Beyond The Frontier Page 12

  “Punch? Ah! Engaging, Commander. Three-two-one. Phoenix jumping.”

  Phoenix disappeared in a manner similar to being sucked into a hole in space. And almost instantly she re-appeared fifty thousand kilometers to starboard of the two-ship enemy formation.

  Railgun bursts streamed down range and tore into the first ship, followed by havoc missiles obliterating its exposed stern. The ORA ship listed to port and explosions rippled along its superstructure.

  A satisfying first volley. “Get on the other one, XO.”

  “On it, Commander.”

  The surviving ORA ship now burned away hard. It seemed its captain was caught between a moment of fight or flight. Phoenix passed its stern.

  Aaron was hesitant to use any more precious havocs, but he couldn’t be sure how long they could jam the enemy comms. And he didn’t want to be engaging ORA reinforcements while his crew was planet-side.

  “Full braking power, XO. Maintain our present vector, turn us into that ship’s escape vector.”

  They were well within the range of the plasma turrets on these ORA ships—it fired, Ayres seemed to anticipate it and triggered a short burst from dorsal thrusters, pushing Phoenix ventral relative to the hostile. The first barrage missed.

  “He’s locked in,” Aaron said, keeping them up to date on his targeting.

  At this distance, and with the ORA ship content to burn away without evading, Aaron had an easy time plotting a firing solution for the weapons located in the bow of Phoenix.

  A volley of fusion torpedoes left a trail as they ignited space dust and slammed into the ORA ship’s aft section. The ship limped along trailing bits and pieces of hull and organics. The doomed ship struck back with a pitiful parting shot from its plasma turrets. Phoenix shook hard.

  Herman’s voice was shaky. “No damage. Polarized armor is sturdy.”

  “It rattled more than anything, Lieutenant,” Ayres told him.

  A hundred tungsten slugs from Phoenix’s railguns silenced the ORA ship, it spun and drifted away on its last vector, opened up to space through and through, totally void of atmosphere.

  Lingering fires quickly died away and many smaller explosions were only brief flashes without oxygen to sustain the flames.

  Aaron signaled the waiting Hammerhead. “Ensign, the barn is open. Launch!”

  The ensign acknowledged.

  Aaron had already triggered the ship’s hangar bay doors. He tracked Hammerhead on his tactical board as it emerged.

  During the battle Phoenix had deployed a scattering of countermeasures. It wouldn’t take long for military-grade sensor array to sort through it, but they didn’t need long.

  The battle served two purposes. Get past the picket ships and mask the insertion team.

  Hammerhead accelerated hard for the surface, burning a streak across the black and breaching the upper atmosphere. Just below the stratosphere two drop pods launched. A dummy and one with the team and their equipment.

  Even if the ORA penetrated the sensor jamming, the Intelligence Bureau designed the pod with stealth as their primary objective for the recon marines.

  In the chaos of two attacking ships and noise from the excessive radiation, it would be a miracle to detect an indiscreet object with no emissions, which used old school tech to slow its descent.

  ***

  Yuri sat upright. Finally it was show time. The Commander gave the signal.

  “—the barn is open. Launch!”

  With that, Yuri flipped the throttle and surged out of the hangar bay on a steep orbital insertion angle towards the planet.

  He keyed open the comms to the others on the cargo deck. “Hang on! This will get fun when we hit the outer atmosphere.”

  The auxiliary craft shook, streaming through the first two stages of entry and into the stratosphere. The tactical board quickly populated with targets of opportunity.

  First, the pathetic ground defenses surrounding the target structure, then whatever detection systems on the surface the computer could identify.

  The ORA bastards couldn’t have been operating here long. Similar to the wormhole, other than the large amount of ships, they didn’t have much of a physical presence. Which could only mean their expedition near the wormhole was very recent.

  “Good luck gentlemen. I’ll see you when I see you.”

  Yuri flipped the switch and the drop craft deployed.

  He then headed for the first missile emplacements. They hadn’t yet overcome the emission noise Phoenix put out. Good.

  He strafed them with railguns and pulled away for another pass.

  Nothing like flying in an atmosphere!

  Warning alarms blared.

  Damn. He had counted . . . what was it the Commander would say when you . . . oh yeah chickens. He’d counted his chickens before they hatched. Missiles rocketed towards Hammerhead.

  The point defense would handle those no problem.

  The first explosion boosted his confidence. One of twelve missiles down. He banked hard to port and several seconds later the missiles blew by and began their turn.

  More alarms—another launch from the surface.

  Soon the missiles would have enough and would communicate amongst themselves to foil his evasive maneuvers. Banking hard from a pursuing cloud of missiles would only reveal another cluster which had maneuvered ahead to intercept.

  He released as much electronic noise towards the flanking missiles as he could. They passed harmlessly by but he wouldn’t be able to do that again. While he dodged, weaved and confused, it gave the point defense more time to shoot them down.

  This place had to have a power source. No mobile planet-side base could power military grade weapons systems without an equivalent power source nearby.

  Finally, the computer located it through the enemy’s own efforts to hide it. It’s what he’d been hoping to neutralize before he was forced to disengage.

  Several plasma cannons opened up. Not easy to avoid those. The ionized plasma blasts slammed into Hammerhead. Several nearby missiles decided they weren’t going to get any closer and detonated. The shaped charges exploded only a few dozens of meters away.

  He turned into the power source. It’s so close. The missiles had corralled him now. He wasn’t getting out of this. He would make sure the team on the ground had a fighting chance in case they encountered a hardened structure they couldn’t enter without heavy weapons.

  He held his course.

  His final railgun burst emptied the magazines and destroyed the power source. Several explosions bobbed the craft in several directions at once. He didn’t have any tungsten slugs left. Not a lot of room on the small craft for munitions. Phoenix wouldn’t even have enough to spare him any reloads.

  The hostile missiles closed for the final intercept, soon they would fire a final burn to max out their speed and mitigate any sudden evasive on his part.

  They never reached.

  The approaching missiles from all around vanished in fireballs, the concussive blasts rocking the small craft.

  The comm blared.

  “Flaps.” It was the Commander. “We won’t be able to cover you any longer. We’re jumping to engage the other two vessels, disengage and return to the ship. No more crazy stunts.”

  “One damn minute, Commander. I was busy. Disengaging and returning to Phoenix.”

  A glance at his board told him the impending missiles of his doom were gone. Phoenix obliterated them from orbit with a precise barrage. He’d done all he could for the team.

  He accelerated into the stratosphere and into orbit.

  ***

  Lee gripped his harness. His fingers felt numb.

  He did another quick test and adjust of his armor’s command functions. He could control the HUD and the activation of auxiliary suit functions using eye movement and blinks.

  His hand rested on his new projectile sidearm. He’d based the new design on rail-fired weapons. It was powerful enough to penetrate armor. The only issue was
the barrel overheated after eight shots.

  On his left hip, he carried the same gas powered grappler he’d “borrowed” from a rescue worker on Atlas. He never went anywhere without it.

  “Good luck gentlemen. I’ll see you when I see you!” Flaps said.

  With that their insertion pod launched from the access bay of Hammerhead and plummeted towards the ground at unsafe speeds.

  The kind of unsafe for anyone who desired to live long and prosper.

  Sergeant Dawes clearly wasn’t bothered. The marine looked around with wild eyes. “Oh yeah! Faster!”

  The vibration was unbearable. Lee could dampen the sound to his ears all he wanted, but he couldn’t dampen the vibrations transmitted through the craft into his armor.

  “Sergeant! We can’t go faster, there’s no propulsion. We’re free falling!”

  The marine grinned. “I know! Isn’t it great?!”

  Lee twisted his mouth into a frown. Both corporals on either side of Dawes were grinning the same way. Lee leaned his head back and squeezed his eyes shut. This atmosphere diving thing isn’t for me. He’d prefer to face an army of soldiers in a duel to the death.

  “We’re coming up on the drop zone,” Corporal Chen said, monitoring his handheld device.

  “Hold until the last threshold,” Sergeant Dawes said.

  Lee’s eyes shot open. “Sergeant, I don’t want to be a puddle of mush on some forsaken tundra planet.”

  “No worries, Lieutenant.”

  Lee shook his head. No worries? You should be worried!

  The altitude to the drop-zone plummeted. Three parachutes would arrest their descent. Lee wasn’t sure all the drama was necessary. There’s no way anyone could detect this obscure pod through the mayhem in orbit. Not judging by what they’d learned so far of the infrastructure deployed on the planet below. That and Flaps’ theatrics above. Still the marine was intent on pushing this drop to the limit.

  The pod was tearing itself apart! Lee swallowed. “Sergeant…”

  “Stand by.”

  The readout on Lee’s heads up display showed thirty thousand. Twenty five thousand—the numbers like seconds ticking to his death. After everything he’d been through, all that might be left of him is mush.

  Twenty-thousand meters.

  “Anytime now, Sergeant!”

  Corporal Ubu’s finger hovered above the button to deploy the arresting descent mechanism.

  “Hold . . . hold!” Dawes replied.

  Ten-thousand meters. Five-thousand meters. One-thousand meters.

  “Sergeant!”

  “Deploy braking chute!”

  The corporal stabbed the button and several chutes shot away from the insertion pod, connected to it with spider silk.

  Lee breathed. How long had he not been breathing? He shook his head looking at the sergeant.

  “I think that was a record,” Dawes said to Ubu.

  “I do believe so, Sergeant.” The corporal nodded.

  The insertion pod hit the ground with a bang. Immediately, angled legs deployed to keep it up right. Lee unclasped his harness and stood. Never again. Not even the Commander could make him do another drop with Sergeant Dawes anytime soon.

  He had the sneaky feeling marines did these things for fun in their spare time. If Flaps had been here, he no doubt would have enjoyed it. Good thing he wasn’t. The scrawny little runt would never let Lee live it down.

  Chen grabbed a deployable turret and Lee grabbed the deployable barrier. Never knew when an old school deployable form of cover might come in handy. Dawes was the point man. He carried the recon-drones. The base was ten kilometers away. A paltry sprint.

  Lee couldn’t shake a terrible, nagging thought at the back of his mind. The large sensor contact they’d detected hounded his thoughts. Although its last known vector took it away from Indri, who knows what exotic technology it might possess. It might arrive in orbit using some sort of quantum jump or other theoretical travel mechanic.

  All he knew was he didn’t want to be on Indri-3 if or when it arrived.

  Chapter 23 – Good Odds for Any Marine

  “We’ll call that ballsy pilot down on top of us and improvise” – Sergeant Randall Dawes

  Main Bridge

  Phoenix

  “One damn minute, Commander. I was busy. Disengaging and returning to Phoenix.”

  One damn minute? Aaron was going to have to inform Flaps that swearing while addressing ranking officers wasn’t proper use of the colorful metaphors he’d adopted lately.

  The other two ships came around the curvature of the planet. Aaron wasn’t waiting. The micro-jump capacitors were charged.

  “Engage,” he ordered.

  “Jumping, three-two-one. Phoenix jumping.”

  This time Phoenix emerged from the micro-jump directly ahead of the ships.

  “I’m locking on,” Aaron said.

  The railguns tore into the first target. He still had the biting feeling he’d need the havocs in the near future and decided to conserve them. The target aligned directly for Phoenix and accelerated hard.

  “Is he trying to ram us?” Herman asked.

  Aaron worked and re-worked firing solutions aided by the tactical computer. “I don’t know, but he’s cutting off our angle of attack on the other vessel.”

  They were close now. The enemy plasma cannons struck Phoenix.

  Herman was right. The ORA vessel continued to accelerate. The enemy captain’s intent was clear. Aaron had two choices, brake and thrust to one side. Or go all in.

  “XO, ahead full. Stand by on my mark for a full burn from dorsal thrusters.”

  If he slowed, it would make it easy for the enemy ship to adjust for any sudden evasive. The only option was to increase speed and cut off the time the enemy vessel would have to realign for its ramming maneuver.

  “Now, Ayres!”

  The sudden push from the dorsal thrusters nudged them down a mere one-thousand kilometers beneath the ORA ship. He’d focused on the calculations to be certain and handed over control of the guns to the computer. The railguns shredded the ORA ship.

  This close, the optic feeds revealed the severity of the damage, it looked like a meteor shower had torn through the enemy ship. It drifted lifeless and powerless. Not every critical hit caused some grand explosion.

  The ORA ship would drift until it was salvaged or it would forever remain among an eternal graveyard of ships in the black.

  Perhaps certain the ramming tactic would succeed, the doomed ORA ship hadn’t even fired. The other vessel had continued accelerating away but not before launching missiles of their own. This close, the point defense didn’t have enough time to get all. Several hit the ventral bow. This is what Aaron had hoped to avoid. A chase.

  “Ayres, bring us around, pursuit course.”

  Although Phoenix would have to slow to execute the tight turn, his ship’s extraordinary acceleration curve should negate the lead the other ship had. But it would take them away from the planet.

  “I’ve got a lock on him, Commander,” Flaps announced over the comm.

  Aaron hadn’t even noticed Hammerhead—after all it was friendly so the computer wouldn’t pay it much attention.

  Hammerhead had egressed the planet along a vector to cut off the escaping ORA ship. Flaps fired the auxiliary craft’s complement of ten fusion torpedoes, ending the ORA vessel’s bid for freedom.

  “Bring it in, Flaps. I don’t know if they got off a comm burst. They had more time than the others. We won’t know if it penetrated our jamming until someone shows up—or doesn’t."

  It could be their extraordinary tactical capabilities with Phoenix, but Aaron felt it had gone too easy.

  He had a lingering feeling the ORA was holding back.

  ***

  If Lee even had in-laws, he wouldn’t recommend they visit Indri-3 for vacation.

  It wasn’t even much of a planet. Barely the size of Earth’s moon. Still it was a planet by definition—it orbited Indri�
�s star, was round, and it had cleared celestial debris from its orbit—according to astronomy-101.

  Perhaps they should revise the definition of a planet. It seemed to change at the whim of every generation of astronomers.

  As soon as they disembarked the insertion pod, the rush of wind made it clear this wasn’t a friendly place. What should have been an easy ten-kilometer jog, now turned into a slog against forty-kilometer winds. Fjords spread for miles out to the east and west. Tall blue and white mountains and glaciers mocked them as they trudged along. In some parts it was relatively flat and yet nearby mountainous regions extended as far as the eye could see.

  Two hours later they’d reached it. The ORA base.

  Lee was down on one knee. He studied the information on his HUD. Distances, power readings, thermal readings, motion readings. Like his suit, the enemy should have equipment to detect and mask these things. His suit blended its temperature and outer material to the environment. Its material could deflect lasers probing for motion.

  Lee zoomed in on the ORA structure. It was rather boring to look at. A prefab base no more than a thousand square-meters. It was new, and it was temporary. Four large towers on each corner of the square compound extended about forty feet skyward with mounted turrets. More anti-personnel turrets littered the perimeter. No human sentries spotted, but it wasn’t likely they’d be outside in these conditions. It wasn’t even necessary with modern detection technology.

  The ORA probably more expected a heavy attack than infiltration. That’s the thing with knowing your enemy. These ORA goons whoever they were, hadn’t taken the time to learn anything about the United Star Systems before firing the first shots in an unprovoked war.

  Either by design or by accident that was the reality. From what he’d seen of their ships, they were rudimentary, on the level of the Terran Union and the space navies of the other smaller enclaves. If what they’d seen so far was their line ship, the ORA should quit this war now.

  That was the thing with stupid people—they had a false sense of greatness and couldn’t comprehend their own stupidity.