The Ashes of Worlds - Kevin J. Anderson [113]
He sat stoically in the command chair. He had to achieve a victory here that exceeded the Chairman’s expectations. He had ships full of armaments, and he would bomb the living daylights out of everything even remotely resembling a bug structure.
He would rather have been aboard his own Juggernaut, but on the other hand, it was gratifying to fly these once-stolen EDF ships, which the black robots had been forced to return. The Mantas and the Thunder Child had passed a complete detailed inspection; absolutely everything had checked out. Even so, Lanyan would never trust the robots again. He had lost too many good men to those tearing mechanical claws.
He had also lost plenty of men to the Klikiss — these particular Klikiss on Pym, in fact. He couldn’t wait to see how well these battleships performed.
On tactical screens, his weapons officers brought up projections of Pym, the location of the original Colonization Initiative settlement, and the site of the known transportal wall. The hive had spread out in concentric waves from the salty inland sea where the human settlers had built their colony.
Tactical officers on the eight ships divided up the approach, and as soon as the planet came into view, they began their attack runs. They had enough powerful flashmelters, thermal-wave warheads, and even a dozen old standby nukes that could peel the top layer of crust like an orange.
With the Thunder Child in the lead, the EDF vessels cruised in high above the chalky white landscape, the alkaline flats, and the rivers of tainted water. They dropped loads of atmosphere-dispersed armaments. Before the bugs even realized they were under attack, the initial bombardment sent deep shockwaves and additive blasts to wipe out a significant section of the hive complex for kilometers around. The nukes made the biggest flashes, but the new-design weapons caused deeper damage.
Destruction continued to rain down in the second run, flashmelters literally erasing parts of the expansive bug city, penetrating deep to hit even the lowest tunnel complexes. As he scanned the smoke and vitrified desert below, Lanyan felt real satisfaction. Nothing — no bug or human — would ever live here again.
While a human settlement would have responded with panicked confusion to the surprise attack, the Klikiss hive mind launched a smooth, efficient counterstrike. Lanyan was amazed that so much of their infrastructure remained intact even after such a hellish bombardment. He ordered another attack run.
Thousands upon thousands of Klikiss component ships shot like fireworks from protected underground bunkers. A roiling, coordinated cloud of them came directly toward Lanyan’s seven Mantas. Each alien component craft had only two energy-weapon cannons, but thousands of stinging blasts caused cumulative damage. Lanyan diverted his bombardment of the hive city below to turn his Juggernaut’s jazers against the numerous small ships.
“General!” Brindle reported, “we’ve got company coming in from above.”
“Where did they come from?”
“Four large cluster vessels were on the far side of the planet. We charged in too fast to detect them on our initial run, but now they’re on the way here.”
“Great, a cockroach cavalry.” On his tactical screens Lanyan watched four giant spherical masses composed of countless linked component ships. “Continue our bombardment of the ground colony while we can! Don’t let up.” Supposedly, once they managed to crush the central mind, the bugs wouldn’t know how to attack anymore. On the other hand, the hive mind might be aboard one of those swarmships instead.
He directed three of his Mantas to peel off from the main group and engage the giant clusters in orbit. When the Mantas opened fire, the jazer blasts carved away sections of the conglomerate vessels, but the swarmships simply recoalesced, shed their debris, and continued to bear down on them.
Lanyan swallowed hard. This was not good.
One of the swarmships shifted its internal structure to form a deep pit in its middle, like a giant cannon mouth. Lanyan was trying