On Silver Wings (30 page)

“Aye Sir. Coming about.”

First the Socrates, then one by one the remaining ships in the Column fired their bow and aft thrusters to bring themselves around to face the planet looming in their screens. Alexi opened the fleet wide comm as he checked the trajectories and made some last minute mental calculations before speaking.

“All hands, standby for aerobraking maneuvers.” He said, “We’re going to be digging deeper than normal, so it’ll be rough. Captains, keep close watch on your telemetry, let’s not suck each other’s dirty air. Good luck all.”

Mira Vasquez’ voice came back over the clear channel, “Teach your grandma to suck eggs, Alexi!”

The others laughed as Alexi Petronov shook his head with a half smile, glad that Mira hadn’t chosen to be somewhat cruder in her rejoinder. Unlike his military counterparts, Alexi somewhat enjoyed Mira’s earthier sense of humor, but since things were being recorded for posterity it was probably best she kept it lower key than usual.

The Socrates buffeted slightly, bringing his full focus back to the present. “Are we in the atmosphere already?”

“No sir! Gravity detection indicates an event, just aft of our position.”

“Bozshe!” He cursed, slapping open the fleet wide. “Hold on tight, planetary defenses have engaged!”

The newly installed battlestations alarm blared to life, driving shivers up and down Alexi’s back. He hated that sound.

“Put our noses another ten degrees down, relative to the planet!” He called out over the damned alarms, “And fire VASIMR drives, One Gee!”

“Firing drives, One Gravity, Aye!”

The Socrates dipped her nose down as the big drive flared to life, pushing her into the edge of the atmosphere ahead of schedule. The forward ceramic tiles caught the edge of the rushing air first, erupting into flame as the ship dug in at a steep angle, actually under power while in the midst of a maneuver most ships would be using braking thrust during.

“We’re digging in too steep, Captain!”

Alexi grinned, slightly manically, knowing that right on his heels the Nicola Tesla was following along with every other ship in the column.

It was good, sometimes, to have friends as insane as you were.

“Stand by to fire thrusters!”

“Thrusters standing by!”

“Kill power to the VASIMR!”

“VASIMR offline!”

“Fire bow thrusters, bring her nose up seven degrees relative!”

“Aye Sir, Seven degrees up to the planet!”

The relatively weak bow thrusters flared brightly, but were almost lost in the friction flames erupting around the surface of the ship as it plunged deeper into the planetary atmosphere. They slowly lifted the bow of the ship up, nudging it away from its death dive just before the ship suddenly bucked hard and impacted thicker atmosphere.

The Captain and crew where slammed hard into their bolsters, spines compressing from the impact, just before the ship skipped along the atmosphere and arced in a low curve along the planetary envelop. Behind the Socrates, streaming long tails of fire, the remaining ships in the column followed like some insane game of interplanetary hopscotch.

Alexi Petronov was all grins as the Socrates whipped around the curvature of Hayden, skimming the atmosphere again in another blaze of fire and light, the dangerous maneuver bringing out the child in him who’d grown up wanting to work in space more than anything in the world.

The tens of thousands of tons large space craft all whipped around the curve of the planet, skipping along the atmosphere and bleeding speed as quickly as their human passengers could physically endure, all the while streaming fire behind them.

At the apex of one of the skips, during a rare moment of relative freefall, Alexi called out new orders.

“Bow thrusters to half, bring our nose down six degrees!”

“Six Degrees down to the planet, half thrust, Aye Sir!”

The Socrates dipped its nose into the coming dive and this time, instead of bouncing off the atmosphere, the big ship drilled right through in an explosion of flames and sound.

Alexi and his crew were thrown forward, hard into their restraints, as the thickening atmosphere began to work on the Socrates. Behind them, the rest of the column had followed the Socrates’ lead and were boring through Hayden’s upper atmosphere and leaving trails of flame hundreds of kilometers long in their wake.

“Heat shields!” Alexi called out, having waited until the last possible second to give the order.

“Heat shields lowering, Aye!”

One by one critical telemetry plots went dead as the more vulnerable sensors were covered by thick metal and ceramic shields, until the Socrates and her allies were plummeting half blind on their headlong rush around the planet.

“We’re on dead reckoning systems now, Cap! Shields in place, all systems standing by!”

This part of the maneuver was one that Alexi wasn’t terribly fond of. Between the heat shields and the interference from the atmospheric plasma around them, the entire column was pretty much blind, deaf, and dumb. Given that they were hurtling well beyond hypersonic speeds, with the distance between each ship being measured in thousands of meters at
best
, it was by far the most dangerous maneuver he’d ever attempted.

In the end, however, all he could do was trust the Captains he was flying with, trust his ship and crew, and try like
hell
to figure out what he was going to do when they slowed enough for that space be damned planetary defense system to start effectively tracking them again.

It had always been a gamble, hoping that the enemy was using ships to cover the planet and that the combat component of the fleet could lure them away while the relief column did their work. As it turned out, that clearly wasn’t the case, so he now had to try and determine his best strategy for dealing with it here and now.

Unfortunately, that was going to mean even more reckless piloting.

Alexi laughed, drawing odd looks from the men around him. Soon they’d whisper from one side of the ship to the other that the Captain laughed in the face of death. Maybe it was true, but really he was just laughing at the fact that the only thing he could think at the moment was that it was a really good thing that he loved his job.

Enemy Facility

Hayden

When her computer informed her of another high pitch event, Sorilla winced. Each and every event she’d experienced had been followed by the low rumble of a nuclear explosion in the not so distant distance. Each whine indicated an attack on people she’d worked with for months, trained, fought beside…

This time, however, when no returning rumble sounded Sorilla was given pause.

She knew that there were no operations so far from the Colony center that her armor’s systems would be unable to detect the blast of one of the enemy’s attacks.

So what are they firing at?
She thought for a moment, but then immediately berated herself. She knew what they had to be firing at.

Damnation.
Sorilla thought grimly, glancing at her chrono app.
They made good time. Of all the times for Fleet to hold to a damned schedule.

The insides of the enemy base was like something out an ancient monument, like wandering through the Pyramids in Egypt or Sorilla’s own middle American nations. Without her armor’s dead reckoning navigation systems, Sorilla suspected she might have gotten lost already. With those systems, however, she had made her way quickly through the corridors, and unless something was well and truly mucking up her systems she was closing on the source.

Which, to absolutely no shock on her part whatsoever, left Sorilla staring at a blank wall with no door in sight.

Well just fan-fucking-tastic,
She cursed silently while staring at the wall that every system she had said was blocking her destination. Sorilla sighed, shaking her head, “Well like my EOD instructor always said… when in doubt, Q-Tex.”

She pulled a charge of the quantum explosive from her supply and eyed the wall for a moment, then ran her hand over it. Ultra-sound readings were pretty solid, so she doubled the charge and applied a nanotic shaping to it. A nanometer thin barrier of copper mesh flexed under power from her suit, molding the charge into a breaching charge before Sorilla applied it to the wall.

After she physically attached the detonator, Sorilla stepped back a couple paces and pushed herself against the wall. In her armor she wasn’t too worried about debris, especially coming back from a shaped charge, but accidents happened and a solid chunk of rock could put her on her back. While seemingly minor, even a few seconds could be costly depending on just what was on the other side of the wall.

In place, she quickly ordered the plasticized explosive to detonate and was rewarded by a pressure wave and flood of dust filling the corridor as the explosives went off and sent a star pattern blast of copper plasma through the stone wall. As the dust was settling she stepped over to the wall, not in the least bothered by the tiny fist sized hole that was the entirety of the results.

A glance through the hole left her puzzled, but not enough to stop. Sorilla drove her elbow through the stone wall, revealing that while it seemed solid on her side the explosives had blown out the other side quite well indeed.

She found herself staring down several dozen feet from a position roughly about midway up the side of an immense spherical room. A glance down told her that dropping into the room would be easy enough, but pointless. She’d slide down the wall to the bottom, where there was nothing but stone curving up in all directions.

The real game was playing out in the very center of the room, across from her position. There was a catwalk established, leading back to another section of the wall, and centered around a mechanism that made no sense to her whatsoever. Of course, since the harmonics her armor was picking up matched the general frequency of the spikes that preceded a nuke rumble, Sorilla figured she didn’t need to understand it to know what it was.

She took a moment to evaluate the distance to the catwalk, noting that the room was empty in the process. The rangefinder in her armor made it fourteen meters to the catwalk, easily workable she decided as she kicked more of the stone away from the perimeter of the hole she’d blown. When she was finished with that, Sorilla loped easily back down the corridor to the end.

Sorilla started from a crouch, leveraging the full power of her armor as she boosted into a sprint that crossed the distance to the hole in under two seconds. She vaulted from the edge, in as high an arc as she could without taking her own head off on the edges she’d been forced to leave, and smashed through the metal rails of the catwalk like they were made of foil.

The walk itself held, though, as she skidded to a stop by digging her armor shod fingers into the metal it was made of before she slid clean off the other side. Sorilla took a moment to get her breath again, then rose to her feet as she examined the device within the catwalk.

It was composed of two black hemispheres horizontally cut by a complex looking mechanism that spun freely within. Sorilla recorded the sight before tossing the last of her Q-Tex into the horizontal cut and loping around the catwalk toward the door in the far wall of the sphere. She was sure that the boys and girls in fleet R&D would want to check out her recordings when it was all said and done.

That, and they’d be a tad miffed at her for blowing the whole damn place before they could check it out.

Screw them,
She thought, smirking as she ran. There were real people on the wrong end of this thing, if it was what she was betting it was. The lab geeks could wait for another chance, something told her that this wasn’t going to be the last time she got to play this game. That is, unless it really
was
the last time.

As she approached the stone door ahead of her, Sorilla was determined to make sure that she got to play a few more hands before cashing out. She was too addicted to the game to give it all up now.

She hit the door without slowing, grunting as her bruised shoulder flattened against the inside of her armor again, the gel layer be damned. The stone shattered again as she catapulted into the room, hitting the floor in a roll and coming up with her rifle already seeking targets. She skidded into the center of the room on one knee, her other leg stretching out to balance her as she identified and haloed targets in the large room.

It was a control center, obviously, with large screens and a holographic display of Hayden itself floating right above where she slid to a stop. Sorilla noted the telemetry tracks above the image of the world in the corner of her eye, but had other things to worry about just then. More of the furry types rushed her, lifting their particle weapons, and ran right into the first shots from Sorilla’s rifle.

They went down hard, her assault rifle putting out heavy rounds designed to perforate light armor. What they did to unarmored security guards simply didn’t bear thinking on. Unlike older armor piercing rounds, the new military standard didn’t over penetrate as it was designed to tumble and explode within its target.

The first two meat slabs went down, spraying blood or whatever bodily fluid did the job for them from grapefruit sized holes in their chests. Sorilla and her armor’s computer quickly evaluated the odds, leading her to extending her rifle to the left one handed while drawing her pistol to cover the right. The rifle fired on automatic as her armor computer recognized targets and nudged her arm to fine tune the shot while she covered the other side with her pistol, putting high caliber rounds into three more as her armor and rifle perforated another four while her attention was focused in the opposite direction.

She slowly rose to her feet, keeping an eye on the room through the compressed panoramic view provided by her ocular implants and armor HUD. There were no more meat slabs lumbering in her direction, but she counted at least eight of the shorter and frailer looking grey skinned types.

Sorilla snorted lightly, noting the rough resemblance of the aliens to Earth folklore and wondered briefly if there was a connection. She put it aside for the moment, it hardly mattered for her purposes. She’d leave it to the historians to figure out.