Battle Station

— 9

The preparations crawled. Every day, I expected to hear from Admiral Crow. I suspected he would soon send formal orders recalling me. Maybe he’d even demand my arrest. But I had the email system locked down, so only I’d hear about something like that.

The order from Star Force never came. After several weeks had gone by, I began to suspect Crow had decided I was less trouble out here in the Eden System. I knew him all too well. Maybe he figured it was easier to let me do whatever I wanted out here. With luck, I’d get my fool ass shot off at some point.

The big invasion day finally came. We were way behind schedule-but nothing was unusual about that. We had a good reason to be late: I’d drastically changed the game plan. Before assaulting the cold Centaur homeworld with native troops, I’d ordered that every Centaur satellite be loaded up with anti-missile batteries. These were essentially beam turrets, like those I’d built on Andros Island back home. Each turret consisted of a light cannon, a generator, a brainbox, a sensory array, a swivel mount, and a number of servos to move it around quickly. These systems were a lot like the one’s I’d built back home, but they had the added advantage of being set up to operate in space. An airless void was a far more effective medium for lasers than an atmosphere, where something like a rainstorm might well ruin your day. Up in space, there were essentially no obstructions. Enemy missiles coming up to take them out would have a tough time of it.

When coming up out of the gravity-well of any planet, a missile was by necessity slowed down. Worse, they didn’t have any distance in which to build up sufficient velocity. Even with nanotech engines, they would hardly be going more than escape velocity-about Mach 30 on this planet-when they came up out of the atmosphere and were burned down. I’d learned that long range missiles were much more effective when they were fired in deep space at a stationary target. That way, they had plenty of time to accelerate up to an incredible speed. Going fast enough, defensive systems became ineffective. Our turrets simply wouldn’t have enough time to shoot them down before they’d slammed into the stations and taken them out.

In our modern form of warfare, Mach 30 was pretty slow. The nano-directed turrets had plenty of time to lock on and plenty of range to fire, as they hung high orbit.

It had taken too long to build the defensive systems, but I knew I didn’t have much choice. If we dropped on the planet, breaking the Centaur treaty with the Macros, they were sure to try to take out the satellites. Hell, they might even have considered that a win. Expunging the civilian population of an entire biotic species was probably worth quite a bit of loss to them at this point. We had to be a big pain in their battery packs by now.

Once every Centaur satellite bristled with laser turrets and we had enough landing pods and infantry equipment, the time to act had arrived. We watched the weather then, hoping for a storm to cover our landing. Unlike past invasions with lower tech systems, storms weren’t really a cause for concern in a space invasion mission like this one. All they did was provide interference for our drop.

“That storm system won’t let up for two days,” Miklos said.

I nodded. “I like the sound of that. We’ll drop in forty minutes. Relay the command and get every marine into a pod.”

Kwon squawked in my helmet a few minutes later. “I heard it was a go, sir! Is that right?”

“You heard correctly, First Sergeant. Get to your pod with a full kit. You are going down with the first wave.”

Kwon roared with excitement, which caused me to wince in my helmet. One pain in the butt about headsets and helmets was you couldn’t easily pull the ear-piece away from your head when someone was being overly loud. Still, I smiled. Kwon had been bored out of his mind for the last month or so. There were only so many drills you could do in the simulation bricks before getting tired of them. He was about to finally be unleashed on a target world, and being allowed to do what he’d signed up for: switching off machines.

When we quietly deployed in space, spreading out in orbit over a large area, I didn’t order them all to drop at once. Instead, I sent down three squadrons of ships, each with three destroyers carrying landing pods clutched up against the bottom skin of the ship. Like birds of prey carrying precious cargo, our ships dove with alarming speed. Watching the assault via optical systems set up on the satellite and on each of the dropships, I thought it looked more reckless than it had seemed on paper. Here we were, riding in thin, smart metal cans in steep dives toward an alien world that was thronged with unknown numbers of enemy robots.

We hit the upper atmosphere and the ships began to glow a burnt orange about two minutes into the assault. We kept up the high rate of speed as planned, the pilots had orders not to decelerate until we hit the friction later.

I’d begun to sweat, when I finally felt the G-forces of heavy braking. Miklos was commanding my ship, and I was with him on the bridge. We both watched our pilot tensely. He was a gifted young man with dark, serious eyes.

“How are the Centaurs doing?” Miklos asked me.

I gave a guilty start. I was in command of a full company of native marines, and I’d failed to check in on them.

“I’ll have a look,” I said. “It’s time to get into the pod for rapid deployment, anyway. Remember your orders, Captain. Do a one-eighty and lift off again as soon as your ship’s arm releases the pod. Any given landing group is less valuable than the ship itself.”

“I know my orders, sir,” he assured me. “I’ll dump you and head right back into space in less than thirty seconds.”

I nodded. I climbed hand over hand along the deck plates, using my battle suit’s implanted propulsion disks to make headway against the G-forces. I didn’t know how hard we were decelerating, but even with the inertial dampeners set to maximum, Barbarossa’s powerful engines had me grunting and straining. It had to be more than four Gs, if I had to guess.

When I reached out and opened the landing pod hatch with a touch, I braced myself. I hoped against hope the Centaurs weren’t killing each other.

My worries were baseless. Inside, I found a hundred of the aliens in full kit. They stood, jostling against one another and struggling somewhat against the nano-arms that attempted to restrain them. But every one of them was staring with their big round eyes at the view from the massive window I’d installed into each of these pods. As I’d ordered, the pilot kept this window directed toward the brilliant planet itself.

The moment I saw the view, I found myself as transfixed as they were. Rushing up from nothing, vapors and mist trailed with glowing orange plasmas over our vision. The vapor moved so fast, ice-particles and sparks looked like vivid lines of color. Beyond that, we could see the surface below the cloud cover. We’d hit the friction layer and were coming in at an alarming rate. I’d been in power-dives like this before-but never with a bay window to look out of.

When I could speak again, I checked in with the unit Captain. He was an old warlord of a Centaur, with one horn and one eye missing. His fur was gray and bristly. I hadn’t argued when they’d assigned him to command my unit. He was clearly experienced, and I was sure assigning him to me was some kind of huge honor for everyone involved. Complaining would have dishonored all of us, and possibly the old goat would have killed himself or something. I’d heard of them doing that sort of thing before-launching themselves off cliffs to fall to their deaths on their satellites because my marines had chewed them out during training. I’d had a number of talks with my noncoms, insisting they curb their natural tendency to abuse recruits.

Among the Centaurs, apparently the way you rebuked an individual was by ignoring them. If you made no mention of honor, pride, wind, sky-or anything on the laundry list of things they cared so dearly about-then you provided them with no honor. That was acceptable, and the message was clear to the subordinate: they had screwed up. But if you exhibited direct anger toward an individual of inferior rank, well, they just couldn’t handle it. They were shattered, and both the apprentice and the master were embarrassed and sullied in the process.

The old one-eyed goat had the only headset capable of translating my orders to his team. The rest of them would follow him-either by mimicking him or listening to his commands. We’d practiced the command structure inside the satellites on the simulated open ground, but it was untested in actual combat. I seriously hoped it wouldn’t bite me in the ass, but there was no way of proving the system other than to employ it in the field.

Before I had time to do more than take in a brief report from the Centaur Captain, we were shuddering and heeling-over.

“All right, this is it,” I shouted into the com-link. “We’ll be landing in the next few seconds. Everyone fix their masks and set their goggles on auto-we might be going in hot. When the big doors open, get out of the pod as fast as possible. Don’t leave your equipment behind, or it will go back up with the ship. They aren’t waiting around for us to smell the flowers.”

I had no idea how this translated into Centaur talk. I do know that the Captain was still converting my thoughts into theirs by the time we’d come to a jolting halt. My feet stung in my boots, we landed so hard. The ballistic glass had a crack in it, and I could see rocks and grass pressed down under us. I grimaced at that. I should have put the windows all around on the sides, not one big one in the bottom like a glass-bottomed boat. I relayed the problem to Miklos, telling the pilot to be more careful and telling them all to dump fresh constructive nanites into the landing pod to effect repairs on the glass for the next trip. I didn’t want it losing pressure.

Then the doors disappeared, and the Centaurs didn’t need any kind of urging. They bounded out into the rainstorm like a herd of fleeing animals-except these animals were armed and were assaulting this world, not running from anything.

A few of them jostled me as their brown furry bodies zoomed past. They could really jump when they wanted too. I followed them out, checking my kit reflexively. All systems registered green and the power pack was full. The generator on my back hummed into life, and I had my projector in my hands, warmed up and humming. I was ready to rock and roll.