Conquest of Earth (Stellar Conquest Series) (2 page)

Bull ran his hand over his huge bald head. “Sir, I’ve been thinking...why not add in a bunch of battle drones and let Michelle run them?”

“Good idea, Bull, but it won’t work. The AI is integrated with
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itself. Once we move outside of a light-second distance or so, there’s no way she could control them any better than you can. In fact, we’re going to operate up to sixty light-seconds away. That’s not doable.”

“Of course. I should’ve gotten that.”

Absen waved his hands. “After a hundred years, I’m still not fully accustomed to how big space is.”

“What about putting the battle drones on automatic?” Reaper asked. “I’m not crazy about the idea – if Marines lose IFF or the drones get damaged, we could get some fratricide – but if we send them in as cannon fodder and make sure we stay behind them, we can minimize that.”

“I support that idea, sir,” Bull added. “We can give the squad leaders drone control capability so they can issue orders if they have to.”

“You sure your people won’t get task-saturated? I’m not a grunt, but you’ve told me that no one is ever undertasked in a firefight.”

“He’s right, Bull,” Reaper said. “It’s hard enough for company command to keep perspective to control a battle. You add drone control to the squad leaders…”

“How about the sled pilots?” Absen asked. “Seems to me that once they’re down, they have some excess capability. Give them a crash course in battle drone operation and you got yourselves on-site control, and they never even have to leave their cockpits.”

The two Marines’ eyes widened. “That’s a really good idea, sir. Might as well get some use out of the airheads.”

“I also want you to take the Ryss along.”

Now the Marines’ faces fell. Bull said, “Sir…we’ve been training their warriors, but they’re really green. They’re good enough individually, and they like their Avenger powered armor
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made for them, but they’re undisciplined. They would just be in the way if we tried to integrate them into the company. I’d rather have automated drones and the risk of fratricide.”

“They’re that bad?”

“Sir, they’re like boys of thirteen. They literally just hit puberty. They’re eager and brave, and Slash is all right” – he meant Slask, the oldest of the warriors in Trissk’s absence – “but right now they’re more dangerous to each other than the enemy.”

Absen steepled his fingertips. “Bull, you said you are understrength. The battle drones will help, but you need the Ryss. Slask has already approached me about going along, and I don’t see how I can refuse. If they stay behind they will be dishonored. You have to find a place for them where they can do some good. Stick them on one flank, point them forward and stay out of their way or something.”

“Sir, they’re going to get creamed,” Reaper said. “They’re just kids!”

“How old were you when you lost your legs in Iraq?” Absen asked, looking at Reaper.

“Nineteen,” she said grudgingly. “Okay, I get it.”

Absen pointed a finger. “Bull, they’re going. God help us, but if they die, they die. I’ve studied the Ryss culture over the last few years. They live for battle. If I refuse, I’ll have a mutiny. Besides, how would you feel if
they
were going and
you
were stuck on the ship watching?”

Slowly, Bull nodded. “Aye aye, sir. We’ll find them a mission.”

“We’re ‘go’ in four days. You’re the designated assault commander, so start planning and coordinating. Get Markis on board, make sure his sled pilots get lots of sim time with the battle drones, talk to Fleede…you know the drill. Dismissed.”

“Yeah, boss. I hear ya,” Repeth replied, not opening her eyes. “Can’t a girl get any sleep around here? We still got four minutes to touchdown.”

“Four minutes…right.” Raising his stentorian voice, Bull punched up the company freq and said, “Listen up, you diggers. In four minutes we’re slamming in hot as hell. All you gotta do is follow your NCOs and kill anything that moves that ain’t wearing yellow. No matter what they look like, there are no human beings here, only Purelings and Blends. Pureling’s are soulless, fanatical clones, not people, and Blends or Meme are high-value prisoners. If you find a Blend or a Meme, do not let it escape. Make every effort to capture it, and burn it if you have to, you got me?”

“
Aye aye, sir!”
roared the line doggies, most of whom had exactly one real battle under their belts – the assault on the Weapon on Afrana’s moon, ten subjective years ago. Bull hoped the extensive VR training would be enough, that and the improved Avenger battlesuits. He had so few Marines.

Bull still wished Captain Absen had brought a lot more troops, but these eight squads of six Marines each were all he had. They couldn’t even take more than a few of
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’s Recluse battle drones, one on each assault sled. Fortunately the pilots had proven quick studies, using their cyber-links to control the ground support machines.

Bull snorted. Aerospace. As usual, it would be Marine infantry that would do or die.
Tip of the spear, end of the shaft,
he thought.

Though he couldn’t forget the thirty Ryss he’d been forced to use. At least they had their own customized Avengers. Unwilling to link in to VR space, the aliens had trained for the assault in an enormous converted cargo bay. Even without cybernetics or nano-augmentation, they made fearsome warriors, if not as deadly as his own troops, pound for pound. They were just so very, very green.

Bull switched freqs. “Slash, you copy?”

“I hear, War Leader Bull.” Between the chip in Bull’s head and the translation software in his suit, the big Ryss officer he called Slash might as well have been speaking English.

“Three minutes. You good to go?”

“We yearn to spill blood and taste Pureling flesh, War Leader. Again, I request the honor of first assault.”

“No. You’ll damn well follow your mission orders or I’ll rip your fuzzy mane right off your neck, you got me?”

“I hear and obey, War Leader.”

Slash, like all the Ryss warriors, was young, a bare yearsmane. Scarcely adult, he had a good head and heart, but like most unblooded troops seemed terribly eager to die gloriously. More than once Bull had cuffed him hard enough to send the young warrior stumbling. Not a recommended method of discipline with human troops, Absen had been adamant that Bull use Ryss training methods on Ryss.

Once again, Bull wished Trissk hadn’t been sent off on some secret mission. The experienced Ryss warrior could have helped get the cat-boys ready, or better yet, led them.

Bull switched his HUD to the forward external view, looking at what the sled pilots saw. Before his eyes stretched Io’s hot yellow surface, colored with the massive amounts of sulfur dust thrown up by the moon’s many volcanoes. Unlike other moons, Io was a hot planetoid on the inside, with violent tidal forces pulling and twisting at its silicate crust and molten core, generating massive amounts of heat.

Despite this, its distance from the sun meant usually that seething heat remained trapped beneath the surface, except when it erupted as lava from a volcano. Most of its surface stayed cold, very cold, even if a few hundred meters down flowed rivers of magma.

The Empire’s command center over the horizon occupied a geologically calm area. Perhaps the aliens had stabilized it by draining the heat below and using that to energize the Weapon just beyond. That massive laser had the power to burn through the heaviest ship armor over ranges out to ten million kilometers, and thus controlled space all around Jupiter.

At least, it controlled the space within the laser’s ever-moving arc of fire. The Marines’ assault was coming in from below the horizon.

Bull looked up to see Reaper staring at him. “Awake now, are we?” he said.

She snorted. “Who can sleep through all your yakking with Slash?” As if in reply, the assault sled bucked again and picked up a harmonic as it skimmed lower, bleeding off speed in the moon’s chill atmosphere. “Besides, we’re about to get hit.”

“Crap.” Switching his HUD view to flight tactical, Bull watched as a swarm of Meme stingships fell toward them, trailing tongues of fusion fire. The enemy launched hypers, tiny ones that nevertheless could bring down something as small as the sleds they rode. “Where the hell’s our aero cover?”

Around him Vango’s squadron did the same, and dozens of stingships fell to their beams. Unlike the Marines or the Ryss warriors, his pilots were thoroughgoing veterans, both of the battles to defend Earth so long ago, and of the fight to wrest the Gliese 370 system from the Meme. Cool professionals all, they lined up targets and one after another calmly knocked them down.

Even so, hundreds of the swift little enemy fighters remained. Roughly half turned away from the assault sleds to attack the StormCrows while the rest held their courses toward the assault force.

“Damn,” Vango said conversationally to his fighter jocks. “I was hoping they would
all
come after us. Alpha and Bravo Flights, with me. We punch through and hit the bogeys chasing the sleds. Charlie and Delta, keep them busy.” All of his Crows couldn’t dive to protect the sleds; if they did, the lagging half of the stingship group would roll in behind them and crawl up their asses.

“Roger, Alpha lead,” came the clipped acknowledgements from his three flight leaders, each with eight Crows.

Vango led Alpha with Bravo flight right behind as they rolled and stooped like falcons through the oncoming formation of stingships. Pushing his time sense up over one hundred to one, the universe slowed to a crawl and Vango let loose with the lasers and railguns in his wing pods. On automatic, the weapons pumped fire into the noses of the oncoming enemy fighters, nice low-deflection shots that could hardly miss, sending them tumbling as the weapons clawed their eyes out.

The Crows knocked out a score of stingships, but not without cost. “Just lost Red Dog,” Bravo’s leader Tex called, his accelerated VR voice sounding tinny through the link. Vango looked over his shoulder within VR space and pushed his time sense up to maximum, almost two hundred to one. Sending his viewpoint toward the expanding explosion where Red Dog’s Crow used to be, Vango could see nothing left but plasma and bits of wreckage in a spray, so he turned back to the slow-motion battle in front of him.

“Shit. He’s gone. Keep your heads in the game, people,” Vango replied in a frozen voice. What he really wanted to do was curse the dead man and everyone else for carelessness. Or maybe the stingship had just gotten lucky. The enemy fighters were fast but predictable, not too bright, and they didn’t have the many advantages of EarthFleet’s tech.

On the other hand, they were dirt-cheap, so that a hundred-to-one loss ratio was still an ugly proposition for
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’s aerospace squadron.

None of Vango’s pilots used their inline masers, saving full charges for later targets. Instead, they flashed through the enemy formation to swing onto the tails of the other group of stingships, the ones trying to line up on the assault sleds skimming over the surface far below. “Watch the red zone as you come out of your runs, people,” Vango called, referring to the slice of space high enough for the Weapon to have line of sight on them. One sweeping wide-area beam from the gargantuan laser waiting beyond the horizon would burn anything it touched. Titanic enough to gouge chunks out of
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’s glacis, the StormCrows would die like insects in a bug zapper if its sun-hot touch ever reached them.

The fifteen remaining Crows took shots at the stingships even as the enemy began to fire at the assault sleds in front of them. Tiny hypers leaped toward the Marine craft, and Vango passed the information via link to the blinding lasers mounted on the rears of the landers. Flashes sparkled in the void as beams crisscrossed intervening space. While the defensive lasers of the sleds sought to dazzle the sensors of the incoming hypers, stingship biolaser shots targeted the assault craft themselves.

Fortunately these new sleds had been fitted with extra armor for this single high-risk landing, and while Vango could see hits, none of the Marine sleds did more than wobble on damaged thrusters. Unfortunately, the stingships were just stupid enough to follow their suicide orders, and they were considerably faster than the sleds, which already decelerated for their landings.

“Dammit,” Vango muttered as he burned enemy after enemy. He hadn’t expected quite so many stingships.

“Sledgehammer in ten seconds actual,” Vango heard Commander Rick Johnstone’s VR voice in his comm.

“Sledgehammer in ten seconds actual,” Vango echoed to his flight leaders. “Check your lines and make sure you’re well out of the firing path.” He kept knocking down stingships as fast as his weapons would recharge, locked in accelerated time sense, determined not to waste any fraction of a second.

One stingship, pulling ahead of the others, dove for the rearmost assault sled, and Vango desperately concentrated all his fire on it, but his maser was out of juice for the next few seconds, and his wing weapons didn’t have the range or punch.

Just then, the ten seconds on his display ran out, and the dirty amber surface of Io erupted in a line of fire. The finger of one primary particle beam fired from
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ripped a hundred-kilometer-long trench pointing arrow-straight at the side wall of the Meme command center buried deep underground. Incidentally, the burst of superheated dust and burning sulfur thrown up engulfed sleds and pursuers alike.