Dan fumed in the Viceroy’s engine room. They’d have to find and train another spatial mage sooner or later, because he was absolutely sick of being sidelined during important battles. The Viceroy could fly and fire its main cannon without him, but a voidship without its teleportation drive was like a fencer with a baseball bat. It still might be a threat, but it was out of its element and neutered.
Technically, even with modern technology, shooting a voidship was incredibly hard. Jennifer had practiced against dud missiles fired from the reapers, but she was generally able to spot incoming fire and initiate a short jump to break the weapons’ lock. Usually a kilometer was enough to scramble the internal sensors on a guided weapon and evade it entirely.
The technique wasn’t as useful against fighters or cannons. It’s pretty hard to identify an incoming slug, after all. That said, the ship’s spellshields could hold their own against sporadic hits.
The last two weeks had been almost nothing but operating the Viceroy, silently shipping out large portions of their armed forces to camouflaged bases they’d set up outside of San Francisco. Any downtime while the ground troops were getting organized was devoted to practicing with the reapers, both launching them in flight and dodging incoming attacks from the drones.
By the time the operation was ready to commence, Dan wasn’t entirely sure he’d trust the Viceroy up against a Tellask voidship, but it’d be more than enough to dance circles around Peter Best, so long as they could keep his jets on the ground.
And that’s where the waiting came in. They’d landed their ship in the country, just outside the city limits, an easy jump to San Francisco’s airspace. Next to them, around three hundred infantry milled around humvees and infantry fighting vehicles, waiting for the call to rush into the city.
Perhaps more importantly, the makeshift base contained one of the four reaper launch sites positioned around the outside of the metro area. It had taken some work, both the magical and the sweaty kind, to create a makeshift airstrip out of the hardened dirt of the countryside, but the ex-Army engineers that had been in charge of its construction assured Dan that it’d launch the reapers.
He looked back to the video feed they’d set up in engineering. Even if Dan couldn’t be on the bridge, he insisted on being kept in the loop. At the moment, it was playing footage from the cameras on Abe and his team. Ordinarily, they’d be too concerned with the footage getting intercepted to stream the attack, but with Tatiana, information security was a bit of a joke.
According to her, it took less than five percent of her processing power to keep the feed absolutely clear of any outside interference. Dan took her word for it. The AI might not have the best attitude, but her speed and skill with computer networks were second to none.
On the screen, Abe and his two companions finished setting the last of the charges. They’d managed to infiltrate the airfield without being noticed by anyone of importance. Tatiana’s help in shutting down the cameras and alarms connected to the airfield’s network certainly helped on that front.
Even with the AI’s electronic help, Best had a fair number of guards patrolling the place, a good number of which were now dead and hidden out of sight. The infiltrators used a fair amount of magic to eliminate the guards silently, most notoriously Abe strangling a pair of guards with chains of force magic from above, but almost half of the kills were good, old-fashioned stealth.
Before any of Abe’s team gained access to magic, they’d served years in the special forces completing similar missions across South America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Frankly, it was a bit disconcerting to watch someone as friendly and jocular as Abe turn into a silent and efficient death machine. His entire team operated wordlessly. Perhaps they were using the communication function of the System, but it was also entirely possible that they just knew what to do and where to be after years of working together.
Silently, Abe nodded at his companions, and they scurried out of the airfield. They’d been sent in with sixty shaped charges and placed all of them. Every grounded vessel had at least one explosive attached to it with the remainder reserved for fuel, ammunition, and any important-looking electronics. Their squad didn’t have enough firepower to turn the base into a crater, but they were going to ensure that nothing could use it for at least the next month.
Dan watched the feed for fifteen tense minutes as Abe snuck into the city proper. Finally, his team and him met at a predetermined parking garage. Deep in the basement of the garage, hopefully protected from enemy sight and gunfire by several tons of concrete, Abe took off the camera mounted on his helmet and turned it around so his viewers could see his face.
“Operation complete.” Abe spoke clearly but with a tired smile. “We will be blowing the airfield in ten seconds. Operation Valiant Bear is a go.”
Dan rolled his eyes, regretting once again the idiotic name he’d let Will talk him into.
“Satellite confirmation,” Tatiana replied after a lengthy pause. “The airfield has exploded and is currently wreathed in smoke. If Best has airplanes, they’re not coming from there.”
Dan took a deep breath before placing his hand on the beacon. In a second, he was about to set everything in motion, and for once, he wouldn’t be on the ground to fix things. It was a strange feeling. He wasn’t sure he liked it.
“Teleporting,” he announced, counting on Tatiana to project his voice to those that needed to hear him. After waiting for a breath, he inserted his mana into the drive.
They flashed into being above downtown San Francisco. The feed in front of Dan switched to the cameras and audio recorders hastily slapped onto the outside of the ship’s hull. It was far from a permanent solution, but Jennifer rightly balked at trying to captain the ship solely via what she could see through the hardened glass of the bridge.
Below them, sirens were just beginning to sound as Best’s private military realized that the airfield had been attacked. The average people were still going about their day, most riding bicycles due to the gasoline shortages plaguing the country.
The lights on the Viceroy dimmed as a lance of white-hot fire erupted from the ship’s bow and slammed into City Hall. Unfortunately, Best wasn’t as much a creature of habit as Bowman. They weren’t able to tell exactly where their adversary was holed up, but the city’s administrative center was a key hub for organizing and formulating a response. In all likelihood, they hadn’t killed their adversary, but the surprise attack crippled his response.
The Viceroy’s Pride shuddered as the aft cargo bay began launching drones. Already, they were visible in the cameras lining the ship as they began sailing off toward their predetermined targets.
They rotated silently in the air as the hovering vessel moved toward a nearby cell phone tower. It’d be a hassle to erect another one after they took the city, but anything that disrupted the ability of Best’s troops to communicate was a net plus to the invasion. A couple seconds later, the mana forges kicked into overdrive, and another blast of energy slipped out from the ship and erased the target.
With a surge of his mana, Dan teleported the ship almost a mile up into the air. Immediately, they lost sight of the city as the weak cameras strapped to the ship struggled to show anything more than a stretch of metal and water below them. Distantly, Dan noted the ant-like convoys of infantry and armored vehicles as they began to pour into the city, drones covering them from overhead.
Periodically, an explosion would draw his attention as a reaper took out an ammunition depot, barracks, or road block. After a minute or so of letting the mana forges recharge whatever passed for the voidship’s capacitors, Dan received a request to jump the ship back into fray over a heavily fortified series of roadblocks and machine gun nests that were holding back Will’s advance.
Reality melted away, and the Viceroy was only a couple hundred feet over the battlefield. Two walls of sandbags and concrete lined the interstate as teams of Best’s conventional troops fired machine guns and mortars at the advancing column. Defending suits of powered armor clomped from one abandoned car to another, firing fifty-caliber repeaters and igniting flamethrowers at the advancing soldiers.
At least one direct attack on the corridor had clearly already been defeated. Two suits of powered armor burned next to a humvee, and Dan could only hope that the armor belonged to the enemy. As for the humvee? Hopefully, the infantry managed to abandon it before the powered armor took it down. Their forces needed them to get to the battle in a timely fashion, but actually using them in combat against powered armor didn’t seem like the best idea. After all, only the infantry fighting vehicles and tanks carried enchantments. A couple bursts of the heavier-caliber weapons on a suit and a splash from a flamethrower, and the vehicles quickly became death traps.
The Viceroy opened fire, a pulse of energy tracing down one side of the interstate, flash-melting flesh and concrete alike. For a second, both sides stopped firing, staring at the destruction wrought by the beam weapon in shock. Spell cannons were meant for voidships to duel each other. Rarely were they used on a target not covered in protective layers of spellshields. Their effect against unprotected infantry was grisly at best.
The defenders opened fire on the Viceroy. Some of the fifty-calibers began inflicting a noticeable drain on the spellshields, but nothing that it would need to worry about immediately. Jennifer rotated the ship. It seemed to move at glacial speeds, bringing new and fresh shield banks to bear as the bow of the ship began lining up on the other fortified position.
Best’s troops ran. Well, the infantry ran. The suits couldn’t move fast enough, and they died as a small sun blossomed in the middle of their formation, ripping a jagged line deep into the fortifications.
The audio began to pick up the sound of cheers from the troops below them as they pushed past the barricades and into the city proper. From there, it’d be street-to-street fighting as they tried to seize the laboratories and factories that were the heart of Best’s operation.
Already, reports were trickling in. The reapers managed to destroy most of the powered armor barracks, preventing Best’s troops from reporting to their armor. They didn’t get everyone; there were still handfuls of armored troops putting up resistance, but by and large, the drones and Bradleys were making short work of them whenever they dared to step out into the open.
There was still plenty of work to do. Dealing with powered armor in enclosed places sounded like messy and painful work, but it was clear that they’d broken the back of Best’s forces. The city would fall, given enough time. The only question was whether they’d be able to capture Peter Best with it.
The drones were on their way back to the impromptu landing strips to rearm with another load of missiles. The infantry was in for a long night, and they’d need air support if they managed to flush any of the armored suits out of cover.
Dan sat down and closed his eyes as Jennifer took the Viceroy’s Pride into a slow course, circling the city. At this point, all he could do was hope for the best.
