“Damn, couldn’t have planned that one better myself,” Duncan muttered, looking over at the other two ships. They were Lampreys, far smaller and less dangerous than the C-Dec. But dangerous nonetheless. “Now if that damned laser will just hold together.”
Tommy swung the laser onto the leftmost Lamprey, which was a tad higher and had a better shot at the battalion. It had already opened fire with one of the heavy lasers on one of its five facets and the line of fire was wiggling randomly across the ground but in the general direction of the battalion command post.
In this case Sunday didn’t target quite so carefully; the ship was farther away and if the antimatter containment system detonated it wouldn’t disturb things quite as much.
The purple laser flashed out again, digging into the side of the ship in a flash of silver fire and penetrating deep into its vitals. The shot missed the containment system but cut the feeds from it to the engine. Once again the ship stopped and dropped like a stone. Some of the Posleen in both ships would be alive but they were relatively unimportant compared to stopping the ships themselves.
He quickly rotated the weapon onto the third ship but in this case he was just a tad too late.
“Captain Slight!” Mike called, cursing. “Behind you!”
Karen Slight had survived innumerable battles and skirmishes in the five years since she had taken over as the Bravo Company commander. Sometimes she felt like a fugitive from the law of averages. But if so, they had just caught up.
She flipped her vision to the rear and leapt to her feet as she saw the line of flashes from a heavy HVM launcher closing on her position, but it was just a fraction of a moment too late. Before she, or First Sergeant Bogdanovich, could do more than stand up the weapons had hit their hole. And when it walked on there was nothing to be found but scattered armor.
“Shit,” Tommy muttered, as he targeted the third ship. This ship had learned from its predecessors and tried to jink aside, spreading the fire. The terawatt laser was not, however, like the lighter grav-guns. They had only a fraction of the power available to the laser. It scythed into the third ship, clawing through crew quarters and the command bridge. For that matter, the ship pilot had not had significant training in flight at such low levels. The Posleen ships, by and large, managed their operations on automatic, so manual flight was something for which very few Posleen were trained or prepared. And it was evident in this case as the ship, accelerating sideways to avoid the laser, slammed into Black Rock Mountain and bounced backwards, hard, into the very laser it was trying to avoid.
In this case it was unclear if it was the laser fire or the sudden impact, but the third ship stopped, droppped and rolled down the hill and impacted with the C-Dec, where the two of them almost entirely blocked the narrow pass.
Tommy watched the ship roll down the hill then extended the tripod on the laser to jut over the top of the fighting position to where it had a clear line of sight on the approaching Posleen. Down below they must be having a tough time forcing their way past the roadblock created by the two fallen ships but there was still a solid wall of them attacking the front ranks. And with the death of their first sergeant and company commander, Bravo company had started to slacken its fire, letting the Posleen drive forward against that side.
Tommy had a fix for that, however, and he opened fire at the approaching centaurs with a snarl of anger.
“Good job, Lieutenant,” Mike said with an unheard sigh of relief. “But you might want to cease fire, now.”
“With all due respect, sir, Bravo needs the support,” Tommy replied, pouring laser fire into the line of Posleen. Already the beams of purple light, designed to destroy ships, had sliced deep into the Posleen ranks, cutting through six or seven of the centaurs at a time as he swung it from side to side.
“Yeah, but it has a little problem,” Mike said. “Let me put it this way…”
The “little problem” with the terawatt laser had been discovered within a year of its actual fielding in combat. The weapon was, as previously noted, a poorly contained nuclear explosion. Anti-hydrogen was injected, in carefully measured doses, into a lasing chamber filled with argon gas. The anti-hydrogen, opposite of real matter, impacted with argon and immediately converted itself and some of the argon into pure energy.
This energy release was captured by other argon atoms and when they released the energy it was as photons of light. These photons were then captured and held until a peak pressure was reached when they were released.
All of this happened in a bare nanosecond, managed by vibrating magnetic fields that drew their power from the same reaction.
The same laser, to an extent, was used shipboard and in space fighters. In both cases it was a regarded with awe and respect, for the barely chained sun at its heart was as much a danger to the ship as to the enemy. And so, in the case of the ships and the fighters, massive secondary fields ensured that the slightest slip on the part of the primary fields meant that the system simply got out of alignment for a moment. Perhaps the weapon would “hiccup.” But that was all.
On the ground-mount version, however, these secondary systems were unavailable. And thus, when in a brief moment of chaos the power levels in the lasing cavity peaked over the maximum rated, or posssible, containment levels of the magnetic fields, the highly excited argon, and a bit of still unconverted anti-hydrogen, escaped the confinement. And proceeded to destroy the weapon. Letting all the rest of the highly excited argon out in a manner that was quite catastrophic.
One second Tommy was firing the laser and the next moment he was flying through the air. Well, not “flying” so much as hurtling uncontrollably. Once again his sensors were overwelmed but what he managed to read in the maelstrom and under the G forces that were slipping through the compensators indicated that the external temperature, while dropping rapidly, was pretty similar to that found in the photosphere of a star.
There was one short, sharp shock and then he was no longer hurtling. As far as he could tell he was sliding. Probably down a mountain.
He noted that he wasn’t thinking very well just about the time he passed out.
Mike looked up from the battalion command hole at the smoking atmosphere and sighed.
“I told him he’d better quit while he was ahead,” he said. The air was still filled with incredibly hot gasses and dust but the systems were already starting to stabilize and it was clear they hadn’t lost anyone to the detonation. In fact, it looked like the laser, which had blown up as usual, had actually cleared the Posleen off their position. Again.
“Nukes,” he muttered. “We should have brought nukes.”
“Oh,” Stewart said, then laughed. “Yeah. Why hadn’t we thought of that before?”
“I dunno, maybe because they were a no-no?” O’Neal muttered. “But some big damned bombs? Why have to ask other people to scratch our back?”
“Or maybe we should just have brought lasers.” Stewart laughed. “Why didn’t you tell him about the secondary ‘issues,’ as the manufacturer puts it?”