"Understood, sir."
"Goddamnit! Air Boss!"
"Sir?"
"Pull the Saviors off of the facility to help the Dawgs support the ground forces. Warboys is getting hammered down there."
"Aye, sir."
"Missiles away, Captain!" the XO shouted. The ship shook and sang out from enemy cannon fire and DEGs ablating the hull plating. Without the SIFs operational, the enemy fire continued to chew away at the ship. It was already battered and couldn't take much more. "Detonation in three, two, one."
"Countermeasures got one of them, sir!"
"The other one got through," the CO replied and used his DTM to look at the onslaught of enemy fighters pouring from the Seppy hauler. The flash of one of the nukes detonating within the cloud of fighters was a sight for sore eyes. More than thirty of the enemy mecha were vaporized within the fireball, and tens more were spun out of control and damaged.
"Keep firing missiles on the nearest ship, XO!"
"Aye, sir."
"Captain! The first wave of our displaced fighters are now entering the mix," the air boss announced.
"About fucking time." The Sienna Madira shook and rang, and the sound of the hull plating being vaporized and blown into space continued. But if the fighters got into the mix and the Blair could get in it too, all wasn't lost just yet.
The ship lurched upward from an explosion on the underbelly armor. Several lower decks blew out, followed by secondary explosions that dominoed upward through the aft section of the ship. The missile hit in just the right location to rip through the supercarrier all the way to the damaged section on the upper decks, leaving a gaping hole more than ten meters in diameter that passed completely through the ship.
"We're taking fire from the deck," the XO said. "Countermeasures!"
"What a typical Navy day," the CO said through tight lips.
"All hands, all hands, brace for impact in ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one!"
The mass driver round pounded dead on target into the bow of the Blair, shaking the ship like a slinky. There were screeches and groans of metal structural members bending against the force of the massive energy from the railgun impact, but the SIFs held.
"Forward SIFs at seventy percent, ma'am!" the XO shouted.
"Nav! Go now!"
"Aye, Captain! Engaging jaunt, now!"
The ship's hyperdrive system spun up, projecting the conduit just abow of the ship, and it slipped safely into a conduit and out of normal space. Seconds later, the ship popped back into normal space, just above the surface of the moon planetoid and too close to it for the mass driver to get line-of-sight with it.
"STO, find it!"
"There! I've got the barrel, ma'am! Transferring coordinates to Ensign Blake now."
"Blake, fire!"
Ensign Blake targeted the barrel of the mass driver and opened up the DEGs full power on it. The massive photonic energy of the directed energy weapons focused to a brilliant sun hot spot on the barrel, vaporizing materials instantly. The hole at the mouth of the mass driver glowed white-hot from light, scattering off the dust and gas particles being thrown up into space from the energy transfer of the beam to the target.
"Captain, probably wouldn't hurt to drop a nuke down their throat," the COB added.
"You heard the COB, XO. Let's nuke the bastards."
"Roger that, ma'am. Best news I've heard all day." The XO tapped a command into her console. "Two missiles away!"
"Nav, get us back down to the fight."
"Yes, ma'am. Preparing to jaunt."
"Air Boss! Have the Killers up first and out as soon as we hit the ball!"
"Aye, Captain."
"Hyperspace in five . . ."
Chapter 18
October 31, 2388 AD
Sol System
Oort Cloud
Saturday, 7:35 AM, Earth Eastern Standard Time
"Let's go, Robots!" Major Roberts pounded through the hangar bay, laying down cover fire across the catapult deck. Several enemy Stingers rushed them in bot mode but apparently were reluctant to go to guns inside their own facility. PFC Kent ran up a wall and flipped over a troop lifter to the left of the major, firing into the back of the vehicle's engine cowl. The cowl blew free as he passed overhead. The PFC hit the ground rolling to cover on the far wall. PFC Gray was right behind him, firing into the open-engine port with a grenade launcher. The grenade detonated inside the skin of the lifter, blowing out the walls of it in all four directions.
"Watch your right flank, Major!" Gunnery Sergeant McCandless warned him, and she dove across the cat lane in front of a Lorda that was catting out.
She rolled aross the runway behind a pylon, and a stack of pallets raised up to fire her HVAR at the Stinger that was racing toward the major. Her HVAR rounds spitapped into the armor plating of the vehicle at the knee joint until fluid squirted freely in a shower of sparks. The mecha tumbled like an runner tripping on a shoe lace, face-forward onto the deck. The major bounced into a flip, landed on the mecha's back and fired several rounds into it, and then he bounced again, landing beside the sergeant.
"Good shooting, Gunny."
"Yes, sir." Tamara checked her ammo, and Major Roberts took the hint and did the same. "If you don't mind my asking, Major, what the fuck is it that we are doing in here again?"
"Gunny, we are here to make a general goddamned nuisance of ourselves and to gather intel." Roberts stood and let go with a quick burst of cover fire back toward the catapult control booth, where several drop-tank support troops had filed up to hold the marines at bay. There weren't that many of them, and the major was beginning to suspect that the Seppies hadn't planned for a ground assault by AEMs. And that was a bad mistake on their part.
"Johnny? Where the hell are you, Lieutenant?" Roberts asked over the tac-net.
"We are a story up and east of you, about a hundred meters on the far wall of the bay, sir." Roberts could see the blue dot in his DTM but had no visual.
"You got anything interesting over there?"
"Yes sir, I do. Suez has stumbled across what looks like blueprints to a mass driver, sir!"
"Yeah, there's one on the moon of this place, I've been told." Roberts checked his blue force tracker and mapped out where all of his robots were. Suez was deep inside, several stories in beyond the hangar. How the sneaky bastard had managed that, Roberts wasn't quite sure.
"Uh, no sir. This mass driver is here, sir. Only a few hundred meters in."
"What? Is it operational?" Roberts expanded his mindview and downloaded the blueprints and the map data that Lance Corporal Suez had uncovered.
"From what we can tell, it looks like it is, Major. Any orders, sir?"
"You're goddamned right. Robots! Converge on Suez and let's see if we can't commandeer us a big fucking gun!"
Tamara rolled out from behind the pallets and launched several grenades into the booth, sending it crashing down onto the support troops beneath it. The cat field generators must have been connected somehow because one of the boxes at the end of the runway blew out like a volcano. Secondary explosions followed along a conduit around the hangar wall. Several SIF generators blew as well. The deck shook so hard from the explosion that Tamara and Roberts were both tossed backward off their feet. Had there been an atmosphere in the hangar, the shock wave from the explosion would have probably killed them both. But they were in the vacuum of space, and the explosion did its job with no blast wave. It was a lucky-as-hell shot, but luck counted, as far as the marines were concerned.
"Scratch one hangar." The gunnery sergeant grinned a toothy smile that Roberts could see through her faceplate.
"Scratch it? Hell, I think you broke the piss out of it, Gunny."