Night Song (The Guild Wars Book 9) by Mark Wandrey (best ereader under 100 .txt) 📕

relayed from advancing forces, others listed ordnance at their disposal. But instead of preparing the attack, they were arguing over something.

“The attack begins in minutes, what’s going on here?” she demanded.

The trio of Zuparti continued yelling at each other for a second, then turned to stare at her in confusion. “Who are you?” one demanded.

“I am Private Ripley Porter; I’ve been put in charge of the artillery.”

“Ridiculous,” another Zuparti said and made a dismissive gesture. “This is our facility, and we are trying to decide who has the honor of pushing the fire button.”

 “Push the bloody button? Who programmed the barrage?”

“The computer,” the third Zuparti said. “We picked one of the preprogrammed attacks.” He shrugged. “What difference does it make?”

Her tail dropped low and straight behind her, and the fur down her spine rose, bristling. “Get out,” Ripley said. The three gawked at her. It would have been funny, seeing a weasel gawk, if she hadn’t been so incensed. “Get out now!” She clawed her Ctech sidearm from its holster. She had just enough forethought remaining not to point the weapon. As it cleared the holster, the three Zuparti screeched in terror and fled. One jumped over her, one scampered between her legs, and the last slid by, as careful as possible not to touch her. In seconds, she was alone.

Ripley slowly breathed to master her rage, her chest hurting with every breath, reminding her why she was there and not with her brothers and sister. After a couple seconds, she snorted, then laughed out loud. The look on the three Zuparti’s faces had been absolutely hilarious. Then she remembered she was there to do a job.

Ripley moved over and began examining the consoles. One was inventory, another was the ordnance management system, and the final was fire control. “Why are there three bloody stations for this?” she wondered aloud. After trying to move between them for a few minutes, she gave up, grabbed a slate, and configured it for networking. In no time, she had all three stations operating from her personal slate.

“Stupid non-merc races,” she mumbled as she began making sense of it. The management and inventory was simple enough; the fire control made use of a hundred files, all with intricate, complicated, and nonsensical firing patterns. Everything from area denial, to danger close, and rolling assault. Who wrote these scripts? She wondered at the work it took. Why not just design each missile sortie based on the situation instead of forcing the response based on what was written? It wasn’t like the system was that complicated.

Friendly forces were still an hour from the point they were certain to be identified. The Zuparti were going to launch now, way ahead of schedule. Stupidity. The one thing she had the most difficulty forgiving was stupidity.

Ripley loaded the enemy position maps, assembled from drone passes and previous attacks, and studied the situation. Despite her dislike of remote warfare, just like on the Phoenix, she was actually pretty good at it. Regardless, her stomach roiled at being stuck ‘in the rear with the gear,’ as Sergeant Bana called it.

The layout of the enemy base was simple, a mobile assault base set down from orbit so the enemy didn’t have to constantly risk ground fire every time they landed. Shaped somewhat like a star, each point had defensive lasers and the area between those had a rocket launcher on each side of the point. It looked like a grounded space station, which was kind of what it was. She could see why artillery hadn’t succeeded in overcoming it.

She didn’t have enough launchers at her disposal. The Zuparti installation did have a small manufactory, and a good store of parts. It just couldn’t get enough missiles on target fast enough to beat back the anti-missile fire. Unless you get creative, she thought with a growing grin. She reviewed the missile design, confirming what they could and couldn’t do, and nodded as a plan came together.

“Why have more than 300 missiles in inventory if you never use them?” She programmed in a launch sequence, writing a script to control the simple weapons. When she was done, she checked her personal chronometer. It was only a few minutes wait until it was the correct time to begin the attack. She pushed the green FIRE button. The Zuparti would be disappointed. There was no sensation from her station of the missiles roaring away. The base was too large, and the launchers were hundreds of meters away.

Four at a time, the missiles jetted into the sky. Only not on their rockets, they were launched via compressed air cannons. On a planet like Earth, the rockets would quickly have plunged back to the ground. On E’cop’k, due to the pathetic gravity, the jettison charge gave them enough Delta-V to create a parabolic trajectory nearly 30 kilometers long.

By the time the first four were rushing toward the ground with seconds to impact, she had 188 missiles in the air. “That’s more like it,” she said as she hit the programmed flight command, which sent orders to all 188 missiles, which fired their motors and roared toward the enemy base. “Little present for you, bloody cats,” she said and reclined in the less-than-comfortable chair. It was only then that she remembered the enemy base was defended by Pushtal and Zuul. Grimly she sat up straight and watched the weapons’ trajectories.

* * *

Alan’s command suit radar buzzed a warning.

[Multiple Air Threats]

He checked the heads up display and quickly confirmed it was the missile launch from their base. Good job, young lady, he thought. Then the few contacts grew, and grew, and grew to over 150! The computer in his CASPer wasn’t designed to track this many airborne targets. It was only meant to warn him of possible aerial threats. It only said “more than 150” targets.

“How the hell did