the nobility in 1919) had most likely been
joking about his status but the men had saddled him with the honorific since
that day. They had also taken endless amusement at his long adjustment to zero
G. The first few weeks after leaving Earth had been hell for him and Märti
suspected that a few hours fighting in regular gravity had set the young
private’s stomach back to square one.

Märti  moved out the open rear hatch
and, after a moment to orient himself, pushed away from the deck towards the
open hatch, fifty feet above that lead to one of the main companionways. The
closest hatches led to the huge dormitories.
No wonder that plague spread so
fast among the troops,
Märti thought as he led his men into the vast
chamber. It was a huge room, two hundred feet square and twenty feet wide. Each
side of the room held a honeycomb of small cubicles.

Three feet square by seven feet deep, each
cubicle gave a soldier room to store his gear, a day’s worth of ammunition in
the event the magazine was hit and a place to sleep. There were just over eight
thousand spaces in this room and there were two other dormitories like it on
the ship. Each room was a giant plague incubator.

“Rearm, recharge your tanks and make sure
you take your pills,” Märti advised his men using the battalion channel. The
pills were mostly prescription strength antacids. A large number of his men had
experienced severe reflux once leaving the gravity of Earth. “We need to be
back on board our lander in twenty minutes.”

He reached his compartment and unlocked the
hatch, swinging it up and into the upper part of his small space. He grabbed a
fresh magazine – he hadn’t done much firing – and plugged his high density tank
umbilical into the air supply panel that sat near the door of each cubicle.
Märti was impressed that the designers had come up with the arrangement. Rather
than thousands of men lining up to rearm and recharge their tanks, they only
had to return to their individual cubicles where they could quickly prepare to
return to the fight.

Their bunks were among the closest to the
hangar deck hatch and it was now proving to be a problem. “
Sohn vonere huere
,”
an unidentified voice erupted angrily. “Some
tubel
has taken most of my
ammunition and left his damned empties behind.” A chorus of angry shouts
flooded the battalion net as others discovered similar liberties taken with
their own supplies.

Siech,
Märti
fumed. They didn’t have time to go to the magazine. He fell back on the
time-honored code of the soldier: if someone steals your kit, steal someone
else’s. “Those who are missing ammunition, find a cubicle that still has some
and take it.” He heard a few dark chuckles over the net. “I will be checking
that each man has a full load before he gets on the lander so open your magazine
pouches at the boarding line.”

His tank charged, he floated over to where
Sgt Goodpaster and his mortar crew were billeted. The man cranked off a
floating salute at his major before grinning. “We have all of our gear and
ammunition for the
stovepipe
, sir.” He looked off into the distance
where one of his men was drifting back with six magazines. “Our small arms
ammunition is another story.”