Above and behind the assault sleds, Major Vango Markis lined his StormCrow Weaver up on the first Meme stingship even while slowing his time sense by a factor of ten. Doing so allowed for precise targeting, and a fraction of a second after he fired his inline maser the first shark-like living enemy died in a blast of microwaves calibrated for Meme ship physiology. Shifting to another bogey, he stroked the trigger and sent another stingship straight to boiling hell.
Around him Vango’s squadron did the same, and dozens of stingships fell to their beams. Unlike the Marines or the Ryss warriors, his pilots were thoroughgoing veterans, both of the battles to defend Earth so long ago, and of the fight to wrest the Gliese 370 system from the Meme. Cool professionals all, they lined up targets and one after another calmly knocked them down.
Even so, hundreds of the swift little enemy fighters remained. Roughly half turned away from the assault sleds to attack the StormCrows while the rest held their courses toward the assault force.
“Damn,” Vango said conversationally to his fighter jocks. “I was hoping they would all come after us. Alpha and Bravo Flights, with me. We punch through and hit the bogeys chasing the sleds. Charlie and Delta, keep them busy.” All of his Crows couldn’t dive to protect the sleds; if they did, the lagging half of the stingship group would roll in behind them and crawl up their asses.
“Roger, Alpha lead,” came the clipped acknowledgements from his three flight leaders, each with eight Crows.
Vango led Alpha with Bravo flight right behind as they rolled and stooped like falcons through the oncoming formation of stingships. Pushing his time sense up over one hundred to one, the universe slowed to a crawl and Vango let loose with the lasers and railguns in his wing pods. On automatic, the weapons pumped fire into the noses of the oncoming enemy fighters, nice low-deflection shots that could hardly miss, sending them tumbling as the weapons clawed their eyes out.
The Crows knocked out a score of stingships, but not without cost. “Just lost Red Dog,” Bravo’s leader Tex called, his accelerated VR voice sounding tinny through the link. Vango looked over his shoulder within VR space and pushed his time sense up to maximum, almost two hundred to one. Sending his viewpoint toward the expanding explosion where Red Dog’s Crow used to be, Vango could see nothing left but plasma and bits of wreckage in a spray, so he turned back to the slow-motion battle in front of him.
“Shit. He’s gone. Keep your heads in the game, people,” Vango replied in a frozen voice. What he really wanted to do was curse the dead man and everyone else for carelessness. Or maybe the stingship had just gotten lucky. The enemy fighters were fast but predictable, not too bright, and they didn’t have the many advantages of EarthFleet’s tech.
On the other hand, they were dirt-cheap, so that a hundred-to-one loss ratio was still an ugly proposition for Conquest’s aerospace squadron.
None of Vango’s pilots used their inline masers, saving full charges for later targets. Instead, they flashed through the enemy formation to swing onto the tails of the other group of stingships, the ones trying to line up on the assault sleds skimming over the surface far below. “Watch the red zone as you come out of your runs, people,” Vango called, referring to the slice of space high enough for the Weapon to have line of sight on them. One sweeping wide-area beam from the gargantuan laser waiting beyond the horizon would burn anything it touched. Titanic enough to gouge chunks out of Conquest’s glacis, the StormCrows would die like insects in a bug zapper if its sun-hot touch ever reached them.
The fifteen remaining Crows took shots at the stingships even as the enemy began to fire at the assault sleds in front of them. Tiny hypers leaped toward the Marine craft, and Vango passed the information via link to the blinding lasers mounted on the rears of the landers. Flashes sparkled in the void as beams crisscrossed intervening space. While the defensive lasers of the sleds sought to dazzle the sensors of the incoming hypers, stingship biolaser shots targeted the assault craft themselves.
Fortunately these new sleds had been fitted with extra armor for this single high-risk landing, and while Vango could see hits, none of the Marine sleds did more than wobble on damaged thrusters. Unfortunately, the stingships were just stupid enough to follow their suicide orders, and they were considerably faster than the sleds, which already decelerated for their landings.
“Dammit,” Vango muttered as he burned enemy after enemy. He hadn’t expected quite so many stingships.
“Sledgehammer in ten seconds actual,” Vango heard Commander Rick Johnstone’s VR voice in his comm.
“Sledgehammer in ten seconds actual,” Vango echoed to his flight leaders. “Check your lines and make sure you’re well out of the firing path.” He kept knocking down stingships as fast as his weapons would recharge, locked in accelerated time sense, determined not to waste any fraction of a second.
One stingship, pulling ahead of the others, dove for the rearmost assault sled, and Vango desperately concentrated all his fire on it, but his maser was out of juice for the next few seconds, and his wing weapons didn’t have the range or punch.
Just then, the ten seconds on his display ran out, and the dirty amber surface of Io erupted in a line of fire. The finger of one primary particle beam fired from Conquest ripped a hundred-kilometer-long trench pointing arrow-straight at the side wall of the Meme command center buried deep underground. Incidentally, the burst of superheated dust and burning sulfur thrown up engulfed sleds and pursuers alike.
The sleds were built to take it, but the lightweight stingships must have felt like they had entered a fusion-powered sandstorm. Even if they were not flash-cooked, they certainly lost sight of their quarries, and dozens slammed into the ground or the sides of the newly dug trench.
Right behind Conquest’s particle beam came a precisely calibrated burst of hundreds of ferrocrystal balls, accelerated by a Dahlgren Behemoth Fifty railgun to over 0.3c, fast enough to cause mutual contact fusion in whatever they hit. Each impact would create a brief, tiny thermonuclear explosion.
Down the dust-filled trench below the sleds these glowing projectiles flew to slam against the buried armor of the enemy command center. If the intel section’s educated guesses were right, that hellish impact would bore a hole into the Meme complex, providing both a breach and a disruption for the Marines and Ryss warriors to exploit. The resulting superheated plasma should expand through the constricted volume and ignite everything inside the confined space, turning anything and anyone not armored or sealed behind blast doors into crispy critters.
Vango watched the assault sleds, specially reinforced for this mission, descend to enter the trench. Invisible to the naked eye beneath the billowing dust and dissipating plasma, they would follow the channel to its end using radar, there to do what Marines do.
Fight, kill, and die.
“Gotcha,” Vango exulted as the pursuing stingships pulled up, shying away from the obscured trench. Barely of animal intelligence, the little fighters hadn’t the wit to figure out what to do when their targets vanished in the hot haze. Instead, they climbed out of the cloud and turned nose-on to the two flights of Crows and stood on their fusion engines, clawing to reverse course.
“Follow me,” Vango ordered as he rolled Weaver left, parallel to Io’s bilious surface, in order to stay under the minimum engagement altitude of the Weapon lurking just over the horizon. Tagging one more stingship with his wing weapons, he skimmed low over mountains and ridges, keeping his speed high while describing a wide curve that would take them back the way they had come.
Charlie and Delta still whirled in their own furball far behind, Crows against stingships. Once Vango set course to rejoin the fight, he said, “Finish them off and then punch it, boys and girls. Execute the bugout plan for refuel and rearming.”