Traveller Vignette 051

Four clusterbombs dropped free of my fighter, scattering anti-personnel submunitions, and the Saruthi field hospital disappeared in a crackling wave of explosions behind me. It'd been clearly marked with red crosses, showing how little the Saruthi understood what was coming. We'd all seen the pictures of Saruthi executing whole hospitals of our wounded during the invasion, to clear space for their own casualties. Besides, given that we planned to kill every Saruthi soldier on the planet, waiting for wounded ones to heal before executing them seemed both inefficient and hypocritical.

I saw the flash of multiple SAM launches, as Saruthi launch controllers let their anger get the better of their judgement, and my threat warning receivers all went off together. I pointed the interface fighter straight up, hit the afterburners, and it climbed for altitude like a homesick angel. I couldn't outrun the missiles, but I didn't have to. The sky flickered briefly as DEW-beams from one of the cruisers in low orbit vaporised one missile, then another.

More directed energy pulses flicker-snapped at the ground, taking out the launch vehicles that had revealed themselves to take a shot at me. The fuel gauge was dropping alarmingly, and I slid the throttles back to shut down the afterburners. There was a tanker already on station to refuel my fighter before the long climb back to the carrier, but no pilot lets her fuel state get lower than she had to.

I'd chalked “For my grandmother” on the cluster bombs before drop-launching from the Vengeance. Most of the ordnance on her flight decks had similar messages; the generations who'd worked and sacrificed to put us here would never know, but we remembered them.

Command reckoned bombing a hospital would only get the Saruthi mad enough to shoot back this once, but estimated we'd get at least three SAM launchers, and every one we killed now was one less shooting at the landing boats when the first waves dropped in a couple of days....

(Author's note - This is a follow-on from Vignette 043, where we saw a world devastated by the Saruthi invasion and planning revenge. This is some time later, and the original victims have launched their war of revenge. Characters might be fighting in the war (on either side), running guns or medical supplies to the Saruthi, or working as diplomats to convince the original victims that the people they are now attacking might not even have been born when the things they are seeking to avenge were done)