TEAM EFFORT
A Story of The Fleet
Most of the Headhunters were experienced enough to know that the Bonnie Parker’d been hit—that bone-jarring clang! wasn’t just re-entry turbulence.
“Instead of coming in on the deck . . . ,” Kowacs said, continuing with his briefing. Barely identifiable holographic images wavered in front of his helmet and the helmets of his troops, poised at the cargo bay doors, ” . . . the Jeffersonian militia we’re supposed to bail out managed to drop straight down into the middle of their objective, a Weasel air-defense installation.”
The Bonnie Parker was still under control. Not that there was a damn thing the 121st Marine Reaction Company in her belly could do if she weren’t. The Headhunters crouched in two back-to-back lines, ready to do their jobs as soon as their ship touched down and her long doors opened.
As it was, there wasn’t half enough time for Kowacs to tell his troops exactly what their job was.
There wasn’t half enough information, either.
The landing vessel bucked. The hull screamed with piercing supersonics like those of a gigantic hydraulic motor—then banged again into the relative silence of re-entry.
Not another hit: a piece tearing loose as a result of the first one.
Not a good sign, either.
Corporal Sienkiewicz, Kowacs’ company clerk—and bodyguard—was nearly two meters tall and solid enough to sling a shoulder-fired plasma weapon in addition to her regular kit. She grinned in a close approximation of humor to Bradley, the field First Sergeant, and murmured, “Bet you three to one in six-packs, Top: we don’t ride all the way to this one.”
“They figured they could keep the Weasel’s heads down with suppression clusters until they landed,” Kowacs said as he watched the gray, fuzzy holograms his helmet projected for him. Instead of a Fleet hull, the Jeffersonians had used their own vessel—and crew; that was bloody obvious—but their cameras and real-time links were to Alliance standard. “And then the missile launchers couldn’t depress low enough to hit their ship.”
The air-defense installation was a concrete pentagram of tunnels and barracks, with launchers at each point. The crisp outline danced in the holograms with the electric dazzle of anti-personnel bomblets going off. A red flash and mushroom of smoke marked the Khalian’s attempted response: as soon as the missile left its hardened launcher, shrapnel exploded it.
In synchrony with the detonating image, the Bonnie Parker’s hull banged.
This time it was another hit.
“Cockpit to cargo,” rasped the PA system, distorting the voice of Jarvi, the Command Pilot. “Three minutes to touchdown.”
The Jeffersonians—those dick-headed anarchists—must have been carrying five times the normal load of suppression clusters; that and luck were what had saved their asses during the drop.
The extra weight was also why the image of the ground beneath their landing vessel was expanding at such a rate.
“They made it that far,” Kowacs continued; his voice cool, his guts cold and as tight as his hand on the stock of his assault rifle. “They landed with the bay doors open, and about half their assault company jumped before the boat was stabilized.”
Blurred images degraded a stage further as the editor—an artificial intelligence aboard one of the orbiting support vessels—switched to the feed from the helmet of one of the ground troops. Shouting soldiers, very heavily equipped and logy with the weight of their hardware, lurched to the ground and sprayed streams of tracer into Weasels popping from hatches in the surrounding concrete walls.
The installation had been hardened against air attack. It wasn’t intended for defense against infantry landing in its interior.
A shadow fell across the tumbling holograms. The viewpoint changed as the Jeffersonian looked over his shoulder and saw his landing craft balloon away from him with half the troops still hesitating at its doors.
The men who’d jumped weighed at least five tonnes. That sudden release had caused the pilot—already fighting excessive descent speed—to let his craft get away from him.
The ship bounced up ten meters on thrust. Before the pilot could get it back on the ground, one of the launchers had belched a line of smoke. The missile was still accelerating when it hit the landing craft, but its warhead didn’t need the boost of kinetic energy to do its job.