Rich Man's War (22 page)

Tanner watched as the navigational screens showed the rover draw closer and closer to its destination. The entry gates to the spaceport were just around the next corner. He thought for the briefest of moments that they might not need air support from the corvette.

Then another particle beam shot through a nearby house, igniting it instantly and announcing the return of their pursuers. “Fire support would be good right now, yeah!”

* * *

Hawkins would have greatly preferred a more orderly evacuation, but he couldn’t blame these people for running for their lives. Sustained gunfire could be heard in almost any direction. Locals ran or hid with panicked cries that proved contagious among his civilian charges. Several bits of debris from satellites and destroyed ships left foreboding trails of black smoke across an otherwise blue sky. At least the orbital bombardments seemed to have stopped, but that only meant troop landings would start any minute now.

Hangars, tall storage bays and administrative buildings created canyons of concrete and metal. Some stood open, allowing Hawkins to bring the crowd inside and keep them from being exposed. Other buildings remained shut, forcing him and his security team to make quick decisions. He’d
rather have brought people through in small groups and handled the load in stages, but the situation didn’t allow for such delays.

Standing in
a cavernous hangar, Hawkins looked back over his shoulder at the stream of men, women and children entering through open garage doors at the back end. Security troopers from
Argent
in combat jackets and helmets worked with a couple of consulate staffers to guide everyone inside. He had to hand it to the consulate workers—regardless of the sudden chaos of the invasion, their pre-planning and diligence paid off. Initial assembly of the evacuees went as well as anyone could have hoped. Running them through the spaceport had resulted in some sprained ankles, stumbles, falls and many out-of-breath and frightened people, but that part couldn’t be helped.

Managing Casey already ranked as one of the toughest assignments Hawkins
had ever had. Shepherding a crowd of nearly a thousand frightened civilians through a war-torn spaceport complex surely ranked as a close second. This was not the sort of thing he’d envisioned when he entered the Intelligence Service.

The garage doors at the rear of the hangar came down with the arrival of th
e last two security personnel. One of them carried a small, crying boy over his shoulder. The other signaled Hawkins with a broad wave of her arm. Hawkins turned his attention to the hangar entrance, where the doors remained partially closed and two of his men stood with weapons ready. He ran to the entrance to look outside at the broad and mostly empty flight line beyond. To his left, perhaps a football field away, loomed
Argent
with her broad cargo ramp extended under her bulk. To his right, Hawkins saw yet another pair of his security people crouched behind a load-lifter. Far beyond them, much farther away, stood one of the spaceport’s perimeter gates. He could see flashes of laser fire all around the gate.

Hawkins rushed from his position to join his people at the load-lifter. “How’s it look?”

“Not good,” grunted the woman on his right. The lowered visor on her helmet offered her much better vision than the naked eye. “Only a few stray blasts have come this way, but even so, it’ll be risky.”

“So is staying here,” noted her partner. “We can’t tell who’s winning out there.”

“Point,” she nodded.

“
Argent
, this is Hawkins. We’re grouped at a hangar a hundred meters south of the aft section of the ship,” he explained over the holocom net. “I don’t think we can get to closer cover. We may have to make a run—“

“Hawkins, stay down!” barked Casey in reply. “Keep everyone bottled up. There’s trouble inbound at the gate and—Marquez, tell them to get a better lead or they’re fucked!”

Contrary to instructions, Hawkins naturally peered up over the edge of the load lifter again. Though the fight continued to rage at the gate, little enough of it seemed oriented toward his direction. “What’s he on about?” Hawkins muttered.

The loud crash at the southern gate answered his question, along with the red particle beam that continued on past him along the flight line.

* * *

“We’ll never make it through those barriers!” warned Booker. He clutched at the dashboard with one hand, watching the oncoming obstructions with wide-eyed alarm.

“I know, I know!” shouted Sanjay. His eyes darted back and forth from the road ahead to the rear view displays. He’d have preferred the ancient but reliable technological wonder of rear-view mirrors, but those had already been shot away. “Might wanna throw on seat belts back there!”

“Shit,” Tanner grunted. He hauled his legs up and sat up straight, enduring less pain than before but still wincing as he bent his knee. Vanessa took up the spot beside him, buckling in just as he did. “
Argent
, we are almost at the gate with tanks still—woah!” He slumped over into Vanessa’s shoulder as Sanjay jinked hard to the right, timing his maneuver just before a pursuing tank’s particle beam fired.

Tanner saw the destruction wrought by the tank’s gun up ahead. Part of the tall wall near the gate crumbled and fell in a smoking wreck. Warring factions fled. Their path, though bumpy, lay clear.
Beyond the gate lay salvation.
Argent’s
engines rose many stories above the flight line.

Rockets
shot from a battery on top of the ship’s hull and arced toward the gate, the rover and its pursuers.

Tanner
swept away his seat belt and lunged for the jamming unit still lying on the floor.

* * *

Joan of Arc
swept overhead mere heartbeats too late. The barrage of rockets crashed into the ground, detonating in a series of fiery blasts over a wide area. Though clearly fired from
Argent’s
anti-missile defenses, resulting in more chaff than explosive power, each was still lethal to ground vehicles and exposed individuals.

“
Argent
, cease fire!” shouted Kelly. She watched as the rover and the pursuing tanks disappeared within the bursts of flame, smoke and debris. “Those are our people! Cease fire!”

The corvette banked left and
flew back around over the liner. Kelly’s eyes swept the field below. She saw a mob of people rushing out of a hangar toward the ship now that the gunfire toward the gate had ceased, but at the gate structure itself she saw only rubble and smoking ruin. Sensors were still too disrupted by all the chaff to make out anything more than simple optical images. A lone, flaming tire rolled away from the mess.

Nothing and no one moved.

“Captain! Vessels overhead have altered course and orientation!” warned Stan. Each of the targets had been given arbitrary designations. “Destroyer Tango and Frigate Charlie have—targeting signals!”

“Chaff! Fire!” Kelly ordered. She had no time for her anguish; all she could do was shove her feelings aside before more people died. In fact, she didn’t have time to give Romita orders as her helmsman. She reached for the computer—
knowing human hands couldn’t react as quickly as necessary here—and set
Joan of Arc
into “screening” mode for
Argent.
The corvette spat out chaff missiles and lasers to disrupt and intercept incoming missiles while
Joan
flew straight over the liner and held steady in the air.

Only three missiles streaked in from the sky toward the spaceport, but they were more than enough to do the job against a less prepared defense. A starship firing from outer orbit at a target on the ground was more or less shooting at short range.
Joan of Arc
barely managed to deflect all three, shooting down one missile with its laser turrets and send the other two flying off in the wrong directions.

The beam weapons that cut through the sky above to strike at the corvette were not something the ship could evade.
Joan of Arc’s
reflective hull blunted much of each blast, withstanding all but the most direct hits. Every corvette captain knew what a destroyer’s main guns could do to their ship after the demise of
St. Jude
, but that ship had been caught unawares and without her ES reinforcement generators working.
Joan of Arc’s
damage control systems warned of malfunctions and threats, but the ship stayed aloft.

Kelly looked to her groundside displays again. She couldn’t make out anything but smoke, rubble and debris where her shipmates had been. Holocom signals from Booker, Sanjay and Malone no longer registered. It amounted to the last thought she could spare for them. She saw no further movement on the ground around
Argent
and took that to mean the last of the passengers had made it on board, or at least under the protection of her hull. The liner’s ES generators wouldn’t work until she was fully buttoned-up, but even a tough ship like
Joan of Arc
could withstand only so much punishment. Kelly had to get her out of the line of fire.

“Helm, lay in an attack vector on Frigate Charlie and execute,” she shouted, speaking simultaneously to Romita and the corvette’s computer. “Gunners, fire at will.”

Still drawing fire away from
Argent
,
Joan of Arc
banked left once more, tilted up toward the sky and blasted away from the urban landscape at a speed suited to space combat. Blue skies turned black.
Joan of Arc
rushed headlong toward the orbiting frigate, her small size and sudden acceleration doing far more to protect her than her hull ever could.

As Kelly expected, she saw the angry red beams of
Joan of Arc’s
main cannon fire off ahead of her well before she could make out the frigate with her naked eye. Smaller beams from her turrets joined in. Missiles streaked out from the corvette’s wings as if to chase after the lasers. The stars spun as Romita added evasive patterns to the course of the ship, but
Joan of Arc
continued to charge in against a larger opponent with guns blazing.

Kelly’s chest rose and fell rapidly. She wanted a trigger to pull, something she could actually do other than shout commands, but that wasn’t her place.
Joan of Arc
had a great crew; Kelly trained them hard to make them greater. She’d already seen that training pay off in getting them this far.

“Hits on the frigate!” Stan announced as the tactical computer relayed the results. Kelly saw little damage from the main gun on her own screens, but understood instantly what her gunner’s mate had done. The broad cannon blast had swept away a good amount of the frigate’s own defensive missiles and chaff, leaving it momentarily open for the missiles that followed in. Ordoñez let loose with another shot from the main gun as soon as its cooling system allowed, this time hammering the frigate with a much deadlier blow.

“
Argent
is lifting off now, captain,” Stan added. “She’s firing her own chaff systems. I think she’ll make it off the ground okay if we keep this up.”

As he spoke
, Joan of Arc
sailed past the stunned frigate. Though still too far away to register as anything but a speck of light in a field of so many others, the frigate showed up just fine on
Joan of Arc’s
optics and active scanners. “Helm,” said Kelly, “alter course to engage the destroyer at range. The frigate’s knocked for a loop right now. We’ve gotta keep the heat off
Argent
.”

“Aye
aye, ma’am,” answered Romita.

Kelly shifted the priorities on her tactical screen, watching the numbers shift as
Joan of Arc
moved in. She saw beam weapons strike the destroyer from planetside almost as soon as she had the ship on her screen. “
Argent’s
firing!” Stan shouted.

“I see it,” she interrupted, watching the destroyer turn and accelerate. A second flash of red light missed the destroyer, but it confirmed what she’d already seen: for a liner,
Argent
packed some serious weaponry.

* * *

Casey worked the tactical station in a frenzy, directing
Argent’s
weapons and countermeasures with swift and sure hands. The ship’s automated guns responded instantly; the gunnery crews followed his instructions without a hitch. “Helm, that corvette made a hole for us,” he said without looking away.

“Aye, aye, sir,” came the response. “Course laid in.”

“Get us the fuck out of here! Turrets, when we’re out of the atmosphere, fire at will,” Casey directed. “Focus on that frigate. Keep it off balance. Hold back on the cannons and missiles; let’s not show all our cards unless we gotta. Damage control, how we doing?”

“Minor damage so far, captain,” answered the voice on his comm. “Critical systems all still holding up. We’ve got some injuries among the passengers.”