Prometheus and the Dragon (Atlas and the Winds Book 2) (18 page)

He spun around the leg of the lander and zoomed in on the streaking objects he saw. “Those are not missiles,” he said. “They are troops jumping out of small carriers.”

“That is not possible,” the pilot said. “They would never survive.”

“I am watching it with my own eyes,” he said. “They are wearing some kind of flying suit and it looks like they are equipped with weapons.” He’d been steadily pulling back the zoom to keep them in focus.

“Incoming troops,” Ming said, pointing to the north as several of his men turned to look in his direction. “Prepare to engage.”

***

Above Prometheus Ridge:

Sophie watched the six volunteers spread out, three on each side of her mini. From her perspective, they simply looked like they’d stepped out onto an invisible shelf, their MMU holding them in place like they were still riding with her.

“Stay clear of the ground,” she said, pointing out the obvious. “Minies, let’s get some altitude and give them some room to maneuver.” She watched as the other ships arced up together, leaving their passengers flying on the original heading.

“All units, you are free to engage your targets,” she said. “Good luck.”

Outside, she watched as they rotated their gravity lasers toward the ground. They hadn’t planned for this first sweep over the landers to be anything except a strafing run. Their weapons were set to work as a neurological scrambler. They weren’t planning on killing anybody if they could avoid it, just holding them off until they gave up.

Dave had been very clear in repeating Cole’s orders that they weren’t to get into the middle of a Chinese-American shooting war, but they couldn’t afford to stand by and do nothing either. They were in it now, like it or not.

***

Jiuquan Launch Center, Nei Mongol, China:

It was night at the Launch Center, and although this was the time that meant a slowdown in activities, the assault on the lunar surface had kept most of the Command Staff on duty well past their usual shift change. Director General Jiang sat as if carved in stone, listening to the voices relayed from the surface of the moon.

Although their primary field commander was out of contact, and the telemetry link from his lander had gone down, he was still optimistic that they would reach their objective. Prometheus had to be stopped before it rendered the
Zhen-Long
missile useless. It had been a hard call to make, but he knew there had been no other choice.

He cocked his head as he heard one of the squad leaders report there were troops approaching. From the north. The Americans had no operations north of Plato, so that could only mean one of the two other colonies was bringing in reinforcements. That was an unfortunate development, indeed. It jeopardized the mission, and it also meant they had new enemies to deal with once this was over.

He heard the lander pilot tell his troops to get clear. His orders had been to get out of the way once the soldiers were on the ground if they encountered resistance. Get out of the firefight and wait until they called for extraction. It was still a textbook operation, even if it was about to get messy.

Suddenly the light coming through the blinds over his office window changed. Dull orange melted to shifting patterns of vivid green and blue. He looked up from where he was staring at his desktop, and watched the colors flashing on the far wall, unable to make sense out of what he was seeing. His own silhouette cast an image of a two headed monster in shimmering black.

Swiveling around, he pried down one of the slats in the blind and stared out. The sky was dancing in liquid fire. An aurora? They weren’t unheard of here, but this looked different, like a rolling cloud of neon smoke that lashed toward the ground.

The comlink in his ear hissed for an instant and then went silent. The lights went out across the field where the gantry towers stood. A wave of darkness spread across the complex toward him, looking like a blanket being drawn slowly over the land.

The hair on the back of his neck twitched and tingled, then the lights flashed above him. Brighter than the noon sun in the instant before they exploded. The building itself seemed to vibrate under his feet and the metal window sash buzzed. Tiny lightning bolts arced and shimmered around the frame. He smelled ozone so thick and choking that he covered his mouth and coughed. His eyes burnt. Flames seemed to dance in front of him and he stumbled over the edge of his desk.

Landing on his back, he screamed. His skin felt like he’d fallen into an acid bath. He thrashed and writhed, rolling onto his side in agony. The carpet on the floor danced, a million neon-white sparks parading in waves, short circuiting his nervous system. His brain felt like it was exploding and he tried to scream again, but no sound came out. Fog surged inward on his mind, and he realized he was smelling smoke, and with it the sick smell of burning hair and skin.

He closed his eyes and waited for the end, but it held off on the other side of his torment. Wave after wave of excruciating pain, each building on the back of the last. Carrying him upward until finally he settled into the silent well of darkness.

***

Prometheus Ridge, Plato:

“Move,” Ming barked, watching his squad grab their gear and scatter. Their pilot had given them ten seconds to clear away before he hit the engines and bugged out for the crater rim. Dashing a hundred yards, he stopped and turned to watch. “Go. We are clear.”

He wasn’t sure what happened next, but as he watched, several of his men crumpled to the ground in broken heaps. There was no sign of what had caused it, simply one second they were running, and the next they were tumbling wildly. Marionettes with their strings cut.

In the same instant the engines of their lander ignited, sending a huge plume of scattering regolith and small stones flying. But the ship remained on the ground, not moving. Ming watched as the pilot applied more power, digging deeper into the lunar soil and sending bigger chunks of the surface flying in his direction. He dove into a small crater, trying to get out of the way of the heavy debris. He poked his head up and watched the lander shaking, but still nothing moved.

“We are at full thrust,” the pilot said, sounding a little panicked. Ming flipped the starlight scope over his eye again and dropped back into the crater to scan the sky overhead. There was a small vehicle hanging a thousand meters above him. He couldn’t tell if it was the source of the problem, but he rolled over on his back, pulled an RPG out of his side pack and pointed it at the ship. With a solid jerk he launched the miniature missile toward the craft.

It hit squarely and there was a blinding flash. He closed the eye that was behind the scope eyepiece, and watched the explosion with the other. Once the fireball faded, he looked back at the place where the ship had been, expecting to see pieces of scrap tumbling toward the ground. What he saw instead was the ship still intact, but had been blown several hundred feet from its original position. Then he saw the flash of another explosion and felt the ground lurch under his back. Shards of metal rained down on him, glowing from the heat of the blast.

He bellowed in pain as a heavy piece of shrapnel dropped over the rim of the small crater and sliced through his arm, severing it just above the elbow. He watched a fine spray of red foam sizzle down onto the piece of what had once been an engine nozzle. He knew he was dead even before his body gave up the fight. The moon was a harsh place to wage a war. Like the shadows that surrounded him, it was all darkness or light. Black or white. Live or die.

***

Bridge of the Draco, above Prometheus Ridge:

Dave watched the battle play out in finite snapshots of selected reality. His mind picked out the moments to remember, filtering them into individual pixels from a larger image that was too big to absorb whole.

He watched the tactical display, maintaining an abstraction that bothered him. He’d been trained as a fighter pilot. He knew the dangers of becoming an armchair quarterback when your own ass was in the pilot’s seat.

“I’m hit!” he heard Sophie scream over the comlink as the thunder rang in the background. “Shit, shit, shit!” she said. “I can’t hear anything and I’m bleeding.”

“Open a visual to her mini,” he said, watching a view screen materialize on his console. She was holding a hand over her forehead and looking like she’d smacked herself pretty hard.

“Are you really deaf?” Dave mouthed, making no sound.

“No I’m not, smart boy,” she said, “but I was seeing double there for a minute, and my ears are screaming.”

“How the hell did you blow up that lander?” he asked. “That was pretty impressive shooting for a hammer.”

“I blew it up?” she said.

“Her AI is reporting when they were hit they changed position relative to the lander, and instead of pushing it down vertically they crushed it sideways. One of the landing struts collapsed and an exhaust nozzle bent on impact,” his computer said.

“Well, at least that’s one landing party that’s going to be walking home,” Dave said. Three red streaks appeared on his display. Missiles heading for the towers. “That was a slick move. Why don’t you see if you can go crush a couple more of them?”

“Roger, I’m on it,” she said, breaking the visual link from her end.

His hands slid over the controls, lining up on one of the missiles and hitting the power control. As he watched, the missile slammed into the ground and erupted into a huge ball of fire. “Oh shit, those are some big sombitches.” he said.

“Attention all Sentinel Forces, be advised the enemy units are setting up to use high-yield missiles in their attack on the gun towers. They must be stopped, but do not intercept. Use gravity lasers only.” He sighted on the second missile and shoved it toward the ground while he sent out the warning. It exploded close enough to the base of one of the towers that he could see it sway from the impact. Someone else got the third missile, and it exploded well before it hit the ground.

“Nice shooting, whoever that was,” Dave said. “Flight Infantry, try to engage them where they’re setting up. We’ve got at least two groups down in craters to the southeast and south.” He touched the spots on his screen where the craters were sending the coordinates to the minies’ AI systems. He had no way to send the locations to the MMU fighters, but he hoped if they could get an eyeball on them by watching the small ships, they’d be able to concentrate their attention.

Six missiles launched in the same second, arcing up toward the towers. “We’ve got a lot of incoming down there. Anybody got a free hand?” He targeted the first one and it exploded, the second one got by his first shot, and he swore under his breath. He realigned and got it on his next try. He shot down the fourth and fifth and then he saw six more appear.

“We’re humped,” he said. “Were gonna lose the towers unless I get some help.” He swung his guns toward the closest one and hit it a glancing blow. It pinwheeled, spewing exhaust in an ever widening spiral trying to realign itself, but before it corrected its trajectory, it had twisted all the way across the ring of guns and slammed into the side of one of the reactor containment vessels. The fireball engulfed the building, but Dave didn’t have time to watch to see if it had done any damage.

Another missile turned abruptly in the last instant, changing its target, and he missed it. Before he got off a second shot, it plowed into the base of one of the towers, twisting the superstructure and collapsing the main vertical columns along one side. As he watched, it began to buckle. “Fuck,” he hissed, spinning his guns around again and taking the next missile out in the first shot. Two other missiles arced past the collapsing tower, dodging the falling pieces deftly, and dove into the ground at the base of the same tower.

The bottom of the tower shredded, and the turret fell straight in on itself like a building imploded by a demolition team. “Those missiles are fly-by-wire or RC,” he said, without taking his hands off the Weapons Controls. “We’ve got to get the fire teams.”

“We have one lander lifting off,” the AI announced. Dave glanced up through the windows, watching the ship trying to gain altitude.

“Not so fast there,” Sophie said, slipping in behind the fleeing ship and locking onto it with a gravity laser. She swung her mini sideways and pivoted the two vehicles back toward the ground. The Chinese pilot saw what was coming and tried to correct, but he had way too much inertia. She flew a single tight circle, and using his own energy to create a hard centrifugal sling, she threw the ship back toward the surface. It tumbled end over end, slamming into one of the craters that a missile team was using for shelter. “OOOOH RAH!” she bellowed triumphantly.

Unfortunately another missile slipped by in the distraction, taking the end off of one of the guns and twisting the gun loose from its cradle. In another slow motion fall, it simply rolled over and crumpled at the foot of its tower. “We can’t keep this up. We’re losing by attrition.”

***

Chang Er Prefecture, Tycho:

“We are starting to take heavy losses,” the unidentified soldier said. “Two landers have been destroyed, and the others are being held on the ground somehow. We have casualties all over the field.”