by M. D. Cooper
Without their firepower and fortitude, the squishies would be doomed.
Kelly’s voice was sullen.
The women fell silent for a few minutes as they picked their way along the hillside, just a few meters below the ridge, at the military crest. Rika knew what the women all feared, what made them lash out at times. They worried that the best-case scenario was that after the war, the military would remove their compliance chips and military hardware, but that would be all. They’d face a lifetime of slinging cargo in some shit station, saving credits for repairs, power, and NutriPaste.
Rika finally said, desperate to think of something happy.
Kelly said wistfully.
Kelly turned the nearly featureless oval that was her head to look back at Rika—an unnecessary gesture since their mods allowed the women to all see in every direction at once.
Rika nodded.
The three women fell silent once more, and Rika did her best to push all thoughts of ‘the world’ from her mind.
This was one area where she learned that the military knew what they were talking about. As much as she hated to, when it came to combat, it was best to think of herself as a machine. She was capabilities and tactics. She was cold steel and death. Her right arm was her sword, and her thick armor was her shield. She would complete her objectives and return alive.
They reached a small depression in the ridgeline, a saddle where some small scrubby bushes grew, and Silva held up her right hand in a fist.
They had all been through VR sims of the terrain on the other side of the ridge, they knew its features by heart; one thing the three women had learned from their prior engagements was that what the VR showed was someone else’s impression of what was important.
Little details always seemed to be off, and those little details made all the difference on the ground.
It could be something as small as a bush, or the degree to which a tree’s limbs bent in a wind, how much dust was on the ground for the enemy to kick up.… Anything could make the difference between coming back, and being just another rotting corpse on the battlefield.
Silva took a position on the left side of the saddle, Kelly on the right, and Rika crouched low behind a boulder in the middle.
Below them, stretching off into the west, was a broad plain. It was shrouded in early morning shadow, the ridge still obscuring the growing light of Parson, the system’s star, which rose behind them in the east. Wind rushed across the dry plain, creating small dunes and eddies of dry earth as it whipped around stray rock outcroppings and a few stunted trees.
A road—little more than a single lane of packed dirt—twisted its way toward the ridgeline from the west before running alongside it for a few kilometers.
It was a wide-open killbox.
She wondered why the Nietzscheans would travel on the west side of the ridge, and not in the hill country to the east. Military strategy was not something they taught much of during her indoctrination, but Rika supposed that if you were worried about an ambush—and everyone was always worried about ambushes—having just one ridgeline looming over you was better than two.
Even so, two kilometers to the north, the road the enemy was traveling on crossed into the hills, and that was where the bulk of Alpha Company would hit them.
Kelly said, and passed the coordinates over the Link to the other members of team Hammerfall.
Rika cycled her vision to a higher level of magnification and saw a thin cloud of dust rising off the plain.
Rika nodded her assent and slipped out of the saddle, back to the eastern side of the ridge.
She was glad the fleets were holding back. Naera was the last terrestrial world that the Genevians held in the Parson System. If they lost it, it was probable that the entire system would fall to the Nietzscheans in a matter of weeks. The Niets won in space more often than not, which meant that if ships showed up to rain starfire, it would probably come down on the Genevians.
The Niets were fierce warriors on the ground, as well. When it came down to squishie versus squishie, they tended to win. However, now that the Genevians were employing mech-meat, the tables had turned, and the Genevians were seeing more victories than losses when the fighting happened dirtside.
Still, all too often, the ground forces would see their victory rendered meaningless by the fleets falling back and abandoning whatever territory they had secured. Or an orbital strike from the Niets would render the victory moot—like what had happened to Bravo Company.
Ahead, Rika spotted a series of granite outcroppings, something that could offer real cover if the enemy spotted her and fired back. Who was she kidding? When the enemy spotted her and fired back.
She lay prone and extended her right arm over the top of a low slab of green granite. She didn’t need her head to be above the rock; she could ‘see’ through the rifle’s optical sights withou
t exposing anything more than the weapon’s barrel.
Rika took another look at the enemy’s rate of travel, and estimated that they would pass in front of her in five minutes, and then reach Bravo Company’s ambush site two minutes later.
She signaled her passel of remote drones to deploy around her, directing them a hundred meters up and down the ridge, using them as extra eyes to make sure no one would sneak up on her. They also facilitated lower EM level comms with the rest of Hammerfall. She didn’t need to send a message the half kilometer to Silva—only just as far as the closest drone, relaying comms through short hops using tightbeam signals.
Over the next minute, as the enemy grew closer, she could make out more of their formation through the cloud of dust they kicked up. Two lumbering figures were visible through the haze, and Rika realized they were mechs—one at the fore, the other at the rear of the column.
Everything she knew said the Nietzscheans despised mechs; their true warrior code would never allow any of them to submit such an indignity. Perhaps their continual losses on the ground to the Genevian mechs had made them reconsider.
No…she thought as a gust of wind blew the dust away from the mech at the front of the enemy column. That was no Nietzschean mech; it was Genevian. The enemy, it seemed, had no compunctions about using captured Genevians. Though Rika supposed that it fit with their master-slave morality. If the Genevians were willing to create a slave class, the Nietzscheans would be more than happy to make use of it.
Rika looked at the mech and compared its buildout to what she knew of other models the Genevian military had produced. It most closely resembled a K1R, though there were a few alterations to suit Nietzschean weaponry.
Poor bastards, Rika thought with a shake of her head as she watched the K1R mech lumbering at the head of the column. We’re just hardware in this fight. Whoever picks us up off the ground gets to pull our trigger.
None of the women spoke further as the column approached and began to pass below the ridge, just three hundred meters down the slope, and another half-klick out on the plain. Roughly seven hundred meters as the projectile—or beam—flew.
Silva replied.
None of those weapons would take down a K1R before it knew where you were. Electron beams would do the best, but those drew a straight, blue-white bolt of lightning between the weapon and the target—a big arrow telling the enemy where to shoot.
They also heavily sapped the tiny bottle of antimatter each of the three women carried within their torsos. When that antimatter bottle ran dry, they would be down to superconductor batteries, and those wouldn’t power their armor or weapons for long.
If the fleet was nearby, they could beam energy down to their mechs, but they all knew that wasn’t going to happen. They’d have to take down the K1Rs the old-fashioned way.
A swath of enemy drones flew up over the ridge, scanning the area for enemies, and Rika clenched her jaw—or at least the neural feedback from her augmentations told her she was clenching her jaw—praying that her active camouflage would hide her from the prying eyes above.
The enemy didn’t halt their march, and she knew she was safe for the moment. Down on the plain, the head of the column had almost reached the pass into the hills. Rika forced her breathing to slow as she waited for the opening salvos, which would be the sound of Alpha Company’s SAWs opening up on the K1R in the lead.
Rika took a moment to wonder, now that they had their own mechs, if the Nietzscheans did have Nutri-Stations. Maybe their paste was better. Though Rika and Silva needled Kelly about it, she was right; half the time they all felt ill after ‘eating’.
Her momentary distraction ended as the thundering CRACK-CRACK-CRACK of the SAWs echoed through the hills, and Rika wasted no time opening fire on the K1R in the rear with her GNR-41B sniper rifle.
She used its kinetic projectile firing mode and mentally squeezed the trigger. The weapon launched a quintet of 22cm projectiles that burst from its muzzle with little more than a soft snap. The rounds flew across the thousand meters to her target in three tenths of a second, striking the target with a combined 1.5 billion joules of kinetic energy.
She had aimed for the joint where the K1R’s right leg attached to its torso, but the shot missed, striking the mech’s thigh instead. The beast of a machine barely flinched as the rounds struck it, and it turned toward her just as it was hit by Kelly’s and Silva’s rounds.
Kelly’s shots hit the mech in the upper ‘chest’, smashing one of its sensor nodules, while Silva’s traced a line down its torso; one lucky round hitting the K1R’s hip joint, though it did not appear to sustain any noticeable damage.
The K1R turned and aimed both its weapons at the hillside. It took a moment to triangulate the origin of the incoming projectiles before firing three shots from its 50mm cannon. Depleted uranium rods burst from sabots and screamed through the dawn air, then slammed into the top of the ridge.
The women of team Hammerfall had not stuck around to see if their cover could withstand those rounds, and were well below the top of the ridgeline, on the move to new positions when they hit.
Rika released another passel of drones, these ones larger and equipped with lasers. They fired at the enemy surveillance drones, and while she took up a new position, automated aerial combat took place above her.
She pulled the feed from her first batch of drones, and saw that the enemy column had stopped. The K1R was spraying the hillside with covering fire as Nietzschean troops in fully powered battle armor leapt out of the transports.
Rika sent affirmation back to her teammate. Soldiers in full armor didn�
�t need transports. They could run as fast as the trucks could drive, faster if they had jump-jets. One on one, the Nietzscheans weren’t a match for the SMI-2s of team Hammerfall, but they were still a force to be reckoned with—especially when there were three hundred of them.
She aligned it with the K1R’s torso, right where two of the armor plates overlapped, hoping to slip the beam in for a kill shot.
She fired, and for a fraction of a second, a laser lanced between her rifle and the target, superheating the air and opening a path for the electrons; then the beam fired. A blue-white bolt of lightning described a straight line between Rika and the K1R mech, and a nimbus haze of cerenkov radiation glowed around the beam—a result, she was told, of the electrons scattering as they collided with the atoms in the air.
The K1R was at the edge of the beam’s effective range, but a stream of electrons traveling close to the speed of light still packed a huge punch, even if it spread out over few centimeters before it hit the target.
Her shot was true, and the beam hit where the armor overlapped in a blinding flash of light, as bolts of lightning arched through the air around the K1R. A second later, Kelly fired her electron beam as well, hitting the same spot on the K1R, and their combined strikes burned a hole through the first layer of ablative plating.
As an added bonus, the radiation showering off the mech caused the Nietzscheans nearby to back away to a safe distance. They bunched up, and down the ridgeline, Silva fired her own electron beam into their midst, scattering them once more.
In response to their attack, the K1R fired a single missile from the launcher on its back. It flew high overhead, almost disappearing from view, before it turned and streaked down from the heavens toward the positions Rika and Kelly had vacated after firing their electron beams.