Jack hoped the thrusters of the ejection seat would give him just enough deceleration to survive the impact. That didn't mean it wasn't going to fucking hurt like hell. Shrapnel from his mecha's impact against the hull spread out in a hemisphere in all directions and slapped into the backside of the ejection couch. Jack held his breath and prayed that none of it hit him. Statistics were on his side, though, since the impact was at such a high speed most of the big chunks stuck. Anything that escaped was small or vaporized, and the relative velocity wasn't extremely fast. His armored flight suit and the ejection chair should protect him.
How long to impact? he asked Candis, but it was too late. The couch slammed into the hull plating with an impact that would have broken his teeth were it not for the bite block in his mouth. The couch was designed to absorb a lot of impact, but Jack could still feel the vertebrae in his back crunch, fracturing his tailbone and rupturing several discs in his lower back and his neck. The pain was overbearing, and he passed out for a few seconds.
Jack! Captain Jack Boland! Captain Jack Boland! Wake up, Jack! DeathRay, DeathRay, wake up!
Chapter 16
July 1, 2394 AD
Ross 128, Arcadia Orbital QMT Facility
Friday, 2:45 PM, Earth Eastern Standard Time
"DeathRay and the enemy ship have vanished, Admiral!" the STO shouted from the science and technology officer's station. "Sir! We've got missiles launched from the planet and the facility!"
"Plot the trajectories for me, Captain Freeman," RADM Wallace Jefferson ordered his STO. "And see if you can detect what type of warheads they are."
"Aye, sir! Coming to you now. They're nukes, Admiral."
Wallace had the entire sphere of the battlescape in his mindview and could see the missiles firing up from the planet at near the speed of light. They were only a second away and not a lot he could do about them other than hope and pray that the ship's SIFs and armored hull plating held in place against the tactical nuclear warheads about to detonate against them.
"Full power to the SIF generators!" he shouted. There was no time for a hyperspace jaunt. "All countermeasures fire! Nav, evasive maneuvers! And keep the facility between us and the planet below!"
"Aye, sir!"
Sound it, Timmy!
Aye, sir.
Uncle Timmy sounded the bosun's pipe over the ship's 1-MC intercom. "All hands, all hands, brace for impact and incoming fire. All hands, brace for impact."
"Larry!"
"Sir!"
"See if you can get me some analysis of that ship that was just here! I hope they don't have more of those." The first wave of missiles hit before the evasive maneuvers and countermeasures could have any effect, and Wallace gritted his teeth.
A handful of the missiles slammed against the starboard hull structural integrity fields with multiple tens of kilotons each. The explosions rippled the SIF barrier fields with an opalescent blue wave of light. Seven smaller missiles hit random locations across the belly of the supercarrier. But unlike a turtle or an alligator, the belly of the Madira was as hard as any other part. The SIFs held, for the most part, but multiple systems were overheated, and there were a few hull breaches in some noncritical locations. There were no casualty reports or systems failures as far as the admiral could tell, and the attack was merely annoying. But you could never be too sure about how badly something was damaged by simply depending on diagnostic sensors.
"COB, check on my ship!" the admiral ordered the chief of the boat. The impact of the missiles rocked the ship upward and to port. The internal inertial dampening fields kicked in and reduced the effect of the missiles' impact. The crew was still tossed about a bit, but they had seen worse, much worse. These missiles had merely caught them off guard. The countermeasures should take care of the next wave.
"Aye, Admiral." Command Master Chief Charlie Green finished his coffee and was out the hatch in double-time. The COB would take care of the ship; that was his job, and he was good at it. Wallace had to focus on the fighting and taking that QMT facility.
"XO! Get the troops deployed!"
"You heard the admiral! Air Boss, why ain't the Gods of War already out? Ground Boss, get those drop tubes moving. I want the AEMs, AAIs, and the Warlords on the ground five seconds ago!" the XO shouted in his gravelly voice at the appropriate bridge crew members. It was his job to make certain that things got done right the first time so the admiral could focus on what to do next.
"Aye, sir!"
"Gunnery Officer of the Deck!" the admiral called out. The youngest member of the bridge crew looked a little nervous.
"Sir!" Lieutenant Junior Grade Guy Hall replied.
"Fire at will at any potential targets. But do not, I repeat, do not destroy that QMT facility!"
"Aye, sir!"
"Nav!"
"Aye?"
"Take us in closer than we had planned. If we scrape the surface of the facility, then maybe that'll keep those missiles from the planet off of us." RADM Wallace Jefferson sat back into the captain's chair and tapped at some of the sensor controls on the chair arm's console. He widened the DTM view of the battlescape in his mind all the way out to beyond the moons of Arcadia. There were three moons of appreciable size, not counting the QMT facility, though it was mostly artificial. Or, if he recalled right, it was half an asteroid that had been tugged there from the rings of the gas giant that Arcadia orbited. The artificial moon looked like a jagged half sphere with craters all over. The moon was standing on edge with respect to Arcadia. On the flat surface there were many concentric octagonal rings. At each point of the outer octagon were towers reaching several hundred meters up into space. The largest such tower was right in the middle of the thing. The facility looked pretty much like the one at the Oort Cloud in the Sol System, without the extra moons and scrapped ships moored to it for structural integrity. This system looked newer and better thought out. It had been built by the U.S. military, not the Seppies on a shoestring budget.
He scanned as best he could for any other surprises. The Seppies were known for using clever guerrilla tactics, booby traps, and kamikaze ships loaded with gluonium bombs, and they had used mass-driver guns at the Battle of the Oort very successfully. He hoped they didn't have any of those here. The problem with mass drivers, though, was that the damned things were usually kept underground and were hard as hell to find until after they had been fired. With all the American traffic in and out of the Ross 128 system, it would have been difficult for the Arcadians and/or the Separatists to build mass drivers in the system without anybody spotting them. Wallace doubted they had them here, but he wasn't taking anything for granted or making any undue assumptions. When in doubt, check it out.
"CO!" The air boss, Captain Michelle Wiggington, turned from her console. "Gods of War are out, sir! The Demon Dawgs and the Utopian Saviors are deploying."