Valkyrie Burning (Warrior's Wings Book Three) (30 page)

It was going to take a miracle to stop those inbound rocks, and firing hundred-kilo slugs at them wasn’t going to qualify.

*****

Steel slugs meeting iron and rock at high percentages of light speed make for spectacular viewing, whether you had the finest scanning suite or just good old eyeball mark one. Material vaporizes in the first few instants, iron sublimates directly from solid to vapor, and extraneous material is blown clear away. As the force lessens, the softer iron begins to liquefy instead, and it reacts precisely like water in a pond as a stone is thrown in.

A ripple pattern forms in the larger object, hardening into a crater as the steel slams to a halt deep inside the larger object. A ripple frozen in place for eternity, until some other outside object acts on it.

In this case, the next outside object slams into the rock before it can harden from the first strike. More material sublimates away into vapor, more iron is liquefied, and more material is blown clear.

First the one, then the second, and then a third, fourth, fifth, and sixth. The strikes keep coming as the magnetic accelerators of Task Force Valkyrie and Liberation station throw a seemingly endless stream of steel in a desperate attempt to throw up a wall of defense around the planet.

The incoming rocks were too fast, too massive, and too set in their path, however. They wouldn’t be stopped so easily.

*****

HMS Hood

“Stand by to roll the ship!”

McKay was struggling to breathe, think, give orders, and calculate high-energy physics problems in her head all at the same time and, honestly, it wasn’t working out so well for her. She had, in fact, decided that now was not the time to be certain.

She would take a chance on instinct for once in her life.

Her instinct was saying that now was not the time to half-ass anything.

“Bring us about using vector thrust!”

That order got her some odd looks, but the helmsman just nodded.

“Aye aye, ma’am.”

By bringing the ship around on vectored thrust, they were committed to a spiral rather than the clean rotation a standard maneuver offered, but they were also turning fast.

“Weapons!”

“Aye, ma’am!” the chief grunted automatically.

“Arm the nukes.”

There was a brief hesitation, but the chief obeyed without comment. One by one the Hood’s nuclear arsenal was armed, five tubes flashing green.

“Plot me a firing solution to hit those bastards off center, Chief.”

“Off center, ma’am?”

“I want to give them a nudge, Chief. Away from the station.”

“Aye, ma’am, that is the trick isn’t it?” the man mumbled as he struggled against the acceleration to obey. It took him less time than she’d expected to come back with the response she wanted. “Solution plotted, ma’am.”

“Fire as bears, Chief.”

“Missiles away!”

*****

Tether Station Liberation

“She’s insane. Nukes won’t do a damned thing against those.”

Kane only grunted, though he certainly didn’t deny the statement. Firing explosives, even nuclear bombs, against something as large, massive, and fast-moving as those targets was futile and even he knew it. The shockwave would blow out and around the rock, wasting the energy on vacuum for the most part.

He wouldn’t have said that the captain of the Hood was insane, however. Desperate? Yes. Insane? No.

“Our nukes would be worthless, but hers are coming in from the side.”

Kane half turned, frowning. “What?”

Lt. Commander Sear flushed slightly but nodded to the plot. “She’s not hoping to destroy them, General. She’s trying to give them a push.”

Kane frowned. “Will it work?”

“Probably not.”

The brigadier general nodded, unsurprised. He considered calling for a general quarters and collision alert, but, frankly, it wouldn’t do any good. One of those things would turn the station into scrap metal.

No sense scaring the hell out of people for no reason.

“Keep firing,” he said. “Hell, arm the nukes and fire them too.”

“Sir?”

Kane glanced over. “What are we saving them for? The afterlife? Fire the nukes.”

“Yes, sir.”

*****

Space burned with nuclear fire, a kaleidoscopic display of destruction and devastation that to most would have been most impressive indeed. For the rocks rushing onward to their target, they were but a momentary warmth to salve the surface from the cold of space. Fired soon enough, perhaps they may have had an effect.

In the last crazy seconds of the terminal fall to destruction?

There was no hope.

Oh, here one rock was turned aside enough to miss the station, and there another was actually pulverized into gravel that, like as not, wouldn’t destroy anything vital when it holed through the armor of the tether counterweight.

For the most part, however?

The changes to their course were minute and of no consequence.

Everyone saw it, everyone knew it, yet no one was willing to admit the inevitable.

For humanity, sometimes that was the difference between survival and extinction. A total fool’s heart and stubborn ignorance in the face of fate and destiny.

And then, just sometimes, it was destiny that would blink.

*****

“General!”

“What is, Sear?” Kane asked tiredly as he refused to turn away from the plot.

“The tether!”

“What?” Kane glanced aside, irritably and irrationally annoyed at being distracted from his death.

“Sir, the tether. We can
cut
it,” Sear said, gesturing with a slashing motion across his throat. “The station will fly off due to angular momentum. We can
cut
the tether!”

It took a second to filter in, a second Kane suddenly realized that he didn’t have. He stiffened, as is galvanized and nodded.

“Do it!” he called. “Get someone to cut it free!”

The orders were given in a flurry of confusion, and through it all Kane couldn’t help but watch the numbers fall on the plots.

We’re under a minute now. Will it be enough? It has to be.

*****

While the theory of severing a tether was certainly sound—the station was nothing more than a weight at the end of a very long, very rapidly spinning string, after all—the reality was that it wasn’t designed to be ‘cut.’ That was something that took the chief engineer only about two seconds to relate back to the lieutenant commander when he got his orders.

“Chief, these are you orders.”

“Stuff the orders, with all due respect, sir!” the chief snarled back over the comm. “It can’t be done in the time you want, and if it would, it would be a man’s life to be caught outside when this beast started moving!”

There was no way in hell he was sending any of his boys out EVA with a hacksaw, even if they could do the job from inside the drive tube of the one-time starship. It was still EVA, and it would take too long besides.

The chief might have reconsidered had he realized that his next words would be taken seriously.

“If you want the damn thing cut, just shoot it with one of your fancy satellites!”

The channel went dead, leaving Lt. Commander Sear seething, but with a new path in mind. “Tactical!”

It was probably best that computers, for all their artificially intelligent capabilities, didn’t question orders. If they did, the systems that controlled the single weapon satellite that abruptly pivoted about in space to aim at another device of its creators might have pondered on their sanity.

Of course, it wouldn’t have been the first decision they had made that would prompt a question of that nature.

The satellite fired, a single round into the taught tether that held the orbiting station tied down to the planet. The carbon tether was one of the strongest materials ever devised by men, and among the strongest ever devised, period, but its strength was all focused on tensile toughness. When faced with the instant shearing force of a high-velocity kinetic weapon, the material parted like silk before a blade and then, slowly…so very slowly, the station began to drift upward as the tether slowly fell away.

The clock now listed impact of the enemy weapons with the station in less than forty seconds.

“All hands, all stations, all civilian personnel…stand by for microgravity.”

The shocking announcement might have had more useful effect had it come
before
things began floating free on Liberation station, though given the utterly bizarre nature of the warning, it very well may not have.

*****

HMS Hood

“Holy shit.”

There were no words that described the sense of shock on the command deck quite so well, in Jane MacKay’s mind, though she herself was too shocked to say anything. The station, once exploration starship, was
moving
relative to the planet. What’s more, it was clearly an attempt by the command center of the station to evade incoming fire.

She wasn’t certain if it was brilliantly insane, or just insane.

I suppose we’ll have to decide which after we see if it works or not.

Whichever it was it was certainly desperate as well.

She literally cringed at the idea of the sheer chaos that now had to exist within the hull of the former Discovery class ship. While it had once been designed to work in microgravity, she was certain that the refit had put an end to
that
particular feature set.

That wasn’t her concern at the moment, however, and she instead set her mind to things that were.

One of those was the inbound tracks of enemy ballistic missiles, if you could call big chunks of rock ‘missiles.’ Immediately she saw that many were no longer on the red tracks, showing a direct and certain impact with the station. Some were even showing on green tracks now, which indicated that they’d miss everything, including the planet itself, but most were yellow tracks.

Hayden is going to take a beating this time around.

Unfortunately, not all the tracks were yellow and green.

“They don’t have the speed,” her helmsman announced, unnecessarily. “Twenty seconds to impact!”

McKay leaned forward, impossibly against the straps and acceleration she was crushed by. “Put us the path of that missile!”

“Ma’am!?”

She ignored the incredulous tone. “There are civilians on that station! Do it!”

They were already close, but the sudden crushing acceleration needed to push the ship into the path of the incoming rock was enough to black McKay and most of the crew out as they topped fifty gravities and were thrown about against their restraints and literally managed to overload the pressure suits they wore.

On automatic, however, it didn’t matter. The computers made the last instant corrections and brought the HMS Hood onto a flight path that intersected with the inbound rock in a near perfect strike directly amidships.

*****

USS Cheyenne

One could imagine that the sudden hissing intake of breath across the command deck of the Cheyenne would be enough to lower the ambient air pressure by a marked degree as the HMS Hood threw itself into the path of the last ballistic missile.

“Match their course!” Roberts growled, keying open a channel to the lower decks. “Search and rescue crews, stand by for deployment!”

He didn’t know if an impact such as he was about to witness would leave any survivors, but damned if he would waste a single second if he could avoid it.

“Impact! They did it!”

*****

Reactive armor had its origins shortly after the second world war of Earth’s twentieth century, born from the earlier discovery of shaped explosives. It was a counterintuitive concept in many ways, since normally the last thing you would think to use as armor was high explosives.

The then-Soviet Union, however, thought otherwise.

They sandwiched a high explosive charge between two armor plates and bolted the resulting mess to their tanks in massive numbers. When a light anti-tank weapon was fired at the vehicle, the plasma jet generated by the rocket would penetrate the outer armor plate and, as a result, detonate the high explosives buried within. The shaped charge of those explosives would then send out a counter-jet of plasma that disrupted the attacking blast, thus saving those within the vehicle.

The ceramic armor plates built for and installed on the Cheyenne and Longbow class vessels were designed in much the same way.

When an outer attack cracked the first ceramic plate, it triggered an instantaneous detonation of the high-yield explosives within, sending a massive plasma jet out into the oncoming attack.

Normally, this defense would be enough to defeat anything a ship might encounter that had the capacity of cracking the ceramic armor plates. However, the obvious limitation of the system was that the reactive jet had to be more powerful than the incoming attack. Most times that wasn’t a problem. A tank, or ship, could carry far more explosive mass than most weapons could match.

Being struck amidships by a ten-thousand-kilo rock moving a significant percent of light speed was
not
a normal attack.

The impact cracked the ceramic plate, resulting in a massive shaped charge detonating directly in its proverbial face. The plasma jet cored it out like an apple, carving a hole through the rock with astounding ease, but only managed to negate a portion of the mass striking the big ship.

What was left hammered into the Hood with the force of an angry god, actually folding the ship nearly in half before the hull tore on the other side and exposed a dozen sections to hard vacuum. What was left of the rock broke through but was slowed enough that the station had flown clear by the time it passed.

In its trail it left utter devastation as plumes of ice, gas, and explosions continued to rock the HMS Hood.

*****

Hayden Jungle

The dust was still drifting in the air when Sorilla realized that she wasn’t dead.

Survival had been a possibility, obviously, or she wouldn’t have bothered preparing even the minimal shelter she’d carved out with the enemy weapon, but, honestly, even with her armor she’d known it was a longshot.