Straker's Breakers (Galactic Liberation Book 5) by B. V. Larson

Author:B. V. Larson [Larson, B. V.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Iron Tower Press
Published: 2019-03-15T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

Colonel Winter, Rhino continent, Premdor-2

Colonel Martin Winter let his mechsuit and his body do the work while his mind stayed on the battlefield. His HUD and SAI were struggling to keep pace, but they were losing their total situational awareness as First Battalion slashed deeper and deeper into enemy territory. The Breakers squadron was doing its best to cover them from high orbit, but by doing so—by firing beams and railgun bullets downward into the atmosphere, keeping the enemy off his back—they were blanketing the area with interference. He was reduced to what his own suits could see, hardly different from pre-tech Old Earth, when men used their Mark 1 Eyeballs.

Even so, he’d demolished three more Rhino combat formations without loss, using up two-thirds of his ammo and half his fuel in the process. Now, after five hundred kilometers of breakneck-speed blitzkrieg, First Battalion reached its first decision point: a civilian auxiliary airport. A small but clear paved spot on the terrain, it had the advantage of being undefended, deserted, and easy to find—even without orbital assistance. Terrain association and translation of Rhino signs led him right to it, on time.

Now to see if the vacuum jockeys could deliver on target.

He circled the airport and deployed his forces facing outward precisely one minute before the appointed time. Suit sensors showed nothing within twenty kilometers, but direct fire wasn’t his worry.

The Rhinos’ ballistic artillery had proven useless against mechsuits that would move a thousand meters between shot and fall. Mechsuits were equipped with Laser Aerospace Defense Artillery, or LADA, systems that could give warning and blind guided warheads. The Rhinos’ hyper-missiles, however, were surprisingly good. Not terribly accurate, but terrifyingly fast, and launched in low, low trajectories that screamed over the treetops and provided little warning.

It was these that Colonel Winter worried about. As soon as the Rhinos figured out their enemies had stopped moving, he expected a storm of missiles to come calling.

Above, the Breaker warships would be dropping into low orbit, armored noses aimed straight downward, capacitors full, fusion reactors running above spec, crews and SAIs ready. They deliberately risked themselves against the hundreds of missiles that leaped up at them in wave after wave, hundreds that added up to thousands over time. The Rhino continental stocks seemed inexhaustible.

Winter wished the Breaker fleet luck as they fired their own dumb weapons at maximum rate—beams and bullets, all replaceable. They’d have been more effective if they’d used up their own missiles, but they had to conserve those for contingencies.

Even so, they must’ve dropped at least one max-yield nuke in high atmo as his sensors whited out and EMP plucked at the fringes of his mechsuit’s shielded systems. With luck, that would degrade the Rhinos for a while.

When the photonic overload cleared, his HUD showed a ring of interdiction fifty kilometers in radius around the airport. Railgun bullets from above met missiles and beams from below, while more beams probed from orbit... and in the center of it, four specially rigged armored landers fell.

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