Honor Bound

on thermal. And there were five hundred of them, packing the old interstate like an ancient traffic jam, rolling along at a steady 50 kilometers an hour, with another hundred corporate cargo haulers following them, each presumably carrying up to 50 biomech troopers as well as support equipment.

“Jesus Christ, there’re a lot of them,” Tom muttered, shaking his head.

“Target rich environment,” Shannon responded. Then she pushed the connection button on her ‘link’s ear bud. “Charlie Gulf Niner Niner, this is Charlie Gulf One. Your birds are cleared to fire.”

“Roger, Charlie Gulf One,” the pilot responded. “We’re coming in for our first pass.”

The view from the lander’s cameras shifted with roller-coaster abruptness as the combat craft banked hard out of its hover and swooped downward like a hawk after a rabbit. Smoke trails followed a fusillade of missiles that arced downward from the lander’s weapons bay and terminated on the trailing cargo haulers in the convoy, swallowing up three of them in a massive fireball. Then the aircraft was past the line of vehicles and angling around and the view shifted to the rear camera, showing the next lander coming in for a firing run…

…and suddenly coming apart like a paper airplane as the cockpit and the entire front end of the aircraft disappeared in a haze of glowing vapor, the heat trail of the weapon that had destroyed it barely visible on thermal, climbing back along its trajectory, straight up into the twilight sky.

Shannon’s eyes went wide and the roaring in her ears of the stunning realization nearly drowned out the panicked, redundant reports of the other pilots. “Get out of there!” she shouted desperately over their transmissions. “All aircraft evacuate the area and take evasive action! The enemy has orbital weapons!”

As she spoke, Shannon pulled up the controls for the orbital defense system and was totally unsurprised when the tablet told her that she was not authorized to access that operation. She shoved the tablet at Tom, spitting out a curse.

“General Kage!” she yelled into her ‘link. “Get your people away from the vehicles! Do it now!”

In the background, Shannon could hear the screams on the communications channels as one after another of the assault shuttles went down, reduced to burning fragments by remotely-steered tungsten darts barely two meters long, dropped from orbit. She fought back bile that rose in her throat, realizing that not only did each strike kill three good men and women, but that each one meant another second gone before those orbital weapons were retargeted…

“What is happening, Colonel Stark?” Kage demanded, his deep voice sounding small and distant in her ear. She knew he was less than a kilometer away from her position, farther down the old interstate. “What are you talking about?”

“The orbital defense network is compromised!” she told him quickly. “The landers are being destroyed by kinetic weapons! Once they’re gone, those weapons will target our vehicles… you have to get everyone away from the APCs!”

Behind her, she could already hear Tom yelling at the Special Ops team to move away from the vehicles and take cover in the tall grass and she began moving that direction herself in a quick jog as she spoke with Kage. “General, did you read me?”

There was no answer, and she was in the process of calling Ari when a CeeGee armored vehicle only a hundred meters away exploded. Shannon stumbled at a concussion that she could feel in her chest and a quaking in the earth from the 50 kilogram tungsten rod hitting the ground at around Mach 10, but she managed to keep her feet long enough to reach Tom’s position out in the middle of the field. She sprawled next to him, pulling on her helmet and securing it as she continued to try to call Ari.

“Ari, get them away from the APCs!” She switched to her helmet radio.

But the only reply she received was the endless roll of thunder as one after another of the armored vehicles was destroyed in a hideous overkill of liberated kinetic energy raining down from the sky like the wrath of an angry god.

Chapter Forty

Drew Franks grunted with a primal satisfaction as the Protectorate ramship vaporized in a cloud of plasma, its fuel stores ruptured by a fusillade of tungsten Gauss cannon rounds.

“Cease fire, reactivate drive field,” acting Captain Lee ordered.

“That’s four of them down,” Lt. Wolford reported, checking the sensor display. “Plus the two the Decatur took out.” He looked back at her from his station. “She’s still drifting, ma’am… and there are two ramships left this side of the wormhole, heading straight for her.”

“Shit,” Franks muttered, earning a dirty look from Lee.

“Can we reach them before they get to her?” Lee asked, looking back and forth between Wolford and Bevins. They looked at each other, then checked their displays and fed data to each other’s station before turning back to her.

“No chance, ma’am,” Bevins said, shaking his head. “The first rammer is less than fifteen minute away now. It would take us a half hour to get there at the maximum acceleration we could stand outside the tanks”

“She’s launching shuttles and lifepods,” Wolford put in. “They’re abandoning ship.”

“Set an intercept course for the ramships,” Lee said. “We can’t save the Decatur, but we’ll clean up those two bogies, then swing back and pick up the survivors.”

“They won’t be able to clear the ramship’s drive field,” Franks pointed out, his voice dull, trying to force down the rage he was feeling. “They’ll get ripped apart.”

“And what would you suggest I do about that, Lt. Franks?” Lee asked tautly but quietly, her dark eyes flaring with anger.

Franks didn’t answer her immediately, biting back the angry retort that rose in his throat like bile. Commander Lee felt just as angry and impotent as he did, he realized, and had absolutely no combat experience. “I don’t know what we can do, ma’am,” he finally said, “or what we could have done differently. That’s what gets me: I know there should have been, and I can’t help but think that if Major Stark or Colonel McKay were here, they would have done things better than I have.”

Lee’s expression softened and she chuckled humorlessly. “Hell, Lieutenant, you think I’m not wishing Captain Perez were sitting in this seat? Or Admiral Patel? This is not how I saw myself getting my first command. But as of a few minutes from now, we’re going to be all that’s left between the Protectorate and Earth, like it or not.”

“She’s moving!” Wolford blurted, leaning closer to the holographic display as if he didn’t believe it. “Her fusion drives are up… she’s moving away at two g’s!”

“She’s getting farther from the shuttles and lifepods,” Franks deduced.

“Get us in there, Bevins,” Lee snapped. “Two g’s acceleration, we have to take out those ramships before they reach the survivors!”

“Aye, ma’am, sounding acceleration alarms, prepare for high-g burn!”

Franks tightened his harness and leaned back into his couch just as the Helm officer fed power to the drives and space-time spat the ship out like a watermelon seed. On the main viewscreen, the ship seemed to jump forward, the stars streaking by around them, but Franks’ eyes were glued to the representation of the Decatur, which was still accelerating as well, a flare of fusion fire behind her drive bell. The lead ramship was bearing down on her, though, not moving terribly fast for an Eysselink drive ship but still outpacing the crippled Republic warship.

Someone-probably Wolford-put up a projection of the reach of the ramship’s drive field and a line showing how far away it would have to be for the shuttles and lifepods to survive. It seemed like the Decatur was crawling away from the tiny green symbols that represented her shuttles, the blue tinged circle of the ramship’s drive field still on course to rip those green symbols apart.

“Why only two g’s?” Franks wondered aloud, pushing the words out past twice his normal weight on his chest.

“What?” Lee asked, eyes flickering over to him.

“The Decatur,” he clarified. “Why is she only hitting two g’s? They can’t be saving