Virtues of War (24 page)

“Alpha-Three, Alpha-One,” she shouted between bursts, “can you see me?”

Amidst the thunder she barely heard his reply.
“I’m at your nine o’clock! Get down!”

Katja tried to duck, but in the zero-g only rolled into a ball. Bullets pinged off her helmet and left her ears ringing. She fired again. The rounds smashed into the deck beneath her feet as the shockwave knocked her upward into the deckhead. A bullet cracked off her faceplate. A tiny, hairline fracture split into her vision.

With sudden clarity, she saw her attackers. Three armored figures hunched on the far side of what she realized must be the bridge. Hernandez fired at them from his covered position below and to the left, but his shots didn’t strike home.

Katja gripped the lower barrel of her rifle and launched two grenades. They lobbed down on the enemy and exploded with the power of thirty rounds each. Body parts and strips of machinery flew in all directions.

Then a deathly quiet descended. Katja pushed off from the deckhead and floated down. Hernandez emerged from cover and swept through the remains of the bridge. Twice the size of
Normandy
’s, it had no doubt been a monument to technological prowess.

Now it was scrap.

Katja shut the door behind her and locked it, ensuring calm for a few moments. From one of her combat pouches she retrieved a small tube of sealant and began applying it to the fracture in her faceplate.

“Bravo-One, Alpha-One—bridge secure,” she reported. Chang responded after several moments, with little of his usual calm.

“Bravo-One roger! Heavy fire in the engine room! Bravo-Two is down!”

Squad Leader Lu Chen. That was a blow.

“Alpha-One roger. Break. Alpha-Two, Alpha-One—status.” Even through the radio Katja could hear the violence in the background.

“Two batteries taken. We’re under heavy fire at number three!”

Two batteries, the bridge, and a whole lot of internal damage. Even if it wasn’t destroyed, this battle cruiser was out of the fight.

“All units this is Alpha-One. Break away! Break away!”

“Bravo-One roger!”

“This is Alpha-Two—we’re pinned down. Over!”

Katja motioned to Hernandez. “This is Alpha-One. We’re on the way!”

Katja unlocked the bridge door and threw it open. Hernandez burst through, firing automatically. Unopposed, they pushed their way back down the corridor to the ladder. Hernandez went down head first to clear the deck below. Katja was right behind, feet first, to cover the rear.

The lights went out. Emergency lights flickered on moments later. Hernandez hesitated at the foot of the ladder, unsure which direction to go. Katja pushed forward, motioning for him to follow. Ahead, she could see the charred, crumpled bulkhead of what had been one of the missile batteries. She pushed past, her helmet protecting her from the thick, black smoke that filled most of the passageway. Four frames further on, a similar scene awaited her. There was little smoke, however, and what remained was being pulled ominously toward the outer hull. Uncontained breach. The ship was losing air.

She saw the ladder of the main access route leading down. She stopped and motioned Hernandez to do likewise.

The thick material of the deck reduced the clarity of her quantum-flux view, but she could clearly see four shapes, crouched in combat firing positions, leaning into and out from doorways. The movement of the weapons told Katja that the rounds they were firing were heavy-caliber—very capable of piercing armored spacesuits. The shooters were coordinated to ensure that at least one of them was firing while the others ducked back under cover.

She motioned for Hernandez to follow her back along the passageway from where they came. Peering down, she saw Assad and Jackson, both hunkered inside a damage-control alcove. She moved further back along the passageway, until the quantum-flux revealed the real source of danger to her troopers below. Around a corner and protected by covering fire, the Centauris were quickly assembling the major components of an anti-personnel robot. Katja wasn’t sure they had enough grenades to take it down.

She pushed off the deck to place herself flat against the deckhead above. Hernandez did likewise, aiming his underslung grenade launcher at the deck.

“Alpha-Two, Alpha-One—we’re taking out the threat astern of your position!”

“Alpha-Two!”

Katja and Hernandez fired. Their grenades struck the deck with twin explosions. Particles flew in all directions and a shockwave rippled away both fore and aft. Even before the debris cleared they fired again, this time into the group below.

Hernandez grabbed Katja and threw her backward away from the hole. A heartbeat later rockets swirled out of the smoke and ripped through his armored body. The APR was functional and loose. Katja yanked herself away from the hole, hearing slugs thud into the deckhead behind her feet. She scrambled along the top of the corridor like a spider.

“Alpha-Two—APR! APR! Take the shooters forward of you with grenades, and get the fuck out!”

Explosions from the main access ladder ahead of her indicated the compliance with her orders. She scrambled along as fast as her arms could pull, ignoring the swiftly moving smoke that flowed up the passageway. She gave a mighty yank, rolled free in the air and activated her quantum-flux.

The four Centauri shooters were right below her. Two were down, two were firing. She launched another grenade at the deck, and watched with satisfaction as they were distracted by the ceiling collapsing around them. More grenades struck them from below, and as Katja watched her two troopers emerged through the quantum haze.

“Alpha-Two, I’m right above you. Blast up through the hole in the deckhead and join me here!”

She moved to the side and watched Assad and Jackson point upward to fire their grenades. Then both their bodies crumpled and jittered as APR rockets tore through them. She gasped in shock, and shut off her quantum-flux.

“Alpha-One, Bravo-One—Bravo Team embarked!”
Chang’s voice was distant in her ears.
“Request ETA Alpha Team!”

Smoke billowed up through the hole, and flowed past.

“Alpha-One, Bravo-One—the landing zone is under fire. Request ETA!”

Katja checked her ammo and her suit. She’d lost at least four troopers. That was enough.

“Bravo-One, Alpha-One. Alpha Team is dead. I’m cut off. Break away!”

“What’s your position? We’ll clear you a path!”

“Four decks and two hundred meters. Don’t argue! Break away now!”

There was a pause.

“Bravo-One, roger!”

Katja could hear shouting on the deck below her. There wasn’t much time. She looked at the flow of smoke into the missile battery and saw her escape route.

One grenade blasted a new door for her, into the compartment. She surveyed the destroyed equipment and human remains, noting the red flashing air pressure gauges on every bulkhead. She pushed herself over to the inside of the ship’s hull, watching the flow of smoke carefully to find the breach. It took nearly a minute to locate the centimeters-long crack.

Katja peeked out and didn’t see the bright surface of Laika, which was good news. If she was going to blast her way out of a spaceship, she did not want to be blasted in the direction of a planetary gravity well.

More shouts caught her attention, and she heard voices moving past in the passageway outside. Bracing herself against a broken support strut, she aimed her rifle at the tiny breach.

She fired two grenades. The hull exploded outward and she was swept up in the torrent of escaping air. Her body slammed against the edge of the hull and spun out of control. She saw stars, and then nothing.

E
ven in zero-g it hurt to move. Every time Jack shifted in his seat he seemed to bump something, which sent shivers of pain through his body.

One glance in the mirror had revealed that he looked even worse than he felt. The meds he was on had been sent over from
Normandy
and were usually reserved for use planetside. Jack didn’t know a lot about Astral medicine, but he’d heard rumors that Corps drugs could keep troopers fighting even after they’d lost any two of their four limbs. Looking down at his suited body, he was pleased that limb-loss hadn’t been a part of his ordeal.

But he wished that his drugs could dull the pain just a little bit more.

After the Centauri ambush at Laika the EF had gone to wartime standards, which brought an end to such luxuries as light duties or recovery time. Jack was a pilot. Terra needed pilots in this instant war. So Jack was drugged up, kept alert, and put in the cockpit.

He altered course to port, sticking with his standard search pattern, doing a quick check of visual, flight controls, and hunt controls. No telling if any Centauri stealth ships still lurked here in low Laikan orbit, and Terra had learned all too suddenly the danger of underestimating its oldest and largest colony.

The massive orb of Anubis filled half the sky overhead, a crescent of brilliant cloud bands haloing the shadow of the night side. It was dawn on the surface of Laika below, although at Jack’s altitude Sirius had risen more than an hour ago.

Ahead to port, Jack glanced briefly at the broken remains of the destroyer
Kiev
hanging at an unnatural angle in her final, decaying orbit. Earlier Hawk flights had already searched the dead ship and salvaged what they could—Jack was glad to have missed that duty. Beyond
Kiev
, half of the cruiser
Admiral Tojo
was slowly tumbling end over end. These two hulks offered visible evidence of Terran losses, but they weren’t the only casualties.

The invasion ships
Gallipoli
and
Sicily
had both been destroyed by stealth attacks—
Gallipoli
with the brigadier on board,
Sicily
with the admiral—and nothing remained of either vessel. The carrier
Athena
had met a similar fate before she could break orbit.
Lepanto
and
Partisan
had collided and burned up together in the atmosphere, and
Rapier
had gone down in flames.

Of all the losses, it was the little fast-attack craft that affected him the most. Apparently half the crew had made it out alive, led by Breeze as the only surviving officer. He was relieved to know that she was alive, but he still felt a real pang of loss.
Rapier
’s captain had seemed a real upstanding guy. And Jack clearly remembered seeing the face of the blonde strike officer during his rescue on Cerberus.

Even in the madness of the evacuation Jack could remember as she led the
Kristiansand
survivors out into the street, got them to their escape pods, and then rejoined the battle. His last image was of her disappearing into the dust and smoke, firing her assault rifle.

Jack owed his life to her.

But the time for remorse was later—he still had a job to do. The Centauri forces had scattered as quickly as they had attacked, and the EF was hunkered down in open space above the Anubian ecliptic. They would be moving into deep space soon, but until then pilots like Jack had to search the battlefield for anything of tactical value.

Laikan traffic had been routed elsewhere by the authorities, who were desperately trying to distance themselves as far as possible from the attack. Jack’s display revealed the two pairs of star fighters that were maintaining combat patrol around the battlefield, as well as the two Hawks on ASW duty.

There were still echoes in the Bulk of the gravimetric attacks conducted by both sides, and he wondered idly which knuckles had been Terran capital ships, and which had been Centauri stealth ships. There was grim satisfaction in the knowledge that four enemy vessels had been scattered versus only three friendlies, but hull counts didn’t always add up to victory. The loss of a carrier was a serious blow, even though some of her star fighters had made it safely to
Artemis
after the battle. The loss of two invasion ships, however—and with them nearly half of the Expeditionary Force’s entire brigade—had seriously undermined Terra’s ability to wage war in Sirius.

With the admiral and the brigadier dead, lots of people weren’t even sure who was in command.

The biggest Centauri hulk loomed ahead, a battle cruiser. Its once-gleaming hull was blackened and charred by multiple impacts, but it was surprisingly intact. Unlike the smashed remains of
Kiev
and
Admiral Tojo
, this enemy ship appeared to have weathered the onslaught with fortitude. There were no gaping holes in the hull, no fatal impacts that had forced its crew to abandon ship. A smaller Centauri combatant had been destroyed in the battle—its debris cloud was fairly easy to track—and he wondered why the bigger ship hadn’t suffered the same fate.

Closer to the dead battle cruiser he maneuvered carefully to avoid the thickening debris cloud. Some recognizable pieces belonged to Terran star fighters, but most of the odd scraps here and there were just twisted, tortured hunks of metal and plastic. Jack sighed, and shifted uncomfortably in his seat to reach for his water bulb.

Movement flickered at the edge of his vision. There was an object tumbling slowly through space off the port bow and getting close. The object was dark, but with each rotation one end of it flashed dully in the Sirian sunlight. Curious, he dropped his visor and tapped the visual lock button on the side of his helmet. A red square appeared on the inside of the visor, marking the bearing and relaying the information to the Hawk’s computer.

He activated the viewer and zoomed in for a better look.

It was a body, wearing a black, bulky spacesuit. The dull flash was the faceplate catching the sunlight. Jack watched for a moment and wondered idly why the Centauris had such dark suits and such shiny ships.

Then he noticed the assault rifle tethered to the suit’s waist.

His eyes went wide.

Jack hauled the stick over to port. Moments later he slowed to match the velocity of the figure, gauging visually as it approached. He tapped at his thrusters, delicately maneuvering while keeping safely clear. Soon the figure was hovering next to the Hawk, still turning slowly end over end.