@mikecj: Thanks my dude.
@pensive: Yeah, I was thinking of that, then realized I'd already done a "blow up a bit of the landscape to take out the bad guys," so it felt like I was repeating myself. Looked for a way to have him hit the target and survive and came across
toss bombing, which was simply too cool NOT to use.
@snakespinner: Knew you'd catch that! I like putting in those kinds of things for people to find. The islands on Poulsbo were all named after painters, too, but maybe that was a little too obscure.
* * *
EPISODE 2-5: Battle drillsPort Moseby was nice. The word ‘nice’ has a certain connotation doesn’t it? It’s the lukewarm tea of adjectives. Slightly pleasant but not too exciting, that was Port Moseby: Mild temperatures, mild geography, mild weather. Bland. Boring. Nice.
Mind you, after Poulsbo I was in the mood for a bit of boring. It was nice, for example, to know that the continent I was on would be in more or less the same place when I woke up the next morning, and that the number of local fish species which could conceivably kill and eat me was in the low single digits.
Back in 3022, the Lyrans had surprised the Dracs—and probably themselves—by retaking the planet after generations of Combine occupation. The people had been under the Combine boot for the last two, maybe three centuries, and had the fastidious politeness and uncertain joy of a population just learning that it would no longer be a capital offence to bow at the slightly wrong angle. The people were inoffensive. Nice.
The most impressive thing about it wasn’t on the planet at all, but rather its big emerald moon, Kiwi, a shade closer and larger than Terra’s own Luna, giving the oceans some impressive tides.
As a border world, we were on high readiness at all times. Spent a lot of time in the air, even a little in orbit, putting the Black Arrows through battle drills. All the same, Reina and I still found a little time to rent a little cabin by a white sand beach, lie together in a big ol’ hammock beneath the pom-trees, looking up at that moon, hanging right over our heads.
That was nice, too.
Which, of course, meant it couldn’t last. Unity, I’d learn to hate that moon.
First sign of trouble was a grey-and-blue groundcar pulling up in front of the hangar, with a request-slash-order for Reina to get down to the 20th Arcturan Guards CP in Feintuch City, ASAP. As the only ’Mech unit on the planet, the CO of the Guards was the de facto commander of the planetary defences. The invite was for Reina and the liaison officer, Anya McBride, but Reina pulled me into the back of the car, too.
The whole party was in attendance when we got there. Colonel Jurgen Petersen, with his saturnine face and black hair and beard spiked with grey. Duchess Joan Welman, back on her ancestral home after eight generations of living on handouts in exile on Tharkad. Prime Minister Simon Teltra, a Combine-era bureaucrat who’d been senior enough to be useful to the Lyrans, but not
so senior that they’d had to purge him. The militia commander, the colonels of a couple of conventional armor and infantry regiments, plus a double handful of communications techs and intelligence officers rounded out the audience.
Most of them ignored us when we arrived: Teltra started to bow, then went for a handshake. Everyone else was glued to a huge monitor, on which there was an image, something in the low-pixel count, showing the long thin needle of a JumpShip. Timestamp in one corner showed earlier that day, digital letters in another spelled out: PTMB-OLY-SCAN:Z:001.
Colonel Petersen nodded to one of his intelligence officers, who stepped forward so he was directly under the center of the image. “At 0300 Feintuch time, the
Olympus recharge station at the zenith jump point detected the arrival of an unscheduled JumpShip. Analysis of gravity waves and the video images suggests it is Star Lord class, tentatively identified as the DCMS vessel
Soaring Crane.”
The image jumped, zooming in and losing even more definition. Mottled grey blobs—four rounded, one more linear—detached themselves from the needle and were haloed with the pixelated fire of thrusters. “The JumpShip immediately deployed six DropShips: One
Vengeance-class, one
Intruder-class, four
Mammoth-class.”
Reina and I looked at each other. “What the hell are they thinking?” she said. Pretty much everyone in the room was echoing the sentiment, if not quite so succinctly. The
Vengeance was a fighter carrier, with maybe two full squadrons and change on board, the
Intruder an assault ship, heavily armed, with space for a reinforced company of marines.
So far, so what you might expect from a Drac raiding force.
“Perhaps a merchant convoy and escort?” Teltra said hopefully. Nobody bothered to correct him.
The
Mammoth, you see, is a civilian cargo ship. Correction, the
Mammoth is a malking gigantic cargo ship. Nearly 20 times bigger than the
Intruder, capable of hauling 40,000 tons of cargo each. But unarmored, almost unarmed. Four of those on a trading mission would be excessive. Four on a raiding force would be idiotic.
“All six DropShips began a high-G burn towards Port Moseby. The
Intruder made a high-speed pass by the
Olympus station, targeting sensor arrays.”
There was a brief flash of cobalt light, and grainy image on the screen cut out in a wash of static.
That was another surprise. By unspoken consent among the Great Houses, attacking recharging stations like the Olympus was generally considered unsportsmanlike, gauche, a Very Naughty Thing Indeed. Those stations were vital to keeping the scattered web of humanity knit together. Knocking out its sensors came verrry close to crossing that rather sensitive interstellar Rubicon. Had to be something the Dracs were pretty desperate for us not to see. Took us a few days to find out what.
With the intel briefing over, Colonel Petersen took the floor.
“Your grace, Mister Prime Minister, gentlemen,” he intoned like a funeral parlor undertaker. “High G approach means we may have as few as three days to prepare. I’m declaring martial law and authorizing an emergency call up of all reservists. Wing Commander Paradis—” He turned to us. “I want one squadron in high orbit at all times, the other on standby. Let’s nail as many of these Snakes as we can before they hit dirt.”
Five days later, I was orbiting Port Moseby about 2,000 kilometers up with Lucky, Bulldog and Nova in tow. While refitting on Galatea, my flight had swapped the F-10 for the heavier HCT-214
Wildcat, a
Hellcat variant with the engines mounted on either side of the fuselage rather than over the cockpit.
“Ah, this is the life,” said Lucky.
After sitting in a cockpit for six hours with the flight suit’s vac-seals making the seat about as comfortable as a Marik family reunion, I was thinking a lot of things, but the joy of flying in space was pretty far down that list.
“Yeah, it’s got everything,” I agreed. “Numbing boredom, freezing death on the other side of the glass, burning death down the gravity well. What’s not to like?”
“Well,” Lucky gave it some thought. “It’s quiet.”
When aerojocks joke we should be making double what the ’Mech jocks do, it’s the cold darkness of space we’re talking about. A BattleMech handles pretty much the same in any environment its in. Buddy, you’d better believe that flying in the air is different from flying in space. It’s a whole new, frictionless, weightless, a million-ways-to-kill-you ballgame. Mercenary aerospace units tend not to negotiate about salvage rights ‘cos if you get shot down out here, then only thing they’ll be salvaging is a microscopic layer of dust spread over half the planet.
If you’ve seen that new holovid about the fight over Stein’s Folly, you might assume that defending fighters are always scrambling to get spaceborne as invaders come ploughing through the atmosphere like comets. That only happens if a very large number of people have screwed up in a very large number of ways. No, what you want to do is have your fighters already up in orbit, with enough velocity to meet the invaders wherever they try to land.
You could post your fighters right at the jump point, I guess, but since there are two in any system, plus Unity-knows-how-many Lagrangian pirate points, that would be way too easy to either overwhelm or bypass altogether. And since each jump point can be connected to the system’s inhabited world by an infinite number of routes on parabolas of varying length, the only other option is to try to catch the blighters right over the planet. Otherwise, you’d find yourself hundreds of thousands of kilometers out of position, as the invading force whizzes merrily past you.
Which is precisely what happened.
“Parsifal one, this is Camelot Home,” a voice interrupted our banter. “Drive signatures detected. Bandits inbound.”
“Copy that Camelot Home. Give me some digits.”
“Azimuth one-one-zero, altitude oh-six-five, range two million kilos,” came the crisp reply. I narrowed the sensor scan in the direction indicated, and picked out the faint flickering of the approaching DropShips’ drive flares as they decelerated, preparing for the attack: The tiny little flicker of the
Intruder, the irregular blobs of the outboard thruster units on each
Mammoth.
Down on the surface I knew Reina and the rest of the Black Arrows would be taking off, rocketing skywards to reinforce us up here. The heavier fighters from the 20th Guards’ air wing would follow soon after. Our job would be to clear the fighter escort provided by the
Vengeance, giving the Lyrans a clear shot at the DropShips.
Bulldog came on the taccom. “Trajectory looks a little odd to me, chief.”
He was right. I punched the Lyran channel again. “Camelot Home, this is Parsifal one. Drive sigs are confirmed. We got a reading on their target zone?”
“Wait one,” came the terse response. “Calculating.”
We waited. Waited some more. Then, just for a change of pace, we waited.
“Still with me, Camelot?”
“Maybe they got sleepy?” Lucky suggested.
“Parsifal one, this is Camelot Home, inbound DropShip trajectories confirmed,” the other guy said at last. “Bogies are not headed for Port Moseby, repeat, not on course for Port Moseby atmospheric entry.” A pause. “It’s Kiwi.
“The Dracs are heading for the moon.”
Which put us a couple hundred thousand kilometers out of position to intercept them. Groans from Lucky and Bulldog. “You mean to say I’ve been stewing in my own fluids for the last two days for nothing?”
“We can still intercept over the moon,” Nova suggested.
In my cockpit I was shaking my head. The
Vengeance had 40 birds, more than enough to wipe my 16 without breaking a sweat. We’d have to wait for Reina’s squadron and the Lyrans, and by then it would be too late.
“That’s a negative, Parsifal four,” I told her. “Might be something else we can do, though. Parsifal six,” I signaled Pepper, leader of the F-10 Recon flight. “This is Parsifal one. Anyone in the mood for some sight-seeing?”
*
We ramped two F-10Rs up to fly-by speed by slinging them around the planet a few times, then hurled them out towards the moon. It’d take them days to slow down and head back after their pass, but they’d also be going way too fast to engage.
It’s 300,000 kilometers from Port Moseby to its moon. Even at the terrific speeds the two F-10s were going, it took six hours until they whizzed by Kiwi like shooting stars, giving us a glimpse of what the Dracs were up to down there.
The
Vengeance was in orbit, like a mother duck trailing a line of little aerospace fighters. The
Intruder and four
Mammoths were on the surface. The latter were unloading machinery, lobster-like things with diamond mandibles.
Drills.
The Dracs were drilling a tunnel into the moon.