All Enemies Foreign and Domestic (Kelly Blake series) (33 page)

      “Not bad,” she thought as she punched a button on her watch, “forty-seven minutes from start to finish.”
 
Now she just had to hunker down and wait for the brigades to show up.
 

      One T’Kab patrol vehicle of some sort, painted blue and yellow, was damaged when it hit a meter-wide ditch cut by a heavy Yestepkin gun, which had vaporized a meter-deep ditch in the pavement and sub-roadbed of the terminal access road.
 
The vehicle’s front wheels were broken free of the chassis and the occupants carried their injured away without further molestation.
 
T’Kab casualties in the early stages of the invasion were light and usually inadvertent, like the worker that surprised Mary.
 
Most T’Kab ran away when given the chance.

      The spaceport was separated from any business or residential areas by a green buffer of trees two kilometers wide.
 
There was very little accidental traffic on the road to the spaceport.
 
Her attached engineers had created the ditch, thought better of it, and built a meter tall berm of dirt in front of the ditch.
 
The engineer lieutenant was proud of his barrier until Mary pointed out how nice it was for him to dig the barrier and then provide the dirt fill for it on the enemy side of the barrier, where all they had to do was push the dirt berm in and drive across.
 
The engineer, a bit red-faced, went back out to remedy it.

      Defending the capital from invasion must never have been considered in the T’Kab’s list of planning scenarios.
 
If the invasion forces could keep hitting them hard, it might keep them disorganized and providing only light resistance.
 
Mary made that recommendation to Major General Allans when he landed with his staff.
 
He recommended Admiral Conover push forward the K’Rang Unified Force.
 
If the combined forces could stay within the T’Kab decision cycle, they could save a lot of friendly and enemy lives.

* * * * *

      Tammy flew high over the western approaches to the capital, observing the devastation her unopposed squadrons were causing on second and third missions.
 
A few attempts had been made with anti-fighter defensive missiles, but effective countermeasures made the missiles self-destruct soon after they were launched.
 
The few T’Kab fighters that made it into the air were no match for the F-53s flying top cover.
 
The operation was proceeding flawlessly and this worried Tammy.
 
She remembered what one of her war college professors had said:
 
“No matter how perfect your plan, the enemy always gets a vote.
 
That vote is almost always a vote against it and you can expect the enemy to resist you at every turn.”

      She was getting tired.
 
She and her co-pilot had been trading the yoke back and forth for eight hours.
 
Her medium attack ships had flown three sorties today and her heavy ships two.
 
It was time to break it off for the day.

She called one of her medium squadron commanders and told him to head for the barn and rearm for an on-call mission, if the ground forces needed support during the night.
 
The commander asked permission to stay and hit the last of their targets before they returned to base.
 
She told him to return at once and get some rest, that she didn’t want tired crews making bad decisions if called out that night.

      She had her other squadrons expend all their remaining missiles and bombs on any missed targets or targets of opportunity.
 
After an hour of unbridled destruction, she ordered them all back to base.
 
Tomorrow wasn’t that far away.

She landed last, walked to debriefing, reported the few targets she’d personally hit, and turned the munitions camera footage over to her intel section.
 
She went to her office and, waiting for the post strike report, put her head on her arms crossed on her desk, and dropped instantly to sleep.
 
Her deputy commander found her, put a blanket over her shoulders, and turned out the lights.

       She awoke the next morning to bright sunlight and the smell of fresh coffee.
 
She raised her head from her desk and looked into the smiling eyes of her deputy.

      “Did you do this?” she asked, pulling off the blanket.

       He maintained his smile and told her she looked so tired last night he just let her sleep.

      “Did the post strike report go out last night?”

      He answered, “It did,” and before she could ask, “We scored 95%.
 
The 5% are on today’s target lists to be hit again.”

      “How are we doing on ship turn around times?”

      “We’re exceeding our training turn around rates across the board.”

As she sipped her coffee, she said, “I wished you had wakened me last night.
 
I would have at least moved to my cot in the back room.”

      He laughed and said, “No, you wouldn’t have.
 
You would have willed yourself to stay awake, bugged the intel section, walked the flight line talking to the crew chiefs, and been a total wreck this morning.
 
At least now you can wash the drool off your face, get a shower, and change into a new flight suit.
 
I don’t know if there’s anything that can be done about your hair, though.”

      Tammy snorted in disgust, pulled out a mirror, and heard her deputy laughing as he headed out the door.
 
Her hair wasn’t too bad, considering how she slept and having been in a flight helmet for ten hours yesterday.
 
She closed the blinds, locked the door, and stripped out of her aromatic flight suit and underclothes.
 
She always felt so odd being naked in her office, but that only lasted a moment, then her communicator went off.
 
She checked the screen, saw it wasn’t important, turned the status to unavailable, and headed for the shower in her private bath.

      Fifteen minutes later, she was drying and fixing her hair and inspecting herself in the mirror.
 
Her boobs had lost a little of their firmness.
 
Even hanging out most of the time in zero G couldn’t help that.
 
Her butt still looked good.
 
Her legs still got stares when she wore skirts.
 
All in all, she still considered herself a looker.
 
She just wished she had someone special to share them with.
 
Oh well, this was the path she’d chosen, one best walked alone.

* * * * *

      By mid-morning the entire 3rd Assault Landing Division was down, expanding the perimeter outward, and readying for the first ground force divisions to arrive.
 
The ship-by-ship search found one Human ship and two K‘Rang ships on the spaceport.
 
The crews were isolated in the terminal and their ships impounded.
 
Fleet Intel and K’Rang Intelligence teams scoured the ships for data, pulling flight logs and cargo manifests for later use in interrogation.
 
The cargos were the most interesting find.
 
They were almost exclusively obsolete or almost obsolete technology that had been refurbished.
 
It seemed the T’Kab were slow evolutionary integrators of technology and were satisfied to be two or more generations behind the K’Rang or Humans.
 

      Overly curious T’Kab were dissuaded from sightseeing by a Yestepkin gun cutting the front wheels off their vehicle.
 
They ran away as fast as they could.
 
There were isolated incidents around the perimeter, but nothing that could be characterized as resistance.

      Some sort of convoy filled with T’Kab soldiers was observed moving toward the terminal building from the city in the early afternoon and a squadron of GA-122s shot out the lead and trail vehicles’ engines, then methodically destroyed the remaining vehicles trapped in the urban canyon of tall buildings and narrow streets.
 
With their vehicles destroyed, the soldiers ran away, never to be seen again.

      By mid-afternoon, the first brigade of each of the five divisions were on the ground, organizing and preparing to move out, secure the city and capture the large military airfields to the north and west.
 
The divisions tasked to capture the city – the 20th Armored, 52nd Mechanized, and the 16th Armored – hit the city from three directions.
 
The divisions’ GA-122s burned in from space and supported the raids on the airfields and the capital city.
 
The city was locked down and secured before midnight, with roadblocks manned by tanks and armored transports at all major intersections.

      The Supreme Queen was captured as her attendants tried to move her out of her palace high rise.
 
Word was sent up to the scientists and they prepared the sentient queen for travel to the planet.
 
She was stunned, loaded on an AS-600 transport and flown to the surface.
 
The Supreme Queen was brought to the terminal building.

      The sentient queen was held separate from the Supreme Queen until the effects of the stun beam wore off.
 
After she recovered from the effects of the ray and had eaten, the sentient queen was escorted into the large room in which the Supreme Queen had been held.
 
Their meeting was the most dangerous part of the day so far.
 
The two were non-communicative with each other until they had first gone through a recognition and seniority ritual.
 
The Supreme recognized from subtle pheromone scents that the sentient queen was a descendant of hers and the offspring of one of her colony queens.

      After the ritual had been observed, the two touched antennae for over an hour, exchanging information before taking a break.
 
They rested for an hour, resisting all attempts to communicate with them, and resumed touching antennae.
 
This went on for two hours.

      If the scientists had managed to find a way to listen in on them touching antennae, they would have heard the two of them plotting their escape.
 
How realistic it was to assume that two insectoids the size of three elephants could escape from a spaceport occupied by 150,000 soldiers was beside the point.
 
The first thing they did was release a special pheromone which signaled the queens were in trouble and caused all T’Kab smelling it to go on a rampage to get to the queens and rescue them.
 
Unfortunately for the queens, they were on the opposite side of the massive terminal building from the confined T’Kab and the ventilators for the room dumped their air downwind from their intended target.
 
However, all this was oblivious to the scientists, guards, and diplomats assembled in another room, observing the queens’ interaction on remote cameras.

      The queens took a small break and then resumed touching antennae. The sentient queen told the Supreme Queen of the language she and the bipeds developed and how she could communicate with them.
 
The Supreme Queen seized on this and had the sentient queen tap out, “What do you want, food?”

      Ambassadors at Large Alexander Steele and T’Rak chose to ignore the reminder that the T’Kab only recognize them as food and tapped out in Morse code, “We wish to negotiate your surrender.”

      The Supreme Queen laughed at the impertinence of food to even suggest the civilization could submit to them.
 
She had the sentient queen to tap back that the Civilization would never submit to food.

      Her bravado was met by silence.

* * * * *

      Ingrid manned a checkpoint in the southwestern quarter of the T’Kab capital city.
 
They were set up in an intersection of three major roads with Ingrid’s tank blocking that intersection.
 
Their roadblock/checkpoint was in an area of two to four-story buildings of peculiar T’Kab architecture.
 
They were constructed from an adobe-like material and generally rectangular, but with rounded corners and a rounded roof.
 
They featured rounded entrances and exits, probably to accommodate their round shape and maintain some mental connection to their burrow origins.
 
The streets were narrow, only wide enough for two tanks to pass each other, except at major intersections.

      The neighborhood appeared to be for the lower class T’Kab, only because they had passed through nicer looking neighborhoods on the way.
 
Most buildings were rooming houses for workers or larger apartment buildings.
 
Under the T’Kab cultural system there were no families in the human sense.
 
The local queen’s residence was one block over in a much nicer multi-story building housing her, her attendants, and her multi-floor egg chamber.
 
The humans had seen several of these on their relatively unopposed march to capture the city.

      They had seen few T’Kab as they road marched into the city.
 
Most they had seen appeared to be on their way from one place to the other and were trapped out in the open as the humans hovered by.
 
They did not seem to panic or break into a run, only stopped and watched them go by.
 
Most could be seen looking out their rounded windows, their black expressionless eyes following the humans.