“How many seconds till we can get them back up?” he asks.
“Seconds? It’ll be a quarter hour, at least. If we don’t wait that long, the radiation levels will kill anyone who goes in there. Even in a rad suit.”
“Tell your shield teams that I need the main shield back up over Sector One in five minutes, or we lose Phobos,” I say.
The engineer blinks at me, then Kavax. “I know those men—”
“Good. So, they will know the importance of their sacrifice,” I say.
“Do it, Officer,” Kavax says. “Do it now!”
Oro’s second watches the exchange looking like he is about to strike me, which for a Blue is saying something. He’s not the only one.
“We have visual of the surface!” a Blue calls.
“Main screen,” Kavax orders.
Faces fall as their worst fears are realized. Images from the surface crackle above us. Maybe they thought I had a magic trick up my sleeve. Something that would make my order less monstrous. They are sorely disappointed. It’s not that kind of day.
The devastation from the destroyer’s impact is incredible. It sheared off the tops of a hundred spires and made an impact crater with a radius of more than two kilometers wide. I’ve never seen so much debris in zero-G. Entire starscrapers and monuments to heroes float like motes of dust up from a punched sofa cushion.
Beyond the moon, the shattered city, and the impact crater, neither our shield nor the stars can be seen any longer. The war-battered belly of theLightbringerhas become the sky, and it creeps closer as the great ship hard brakes to hover barely a kilometer over the tallest starscraper. Then theLightbringerfires on Phobos with whatever guns it has left. Oro trains the guns of Phobos and fires back.
It becomes a slugging match. My moon and Lune’s moonBreaker go at it like two bare-knuckle brawlers tied together, punching and obliterating each other’s delicate features at close range.
Oro glares at me. His sync connection must have been broken by damage to subterranean hardlines. He discards his useless circlet. The guns are now under the control of their on-site manual redundancy teams. He strides over and says in a quiet voice: “My Sovereign, the shield could have withstood that impact…”
“Maybe but the kinetic whiplash would have overloaded the entire system. It would be down for a day or more. Now Lune’s landing zone has so much debris that his Praetorians will shoot him if he orders them to make landfall in it. He’ll have to adjust. Shift north, toward Bastion One. Sector One. Where he’ll be in range.”
“Of what?”
“Retaliation,” Kavax says. He’s already set Sophocles down and begun field-checking his armor. Sure enough, theLightbringerrecognizes the impossibility of the crater, and the ship sacrifices its surprise to begin a slow shift north.
Lune’s captain is good, and rotates the ship to hide its cratered belly and present fresh guns. The ship completes a full turn so that when it reaches its new landing zone, its original side is facing down toward themoon. Then all its fighters and bombers, held back for the assault, flow out its hangars like a plague of locusts. I send ours from Bastion One and its adjacent fortresses Bastions Two and Eight.
Then Holiday curses in disgust. Familiar silhouettes fall from theLightbringertoward the surface of Phobos’s cityscape. Lune didn’t just bring battering rams. He brought clawDrills too. Hundreds of them.
“He’s aping Darrow,” Kavax says and kneels to stroke Sophocles’s head. The fox has started to whine with anxiety. He can always tell when Kavax is about to leave.
I patch into the squadron commanders. “Ignore enemy fighters. Fire on those clawDrills. Bring them down before they hit the surface.”
Holiday motions forward the commander of the Bastion One’s legion—Red Legion I. The stocky Red thumps forward, fists balled, one hateful eye on me, the other still on the crater the destroyer made in Phobos’s cityscape.
“Legate Dunlo, those drills allow them to bypass the Bastions, and the defense levels. They will land north of the crater and south of Bastion One. They will chew through the starscrapers and the surface into the moon’s interior and Praetorians will pour in like water.
“It’s up to you and Red Legion I to stop their downward penetration before they get to the Core and the reactors. Make contact and kill those drills. Plug the breaches best you can. Hawk Legion and Haemanthus Legion will press in laterally from Bastions Two and Eight to reinforce and stop their lateral movement.”
“They’ll be able to put men on hundreds of levels from the drill shafts,” he warns. “I…don’t know if we can contain them.”
“Which is why we will also attack them on the surface at the breaches themselves. Tell your Drachenjäger commander that Kavax is on his way and will lead the charge.” Silence greets my announcement.“Go.”
With a salute, he storms away with his officers to join his legions.
Holiday returns to fit me in my armor. “Engineering, where are we on the shields?” I ask.
The engineer falters. “Ma’am…”
“Speak up, man!” Kavax barks.
