“So, it’s like orchestrating a pickup basketball game?”
Jam slithered under another materializing branch. “Sort of. He plans too, of course, but preparation is key.”
Ping could sense Jam studying her as they trotted along, not even glancing at the roots upon which Ping kept narrowly avoiding breaking an ankle. Jam finished, “Preparation you could do, I think.”
Ping gave that some thought. She flashed a wide grin, teeth shining in the moonlight. “Oh, yeah, baby. Could I do some preparation!”
They ran silently as she contemplated increasingly more heroic possibilities for wartime prep, until she started having ideas that would require the entire defense budget of the United States.
Time to return to current reality. Ping grumbled, “Any guess how long it will take them to figure out I diddled their fuel? Shura didn’t say anything to me about how easy it would be to figure it out if they started seriously looking.” She continued morosely, “And if they figure it out, they’ll probably warn the airbase to check their avgas, too.”
Jam chuckled. Before finishing their run in companionable silence, her last words were, “Oh, I wouldn’t worry about the reports from the truck drivers too much. I can just hear their report now.”
Colonel Suen stared at the four soldiers standing stiffly at attention. “You saw Empress Ping,” he stated again in disbelief. “You really want to stick with that story?”
The men, who had been found crawling around like drunkards after a binge, sweated some more. The one with the swollen face, presumably from banging into the truck in his drunken stupor, answered with reluctant certainty. “Yes, sir! Empress Ping, sir!” He continued with less certainty, “I understand how crazy that sounds, sir. But I saw her.”
The doctor at the other end of the row of men clicked off the flashlight he had used to study their pupils and inspect their skin. “It does look like they got jabbed with needles.” He continued doubtfully, “Or maybe stung. It doesn’t look like any sting I’ve ever seen, but the information I have on those hornets isn’t like anything I’ve ever seen, either.”
The colonel fixed the doctor with a harsh stare. “And the blood tests?”
“No alcohol. Rohypnol. The stuff the hornets inject, according to the reports.” After a pause, he added, “And the men’s behavior was more in line with being drugged with that as well.”
Suen threw up his hands. “So, the most sensible explanation is that a few of those engineered hornets wandered into our camp and nailed a group of men playing cards, who then hallucinated seeing the Benin empress before one of them stumbled into the truck and broke his face. Really?”
The doctor grimaced. “Sounds crazy to me too, but it fits the facts better than any other explanation.”
Suen was silent for a while. “Just on the off chance they actually saw something, even if it wasn’t an empress, I’ll have the trucks checked out.”
The doctor shrugged. “No reason not to.”
But the trucks all passed inspection with flying colors, and the gas seemed fine. As Shura could have told them if she were there, the bacteria would not become noticeable until they had doubled in number a few times.
So the battalion refueled in the morning and headed onward toward its destination.
The President for the Duration finished making his announcement. “The CEO of GS is being arrested as we speak. After maneuvering the state of California into a financial disaster last year, GS is now taking windfall profits in this time of crisis. I’ll be sending Larry Winters to a SuperMax prison for profiteering in a national emergency.”
One of the reporters asked an obvious question. “Why didn’t you arrest him on your first day in office?”
The President thought this was a good question indeed, one for which he didn’t have a good answer. Except…”Thank you for the question. Let’s be honest, on the day I arrived, the shenanigans of New York financial firms were not the most important problem we faced. As you’ll remember, an attempt at a rebellion had begun, with a first strategic initiative of destroying Hollywood. I had to prioritize.” He paused to make a joke. “With Hollywood under threat, you probably wouldn’t have even bothered to cover the arrest of a mere greedy CEO.”
That got a good laugh.
Lucy Palmer brought the laughter to a halt. “Excuse me, Mr. President, but I just talked to someone on the BrainTrust spaceport ship outside New York. They say Larry took a rocket before dawn. Do you have more current information?”
The President glared at her, then finally ground out, “I will get back to everyone when I have the latest update. But no matter what, do not fear. Larry Winters cannot escape the long arm of the law. At least, not under this administration.”
Ping had earlier wondered whether they would try to power the army with a beta-battery-carrying truck or with lasers. In the end, they did both.
Ping surveyed the scene through her F35 virtual immersion helmet, now showing a view generated by a pair of new stealth drones that hung over Rubinelle’s army’s position. A handful of bots connected the segments of the large dish carried in their largest electric-powered truck, while a handful of the electric-powered drones added to their fleet floated down and hooked up to the second-largest truck filled with beta batteries.
Once the dish had been assembled and Matt’s spaceborne lasers had lit it up, all the drones except Ping’s surveillance machines landed to suck up power like puppies receiving milk from their mothers.
Gleb paced by the recharging drones, muttering, “If they see us, we’re toast.”
Rubinelle held up her hand to shield her eyes from the sun’s glare as she scanned the air. “If they try to toast us, Toni assures us she’ll have the advantage. Even as we die, their fighters shall meet a fiery doom.”
Jam shook her head. “I’d be just as happy to still be alive to watch the fighters’ fiery doom if you don’t mind.” She looked to the west, where their theoretical fighter cover was not visible. “Ping, Toni, I sure hope you’ve got this covered.”
Ciara on board the Mount Parnassus interrupted. “Relax. Oziegbe’s got eyes on the fighters at the airfield.” Oziegbe had taken another of the handful of stealth copters with the Prometheus fleet to keep an eye on Murtala Airport. He was at the limit of his range—the fleet had moved a considerable distance to the west to avoid being too tempting a target for the Chinese—but he could loiter long enough to serve as early warning during this last recharge of the army units before the assault.
Shura, sitting next to Ciara, couldn’t help adding, with a hint of glee, “Soon you won’t have to watch the fighters. It won’t be long before they drop out of the sky. It should be very cool.”
Ping let her own fighter flow through a lazy barrel roll as she loitered close to Novo Porto. “If Shura’s goop kills all the fighters, I’m going to be very disappointed. I need five kills to be an ace, right, Toni?”
Toni chimed in, “Don’t forget, I still need one, too.”
Marcos flew the other stealth copter, just west of their army’s staging area. Diric sat beside him, once again wearing the BrainTrust virtual immersion helmet as he managed the drones in their feeding and return to the sky. “And that about wraps up the recharging, guys. Time to go.” As the bots took down the dish, the racecars took off, followed by trucks filled with Amazons.
Colonel Suen watched a half-dozen J20s punch through the sky as they chased the two F35s back to Benin once more. The enemy fighters had been making multiple sorties every day. They circled beyond the range of his SAMs, never committing to an attack, then fleeing as his fighters came into range.
The F35s were no longer stationed on the BrainTrust ships. His fighters had been following them into Benin, then losing them as they dived low into the ground clutter around Porto Novo. No satellites had managed to track them to their hiding place. None of this surprised him, really; an airplane that took off and landed vertically was much easier to hide than any of his jets.
Thi
s time, as his fighters broke off to return to base, something new happened.
One of the fighter pilots commed him. “Colonel, I see movement on your right flank.”
At last, the enemy was making a move!
Suen snapped out orders. Half his armor shifted to meet the enemy as his flanking scouts spotted a dozen of the peculiarly armored racecars bouncing over the terrain toward his formation. One of his scout’s jeeps got caught by a BT12-PGM AutoLauncher missile and blew sky high.
But two of his men with Red Arrow-12 anti-tank missiles hit the Benin racecars.
Suen arrived on the scene in his tank just in time to see the result when the second missile hit. As he had surmised, the armor that had completely stymied the Nigerian technicals failed utterly in the face of the shaped-charge warheads on his men’s anti-tank missiles. Both of the cars his men hit disintegrated.
Then his tanks engaged the cars. Once again, it was a ridiculous matchup. One of the Benin vehicles launched a salvo of missiles at his lead tank. The tank replied with 125mm HEAT rounds for all the cars in range. They obliterated the targets.
The Benin missiles struck home against the T96, to no avail; the reactive armor exploded outward, destroying the shaped charges of the Benin warheads.
But the battle was not over. The surviving racecars sped west, staying just beyond the range of Suen’s tanks. He quickly deduced their new plan. “They’re after the fuel trucks! Defensive positions, everyone!”
Those orders were almost irrelevant. He’d anticipated a strike against his fuel supply and given orders for their defense at the very start of the campaign. Men with Red Arrows were already in position to take out the Benin attackers before they could target the trucks, and the two tanks he’d assigned as rear guard moved slightly to get better positions.
Several more of his jeeps died in the flurry of enemy missile launches. One missile headed straight toward a fuel truck, but the truck was just out of range, and the missile plowed into the ground before reaching its destination.
The racecars raced but didn’t stand a chance. Red Arrows and HEAT rounds competed to see which would take out each target. Soon nothing remained of the Benin force but smoldering wreckage.
Suen was starting to wonder what the point of all this had been when his Taian anti-aircraft launchers started firing. He followed the rocket trails with his eyes until he saw the targets.
Drones! Enough to use up all his surface to air missiles if he allowed it.
He’d risk the drones’ penetration to make sure he had enough missiles to ensure the F35s didn’t get an opening. “Halt fire!” He paused for a second. The fighters that had chased the F35s were already returning to base for refueling. “And send me more fighters!”
Over half the drones were gone. The rest hummed on their attack path. “Flying Crossbow squadrons, engage!”
A dozen of the man-portable anti-air missiles flew toward the drones. The Flying Crossbow missiles were too short-ranged and too slow to engage the enemy fighters, but against the drones, Suen anticipated excellent results.
At last, the colonel experienced disappointment. The drones hardly bothered with evasive maneuvers, but the Flying Crossbows seemed unable to lock on. They darted harmlessly past the drones.
And finally, the drones came in low. Brown balls fell from the sky.
The hornets had arrived, Colonel Suen realized.
He also realized that the enemy had suffered a timing failure. If the hornets had been released at the same time the racecars arrived, his men carrying missile launchers could have been incapacitated, and the racecars could have outrun his tanks and blown his fuel trucks to smithereens.
Suen relaxed. His enemies were human after all. In the face of a competent, prepared enemy, even they made mistakes.
He did not bother giving orders for the hornets. His men knew what to do.
Everything was going marvelously.
Rubinelle put down the videogame controller with which she’d been driving one of the doomed racecars. “That was quite exhilarating.”
Gleb chuckled as he put down his controller. “And much better than being in the car when it got blown up.”
Jam did not put her controller down since she was still directing the lone surviving vehicle from the assault. “Though let’s be honest—driving overweight race cars across open terrain is far from optimal.”
Rubinelle’s lieutenant countered this with her opinion. “I too found it delightful. Not as much fun as charging across the battlefield on a horse and beheading the enemy with a sword, but entertaining nonetheless.”
Rubinelle turned philosophical. “The techniques of warfare have moved on. I do not believe we’ll ever again have the kind of glorious, joyful battle our ancestors once knew.”
The lieutenant acknowledged this with a grunt. “Meanwhile, everything seems to be going splendidly,” she offered.
Jam stared at her. “I can’t believe you just said that.”
“Bombs away!” Diric called. “Now let’s see who’s right about what.”
The hornet nests plummeted to earth. Small clouds of insects emerged from each one.
But a widespread fog quickly obscured everything, including the hornets.
After a few seconds, Ciara exclaimed, “Aha! Told you so.”
Jam asked, “What’s happening? We can’t see a thing on the ground here.”
Ping, with her overhead view, groaned. “The fog the Chinese laid down is starting to disperse. I can sorta make out the Chinese soldiers.”
Gleb demanded, “And the hornets?”
Diric answered. “Not a sign of them. Shura, any idea what happened?”
Shura answered with some disappointment, “They flooded their camp with pesticide. DDT, probably. My hornets died almost instantly.” She continued after a pause, “I agreed with Ciara and Jam that they’d probably have a solution for the hornets, but I was expecting them to develop something like the cream we use to ward them off. I didn’t expect this.”
Gleb muttered approval of the enemy’s tactics. “Simple and brutally direct. Hey, Shura, any chance the DDT will kill some troops?”
Shura pouted. “Not toxic enough for people, darn it.”
Ping offered, “So it didn’t make any difference that we carefully didn’t time it right. We could have launched the hornets in sync with the attack, and we still wouldn’t have been able to hit their fuel trucks.”
Ciara remade a point from their earlier strategizing. “Still, we couldn’t be sure. We wanted them to think we want to kill their fuel supply. Now they’ll go even slower, being extra careful to protect the trucks, while Shura’s bacteria continue to eat away at all the vehicles’ innards.”
Shura complained. “It was still unnecessary. Their tanks should stop in a day or two anyway.”
Toni added a few words of military wisdom. “Better safe than sorry, just in case it takes a few days more than you expect, Shura.”
Rubinelle wrapped up. “In any event, let’s all take the rest of the day off. Next thing, as I understand the plan, is to accept their surrender.”
13
Unholy Alliance
Arise, or be forever fallen.
—John Milton, Paradise Lost
The first hint of trouble to reach Colonel Suen was the loss of a jeep. It coughed, sputtered, stopped, and started leaking gas. He left a couple of engineers to try to get it running again, and continued upstream toward the dam.
The following day he learned he had serious trouble. This time one of the fuel trucks coughed and sputtered. Then it started burning. Only the supreme skill and speed of his men prevented a much larger disaster. Without a prompt and heroic emergency response, the truck would have blown up and taken at least half the other fuel trucks with it.
The fuel they salvaged from the broken truck was quickly pumped into the other vehicles, and once again, Suen’s battalion moved forward.
The colonel did not expect to get very far before the next disaste
r struck, so when the tank on his far right flank ground to a halt, he accepted the news impassively.
Even as he climbed out of his tank, the two men he’d left behind to fix the first dead jeep came running up.
Suen turned to face them and hear the bad news.
One of the men saluted and held up a used water bottle with greenish-gold liquid inside. He poured some on his fingers. The liquid left behind a slimy residue. “The fuel is full of bacteria.”
Suen sighed. “All our fuel?”
The second man nodded. “Probably.”
The first man offered, “We might be able to filter the slime out.”
The second man held up his hand and continued apologetically, “But that won’t fix the big problem.”
At that moment, the sound of jet engines raged across the sky. Suen watched as four of his fighters surged into afterburner in another attempt to force the F35s to engage.
Then a peculiar thing happened to one of his fighters: the starboard engine started to glow from the middle and exploded from the inside out. The plane disintegrated in the ensuing moments.
The colonel addressed the two men with the slimy gasoline. “Let me guess what the big problem is. The bacteria has eaten the entire fuel system in every tank, jeep, and truck we have. Even if we had pristine gas, every vehicle we have would break down in the next day or so.”
The first man winced. “Sorry, sir.”
Suen continued to watch the sky. His three surviving fighters, watching their brother explode mysteriously, decided caution was the better part of valor for today, shut down the afterburners, and turned back.
So, of course, this was the moment when the Benin fighters decided to make a fight of it. They zipped through a tight turn and went to afterburner themselves.
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