Legion Of The Damned - 02 - The Final Battle (45 page)

Both sides had opened fire with long-range missiles and torpedos. Most were intercepted and destroyed hundreds of miles away but a few got through. Chien-Chu felt the deck lurch under his boots as a missile blew a hole in the ship’s screens and a torpedo exploded against the hull. The holo tank flickered and came back on. Damage reports filtered in.

“Engineering to bridge . . . the ship’s AI reports a pressure loss in sections P-42 through P-46. The port power routers were destroyed, backups on-line.”

“Medical to bridge ... launcher complex six suffered collateral damage. We have four confirmed KIAs, three missing, and six wounded.”

“Com center to bridge . . . the carrier
Confederate Victory
took a hit on the bridge. She’s still operational and Lieutenant Nakamura has assumed command.”

McGuire had counted on the carrier to screen the flagship from some of the incoming fighters and a friend of hers had been the ship’s XO. She
fought to maintain her composure. “Acknowledge message . . . confirm command. Request status.”

“The
Victory
reports twenty-five-percent readiness . . . launching now.” And so it went, in a long litany of damage reports, casualty lists, and lost ships, until even a civilian like Chien-Chu knew that the aliens were winning the battle, or battles, since there were at least five or six major conflicts taking place within the system as a whole, with lesser skirmishes being fought in and around the nearby asteroid belt.

Then the Hudathan task force broke through the fighter screen and forced their way in. The escort ships went out to meet them but were overwhelmed by thousands of enemy attack ships. Chien-Chu’s highly augmented fingers made dents in the armrests of his chair as he watched live video supplied by the fighters.

A cruiser lost her screens, took a pair of missiles up her stem tubes, and exploded. The light challenged the sun before darkness consumed it.

A fighter ran through a cloud of metallic debris, staggered, and came apart.

Two Confederate destroyers, their fighters clustered around them, blasted up towards the incoming task force. They fired in concert. A cruiser replied. Chien-Chu saw the enemy’s defensive screens flare and disappear. Explosions rippled the length of the long black hull as energy beams probed for a weak spot. The fighters went in, fired their torpedos, and strafed the enemy hull. The Hudathan ship absorbed hit after hit. Then, just when it seemed that the alien vessel was impervious to the human weapons, it split in two. There was no explosion, none that Chien-Chu could see a
nyway, just a parting of the ways as the bow separated from the stern, and drifted away. A cloud of debris appeared, including pieces of duct work, a power grid, and what might have been bodies.

The bridge crew cheered, but their happiness was short lived as the battlewagon took multiple hits. During the next thirty minutes the Hudathans destroyed the
Confederate Victory
, two cruisers, and a troop carrier packed with marines. Chien-Chu wished he could do something, anything, to make a difference.

The first tendrils of smoke found their way out of a vent and thickened the air. An ensign coughed and sealed her suit. McGuire issued an order to a rating and turned in Chien-Chu’s direction. Her face was tight and drawn. Defeat was written in her eyes. “It’s time to shift your flag, sir . . . I have a scout on standby.”

“Tell the pilot to load some wounded and get them clear,” Chien-Chu said grimly, “my place is here.”

McGuire nodded soberly. “Yes, sir . . . sorry, sir, but I have orders to the contrary. Sergeant . . . the admiral is under arrest. Take him to his shuttle. On the double.”

Vice Admiral Chien-Chu had no more than seen the marine, and formulated his reply, when the
Invictor
exploded.

 

Captain Cynthia Harmon had never heard Commander Tom Duncan swear. . . but she heard him now. ‘The double-dipped, miserable slime-sucking sonsofbitches killed the
Invictor!
She exploded!”

Harmon looked into the
Nooni’s
holo tank and saw it was true. The double-dipped sonsofbitches
had
destroyed the
Invictor
. Which meant Chien-Chu was dead, along with McGuire, and Lord knew how many other senior officers, all of whom were
real
warriors, and therefore critical to any sort of successful outcome. She thought about the Say’ lynt, how helpless they were, and knew what Valerie would want her to do. “Secure for a hyperspace shift. Enter the coordinates for IH-47-whatever-the-hell-it-is and stand by to break formation.”

The nearest members of the bridge crew looked surprised and Duncan turned in her direction. He cut himself out of the intercom and addressed Harmon directly. “Run in the face of the enemy? Have you lost your mind? You’ll be shot . . . and rightly so.”

Harmon had learned enough about the military to know that there should have been a “Captain” or a “ma‘am” somewhere in the last paragraph but really didn’t give a shit. She forced herself to display the same calm exterior that had sustained her in the Pacific. “No, I haven’t lost my mind. Think about the Say’lynt, Tom, think about the fact that we have fifty percent of an entire species on board! What other race has invested half of its gene pool in a single battle? It isn’t fair . . . and we’re taking them home.”

Duncan searched her eyes, saw the determination there, and shook his head sadly. “Sorry, Captain, but that amounts to an illegal order, and I refuse to follow it. The Say’lynt are members of the Confederate Armed Forces. We’re staying and so are they.”

Harmon had formed the words “we’ll see about that,” and was just about to say them, when an incredibly bright light exploded within her head. The scientist tried to move but found she couldn’t. Raft One had entered her mind. His thoughts were clear and rather stem. “Commander Duncan is correct. It would be wrong to leave while other sentients fight on. Please do not presume to make decisions for our race, or make us party to a mutiny. Valerie would
not
want you to violate our sovereignty. Besides, as long as the Hudatha are free to roam the galaxy, there will be no safety for our planet, or yours for that matter.”

The
Nooni
shuddered as a flight of missiles exploded against her screens. A klaxon started to beep. The bridge crew looked from Duncan to Harmon and awaited orders. The light that had filled Harmon’s head disappeared. She tried to move and discovered that she could. The biologist blushed and frowned at those around her. It had been a long time since anyone had taken her to task . . . but Raft One was correct and she knew it. “So what the hell are you waiting for? We have a battle to fight. Let’s get on with it.”

Duncan nodded, grinned, and turned his attention to damage control. It wasn’t especially logical, but he respected Harmon, and was glad she had command.

 

Poseen-Ka was secretly pleased. So pleased that he had permitted his steward to bring a simple meal. He kept one eye on the ever-changing holo tank while he ate. The battle had gone better than what even his most optimistic scenarios had projected. His forces had scored more than three hundred confirmed kills while losing only half that number themselves.

And making a good situation even better was the fact that they had destroyed what had almost certainly been the human flagship, leaving the monster to flail about without benefit of its head. This accomplishment would have been even more notable had it not been for the fact that the humans seemed blessed, or cursed, depending on how you looked at it, with a never-ending supply of leaders. No sooner was one killed than another popped up to take his or her place. A norm that stood in marked contrast to his own culture, in which leaders protected their power, and did everything they c
ould to eliminate potential rivals. A stupid and rather shortsighted tendency, but one he had grown used to. A voice that Poseen-Ka recognized as belonging to an intelligence officer sounded in his ear.

“The enemy’s forces are fully engaged. The computer progs look good for Phase I of the ground assault.”

Poseen-Ka felt the ship vibrate slightly as the starboard missile launchers were fired. Phase I of the ground assault plan called for an orbital bombardment of the primary ground targets. He gave the necessary order. “Permission granted. Implement Phase I.”

 

Although Chien-Chu had never lost consciousness, the explosion, followed by the wild tumble through space, had left him dizzy and disoriented. He l
ooked around. Algeron was a pale disk against which blast-torn hull plates, ruptured solar collectors, mangled consoles, and other, less identifiable debris were silhouetted, drifting in their own individual orbits. Hundreds of lesser items, including hand comps, coffee cups, fire extinguishers, and what looked like a severed hand were visible as well.

Something bumped Chien-Chu’s shoulder and he turned to find himself peering through a blood-spattered face plate. The technician’s suit had been holed, resulting in a violent decompression. What was left looked like something out of a nightmare. Chien-Chu screamed, heard no sound, and pushed the body away. Wait a minute . . . how could he push the body away? Or do anything else, for that matter? Especially since he was dead?

Space-suited hands came up, passed through the open face plate, and touched his plastiskin face. That’s when Chien-Chu remembered: cyborgs need some air, but not very much. They can thrive in a vacuum. As he had proved time and time again while welding. In fact, the only reason he had agreed to wear space armor was to set a good example, and appear more human. An excellent decision, since the suit boasted a com set that was superior to the one in his head, and had an on-board propulsion system.

The industrialist checked the emergency freq, and discovered that hundreds of people were in the same fix that he was. Some of them had been drifting for quite a while, and were running out of air. They had priority for rescue and rightly so. It would be hours before his number came up, assuming the search and rescue crews lived long enough to find him, which looked less and less likely. Lights flared as a ship fired its energy cannons. Chien-Chu turned in that direction, called on the suit comp for instructions, and did what he was told. The result was clumsy but serviceable. He s
purted forward. The ship, a huge, awkward-looking affair, grew larger.

 

Rebor Raksala-Ba had been dreading the moment when he and his comrades would be scattered over the planet below. The orbital bombardment had lasted for little more than a single planetary rotation before the Regiment of the Living Dead had been ordered into action. As they fell, their ball-bearing-shaped entry capsules glowed pink and the friction wore them thinner.

The cyborg heard a series of short beeps, followed by a steady tone . . . and knew that the humans had painted his capsule with radar. By now they were firing up into the sky, killing Hudathans as fast as they could, not knowing or caring about his particular fate. Raksala-Ba found the thought
both comforting and disturbing as he confronted the fact that he, the most important person in the universe, had been reduced to little more than a blip on a screen. He prayed that the computers would select someone else, someone like Assistant Dagger Commander Gudar Kabla-Sa, who was a major pain in the ass and deserved to die.

The capsule rocked as an antiaircraft missile detonated nearby. Raksala-Ba’s on-board computer informed him that the entry vehicle had started to disintegrate. The warning preceded the event by five seconds. The chute popped open, slowed the cyborg’s fall, and provided sufficient stability for him to deploy his wings. The wings were a recent addition, thought up by some half-wit who would never have to use them, intended to provide the cyborgs with “enhanced battlefield mobility,” which translated to more hang time, and left them exposed to additional ground fire.

The regiment had experienced technical problems during training, so Raksala-Ba was grateful when the chute was released, and his wings were extended. He banked to the right, vectored onto one of the beacons the Pathfinders had planted, and swung into a ragged-looking formation. Other troopers, those who had survived the antiaircraft fire, did the same. Together they wobbled through the thin mountain air and dropped towards the valley below.

Raksala-Ba recognized their objective as a surface-to-air missile battery, one of many scattered across the planet, and saw the craters left by the orbital bombardment. The fact that many of the shell holes overlapped each other provided evidence as to the intensity of the attack. The humans would be eager for revenge, but the cyborg took comfort from the fact that ship-class missiles were expensive, and the enemy would be unlikely to spend one on him.

It didn’t take very long for the thought to generate some bad luck. Four carefully camouflaged gatling guns opened fire along with computer-controlled energy cannons and crew-served automatic weapons. Cyborgs started to die. Kabla-Sa lost a wing, swore, and corkscrewed in. Others met similar fates. Raksala-Ba noticed that some fired all the way down while others screamed in fear. The Hudathan wondered which kind he was but didn’t really want to know.

Ridges rose around them, Raksala-Ba saw a Pathfinder and wondered why he was sitting on a ledge. The bio bod gestured respect and vanished upwards. The ground rushed up to meet the cyborg, his wings fell away, and the real battle began.

 

Due to the fact that the
Nooni
was the only ship of her kind in-system, and didn’t exhibit the physical or electronic characteristics necessary to generate a high threat index, she had been largely ignored. But with the battle under control, and a clear numerical advantage, the Hudathans were free to engage secondary and tertiary targets. Targets such as the big, slow Colony-class ship, which, after sustaining more battle damage, had only limited mobility.

A pair of fighters made a run down the port side and Harmon felt the command chair shudder in response to the torpedo hits. The hull was thick, thank God, thicker than those provided to newer vessels, but far from invulnerable. Due to the fact that the Say’lynt habitat took up nearly 86 percent of the
Nooni’s
mass, the ship had 70 percent fewer airtight compartments than most vessels her size, and could be destroyed with a single well-placed shot.