“Maybe we should give up on trying to protect the freighters,” Marphissa grumbled. “All that we are doing is delaying the inevitable. Maybe if we all head back to the inhabited world and concentrate our fire on the enemy ground forces, we can help General Drakon.”
“But…” Diaz clenched his hands into two fists. “Maybe we should. We can’t save the freighters.”
Marphissa looked to where Hawk and Eagle were trying once more to come to grips with Haris’s light cruiser, which was once again dancing out of reach.
She reached for her comm control, but paused, wincing, as another alert sounded.
Another ship had arrived at Ulindi hours ago. And she did not expect any reinforcements, so it was probably more bad news.
Drakon glanced upward at the overhead that bounced and shuddered continuously. The base command center was buried under armor and rock, above it other subsurface rooms also protected by armor and rock, and above them the surface where a variety of buildings had once stood. Those buildings were now piles of rubble that splintered and flew under the hammerblows of the artillery barrage flaying the former enemy base.
Fine dust shifted down onto Drakon and the other soldiers in the command center. The emergency lighting didn’t waver, though, and the displays remained bright and steady. The base’s power plant was buried deeper than anything else, invulnerable to anything short of a massive orbital bombardment.
“They’re not scoring many direct hits on the outer fortifications,” Malin reported. “Their global-satellite positioning arrays were taken out by the Midway warships before we landed, and all of the chaff and dust in the atmosphere near here is interfering with direct targeting systems, so their accuracy is far from precise.”
“They’re getting some hits, though,” Drakon said. Most of his soldiers were huddled in the blast bunkers near the outer defenses of the base, riding out the barrage in as much safety as possible. “If they were dropping rocks on us from orbit, we’d all be chewing dirt right now.”
“The Kommodor must be keeping the enemy warships occupied.”
“If she doesn’t continue to keep that battleship occupied, it will drop a world of hurt on us. We can’t disperse over the surface as I’d hoped while we’re penned in here by those Syndicate ground forces out there.” Drakon turned as a prisoner was escorted up to him.
The prisoner saluted in the Syndicate fashion, right fist coming across to rest on the left breast. “Sub-CEO Princip.”
Drakon ran his gaze over the man’s precisely tailored suit. “Why weren’t you in battle armor when you were captured, Sub-CEO Princip?”
Princip gave Drakon a disdainful look even though he couldn’t hide his nervousness as the ground shook from more impacts above them. “I am not a front-line worker. I am a high-level manager.”
“No, you’re a waste of resources,” Drakon said, leaning closer, menacing in his own battle armor, his blank faceplate a few centimeters from Princip’s sweating forehead. “I want a full accounting of snakes in this base, and I want it now, or I am going to give you an escort up to the surface, where you can personally evaluate the effectiveness of the artillery striking this base.”
“I—I—I don’t have—”
“Get rid of him,” Drakon told Malin, turning away.
“Finley would know! Finley is the senior snake here! Get her!”
Malin nodded, smiling. “We have an Executive First Rank Finley among our prisoners. A logistics executive, she claimed.”
“Get her and find out what she knows. We’re getting hit hard from the outside, we’re about to get hit harder, and we don’t need any hits from the inside.”
“What about the sub-CEO?”
A thought of Conner Gaiene crossed Drakon’s mind, along with a temptation to order Sub-CEO Princip disposed of. But Conner hadn’t liked that sort of thing, and neither had his much-longer-dead wife Lara. “Put him with the other prisoners.”
“I am a sub-CEO!” Princip protested. “I should—”
“Shut up while you’re ahead,” the senior soldier among his guards cheerfully informed Princip. “General Drakon is already treating you a whole lot nicer than you deserve. Get going.”
Cringing as well as outraged to be talked to that way by a mere worker, Princip left the command center under the prodding of the barrels of weapons. Drakon knew his soldiers would not disobey him by killing Princip, but he suspected that the sub-CEO would “accidentally fall down the stairs” at least once on the way back to the other prisoners.
A medic came into the command center, attention focused on her helmet display. “Who needs a patch and a pill? You.”
She rapidly applied a combat wound patch to a soldier’s arm, pushed three tablets into the soldier’s mouth, then, with another look at her display, began to leave.
“Medical specialist,” Drakon said.
“Do you need—?” Her eyes focused on him, and she went to attention, saluting. “I’m sorry, General, I didn’t—”
“Never apologize for doing your job,” Drakon said. “Were you one of those out in the open bringing in the casualties?”
“We all were, sir.”
“Pass the word around that I told you how much I admire all of you medical personnel for doing your best to save our wounded while under enemy fire.”
“Yes, sir.” The medic sounded a bit confused as well as very tired. “That’s our job, sir. Our responsibility.”
“You do it well. All of you. Thank you. I’ll make a formal announcement to everyone when this is all over.”
“Uh… yes, sir.” The medic left, heading for the next soldier who her display indicated needed help.
Drakon sensed the next event a second before his display alerted him. “The barrage is lifting.”
Malin nodded, his hands moving rapidly over his display. “Colonels Kai and Safir are ordering their soldiers out of the blast bunkers and into the outer fortifications. Surviving base automated defenses are already engaging attackers.”
“They sent the first wave in too close to the barrage,” Drakon said with disgust. In an attempt to catch the defenders still in their blast bunkers, the initial attacks had gone in while the barrage was still under way. That was risky enough when precision guidance was ensuring the artillery fell pretty close to exactly where intended. With precision guidance on the artillery badly impaired, it was too risky for any commander who cared about their soldiers.
But, then, the commander of the Syndicate forces was a Syndicate CEO, and to him or her, the soldiers were workers, faceless creatures whose fates did not matter.
Heavy artillery or rocket rounds falling short of the base ravaged the front ranks of the attackers. As the survivors staggered out of the blasts, no longer screened by chaff clouds this close to the base, a wall of fire from the base’s defenses and Drakon’s soldiers hit them and wiped them out.
No one cheered. Like Drakon, many of them had been sent on similar attacks in the past while still under command of the Syndicate, lucky enough to survive and knowing too well how it felt.
Enemy warbirds darted closer through the skies overhead, continuously testing the base’s antiair defenses and preventing any of those weapons from shifting to engage ground targets.
Another wave of enemy soldiers erupted out of the murk, going all out. “Colonel Safir is reinforcing sector six with her reserve company,” Malin reported. A single drop of sweat trickled down his face, clearing a meandering path through the dust. “She’s going to need more.”
“We haven’t got more,” Drakon said, eyeing the disposition of his soldiers through the base. “They want us to short Kai’s forces because they’re going to hit there next.”