Earth by Weyand Richard F

Author:Weyand, Richard F.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Weyand Associates, Inc.
Published: 2022-01-29T00:00:00+00:00

Chen ChaoPing didn’t hold her own after-action review until they had been underway back to Arcadia for several days. Giscard Dufort had performed an arthroscopic surgery on her thigh to repair the buried muscle damage from the bullet that passed through her leg. With nanites in place, the healing was accelerated, but healing still took time.

Everybody was in the dining room for the review, all eighteen of them. At the main table sat the landing party, plus Moore and McKay. The five robots from the landing party stood along the wall.

“All right, Justin. You kicked this off. Why don’t you start?”

“Yes, ma’am. After you told us to keep an eye out because you thought Wilson was up to something, I made sure we were tracking all the objects in orbit around us. My second officer brought it to me that they were sliding assets into orbit both in front of and behind us.”

“To stop Endeavour from making a standard departure and to forestall any rendezvous of the shuttle with Endeavour,” ChaoPing said.

“That was our conjecture, ma’am. They were trying to hem us in, no doubt about that. I let you know, then when you told me the alarm had gone up on the planet, we made a hard left turn and got out of there.

“Well, those assets they were sliding into place were shuttles, all right. Fast ones. Even with our maximum acceleration and the fact we got the drop on them with our direction change, they were catching us. So we deployed two of the container bombs. We detonated them right in front of them, and they couldn’t miss them. Took them all out.

“Then we continued hightailing it for the hyperspace limit. Nothing else came after us, and we went into hyperspace bound for Alpha Centauri.

“That’s about it, I guess. Except we left a hell of a mess behind. Four million pieces of shrapnel in their high orbitals. They’re going to be forever cleaning that crap up. And if they don’t, it’ll randomly take out satellites, shuttles, and spaceships into the indefinite future.”

“Serves them right,” Carla Maier said.

ChaoPing nodded.

“On our end,” she said, “when you told me they were hemming you in, I gave orders to Rolf to initiate the plan to leave. The robots overpowered the guards at the shuttle, gassed the guard barracks, and came to the hotel. Our robots in the hotel carried us to the shuttle with the others as armed escort.

“I could hear that the alarm went up before we got to the shuttle, and told you to get out of there. As we neared the shuttle, some group of guards we had missed opened up on us, and the robots returned fire and killed them. We got on the shuttle and got out of there.

“I’ve heard from the robots that they fired surface-to-air missiles at us from the ground, and the pilot took them out with one drop of forty bomblets. We proceeded to the hyperspace limit and headed for Alpha Centauri.”

“And you took casualties, ma’am,” Moore said.

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