“Thank you, Colonel.” Geary took a good look at Carabali. “Do you want to go in with them?”
Carabali hesitated, clearly torn by the offer. “I should remain on a ship, coordinating the battle from the landing force control center, Captain Geary.”
Strange, Geary thought. For fleet officers, gaining rank didn’t do much to change the risk of combat. Even the highest admiral in a combat assignment would be facing the same risk from enemy fire as the lowest ranking sailor, because they rode the same ships into battle. But it was different for the Marines. When the landing forces went in, their overall commanders had to have the discipline to avoid diving into personal combat so they could oversee the entire battle. It was odd to realize that in the case of the Marine commanders not rushing into combat required more discipline and, in a way, courage than simply accompanying the landing force would need. Facing death could be easier than watching your troops die while you floated above it all.
But all he said was, “Very well, Colonel. Should I address your people before they go in?”
Carabali hesitated again, this time for a different reason. “They’re about to launch, sir. Any distraction at this time might be unwise.”
Geary almost laughed. A distraction. If only that were the worst problem he could cause. “All right, Colonel. Let me know immediately if you need anything. Otherwise I’ll leave you alone now so you can run your battle.”
“Thank you, sir,” Carabali replied with a grin. She rendered a precise salute to him. The Marines had never abandoned saluting like the rest of the fleet had, naturally, and so hadn’t had to relearn the gesture. “I’ll notify you when we have the facility in hand, Captain Geary.”
The colonel’s image vanished, and Geary leaned back in his command seat with a sigh. There was a sense of helplessness at times like this. Ships had been committed to their courses and speeds, Marines prepared for their assault, and now all he could do was watch it happen and hope nothing went wrong. Commander of a fleet, and I’m still subject to the laws of time and space. I knew a few commanders in my time who thought their rank allowed them to ignore those things, but I imagine those commanders died early on during the war. While I floated in survival sleep and the Alliance turned me into a mythical hero. I wonder which of us was luckier?
“Nothing’s leaving the mining facility,” Captain Desjani noted.
Geary switched his attention back to the display and nodded. “No escape pods, and even that old tug is still just sitting there. Whoever’s there is staying instead of evacuating.”
“They probably fear we’ll blow away anything trying to escape,” Desjani suggested in a way that told Geary such practices had been common before he assumed command.
He refrained from asking what honor there was in shooting defenseless escape pods. Practices that Geary found abhorrent had become commonplace over a century of war, as the Syndics had committed increasingly worse atrocities and the Alliance had responded in kind. Over time a lot had been forgotten by the descendants of the officers and sailors whom Geary had known. Forgotten until the revered Black Jack Geary had awakened and reminded the present of the things the past had believed in. Desjani had been among the first to realize what had been lost in trying to match Syndic inhumanity, so there was no sense in making an issue of it with her again. Instead, Geary nodded once more. “Or maybe when we slowed down they figured out we were coming to take the place instead of just destroying it. But they can’t hope to repel our attack.”
“No,” Desjani agreed. “But they might inflict losses; they might slow us down. Syndic leaders would be willing to trade the workers in a mining facility for that.”
“Yeah.” They’d already seen evidence of that in almost every system they’d passed through. The Syndics had risked entire surplus worlds for the chance to strike blows at the fleeing Alliance fleet. He studied the image of the facility again. “They’ve got maglev rails for moving ore.”
Desjani nodded. “Taking them out from a distance would risk hitting the stockpiles.”
“What are the odds the Syndics could turn them into weapons?”
She shrugged. “They could try. But we’ll see them elevating the tracks to turn the maglevs into weapons aimed at our ships or the shuttles.”
Geary nodded, checking to see that his two surviving scout battleships, Exemplar and Braveheart, were braking to slide into position right over the mining facility, matching their movements precisely to that of the facility so they could fire down at it from very close range using their hell lances. In theory, a small kinetic projectile could be aimed accurately enough from a long distance to take out even a little target in a fixed orbit, but Geary wanted to conserve his supply of what the Marines called “rocks.” Besides, in practice he adhered to the old theories that the closer you were to the target, the better the odds of hitting it square, and that there wasn’t any sense in using too much weapon for the target, so hell lances would work fine.
He’d learned that the new theory, born of a century of war, was to just use a large kinetic projectile and blow apart not only the target but a substantial area around it, which after all belonged to the enemy anyway, even if it did include things like schools, hospitals, and homes. Geary had no intention of ever succumbing to that logic.
Neither scout battleship was firing yet, since neither had targets. But they’d be positioned close overhead when the Marine shuttles came in to land.
“Launching assault force,” a watch-stander reported.
A dozen shuttles separated from their ships, their courses arcing down toward the mining facility.
“Why only a dozen?” Co-President Rione asked from her seat behind Geary. “It’s unlike Colonel Carabali not to employ as much force as possible.”
Did she mean to imply that Geary had limited Carabali’s forces? He turned to look at Rione. “It’s a small facility, Madam Co-President. There’s not enough room to land and employ a larger force.”
Turning back, Geary saw Captain Desjani with a lowered brow in apparent annoyance at Rione’s question. But Desjani kept her voice even as she spoke. “Movement around the maglevs.”
Geary twisted back and focused on the magnetic-levitation rail lines that were used to move ore, containers, and other materials around the facility. The full-spectrum and optical sensors on the Alliance ships were precise enough to track small targets on the other side of a solar system. This close to a target, they could easily count individual grains of dust if required. Human-sized targets were exceptionally easy to see.
Sure enough, a group was clustered around one of the end rails, raising one end toward the shapes of Braveheart and Exemplar above. “Stupid,” Geary couldn’t help muttering.
Desjani nodded. “Exemplar is firing hell lances.”
Fire control systems designed to get hits on targets moving at thousands of kilometers per second during firing opportunities measured in fractions of a second didn’t have much trouble getting a perfect hit on a close target almost at rest relative to the ship. On the visual display, Geary couldn’t see the charged particle beam that tore through the maglev segment, but he did see the results. The segment shattered, the workers around it being blown back by the force of fragments hurled at them, a neat hole punched in the surface of the moon where the hell lance had kept going, barely slowed by the minor obstacles it had hit.
Then another segment of the maglev line shattered, then another. Geary cursed and hit his communications controls. “Exemplar, Braveheart, this is Captain Geary. Fire only on identified threats.”