everybody.” And finally, with a firm shove, hydraulic rams pushed Moaning Minnie away from the massive hull of Space Battle Station 1, out of any residual effect of its artificial gravity, and started the assault lander on its way planet-ward.
The assault landing process was as rough as people and machine could tolerate and as quick as the lander’s command pilot could make it. That way, the trip was short and sharp, a decidedly attractive tactical advantage. Loitering at high altitudes in hostile airspace was not a life-extending strategy and one that the assault lander pilots did all in their power to avoid, short of actually breaking the lander into pieces.
Barely a minute after Minnie had dropped clear, the assault commander gave the order.
“Bravo Mike, this is Alfa. Authenticate Kilo Oscar. Immediate execute Ops Plan 41 Bravo. I say again, immediate execute Ops Plan 41 Oscar. Stand by, execute!”
With a deep breath, Michael started Moaning Minnie, which already was positioned tail first in anticipation, on her way dirtside, firing her main engines at full military power to wipe out enough of her orbital velocity to put her almost instantly into a rapidly steepening parabolic fall to the ground. As she fell, the rest of the assault lander stream fell around her, the landers cocooned in a huge cloud of active decoys, the attack blossoming out in all directions into a huge sphere that was too confused, too complex, and too fast-moving for ground-based radar to distinguish high-value targets from decoys.
With Minnie’s height unwinding rapidly, Michael shut down the main engines and spun Minnie back nose first, ready for reentry. He could see for himself the threat blossoming in front of them as long-range search radars appeared on the threat display. It was becoming increasingly clear that whoever had set up the exercise, the enemy had a threat profile that, as always, looked exactly like the Hammer of Kraa’s and was determined to kick Minnie hard.
But that didn’t matter too much.
An assault lander could do very little against long-range weapons systems except stay as far away from them as possible. The combination of poor maneuverability at very high speed and a limited self-defense capability made landers easy meat. It was up to the planetary assault force supporting the attack from orbit-in this case, lead by the hypothetical FWWS (Federated Worlds Warship) Shrivaratnam from which Moaning Minnie supposedly had dropped along with 139 other hypothetical assault and ground attack landers-to provide volume defense for the assault lander stream, and Michael was pleased to see that the Shrivaratnam had made a good start in suppressing ground radar sites and launching the follow-up waves of decoys needed to confuse the enemy’s tactical picture further. The radar sites were bound to be dummy emitters, though, he thought, and God only knew which ones were the “real” missile radar and launch sites.
“Command, Tac. Threat Red. Multiple battle management radar emitters. Stand by… Shrivaratnam reports multiple ABM missile launches.”
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
