Qualea Drop (The Spiral Wars #7), page 22
Thirty had so far made it to jump, and four more were currently underway, lumbering with underpowered engines toward a higher position on the gravity slope where jump engines could find purchase to propel their massive bulk into hyperspace. Three-point-four million corbi, it was quite an achievement already... but there were around two hundred million down there, and already signs that some would struggle to make the evacuation zones in time without modern transportation.
Among the big Sho'jis were a swarm of smaller transports, Scan informed her that the number had swelled while she'd been asleep to reach six hundred and eighty one. Most were much smaller, some could hold barely a few hundred corbi, and all were down there in close orbit where the shuttles could reach them most efficiently. Some had their own shuttles, but at least half did not, and so were reliant on the growing fleet of unattached shuttles ferrying evacuees up to them. The Sho'jis had left their shuttles behind, crews working in round-the-clock rotations to bring passengers up to civilian ships, docking at unfamiliar airlocks with sometimes incompatible grapples, with several reports of near-collisions and decompression accidents, though no deaths so far. But, as Lisbeth had predicted to Rhi'shul when she'd first gotten the tour, the shuttle capacities and freighter capacities were now not matching, so shuttles were having to waste time delivering part-loads to one ship, then part to another, delaying the frequency of their ascents and descents, and thus slowing the total flow.
"Lisbeth," said Liala, "I believe that the reeh are about to make a flanking hook to the Rando nadir with their next jump, this current attack is merely to draw the croma outer defences into engaging."
Lisbeth looked at the confusion of intersecting trajectories and plotted guesswork of firing solutions, and thought it looked like a haystack in a tornado. But beyond that one point of confusion, Liala's suggestion looked... plausible. "Surely the croma will guess that it's coming?" she asked.
"It is very much the standard manoeuvre for the situation," Liala conceded. "The outer defences engage to prevent long-range fire from being successfully deployed against our forces closer to Rando, and the second attack comes about their flank to hit us directly. However, I do not think the croma have anticipated how many there will be."
Lisbeth had thought she was handling her first view of warship combat from an operational bridge quite well until that point. But now her heart began to thump quite rapidly. "How many?"
"It is a probabilistic thing, and I cannot be certain." Meaning that drysine queens understood the mathematical complexities of the highest-order risk assessment better than any other minds in the Spiral. "But this attack pattern raises the likelihood that the reeh have concentrated a larger than anticipated portion of their force here at Rando. We had hoped the croma flanking attacks on Jikul and Torsena would draw them off, but I do not think it has worked."
"Or maybe they had more ships in reserve to begin with," Lisbeth muttered, zooming and squinting on her displays as she tried to make sense of what they showed her. "Croma Fleet Intelligence has let them down before."
"Indeed," said Liala. "I feel that the possibility should be raised with the croma commanders."
"I showed them your last analysis of our transport deployments," said Lisbeth. Truth be told, she didn't like interrupting croma commanders while they were working. "They ignored it."
"And every logistical issue that I highlighted has since come to pass. Lisbeth, I believe the equivalent human emotion would be frustration. We are losing time, and we are about to start losing ships, all of it unnecessary."
"How many ships?"
"Four," said Liala. "Four is my median estimate. They'll go after the cruisers first to weaken our defences. But their long term objective is the transports. So many Sto'ji transports in one place are a tempting target -- they have no offensive armament and are a large asset for the croma Fleet. The reeh may feel the target tempting enough to leave neighbouring systems relatively undefended, just to send more forces here."
"When is the second wave coming out of jump?" Lisbeth asked.
"Five seconds," said Liala. "The timing needs to be quite precise." New plots blinked into existence on Lisbeth's screens, to Rando's nadir as Liala had said, and the Scan Officer called the alarm with cool parren calm.
"Seven seconds," said Lisbeth. "You missed by two."
"I should be in command, Lisbeth."
"I know Liala." Thrust began to build, forcing Lisbeth back into the seat. As much as she loved the engineering of warships, she'd never grown to like this bit. "That was a joke, by the way."
"I am aware," Liala said drily, for that moment sounding entirely like Styx. "Amity will now commence its interception manoeuvres in conjunction with Coroset. Amity shall attempt to coordinate, but there can be no guarantee that Coroset and Amity shall be in complete agreement about what to do next."
Lisbeth could hear Liala's frustration quite plainly. Simulated vocalised emotion or not, she had no doubt that it mirrored some very real drysine equivalent. "Organics aren't drysines, Liala," she said through gritted teeth as her breathing contracted to short gasps, her vision narrowing as the Gs passed six. "We can't coordinate like a single unit."
"I've noticed."
Ciri Two was commencing reentry once more when the counterattack came in. By the time they'd pulled out of the low-V entry dive, all hell was breaking loose in orbit. But their pilot, Gula, was too focused on their approach to care.
"We've got two An'ji's down in the zone," he said, voice hard with concentration in Tiga's flight helmet. "One more approaching, I don't know if there's going to be any room."
"Pattern-net says there's nearly five thousand civvies down there," said Peshi, the flight engineer. "They're trying to clear them all out... hang on, map says there should be some space, I'll see if I can get an ETA on one of those An'jis leaving."
They were rocking and rattling in over Rilo continent, an equatorial zone called Brieva. Gula and Peshi were replacements for Ciri Two's previous crew, who'd transferred onto a Resistance ship to get some sleep after a full rotation on duty. That was an easier matter for croma crews than corbi, as there were far more croma to transfer between. Tiga had gotten bursts of sleep in her chair, not having the kind of job that exhaustion made impossible or lethal, and during the last maintenance shutdown to check the overheating second engine she'd even managed a blissful four hours straight. Even so, the pace had been relentless, and this was her tenth sortie in nearly two days. Every run had met with a full load, so they'd saved nine hundred corbi so far. By her calculations, that was one two hundred and twenty two thousandth of all those needing to be saved.
"Hello, this is Ciri Two," she said to her own logistics channel, ignoring the stomach-lurching bumps and increasing Gs as they hit the lower atmosphere. "I am inbound to Brieva 138, we are reading heavy congestion, An'jis on the ground for longer than normal. Wondering what the holdup is."
"Hello Tiga," came Bajo's voice back on coms from Yoma in orbit. "Sorry, can't talk right now, we are evasive." Her voice sounded strained with Gs from whatever Yoma was doing to avoid the reeh counter-attack. Tiga wanted to retort that proper military crews could operate coms under all conditions, but a lot of the Resistance crews were more accustomed to hiding than fighting, and saying so wasn't helpful.
"Warnings of ground fire in Brieva," Peshi remarked. "That's thirty tarans from here. Reeh attacks in Shomi and Pinlo, looks like the ground forces are waking up."
"We didn't get all of them on the way in," Gula muttered. "They've been hiding, they'll coordinate with the counter-attack."
Tiga's scan feed showed little tactical manoeuvring -- her screens were prioritised to watch shuttles and transports, not warships. The transports were locked into predictable orbits to allow scheduled rendezvous from various shuttles. If they started dodging like crazy, they'd miss the next rendezvous and throw the entire schedule out of whack. She imagined all the low-orbit ships would be firing defensive weaponry to ward the offensive fire that came their way from higher up the grav-slope, but her screens did not show her that either.
"We're getting a warning in Kul'hasa," Peshi added. "Incoming rounds, V-strike velocity. No idea if the defences will intercept it." She sounded scared. Phoenix had hit various reeh bases at V-strike velocities during the Splicer attack, and croma ships had done the same at the beginning of the evacuation. Now the reeh were returning the favour.
"They'll be going after the evacuation zones," said Tiga, trying to keep her voice steady. "Dammit, if we can know which ones are going to get hit, we can save shuttles." She almost couldn't believe what she'd said, but it was the necessary truth. An evacuation zone hit would kill every corbi there within a ten taran range or more, which was tragic, but losing multiple shuttles was worse. Ciri Two had saved nearly a thousand corbi in just two days. If the evacuation lasted a full thirty days, and if they could keep up the present rate, they'd save fifteen thousand. But if Ciri Two were destroyed now, fourteen thousand corbi would stay stranded on Rando. For every An'ji Class destroyed, the number was a hundred and twelve thousand.
A series of brilliant flashes lit the sky, like lightning leaping from cloud to cloud, only spread across hundreds of tarans. Vertical slashes, blindingly bright, leaving thick clouds of vapour in their wake. "Oh God!" Peshi yelped in disbelief, as Gula swore loudly. "Oh shit, what was that?"
On coms, Tiga heard croma voices in Kul'hasa, hard-but-cool. "It's V-strike particles," she translated for her pilots, trying to keep eyes on her screens despite the blinding fireworks. "Incoming rounds partially destroyed, there's not enough mass to reach the surface. Defensive batteries must have got them." Like super high-V asteroids, she thought, each probably no larger than a fist.
"Do we still go for the evac zone?" Gula asked, a clear tremble in his voice. "I mean, they're clearly aiming at it."
"They're aiming at fucking everything!" Tiga retorted. "The attack could last another hour, we either do orbits for an hour waiting for it to be safe or we go in! These attacks will be constant for the rest of the evacuation, if we stop the landings because we're scared of a hit, the whole schedule will get smashed and we'll end up leaving millions of corbi behind!"
Gula said nothing, but there was no change in Ciri Two's approach. Tiga hadn't meant to sound like she was accusing him of something. Mostly she'd been trying to convince herself. They were bumping through cloud, subsonic and on approach. If a V-strike hit Brieva 138 right now, they might possibly survive. But as they drew closer, it would be death.
"One of the An'jis is leaving!" Peshi announced. "We've got some room!"
"Yeah I see it," said Gula. "We're going straight in."
The network, Tiga saw, was telling her that Brieva 138's evacuee numbers had not actually decreased with the An'ji's departure, but had gone up to six thousand plus. Then Ciri Two was slowing, across a landscape of bare granite hillsides, red in the shimmering of an equatorial sun. The shuttle flared for landing, Tiga having no idea what the landing zone looked like but trusting that Gula could see everything. A thud as the gear touched, and she unhooked herself with practised speed and left the cockpit.
In the main hold, the heat hit her, and the glare from the sunlight on red rocks. From the top of the ramp, she saw a straggle of brightly-clad corbi civilians running, clutching possessions and each other. Brieva was another culture entirely, folks here were short-haired, more frequently light-coloured and with a higher tolerance of heat.
She intercepted those corbi who looked least desperate and most likely to talk, and asked about their villages, and the numbers there, while about her the engines shrieked -- an An'ji Class was idling nearby, the enormous beast hulking over the surrounding low trees and stump-bush between the hills. And then, even with her flight helmet still in place, she heard, or felt in her bones, the enormous THUD THUD! of V-strike detonations somewhere overhead, as the ramp beneath her feet seemed to leap, and corbi on the grass yelled in panic and crouched, as though that would help anything. Tiga risked a glance, and saw one enormous plume of smoke, like a giant finger reaching down from the heavens, but thankfully not touching the ground.
"We have incoming!" Peshi was shouting then into coms. "Reeh attack ships from the mountains north! We have to go!"
And Tiga abandoned her intelligence-gathering to wave and yell at everyone to get aboard, as Telka and Pel'ocho did also -- two loadmasters, one of them croma, having volunteered from a croma ship when they'd unloaded at a Sto'ji freighter two trips ago, and the existing loadmasters had needed a break.
Corbi came pouring aboard -- not usually the fastest method of loading, given large numbers tended to tangle in their unfamiliarity with procedures, but there was nothing for it now but to get them on and hope. She helped the loadmasters with passengers, children wailing to be held by their mothers and not strapped into some strange contraption alone, and old folks weak with days of walking who could barely sit upright.
"Belongings in the storage!" Telka was yelling, his voice turned to a bellow of the local tongue over the hold speakers. "Belongings in the storage, in the side here, hurry up we have to go!"
From outside the noise became unbearable as the An'ji landing was joined by the one taking off. Pel'ocho waved corbi back off the ramp, yelling that all spaces were taken, they'd have to wait for the next one. Parents grabbed up children and did that, covering their ears and staring fearfully at the sky. More minutes, more hours spent waiting under a bombardment, hoping that the orbital defences continued to keep the large projectiles out, in the sure knowledge that if one got through, everyone would die. The blast radius of such an event was so large that running away now would save no one.
When the loadmasters looked to be getting on top of their task, Tiga ran back to the cockpit and strapped herself in. "Maybe three minutes," she told the pilots. "Where's that reeh attack?"
"We called down orbital anti-air," said Gula, mask off and voice audible in the more soundproofed cockpit, watching his screens with hard intensity. "The An'jis put some fire in their direction too... it's all long range, the croma look like they've got good countermeasures."
Up ahead, Tiga could make out the small, fading dot of the newly airborne An'ji Class, engines flaming as it roared for orbit. Even as she looked, a white flash cut across it from above, then a flash, and the shuttle was falling in flames. For a moment, no one in the cockpit spoke, frozen in shock.
"That wasn't V-strike!" Gula exclaimed. "That was anti-air! I bet those fucking croma shot down the wrong shuttle!" And then Peshi was on coms, demanding to know where the croma anti-air strikes were hitting.
Tiga thought there was a faster way to get a response, and dialled her coms to general, broadwave, received by anyone. "Hello Liala, hello drysine warship Amity, please respond."
"Hello Tiga," came Liala's voice with barely a light-delay. "Please go ahead."
"I am at Brieva 138, an An'ji Class shuttle ahead of us was just shot down from above, can you confirm if croma warships are firing on the correct targets?"
"Tiga, that An'ji Class shuttle was destroyed by reeh fire. There are reeh warships in close manoeuvres with the atmosphere, they are low-V and are dropping anti-air ordnance onto evacuation zone positions."
"Guys, Gula!" Tiga shouted to be heard above whatever conversations were happening ahead of her. "That fire was from the reeh, they're dropping low-V anti-air onto the evacuation zones, their ships are right on top of us!" And back to her coms, "Liala, we never received your warning!" Ahead through the canopy, the flaming remains of the big shuttle dropped behind a red granite hillside and vanished, leaving a smoking pyre in the sky to mark its passage. Eight hundred plus lives gone in a flash.
"Tiga, croma command have locked me out of command channels. I can receive transmissions but I cannot send without committing an aggressive override that will be taken by croma command as a hostile act against their authority."
Something big exploded to one side of the cockpit, followed by a huge cloud of dirt and dust, and a showering of small rocks into the canopy, as Peshi shouted something about anti-air missiles being diverted by countermeasures.
"Well that's fucking stupid, Liala!" Tiga retorted, as Gula received the all clear from down back, and Ciri Two thundered into a low hover. "See if you can get individual croma captains to listen to you -- they won't like their command depriving them of important intelligence, they'll listen if you tell them things they need to know!"
"This may seem to croma command like treasonous activity," Liala replied. "Croma command have made clear they will not accept drysine influence anywhere within the command structure."
"Then talk to Lisbeth!" Tiga insisted, as Ciri Two accelerated hard, staying low to get clear of the reeh assault ships' missile range. "Lisbeth is very good at this kind of political stuff, she'll figure out what to do!"
"I will take your advice, Tiga."
The coms cut, which left Tiga with no choice but to refocus on where she was, shuddering at increasing velocities close above the parched landscape of Brieva, hoping against hope that neither reeh assault ships behind, or reeh warships above, managed to land a shot. Her screens showed her the local skies above Rando, Sto'ji transports continuing on their low orbits despite close reeh attacks, laying down defensive fire in swarms as reeh ships climbed away or streaked around the planet's backside, still carrying great velocity from jump.
One Sto'ji transport had been destroyed completely, plus a pair of smaller civilian ships without defensive armament. A second Sto'ji transport over Relo continent had been badly damaged and was tumbling, nearby shuttles rushing to dock and unload the passengers aboard before it depressurised completely. Two croma warships had also been destroyed, and a third badly damaged, attended by a comrade in an attempt to assist in repairs, or evacuate completely.
