Кристофер Банч - Vortex

The Suzdal and Bogazi main battleships moved out from Jochi toward Mason's fleet and formed in a defensive perimeter. Waiting.

The thin-skinned transports gunned toward the ground, protected by only a thin screen of destroyers.

The first wave of Imperial tacships hit them in Jochi's exosphere.

Hannelore La Ciotat was a drakh-hot pilot—her phrase. Everyone agreed, including the other pilots in her squadron. Not as drakh-hot as she thought she was, and certainly not as drakh-hot as they were—but drakh-hot.

She had slaved a secondary weapons-launch helmet from her weapons officer's station to her own post at the controls. She claimed it helped to be able to see on-screen not only what her tacship was doing, but what the enemy was about to get bashed with.

The transport bulked large in the screen. Readouts blurring on either side, indicators moving across it, read, deciphered, understood yet ignored by La Ciotat.

"Closing… closing… range… range…" her weapons officer droned.

"Standby…"

The transport grew larger.

"Downgrade launch from Kali," La Ciotat snapped, and the weapons officer changed the weapons choice from the huge, long-range ship killer to the medium-range Goblins.

"Range… range… range…"

"Stand by…"

La Ciotat felt herself drakh-hot as a pilot—but more importantly, she had a secret: she was not a drakh-hot shot. So she never launched outside point-blank range, and preferred to get closer.

"Standby… clot!"

The transport's sensors must have seen the incoming tacship and emergency-launched its troop capsules, spattering long tubes full of troops into Jochi's atmosphere.

"Transport…"

"Still acquired."

"Launch One! Cancel backup!"

She flipped the weapons helmet to the back of her head, ignored the ghost image of the missile slamming into the transport as it futilely lifted for space, fingers and boots dancing on the controls, and brought the tacship back—a lethal hawk swooping as the waterfowl scattered.

"Range… range…"

"Goblins… Multiple launch, single target distinction… set!"

"Set! Range… range…"

"On automatic… fire!"

The tacship held eight Goblin missile launchers, each loaded with three missiles. The launchers chugged… the tacship shuddered as the 10 nuke-headed missiles blazed out.

Nineteen troop capsules shattered, spewing screaming, dying soldiers into the high atmosphere, soldiers clawing at emptiness as gravity spun them down and down toward the ground far below.

Suddenly for La Ciotat these targets stopped being inanimate simulations on a battlescreen and became beings—whose deaths had come swiftly in the blast, horribly as their lungs froze in the frigid atmosphere, or mercifully as they spun into unconsciousness.

And "Bull's-eye" La Ciotat saw the deaths from very close range. Her stomach recoiled. She was violently sick, vomit splashing over the screen and controls.

She turned back for another pass, to kill the twentieth and last capsule.

Sten watched the slaughter from a battlescreen in the embassy's control room, refusing to let his mind translate those points of light appearing and vanishing into what they represented. He could have gone out of the subbasement to an upstairs window and seen the great battle raging over the mountains ringing the valley that contained Rurik. But that would have been still worse.

Around him the last embassy staffers hurriedly packed what files and equipment they would take offworld.

Outside, in a courtyard, high fires raged, as the rest of the embassy's records were destroyed.

Sten had been somewhat surprised that there had been no panic or trouble. Kilgour had explained: he had borrowed a company of Guardsmen for embassy security, told the Bhor and Gurkhas to rack their weapons and help with the evacuation. With one experienced combat veteran to every four civilians, it was hard to start a proper panic.

"A'ready, boss, w' hae i' better'n Cavite." On Cavite, Alex had been in charge of evacking the civilians—and had sworn his own oath of never again. "Whae'll we do wi' th' embassy? Blow it? Or jus' leave some wee booby traps?"

"Negative on both. There might be another ambassador show up one of these years. Why make life hard for him?"

Kilgour's stare was glacierlike.

Who cared what happened with the next regime, or the next clot dumb enough to take the Imperial shilling?

But he did not say anything.

"Do you have a prog on the landings, General?" Sten asked.

"Tentative,'' Sarsfield said. "They appear to have come in with, oh, call it twenty divisions. Say five for the first wave, five for the second, the same for the third, and five for reserve. That's my guesstimate, and that's what I'd do. But none of the Intel progs disagree, so that's what I'm going with."

"GA."

"Right now, I'll say—and these are pretty firm—that they've managed to put no more than eight on the ground. The rest either were lost in the landings or are still in orbit after the invasion was aborted.''

Sten repressed a wince, even though the body count was enemy. The First Guards Division, at full strength, numbered about eighteen thousand beings.

Assume—and a screen nearby showing Imperial Intelligence's order of battle said the assumption would be fairly correct—the same book strength for the Suzdal/Bogazi landing force.

Three hundred and sixty thousand beings, and only eight made it—the invasion force had taken over fifty percent casualties before real battle had even been joined.

"Of course," Sarsfield went on briskly, "casualties were not total. Elements of all invading units are almost certainly on the ground. But as stragglers, casualties, and so forth—not to be taken seriously.''

Sarsfield was a true Guardsman, Sten thought. He didn't appear worried that at least 150,000 enemy were now on Jochi, reinforcing whatever Tork militia were deployed—probably around a hundred thousand beings, and then the half a million more serving in the Jochi army. Three-quarters of a million, versus eighteen thousand.

"I'm grateful they don't appear, at least so far," Sarsfield added, "to have landed any heavy armor or artillery."

They wouldn't need it, Sten knew. Douw and the Jochians had more than enough to go around.

Now, he wondered, how long would it take for them to reform and attack the city?

He knew that answer, too. No more than three E-days.

Imperial losses were slight—only five tacships had been shot down. But those five were irreplaceable.

Sten, Sarsfield, and Mason were on a three-way sealed beam, trying to plan what next.

What should have happened was that the Imperial personnel should have been onboard their ships and scooting for deep space and home.

But there were two small problems: the Suzdal/Bogazi fleet off Jochi, and the oncoming allied army.

Almost a dozen Frick & Fracks had been infiltrated and blown out of the sky before Kilgour had a firm report that the Altaic Confederation was on the march.

Sten had two advantages: First, Mason's ships off Jochi—which were enough of a threat to worry the Suzdal and Bogazi fleet admirals. Second, he had in-atmosphere aerial superiority, or at least enough units to make the air overhead contested territory.

The Suzdal and Bogazi heavies would be unlikely to hang in space and lob heavy missiles down on the Imperial Forces inside Rurik. None of the allied forces, including the two ET races, would define noble victory as having destroyed the longtime capital of the Cluster. That was a shade too Pyrrhic even for these beings.

Nor would the fleet, except as a last resort, sacrifice maneuverability and come down to smash these sprats that were tac-ships—sprats that very likely could kill more than one-for-one as they died, and no one would trade a battleship or cruiser for a fifteen-being spitkit.