The Siege of Earth (The Ember War Saga Book 7) (13 page)

Acceleration pressed Durand against her seat. Compression pads tightened around her thighs and her abdomen, keeping blood in her head where she needed it. Her Eagle shot over Charon’s surface, a barren expanse of ugly rock and ice. She glanced up and saw the distant Grinder in orbit over Pluto, light from the drones building it winking against the star field.

“Keep your eyes peeled, boys and girls,” she said. “Let’s complete this pass and drop the buoy.”

“Gall, this is Lancer,” said the Condor pilot she and two other fighters accompanied on their high-speed orbit. “Relays one and two are down. Should be done in another three minutes.”

“Why are the Xaros just sitting out there?” asked Manfred, one of her Dotok pilots. “It’s not like them to just let us limp away after a fight.”

“What’s our purpose out here?” Durand asked.

“To blow that damned thing up before it opens a portal to the underworld and floods our new home with death and destruction,” said Lothar, Manfred’s brother.

“What do you think the Xaros defenders’ purpose is?” Durand asked.

“To…not let us do that?” Manfred quipped.

“To protect the Grinder until it’s done,” Durand said. “They come after us and they’re vulnerable to another strike from Earth through our Crucible. It takes light almost six hours to get from Pluto to Earth,” she said, looking at the timer on her dashboard, “which means Earth either just saw our last fight or they’re listening to Captain Valdar explain what happened.”

“Relay three down,” Lancer said.

“And we have to wait six more hours for instructions to reach us from Earth,” Lothar said. “Or we wait for them to send reinforcements through…which could come at any time now.”

“Welcome to life at the edge of the solar system,” Durand said, “where the speed of light is just too slow to get things done.”

She tapped into the camera feed from a relay and zoomed in on the Grinder. The gap in the ring was smaller than when they’d first arrived. When Valdar first briefed the mission, he said intelligence estimated the jump gate wouldn’t be done for days. At the rate the Xaros were working, they looked like they’d be done in a few hours.

“Relay four down. The task force has eyes on the Grinder. Ready to burn home,” Lancer said.

“Maintain speed,” Durand said. “We flash the afterburners and they’ll know we’re up to something.”

Durand ignored the grumbles from the pilots, all of whom had been in their cockpits for the last twelve hours and were eager to land on the
Breitenfeld
for some much needed rest. She felt sweat trickling down her body and a heat rash forming around her joints. Such were the realities of life as a void fighter pilot. There was danger, glamour, mediocre bonus pay and the persistent funk of one’s own body odor.

The flight flew across Charon and came upon the task force…where Durand did
not
see the missile pods in the void around the
Breitenfel
d
as she’d expected.

“Ahh…this is bullshit,” Durand said. She opened a channel to the ship’s flight tower. “Blue flight reports mission accomplished. We are running on fumes. Where the hell are we supposed to land if those big blocks of missiles are still on the flight deck?”

“This is Valdar. There’s a FARP on the port side between point defense cannons three and four. Cycle through there for new batteries and ammo.”

Durand choked down some choice words. Conducting resupply on a forward arming and refueling point while in the void was never easy. Trying to land on the pinhead’s worth of space between the two gauss turret batteries would make the task even harder. She directed Lothar and Manfred down first.

“Captain, I think there’s something you wish to tell me?” Durand asked.

“We received a transmission from Phoenix,” Valdar said. “More of those cloaked Xaros ships hit the planet and did a number on the Luna fortifications and the home fleet is decisively engaged. There’s no help coming.”

“How did we fall for the trick the Toth tried to pull on us?” Durand asked. She’d been in space over Europa when the Toth’s
Naga
de-cloaked after a broadcast from the Crucible disrupted their cloaking field. The Toth had attempted to sneak the dreadnought to Earth during negotiations. Only a lucky observation by Stacey Ibarra had deduced that the Toth had come to the solar system with far more than could be seen.

“Different cloaking technology,” Valdar said. “Lepton pulse didn’t disrupt it. Xaros have never used cloaking tech before and high command’s assumption that they wouldn’t use it now came back to bite us in the rear. The Crucible’s worked out a counter, which doesn’t help everyone who died on Luna.”

“I’m not going to worry about Earth’s problems right now, especially when we’ve got plenty of our own,” she said. “Do you see the Grinder?”

“I do…even if I started screaming for reinforcements, there’s no way Earth would get the message and send us help in time,” Valdar said.

“I look at what the Xaros have, what we have, and all I can think of is the Battle of Agincourt…and we’re the French,” Durand said.

She brought her Eagle over the FARP and locked her gaze on a crewman standing on the hull, holding two lit cones over his head. The crewman directed her down, signaling minute adjustments to her descent. Her landing gear hit the hull and crewmen slapped magnetic chocks against them to lock her fighter in place.

Durand felt her seat rock slightly as batteries, thruster pods and gauss magazines were swapped out. What she wouldn’t have given for an ice-cold soda right then and there.

“We’re not going to go charging through their guns if we can help it,” Valdar said. “Not the
Breitenfeld
, at any rate. Our working theory is that the Grinder is able to affect wormhole formation even if it isn’t complete, just like our Crucible. That’s why we came back into real space in the wrong spot and directly under the Xaros guns.”

“This sounds like another assumption,” Durand said, “which is the mother of all fuckups, if I am to believe the things you Americans say.”

“Have you ever heard of an American named Muhammed Ali? He had a move called the rope-a-dope,” Valdar said. “We’re going to take a chance and see if we can use that move out here.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I don’t like the sound of it,” Durand said.

****

Durand flipped her fighter upside down and keyed a maneuver thruster on the edge of a wing, pushing her over the top of a line of Eagles. She looked up and into the cockpits of her pilots, looking each in the eye as one final readiness check before the battle.

She passed last over Glue, her second-in-command. The Chinese pilot looked tired, but focused as ever. Durand maneuvered back to the other end of the line. The rest of the task force, minus the
Breitenfeld
, was arrayed into a loose cone. The
Centaur
with her gleaming energy cannons sat at the tip, while heavier ships fell into rings behind the
Centaur
with corvettes at the base of the cone. The
Breitenfeld
hung in the distance, well behind the formation.

Durand and her fighters hovered over the
Vimy Ridge
; her remaining bombers were on the other side.

“Task Force 37,” Valdar said, “we’ve got one shot at this. If the Xaros get the Grinder up and operational, they will flood our solar system with drones. If this ship’s maneuver fails, we will ram the construct.”

Durand swallowed hard. If Valdar was willing to send the
Breitenfeld
on a suicide run, then the captain didn’t expect anything less from the rest of the task force. France did not have a tradition of kamikaze attacks, but if she had to turn her fighter into a human-guided missile, she would do it. Probably.

“
Centaur,
begin your attack,” Valdar said.

The lead ship’s engines flared to life and she accelerated forward. Durand cut ahead of her fighters and led them around Charon. The task force picked up speed and left the
Breitenfeld
behind.

The task force cleared the horizon and rose away from their close orbit of Pluto’s largest moon and angled toward the Grinder.

“Pull it up,” Durand said and banked higher, clear of the line of fire between the ships and their target.

The
Centaur
’s energy cannons let off a ripple of energy blasts that streaked toward the Grinder. A loose coil of burning points of light closed the gap to the Xaros jump gate in seconds.

The defending constructs snapped away from their position around the Grinder and made for the attacking human ships. The
Centaur
’s attacks smashed into Xaros ships well short of their intended target. The Xaros pulled damaged ships away from the leading edge of their swarm.

“They’ll take hits, but not lose any part of their line,” Glue said. “I hate how smart these things are.”

Rail cannons from every other ship but the
Centaur
fired. Red beams from Xaros point defense stabbed out and destroyed most of the shells before they could connect. Two Xaros ships fell back, cracked and burning.

The
Centaur
opened fire again.

Durand’s hand tightened against her control stick. She hated watching a fight, but her Eagle would make about as much of a difference as a sparrow between two fighting elephants if she tried to get between the two fleets.

The disintegration beams stabbed through space and hit the
Centaur
, leaving deep dents as it burned through the aegis armor. One beam struck a Toth energy crystal, shattering it into a cloud of tiny shards.

The ship rolled on its side, a substance like white smoke trailing from the shattered cannon.

One of the corvettes, the
Scipio
, swooped down and put itself between the
Centaur
and the focused fire from the Xaros. A scarlet beam raked across the corvette’s rail cannon and cut into the starboard engines. The
Scipio
spun out of control, taking another hit that tore through the shuttle bay door.

One of the Xaros ships began to spin on its axis as lumps of its hull flew off and morphed into drones.

“Here we go!” Durand shouted and brought her fighter about to intercept the new targets. “Take them out before they can reach the ships. The
Breit
should be here in—” a white portal opened several miles above the Grinder and collapsed, leaving the strike carrier in its wake “now. She’s here right now.”

Durand flew straight at an incoming drone and fired the gauss cannon slung beneath her fighter. The bullets ripped the drone apart and Durand flew through the debris. Burning stalks bounced off her canopy.

Four cubes slid out of the
Breitenfeld
’
s
flight deck. Missiles slid out of the cubes and streaked toward the Grinder, each IR guided by a sailor inside the ship.

Durand snapped her Eagle to the side and got on the tail of a drone as it made a mad dash back to the Grinder. She destroyed it with a blast of gauss bullets and dove back to the dogfight…which had turned into a chase as the Eagles pursued drones fleeing back to protect the jump gate.

“Xaros ships are breaking off!” announced Nag, another of her Chinese pilots.

Guided missiles struck the Grinder. The denethrite explosive warheads broke thorns off and sent them spinning through the void where they disintegrated seconds later. The Grinder broke in half under the onslaught of more missiles.

Rail cannons from the task force kept firing, catching the Xaros as they tried to maneuver back to the dying jump gate.

Guided missiles kept coming from the pods, now steering toward the Xaros ships. The
Breitenfel
d
and her task force had the Xaros in a deadly crossfire. The rest of the battle was over within minutes.

“All ships
,
pull in tight around the
Breitenfeld
. We will jump out as soon as we’ve recovered the
Scipio’s
life pods,”
Valdar said.

“Wait, what about Hale and the Marines on Pluto?” Durand asked.

“Negative contact,”
Valdar said. Durand could have sworn she heard a tremor in the captain’s words. “
Admiral Garret wants our ships back in the fight as soon as possible. We’re to jump to Mars immediately. This isn’t my decision, Gall. The situation on Mars is in doubt.
”

Durand looked down at Pluto, watching as slag spewed from the giant mineshaft running beneath the Norgay Montes. She had no idea if any of the Marines were even alive. She hated the idea of leaving the Marines behind…but there was more at stake than just their lives.

“Manfred, Lothar, stay with me out here until the life boats are recovered.” Durand said to her squadron, “The rest of you get back on the
Breit
and get ready to fight again.”