The Heart of Matter: Odyssey One (23 page)

“Cav Flight, this is Cav One,” Bixx said a few seconds later, finally eschewing the cursing for something useful. “Stand ready to go to full atmospheric braking on my signal.”

There was no response as they continued their headlong rush toward the surface of the world, doing what would have
been considered insane just a few decades before and wasn’t considered very bright even today.

“Mark!” Bixx snarled, yanking back on his control stick.

The headlong rush of the four shuttles halted at the same moment, the fighters staying in perfect formation with them as their wings flexed under the commands of their pilots and each of them tilted back up and showed their bellies to the world below.

The large delta-shaped shuttles were designed as one-piece lifting bodies, their entire airframe intended to catch as much air as possible during just the sort of hard reentry maneuvers that these were being put to. Their control surfaces didn’t rely on the old ailerons and elevators of their early brethren, but instead extended along the entire surface of their wings, controlled by flexing memory metals.

Each wing could flex of its own accord, and that of the pilot, changing the characteristics of the shuttle effectively without the added complication of a separate control surface that could become jammed.

The results of the flex were fast and effective and, above all, very predictable, so when the shuttle instantly began to buck and shudder around them, neither Bixx nor his copilot were surprised, startled, or nervous. Not very nervous, at any rate.

“Hit the counter mass on my mark!” Bixx snapped as the LZ came into sight ahead of them.

His copilot gripped her seat with one hand as her other rested on the controls for the counter-mass field generators. The timing had to be perfect on this, or at least it couldn’t be late. Early was fine, early they could survive since it was a training operation. In combat, of course, it might be another story, but here and now, early was survivable.

Late, however, would result in them plowing their shuttles right into the ground in a rather spectacular display of pyrotechnics.

The ground was racing up at them, counted in the hundreds of meters instead of thousands now, when Bixx finally yelled out above the roar.

“Mark!”

PRIMINAE COLONY, THEORA DEICE
Orbital Station

▸“FIRE.”

Commander Breem was surprised at how calm her voice sounded, an odd detached feeling infusing her as she watched the numbers count down to the Drasin approach. The ships were less than a light-minute out now, the twenty of them that the sensors had finally managed to count, and she knew that it was almost over.

The last of the refugee ships had lifted off over an hour earlier, taking the last of the people who would—who could—be evacuated from the surface of the planet. Now it was just a matter of the final tune being played.

The laser pods made no sound, they didn’t even flash or wink as they fired, but on her enhanced projections, she watched the beams race out from the pods, slashing across space toward the enemy.

“Impact in forty seconds,” someone said in the background, but she didn’t pay any attention.

Lora Breem had learned her lessons from the battle records of her predecessors and had focused the entire force of her arrays on only three of the incoming ships. The Drasin
vessels had proved already that they were incredibly tough and resistant to laser attacks—from Priminae laser crystals, at least.

Even so, they weren’t invulnerable. The
Cerekus
had proven that in the final moments of the Battle of Ranquil.

The screens showed the shots intersect the enemy flotilla and marked the three ships as unknown as they waited for confirmation of the strikes.

“Hit!”

Two of the ships winked out, the sensor information being fed back to them from the
Heralc
listing them as destroyed. The third began to twist in the three-dimensional projection, its drives dead and the pluming ejection of gas and flame causing it to lose stablity.

The cheers in the background only underscored both Breem’s dark rapture as she watched the two ships flicker out, and also her despair as she watched the eighteen others shift their course to better target her positions.

“Scanners!” she called. “Full power!”

They knew she was here now; the time for hiding was past.

PLANET RANQUIL

▸THE FOUR SHUTTLES seemed to come to an unnaturally fast stop as they leveled out under a hundred meters over the ground, their retrothrusters burning brightly in the early morning light. Reed watched the maneuver with approval, recognizing the skill needed to pull a tight maneuver like that, especially in tandem.

The skill of the
Odyssey
’s pilots, however, was never in question.

The Archangels split up as the shuttles slowed, a third of them staying with the slowing troop carriers as the remaining eight pulled up in a shallow arc that bled of precious little of their speed. The radio chatter that they were listening to keyed over to the fighter jocks then as the first phase of the attack began.

“Archangel Lead to Archangels, weapons free! I say again, weapons free!”

Tanner and Nero flinched slightly as the ground suddenly lit up, bathed in flames and smoke as the fighters passed over the LZ with their weapons blazing. Guided submunitions, released from missiles in flight, erupted in airbursts over the
battle zone and turned the land into pitted, smoking craters. Lasers from the four linked cannons mounted on the Angels’ wings scorched the ground as they passed, frying one defensive installation after another, and the gimbal-mounted 80mm cannons roared in the distance as the pilots let them fire free at any target on their screens.

“Watch the shuttles,” Reed said then, knowing that the spectacular destruction caused by the fighters would distract the two men beside him. “This is important.”

Tanner and Rael turned their focus to the shuttles, watching through an advanced projection even as their eyes flickered occasionally to the reality in the distance. The shuttles had turned side-on as they came sliding to a stop over the field, nothing but smoking wreckage below them.

Then, from just over forty meters up, the first of the troops vacated the shuttles. The whining crack of assault rifles was lost in the distance, as was the damage they inflicted lost in the general carnage of the Archangel’s pass, but the figures themselves were dropping to the ground and instantly rushing away from the landing zone.

“Air cav tactics—adapted slightly, of course,” Reed said calmly as he watched, glancing at his watch.

“Move! Move! Move!” Greene snarled, wondering when he would get tired of yelling at people, as he slapped the armored backs of the men as they leapt from the shuttle.
Meh, haven’t gotten tired of it yet, don’t see it coming anytime soon.

They were going out five at a time, suits already picking up possible defensive emplacements as they jumped, their assault rifles leading the way as they dropped. Those that hit the
ground seemed to bounce as their suits absorbed the impact, then allowed the soldiers to arc back into the air in shallow leaps that carried them across the devastated terrain.

Greene noted one soldier whose rebound jump carried him about five meters and winced as his suit vitals flickered almost instantly to “dead.” The trooper in question hit the ground hard as his armor locked up and let him bounce across the terrain.

The sergeant made a note to ream the soldier out later, but then the shuttle was empty and it was his turn out the door.

Lieutenant Crowley cursed as the straps that secured his tactical armor in place refused to give properly, keeping him pinned in place as the others exited the shuttles.

“Move it, Lieutenant!” Brinks shouted as he sent the last of the troops on their way. “This is a combat drop!”

Crowley activated his armor and reached up with one metal-shod hand and simply ripped the two-ton test straps in two. Then he levered himself up and tromped across the shuttle to the door.

“Sorry, sir,” he said. “Ready to go.”

“Then do it, soldier!” Brinks snapped, gesturing to the door.

Crowley nodded inside his armored shell and stepped out of the shuttle.

Brinks watched him fall for a second, then threw himself out as well.