Red Company: Invasion by B. V. Larson

Author:B. V. Larson [Larson, B. V.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Iron Tower Press
Published: 2024-01-21T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 18: Shifting Tactics

The next hour or so was a time of sheer terror. We fully expected to be annihilated. We’d dared to strike at our gods, and now they’d decided to strike back at us. As was ever the case when a battle between gods and mortals occurred, it was the mortals who seemed to have taken the worst of it.

And so, we waited for doom.

Blinded, powerless, and pretty much defenseless, we all expected the enemy ship to work over what was left of our colony. They could destroy the dome, the spaceport—plus all the terraforming machines that we’d spent so much time constructing for decades…

We gritted our teeth, and some men prayed. Others howled with fury. None of it seemed to make any difference.

There was no power available up on our hilltop. The giant cable, thick though it might be, was giving us nothing. The power plant downslope was a smoking ruin.

Switching to batteries, we at least had emergency communications. We found a lot of this was staticky. The defensive networks that we’d so relied upon had been destroyed—or were operating on batteries like we were.

We were able to talk to the other commanders in charge of the defense of Mars. Those who were still alive responded with despair equal to our own.

Commander Kaine contacted me and demanded a full report. I told him the warp cannon had lost power, but we had struck the enemy ship at least once, possibly more than once. It was difficult to be sure.

“If you hit it, how come it wasn’t destroyed?”

“I don’t know, sir,” I told him. “That ship is advanced. It’s got at least 40,000 years of technological development on us. What kind of tech do you think Earth is going to be able to build 40,000 years from now?”

“I don’t know, and I don’t care. You guys failed.”

I wanted to tell him that it was Commander Kapoor who had failed, but I didn’t think that he deserved that, either. In fact, I didn’t really think that he had failed.

If the warp cannon had, as we suspected, landed on target at least once, possibly three times, then these men were far from losers or failures. They were heroes. No one else had yet to lay a glove on the enemy ship, and we’d done enough damage to get it to veer off at least.

That was the other piece of information that Commander Kaine relayed to me. The enemy vessel, after having been hit, had broken off. They had thrown a few salvos at us, obviously, blasting our power plants and three firebases, but they hadn’t bothered to press their advantage and finish us off.

When I got off the communications system, I met up with Commander Kapoor, who had received essentially the same information from other individuals on the military network.

I shook my head. “They had us,” I said. “They had us flat on our backs, ready to die.”

“Yes…” Kapoor said, “but we must assume they weren’t certain we were broken.”

I thought about it, and I realized that he must be correct.

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