Dolphiam Sector, Warhawk 104

  Jumps were always worse in a smaller ship. The smaller the ship, the worse the ride. In the case of the small Warhawk, the sensation was like having one’s head put through a juicer. It was an encompassing, crushing force, but they came out of it intact. “Sound off,” the Admiral ordered.

  “Present,” Havermeyer said, moving to confirm their present location.

  “Ready for battle,” the Marines chorused.

  The Admiral could pick out each Marine’s individual voice and a quick glance in the mirror facing the rear compartment revealed the Hydra was still alive, even as one of its onyx eyes twitched irregularly. It looked a little worse for the wear, which made sense, as the Hydrian armada never utilized subspace FTL jumps. They considered it ‘unclean’ – whatever that meant. The biological drone would have no tolerance for subspace travel the way human sailors built it up. But, Hydra were hardier than humans in almost every way, so whatever variety of subspace sickness it developed wasn’t likely to kill it.

  “Coordinates confirmed,” Havermeyer said after verifying with the Warhawk’s navigation system. “Welcome to Azura.” The heart of the Quarantine Zone.

  The view before them was half-speckled with stars. The other half was dominated by a mottled gray disc – Azura’s moon. It hung heavy and close to the world itself, controlling the cyclic pull of the water world’s tides. The moon orbited slowly, but never rotated, always presenting the same face to Azura’s surface.

  Given the proximity of the moon and the constant humidity of Azura’s atmosphere, a communications relay had been set up to bolster communications from Azura’s colony. Now, that relay facility lay in an artificial crater. A blackened ruin, its great arrays were snapped and tangled amid wreckage like twigs upon a bonfire pile. The remains of the relay marred the light, reflective surface of the moon, destroyed by the Hydrian ships that had come to siege this system forty-nine years before, and untouched since.

  Ruins like it – comms relays, outposts, colonial cities – dotted the Neutral Zone and the Isolation Gap. Some were untouched like Azura’s, but others had been harvested – picked clean of any and all useful material by the Hydra. In that war, waged for extinction, absolute force had been applied. The Hydrian War’s scale of destruction knew no parallel, just as the Frontier Rebellion’s cruelty escaped compare.

  The Hydrian War had been brutal, but the Hydra had done as their survival instincts demanded – a fault of biology. There was something inherently evil about humanity’s absolute willingness to torture and slaughter one another over faults of ideology.

  But the Admiral supposed his perspective was skewed. He’d served in the Rebellion, been a prisoner in the separatists’ torture camps. He’d been a child with more immediate problems when the Hydrian War had ended. Someone like Kallahan, who had served in the War, might have a different perspective.

  However, Azura was not a creation of the War, nor was it a memory of the Rebellion. It was a wasteland, the result of an artificial intelligence gone mad, and no living soul had set foot on its surface in forty-nine years. Until now, when a ship renegade from Command had to deal with the Hydra, and when a planet so cursed became the only option.

  Applying a gentle pressure to the thrust controls, the Warhawk’s main engines kicked in, rising to an audible thrum as the ship pushed out from behind the moon.

  “We’re being pinged,” Havermeyer announced. The dropship’s arrays had picked up an active scan being aimed in their direction. “No identifiable weapons lock.” Of course, there was no guarantee a Hydrian weapons-lock would be identified by human systems. They had no idea what Hydrian capabilities had become. No one had seen a Hydrian ship since the end of the War.

  This was not a stealth insertion. There had not been enough information on Hydrian positioning or capabilities to even attempt a stealth flight path. Coming out of subspace behind Azura’s moon was the only achievable measure of safety. It granted them some cover, and put them near the atmosphere, should a sprint become necessary. The Warhawk could hide amid Azura’s atmospheric storms. Almost anything could and be mostly undetectable from orbit, the clouds and sheer winds were so thick.

  But running had never been the plan either. Admiral Gives reached over and activated the Warhawk’s comms array for a general, unencrypted broadcast. “This is Warhawk 913, inbound to Azura. The Hydrian Ship-Controller is aboard.” Likely, the Hydrian ship’s scans had just confirmed that.

  There was a pause, and then the radio crackled. A voice emerged, hissing and clicking. Perhaps calling it a voice was a generous way to describe such sounds, but it cut off as abruptly as it had come, and all eyes turned to the Admiral.

  “Instructions,” he informed the team. “The ambassador is waiting below. East side of the colony remains, with a transponder beacon.”

  “Meaning we will land on the West side and hike, suh?” Johnston surmised.

  “Aye.” They would conceal their ship’s landing position in case the Hydra double-crossed them. There was no point in making themselves an easy target from orbit. Azura’s near-constant cloud cover granted them an opportunity to conceal their ship’s final approach and head to the rendezvous on foot. Landing too near the ambassador meant their position could be called in to the ships above, so hiking would be an unpleasant necessity. “Also, there will be company off our starboard side.”

  Even as he said it, the radar picked up a return, a ship approaching from the far side of the moon. It wouldn’t have had line of sight to scan them before – blocked by the moon, so it clearly wasn’t the only ship here. It was just the only one they could detect. Invisible to the Warhawk, a scoutship, maybe even Swordbreaker itself was also here, but the ship approaching them now was far too large to be a scoutship.

  “An escort,” Havermeyer acknowledged.

  “More like a ‘don’t try to run now or we’ll kill you’ greeting,” Valentina corrected.

  Admiral Gives was more inclined to agree with her, though he said nothing, studying the approaching ship for all it was worth. It was a glimmering ivory-white, unconcerned with any degree of visual stealth. But then, visual identification was the least accurate of any. By the time a ship was visually spotted, it was generally far too late. There were much better ways to detect ships.

  The ship closing in on them could only be a battleship. It was massive. The radar return told him it was twice as wide as the Singularity, though only a third the length, far more even in its dimensions than the Singularity’s long and narrow shape. In view, it looked like a maple leaf, three main prongs with fragile-looking spines protruding outward. It was alien. Utterly so.

  Human ships had minimal exposed mechanics, and a thick, armored hide. This Hydrian ship was something else. Its spines shifted and moved, probing the void for better scan data. Gaps in its white shell unveiled wiring, piping and arrays as densely packed as could be, giving the texture of worms pressed up against one another and layered into a squirming knot. But, for all its foreign layers and jagged outlines, the shape on the radar return appeared nearly spherical, the radar picking up the strong electromagnetic shielding that surrounded the battleship. It was powerful, the very Hydrian technology the Singularity’s oversized main battery had been designed to counter.

  There was no way to know if the Singularity’s armaments would still be effective. This Hydrian ship was newer, the result of fifty years’ advancement by the Hydrian Empire. It had more spines, appearing larger and more complex than the images the Admiral had seen of Hydrian battleships from the War.

  The battleship tailed them closely, a white shadow that eclipsed the view of the system’s sun. It hung near enough that should it launch a missile from any of its dozens of launch tubes, there would be no time to dodge. Impact would be near-instant, and would have been damaging to the Hydrian ship, were it not for its shields, which would doubtlessly push the debris away.

  Still, the Hydra would not fire now, no matter how near they hung. They needed Rowin, needed to know what populations had seen the biological drone, and what evidence might remain of their intrusion into human space. If negotiations failed, atmospheric exit would be more uncertain, and it was likely the Singularity’s absence might be the only thing to preserve peace in this system, odd as it was to consider. With the Singularity absent, and her location secure, there was a promise that if the away team did not safely return, the ship would be sent to warn humanity’s leadership.

  It was convoluted. If the Hydra were confident that no evidence remained of their incursion, or that there was no proof it had been purposeful, this would end peacefully. It was the Admiral’s job to convince them of that, and to prove that humanity would not be an easy conquest. If that failed, then came the insurance policy. If the away team was attacked, the Singularity would depart immediately to issue a warning to humanity. If the away team was allowed to leave, even after a failed negotiation, then the Singularity would be delayed to recover them, giving the Hydra precious time to mobilize their forces. Perhaps the Hydra valued that time, perhaps they didn’t. Likely, it would depend on how far along their invasion plans were. And there was a plan. The Swordbreaker’s purposeful intrusion to human space was evidence of that, even if the Singularity had not unearthed what exactly the plan entailed.

  That could come in time, if they survived this. If not, the Admiral supposed it wouldn’t be his problem.

  Azura approached, a churning gray orb that quickly swallowed the view. Amidst the silence of the Warhawk’s cabin, the Admiral angled them downward, dipping into Azura’s upper atmosphere.

  It was invisible at first, but then the heat friction of travelling through the mesosphere began to glow red at the nose of the craft. The battleship behind them peeled off, apparently incapable of atmospheric insertion, and the glow grew brighter and brighter. The ship picked up a slight rumble that without the insulation of environmental suits would have been a bone-shuddering roar.

  “Brace for turbulence,” the Admiral warned, reaching up to activate the Warhawk’s atmospheric engines and controls. The thrusters and maneuvering propellant used in space were less effective in atmosphere. Here, the Warhawk would utilize tried and true aerodynamic controls: flaps and elevons on its wings, then the rudders built into its twin tails.

  Atmospheric insertion as a game of trajectory. It was played falling through the atmospheric layers, around the curve of the planet on an angle that wasn’t so steep the pull of gravity became irreversible, but wasn’t so shallow that the heat and friction of the atmosphere’s upper layers melted the hull before the ship dropped into the cooler, habitable layers.

  The transition between the stratosphere and habitable troposphere was more obvious on Azura than most. Dark gray clouds bubbled up in the boundary layer, mixing slightly before the Warhawk plunged into the gray mist.

  The sun vanished almost immediately, as if it were a candle just snuffed out. It was daytime still, not completely dark, but the light lost its warmth and directionality, enveloping them in a swirling gray miasma of water vapor. The inconsistent sway and bounce of winds and inconsistent density buffeted the ship like a rowboat bobbing down a churning river.

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  “Got the beacon,” Havermeyer said, picking up its broadcasted signal pulse as he bounced in his seat. “Recommend we head due West and then drop down.”

  “Roger,” the Admiral said, gently banking to follow the instruments’ reading for Azura’s local West. Every planet determined the cardinal directions for navigation differently. Those with stable, notable magnetic fields often did it that way. Others followed the rise and fall of the nearest star or traced notable constellations. Azura, once a promising habitable world, did it the same way Ariea and many other well-settled worlds had – by magnetism, the easiest way.

  In a few millennia, once more of its continents rose above the ocean, Azura could have been ripe with life. It could have evolved varied and complex ecosystems the way other worlds had. But now, only the stars knew what would become of Azura. Its once-promising oceans had been stripped of life, and it was haunted by the remains of the cataclysm’s millions of dead. Somewhere below the ocean waves, there would be piles and piles of white bones, picked clean by rot and weathering.

  Thick clouds enrobed the Warhawk. Nothing was visible, just churning spots of vapor, some thicker, some thinner. The bullet-shaped nose of the craft parted them with ease, but more still flowed in to take their place. There was no choice except to fly by instruments, trusting the radar and proximity scanners alongside the altimeter.

  The cloud cover was generous. It would hide them from orbit and from the naked eye, but it wasn’t enough to fool tracking sensors. Whatever shuttle had brought the Hydrian Ambassador to the surface would surely have them, and to drop their feed would require breaking line-of-sight. On Azura, there was only one way to do that: flying below the horizon line. That sounded worse than it actually was. It was easy on most worlds. Any geographical feature would do – a mountain range, a canyon, even hills if the altitude difference was enough, but Azura had none of that. On Azura, they’d have to follow the massive swells of the waves as if they were hills, and weave between the larger parts of the colony’s wreckage. In short, it was a challenge, but they were over the remains of the colony now, judging by the abrupt fluctuations of the altimeter, and they’d passed far enough away from the ambassador’s beacon.

  Admiral Gives dropped them out of the clouds. It didn’t help visibility. The endless gray churn was replaced with rain, clear rivulets streaking across the canopy of their craft. Big droplets hit with a constant, thundering beat.

  Havermeyer swallowed. It was dim and wet. Racing to meet them as they shed altitude, the gray-green seas frothed, pounded by the same cold, heavy rain. The white peaks of the waves swirled, whipped into a frenzy by the crosswind hammering their craft. As they drew closer, and the waves grew more distinct, Havermeyer realized how large they really were. From peak to trough, they measured several hundred feet. “You’re comfortable with this?” If any of those waves collapsed on them, it would down their little craft.

  Havermeyer was a trained copilot. Not a pilot. Moments like this made the distinction. He’d probably never ridden on a small craft in combat, and it showed because he complained and the Marines in the back didn’t. The Admiral tried not to take too much enjoyment from his discomfort, and by way of answering, dove them down the back side of a wave. He followed it to the trough, pulling back on the controls just in time to pull up and fly up the swell of the following wave. The rhythm was easy enough to find, and they settled into a slow bobbing motion, disrupted only by the occasional gust of wind jolting the craft.

  Havermeyer kept a white-knuckle grip on the controls before him as he watched another wave approach – a gray-green wall of murky water that towered above them until they pulled up to follow the surface of its rise. “You’re making this seem easy,” he noted.

  “This is the easy part.” The waves were predictable, primarily controlled by the proximity of Azura’s moon, they were only bolstered by the weather conditions. As they crested the next wave, the Admiral rolled them to the right, slaloming the Warhawk between two pillars of wreckage. Likely, they were anchor points, piers that should have held up the colony’s floating city. He had seen them from the peak of the previous wave, but judging by his startled gasp, Havermeyer hadn’t.

  A few more pillars rose from the following wave, broken tips reaching toward a weeping sky, but supporting nothing. The Warhawk slid between them easily, tilting and weaving, motion enough to turn Havermeyer a shade of green. In the back, Frenchie raised his hands and simply cheered, “Weeee!”

  The wreckage grew denser, larger pieces rising up. They became visible above the waves, not just in the low point of the troughs. The piers began to hold structures, jagged, incomplete, and smashed together, but solid – the remains of a city that had seen an apocalypse-level event. Towers had toppled, crushing the structures below, and shorter, stouter buildings had been cleaved in half. Their broken windows gaped up at them, the sludge of algae and weathering dripping from their jagged edges. Parts of the floating structure had given way, sinkholes swallowing entire blocks to where only the vicious sea could be seen below.

  The Admiral kept them as low as he could, a few dozen feet above the surface of the surviving streets, following their path through the ruins with quick, sharp turns that jerked the away team around roughly in their seats, kept from being flung only by the acceleration harnesses that buckled them in.

  Rounding one corner, the ruin of an unseen building greeted them, forcing a tighter turn. “Umpf…” the air was forcibly expelled from Havermeyer’s lungs as he was slammed once more into his harness. The ship slid outward on its turn, careening toward the building’s exterior walls as it fought inertia to corner. The engines kicked into a higher burn, their roar surely deafening on the empty avenues below as they thrusted the ship violently into a new direction. The tip of the wing came uncomfortably close to the wall, the engine wash leaving behind a scorched line of black on the ruin. Havermeyer watched it vanish behind them in the maneuvering mirror, fighting to calm his breathing. “Getting a little close there, don’t you think?”

  Without breaking his gaze off the path ahead, the Admiral answered, “No.” There’d still been twenty feet between the wingtip and the wall. He’d hardly call it close, though he could feel Havermeyer looking at him with something akin to horror. You asked, the Admiral thought. These were tight quarters, but he’d flown hundreds of sorties with less room for error. Besides, he knew from experience these Warhawks could fly decently well with half a wing, even in atmosphere.

  From the back, Frenchie laughed, as if enjoying an amusement park ride without a care in the world.

  Threading through a few taller ruins, the Admiral spotted a structural plate cast upon a set of half-crushed buildings. The plate, one of the lily-pad floating structures that would have formed many of the colony’s docks, must have been thrown by the impacts of the orbital bombardment. It had landed here, atop these buildings, half-destroying them before their structures caught and held it. Between the half-crushed buildings, there was an artificial cave. It looked haphazard, but had been standing as it was for fifty years. It would hold for another day.

  Admiral Gives angled them downward, and slowed them. When the lift forces became insufficient, he reached up to enable the vertical thrusters, guiding them easily into the cave waiting below.

  He rotated the ship to point its nose outward for a fast escape, then put them down slowly, testing that the ground below would hold the Warhawk’s weight. The street surfaces looked more solid here, shielded from the elements by the disc above. They held without so much as a shudder, and the Admiral cut the thrusters, but kept the engines running. “Clear to disembark.”

  “Roger,” the Marines said, beginning to unstrap themselves. Valentina and Frenchie were the first up, grabbing their weapons from their stowed location and popping the hatch. They jumped out, and began sweeping the area to secure the landing zone. It didn’t take long, they circled the craft, peeking behind anything large enough to conceal a threat, then radioed back. “All clear.”

  With that, the Admiral cut the engines and began powering everything down. “We are three miles out from the rendezvous.” It would be difficult terrain, but they still had a little over three hours on the clock.

  “Aye,” came Johnston’s reply. He slung the fortification turret he carried as his primary weapon over his shoulder, then grabbed the Hydra and pulled it up, pushing it out the airlock. It gave no resistance, pliant, or perhaps still dazed by the FTL jump.

  Unbuckling himself, the Admiral climbed out of the pilot’s seat, and retrieved his equipment from the storage spaces under the seats in the back of the cabin.

  Havermeyer exited the ship last, unsteady on his feet. He collapsed against the side of the Warhawk, dropping his pack beside him. Leaning against contours of the hull, he stepped roughly down and sat onto the wing, trying to steady his senses. The nausea was worse now that they’d stopped moving, as if it had all caught up to him at once. “Naddlethworfing hell,” the monk cursed miserably.

  “You pray to your Saint with that mouth?” Valentina asked, keeping her rifle carefully trained on their surroundings.

  “Fuck you,” Havermeyer said, looking at the damp street below his feet, then managed to raise his head to the Admiral, “And fuck you, specifically.”

  The Admiral withheld his reply, drawing a degree of silent satisfaction from humbling Havermeyer’s confidence. My pleasure. The monk boasted a lifetime of training better than the fleet bothered to provide its recruits, but it was no match for experience.

  Johnston turned the Hydra over to Frenchie’s watch, then came to clap a massive, comforting hand onto Havermeyer’s shoulder. “Stonewall’s an ace.” Not any pilot could handle these conditions, let alone make it look so easy. “We found out the hard way the first time too.” He had the memory of thinking they’d violently crash and die multiple times. The big Marine massaged the monk’s shoulder gently, unsure how much could be felt below the rubbery hide of their environmental suits. “Flying sub-horizon ain’t for everybody.” It almost always made passengers sick the first time. “But, close quarters maneuvering is his specialty.” There were specialties among pilots just as there were for Marines. Some pilots were excellent dogfighters, others excellent in stealth or speed. And then there were defensive pilots who excelled in precisely controlled movements. The Admiral was one of those, a defensive ace with an astounding number of missile intercepts, so there was a reason no one had objected to him flying the mission.

  Johnston patted Havermeyer’s shoulder a few more times, trying to ground him in the moment, but looked over to the Admiral. “Mighty fine work.” There was no way Hydrian tracking sensors had been able to follow that. “And,” he nodded to Havermeyer, “I did give him anti-nausea pills.”

  “I figured,” the Admiral said. If Havermeyer was going to vomit, he’d have done it by now. Anti-nausea meds were standard for anyone on their first combat deployment. There was no point in risking them vomiting in their helmet. Some soldiers took them every time, but Johnston’s team was experienced enough to be unbothered by a rough transport insertion. They’d been through it before, and known what to expect. Havermeyer had also been told, but being told to expect heavy maneuvering and turbulence was different than enduring it.

  After a minute of committing himself to the breathing exercises taught to spacers in training, Havermeyer’s stomach began to settle. He straightened up, and glared at the Admiral’s stocky form. “Where the hell did you learn to fly like that?” And why?

  “The Frontier Rebellion,” the Admiral answered stonily. It was obvious that Havermeyer had expected something tamer from him, a slower pilot, technically solid, but rusty from the years he’d spent in command. Sure, the Admiral would be the first to admit he wasn’t as fast as he’d once been. His eyes certainly weren’t as good as they’d been when he graduated from the Academy, but he still knew how a Warhawk handled – what it could be forced to do when the right thrusters were fired at the right time. There was as much to be gained in technical knowledge of the Warhawk’s flight envelope as there was in pure instinct. “I flew defensive assignment, Ensign.” As Johnston had said, he was a defensive ace, but Havermeyer stared back, clearly uncertain what that meant. It was an uncommon assignment these days, not usually required. Knowing that Havermeyer was unlikely to let a subject that had his curiosity rest, the Admiral elaborated, “Defensive pilots are assigned to cover regions of their carrier that are not protected by their mounted defenses.” There were always blind spots, caused by the shape of the structure blocking the way, or waste heat blinding the sensors. With her relatively plain shape, the Singularity only had one such spot: her aft, where the main engines were. All battleships had a blind spot there, and the engines were primary targets for any attack. A direct hit there had the potential to stall a ship entirely, and if it ignited the fuel lines, had the potential to detonate fuel stores and sink a ship.

  Engine defense had been critical in the Rebellion, but it had the highest fatality rate of any combat pilot assignment. If pilots flying defense weren’t killed by the enemy fire they went to intercept, then there was every chance of hitting the engine pylons during maneuvers or getting burned up by the engine waste heat, not to mention getting crushed by the carrier ship’s own movements. It was deadly, but that was the reason Admiral Gives had been assigned there. Command hadn’t expected him to live.

  “Ah,” Havermeyer said. “Not a dogfighter, then.” That was the most common way to get an ace accolade.

  “No,” the Admiral said, watching Havermeyer reach over and seal the Warhawk’s door closed. The monk’s illness had passed, so it was time to move beyond this artificial cave. Johnston felt it too, and moved to reclaim custody of the prisoner. Admiral Gives signaled him to take over. “Lead on, Corporal.” He was wise enough to know that his jurisdiction ended with flying. Corporal Johnston would command the mission while they were on the ground.

  “Thank you, suh.” Not all officers were willing to cede control to the Marines on a mission like this, but Johnston had never known Admiral Gives to argue about such things. He simply allowed the subject expert to take point, and on the ground, that was the Marines. “Valentina, take point. Havermeyer, follow her, I’ll follow you. Stonewall, with me. Frenchie, take the rear.”

  Everyone moved into position without complaint. Admiral Gives was not oblivious to Johnston keeping him close. No doubt, Johnston had been given explicit orders by the ship’s security officer to protect him, but it also kept him near Rowin, close enough to translate, if needed.

  Johnston kept an enormous hand on the Hydra’s scaly hide, ready to physically force Rowin to comply. It hadn’t proved necessary yet, but the big Marine stayed tense and ready. “Let’s move.”