Reclamation (Book One of the Art of War Trilogy), page 19
He was cut off by five separate profanities. A starburst of light and a stream of red CODOR graphics heralded the destruction of one of the destroyers. Without the cloud cover, it would have been visible to the naked eye. Full-spectrum radiation bounced off the drone’s sensors, bombarding it with a debrief of destruction. Vondur’s mouth fell open as the data stream populated his Goliath’s processors, the unmistakeable signature of atomics blooming iridescently across his enhanced optics. The wideband lapsed into stunned silence as each member of the squadron watched the feed aghast.
‘Shit,’ Elyan said after what felt like an eternity. ‘Do we arm?’
‘No!’ Vondur barked. The best thing to do would have been to deactivate the Goliaths entirely. Even with all weapons set to safe, they would be leaving a huge signature on the cruiser’s sensors. He thought for a few moments, trying to decide what to do. Their priority had to be to protect civilian evacuees, though flying escort would be more likely to put them in harm’s way.
‘Right, everybody listen in,’ he said, but before he could marshal his thoughts into orders, the drone calmly logged a second destroyer lost.
‘Goddamn it!’ Cox roared amidst a chorus of incredulity. Vondur could see the sergeant’s Goliath ball its fists.
‘Stand down!’ Vondur shouted, adrenaline coursing through his guts. ‘Everyone stand down, that’s an order!’ He could feel himself sweating inside the Mantix interface. He decided on the only course of action he could think of that would keep the maximum number of people – including his own – safe. ‘Gatekeeper, prepare for exfiltration. We are RTB, understood?’
They understood. His squadron tracker flared as the Goliaths’ plasma thrusters powered on. The last thing he saw was a battery of flak smashing through and terminating the third and final UN destroyer before Cox recalled it. It soared down through the clouds like a bird and slid mechanically back into his Goliath’s spine nacelle.
‘ZEN, RTB,’ he said.
‘Yes, Captain,’ ZEN replied, and Vondur watched it break into a run, exiting the plaza via the northbound carriageway of the A5 highway.
‘Let’s keep it slow and controlled,’ he said over the wideband. ‘Vanilla insertion vectors, everyone.’
He ignited his main thrusters and had managed to lift a metre off the platform when the MASTER ARM lettering on his HUD flickered from SAFE to ARMED entirely of its own volition. Tenths of a second later, the high-visibility armour scheme of his Goliath faded to its default tactical dark grey, his refraction and force shielding hummed online, and his weapons cycled and racked to active.
‘What?’ he managed dumbly as his passive ocular display transformed into an active targeting grid and immediately picked out the hostile provari cruiser in orbit, filling his vision with ordnance diagnostics and attack vectors. He could only watch in mute horror as his Hydra battery whirred free from its housing, acquired the cruiser’s position on his targeting computer and moments later began systematically discharging missile after missile into orbit.
‘Uh… Captain?’ Elyan asked, one second before a cylinder of tungsten travelling at Mach six obliterated his Goliath like a sledgehammer hitting a vase. Syoba, along with a hundred square metres of bedrock and a good portion of the adjacent hospital building, was lost in the blast wave. At such close range, the nanogel matrix layer of his cockpit was powerless to protect him from the overpressure, and his IHD immediately knocked him into a deep coma to salvage what it could of his consciousness.
‘INCOMING!’ Cox roared, immediately extending his own surface-to-orbit battery and firing off a long salvo of Hydra void missiles.
Vondur looked wide-eyed about his HUD, his heart beating so hard it felt as though it would burst through his chest. Every time he tried to disarm, his targeting grid would scramble kaleidoscopically. All other systems read nominal or were completely unresponsive. In a matter of seconds, the Goliath had gone from lethal war machine to remotely controlled tomb.
‘Thunderhead, this is Gatekeeper Actual!’ he yelled, his mouth dry. All around him rail strikes were smashing into the ground in a spectacular calamity of light and noise, wantonly obliterating buildings in vast explosions of blinding white flame. He could only watch helplessly as the squadron scattered on rapid evasion trajectories and reverted to full tactical mode. Within seconds, a vast salvo of missiles from five different sources speared into the sky on lances of smoke and light, and fleets of drones zipped through the air attempting to rob the rail slugs of some of their kinetic power through a concentrated lattice of laser beams and x-rays.
‘Thunderhead!’ he shouted, sweating from every pore in his skin. The comlink remained defiantly silent. Every channel he opened to the base was immediately corrupted, and the squadron wideband wouldn’t even initiate. He strained against the nanogel matrix, trying desperately to elicit any kind of response from the machine, but he only succeeded in straining his muscles and nearly herniating his gut.
He forced himself to relax. As with any piece of military equipment, there were procedures to follow in an emergency. He checked the plasmastats, which provided his backup power supply. They were fine. His main engines were functioning impeccably. The firmware suite was functioning on triple redundancy. His ancillary systems were reading normal across the board. His weapon systems – judging by the terrifying amount of ordnance being unleashed from his batteries – were operational. In the two seconds it took him to perform a full diagnostic, absolutely nothing was out of place. The Goliath’s firewall was supposed to be incorruptible, backed up by UNIS-grade encryption. Firmware malfunction was beyond countenance, and yet, against every fibre of his will, it had engaged the cruiser quite automatically. He realised then, with a horrible stab of adrenaline, that the only explanation was malicious intervention – and by a necessarily highly sophisticated operator.
He wasn’t given long to think about it. A javelin of tungsten hit the xenopathology building at its apex and travelled, completely unhindered, through seventy floors of carbon steel before coming to a stop deep within the bedrock under Anternis. For the briefest of seconds, nothing seemed to happen at all; then the entire superstructure disintegrated outwards in a twelve-thousand-tonne storm of steel and glass, hurling Vondur’s Goliath three hundred metres west into the First ITG Bank building.
Whatever had overcome his Goliath’s firewalls, smashing through three floors of office building and a severe dose of electronic warfare from the cruiser above somehow rid him of it. The familiar, powerful feeling of limb-sync returned, and ten seconds of jammed-up comms were suddenly released into his ears, a dissonant cacophony of screams and profanities, including several loud demands from Thunderhead.
‘… Directed fire, attack pattern Gamma! All STO batteries cleared to fire! Keep all drones on maximum disruption – read my marker and proliferate on all bandwidths!’ It was Jarvin issuing orders. He’d assumed Vondur was either incapacitated or dead and had – rightly – taken command.
‘I’m back in!’ Vondur shouted on the wideband, igniting his main thrusters and powering free of the shattered bank building. He could hear orbital bombardment alarms now, wailing across Anternis as rail strikes continued to thunder down. There were dozens of civilian transports still airborne, all banking wildly to avoid the solid grid of ordnance which had suddenly descended from the heavens. Many were unsuccessful in their attempts and either exploded violently in mid-air or careened into the hydroponics domes or the ocean beyond.
‘Captain! Orders!’ his lieutenant shouted.
‘Disengage and pull back!’ Vondur roared in reply. He retracted his Hydra battery and disarmed his primary weapon systems, then opened a channel to the UNAF base. ‘Thunderhead!’ he snarled, igniting his primary thrusters on full burn and soaring to another bank building east of the hospital.
‘Jesus Christ, Gatekeeper, what the hell is going on?’ the comms controller yelled. ‘Stand down at once, that’s a direct order!’
‘Thunderhead, my firewall is compromised,’ Vondur growled as calmly as he could. He leapfrogged to another building, IHD-marking the remaining members of the squadron, then dispatched his entire suite of drones to try and curtail as many of the rail strikes as he could.
‘Gatekeeper, your Goliath is reading as functioning on full redundancy!’ Thunderhead shouted. ‘Pull your men back at once and RTB!’
‘Damn it, Thunderhead, lis–’
‘Captain!’ Jarvin roared. Vondur turned to his right just as the lieutenant’s Goliath tackled him off the side of the bank roof. Moments later, half the building disintegrated in a blinding flash of light, and Vondur was given precious seconds to activate his thrusters on full burn before he hit the ground.
‘Gnnnn,’ he managed, as tonnes of blast-powered debris bombarded his force shielding. LRIS warnings flashed across his HUD, and another rail strike hit the ground a hundred metres away, tossing them both bodily into the smoking ruins of the building. For all its efficacy, his refraction shielding couldn’t conceal the multiple intense power blooms of both his plasmastats and primary engines, especially while his drone suite was engaged in damage limitation. Usually they could be relied upon to proliferate full-spectrum junk signatures; instead, they were fully utilised trying to disrupt the rail strikes.
‘Think they’ve got a bead on you,’ Jarvin said without a trace of irony, jogging back towards the plaza.
‘Thank you, Lieutenant,’ Vondur exhaled. A host of natural and artificial stimulants were keeping him calmer than he should have been. Jarvin had just saved him from certain death.
Over the course of the next couple of minutes, the rail strikes reduced markedly in intensity, now that the squadron was fully refraction shielded. The last few went well wide of the mark. One flattened an empty hotel; the other gouged a huge crater in the westbound carriageway of the hospital’s emergency access route, the crunching of rock echoing loudly through the city.
‘Christ,’ Jarvin breathed over the wideband in the silence that followed. It was the only thing the squadron as a collective could muster before their tactical displays were once more filled with warning graphics and burbling streams of data.
‘Multiple objects incoming,’ Cox said over the wideband. Vondur scrambled to his feet, dislodging a good deal of pulverised masonry and shattered plate glass, and immediately picked up the reading from one of his CODOR drones. Six signatures, travelling far too slowly to be rail strikes, had just entered the upper atmosphere.
‘Thunderhead, we have six refraction-shielded masses closing on attack vectors,’ Vondur said, re-arming his entire weapons suite.
‘Gatekeeper, you have orders to return to base,’ the base controller said. ‘Stand down and–’
‘Incoming fire!’ Vandemarr shouted. A series of mid-air explosions heralded the destruction of several of the squadron’s CODOR drones.
‘Engage all targets,’ Vondur said, calmly switching off the feed from Thunderhead and IHD-tagging all of the incoming masses. ‘Weapons free. Read my marker.’ The rail strikes had stopped, but they were in no less danger. The provar had dispatched their own manned interdictor-variants, Violator-class Zealot attack craft, if the engine signatures were anything to go by. They moved on supersonic engagement vectors, and their ordnance pylons were thick with force-shield-busting munitions. Any chance of an ordered retreat was now out of the question. They would have to go on the offensive.
His tactical display wasted no time in picking out likely attack trajectories, and within a few tenths of a second, the air was rife with missiles twisting away from his Goliath’s shoulder-mount batteries on corkscrews of smoke and flame. Violet beams from the Zealots’ prow lasers made short work of most of them, and the rest detonated prematurely against their force shielding.
‘Here we go,’ Cox said, soaring through the air four hundred metres to the east of Vondur’s position. A vast cannonade of rail slugs erupted from his RRG, slashing among the careening aircraft and once again battering their force shielding. The projectiles exited the triple-barrelled mass driver at such a high frequency that the individual discharges merged into one steady hum so that it looked as if the sergeant was attacking the Violators with a lance of blue light. It was enough to overpower the shields of the rearmost craft, which was quickly shredded. It fell apart in mid-air in a blossom of radiation of twisted wreckage.
‘Scratch one,’ Cox said, twisting round on a high-G evasion vector and unleashing another barrage of ordnance from his LAO battery while hypervelocity projectiles ripped through the air around him. The Zealots quickly dispersed, each discharging a host of subdrones which cluttered the tracking bandwidth with decoy signatures. Since Vondur had IHD-tagged the mother drones, the squadron simply tasked their own CODORs to engage the slaves. As a result, a high-tech proxy war raged above them between roaming bands of screaming cybernetics, filling the air with high-energy munitions as they flitted between the remaining buildings like flocks of supersonic birds.
Ancillary fire peppered the road around Vondur and sprayed him with molten asphalt as he ignited his thrusters to full burn and acquired a target, a Zealot in the middle of the flight which was about to engage August to the south. He cycled his RRG to full and unleashed a long salvo of rail slugs while burning hard to the west. A barrage of Hydra missiles from Cox intercepted the Violator as it vectored north to re-engage and overloaded its shields, allowing Vondur’s parabola of rail slugs to blast away a good portion of the craft’s starboard casing. Moments later, it lost control and ploughed into the ground.
‘That’s two!’ Vondur shouted, and then he was forced to drop as two of the Zealots hit him with enfilading fire. A lattice of laser beams carved up the towers either side of him, one connecting with his force shields so powerfully that it threatened to overwhelm them entirely. His cockpit was suddenly filled with power warning alarms, forcing him to beat a hasty retreat while his plasma cores fought to re-boost them to full.
‘I’m under fire!’ Vandemarr shouted from the south-east. Vondur checked his HUD map to see that he was actually approaching Vandemarr’s position from the west, past the ruins of the traumatic injuries ward, at the same time the other two Zealots were closing in on the man from the east. He cycled his RRG.
‘Cox, watch my back, I’m coming in–’ he started, but was cut off as a spear of phase fire from the lead Violator hit him square in the chest plating, wiping his force shielding out and burning a three-centimetre hole down the length of his number one plasmastat. Critical warning graphics exploded across his HUD as his power tanked, and rather than coming in on a high-G attack vector, his Goliath ploughed into the ground face first and skittered across the surface of the road. He came to a crunching halt in a pile of rubble.
‘Fuck!’ he shouted, cross-hatching the engines and running full diagnostics to see where he could suck power from. Alarms shrilled into life inside his cockpit. ‘Vandemarr, pull back, I can’t cover you!’
‘I’m pinned!’ Vandemarr shouted in response. Even as Cox and Jarvin burned in on red-out vectors, a triple blast of precision phase fire overwhelmed the man’s struggling Goliath and left him a sitting target. Vondur could only watch in horror as a shower of hypervelocity rail slugs pummelled the Goliath, punching through the naval-grade composite armour as if it were paper and obliterating the pilot’s capsule. Orange nanogel, mixed with blood and viscera, exploded from the Goliath’s sternum section. Vandemarr’s vitals immediately flatlined.
‘Read!’ Vondur yelled across the wideband as he frantically tagged the two Violators which had killed Vandemarr. They screamed past him and looped upwards so that they were travelling directly back towards the upper atmosphere. Vondur managed to propel himself on to his back and empty thirty per cent of his Hydra battery at the tail sections of the retreating craft, but none of them hit home.
‘I’ve got them,’ August snarled, re-directing his drones to pursue. The smaller CODORs were capable of greater acceleration than the heavier Zealots, and within seconds of full burn they had intercepted them six kilometres above Anternis. Eight were destroyed by blurts of directed defensive fire, but four still made it through the Zealots’ shield barrier. They detonated in high-intensity EMP blasts, shorting the Zealots’ primary shields and leaving them exposed for a few tenths of a second while their ancillary systems kicked in. With needlepoint accuracy, August obliterated them both with a perfectly timed blast of phase fire.
‘Scratch two,’ he snapped, spinning into the air to search out the remaining two Violators.
‘They’re gone,’ Vondur said over the wideband as Cox and Jarvin converged on his position. The final two Zealots were twenty kilometres up and tracking back to the cruiser, leaving their slaved drones to be massacred by the squadron’s CODORs. The debris left from their high-energy termination sprinkled the city below, and once again an eerie calm descended. This time, the targeting grid remained clear.
Vondur managed to stand after an intense period of diagnostics and jury-rigging. In front of him, Cox and Jarvin stood, phase cannons and RRGs up, Hydra batteries extended and LAOs primed. In the distance, August soared slowly towards them on a lazy insertion vector, trailing the squadron’s remaining drones.
The centre of Anternis was in ruins. Greasy black smoke billowed into the sky from hundreds of sources. Beautiful, sleek skyscrapers had been replaced by vast piles of twisted steel, rubble and shattered glass. The Bayscillic Ocean was on fire where oil slicks from downed civilian aircraft had spread insidiously throughout the pristine turquoise water. Vondur didn’t even want to think how many civilians had been killed. He’d lost three of his own men. He felt exhausted. His firmware had been battered by wave upon wave of electronic warfare, his force shielding had been burned out and his plasma cores were shot. Without one, the other two would degrade. His chest plating was buckled and warped. The whole machine would need a lengthy overhaul. When he could afford to stop running his combat stimulants, there would be high emotion.
He was pleased to note, however, that ZEN had made it safely back to base.
‘Shit,’ Elyan said after what felt like an eternity. ‘Do we arm?’
‘No!’ Vondur barked. The best thing to do would have been to deactivate the Goliaths entirely. Even with all weapons set to safe, they would be leaving a huge signature on the cruiser’s sensors. He thought for a few moments, trying to decide what to do. Their priority had to be to protect civilian evacuees, though flying escort would be more likely to put them in harm’s way.
‘Right, everybody listen in,’ he said, but before he could marshal his thoughts into orders, the drone calmly logged a second destroyer lost.
‘Goddamn it!’ Cox roared amidst a chorus of incredulity. Vondur could see the sergeant’s Goliath ball its fists.
‘Stand down!’ Vondur shouted, adrenaline coursing through his guts. ‘Everyone stand down, that’s an order!’ He could feel himself sweating inside the Mantix interface. He decided on the only course of action he could think of that would keep the maximum number of people – including his own – safe. ‘Gatekeeper, prepare for exfiltration. We are RTB, understood?’
They understood. His squadron tracker flared as the Goliaths’ plasma thrusters powered on. The last thing he saw was a battery of flak smashing through and terminating the third and final UN destroyer before Cox recalled it. It soared down through the clouds like a bird and slid mechanically back into his Goliath’s spine nacelle.
‘ZEN, RTB,’ he said.
‘Yes, Captain,’ ZEN replied, and Vondur watched it break into a run, exiting the plaza via the northbound carriageway of the A5 highway.
‘Let’s keep it slow and controlled,’ he said over the wideband. ‘Vanilla insertion vectors, everyone.’
He ignited his main thrusters and had managed to lift a metre off the platform when the MASTER ARM lettering on his HUD flickered from SAFE to ARMED entirely of its own volition. Tenths of a second later, the high-visibility armour scheme of his Goliath faded to its default tactical dark grey, his refraction and force shielding hummed online, and his weapons cycled and racked to active.
‘What?’ he managed dumbly as his passive ocular display transformed into an active targeting grid and immediately picked out the hostile provari cruiser in orbit, filling his vision with ordnance diagnostics and attack vectors. He could only watch in mute horror as his Hydra battery whirred free from its housing, acquired the cruiser’s position on his targeting computer and moments later began systematically discharging missile after missile into orbit.
‘Uh… Captain?’ Elyan asked, one second before a cylinder of tungsten travelling at Mach six obliterated his Goliath like a sledgehammer hitting a vase. Syoba, along with a hundred square metres of bedrock and a good portion of the adjacent hospital building, was lost in the blast wave. At such close range, the nanogel matrix layer of his cockpit was powerless to protect him from the overpressure, and his IHD immediately knocked him into a deep coma to salvage what it could of his consciousness.
‘INCOMING!’ Cox roared, immediately extending his own surface-to-orbit battery and firing off a long salvo of Hydra void missiles.
Vondur looked wide-eyed about his HUD, his heart beating so hard it felt as though it would burst through his chest. Every time he tried to disarm, his targeting grid would scramble kaleidoscopically. All other systems read nominal or were completely unresponsive. In a matter of seconds, the Goliath had gone from lethal war machine to remotely controlled tomb.
‘Thunderhead, this is Gatekeeper Actual!’ he yelled, his mouth dry. All around him rail strikes were smashing into the ground in a spectacular calamity of light and noise, wantonly obliterating buildings in vast explosions of blinding white flame. He could only watch helplessly as the squadron scattered on rapid evasion trajectories and reverted to full tactical mode. Within seconds, a vast salvo of missiles from five different sources speared into the sky on lances of smoke and light, and fleets of drones zipped through the air attempting to rob the rail slugs of some of their kinetic power through a concentrated lattice of laser beams and x-rays.
‘Thunderhead!’ he shouted, sweating from every pore in his skin. The comlink remained defiantly silent. Every channel he opened to the base was immediately corrupted, and the squadron wideband wouldn’t even initiate. He strained against the nanogel matrix, trying desperately to elicit any kind of response from the machine, but he only succeeded in straining his muscles and nearly herniating his gut.
He forced himself to relax. As with any piece of military equipment, there were procedures to follow in an emergency. He checked the plasmastats, which provided his backup power supply. They were fine. His main engines were functioning impeccably. The firmware suite was functioning on triple redundancy. His ancillary systems were reading normal across the board. His weapon systems – judging by the terrifying amount of ordnance being unleashed from his batteries – were operational. In the two seconds it took him to perform a full diagnostic, absolutely nothing was out of place. The Goliath’s firewall was supposed to be incorruptible, backed up by UNIS-grade encryption. Firmware malfunction was beyond countenance, and yet, against every fibre of his will, it had engaged the cruiser quite automatically. He realised then, with a horrible stab of adrenaline, that the only explanation was malicious intervention – and by a necessarily highly sophisticated operator.
He wasn’t given long to think about it. A javelin of tungsten hit the xenopathology building at its apex and travelled, completely unhindered, through seventy floors of carbon steel before coming to a stop deep within the bedrock under Anternis. For the briefest of seconds, nothing seemed to happen at all; then the entire superstructure disintegrated outwards in a twelve-thousand-tonne storm of steel and glass, hurling Vondur’s Goliath three hundred metres west into the First ITG Bank building.
Whatever had overcome his Goliath’s firewalls, smashing through three floors of office building and a severe dose of electronic warfare from the cruiser above somehow rid him of it. The familiar, powerful feeling of limb-sync returned, and ten seconds of jammed-up comms were suddenly released into his ears, a dissonant cacophony of screams and profanities, including several loud demands from Thunderhead.
‘… Directed fire, attack pattern Gamma! All STO batteries cleared to fire! Keep all drones on maximum disruption – read my marker and proliferate on all bandwidths!’ It was Jarvin issuing orders. He’d assumed Vondur was either incapacitated or dead and had – rightly – taken command.
‘I’m back in!’ Vondur shouted on the wideband, igniting his main thrusters and powering free of the shattered bank building. He could hear orbital bombardment alarms now, wailing across Anternis as rail strikes continued to thunder down. There were dozens of civilian transports still airborne, all banking wildly to avoid the solid grid of ordnance which had suddenly descended from the heavens. Many were unsuccessful in their attempts and either exploded violently in mid-air or careened into the hydroponics domes or the ocean beyond.
‘Captain! Orders!’ his lieutenant shouted.
‘Disengage and pull back!’ Vondur roared in reply. He retracted his Hydra battery and disarmed his primary weapon systems, then opened a channel to the UNAF base. ‘Thunderhead!’ he snarled, igniting his primary thrusters on full burn and soaring to another bank building east of the hospital.
‘Jesus Christ, Gatekeeper, what the hell is going on?’ the comms controller yelled. ‘Stand down at once, that’s a direct order!’
‘Thunderhead, my firewall is compromised,’ Vondur growled as calmly as he could. He leapfrogged to another building, IHD-marking the remaining members of the squadron, then dispatched his entire suite of drones to try and curtail as many of the rail strikes as he could.
‘Gatekeeper, your Goliath is reading as functioning on full redundancy!’ Thunderhead shouted. ‘Pull your men back at once and RTB!’
‘Damn it, Thunderhead, lis–’
‘Captain!’ Jarvin roared. Vondur turned to his right just as the lieutenant’s Goliath tackled him off the side of the bank roof. Moments later, half the building disintegrated in a blinding flash of light, and Vondur was given precious seconds to activate his thrusters on full burn before he hit the ground.
‘Gnnnn,’ he managed, as tonnes of blast-powered debris bombarded his force shielding. LRIS warnings flashed across his HUD, and another rail strike hit the ground a hundred metres away, tossing them both bodily into the smoking ruins of the building. For all its efficacy, his refraction shielding couldn’t conceal the multiple intense power blooms of both his plasmastats and primary engines, especially while his drone suite was engaged in damage limitation. Usually they could be relied upon to proliferate full-spectrum junk signatures; instead, they were fully utilised trying to disrupt the rail strikes.
‘Think they’ve got a bead on you,’ Jarvin said without a trace of irony, jogging back towards the plaza.
‘Thank you, Lieutenant,’ Vondur exhaled. A host of natural and artificial stimulants were keeping him calmer than he should have been. Jarvin had just saved him from certain death.
Over the course of the next couple of minutes, the rail strikes reduced markedly in intensity, now that the squadron was fully refraction shielded. The last few went well wide of the mark. One flattened an empty hotel; the other gouged a huge crater in the westbound carriageway of the hospital’s emergency access route, the crunching of rock echoing loudly through the city.
‘Christ,’ Jarvin breathed over the wideband in the silence that followed. It was the only thing the squadron as a collective could muster before their tactical displays were once more filled with warning graphics and burbling streams of data.
‘Multiple objects incoming,’ Cox said over the wideband. Vondur scrambled to his feet, dislodging a good deal of pulverised masonry and shattered plate glass, and immediately picked up the reading from one of his CODOR drones. Six signatures, travelling far too slowly to be rail strikes, had just entered the upper atmosphere.
‘Thunderhead, we have six refraction-shielded masses closing on attack vectors,’ Vondur said, re-arming his entire weapons suite.
‘Gatekeeper, you have orders to return to base,’ the base controller said. ‘Stand down and–’
‘Incoming fire!’ Vandemarr shouted. A series of mid-air explosions heralded the destruction of several of the squadron’s CODOR drones.
‘Engage all targets,’ Vondur said, calmly switching off the feed from Thunderhead and IHD-tagging all of the incoming masses. ‘Weapons free. Read my marker.’ The rail strikes had stopped, but they were in no less danger. The provar had dispatched their own manned interdictor-variants, Violator-class Zealot attack craft, if the engine signatures were anything to go by. They moved on supersonic engagement vectors, and their ordnance pylons were thick with force-shield-busting munitions. Any chance of an ordered retreat was now out of the question. They would have to go on the offensive.
His tactical display wasted no time in picking out likely attack trajectories, and within a few tenths of a second, the air was rife with missiles twisting away from his Goliath’s shoulder-mount batteries on corkscrews of smoke and flame. Violet beams from the Zealots’ prow lasers made short work of most of them, and the rest detonated prematurely against their force shielding.
‘Here we go,’ Cox said, soaring through the air four hundred metres to the east of Vondur’s position. A vast cannonade of rail slugs erupted from his RRG, slashing among the careening aircraft and once again battering their force shielding. The projectiles exited the triple-barrelled mass driver at such a high frequency that the individual discharges merged into one steady hum so that it looked as if the sergeant was attacking the Violators with a lance of blue light. It was enough to overpower the shields of the rearmost craft, which was quickly shredded. It fell apart in mid-air in a blossom of radiation of twisted wreckage.
‘Scratch one,’ Cox said, twisting round on a high-G evasion vector and unleashing another barrage of ordnance from his LAO battery while hypervelocity projectiles ripped through the air around him. The Zealots quickly dispersed, each discharging a host of subdrones which cluttered the tracking bandwidth with decoy signatures. Since Vondur had IHD-tagged the mother drones, the squadron simply tasked their own CODORs to engage the slaves. As a result, a high-tech proxy war raged above them between roaming bands of screaming cybernetics, filling the air with high-energy munitions as they flitted between the remaining buildings like flocks of supersonic birds.
Ancillary fire peppered the road around Vondur and sprayed him with molten asphalt as he ignited his thrusters to full burn and acquired a target, a Zealot in the middle of the flight which was about to engage August to the south. He cycled his RRG to full and unleashed a long salvo of rail slugs while burning hard to the west. A barrage of Hydra missiles from Cox intercepted the Violator as it vectored north to re-engage and overloaded its shields, allowing Vondur’s parabola of rail slugs to blast away a good portion of the craft’s starboard casing. Moments later, it lost control and ploughed into the ground.
‘That’s two!’ Vondur shouted, and then he was forced to drop as two of the Zealots hit him with enfilading fire. A lattice of laser beams carved up the towers either side of him, one connecting with his force shields so powerfully that it threatened to overwhelm them entirely. His cockpit was suddenly filled with power warning alarms, forcing him to beat a hasty retreat while his plasma cores fought to re-boost them to full.
‘I’m under fire!’ Vandemarr shouted from the south-east. Vondur checked his HUD map to see that he was actually approaching Vandemarr’s position from the west, past the ruins of the traumatic injuries ward, at the same time the other two Zealots were closing in on the man from the east. He cycled his RRG.
‘Cox, watch my back, I’m coming in–’ he started, but was cut off as a spear of phase fire from the lead Violator hit him square in the chest plating, wiping his force shielding out and burning a three-centimetre hole down the length of his number one plasmastat. Critical warning graphics exploded across his HUD as his power tanked, and rather than coming in on a high-G attack vector, his Goliath ploughed into the ground face first and skittered across the surface of the road. He came to a crunching halt in a pile of rubble.
‘Fuck!’ he shouted, cross-hatching the engines and running full diagnostics to see where he could suck power from. Alarms shrilled into life inside his cockpit. ‘Vandemarr, pull back, I can’t cover you!’
‘I’m pinned!’ Vandemarr shouted in response. Even as Cox and Jarvin burned in on red-out vectors, a triple blast of precision phase fire overwhelmed the man’s struggling Goliath and left him a sitting target. Vondur could only watch in horror as a shower of hypervelocity rail slugs pummelled the Goliath, punching through the naval-grade composite armour as if it were paper and obliterating the pilot’s capsule. Orange nanogel, mixed with blood and viscera, exploded from the Goliath’s sternum section. Vandemarr’s vitals immediately flatlined.
‘Read!’ Vondur yelled across the wideband as he frantically tagged the two Violators which had killed Vandemarr. They screamed past him and looped upwards so that they were travelling directly back towards the upper atmosphere. Vondur managed to propel himself on to his back and empty thirty per cent of his Hydra battery at the tail sections of the retreating craft, but none of them hit home.
‘I’ve got them,’ August snarled, re-directing his drones to pursue. The smaller CODORs were capable of greater acceleration than the heavier Zealots, and within seconds of full burn they had intercepted them six kilometres above Anternis. Eight were destroyed by blurts of directed defensive fire, but four still made it through the Zealots’ shield barrier. They detonated in high-intensity EMP blasts, shorting the Zealots’ primary shields and leaving them exposed for a few tenths of a second while their ancillary systems kicked in. With needlepoint accuracy, August obliterated them both with a perfectly timed blast of phase fire.
‘Scratch two,’ he snapped, spinning into the air to search out the remaining two Violators.
‘They’re gone,’ Vondur said over the wideband as Cox and Jarvin converged on his position. The final two Zealots were twenty kilometres up and tracking back to the cruiser, leaving their slaved drones to be massacred by the squadron’s CODORs. The debris left from their high-energy termination sprinkled the city below, and once again an eerie calm descended. This time, the targeting grid remained clear.
Vondur managed to stand after an intense period of diagnostics and jury-rigging. In front of him, Cox and Jarvin stood, phase cannons and RRGs up, Hydra batteries extended and LAOs primed. In the distance, August soared slowly towards them on a lazy insertion vector, trailing the squadron’s remaining drones.
The centre of Anternis was in ruins. Greasy black smoke billowed into the sky from hundreds of sources. Beautiful, sleek skyscrapers had been replaced by vast piles of twisted steel, rubble and shattered glass. The Bayscillic Ocean was on fire where oil slicks from downed civilian aircraft had spread insidiously throughout the pristine turquoise water. Vondur didn’t even want to think how many civilians had been killed. He’d lost three of his own men. He felt exhausted. His firmware had been battered by wave upon wave of electronic warfare, his force shielding had been burned out and his plasma cores were shot. Without one, the other two would degrade. His chest plating was buckled and warped. The whole machine would need a lengthy overhaul. When he could afford to stop running his combat stimulants, there would be high emotion.
He was pleased to note, however, that ZEN had made it safely back to base.
