Homeworld: A Military Science Fiction Novel (9 page)

"Captain, the V.A.!" his Executive Officer called out.

Looking quickly at the Virtual Array, he watched as another battle cruiser, the Arnold, turned hard to port from its broadside position alongside one of the Coalition's Battle Fortresses. Firing a salvo of Ceramics from its bow mounted rail guns; it quickly caused a massive hull breach into the port side of the enemy ship.

Frantically, Captain Wolfe slid forward in his chair until he was perched on the edge of his seat, his knuckles white from the grasp he had on the armrests. Wanting to scream, but not finding the words, he watched in realization that the cruiser did not intend on turning away in time. They were going to take the final plunge and were increasing their velocity.

He watched in silent awe and reverent thanks as the crew of the Battle Cruiser sacrificed themselves in the hope of taking out the massive enemy vessel. The Coalition Battle Fortress rolled to starboard as it vented atmosphere and its systems went offline. With the armor plating of its underbelly gone from the massive collision, the Wayne unleashed a broadside barrage of Ceramics that tore through the Coalition vessel like a shotgun blast through tissue paper.

The Terra II and the other Earth Republic Fleet Battle Fortresses completed their turn from their initial attack run and began closing in on the Coalition fleet from its flank.

“Target the transports and carriers!” Wolfe shouted over the open ship to ship com. “Hit ’em now with everything we've got!”

The Terra II’s Ceramic Rail Guns pivoted in their gun ports and began spewing forth a cloud of high velocity death that reduced several infantry carriers to nothing more than chunks of salvage.

Whoever was in charge of the Coalition fleet was good at their job, better than Wolfe had hoped. Their fleet commander launched all the fighters at his disposal instead of trying to turn the incredible mass of his Super Dreadnaughts on a dime to meet the Terra II and her sister ships.

“Damn," Wolfe muttered as the sleek prism shaped, faster, more maneuverable, one man attack craft came at them by the hundreds. The Terra II’s point defense weapons consisting of automated short ranged high-powered crimson colored lasers, strained to keep the ship protected, but there were too many fighters, moving too fast. Even with their recently upgraded computer systems, the best automatic close range defense system that the Earth Republic Fleet had to offer was too slow to provide any real defense.

Swarms of the fighter’s relatively tiny barrages of ceramics riddled the Terra II’s armor with direct impacts.

“Our armor plating is down to only thirty percent effectiveness, sir!” Wolfe’s Weapons Officer yelled at him.

Wolfe could hear the fear in the junior officer’s voice but that was okay; this was only his second brawl. If they survived the day, he’d make a fine officer yet. He just needed a little steel in his gut to lose that fear of explosive decompression.

The Hawkins was left battered from the fighters’ initial run; its armor plating was utterly decimated in several spots of its superstructure. Its hull had started to buckle and it was on the brink of cracking like an egg.

Wolfe could see that she was limping without even checking the data from the sensors. The Wayne was another story altogether. Over half of its hull was shattered, resembling nothing more than a loose collection of space dust. The aft section that remained intact rolled end over end through the empty darkness of the void as it vented atmosphere.

Over three hundred Coalition fighters swooped in, firing on the few escape pods that had somehow managed to get off the mortally wounded Wayne. One by one, he watched on the Virtual Array as their Ceramics arced through space and time, finding their targets, destroying the escape pods which were of no threat to them.

Wolfe’s fists were now clenched in anger and frustration. They had done all they could do. Anything more would be mass suicide and the Earth Republic Fleet would need every ship they could muster to defend the birthplace of the human race. It was time to follow orders and leave.

“Disengage! All craft disengage! Null out and regroup at the Earth Null Point!” Wolfe shouted over the ship to ship Com.

His brow was slick with sweat and his hair mucked about from the multiple times he’d ran his fingers through it from the stress of the battle. His heart was thundering in his chest as if he’d just run two miles and there was a tingling in his right arm.

“All vessels power up your Null Drives! Leap to Earth on my mark!”

Having finished massacring the escape pods, the Coalition fighters were closing in on his ship now. With her close range defense system knocked out by the amount of damage they head sustained, the fighters were making unopposed strafing runs, point blank, along the curves of the Terra II’s length. The pilots were banking to keep their craft in close orbit around the Terra II emptying all the Ceramics their rail guns carried.

“Our armor plating is almost gone!” his Weapons Officer almost wailed as the Terra II’s Null Drive built up the energy to make the leap to Earth.

“Three, two . . .” Wolfe felt incredible pain rush up his right arm. The world spun around him, as he felt incredibly lightheaded. “Seems like we were both right, Doc,” Captain Burton Wolfe thought as he forced himself on, ignoring the warning from his Weapons Officer and the obvious signs of an impending heart attack.

“One. . .” he finished as a three squadrons of fighters unleashed their small Ceramic rail guns into a gaping hole in the Battle Cruiser’s armor before breaking off in three different directions searching for their next target. The tiny projectiles penetrated deep into the Terra II and into the command section. Instantly, the bridge was flooded with a maelstrom of shrapnel and roaring flames as hot as the raging fires of Hell itself.

Victory

Admiral Christopher Barhalemi Watkins the second stood in his garishly ostentatious black and silver uniform, complete with a lustrous red plume on his pith helmet, near the center of the Harrington’s bridge as he watched the few remaining vessels of the Earth Republic Fleet retreating into Null Space.

It grated on him that the Republic battle group had managed to destroy five of his Battle Fortresses and one of the Super Dreadnaughts under his command, but the real damage had been inflicted upon his transports.

The Republic’s ships last, desperate attack had cost him a full quarter of his fighter carriers and ground troop transports. Given the enormous amount of financing and planning that had gone into creating this fleet, he was still certain he retained enough combat effectiveness to accomplish the Coalition’s desired goal, but his margin of error had been drastically reduced.

Even then, he knew he couldn’t afford a prolonged ground battle on Earth. The strike there, once the ships defending the home world had been swept aside, needed to be a fast and decisive one. If he had to call for reinforcement, it would allow the Earth Republic Fleet the time they so desperately needed to recall the remnants of their fleet scattered through what once was their territory.

Watkins knew that the Earth Republic ships’ run on his transports had been their primary objective in confronting him at Mars at all. Only a fool would have thought they had any real chance of stopping his armada here. In retrospect, he should have left them with a small battle group to defend them at their last Null Point but he had been overconfident in the abilities of the capital ships of his armada.

It was also perhaps his tactical error in assuming that the crews of the Earth Republic Fleet would not willingly go to their deaths, by ramming ships of his fleet, to defend their fellow citizens and give their capitol a better chance at resisting him. He had of course heard of such desperate measures taken before in this campaign but they had been few and far between.

In the future, he would have to ensure that Captain Burman kept a reserve of the one man fighters close in to the most important of his ships in order to destroy any Republic vessel from succeeding in such a suicidal tactic in the future.

The Earth Republic Fleet had sacrificed some of their ships in order to weaken the amount of his ground forces he could bring to bear by dropping them onto Earth’s surface and in an attempt to allow for the possibility of losing even more ground forces in the battle he was about to win on the surface of Mars as well. With each world he’d taken en route to Earth, he had been forced to leave behind a garrison of troops in order to keep the former citizens of the Earth Republic from revolting. The potential of the losses he could suffer by launching a ground war on the surface of Mars irritated him. If capturing it relatively whole and undamaged would not be such a prize, and better his opportunity for appointment to the Executive Board of the Coalition, he would have simply unleashed a Kinetic Impact Assault and have been done with it.

So the ground forces would drop as soon as Captain Burman finished assessing the damage to the armada and softened hardened targets with a few Kinetic Impacts. His goal on Mars was simple and twofold: disable the planet’s ability to launch anything else against him, and force a surrender of its provincial government as quickly as possible. He hoped the thought of his men filling the streets of Mars with the blood of innocent civilians would go a long way to a fast surrender. After all, the tactic had proved remarkably successful in the past.

Admiral Watkins left the details of the attack and occupation to Captain Burman with a dismissive flick of his black gloved hand as the Captain approached him.

“Just do what needs done and leave me be,” he ordered, leaving the Harrington’s bridge.

Mars was quite a prize, but it was not Earth and he needed victory at Earth.

The entire success or failure of his mission rested upon taking the Coalition’s original home world. As long as Earth stood, so did the Republic, and with Earth Republic Command coordinating and rallying the other worlds of the Republic. They would fight tooth and nail to protect it and its tired ideology of individual freedoms and flawed morality.

As Watkins stormed from the bridge and entered Captain Burman’s ready room, which he had requisitioned and had converted into his personal war room, his expression was grim and determined. Flopping into the chair behind his desk, he ignored the numerous holo-displays of the Sol system that depicted what the Coalition’s intelligence knew of the Republic force movements. Its real time display charted everything from his own fleet’s supply data to scrolling reports of the statuses of the worlds his fleet had already taken.

Instead, he swiveled his plush leather chair to stare out the large, reinforced, domed and transparent plastisteel observation window, watching the fleet’s larger troop transports detach dome shaped dropships full of soldiers and equipment toward the red enemy world below.

Small groups of fighters escorted the dropships along their angle of descent in an effort to protect them from any surface to space Ceramics that the Martian military could throw at them. As he watched the “Hail” of Ceramics rained both from above and below. In addition, the Martian Defense Force was apparently trying to use fusion tipped missiles to stop the eminent destruction but the Ceramics from his capital ships turned them to debris before most had a chance of detonating in low orbit. Still some managed to blast apart a few of the dropships. It seemed the Martian’s intended to resist the Coalition.

Watkins’ lips parted in a thin mockery of a smile that twisted the features of his face into something that might resemble glee if his eyes didn’t burn with sinister satisfaction as Captain Burman correctly destroyed the missile silos with Kinetic Impacts that would devastate approximately one hectare around such complexes.

Watkins leaned back in his comfortably upholstered chair and poured himself a well-steeped cup of lapsong souchong tea from a finely decorated porcelain tea set. As he sipped his warm soothing beverage, he contemplated how that this smoky flavored tea was one of the first to be enjoyed by Earth’s earliest emperors and like them his place in history was already assured.

Not since the first founding of the Earth Republic itself had there been a commander who single handedly had conquered, if you can call claiming uninhabited worlds conquering, so many worlds as he had during this operation and never in all of recorded human history had there been such a glorious victory in so short a time. “Yes, my name will far outlive theirs and my star is just beginning to rise,” mused the admiral as the tiny bursts of light on the planet below showed that the Kinetic Impacts were finding their targets.

Ground Fall

“We’re coming in hot!” the pilot warned over the com link in Drake’s helmet. As the turbulence of the rapid atmospheric entry shook the dropship, Drake did not like the almost imperceptible tone of concern in the pilot’s voice.

"I really hate this shit," Drake said through his gritted teeth to keep from biting off his own tongue. Only his harness was keeping him from bouncing off the ship’s walls and ceiling. His M-220 was locked, as always, in his white knuckled grasp, its stock nestled between his feet on the cold metal floor of the dropship.

This was the worst part of every mission for Drake. The minutes of knowing his life rested completely in someone else’s hands irritated him more than he liked to admit. On the battlefield, he was in control of his own destiny, and it was his experience and hard earned skill that gave him the edge. Up here, he was plummeting towards an unforgiving rock in a tin can that, if the pilot of which so much as twitched the flight stick in the wrong way, he would be just another char mark on the surface

Hurtling towards the planet’s surface in this practically unarmed dropship, there was nothing to do but pray that he reached the surface alive and in one piece. Drake imagined God wasn’t too happy with him these days so he didn’t bother with the praying bit.

The wailing of the dropship’s engines as they strained to keep a proper vector of descent was like the cry of a dying man. “A sound that I’ve become very accustomed to,” the former SpecOp turned grunt mused as his body was thrown against his harness again.

The sound grated on Drake’s raw nerves.

“Brace for impact!” the pilot cried, his voice containing an edge of panic that only the most trained ear could pick up on. Drake’s ear was very well trained.

“How much more braced can I get?” Drake wanted to yell. Having picked up on the tone of the pilot’s voice, he barely opened his left eye as he looked towards the cockpit. He considered spitting at the pilot out of sheer contempt, but decided the risk of biting his own tongue off was too great. His fondness for his tongue was greater than his contempt for this pilot.

The dropship lurched as it struck the ground. Drake’s teeth rattled as it slid to a stop. The vessel was bleeding its inertia off the hard way through friction with the surface of the planet.

Upon coming to a full stop, the main rear door popped open as Drake and the other soldiers’ harnesses automatically released the hold it had on them.

From his seat directly behind the pilot, Drake was going to be the last one off the ship, which was fine by him, because if they were immediately met by hostiles, he wouldn’t mind a few of his squad mates taking a bullet for him. As the soldiers in front of him disembarked, he waited for the telltale sounds of enemy fire, but everything outside of the ship was quiet. Well, at least as quiet as the screams of about a hundred civilians fleeing in terror could be at a time like this.

Drake reached the opening, and saw that they had come down in the middle of a Martian city’s street. It looked like the business center of this city with its tall black plastisteel skyscrapers pointed back up in the direction he had just come from.

Panicked civilians ran for their lives as Flint ordered the two squads under his command to form up and open fire.

The fine tailored business apparel of the unarmed men and women in the street would do nothing to protect them from the flechette rounds designed to slice through Republic Infantry armor. These bullets soon entered and eviscerated the bodies of the civilians as Flint’s men complied with his order. The soldiers seemed to be enjoying their work as they were screaming their battle cries and whooped in battle frenzy every time a limb was ripped from a body or a torso was cut in two.

It didn't matter how fast the civilians ran in their highly polished or high heeled shoes, or how many other people they would trip or trample in their panicked stamped as they desperately tried to get away, no one can out run a bullet.

Drake held his fire; there was no reason to waste ammunition he might need later today. The quickly falling, screaming mob posed no threat and he was never a fan of killing the unarmed anyway. It was not so much a rule of Drake’s, as he lived by few rules, but if you couldn’t kill him, generally he wouldn’t waste a bullet killing you. So rather than participating in the massacre, he chose to shield his eyes and looked to the sky. Rachel’s tanks were supposed to be with them by now.

A transport ship several times the size of the dropship he had just landed in roared slowly overhead and Drake’s unspoken question was answered.

Their orders were to rendezvous at coordinates not more than a few klicks to the north, take whatever was there that the brass had wanted so desperately to send them, or rather him, in for, and hold onto it at all costs.

As he returned his gaze to street level, Drake saw a young brown haired woman in a luxurious burgundy business jacket and skirt take a round to the back. On impact, the projectile shattered the fifth and sixth thoracic vertebra, driving the fragments through her heart, lungs and tore through her chest. In her death pirouette, her eyes met Drake’s as she fell to the ground. A silent question was in her dying eyes that Drake would never be able to answer.

The cry of a lone siren arose over the cacophony of gunfire.

Drake blinked in disbelief as a Martian Police cruiser came barreling down the road towards his squad’s position. Drake could not see the driver due to the heavily tinted, and probably reinforced against standard ammunition, windshield but he could see that the law enforcement officer had his automatic rifle resting on his side mirror and was firing wildly as he came at them. One of the Coalition ground pounders went down in a cry of pain as a lucky bullet found purchase in the exposed bit of flesh between his body armor and his helmet.

Flicking off the safety on the side of the AT-40 anti-tank weapon mounted beneath the barrel of his M-220, Drake raised the weapon to his shoulder. Looking down the barrel, instead of using the optical sights, he pressed the trigger sending a "Tank Buster" slamming into the front end of the black and white police cruiser. Its siren gave a last high-pitched shriek before going silent as the car’s mangled remains careened from its previous path and slammed through the glass front of a nearby business whose bright yellow neon red sign declared it Ogden’s Fine Tanning Salon and Day Spa. Drake admired the driver of the burnt out wreck’s foolish bravery and sense of duty, but not his final destiny as the overheated metal from the police cruiser started to ignite the interior of the building with flickering spots of orange flame.

“Cease fire, cease fire! Shike, Kuline get Knoll back on the dropship,” Flint called over his com link as Knoll thrashed on the ground both hands clasped to his wound

As Flint’s men complied with the order, Drake opened the breach on the AT-40. He let the empty shell casing drop out of the weapon and fall to the ground at his feet with a metallic ring. Sliding a fresh round into the chamber and closing the breach, he looked around at the killing field Flint’s men had created.

There were no civilians left to gun down in the general area. No sniper fire had come from nor was coming from the tall buildings surrounding them. So unless Flint wanted his squads to waste more ammo by using those buildings for target practice, there was no need to remain here.

“Perhaps now they could get to work?” Drake wondered, silently surveying the piles of soon to be rotting maggot food that had moments before, been ordinary people going about their ordinary lives. They lay crumpled and twisted in the streets and on the sidewalks. Pools of blood and other bodily fluids were quickly spreading beneath them.

Flint’s men were congratulating each other by pounding each other on the back of their armor while some were bragging about some of the “difficult” shots they had made but Flint cut short their celebrating. “Move out! Double time!” Flint shouted as soon as Knoll had been loaded on the dropship.

The squads advanced Northward in two separate staggered columns, one on each side of the road searching the urban area for targets of opportunity as they went. They soon heard the roar of the dropships engines as it aimed for the sky and cold dark of space beyond.

Drake watched them from the rear as they progressed. He never marched with the unit as his time in the Rapier Commandos had made him a loner and moving down the city street, where little cover existed, would make Flint’s squads easy targets as proven by the piles of bodies they were moving away from. Choosing to make his own way, he ducked into an alley darkened by the artificial “canyon” created by the skyscrapers and melded silently into the shadows.

Flint’s helmet heads up display showed Drake breaking formation but he was well accustomed to Drake’s disregard for his orders and didn’t mind cutting him some slack at times like this. It was Drake’s rogue behavior that on more than one occasion had saved Flint’s life or turned the tide of battle into a victory enough times to warrant it being allowed.

Besides, Sergeant Flint was one of the few who knew, on paper if not on his uniform, Drake still actively held the rank of Colonel, so if push came to shove, there wasn’t much Flint could do about it anyway.

Moving cautiously through the litter-strewn alley, Drake heard a noise approximately fifteen meters ahead. Snapping his rifle to his shoulder, he flicked the safety off with his thumb and closed the distance between himself and the large square trash receptacle.

Slowing to a snail’s pace when he reached the corner of the large brown bin, he flinched slightly as a child jumped out into the alley from behind it.

Standing there with his finger on the trigger, Drake looked down the barrel at the blond haired, brown eyed boy in a white t-shirt emblazoned with the name of some band Drake had never heard of. The kid was wearing blue jeans wet in the groin from where the boy had soiled himself. As the boy stood there trembling, his arms instinctively covering his face with both arms, a small puddle of urine collected at his feet. Flicking the safety on, Drake dropped his rifle to a low ready and hissed at the child, "Get the hell out of here, boy!"

Turning to run down the alley away from Drake, the boy was almost to the street that would lead him to a quick and painful death, courtesy of Flint’s men, before Drake snapped at him, "Not that way boy, behind me!"

Skidding to a halt, the boy turned and looked at him, with the mixed emotions of confusion and terror clearly evident on his face. Large glistening began running down his cheeks, Drake jerked his head in the direction behind him and hissed “Now! The boy looked once at the street before turning back towards Drake, breaking into a sprint and running past him.

Looking back over his shoulder, Drake watched the boy run as fast as he could to get away from him, then yelled out, "Turn left, boy, turn left!" Watching as the boy broke left at the street and disappeared.

Drake took no pleasure in gunning down innocent civilians, especially those not even old enough to heft the weight of a rifle, unlike most of the other men in Flint’s squads who were ecstatic just to have targets that couldn’t shoot back. He knew it was nothing more than a waste of valuable resources he might need later when the shit really hit the fan. Plus there had been something in that kid’s eyes that had kept Drake from the almost instinctual trigger squeeze. He doubted the kid would live through the rest of the day but if he did, he had already seen more than a toothless old man should.

Make no bones about it, Drake thought to himself, Mars might be surprised by the fact that whoever was in command of this assault had chosen to go straight to an invasion before initiating a Kinetic Impact Assault, but sooner or later, the Defense Forces would pour out of their protected bunkers and give them a hell of a fight.

Stopping to check his corners at a street, Drake carefully looked left and then to his right. As far as he could see, were empty streets and tall skyscrapers. Maybe Drake had misjudged the dropship pilot’s skill. At least he hadn’t crashed them into any of the buildings on the way down.

Silently sprinting across the street in front of him, he ducked into the shadows of another alley. Taking a moment to listen, he pulled out a fresh pack of his preferred brand of black market smokes; rank did have some privileges after all. He lit one and continued down the alley. No doubt, the Mar’s Defense Forces would be coming for them by now, and Drake would be ready for them when they finally arrived.