Relentless (15 page)

Just as Rione had also guessed. Put up a good fight and maybe die trying to defend the prison camp, or let the Alliance have its personnel and certainly die at the hands of the Syndic authorities. “Looks like we’ll be doing this the hard way, Colonel.”

“Yes, sir. Request that the fleet carry out the preassault bombardment as laid out in the battle plan.”

“Consider it done. Good luck, Colonel.”

“They’re not asking for much in that bombardment,” Desjani observed after Carabali’s image vanished.

“There aren’t many targets identified yet.” Geary indicated the real-time imagery of the camp far below
Dauntless
as the battle cruiser and the rest of the Alliance fleet orbited Heradao’s third planet. “We can’t just hit the whole camp because it’s full of prisoners, and we don’t know every building that holds them. The preassault bombardment is mostly aimed at eliminating fixed defensive sites, trying to overawe the defenders, and suppressing their response to the assault.” He glanced at the time lines scrolling down one side of the display. Time to launch of Marine shuttles. Time to launch of evacuation shuttles. Time to launch of bombardment.

The aerodynamic chunks of metal formally known as kinetic bombardment projectiles harkened back to the earliest weapons known to humanity. Aside from their streamlined shapes, they worked like rocks, and fleet slang referred to them that way. Unlike rocks hurled with only the force of human muscles, however, these kinetic bombardment rounds were launched from orbit high above the planet, gaining energy every meter of the way as they dropped. When they hit, the results were as devastating as if large bombs had struck. Simple, cheap, and deadly, the rocks were almost impossible to stop once they were fired.

“Marine shuttles launching,” the operations watch reported.

On his display, Geary called up an image of the launches, the shapes of the shuttles enhanced for visibility. “I’ve never seen this many launch at once,” he commented to Desjani.

“Sir, you should have been at Urda. Thousands of shuttles coming down. Absolutely amazing.” Desjani’s eyes shaded for a moment in memory. “Then the Syndics opened fire.”

“Bad losses?”

“Horrible.” She forced a smile at him. “This won’t be like that.”

He managed to force a smile back, wishing that Desjani hadn’t mentioned Urda.

“First wave of evacuation shuttles launching.”

“We have enemy movement on the surface. Armored column heading for the prison camp.”

Geary’s display illuminated the line of armored vehicles crawling along the surface toward the POW camp. He reached and with careful deliberation tagged the column as a target, asked the combat system for an engagement solution, got it an instant later, then tapped approval. Rocks punched out of three Alliance warships, hurtling downward into the planet’s atmosphere. The entire process to firing had taken less than ten seconds.

“Preassault bombardment launching.”

A wave of rocks burst from Alliance warships, each projectile aimed at a specific point within the POW camp. With the shuttles coming down slower than the rocks would drop, the bombardment would clear the airspace over the camp before the shuttles reached it.

“Boom,” Desjani muttered, as the armored column disappeared under a cloud of fragments and dust tossed into the air by the impacts of the bombardment aimed at it.

“Maybe they’ll figure out that resisting us is a bad idea,” Geary observed.

“I wouldn’t count on it, sir.”

“We have surface-based particle-beam batteries opening fire at five locations!” the operations watch called. “Near misses on
Splendid
and
Bartizan
.”

Geary faced his display, tagged the batteries, got a firing solution, and launched another bombardment. “Good thing I already had the fleet doing evasive maneuvers.”

The preassault bombardment slammed into the surface, some of the rocks aimed simply at trying to suppress unseen defenses but many smashing into identified enemy locations and every guard post or tower. Within moments, craters of rubble had replaced the guard installations, and the formerly solid wall between them had collapsed in many places.

“Do you think there were any of them inside those guard posts?” Desjani asked.

“I doubt it. Colonel Carabali figured they were planning on firing the weapons on the guard posts by remote if we left them standing. So we didn’t.”

The operations watch called out another report. “Marine shuttles are two minutes from drops.”

The locations of the five particle-beam batteries went up in clouds of debris.

“Shuttles on final. Marines on the ground.” The operation had a sort of beauty when seen from this high, the shuttles swooping down toward their objectives around the perimeter of the camp and at its center, Marines leaping out as the shuttles hovered, the tracks of fire from enemy troops painting flashing lines as they fired on the Marines or the shuttles. Unlike regular fleet shuttles, the Marine shuttles carried defensive combat systems, which started pumping out grenades and automatic fire at wherever the Syndics were firing from. As the Marines deployed and went to ground, they joined in the barrages, the firepower blowing apart any location holding enemy resistance. The battle sites formed small eruptions of violence at locations all around the perimeter of the camp and at a few places near the landing field in the center.

“We don’t know where all of the POWs are,” Rione protested, “and the Marines are blowing that camp apart!”

Geary shook his head. “Their battle armor has every known POW location painted. Other than that we have to trust that they’ll ID targets before they fire.” He pulled up the feed from the Marines.

“The enemy is dug in,” a Marine officer was reporting. “Strong resistance around landing zone.”

“This isn’t going to be pretty,” Desjani muttered.

“CONVENTIONAL ground artillery firing upon the camp from locations thirty kilometers to the east and twenty kilometers to the south.”

Geary tagged more targets and launched rocks at them. His main display floated to one side, showing the situation on a wide portion of the planet’s surface below and orbital locations that could threaten the fleet. To the other side hung an overhead view of the POW camp, symbols crawling along it to mark the movements of friendly and enemy troops on the ground. Directly in front of him, Geary had positioned a string of windows for calling up views from the battle armor of Marines. He had to avoid using those too much, had to avoid getting sucked into the action on one tiny part of the battlefield when he was supposed to be overseeing the entire fleet, but sometimes those personal views from the Marines could provide a very good feel for how things were going for them.

At the moment, that was hard to figure out no matter how he viewed it. On the overall view, some of the Marine platoons and companies were pushing steadily inward toward the center of the camp, symbols for liberated POWs multiplying rapidly around them as they blew open prisoner barracks and collected the occupants. In other areas, the Marines were moving slowly, under fire from Syndic guards entrenched in the buildings on all sides. Evacuation shuttles were dropping down into the center of the camp despite occasional shots fired at them as they descended. On the landing field, a growing number of dazed, liberated prisoners were being hustled toward the first shuttles. The command and control feed from the Marines was filled with reports and warnings.

“Shuttles Victor One and Victor Seven badly damaged by ground fire. Returning to base ships.”

“Target building desig five one one! Hit it!”

“They’re on the left, too. Small structures bearing zero two one and zero two three true.”

“Mines. We’re in a field, two Marines down. All units watch for mines.”

“Can’t somebody do something about that damned artillery?”

“The fleet’s on it. Bombardment hitting now.”

“Lighting up a bunker. Put a round on it!”

Desjani, who was listening and watching as well, shook her head. “Are we winning?”

“I think so.” Geary turned as the combat-systems watch called.

“Sir, we’re getting a lot of bombardment requests from the Marines—”

“Every bombardment request outside the one-hundred-meter safety zone from our Marines is supposed to be approved automatically,” Geary replied a bit irritably.

“Yes, sir, but we could respond to them a bit faster if they were one hundred percent handled by the automated systems, just like when we engage other ships.”

Geary shook his head. “Lieutenant, we might shave some seconds off the response time if we did that, but the Marines asked that every bombardment be verified by a human set of eyes before final approval to ensure it’s aimed at the right spot. I’m not going to overrule the preferences of the Marines in this.” The lieutenant looked unhappy, so Geary took a moment to explain. “We have no choice but to leave targeting entirely up to the fire-control systems when we’re engaging Syndic warships. It’s physically impossible for human beings to react quickly enough at the velocities involved. But neither the Syndics on the ground nor our Marines are moving at any appreciable fraction of the speed of light. We can afford to have a human in the loop. If you get any reports of undue delays in approving bombardment requests, I want to know. I assure you that the Marines will be the first to let us know if they’re unhappy.”

“Yes, sir.” Only slightly abashed, the lieutenant focused back on his tasks.

“You’re tolerant of lieutenants,” Desjani remarked, her eyes still fixed on her own display.

“I used to be one. And so did you.” Like Desjani, Geary kept most of his attention on the situation but welcomed anything that might cut the tension slightly. He suspected she could see how wound up he’d become and was trying to relax him a little.

“Not me,” Desjani denied. “I was born the commanding officer of a battle cruiser.”

“That must have been painful for your mother.”

She grinned. “Mom’s tough, but even she didn’t like having the sideboys in the delivery room.” Then the smile vanished as a high-priority transmission came over the Marine net.

“Third Company is pinned down!”

Geary tapped windows until he picked up the lieutenant in command of that unit. The view from the lieutenant’s combat armor showed broken, tumbled walls shuddering and blowing apart under the impact of enemy fire. “Heavy-weapons emplacements and hidden bunkers,” the lieutenant continued. “We must have stumbled onto some kind of citadel area. We’re badly outgunned here, and we’ve taken substantial casualties.”

Colonel Carabali’s voice came on. “Can you withdraw toward the center of the camp by stages, Lieutenant?”

“Negative, Colonel, negative!” The view through the lieutenant’s armor jumped as something exploded with enough force to toss around nearby Marines. “We cannot move without being targeted. Request all available fleet fire support.” Geary watched the tactical maps pop up on the lieutenant’s heads-up display, watched as the lieutenant tagged scores of targets in a rough circle around the friendly symbols marking the positions of the Marines of the Third Company. “Request bombardment support on the following coordinates. All available supporting fire as soon as possible.”

“Sir,” the combat-systems watch reported, “we’ve received another Marine fire-support request, but the targets are inside the safety parameters.”

“How far inside?” He read the data, blowing out a long breath as he saw the distances.

As Geary was checking, Colonel Carabali’s image appeared. “Captain Geary, my Third Company needs fire support and it needs it now.”

“Colonel, most of these targets are only fifty meters from your Marines. Some of them are within twenty-five meters.”

“I understand, Captain Geary. That’s where the enemy is.”

“Colonel, we’re dropping rounds through atmosphere. I can’t guarantee that our own fire won’t hit those Marines!”

“We know that, sir,” Carabali stated. “The lieutenant knows that. This is what he needs. He’s the senior officer on the scene. He’s made the call that these targets have to be engaged despite the danger to own forces. Request approve and execute the fire mission as soon as possible, sir.”

Geary looked into her eyes. Carabali understood the danger, too, but was accepting her on-scene commander’s judgment. As fleet commander, he could do no less. “Very well, Colonel. It’s on its way.” He turned to Desjani. “How can we maximize the accuracy of a surface bombardment right now?”

Desjani spread her hands. “Through atmosphere and all the junk we’ve already tossed up? Get the bombarding ship in as low an orbit as you can manage. But that will expose the ship to fire from the planet.”

“Okay.” A quick scan of the display showed the right candidate. A battleship could deliver enough firepower and have the best chance of surviving counterfire from the ground. “
Warspite
, proceed to lowest orbit and execute following fire-support mission as soon as possible.”

“
Warspite
, aye. On our way.”

“Sir, we have detections of aircraft en route the POW camp. Aircraft assessed military profile, all using maximum stealth capabilities.”

“Engage them,” Geary ordered.

Hell lances lashed down from orbit, forming webs of high-energy particles around the Syndic aircraft. With so many Alliance warships in space above the planet and able to fire on targets, the aircraft didn’t have a chance. Hard to see though the aircraft were, even a glancing blow from a hell lance was enough to knock them out, and a lot of hell lances filled the atmosphere around the aircraft. “All aircraft assessed destroyed.
Warspite
opening fire.”

On the view from the lieutenant commanding the Third Company, walls began blowing inward, and the ground jumped in a continuous wild dance as
Warspite
hurled hell lances and small kinetic projectiles into her targets. The feed from the lieutenant hazed as the destruction continued, dust and charged particles filling the air around him, then cut off completely.