A Deep Sleep (Valhalla Book 1) Read online

  “Alright, Comms, Priority One Evacuation. All Hands, abandon ship.” Athena turned to face the tactical display. It showed Eagles Two and Five splitting port and starboard of Roberts while diving slightly below her previous line of advance. They were less than one-hundred thousand kilometers from Shanghai now.

  “Sam, assume control of all functions. This is a Command Authority Authorization.” Athena’s voice was remarkably calm, at least in her own mind. She settled into the command chair, having accepted her fate. “Continue on course, full-point defense spread. Preference defensive fields of fire to protect Eagles Two and Five. Maintain full gunboat ECM and counter-interdiction jamming.”

  “Yes Sir.” Sam responded with a total calm, unaffected by its own pending destruction.

  “Sir, we need to go!” It was Ensign Daniels, but she wasn’t alone. Standing behind her were two Marines in their power armor. Marine armor was a formidable thing to behold, especially the shipboard units since they were jet black. The black paint job helped to hide them from optical sensors when executing a boarding action or fighting on the hull of a ship.

  “Ensign, get yourself out of here, that’s an order.” Athena couldn’t bring herself to abandon Roberts after all they had been through. She knew it was an emotional and irrational decision, a bad one at that, but she couldn’t bring herself to care.

  Ensign Daniels looked resigned to her commander’s decision. Clearly she had hoped that the presence of the Marines would help her to convince her commander. Athena would have thought that Daniels knew better than that. That was when Athena noticed that the Marines were not armed with their typical assault rifles. They utilized a distinctive bull-pup version of the standard rifle, chambered for either the normal high density round for fighting armored troops or the ceramic round with metallic core to be used to engage unarmored personnel without puncturing the ship’s hull. Instead they were carrying the equally distinctive sonic stunners. Those were generally only issued in cases of crew mutiny or… “Stand down Marines. That’s an order!” Athena practically yelled over the open comm. Daniels visibly stiffened through her pressure suit but the Marines didn’t hesitate. The Marine to Daniels left snapped up his stunner and fired a single pulse at Athena. Almost instantaneously, the second leapt forward, reaching Athena a fraction of a second after she was hit, preventing her from falling unceremoniously to the deck. The Marine scooped her up into his arms, displaying a gentleness and grace that one unfamiliar with the armor would find amazing.

  “Let’s get going boys, we can submit for Court Martial later. I’d be glad to stand before the tribunal board, so long as Athena sits at its head.” Daniels headed out of the compartment with the Marines in tow.

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  Outside the ship, oblivious to the happenings within the battered cruiser, Eagles Two and Five had reached their launch points. Roberts’ deceptive jammers had been taken offline by enemy weapons fire, as had the last of her engines, leaving the dying ship to cruise along flat and level with no hope of stopping for many thousands of years. The ship was spent, but she had shepherded her charges to point blank range.

  As one, the two gunboats flushed their Mk-92Bs at the big PRC behemoth. Even with the degraded point defense from her escorts, the big battleship had a formidable point defense array of its own. Of the twelve ASMs launched, four died quickly to well-placed barrages of tiny sprint anti-missile missiles. The eight that struggled through were engaged by sophisticated ECM attacks, as well as attempts to breach their data sharing protocols and overcome their onboard AIs. These attempts were thwarted primarily by the fact that Athena had ordered the gunboats to set the ASMs to not receive in-flight retargeting, leaving them only communicating with point-laser comms. The missiles couldn’t be given new targeting instructions if the original was destroyed. The missiles had one task and that was to kill Shanghai. Still, the ECM overloaded one missile’s seeker, forcing it off course, while another was lured away from the Shanghai and vectored onto a ghost target. After passing through the ghost, the missile re-engaged its own target, which happened to be one of Shanghai’s badly battered escort destroyers. The missile scored a direct hit, an extreme rarity, and the destroyer ceased to exist as a miniature sun flared bright for a full second, before collapsing on itself and making space black once again. The particles and radiation thrown off by the detonations blocked any further ECM utility and the final six missiles pressed on. Close range point-defense guns destroyed another three on their final approach, but the distances were simply too close and the Chinese AI could not get them all. The surviving three Mk-92Bs detonated in a rough triangle around Shanghai, bracketing her at less than one kilometer with three massive explosions. Shanghai bucked and spun, surrounded by more than two-hundred megatons of thermonuclear fury.

  Even though she had previously sustained only light damage, her armor couldn’t handle such a bombardment. All across the ship’s hull, shielding failed, systems sparked and blew up, and crew perished instantly from a massively lethal dose of radiation. Sections of superheated hull and compartments within ruptured, adding to the destruction. Near the aft lower port quarter, a team reloading the anti-missile missile battery was caught with a blast door open. When the hull shielding failed, the missiles added to the conflagration. Shanghai’s entire after section was opened to space, with secondary explosions ripping through her defensive magazines. Finally, she couldn’t handle the torture. The drive section turned 25 degrees relative to the rest of the hull, flaring out quickly as the drives unit sheared its connections to engineering. The combination of power fluxuations from this event, the shock pulses from the Mk-92s, and smaller secondary explosions had the effect of starting a containment failure in the fusion reactors. The combination was a death knell for the ship as she came apart in space as a ball of white light, magnificent and ghastly.

  Sigma Zeta Alpha System: Xi Beta Delta Slip Gate

  USS Guadalcanal (ASO-65)

  Guadalcanal had been waiting on the far side of the Slip Gate from Sigma Zeta Alpha to Xi Beta Delta for the better part of two days, holding just over 500,000 km from the gate at a complete standstill. Now, they had the word, transit.

  “Attention all ships, begin transit now.” Vice Admiral Raymond Thompson spoke with a commanding voice, one he had developed during his 25 years of service in the USN.

  “Attention all hands, prepare for Slip Gate insertion.” The announcement was on ship-wide, letting everyone on Guadalcanal know they were about to transition with a slip gate. Slip gates, while the fastest way to travel the stars, were a little uncomfortable for even veterans of the service. The instant transition over dozens of light years, sometimes upwards of 200, tended to cause nausea, severe migraines, and even disorientation. For people less suited to handle a Slip Gate transit the symptoms also could include hysteria, slipping into a coma, and for one specific genetic pre-disposition, death. The service had to screen potential candidates very carefully and then monitored everyone throughout training. The Marines, by nature of the force being a space-borne force, performed the same process to their inductees.

  “Lieutenant Smith,” Admiral Thompson turned his helmeted head slightly to face his Flag Lieutenant, a pointless gesture since he could hear Thompson over the comm or the speakers built into the suit equally well. Some habits were just hard to kick. “the fleet will come to battle stations, ship-to-ship. Can’t be too careful now.”

  “Yes sir, issuing order now.” Lieutenant Andrew Smith had been Thompson’s aide when Thompson had commanded a squadron from USS Saratoga, a battlecruiser. When he was promoted to flag rank, he brought Smith with him.

  “ATTENTION ALL HANDS. GENERAL QUARTERS, GENERAL QUARTERS. SHIP-TO-SHIP. ATTENTION ALL HANDS. GENERAL…” The AI continued to announce the order throughout Guadalcanal, Flag Captain Hannah Ledger bringing her ship to readiness as the Admiral had ordered. Even though he’d been in command of Orbital Assault Group (OAG) 4 for mo
re than a year now, Thompson was still struggling to not command the ship he was on. He knew his place was to fight the fleet and to leave the ship handling to Captain Ledger, but it was still a hard urge to quell. Not that Thompson felt he had much to do. OAG-4 was just too valuable to actually put on the line against an opponent, so Thompson spent most of his time behind the battle, then entering a system and handing over operations to the Marines so they could conduct their landing. Overall he felt quite useless.

  “Both of the lead gunboat squadrons have transited Admiral. Waiting on confirmation before we transit.” Lieutenant Smith informed him. “There is Eagle 43 sir, they indicate we are cleared to transit.”

  “Very well, let’s get this done.” Thompson glanced at the tactical plot, noting with amusement that Guadalcanal among the first ships to transit. No, not among the first, first. She was the first of the group by a wide margin. Captain Ledger knew that her admiral hated waiting in the rear and would want to be there as quickly as possible. Thompson also figured that Ledger’s highly competitive nature had something to do with it. She would want to execute this mission flawlessly, second to none.

  In Orbit Around Xi Beta Delta II

  USS Guadalcanal (ASO-65)

  Captain Ron “Viper” Danford had been in his suit for the last thirty minutes, waiting to be launched. Yesterday, they were all ensconced in their acceleration couches in the ‘seating’ area, the couches ready to ease the maneuvering load if Guadalcanal had entered combat as she entered Xi Beta Delta. It had been learned early in the war that relying on artificial gravity and inertial dampeners just got people killed. Too often they would be knocked out in combat, their effectiveness reduced. Even when they weren’t, trying to prevent any of the ship’s accelerations required massive power, something that was all too often in short supply during a battle. So instead, everyone not doing something was in the couches.

  Now, Danford just wanted to be launched. He had already been fitted with his disposable heat shield and sprayed with a thermal ablative foam. He was also bolted to his open lander. The lander had its own heat shield, but that wouldn’t help Danford all the way down. The lander only dipped down into the atmosphere before launching its Marines into the atmosphere. The lander would then rise back to orbit and re-dock with Guadalcanal. Danford and the rest of the Marines in 3rd Battalion 2nd Regiment of the 1st Marine Division, 2nd Army were about to drop onto the only habitable planet in this system, Xi Beta Delta II. Of course, habitable was a relative term. The habitable region was limited to a collection of small islands near the southern pole. The equatorial regions were a collection of desert islands and a good sized continent. Inevitably, this was where the rare and valuable minerals and ores were located. Thus, while the majority of the population and support facilities were located on the southern pole’s island chain, there were substantial mining operations on the central continent. The wastes of the polar north were a collection of small islands locked in a massive ice cap, covering almost the entire top third of the planet. Most of the planet’s freshwater was locked in those ice caps.

  Wherever men went and discovered something of value, more men travelled there to take it from them. When you stripped away the causes, the politics, it was just that simple. Danford didn’t think he was fighting an unjust war, that his actions were criminal, but that didn’t mean that he felt that his own side had the unquestioned moral high ground either. War was messy, best thing he could do is help it end quickly and with the least unnecessary bloodshed.

  “Captain Danford, we are prepping for launch.” It was his suit AI. The unit had a sort of personality, though it was quite basic. It mostly ran his suit and some other functions to help him move the metric ton of high strength alloys and suit systems around with surprising agility.

  “Very well.” He had never really gotten used to the machine, still responding to it even though it didn’t require such a response. Danford took a deep, slow breath, trying without success to calm his nerves. He was always nervous, afraid, right before a launch. He managed, somehow, to push that away by the time he hit dirt, but standing immobile in the launch bay always made him tense. He commed the rest of his company, “We’re getting ready for the drop, so I want everyone on their A-game. This is an enemy controlled world and has been since it was discovered. We have almost no idea what is down there. You’ve all seen the intel and know that our predictions of enemy force strength are just that, predictions. No matter what we face, there is no unit I’d rather have at my back for this drop.”

  “Attention, 1st Company,” Lt Colonel Jack Cain, the battalion commander, was addressing Danford’s unit directly. “you are the first wave. You know your mission. We’re all coming down right behind you, so hold the line. This battalion is the best fighting force in known space and we will give them hell. Good luck Marines!”

  Danford barely felt Guadalcanal spin sharply as she oriented herself to point tail first towards the planet. All along the midship, aft facing tubes ejected the landers holding him and his Marines, out into Xi Beta Delta II’s atmosphere.

  Xi Beta Delta II

  T + 1 hour

  “I want that mortar firing in two-zero seconds, you got me?!” Staff Sergeant Caroline Gilson was furious. “If I have to come over there, I’ll shoot you sorry sons of bitches out of the damn mortars. At least then you might kill some of the enemy!”

  “Yes Sergeant!” The emphatic response was all that Lance Corporal Franks spared for his furious sergeant. Gilson was one considered the battalion’s toughest sergeant. There were rumors, dutifully spread through the enlisted and passed from one platoon to the next about the fearsome sergeant. No doubt exaggerated in the telling, but it only served to increase her fearsome reputation within the division.

  The mortar team had moved twice in the hour since they hit the dirt, not so much advancing as repositioning when the enemy started to zero in on their location. Normally, with the range the mortars had and in good cover, they could fire for some time before they were engaged with counter-battery fire, if they were engaged at all. This time, however, the LZ was barely a 4 km square and they were pressed from all sides. The enemy had allowed 1st company to land completely, and just as 2nd and 3rd company was launched, they hit the LZ from all directions. They were outnumbered at least 10-1 before the other two companies landed, but that still left them outnumbered at least 3-1. The enemy still seemed to be feeding in some reserves, so they may be even worse off. To make matters worse, the bastards had some tube artillery, heavier than the Marines could lug down from orbit. Their heavier guns were trapped on the transports until this LZ was at least marginally safer. For now, the majority of 3rd Battalion was on their own.

  “Sergeant Gilson, I need you to detach a SAW and send it over to Corporal White’s position. The enemy has a bit more cover on their approach there and it looks like they know it. He’s got at least two platoons moving against him and his squad is down to 7 effectives.” Captain Danford’s voice was rock solid and without a hint of frustration or concern.

  “Yes sir. They’ll be firing in three minutes sir.”

  “Excellent Sergeant, carry on.” Danford would be thoroughly impressed if Gilson had that SAW moved and firing in three minutes. That team would have to move almost 200 meters across relatively open ground. What had made for an excellent LZ was a terrible place to try to dig in and hold against a superior foe. The original plan had been to land on this small plain and then advance quickly on the small coastal port as well as seizing a series of small hills that overlooked the port. This meant choosing an LZ close enough to the port for quick access, but also one large enough to land a substantial strike element. Now, the LZ was too small to land the whole battalion and stage a break-out attack against the forces trapping them, but was also too large of a flat plain to allow for the Marines to capture and hold decent defensive ground without stretching themselves too thin.

  Sergeant Gilson flipped over to her platoon comm link, the one she had inherited whe
n the lieutenant bought it on the landing, with a thought to her AI. “Alright, Reynolds, Meyers, pack up your SAW and get it moving over to Corporal White’s position. I want you set up on in the middle of that low stone wall, about two hundred and fifty meters from your current position.” Gilson highlighted the place and shot the update to their suits.

  “Yes Sergeant, we’ll be firing in four minutes.” Reynolds, the senior of the privates, responded.

  “Unacceptable Private. The Captain told me to get that gun operating in two minutes. If the Captain comes over here to chew my ass out I can guarantee you won’t like what I’ll do to you. Now get your lazy ass going and move that goddamned gun!”

  “Yes Sergeant!” Reynolds had no idea how he was going to get his gun moved, but he was still more scared of the Sergeant. Plus, in a more abstract part of his brain he knew he couldn’t stand to let the Captain down.

  “And Reynolds, if you get careless and get something shot off, it’d better kill you because if it doesn’t, you’ll wish it had. You got me?” Gilson’s voice had a cold edge. The anger was still present, but now it was more chilling than fiery.

  “Yes Sergeant, we’ll be up in two minutes, nothing shot off.” Reynolds was technically pushing it, having already taken twenty seconds or so up to this point, but Gilson let him have it. She had shaved a bit off her estimate to the Captain anyway. She noticed, with some degree of satisfaction, that the pair had nearly packed their gun and were prepping to move out. The rated pack up for that gun was thirty five seconds. They had shaved almost seven off that.

  T + 15 hrs

  Captain Danford edged his head just out past the rocky outcropping he was in cover behind. His HQ bunker, such that it was, had been dug into the sandy soil just behind a low spine near the middle of the LZ. He crouched outside of it now, looking towards the small port town of Haikou. He wanted that position and he wanted it badly. The question was how to get to it without crippling losses. A direct frontal attack towards such an obvious object would be a killing ground. He could already imagine the PRC Marines opening up from positions of good cover with interlocking fields of fire. He needed a way to blow open their defenses or even a way to flank them.