ABMs! Shit, Michael thought. Antiballistic missile systems were designed to take out missiles before atmospheric reentry, a role that made them extremely good at hacking big, fat, and relatively slow assault landers out of the sky. But there was nothing much Michael could do about them except worry and leave them to Shrivaratnam. ABMs were too big and too fast and, with tacnuke warheads, much more than any lander’s thin skin of ceramsteel armor could withstand. As he commed his neuronics to display the overall command plot, he was happy to see that the ABMs, for which an undefended stream of assault landers was the easiest of easy meat, were having a hard time of it.
But a handful did slip through.
Michael watched as the ABMs closed in relentlessly, the more heavily armored ground attack landers leading the assault stream filling the space between them with short-range missiles and sheets of chain-gun fire, with reddish-yellow flares marking their successes. But two landers lost their battle to fend off the massive missiles, Michael wincing as microyield tacnuke warheads exploded in searing balls of blue-white energy, turning the landers into useless lumps of metal slag tumbling end over end to burn up in the atmosphere below. But then there were no more ABMs, and Michael watched in relief as Mother downgraded the ABM threat from red to orange. He wasn’t allowed to stay relieved for long.
“Command, Tac. Threat Red. Expect antilander missile launch at twenty-seven minutes on current track.”
“Roger, Tac.” No surprises there. He’d seen the missile control radars come online, and there were a lot of them, which wasn’t good. Michael risked a glance across at Hadley. His face was tight with concentration, with the screwed-up eyes that came with looking at neuronics dataflows.
As Moaning Minnie began to tear into the first thin tendrils of Terranova’s atmosphere, the lander’s thrusters started banging away to hold the finless, wingless machine at the right angle for reentry. Then Michael felt the vibration slowly begin to build as deceleration started in earnest. The lander’s artificial gravity rippled as it absorbed the growing influence of Terranova’s gravitational field.
As he studied the command plot, his relief evaporated. Shit, he thought. The missiles would be on them quickly, and the threat wasn’t quite what the THREATSUM had predicted. For a start, there were many more medium-range missile control radars than predicted, and with them went hypersonic antilander missiles, truly nasty pieces of Hammer engineering. Big by Federated Worlds standards, they were very fast and agile enough to stay locked on to even the most desperately flown heavy lander. That and a conventional chemex warhead big enough to punch a hole through lander ceramsteel armor with no difficulty made them a real lander killer.
But there was only one way down, and Michael turned his focus to the job at hand: getting Minnie and her crew home safely, threading her way through the layers of defense standing between him and his objective.
Plummeting almost vertically nose first past 90,000 meters, Mother pulled Moaning Minnie up into a steady 40-degree angle of attack as the lander punched into the atmosphere in earnest. In seconds, Minnie had disappeared into the heart of an incandescently hot fireball as her still-massive residual kinetic energy bled off into the air ripping past the hull. For the moment they were safe; no weapon system yet invented could get even a half-decent targeting solution out of the enormous ball of ionized gas that had wrapped itself around Moaning Minnie, and even the Hammer didn’t like popping off tacnukes inside their own atmosphere. Not that Michael was completely happy. This element of the reentry would have been familiar to the pioneers of space flight centuries earlier, and he hated every painful second of it as the lander’s speed bled off. One day, he said to himself, one day maybe the designers would work out how to get a lander through ionization ass first, with the main engines firing all the way to get her dirtside as quickly as possible. But good though lander technology was, that happy day was a long way off.
Any minute now, Michael thought.
“Ionization finish in ten seconds. Speed now 12,200 kph, altitude 51,500 meters. Standing by to maneuver.” Mother’s calm tones belied the storm still raging outside.
And then they were out; it was time to screw up the opposition’s missile firing solutions. “Standby max g aerobrake, stand by, stand by. Now!”
Mother didn’t hang around. She rammed Moaning Minnie back almost onto its tail, holding the lander at an 85-degree angle of attack to present the lander’s flat underbelly nearly at right angles to the airflow. For an instant Minnie’s artgrav, as always slow to react, allowed the gravity to push Michael into his seat as the lander shed speed. Minnie’s airframe was twanging and twitching as it absorbed the enormous stresses being imposed on it by turbulent air ripping past, the lander’s kinetic energy dumped into the freshly reenergized plume of intensely hot gas coming off its underbelly.
“Weapons, Tac. Decoys now.”
“Decoys away.” Taksin sounded bored, not at all like somebody sitting inside a 750-ton lump of armored ceramsteel plunging groundward with all the finesse of a huge boulder.
With decoys safely away, Mother powered up the main engines to stab Moaning Minnie’s blunt nose straight down at Terranova’s surface, now only 48,000 meters below them. As the lander settled into a nearly vertical dive, Mother slowly extended its variable-geometry wings to mark the beginnings of the lander’s transition from a brick to something more like a proper aircraft and then cut the main engines to let Moaning Minnie drop into free fall, pushing Michael’s stomach up into his mouth before the artgrav could respond. The height unwound at a dramatic rate before Mother extended the wings and started the slow and careful process of pulling the lander out of its headlong plunge to earth. Michael’s neuronics were plugged into the lander’s neural system to make doubly sure that the huge stresses on the lander’s wings stayed within acceptable limits. Even so, the synthpain was uncomfortably intense. Michael’s concern was well justified. The lander’s foamalloy wings were incredibly strong, but even they would have trouble taking the load imposed by a 750-ton lander trying to pull too sharp a recovery.
At last, the lander leveled off at 5,000 meters, and Mother allowed it to slow before bringing the main engines back up to power, turning the lander slowly back toward the landing site.
“Tac. How do we look going in?” Michael asked.
“Well, we are in the first wave, so in theory the opposition has only a hazy idea of where we will land, at least to start with.”
“Other than the college spaceport, you mean?” said Michael, at which Hadley actually laughed. Good, Michael thought. Things were looking up if the man could take a joke and not bite his head off.
“Play the game, Helfort. As I was saying, the only advantage we have is where we will hit the ground. Ah, good. Mother thinks this is the optimum final approach track.” The track bloomed in Michael’s neuronics. Pretty simple: two doglegs, both over water, which was always nice, a sharp turn onto a short final approach, which would be fun, and then onto the ground. But no terrain to hide behind for the final approach, which was a pity. They had twenty-three minutes to run, and Michael offered up a small prayer that there wouldn’t be too many surprises.
His hopes of a quiet run in were dashed fourteen minutes later. With no warning, Fusion A tripped offline, immediately depriving Michael of his starboard mass driver-powered main engine. Seconds later, the cross-feeds that would have allowed the starboard main engine to draw power from Fusion B on the port side went down as well. Fucking terrific, Michael thought.