“I still think we should have bumped ‘Big Willie Style’ for this operation,” Abe groused while slouched in an overly ornate chair on the bridge of the Viceroy’s Pride.
“Once you and the rest of the ground forces have touched down, you can put whatever you want on your speakers,” Jennifer replied from the captain’s chair. “Until then, my ship, my rules, and that means no touching my radio.”
“It’s Dan’s ship,” Abe muttered, refusing to move from his chair.
“Of course it’s Dan’s ship.” Jennifer rolled her eyes. “Everything around here is Dan’s, but he’s going to have to be in the engine room using spatial magic to power the ship’s teleportation drive. He can’t really be up here to pilot the thing during the battle itself.”
“Will you two stop bickering like a pair of children?” Dan said, his head in his hands. “We’re supposed to be going over final details of the attack plan, not putting together a combat mixtape.”
“Honestly,” William joined in affably. “As much as I’m done with these two bickering over nothing, I think we’ve gone over everything twice. We can keep making contingency plans all we want, but at some point, we’re going to have to just quit dithering and go for it.”
“Fine.” Dan nodded in his direction before turning to Sam. “Doctor Weathers, have you gotten the viewcasting function to work? I don’t want to miss anything while I’m buried in the bowels of the engine room.”
Sam nodded. “It should work. As long as Jennifer has her sight set to ‘share,’ you should be able to get a picture in picture of what she’s viewing.”
“Good enough for me.” Dan stood up and stepped toward the bridge’s exit. “I’ll head down to the engine room right now. If we’re good to go, then there’s no reason to wait. We’ll start the operation in thirty minutes, so everyone get ready.”
He exited the room, doing his best to ignore Abe’s griping at Jennifer. Theoretically, Abe should be on his way to the front cargo hold along with the rest of the infantry. They wouldn’t be needed until most of the battle was over. But the plan called for him to be with the ground troops, keeping them calm and secured while the voidship engaged any ground defenses with its spell cannon.
The plan almost seemed overly simple. According to the messages fed back from the deserters after they slipped into Miami, Bowman and his top goons took over a highrise in the downtown area. They rarely left the building, and Abe had a scout watching the building to provide real-time updates.
After the main building, they had a couple other targets. Regional command and control centers, motor pools, that sort of thing. Frankly, the battle plan made Dan’s eyes cross a little. William and Abe really seemed to know what they were doing, identifying targets that would cause immediate chaos, but which could be repaired easily once DuBlanc took charge.
He nodded at the workers fussing around the engine room as he walked in. All of them had originally been rescued when the Tellask Empire left behind an outpost satellite. They were slowly acclimating to modern society, but they still seemed much more comfortable around the mana-heavy elven technology. Considering that only Dan and Sam really understood the teleportation drive amongst the ‘modern’ humans, it made sense to assign them to maintaining the internal and sensitive processes on the Viceroy’s Pride.
Dan tried to make small talk with the workers, but quickly stopped. His attempts came off as forced and clearly made them uncomfortable. After the forced responses, both sides let the engine room lapse into mercifully awkward silence.
Finally, the System’s clock alerted Dan upon a half hour elapsing. Pausing to send a message to the rest of the crew, he put his hands on the control crystal. He’d operated the ship’s engines a couple of times since their initial theft of the Viceroy, but it still felt strange every time. A second later, a small box containing Jennifer’s vision appeared in the corner of Dan’s sight.
He reached mentally for the ship’s mana, focusing on a spot in space just above downtown Miami. He’d studied that particular spot for days, looking over picture after picture, trying to memorize enough details about it to successfully teleport the ship there. He hoped it’d work. Teleportation in atmosphere was always inaccurate and tricky, a large part of the reason why many voidships would use regular gravity magic to land once they teleported near where they were aiming.
The power swelled around Dan as the ship’s mana forges kicked into high gear, supplying the majority of the energy needed for the jump. He focused on the satellite image of his target and crossed his fingers. Mentally he nudged his aim high. He’d rather accidentally show up in the mesosphere than the Earth’s mantle.
He pushed and the world went white. Reality reasserted itself and Dan exhaled in relief at the decided lack of dirt in the main viewscreen. Instead, Miami appeared beneath them in the predawn half light, their target clearly visible as it was the only high rise with its lights still on. Around it, the rest of the city lay mostly silent, with only the occasional light or car disturbing the morning stillness.
The ship shook slightly as the aft catapult began launching drones. They only carried six of the things, and it took between two to three minutes to launch all of them, but after watching some old clips of their firepower in action, Dan was more than happy to incorporate them into the ship. One-by-one, they screamed away from the Viceroy’s Pride, controlled by some of their original operators that William had managed to track down and hire in Las Vegas.
Then they were lined up on the high rise. Dan felt the available mana from the mana forges dip heavily as the lights dimmed. Distantly, a whining noise rose as the spell cannon charged for a bit under a second. Then, it fired, a brilliant lance of white and yellow that slammed into the base of the building, melting metal and glass like butter under a blowtorch.
Jennifer blinked a couple times against the brightness of the cannon, obscuring Dan’s view for a second. When her vision returned completely, he could see the semi-sized hole, still glowing cherry red, bored straight through the side of the building. While the mana forges struggled to recharge the Viceroy’s reserves, a Reaper flew past the listing building and dropped a paveway bomb into the gap opened by the spell cannon.
With a thump, the building began collapsing as the laser-guided explosive knocked out most of the remaining load-bearing pillars. The ship moved upward slightly, angling the prow downward. Just as the remainder of the building came down, the spell cannon fired once again into the debris, melting a trench of twisted steel in the concrete.
The Reaper made another pass, dropping a second bomb into the remains of the building. Dan smiled tightly as another explosion lit the early morning. Pounding the remains of the building might seem like overkill, but mercy at this point would likely cost more lives. He’d gotten cute when he tried to take Merella alive for questioning, and only time would tell how badly that would come back to bite him.
Right now, more than just his team relied on the success of the mission. The entire Army of New Orleans was traveling toward Florida to help restore order. Without the chaos created by Bowman’s death, they would be outnumbered and overextended. Their only hope was for Dan to create a power and organizational vacuum for them to step into. That meant Bowman needed to die.
The Viceroy hovered over the battlefield, the remaining Reapers seeking out their targets, demolishing bridges, buildings used by command staff, and the occasional armored vehicle active on the street. The spell cannon roared one more time, blowing up a nearby substation that routed the meager supply of electricity to the privileged neighborhood surrounding the downed command building.
Then they went in for a landing. The entire time, Dan held his breath, waiting for anti-aircraft fire of some sort. The Viceroy’s Pride had spellshields capable of deflecting one or two spellcannon shots, but a missile or dedicated high-caliber fire would likely mean that he’d have to teleport the voidship away in a hurry.
The ship touched down without incident, and Dan breathed a sigh of relief. The Viceroy’s landing struts rested uneasily in remains of the bombed-out office building, the front of the ship jutting out into the nearby boulevard. The fore cargo bay slammed open, and through Jennifer’s eyes, he watched the Bradleys drive out onto the street, twelve armored suits following them.
That was Dan’s cue. He removed his hands from the control crystal and jogged toward the ship’s exit. Overhead, he heard the roar of the drones looking for a place to land, their munitions expended. The plan called for them to be retrieved after the battle, but the Viceroy’s Pride simply didn’t have a way to reload and launch them.
Exiting the front ramp, Dan saw the Bradleys blocking off the street access to their landing site. Abe and two other soldiers in power armor stood watch, their presence warding off the curious or brave while the remainder of the team used their enhanced strength to sift through the building’s remains. Dan didn’t really expect to find Bowman’s remains, but it would certainly be helpful in getting his soldiers to stand down if it happened.
A man jogged up to them, causing Dan to tense for a second before recognizing him as one of the defectors. He flashed a quick salute before addressing Abe and Dan.
“I think you got him.” The man nodded toward the smoldering wreckage of the building. “He leaves during the day sometimes, but more and more, they bring everything to him. I haven’t seen any motorcades leaving since he came back after dinner last night. Unless Bowman learned how to fly and didn’t tell anyone, he was in the building when you brought it down.”
“How are the others doing?” Abe continued scanning their surroundings.
“Last I heard, they were talking with a lot of noncoms.” The man shrugged. “Bowman got rid of most of the officers, replaced them with his own stooges. Most of them never actually served on the front line. A bunch of rear-echelon admin types with delusions of grandeur. Nobody likes them, but they weren’t all that likely to question him, and that’s all Bowman was looking for.”
“Do you think they’re going to be able to convince them to defect?” Dan interjected, somewhat nervously eyeing up his small unit. True, they’d simply be able to fly away, if this didn’t work out, but they’d sunk a lot of resources into this operation. He wasn’t exactly keen to abandon everything if they could help it.
“I guess we’ll find out,” the soldier responded, unhelpfully. “Bowman had them all scared about acting without his orders, so I wouldn’t expect anything organized for some time. But your little light show was pretty impressive. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the nearer units sent out teams to figure out what’s going on.”
Almost on cue, the heavy guns from the Bradleys opened up with a series of dull, staccato thuds.
