Rebellion (37 page)

One Guard Scoutstrider shook off the spell that held its operator and fired some sort of close-in, shotgun-type weapon, a bursting shell that mowed down a column of civilians in a bloody, tangled mass. A bottle, flame streaming from its neck, arced through the air, struck the RLN-90 high up on its torso, and exploded in writhing flames. A second bottle followed, and a third, and then a rocket round from a shoulder-fired launcher streaked low above the crowd and struck the burning strider squarely in its side. The crippled machine kept trying to move, until several laser bolts from Hagan’s machine stopped it for good. Katya waited for the pilot’s ejection, but it never came.

The surviving warstriders were retreating now, unable to face the sheer, ferocious weight of Babel’s civilian population. The Warlord broke to Katya’s left, making for the south end of the dome. With few civilians blocking her path in that direction. Katya changed course and angled for an intercept.

The Warlord’s high-velocity cannon, a squat dome-shaped turret mounted on the dorsal surface of its hull, loosed a buzzsaw burst of depleted uranium slugs that slammed into the Ghostrider and nearly smashed her to the ground. Lipinski, controlling the LaG-42’s missile launchers, loosed a short-range ripple-fired volley of M-490 rockets that savaged the bigger machine’s left leg and nearly brought it down. She locked onto a weak spot, a laser scar in the RS-64’s armor near the leg actuator joints, and fired pulse after pulse of 100-megawatt laser energy into duralloy plate suddenly glowing white-hot. The left joint gave suddenly, bolts of lightning jaggedly caressing tortured armor as main power leads shorted out. The machine ground to a halt, and as Katya’s Ghostrider moved closer, the crewmen ejected in a one-two-three sequence of smoke and noise.

It didn’t help. The crowd caught them almost before their chute-slowed capsules finished bouncing off the pavement. Katya turned away, unable to stop what happened next, and unable to watch it.

“
Ta
nis!
Ta
nis!
Ta
rns!”

She had never imagined a battle quite like this one.

Chapter 30

The first warflyers were man-jacked constructors and workpods equipped with maneuvering thrusters, indispensable for heavy construction work on the synchorbitals and other big orbital facilities. By 2250, forty-three years after the first military use of warstriders, orbital workpods were being armed for sentry and customs inspections. Slower and with less range than conventional space fighters, they have greater armor and endurance. Nonetheless, they have seen only limited use in combat.

—
Armored Combat. A Modem Military Overview

Heisaku Ariyoshi

C.E.
2523

“They’ve just gone to General Quarters,” Anders said over Dev’s intercom circuit. “Looks like we have to do it the hard way.”

Dev agreed. “Launch the warflyers.”

Warflyers were little more than converted warstriders, with legs replaced by cryo-H tanks and strap-on maneuvering thrusters. The two DR-80 Tenrai craft—
Tenrai
was Nihongo for “Heavenly Thunder”—had been captured by the raid at Nimrod that rescued Dev and the other Terran Rangers. Each massed twelve tons—eighteen with a full load of reaction mass—and was essentially a small, self-contained spacecraft. They could not reach orbit by themselves, nor could they reenter atmosphere for a landing. Instead, they were carried to and from orbit in ascraft rider slots, just as striders were transported to landing zones on a planet’s surface.

Silently in the vacuum of space, panels blew clear of the Moketuki’s belly, spinning end over end as they drifted into the night. The DR-80s, secured by magnetic grippers inside the ascraft’s riderslots, dropped free a second later. Just under fifteen minutes out from the Babylon orbital facility, Shippurport was visible only as a webwork of distant lights surmounting the razor-slash gleam of the sky-el. To Dev, it resembled a spider’s web glittering with sunlit droplets of dew, indescribably delicate and beautiful.

The laser defenses hidden within that beauty must be targeting them at this very moment.

“Laser com functional,” Simone reported. “We’re linked.”

Neither warflyer was manned, save for the Artificial Intelligences residing in their on-board computers. The odds were high that both craft would be destroyed in seconds. Instead, two of the ascraft’s passengers, Harald Nicholson and Torolf Bondevik, had jacked in from their acceleration couches on the flight deck and were controlling the flyers through teleoperation.

Both of the former Thorhammers were Lokans, with experience doing this kind of work at Loki’s Asgard synchorbital. They fired the DR-80s’ main thrusters almost in unison, accelerating out from the shadow of the pirated ascraft.

“Quite a view,” Nicholson said over the general frequency. “Sensors are recording a power-up zero-three-zero, plus zero-seven.”

“Got it.” Bondevik said. “Cloudscreen is armed.”

“
Fire!”

A bolt of light streaked from the central hull of one of the warflyers, followed a beat later by a launch from the other. The missiles, high-speed Starhawks, had a range of over one hundred kilometers. Though Imperial Starhawks could carry nukes, Hegemony weapons were limited to conventional warheads. These carried EWC-167 nanomunitions packs, and their twin detonations a moment later, a silent double flare of white light, released trillions of minute, nano-generated motes that gleamed in the sunlight like mirrored shields.

For centuries, engineers had searched for the key to the mythical “force field” of ViRdrama fictions. While numerous magnetic screens existed—such were vital for manned craft penetrating gas giant radiation belts, for example, or in the inner planetary systems of red dwarf flare stars—the magical defensive shield that could reflect lasers and charged particle bolts as well as nuclear missiles had remained a dream of science fiction.

Cloudscreens were the next best thing, however, for what couldn’t be seen or tracked by radar could not be accurately targeted. Two hundred kilometers from the synchorbital docking port, the twin, silvery clouds slowly merged and continued to drift toward the port with a closing speed of nearly ten kilometers per second. Behind the cloud, the ascraft shuttle and the two warflyers accelerated together, pacing the cloud, hidden in its opaque radar shadow.

Lasers lashed out from the docked
Tokitukaze
and from small defensive turrets on the synchorbit facility itself. The beams left dazzling trails as they vaporized paths through the dust, but the cloud rapidly absorbed and dispersed each beam, while continuing to shield the attackers. Radar and ladar returned only the blank, silvery disks of the approaching clouds.

Missiles could have penetrated the cloud, of course, and used on-board AIs to identify and track the targets, but they could not be launched while the ship was docked. Orders were given to cast off from the port facility, but it would be minutes yet before the countless power and data links between ship and port could be secured. Meanwhile, the Imperial destroyer’s missile tubes were blocked by the docking shroud, unable to turn their nuclear-tipped fury against the attackers.

And they had only seconds.

The cloudscreen swept across the port facility, a silent storm, the silvery dust already dispersing to transparency but packing inertia enough in each microscopic particle to scour painted numbers and insignia from duralloy surfaces, and sending spacesuited workers and workpods scurrying for shelter behind intervening superstructures. Transplas windows frosted over in seconds, and inside the synchorbital and aboard the docked destroyer, the drumming tick of hurtling dust sounded like the hissing-roar of ocean surf.

The surf roar subsided as the cloud swept past, rapidly thinning, bound now at far greater than escape velocity for deep space. As the skies surrounding the synchorbital and the docked warship faded to transparency, the first high-explosive warheads struck.

“I see three other big Impie ships. What the hell are those?”

“Transports. Don’t sweat ’em. Watch your closing rate.”

“Copy. I’ve got the lead.…”

Dev listened silently to the ViRcommunications between Nicholson and Bondevik. It was hard to realize that both men were silently strapped into couches back on the shuttle’s flight deck, and not actually aboard the two warflyers as they swiftly closed with the docked Imperial destroyer.

Each had loosed two more Starhawk missiles, these packing HE warheads, seconds after the cloud had engulfed the spaceport. Linking their cephlinks with the ascraft shuttle’s AI, they’d computed accelerations, courses, and times with lightning speed and inhuman accuracy; the four Starhawks reached the
Tokitukaze’s
hull seconds after the cloudscreen began to dissipate.

“I’ve got a solid lock,” Bondevik called. “Guiding home…
hit!”

White light flared against the destroyer’s port side. They were close enough now that Dev could clearly see the
Tokitukaze,
the forward third of its wedge-shaped length still engulfed by the docking shroud and the webwork of orbital gantries. Twisted fragments of wreckage spun across the night, and Dev could see the gantry frameworks rippling and twisting with the stress of the impact.

“Right behind you,” Nicholson said. Dev saw the next missile, a minute point of light darting for the ragged. IR-glowing gap in the destroyer’s port side. The spark flared, dazzlingly bright, then faded. “Damn! They nailed it. Switching to Two.”

Dev’s viewpoint was through a long-range, image-enhanced optical scanner aboard Bondevik’s flyer. With a thought, he shifted his point of view to Nicholson’s second missile. For a moment, he saw what Nicholson was seeing, the flank of the Imperial destroyer swelling with alarming speed, the ragged hole punched in her side by the first missile bracketed by target lock discretes, the flicker of numbers in one corner of the field showing the rapidly dwindling range. He had only a fleeting impression of the destroyer’s sheer bulk, caught a glimpse of another soundless explosion to the right as Bondevik’s second missile was taken out by a defensive laser battery.…

The hole in the
Tokitukaze’s
side expanded into a gaping cavern. Dev felt like he was hurtling through the cavern’s mouth, sensed a tangle of wreckage and blast-twisted bulkheads ahead… and then his mind was filled with the staticky, hissing snow of a sharply broken ViRcom link.

His vision cleared with only a flicker of delay. He was aboard the shuttle once more, trailing the two flyers by nearly one hundred kilometers. Eridu’s synchorbital facility had expanded to fill most of the sky ahead, a bewildering tangle of beams, struts, lights, tethers, storage tanks, and habitats. He could pick out the
Tokitukaze
now without enhancement. White fog—frozen air and water—was boiling into space from the double hit amidships.

A turret on the huge ship’s dorsal side swiveled. “Power buildup,” Anders warned. “I think—”

A gigawatt laser touched Bondevik’s warflyer, and the chunky craft glowed white-hot for an instance before soundlessly vanishing.

“Here we go.” Dev called. “Full acceleration!”

Nicholson’s warflyer and the shuttle plunged toward the
Tokitukaze.
The laser swung slightly, drawing down on the second flyer. Nicholson fired first, targeting the dorsal turret, which flared like a small sun.

And then the ascraft was so close that the destroyer filled the view forward, with the twisted and blackened hull plates centered dead ahead. Dev heard the
tic-tic-tic
of tiny, metallic fragments impacting on the ascraft’s hull, could see the gigawatt laser turret pivoting for a third and final shot, and then Anders was firing full retros, decelerating the last few tens of meters on hard-driving pillars of white-hot plasma from the bow thrusters, the ship’s squared-off prow plunging through tattered hull plating and twisted girders and burying itself in the destroyer’s wounded flank like a thrusting knife blade.

Jacked into the shuttle’s AI system. Dev did not feel the actual shock, but he knew they’d hit hard when both his vision and his data feed went out, leaving him literally in the dark. He broke his connection then, and woke up in the co-pilot’s slot.

He had weight—a little, anyway, under a tenth of a G. Shippurport was far enough out-orbit from Babylon to provide a modest spin-gravity. He snatched up his helmet and gloves, grateful that the shuttle’s hull hadn’t been breached in the collision.

Actually, the shock had probably opened dozens of tiny leaks, but none serious enough to evacuate the ship suddenly. He pulled on the helmet, then donned his gloves and checked his seals. Simone and Lara were clambering out of their slots, and he helped them with their armor as well.

The
Tokitukaze
was an Amatukaze-class destroyer, 395 meters long and massing 84,000 tons. No single conventional warhead could destroy such a giant; it would take a nuclear warhead—which the rebels did not have—or a volley of subnuclear munitions—from more ships than the rebels could muster—to destroy her.

But she had to be taken out of action or the gains made by the rebels on the surface would be meaningless. The only alternative was to revive a form of naval warfare dead for six centuries. They would board and storm the giant warship in an attempt to reach her bridge.

Dev had researched their target carefully on the ground. Her normal complement was around four hundred men, plus a marine company of 120, far too many for thirty rebels to handle.

Fortunately, they wouldn’t need to.
Tokitukaze
—her Nihongo name meant “Fair Wind”—was in a friendly port, and though there was considerable tension on the planet’s surface they could not be expecting an attack here at synchorbit. There would be a maintenance or caretaker crew aboard, fifty or less, plus perhaps half of the marines.

Odds of thirty to one hundred were still less than ideal, but the defenders would be scattered through different parts of the enormous ship, dazed by the attack, possibly trapped by warped pressure doors or by compartments opened to vacuum. Some would be dead; an instant before they’d rammed the bigger ship, Dev had actually
seen
several bodies pinwheeling through the night, blown out through the destroyer’s ruptured side. The ship’s slow and lackluster defense—only one main laser turret functioning with some fifteen minutes’ warning—suggested that they had indeed caught the Imperial ship shorthanded and unprepared.