What the hell is that thing again? I asked Jim.
It’s a manipulation of spacetime that mirrors the ship’s drive. The Unity ships use a similar drive, and the beam destabilizes their warp bubble until it collapses in on them.
Which was probably simplified, but I was a simple man. What worried me was that the enemy ships probably had the same type of weapons, and they’d have the same range… but Nance, for all his weaknesses, was a hell of a captain, and he’d thought of that too. The Ellen banked away like she’d been shot out of a cannon, and when the return fire came, it couldn’t keep up with her acceleration.
The front globular formations peeled away after her, losing coherence, though not a unity of purpose of course. Yanayev was at the controls of the Ellen, and she made that ship dance like a prima ballerina… or more like one of the figure skaters Vicky liked to watch on the old recordings. Spinning, arcing, leaping across thousands of klicks in seconds while Woj manned the guns. The Unity might have been a powerful hive mind, but it could miss. Woj didn’t. He was a sniper, making headshots while racing away in a speeding car.
Go! Go! Take them out!
They’re not going to be able to destroy them all in time, Jim informed me, always ready to be a bucket of cold water splashing over my head. The third cluster formation is making an end run toward orbit.
He was right, of course. Ten ships, but not all ten entered orbit. Seven of them arrayed in a blocking formation, ready to defend against the Ellen if she doubled back to try to stop the attack. The other three made a beeline right for us. But the Intercepts hadn’t given up yet. The Ellen had packed three of them, one inside her hangar bay, the other two parasites on her hull held on by a jury-rigged magnetic anchors, and the Dutchman II made four.
Brandano piloted one, Villanueva another. Their IFFs floated in the display above the sensor icons of the delta-winged craft, and just from that I should have figured they’d play this smart. There was no point in trying to engage the skull ships in a vacuum, not with their incredible speed and maneuverability advantage out there with their warp drives.
Most of those advantages were negated in an atmosphere. Not all, but most. It wasn’t a guarantor of survival, but it was all they could hope for. The view from the Dutchman II spun into a kaleidoscope of color and motion as she and the other Intercepts dodged beams of energy that were not the same weapons the skull ships and the Ellen had fired at each other.
The warp beamers wouldn’t work this close to a gravity field, Jim said helpfully. Those are antiproton weapons.
Oh, that’s all.
I couldn’t tell what was happening anymore, the gyration of the ship too much to follow, and I switched off the feed, concentrating now on what even my suit’s on-board sensors could follow. One of the skull ships had broken through and was descending just above us. Three thousand klicks up and coming down fast. I knew what would happen next and thought about telling the others to get ready for it, but there was no point.
Beams of coruscating energy crackled in the night sky, lightning from the gods, the stuff of myth. Except Gamma Junction was a poor substitute for Sodom and Gomorrah, and the people there had committed no sin worthy of what happened now. The city burned at the atomic level, Cherenkov radiation glowing blue in a halo around where the buildings had been.
Each of them had represented crystallized sweat, days or weeks of work, and now they were gone as if they’d never been. I didn’t know if God was still listening, if He had ever listened, but I prayed anyway that no one was left inside the city when the beams hit. Certainly nothing was left when they stopped.
“Where are the other two?” Vicky wondered. She had half of the company with her, over on the other side of the hill where the terrain grew rockier and irrationally, I wished she were closer.
“They’re going after the other settlement,” I guessed. “They didn’t leave a damned thing behind on Hudson Bay.”
This one had done its job, and when the beams cut off, it nearly vanished in the low clouds. But the thermal dots coming down out of the openings in its belly showed exactly where the skull ship was, along with its next move.
Infantry. Coming down in a ring around where the town had been. They touched down in seconds, floating like leaves in the fall to a gentle landing. I realized I’d been holding my breath and forced myself to stop. It wouldn’t help.
“Nobody move,” I said, softly as if they might overhear me. “No one break ranks. Wait for them to come to you.”
And that they did. There was open plain on the other side of the city, nowhere for survivors to hide, so the bug-things didn’t bother with it, all of them coming straight for the tree line. Intent on wiping out every man, woman, and child on this colony, just like they had Hudson Bay. But Hudson Bay didn’t have any Marines around.
“Don’t forget their personal shields,” I warned. “Wait until they’re firing before you fire back.”
The shields had been very effective against coilguns, but I was hoping they wouldn’t prove that efficient when facing the plasma weapons. I was also hoping the Unity wouldn’t bother with the same mind-fuckery they’d tried back on Waterline. It had been focused, targeted against each of us using the Unity’s access to the Network, but would the hive mind bother now that I lacked any connection to that Network? It had sought revenge against me, personally, for committing genocide against the Skalex, but would it know I was here?
The pale eggshell of the Unity drones didn’t seem to shimmer with the sense of unreality I remembered from our last confrontation, though God knew just their physical features were enough to make most people run screaming. There was a lack of symmetry to them, a lack of design, as if they’d been created not by a God as we imagined Him but by some demon of chaos, something at home in the outer darkness. Legs scuttled, arms writhed, and mouths rimmed with cilia shifted and transformed with every movement, going from jagged shark’s teeth to wriggling sea worms at volcanic vent.
The weapons they carried bore no resemblance to what their spacecraft fired, biological extensions of their engineered bodies, the muzzles yawning like the maw of some ocean-going predator.
“Goddamn,” Vicky murmured. “I’d forgotten how ugly those fuckers were.”
“Focus,” I told her, but I was thinking the same thing.
The tips of my Vigilante’s footpads were twenty meters inside the tree line, and the first of the drones couldn’t have been more than twenty meters beyond that when they finally spotted us. I sensed it, felt it, an instinct more than a knowledge, borne of some subtle, subconscious cue I wouldn’t figure out until later, a shift of stance or a turn of one of those horrifying faces.
“Converge fire on my target!” I blurted, pulling the trigger.
Actinic energy blasted out from me among a chorus of plasma, and in response a hail of mucous-coated slugs splintered tree trunks with the force of atomic annihilation.
The world exploded with the first shots of the last fight, and if we went down, we’d go down swinging.
[ 27 ]
No battle plan survives contact with the enemy, and this one was no different.
I’d intended for us to stay inside the tree line, but that wasn’t going to work when the tree line no longer existed. Fire and concussion filled every centimeter of existence, and my world shrank down to identified threats on the HUD’s tactical display. Just like every other battle I’d ever been in, no different than the Tahni or the Skrela, and suddenly how hideous the Unity drones were wasn’t a factor for me.
Jump. Target. Fire. Slide. I couldn’t think, and the difference between me and every other Drop Trooper I’d ever met was, I didn’t try. It had taken me a long time to figure that out and I no longer tried to fight it, just letting the action flow over me, the details becoming clear only in hindsight.
I’d formed up in the center of the Vergai platoons, figuring they’d need me the most, since only their platoon sergeant and me had the Resscharr-improved suits and weapons, and my own personal strategy had been to cut a swathe down the middle of the enemy and draw them toward me, distracting them from the others. That part of the plan, at least, stayed intact.
The Resscharr energy cannons had two major advantages over the plasma guns the Vergai had been upgraded to, and one of them was the ability to fire almost continuously, at least until they overheated. No waiting for capacitors to recharge, no praying to stay alive in those precious seconds. The other was range, and I took advantage of both, hosing the charging Unity drones with the weapon, weakening their shields, drawing their fire… and opening them up for the others.
Evading their return shots was a secondary objective but one I was very attached to, since it meant my continued existence. Another tactic that I executed instinctively but which came from a train of logic worthy of the hours of consideration I’d given it in the days and weeks previously. The Unity’s strength was that the drones acted as one, controlled by a singular mind… and that was also their weakness. A hive mind would act quickly and decisively but also predictably, and it would expect the same of others.
So I didn’t. No patterns, no rhythm, just the first motion that entered my mind. Leap, jet, long and high enough that multiple drones targeted me on my natural arc downward. But I didn’t take that arc, instead flipping head-downward and boosting straight at the ground, straight into an enemy soldier. My shoulder slammed into the unspeakable horror of one of those cilia-ringed heads and took the entire creature to the ground, finishing it off with a stomp of my boot.
They tried to close in when I took the half-second for the coup-de-grace, but I anticipated that as well, skating across the ground, leaning forward and blasting the jets at half-power. The Unity didn’t give a shit about killing pieces of itself and enemy fire followed me, the detonations of the biological slugs destroying ten or twelve of the things.
That part of the plan worked too well. I had a half a second’s warning, not from my own instincts this time, but from Jim.
