Stark’s Crusade Read online

  “Yessir, yessir, three bags full.”

  The scattered blue symbols paused in their motion as commands flew to every soldier and vehicle, then began rapidly falling back toward the shuttles. They left behind myriad symbols blinking with threat warnings, explosive charges planted on almost every piece of equipment around the landing field. As the Americans retreated, the fire from the warehouse area grew in intensity, lashing at soldiers trying to hasten back to their shuttles. Heavy shells began falling around them as well, as the enemy finally shifted batteries normally aimed beyond the front to target the field to their rear. “Milheim,” Vic commanded. “Put some fire down on those warehouses. Make those shooters keep their heads down. Lamont, can your tanks take out any of that incoming artillery?”

  “If the firing angle’s right,” Lamont responded. “But I’m starting to run low on ammo.”

  Stark brought up the ammunition status of the tanks, grimacing as he noted how much the armor had already fired off. He briefly wondered about the chances of scrounging more ammo from the massive stockpile to one side of the landing field, and just as quickly discarded the idea. The way it always works is the stuff we wanted would be on the bottom of the pile. And I don’t want my people messing around that mountain of explosives while the enemy drops shells on them. “Understand. But if you apes don’t leave now, all the ammo in the world won’t do you any good.”

  “Okay, we’ll keep shooting until we’re jacked back into the shuttles. Hope that doesn’t make them sailors nervous.”

  Stark grinned. Those sailors are probably already plenty nervous because of the artillery dropping around them. “Who’s monitoring the shuttles?” he called to the watchstanders. “How are they?”

  “Ready to boost,” a private reported. “No damage except some surface scratches from shrapnel.”

  Stark switched scans again restlessly. The fire from the warehouse area kept growing heavier. So far, no direct cannon fire had advertised the presence of enemy armor, but that had to be close. Blue symbology clustered around the shuttles as the ground troops returned to their transports. Stark fought down an instinctive impulse to order the soldiers to disperse, knowing a concentration of targets was impossible to avoid if Milheim’s infantry wanted to board the ships rapidly. The clusters of symbology shrank quickly as the soldiers raced aboard, replaced by tick marks alongside the shuttle symbols indicating numbers onboard. Go! Go! Go! Get the hell out of there!

  “Got something going on over here,” Vic noted. “Shuttle Bravo, what’s the holdup?”

  “Got a jam in the cargo loading hoist,” the shuttle pilot reported. “Trying to clear.”

  “How long? How long to clear the jam?”

  “Dunno. Could be five seconds, could be five minutes. Or longer. This gear is a real bitch sometimes.”

  Vic looked over at Stark, who shook his head wordlessly. “Shuttle Bravo, forget the armor. Get the tank crew on board with the infantry.”

  “Roger. Understand I leave the tank and get all personnel on board.” It was hard to tell whether the pilot felt relieved or frustrated at having to dump the armored vehicle.

  Sergeant Lamont’s voice didn’t leave any doubt, however. “Stark! You can’t leave one of my hogs behind!”

  “We don’t have any choice,” Stark answered. “We can’t afford the delay.” As if to emphasize his words, enemy soldiers finally began spilling onto the field, evading forward in a last-ditch attempt to disable one or more of the shuttles. “Can’t you put that tank on auto or somethin’ to help hold those guys off?”

  “Yeah.” Lamont sounded as if he’d lost a friend. “Okay, I’m putting it on an auto-defend/destruct sequence. It’ll raise hell until we take off and then self-detonate its fuel, air, and ammo supplies. Sorry, man.” The last words seemed addressed to the forlorn tank as it shot away from the shuttle and began throwing rounds into the advancing enemy ranks.

  The last of Stark’s infantry tumbled into their shuttles, firing until their weapons were blocked by closing hatches. “All tanks secured!” Moments later, the shuttles blasted upward in a ragged volley, chased by futile shots from the ground. Lamont’s abandoned tank ripped off a blistering barrage, staggering as a couple of antitank rounds impacted in the empty crew compartment, then blew apart in a series of blasts that sent shrapnel flying across the landing field and high overhead. Stark, trying not to think about how important every piece of armor was to his forces, watched the projected paths of some of the debris as it flew upward, then snorted a brief, tense laugh. “Looks like Lamont put one of his tanks into low lunar orbit.”

  “A few pieces of it, anyway.” Vic checked the time on her display. “They set the charges for minimum delay to make sure those enemy troops wouldn’t be able to deactivate them. Any second now and we should see a lot more stuff heading for orbit.”

  “Those shuttles are still too damn close. Wish we coulda command-detonated the charges.”

  “That kind of signal is too easy to jam,” Reynolds reminded him. “And fiber-optic cable doesn’t unreel well from a shuttle heading off at max acceleration. Hold on.”

  She’d barely finished speaking when the charges left by Milheim’s troops began detonating. Watching the view from a backward-looking camera on one of the fleeing shuttles, Stark saw a section of lunar terrain lift skyward as the huge ammunition stockpile went off in a rapid series of blasts that quickly merged into one massive explosion. Luminosity and infrared scales backed down in swift shifts to avoid being overwhelmed by the glare. “Holy cow,” Vic breathed. “How much ammo did they have in that pile?”

  “I dunno, but I’m sure glad I’m not on that landing field. I guess we could’ve saved the other charges. There ain’t gonna be nothing left of that field but one mother of a crater.”

  “Maybe they ought to name that crater after you.”

  “Thanks. Are the shuttles clear of the blast effects and debris?”

  “It’s going to be close,” Sergeant Tran reported. “There’s too much junk flying to track every piece.”

  “The shuttles are still boosting out at max acceleration,” the private who had reported earlier announced. “But they’re heading into threat envelopes from enemy antiorbital systems.”

  “I’ve got enemy and American warships converging toward the shuttles’ projected orbital track,” another watchstander reported.

  Stark took a second to rub his forehead, trying to fight down the sick feeling in his gut. Now comes the hard part. Getting away. “Where’s Wiseman and her armed shuttles?”

  “Moving to intercept the warships.”

  “Is she nuts?”

  “No,” Vic advised. “She’s pushing the other deception, Ethan. Making the warships and the enemy think those shuttles are going to follow a suborbital path back here.”

  “Sure. Right. So when do our shuttles change—” Stark bit off the sentence as acceleration vectors on the cargo shuttles swung around. Attitude jets pushed the spacecraft tails toward the black heavens and pointed their noses back toward the dead Moon below. “Okay. Standby on the artillery.” He checked the armed shuttles, watching as they canted wildly as well, arcing their courses around so they were also pointed at the Moon’s surface. The displays updated the spacecrafts’ courses continuously, the projected paths of the two groups of shuttles now pointing toward each other. Wiseman’s armed shuttles were curving in from over the American enclave toward the enemy front lines as the fleeing cargo shuttles headed toward the same location from the opposite direction.

  “I sure as hell hope this works,” Vic whispered.

  “You and me both. Artillery. Sergeant Grace? Execute preplanned fire mission Bravo Foxtrot.”

  “Roger. Understand execute fire mission Bravo Foxtrot.” Behind the lines the heavy artillery pieces sat within their own bunkers, monsters designed to hurl shells long distances. On the Moon, with only one-sixth the gravity, those shells carried a lot less propellant and a lot more warhead. As Stark watched, threat s
ymbology sprang from the artillery sites, heading for the same area as the shuttles were converging upon.

  “You know,” Sergeant Tran remarked. “If I were one of those enemy soldiers at that spot, I’d wonder what the hell was coming at me.”

  “That’s the idea,” Stark noted. “Wiseman, how’s it look?”

  “Just keep those warships off my tail.” Her face seemed oddly flattened under the force of her shuttle’s acceleration. On display, the enemy warships were pushing the edge of the Colony’s anti-orbital defenses. A few threat symbols detached from the warships, marking desperate attempts to achieve an improbable hit against fleeing targets at maximum range. “Just for the record,” Wiseman added, “I really hate accelerating toward the surface of planets and moons. Understood?”

  “I assume you’re planning on pulling out before you hit.”

  “Assuming everything works right, yeah. If it doesn’t, I’m gonna be real pissed.”

  And real dead. Stark checked the converging tracks of cargo shuttles, armed shuttles, and artillery. Okay. Artillery hits first. Saturates the defenses around that location while Wiseman’s shuttles sweep in from the front and the cargo shuttles come in from the rear. Any functioning defenses should automatically engage Wiseman’s shuttles because they’re an incoming target. Defenses should give the cargo shuttles low targeting priority because they’re fleeing targets. Hopefully none of the defenders will realize we’re planning on that and switch to manual targeting in time. Those cargo shuttles don’t have half the survivability of Wiseman’s armed shuttles. “Cross your fingers, Vic.”

  “And my toes,” she assured him.

  Enemy defenses began throwing out rounds to intercept the incoming artillery, but Stark’s barrage was too big to be stopped. He’d sat under enough artillery barrages himself to know exactly what would happen while those big shells were hitting the enemy line. Exposed sensors and weapons would be shielded and troops would keep their heads as low as possible. In the case of soldiers in bunkers, it was an almost irrational reflex, since any shell penetrating their underground lairs would be certain to kill everyone whether prone or standing fully upright. But sometimes even irrational reflexes made you feel a little better, made it a little easier to handle the thought of tons of explosives falling all around you.

  Wiseman’s armed shuttles were maneuvering again, putting everything into pulling out of their death dive toward the surface and converting it into a dash straight over the enemy line. The cargo shuttles were also altering course, jinking as madly under the push of their attitude jets as their forward velocity would allow.

  Symbology converged. Stark avoided calling up visual of the artillery hitting the enemy positions. He’d seen it happen a thousand times, and derived no joy from thinking of the soldiers cowering under the bombardment. Wiseman’s armed shuttles tossed out weapons of their own, and a flurry of countermeasures, as a scattering of enemy defenses tried to engage the fast-moving targets. At the last instant, a few of the enemy shots sought out the cargo shuttles as they and Wiseman’s armed shuttles rocketed past each other. Almost instantly, the armed shuttles fired their attitude jets again, then kicked in their main drives, arcing up once more in a high-g maneuver to curve back inside the American defenses as quickly as possible.

  Stark realized he hadn’t been breathing and took in a long, shuddering breath as the cargo shuttle symbology lunged toward the American defensive line. Damn. Did we pull this off? Actually get our people out intact?

  “Got a hit,” a watchstander announced as alarms sounded. “Shuttle Alpha.”

  “How bad?”

  “Hull rupture, stabilization systems out, got an uncontrolled tumble. The shuttle’s close to the deck. She’s got no room to recover.”

  “Oh, man.” Nerving himself, Stark called up vid from the shuttle, jerking involuntarily as his vision suddenly filled with wildly tossing images. The impact of the hit and secondary explosions on the shuttle had thrown it off its smooth trajectory.

  Lunar terrain littered with rocks zipped past in flashes of gray and white, alternating with the star-sown blackness of space.

  “Gutierrez!” Chief Petty Officer Wiseman shouted over the circuit at the shuttle pilot. “You’re too low for autorepair to stabilize that pig. Do it manual!”

  “R-roger,” Gutierrez came back, his voice shaking, as his body was tossed constantly against its restraining harness.

  Stark blinked as Vic deliberately broke his vid connection, then toggled another circuit. Now he could see the shuttle from the outside, captured by ground sensors as it cartwheeled over the Moon’s surface inside the American perimeter. Apparently random spurts of heat marked firings of the shuttle’s stabilizer jets as Gutierrez tried to halt the tumble by feel. “Is it working?” Vic asked.

  “Can’t tell. Wait.” A heavy burst from two stabilizers and the shuttle seemed to shudder in place, the uncontrolled tumble replaced by a ragged corkscrew with the shuttle’s nose yawing in a wide circle. “That’s one damned good pilot.”

  “Yeah. But he can’t save it. Too low. And too much forward velocity. When it hits—”

  Before Reynolds could finish, the forward stabilizers fired again, shoving the shuttle’s nose up and on past the vertical so that the shuttle’s main drive pointed forward. The main drive roared, its exhaust throwing up swirls of dust from the nearby surface as the shuttle yawed wildly overhead. The shuttle slowed, shaking under the force of deceleration even as it sank closer to the rocky landscape. A moment later, some portion of the shuttle impacted the surface, shedding pieces of hull as the spacecraft bounced back upward, tumbling out of control once again. “Gutierrez!” Wiseman commanded. “You’ve done everything you can! Eject! Get your crew out of that thing!”

  “No! I’ve got passengers! I can still—”

  The pilot’s voice cut off as the shuttle hit hard, hurling rocks and fragments of the ship off to either side, rose slightly, then slammed to the Moon’s surface again with brutal finality. The shuttle slid across the rough surface, its progress erratic as the crippled craft rebounded off the larger rocks and bounced over the smaller ones. “Medical!” Sergeant Tran was calling into the comm circuit. “Get a full response team to that site as fast as possible.”

  “On our way,” Medical responded instantly.

  Tran pointed to the display. “Four ambulances. I’ll have more headed there in a minute.”

  “Good,” Stark approved, angered as his voice shook slightly. “Good,” he repeated in firmer tones. “And good job having that medical team on alert. Vic, is everybody else okay?”

  She scanned the display, chewing her lower lip, then nodded. “Looks like it. The other cargo shuttles are braking for landing, and Wiseman’s got her armed shuttles headed back this way. You going to the scene?”

  “Yeah.” Once again she’d read his mind. Or maybe she just knew him better than anyone else. “Alert my command APC, okay?”

  “They’ll be waiting.”

  Stark ran this time, not worried about decorum. Word of the downed shuttle had spread with the impossible speed of any bad news, so no one questioned his dash to the APC dock. Inside the APC, he pulled himself into the command chair and strapped in with one motion. “You’ve got the crash site?” he asked the driver.

  “Yessir.”

  “Then get me there fast!”

  “Yessir.” The driver fell silent, concentrating on his driving as the APC surged into motion. Stark sat silent, his eyes not really seeing the display before him where the cargo shuttles were coming to rest on the American Colony’s landing field and Wiseman’s armed shuttles were braking to shed velocity after safely regaining the protection of the Colony’s surface defenses. He tried not to think, not to worry, knowing nothing he thought or imagined could help the soldiers and crew of the crashed shuttle. But, finally, he prayed, briefly and fervently.

  The APC came to a halt near the ambulances clustered around the crash site. Stark checked the seals on his own
battle armor before cracking the APC’s hatch, then pulled himself through onto the lunar surface.

  As always, time seemed to suddenly slow down. Stark dropped slowly, his feet landing gently yet still puffing up small clouds of fine gray dust. Small rocks littered the landscape here, interspersed with a few larger boulders, all as jagged as the day they were birthed, without the smoothing effects of an Earth-like environment to round them off. Figures moved around the wreck and the ambulances, bounding with odd grace from point to point. Stark’s HUD automatically tagged the figures, some with medical symbols, some as regular infantry, and some as wounded. The medics weren’t hard to spot. Unlike the battle armor of the infantry, the medical personnel wore lighter weight outfits that allowed them to better treat wounded while still in their suits. Medics weren’t supposed to need armor anyway, since they weren’t supposed to be shot at. Sometimes the enemy actually abided by that rule. Most of the time, the medics practiced trying not to get hit while they tended casualties.

  Off to one side, a small pile of armored bodies was marked with the ugly symbol that signified the dead.

  Stark moved forward, trying to get involved in the rescue and recovery while simultaneously staying out of the way of people who were doing their jobs just fine without his interference. “Doctor Asad. You in charge?”

  The figure tagged by his HUD as Asad turned slightly to nod toward Stark. “That’s right.”

  “How bad is it?”

  It was impossible to shrug in a suit, but somehow Asad managed to mimic the motion. “Could be worse. You see the dead over there. Not too many. Very few, considering how torn up this shuttle is. Most of the rest just have the usual abrasions, bruises, broken bones, and such. No big deal fixing them up.”

  Stark took another look at the grouping of the dead, counting them this time, then looking toward the shredded, crumpled wreck of the shuttle. Only five. Very few is right. Damn miracle is more like it. “That’s amazing.”