Originator (49 page)

“Snowcat copies,” said Sandy. And deactivated her home movies, because if she was glad for anything, it was that her kids weren't here for this.

Again the stomach-churning lurch into hyperspace, but shallower this time, then out, as
Mekong
performed a flip end over end, with three heavy cruisers in support, and hammered on the main engines. Again Sandy's muscles compressed all over, as ten Gs of thrust hit them, and she sucked air with difficulty, vision blurring. It wasn't comfortable for a GI, God knew how the straights coped, augments or not. Actual-velocity approached optimal-velocity, twenty seconds, fifteen seconds . . . tacnet showed that several of her non-synthetic troops were out cold, vitals registering unconsciousness. Vanessa was one of them. And Sandy worried anew at Vanessa's recent augment overload syndrome, as it had been diagnosed—the doctors had patched it best they could, but there was no guarantee that if physical stress reached a certain level . . .

And scan blinked red alarms, new contacts, but scan on the bridge couldn't say a thing under this much G-stress, could barely force the air from her lungs. Contacts hostile, low angled across the Pantalan atmosphere, and apparently firing. . . .

WHAM! as the grapples cut early, and the assault shuttle was clear of
Mekong
, and Sandy's feed went dead, then new thrust kicked from another direction as the shuttle's own thrusters engaged. This was more gentle, but still fierce at 7G. . . . Sandy's feed came back as the shuttle's own nav comp became independent. And everything abruptly blanked out as
Mekong
cycled up once more—very difficult right above the planet, fire now outgoing with railguns and missiles but carrying little velocity so it wouldn't scare opposing captains into disruptive evasions yet.

One thousand Ks altitude, on a shallow approach but far too fast—if they hit the atmosphere like this they'd burn up like meteors. Even as she watched, the pilot readjusted the approach trajectory to a shallower angle, buying them
more time as the engines thundered in a desperate attempt to lose sufficient velocity. A huge flash nearby, someone had been hit, but she couldn't worry about it now, all her ten assault shuttles were intact, it must have been one of the big ships. Just hope none of that incoming fire was aimed at the shuttles. Droze was just under two thousand Ks from their entry point, and reentry would cover most of that . . . this might yet work.

Fleet were engaging, fire going in both directions, and now fire coming from the surface . . . no telling yet who it was aimed at; Sandy decided to assume it was hostile. Unlikely that the Talee would have left human-friendly gunners on the surface. She tuned the Fleet chatter out; she was a ground pounder now, and all her attention had to be on the surface . . . but then, “
New contact, new contact! Three-twenty-eight by thirteen, range point twenty-one!
”

Those were new ships jumping into the system. They broadcast no IDs, so there was no telling whose they were. They
should
have been their League allies, if that plan was working, but if Talee farther out were receiving this light-wave by now, and heading in far faster than news of this attack could head out . . .

If Fleet lost this fight, she and everyone in the assault were going to be stranded down on the surface, with no way off. The possibility of which was, of course, why marines were bred so damn tough since their invention in support of wet navies all those centuries ago.

They hit the atmosphere, and Gs briefly ceased as the shuttles reoriented their shielded bellies and throttled their engines back. It was an intensely vulnerable moment, as it was very hard to dodge during reentry . . . though luckily most ordnance didn't handle well in this midpoint transition between air and no air, so targeting them would be just as hard. Then the Gs came back, worse than ever, ten Gs, now eleven, and everything shaking and banging like some giant had grabbed them for the joy of making them rattle.

It went on for another three minutes before easing off, as active control returned to the pilots, and they hurtled down through the middle atmosphere with flight surfaces reengaging, spreading out across a ten-K formation. Still sixty Ks up and descending fast.

“
Entering communications range now
,” announced the shuttle pilot, and Sandy saw a flicker on the coms shields. Recently familiar patterns, spikes in passive data of a certain structure. Then it faded, finding no purchase.

“That looked like a coms assault,” said Sandy. “Let's hope that's the best they can do.” If it weren't for their new tech upgrades, they'd be falling out of the sky about now, while dreaming happily (or unhappily) in VR. An eruption of missile contrails followed, from within the haze of the dusty horizon.

“
Made them angry
,” said Jane, who was Sandy's wingman for this op. “
They don't like us not falling asleep
.”

“Let's not judge their state of mind,” said Sandy. She actually didn't want to think about it at all. These were aliens. She'd never fought aliens before. No one had, at least that they knew of—it was always possible that League had tussled with Talee before and never admitted to it. The existence of Talee was old news; it was nearly two hundred years since the first explorers into this region of space had begun encountering Talee ships keeping a watchful distance. It was one of the longest-running mysteries humans had ever faced, the identities of these mysterious watchers, who refused every offer of friendship and trade. Everyone had hoped that the mystery would not be finally unravelled in circumstances like this.

“
That's coming from Droze
,” said the pilot, looking at the incoming missiles. “
Full countermeasures
.”

“
The question now is our tech, or theirs?
” said another pilot.

There was no hope of evasive manoeuvers in huge assault shuttles against missiles that could pluck birds out of the air. But being big had other advantages, and the shuttles packed every countermeasures system yet devised. They engaged now, jamming, active hacking, sensor-blinding, then multiple volleys of antimissile missiles, while lasers and electro-magfire waited for anything that got through, with chaff and flares as final precaution. Sandy registered thirty-plus incoming, but even now several looked to be struggling to acquire. Not Talee tech, then.

They had visuals now, from drones now high above Droze, and Sandy focused on them instead of the missiles. Familiar layouts, city streets and boundaries, the big corporations in the middle, surrounded by high walls and defences, and then the sprawling outer rim, the uninvited settlers who ranged from mildly to extremely poor and desperate. There, on the far eastern border, was Rimtown. Danya, Svetlana, and Kiril's home, where she'd found them, or they'd found her. And if some other stroke of fate had intervened, she'd have missed them, and they'd still be there, and all their lives would be so much different.

“There's ships down in the corporate zone,” said Sandy of those visuals, highlighting the dark shapes on the map for others to see. “No apparent street traffic; that's normal under assault. Those ships don't look like any design we've seen.”

“
Any coms traffic?
” Vanessa queried the shuttle crews. “
Anything to let us know what's happened?
”

“Look for broadband radio from the perimeter,” Sandy added. “Home Guard used the most basic tech to beat the companies. If they've been occupied, one of them might tell us.” Assuming Home Guard thought Federation occupation would be preferable to Talee.

“
Looks like scenario C
,” said Captain Singh.

“
That it does
,” said Sandy, as incoming missiles detonated five Ks out, and others spun off as lasers blinded their guidance. Scenario A had been a fast strike, Talee going in and out fast and leaving most intact. In that case, they'd have been long gone. Scenario B had been similar, only more violent, destroying rather than occupying. Scenario C had been occupation, not destruction, relying on Talee network technologies to keep humans subdued for long enough to do a thorough job of searching for what they were after. Of course, Droze presented a problem for them, because only the wealthy, high-tech people in the corporate zone were uplinked. Much of the outer zone was not, especially the younger ones, and that was three-quarters and more of the population. On the other hand, Sandy wondered, would that majority care if the corporate zone had been occupied by some mysterious outside force? Would they assume it was League? Or Federation? And would they care what happened to corporate folk at all? She doubted it. The Talee didn't need to subdue the entire population, just the corporates. And the rest of the city probably wouldn't thank her for bringing a strike team down from orbit to solve the corporations' problems and dumping a big pile of ordnance on their heads to do it.

Thirty Ks up, and still no city chatter. “Looks like they're jamming everything,” she said, as surviving missiles detonated ahead. “I'll bet they've got much better weapons than these, if we get too close to the corporate zone. We will go deployment by teams, east through north, and advance with maximum speed and cover.” She illustrated as she spoke, deployment patterns on tacnet, who went where. “It's not a Federation city, but it is a human city. Let's take it back.”

The shuttles began turning, spreading their formation even wider, banking into S-bends to confuse defences and lose altitude. “
Expect heavy defences
,” Vanessa told them, as soldiers did final check on their suits and systems. “
Droze is an armament manufacturer, and the Talee can take over most oldtech human systems by remote. Expect a lot of emplacements used against us, and a lot of remotely operated systems
.”

“
Snowcat
,” said a shuttle systems operator, “
counter-bandwidth operational, we're coming into range now
.” That was jamming and coms interception. With their new software toys, and a fair idea of what to look for, they might be able to jam whatever Talee signal was used to take control of local human systems.

“Copy that,” said Sandy, and slammed her faceplate shut once more, dulling the roar of shuttle engines. Seals hissed and she was airtight. “Marks set for ten K release, all weapons arm.”

“
If the corporations send remotely controlled tanks into Home Guard zones
,” Singh sent on private link, “
Home Guard might toast them for us
.”

“It's possible,” Sandy conceded. “Expect nothing, shoot at anything that shoots at us. That includes Home Guard.” She'd run into the Droze anticorporate militia before and wasn't about to do them any favours if they got in her way.

Fifteen K, and the carrier rig holding her suit elevated to forty-five degrees. Suits had to come out sideways; the shuttle heat shielding wouldn't allow it otherwise. Sandy recalled Svetlana asking her when she'd done assault ops before. Well, never in suits like these, save for Pyeongwha. But in the League, she'd done plenty, with lesser armaments. She'd meant to tell Svetlana those stories eventually. Now it occurred to her that she might never have the chance.

Eleven K, and the panels at the end of the launch tube retracted and let in light and a howling gale. The thing that separated this assault from those others, she realised, was that this was the first time she'd really had something to return home to, once it was all over. If she'd died then, she'd have been just another synthetic casualty, a person barely known and barely missed. If she died now, many would mourn, and many would celebrate, and three would mourn most of all. This time, her life mattered, well beyond what she did on the battlefield. And in the skies above a League world, fighting once again to save a League population from invaders, that revelation felt something like a journey brought full circle.

Rails whizzed, and she shot down the tube, then out. She liked this bit, the blessed relief of a view, and escape from the possibility of death while still trapped in the tubes. She liked the next wave of defensive missiles a lot less—suits in free fall lacked the shuttles' defensive layers. But they were a lot more mobile, and she elevated her huge electro-mag rifle to track one at five-K range and put down ranging fire. The rifle plus suit armscomp was accurate out to about three K, even in free fall, and the missile lacked imagination and broke up two Ks out as she shredded its engines.

More missiles came in elsewhere, and more defensive fire, and explosions, spread across this vast stretch of pale blue sky. She ignored it all and looked down . . . and here was Droze, from twenty Ks up, and getting bigger quickly. A big circle, like a fried egg, green and brown in the center, yellow and brown in the outer, all in a sea of yellow-brown sand. About her, other suits were falling—fifty per shuttle, five hundred total, plus ten Trebuchet support launchers and operators, for the bigger stuff the suits couldn't handle. The shuttles peeled away and climbed—further artillery if they needed it, but it took a while to arrive, as shuttles were too important and vulnerable to allow too close to the city center.

Ten K, and she could see traffic on the dusty streets below, between the jumble of boxy concrete buildings that passed for a skyline on Droze. Old factories, blocky residential complexes. Parking yards on vacant blocks. Shanties. Nothing green, nothing wealthy.

“
I'm getting an active track
,” said Lieutenant Terrassi, commander of Green Squad, Golf Company. “
Coming from below, only light
.”

“
Home Guard
,” answered Golf Company's commander, Captain Ledo. “
Warning shots, put them in the road
.” Magfire answered, and ten Ks below, white-hot rounds blew big holes in the road beside the offending rooftop, rather than dismantling the building and all within it. No return fire followed. With any luck Droze citizens would take the hint, with all the sonic booms and shooting, and go to the most secure parts of their homes. Most Droze citizens had plenty of practise finding those, the past seven years.