New Hope spaceport, Salvation planet
With no lander movements scheduled, it had been a long night. Why would there be? Salvation was not exactly humanspace’s most popular destination. That left the controller on duty at New Hope spaceport with little more to occupy his time than counting off the minutes to the end of his shift while drinking more coffee than was good for him. Moodily, the man stared out of the plasglass window: Sprawled out in front of him was New Hope spaceport’s runway, a long strip of laser-fused rock traced out of a rain-drenched night by thin lines of lights, the wind chasing silver-slashed pools of water across its milled antiskid surface. He yawned as another squall hurled rain at the windows. Tonight’s storm was an unmistakable reminder that hurricane season was on its way. Not that anyone needed any prompting: Thanks to Salvation’s eccentric orbit, its seasons ran like clockwork.
He yawned again. Hurricane season was a massive pain in the ass; he hated it. Spawned by fast-warming seas, huge storms ripped across the planet’s ocean, driving the inhabitants underground into the safety of their bunkers. When one storm exhausted itself, the next arrived, a relentless procession of energy and raw power that stopped only when Salvation passed perihelion and started to open out from its sun. It would not be long. Hurricane Alex, the first of the year, was developing nicely on the far side of the planet. Betsy, Charlie, Deanne, and all the rest would follow when what passed for summer on Salvation arrived, a nightmare of raging winds, driving rain, and mountainous seas. So he did what he always did when hurricane season threatened: wondered why he did not move to a more congenial planet. The only people who enjoyed hurricane season were the extreme sailors, suicidal idiots whose idea of fun was surfing down mountainous waves in a ceramfiber yacht; he had tried it-once-and it had taken him weeks to recover.
Wearily, the duty controller rubbed eyes gritty from too little sleep and too much caffeine. Kraa, he was tired.
Without warning, the holovid screen burst into light to reveal Salvation’s president framed by the flashing red lights reserved for the imminent arrival of a category 7 superstorm, and suddenly he was not tired anymore. What the hell? he said to himself. It was way too early for a Cat-7. Last time he had checked, Alex was a humble Cat-2 storm half a world away.
“Citizens,” the president said. “This is a matter of the utmost urgency. I have just been informed by the Federated Worlds embassy that a Hammer invasion fleet is inbound. An attack on Salvation is imminent. Help is on its way, but it may not be here in time to stop them. I fear the Hammer’s target is those of you who follow the Faith of Kraa. All of you, irrespective of religion, return home, batten down your houses, and send your families into the storm bunkers. When they are safe, those of you who wish to fight-which I hope is everyone able to carry a gun-report to your neighborhood emergency station with whatever weapons you have. Team leaders will have instructions for you. Don’t wait. Do it now. I will issue updates on voicecomm channel 54 when we receive more information. May God and Kraa watch over us. Thank you.”
The duty controller did not hesitate. Slapping a switch to plunge the spaceport into darkness, he shut it down and raced out of the control center, an initial frisson of fear buried by fast-mounting rage. The Hammers, all arrogance and hubris, had no fucking idea what they were walking into; if they imagined the people of Salvation were going to lie down and wait to be kicked to death by DocSec, they were idiots. “Kraa damn them all,” he swore, his anger replaced by an ice-cold determination to send every last Doc-Sec trooper to hell.
One hundred fifty thousand kilometers out from Salvation, space was torn apart as ship after ship dropped into normalspace, bubbles of ultraviolet racing away to announce their arrival. Aboard the flagship of the Hammer task force, Rear Admiral Tu’ivakano allowed himself to relax a fraction while the threat plot crystallized. The two light patrol ships that constituted the Salvation Fleet’s entire order of battle wasted no time in running up the white flag, a single salvo of obsolete antistarship missiles the sum total of their defiance. More significantly, there were no damned Feds in Salvation nearspace.
The task force turned end for end and decelerated hard to drop into orbit around Salvation. Tu’ivakano allowed himself to relax a touch more. Things were going according to plan. By Kraa, he would be glad to see the last of Salvation. Hanging around so deep inside the Fed’s sphere of influence was something he did not enjoy.
With a thump, the flagship’s main engines shut off. With well-practiced efficiency, the two planetary assault ships following Tu’ivakano’s cruisers into orbit disgorged assault landers in a steady stream, their blunt-nosed armored shapes forming up into a loose cloud.
Abruptly the admiral found out why hanging around in Fed space might not be such a good idea.
“Sir,” Tu’ivakano’s chief of staff called, his voice tense, “Positive gravitronics intercept. Estimated drop bearing Red 70 Up 3, stand by range. Multiple vessels, designated hostile task group Foxtrot-1. Gravity wave pattern suggests pinchspace transition imminent.”
“Roger.”
“Shit,” the admiral murmured to himself. Feds, must be. Tu’ivakano forced himself to say nothing more. His chief of staff was a competent and combat-tested spacer; he and his captains knew how to deal with the incoming Fed counterattack without any prompting from him. And Tu’ivakano’s staff did know what they were doing: Ponderously, the cruisers in the task group turned to face the threat, Hammer missiles already driving away hard to meet the incoming Fed ships.
“Admiral. Drop datum confirmed. Range 15,000 kilometers. Stand by, rail-gun salvo … now!”
With a solid crunch, Tu’ivakano’s flagship unloaded a full rail-gun salvo at the Feds. That’ll make their eyes water, he said to himself, eyes locked on the command holovid, the green lines of missile and rail-gun salvos projected across the gap to intersect the drop datum, a scarlet lozenge tagged with the identity of the incoming ships: Foxtrot-1.
“Get the landers moving,” Tu’ivakano said. “Don’t wait. The Feds will slice them up.”
“Yes, sir,” the chief of staff replied.
Main engines fired; savage deceleration dropped the landers carrying the ground attack force down Salvation’s gravity well like bricks. Tu’ivakano was happy to see them on their way. The Feds would ignore the capital ships in favor of the landers; the sooner they dropped dirtside with their precious cargoes of marines, the better.
“Foxtrot-1 is dropping, sir. Datum is confirmed. Ten seconds to rail-gun impact.”
Tu’ivakano held his breath, uttering a silent prayer that his ships had calculated their rail-gun swarm geometry right. “Sons of bitches,” he hissed. They hadn’t. The swarm sliced right through the drop datum, but the Fed ships were too widely dispersed, a single impact on the bows of the leading ship-Damishqui, a heavy cruiser-the only payback for all that effort. But a dispersed formation was vulnerable to missile attack, and barely seconds later, Hammer missiles accelerated to full speed, the Fed ships disappearing behind Krachov shrouds even as they dumped their own missiles into space to take the attack back to the Hammers.
It was chaos. As Tu’ivakano expected, the incoming Feds ignored his ships, a decision that signed their own death warrants. Going to full power, their missiles chased after landers plunging in desperation for the safety of the planet. Only the Fed’s rail guns-useless against small, fast-moving landers-targeted the Hammer task group; with a time of flight of only seconds, the Hammer ships were forced to soak up the rail-gun swarms, the slugs’ enormous kinetic energy transformed into enough heat to blow huge craters in the ships’ bows. Tu’ivakano’s body was thrown violently from side to side as his flagship struggled to absorb the shock; his head snapped forward onto his helmet so hard that his eyes watered in pain.
Then the Fed’s first salvo was over. Tu’ivakano, blinking tears out of his eyes, took stock, mentally tallying losses and gains. His lander losses, bad though they were, were nowhere near enough to make him quit and run for home. Only two of his ships-light escorts-had suffered missionabort damage, but both had survived; hulls intact, their part in this operation was over. The rest of his task force was still very much in the fight.
That was more than could be said for the Feds. He shook his head: They might be the enemy, and by Kraa he hated the Feds and all they stood for, but he admired their insane bravery. With only a handful of ships, they were no match for his cruisers. His first missile salvo ripped the guts out of three heavy patrol ships and two heavy scouts, uncontained fusion plants blowing them into balls of white-hot gas in a matter of seconds, their lifepods running away in all directions.
One more salvo was enough to destroy the rest of the Feds: a carefully crafted attack that saw missiles and rail-gun swarms arrive on target within seconds of each other, a blizzard of close-in defensive fire marking the Fed ships’ frantic attempts to keep death at arm’s length. One by one, the Fed ships died, fast-expanding spheres of hot gas and orange-strobed lifepods the only things left to show they had ever existed.
Tu’ivakano grunted his approval and detached four of his heavy patrol ships to go round up the Fed lifepods. So far, the operation was textbook perfect, though he knew he had been damned lucky the Fed task force had been so understrength. He switched the command holovid back to track the lander assault. In an incandescent blaze of fireworks, the landers smashed into the upper atmosphere, the controlled violence of ballistic reentry spawning hundreds of white flares heading into the clouds of rolling gray murk that covered the planet.
Tu’ivakano switched the holovid screen to show a schematic of Salvation overlaid with lander icons. Protected by a screen of heavy ground attack landers, the marines rode their craft down until, with a precision that impressed Tu’ivakano, the attack opened out. A handful of landers headed directly for the spaceport; the rest dropped to establish a secure perimeter around the city of New Hope. Tu’ivakano switched the holovid to take the feed from the ground assault commander’s lander, watching spellbound as it burst through the clouds into the leaden predawn murk. The long runway of Salvation’s spaceport opened out in front of the lander’s nose. Twin streams of depleted-uranium rounds from belly-mounted cannons ripped the spaceport’s squat ceramcrete buildings into thousands of angry fragments, the ground on either side of the runway disappearing behind boiling clouds of mud and dirt thrown up by suppressive fire from the ground attack landers escorting the assault stream.
Tu’ivakano watched the lander’s nose go up sharply, the image trembling as belly thrusters killed its forward momentum. The nose dropped, and the lander hit the runway with a crunching thud, dropped some more, and came to a shuddering halt. The ground around it filled with the ephemeral shapes of chromaflaged marines running into position, light armor already fanning out to protect the assault.
On schedule, the assault commander’s head and shoulders appeared on Tu’ivakano’s personal holovid screen.
“Admiral Tu’ivakano, sir. Pleased to report that the spaceport and perimeter around New Hope are secure.”
“Thank you, General. We’ll start down-shuttling DocSec.”
“That would be good, sir,” the marine said, his mouth twisting into a momentary grimace of revulsion.
Tu’ivakano ignored it; he shared the marine general’s opinion of DocSec. Besides, he was pleased with the way things were going. Apart from the Feds’ forlorn hope, the initial phases of the operation were running according to plan. Now the marines had to secure the streets and key buildings of New Hope. When that was done, it would be up to DocSec to go house to house rounding up the heretics and bundling them onto the landers. Knowing what lay in store for the Salvationists once DocSec’s black-jumpsuited troopers laid their hands on them made Tu’ivakano uncomfortable. DocSec were the scum of the earth, and their shock brigades were the worst of a sadistic bunch.
He would hate to be a Kraa-worshipping Salvationist.
Tu’ivakano’s face flushed livid with anger. “What do you mean the operation is stalled? Stalled? How can that be? These Kraa-damned Salvationists are nothing, nothing. They’re only a bunch of fucking civilians, for Kraa’s sake. They don’t even have an army,” he shouted, struggling to control himself, white flecks of spittle collecting in the corner of his mouth. “How can the attack be stalled?”
The assault commander’s face betrayed him; he was angry, frustrated, and embarrassed, all at the same time. “Well, sir,” he said, “yes, they are only civilians, but they are civilians with nothing to lose, they are well armed, they understand urban combat, they know how to fight, and their damn houses are the closest things to bunkers I’ve ever seen. No, Kraa damn it! They are bunkers. Every one is a steel-reinforced ceramcrete fortress, mostly underground, with small windows protected by plasteel shutters, all interconnected by a tunnel network with access to the streets. I’ve never seen anything like it, and needless to say, we are having to take them the hard way, meter by meter, house by house.”
“Wait, General,” Tu’ivakano said, puzzled. “That makes no sense. Bunkers for houses? Who’d want to live in a ceramcrete bunker?”
“It’s simple, sir, not that anyone considered it important enough to include in the intelligence briefings. The few prisoners we have tell us that they have storms here like nothing you’ve ever seen, wind gusting 350 kilometers an hour. The buildings have to be tough to survive. Problem is we didn’t know that.”
“Kraa damn it! Why? Why didn’t we know? What’s the point of an intelligence briefing that misses something this important?”
“I wondered the same thing, sir.”
“Have you considered sending in the ground attack landers?”
“We tried that, sir. Doesn’t help. Landers just make our job harder. Everything above the ground gets reduced to rubble, and the minute the marines go in, the heretics pop up out of their basements like nothing’s happened and start shooting again.”
“Kraa!” Tu’ivakano said as the seriousness of the problem sank in. Thin tendrils of fear twisted their way through his body as he contemplated what would happen to him if he failed to carry off what was supposed to be a simple, fast in-and-out operation. “Armor?”
“Armor’s no better than landers. Ceramcrete blockhouses and armor don’t go well together. We end up having to blast our way through, which means more collapsed houses, more piles of ceramcrete rubble, and even more ambush sites. We’ll push on, sir. It’s all we can do.”
Tu’ivakano nodded. “Understood. But remember, we have less than thirty-six hours to wrap this up. Finished or not, that’s when we’re leaving. I don’t think the Fed attack this morning was an accident. Some of my staff think our operational security has been blown, in which case more Feds will be on their way.”
“We’re doing our best, sir.”
“I hope so. For both our sakes, I hope so. Kraa, I wish we were able to nuke the damn place. That would solve the heretic problem once and for all.”
The assault commander said nothing. Tempting though the idea was, Tu’ivakano knew that even the Hammers would not stoop that low.