John Ringo: Eye of the Storm

The KEWs really weren’t much more than chunks of iron. Oh, they had tungsten fins and an internal gyroscope. But other than that they were just great big pieces of steel shaped vaguely like a dart. The rain of steel was aimed in various directions, but most of it was aimed more or less straight down at the just completed, and nearly charged, Hedren wormhole generator.

The Hedren fire was slow to start but brutal when it finally got into motion. Hundreds of lasers flashed upwards along with dozens of heavy meson guns. However, they were having a hard time hitting the Mound and her consorts. The air was almost literally filled with chunks of metal. Meson bolts capable of tearing apart a cruiser burst into pointless fireworks when they hit a KEW the size of a crowbar. Lasers had trouble with just the plasma and gases that were filling the sky.

Targeting the KEWs was automatic, but there were simply too many. Lasers flashed and flashed, but all it did was cut the darts in half. Small enough they would burn up from reentry heat but most of them were large enough it took quite a bit of chunking to get to that point. Missiles flashed up as well, intercepting the larger KEWs and blasting them apart. But, again, there were a lot of KEWs and only so many missiles. Well before the Mound was out of chunks of steel the Hedren anti-ship missile inventory was exhausted.

And behind fell the tanks, AFVs, panzerjaegers and artillery carriers of the Vaterland in their very first Augenhöhlentropfensturm, an orbital drop storm.

Frederick was praying as fast as he could but could not tear his eyes from the vision blocks. The world of Daga Nine was spread out below him and the panzer was dropping into a cloud of fire. The kinetic energy weapons, coherent and those that had been broken up by fire, were dropping beneath him to the surface of the world and they were burning. The effect filled the sky with orange fire, a volcano of torrential energy, into which the panzer was falling, the volcano falling away just as fast. At times they seemed to catch up to it then the distance would open, close… open. It was like one of those dreams where you fell and fell, the ground always only inches away but about to kill you at any moment. Energy screen or no, he did not think that there was any way that they could survive. And it was, yes, getting very hot. Sweat was pouring down his face for more than one reason.

He could see some of the fire coming up, but it was insignificant to the power of the dropping weapons.

“I saw an Eye of Baal from the ground one time,” Harz mused. “That was what we called the Posleen drops. They would light the sky with fire in a great circle like a glowing red eye. Now I know what it was like from the top-side. I rather prefer this. And if you’re going to pray, Schutze, might I ask that you at least not babble the words.”

“Your pardon, Feldwebel,” Frederick said, continuing to whisper the Lord’s Prayer under his breath.

“Here, this will help,” Harz said as a bass male voice started to recite the Lord’s Prayer in Deutsch. Then a booming electronica synthesizer started up followed by a soaring chorus. “This is how to pray to the Lord , Schutze!” the track commander shouted. “For the Lord did say unto his people, make a joyful noise and rejoice for I am the Lord Thy GOD !”

“ Emergence .”

The Posleen tunnel drive was extremely useful, tactically, but enormously expensive energetically. The only really functional fuel for it was antimatter, which was both costly to make and extremely unstable. But there was no way that any ship could have enough fuel space, bunkerage, for fusion bottles to produce the same power with any reasonable range.

Converting ships to use both ley-line transport, which was much cheaper energetically, and tunnel drive meant that something had to go.

In the case of the superdreadnought Lexington IV it had been Ronnie’s pride and joy: the primary mass-driver. However, the Hedren in the Daga Nine system didn’t have any ships really suitable for the main-gun to engage. Would have been cute, mind you. Even their battleships would have come apart like tinker-toys. But they just needed the space.