by C H Gideon
Luckily, Styles had planned for that eventuality.
“Styles…” Jenkins drew a steadying breath. “Execute program Bloodmoon.”
“Program Bloodmoon, aye,” Styles acknowledged before raising Eclipse on the P2P. “Eclipse, this is Roy. Execute Bloodmoon. I say again: execute Bloodmoon.”
“Bloodmoon order confirmed,” Eclipse acknowledged, and all of Roy’s sensor feeds briefly went dark. “Blanket interference initiated,” Eclipse declared. “Uploading new targeting solutions throughout the battalion via chained P2P linkage.”
Precious seconds ticked by while missiles soared through the air. The battalion stood by, every man and woman on edge as the special operations mech, Eclipse, did what it did best.
Then the sensor fog suddenly disappeared, followed by Eclipse’s report. “All targeting systems slaved to Eclipse. Bloodmoon is online.”
“Copy that,” Jenkins cut in across the battalion-wide comm. link. “This is Roy. Re-engage anti-missile shield under pattern aegis six. I say again: aegis six.”
The acknowledgments flickered across Roy’s comm panel, and this time when the battalion unleashed its anti-missile arsenal, it did so with devastating effect.
Railguns struck missiles at an accuracy rate greater than ninety percent, while anti-missile rockets managed to clear the seventy percent mark. Hundreds of outbound rockets scrubbed their targets as the Jemmin sent up a second, larger wave of a hundred and fifty missiles in reply.
Jenkins had just played his last major card in authorizing Bloodmoon. By rebooting Eclipse’s entire computer system, he had relegated it to a purely support role from which it, and it alone, would provide live telemetry and targeting solutions to the rest of the battalion.
With a fresh, uncontaminated targeting computer, Eclipse could temporarily neutralize the Jemmin virus’s effects on Terran targeting systems. It wouldn’t take the Jemmin long to triangulate on Eclipse’s newfound importance, and when they learned of it, they would attack with a vengeance to once again neutralize the Terran missile shield.
But for those few seconds following Bloodmoon’s activation, Colonel Lee Jenkins couldn’t help but smile as Jemmin missiles were torn from the sky with clinical precision. The entire first wave was eliminated long before it could interfere with Xi’s bizarre attempt at diplomacy.
Sure enough, and quite a bit faster than Jenkins would have liked, the Jemmin responded to this latest shift in battlefield conditions.
“Two hundred Jemmin missiles inbound on HQ,” Styles reported urgently as a fresh volley of inbound ordnance appeared on the screen. Making little attempt to hide their position, the Jemmin authors of those missiles suddenly became visible on the screens.
“Authorize anti-personnel weapons to engage inbound missiles,” Jenkins ordered. “But under no circumstances are we to compromise Elvira’s shield.”
“Copy that, sir,” Styles acknowledged.
“Preacher, this is Roy.” Jenkins raised the company’s main missile-mech. “You are cleared to engage Jemmin targets at your discretion.”
“Preacher here,” the missile mech’s Jock acknowledged with relish, “spreadin’ the word.”
Missiles screamed out of Preacher’s launch tubes, locked onto a handful of distinct Jemmin targets that Eclipse’s ultra-powerful sensors were finally able to locate after the purge of its sensor computer.
The Jemmin targets scrambled, looking every bit like spooked rabbits as the precision projectiles hurtled toward them on low trajectories.
“Incoming!” Chaps called out before Roy was rocked by a Jemmin near-miss. A dozen missiles struck the icy field of the battalion’s new HQ, with two striking targets directly and the rest missing by less than five meters.
“Their targeting systems aren’t any better than ours,” Jenkins realized, as Eclipse and the anti-missile drones now hovering above HQ created a partially effective sensor barrier to Jemmin targeting systems.
“Not so tough now, are you?” Chaps sneered, sending SRMs streaking toward a fresh Jemmin target twenty-one kilometers from HQ. Roy’s chain guns whined on full-output, and they actually managed to snipe a pair of missiles a hundred meters above the surface. Their mid-air explosions showered HQ with shrapnel, some clattering off Roy’s topside. “I love it when it rains!” Chaps howled gleefully, turning Roy toward a fresh Jemmin signature as his previous flight of SRMs pulverized the twenty-one-kilometer target.
For the moment, the tide was in their favor, and Jenkins knew they needed to take as much advantage as possible.
Because if there was one thing he had learned in his career about momentum, it was that the pendulum never stopped swinging until the last enemy was off the board.
Podsy knew what he was about to do could get him court-martialed. There was no question. And frankly, he couldn’t blame them.
A firefight had just erupted on the surface, and it looked like this one would be for the whole kit and kaboodle. He had done a monumental amount of work on the Bonhoeffer to ensure a constant flow of supplies made its way planet-side, but he knew there was one more move he could make that might prove decisive.
Then again, it might blow up in his face. And not just his face, but in the face of everyone on the Bonhoeffer.
He had secretly coordinated with Styles to work up a program which, if introduced directly to the Bonhoeffer’s computer core, would do two things. First, it would confirm if the Jemmin had somehow managed to sneak their sensor virus into the Bonhoeffer’s systems. And second, if the Jemmin had achieved that unlikely feat, the upload would purge it just as it had done for Eclipse in preparation for Bloodmoon.
Of course, all of that sounded well enough until one realized that in order to upload the antivirus, one would need to directly insert it into the Bonhoeffer’s computer core. If it worked, it would permit the warship’s powerful sensors to easily locate the Jemmin forces on Shiva’s Wrath, enabling orbital strikes to eliminate them from the surface of that frozen world.
If it failed, it could potentially mean taking the Bonhoeffer’s entire sensor grid offline while the data techs worked to restore the system. Styles had been clear that the reboot process could take up to three hours, during which time the ship would be unable to contribute in any meaningful capacity.
So even the normally devil-may-care Podsy hesitated as he reached toward the control icon which would insert the antivirus into the Bonhoeffer’s systems. The best-case scenario was that it worked, the Jemmin suddenly appeared on the Bonhoeffer’s scanners, and they were eliminated without anyone tracing the insertion back to Podsy.
Fat chance of that. He smirked.
“Okay, Podsy…” He exhaled steadily. “Time to earn your keep.”
Striking the icon, he inserted the program into the Bonhoeffer’s computer core. At first, nothing seemed to happen, and he felt the pit of his stomach fall away in the ensuing ninety seconds.
During which time, absolutely nothing happened.
He laced his fingers behind his head and closed his eyes, wondering precisely how many days they’d keep him alive in the brig before they spaced him for mutiny and a dozen other charges.
The bitch of it was, he’d do it all again given the chance.
15
The Duel
Xi flattened Elvira to the ground just as the bug spat a bolt of blue plasma at her cockpit. The plasma struck her topside, gouging a red-hot, thirty-centimeter-deep groove that stretched a third of the mech’s length.
“You want to dance?” Xi growled, crab-walking and raising her stern to train the fifteens on the bug-thing. AP shells loaded into the fifteens, with both guns going green on her HUD as she lined up a shot. “Let’s dance.”
The shockwave of the deafening reports sent icy debris scattering in a rapidly-expanding disc. Both shells struck true, but neither pierced the thing’s robust hide.
“Fine, you like it rough?” she quipped, loading HE shells as she continued crab-walking in a clockwise pattern. “I can d
o rough.”
The bug spat another bolt of plasma that struck her front-left leg, slagging much of its armor but failing to damage the limb’s internal workings. Crab-cakes skittered out from beneath the thing’s bulbous form, and with single-minded purpose, the mobile grenades surged toward Elvira with chilling unity.
“On the way!” she barked, authoring another pair of reports from her fifteens. The HE shells struck home, one head-on and the other a near-miss that blew a three-meter-long gash open on the very top of the thing’s “back.”
Strangely, the head-on impact seemed not to have much effect. She loaded another pair of HE shells with the intention of putting the overgrown bug down. Hard.
She presented her left flank to the line of crab-cakes, raking up and through the tide of explosive drones-slash-creatures and causing more than half of them to explode on impact. No matter how good she aimed, a few snuck through and began latching onto her limbs, where they exploded with such intensity that plumes of steam wafted up around her mech.
Her board registered a pair of the bizarre, mortar-like projectiles, and she was unable to re-train her guns before they struck near her stern. Warning lights sprang to life, indicating her right fifteen had suffered severe damage to its aiming mechanism. Snarling in frustration, she removed that gun’s shell and quickly fired the left gun’s HE round, where it exploded with a violent crack against the bug-thing’s carapace.
“Come on,” she muttered, “give it up. You’re tough, I’m tough, everybody’s tough. Let’s make nice and grab some tacos—”
Another bolt of plasma fire struck her, this time hitting the left fifteen and causing similar warning alarms to sound.
“Lu,” she snapped, “see if you can do something about Righty’s aiming mech.”
“Yes, Captain,” he acknowledged.
“Blinky,” she continued, increasing her lateral speed as her chain guns tore deep divots in the icy shell of Shiva’s Wrath while steadily picking off the crab-cakes, “I need you to remove the safety interlocks on the primary drive hydraulics.”
That last order was one of the many reasons she had switched Lu and Blinky for this particular op. She expected Lu would argue, or at least delay carrying out such an order, but Staubach was ever-eager and would likely not hesitate to follow such a dangerous command.
True to form, Blinky replied, “Safety interlocks disengaged. Increasing system pressure to one-hundred-twenty-percent of maximum.”
“That’ll do,” she grunted, careful not to overdrive the suddenly super-powered ambulatory system. “All right…” she muttered as the tide of crab-cakes drew steadily nearer, during which time she waited for the opportune moment to mute her chain guns. “Hang on!” she yelled when that moment arrived.
She cut her chain guns and, using Elvira’s briefly super-powered legs, jumped her mech a full two meters off the ground before bringing it back down with precisely the desired effect.
Every crab-cake within thirty meters of her position exploded when a chain reaction took place as a few of the nearest crab-cakes were crushed by her mech’s legs. Their explosions rippled down the line of encroaching critters, killing at least three-quarters of them in the most satisfying version of the domino effect that Xi had ever instigated.
She howled with delight, re-lighting her chain guns and tearing into the few remaining grenade bugs with surgical precision.
It wasn’t until she had cleared the ground of the destructive little drones that she realized how bad the damage to her drive system was. Three of her legs were seriously damaged, with Leg Two knocked completely offline.
Gritting her teeth in irritation, she called, “Blinky, I need you to get Two Leg back online.”
“Working on it, Captain. Give me twenty seconds,” Staubach acknowledged, neither frantic nor muted in his tone. He was proving himself worthy of full-time assignment as a Wrench with his combination of a steady hand and eager demeanor.
“How’s that gun coming, Lu?” Xi asked as she prepared to fire SRMs at the wounded bug-thing, which circled clockwise opposite her position on an invisible circle nearly a hundred meters across.
“Right gun’s out, Captain,” Lu replied, his voice strained. “Left gun’s…questionable. Give me thirty seconds.”
“We might not have it.” She grimaced, recoiling in sudden surprise when the bug-thing shuddered.
She narrowed her eyes as its chitinous plates began to fall away one by one until something entirely different took shape beneath.
“Oh, you have got to be fucking kidding…” she swore, firing all of her SRMs simultaneously as the bug-thing split in two smaller creatures. One of them slithered out like some kind of centipede, complete with a pair of horn-like apparatuses at its head and a long, articulated spike at its tail.
The other unfurled yellow, wasp-like wings from a slender, teardrop-shaped body and took to the sky.
The SRMs destroyed what was left of the original creature’s hide, and the shrapnel thrown off by the explosions struck both the crawler and flyer. Surprisingly, neither seemed deterred by the impacts even though each began dripping greenish-blue liquid onto the ice.
The flyer shot forward as a rocket-like flame erupted from its rear, propelling it faster than any creature its size had a right to fly. She swept her chain guns up to intercept, but it simply moved too fast for her to be able to do more than rip a dozen holes in its wings before it cleared her firing arcs.
Xi began loading anti-missile rockets into her launchers, but no sooner had she issued the command than both launcher mechanisms registered catastrophic warning alarms as the flying thing dropped some sort of incendiary devices onto Elvira’s stern.
A bloodcurdling scream pierced her skull, and she immediately knew what had happened: caught in the tiny crawlspace beneath the left gun, Lu had just been burned by whatever the flyer had dropped on her.
“Blinky,” she yelled, “get him out of there ASAP!”
“Already on it,” Samuels unexpectedly replied. And if the reporter’s voice was filled with abject terror, Xi would die before confirming it. Not now. Not ever. For all her flaws, Samuels had answered the call without hesitation during this deployment. She had earned respect the hard way.
“Good work, Samuels,” Xi acknowledged grimly, turning and raking the meter-tall, three-meter-wide, and ten-meter-long centipede-looking thing with her right flank chain guns.
She struck true with over half of her rounds, but somehow none of her slugs pierced its skin. It would have taken a mech with fifteen centimeters of solid steel armor to shrug off such an attack.
Xi moved Elvira toward the centipede and was pleased to see Blinky bring Two Leg back online while somehow stemming the flow of hydraulic fluid from a dozen different leaks caused by her jump’s self-destructive back-pressure.
The flyer swept along a ponderous arc as it lined up for another strafing run, but Xi suspected anything light enough to fly would be less durable than the armored centipede.
With her right flank chain guns pouring fire on the fast-approaching centipede, Xi turned her left chain guns onto the flyer. Three hundred and fifty depleted uranium slugs flew from her rotary barrels each second, and it took her two full, agonizing seconds to sight in on the flyer.
But when she did, it was all over for the would-be bomber.
Gore flew in all directions as Elvira’s anti-personnel guns cut the five-meter-long flyer into ribbons. Somehow, it maintained its approach trajectory, even firing its bizarre thruster before finally succumbing to the savage ferocity of Xi’s chain guns.
The flying thing’s devastated form hurtled mindlessly over Elvira, its rocket engine suddenly firing at maximum. The flyer tumbled end-over-end in mid-air again and again before its chaotic death throes finally ripped the thing completely apart in a shower of fiery gore that spread across the ice-field just under a hundred meters from Elvira.
“One down.” She smirked. “One to go.”
But without her artillery or
missile launchers, Xi was seemingly unable to deter the oncoming creature. Its twin “horns” belched fire when it came within twenty meters, and those streams of liquid flame covered Elvira’s hull from stem to stern.
Steam boiled up all around Elvira as the burning fuel dripped onto the ice, and for a brief moment, Xi imagined her mech, surrounded by both ice and fire, as a metaphor for the Terran contingent on this world. Surrounded by forces that wanted to destroy them, it seemed their only hope was to master one before the other could kill them.
Then the centipede came within five meters, and Xi lowered her right legs at the last second, hoping to crush the thing before it reached the lightly-armored undercarriage of her mech.
That undercarriage would almost certainly fail to protect Elvira’s crew from any anti-vehicle ordnance the centipede might be carrying.
As her legs struck the ice, Xi experienced the phenomenon of her life flashing before her eyes.
And she was proud of what she saw.
“Colonel,” Styles called out in a raised voice as the Terran missile shield continued to scrape Jemmin missiles from the sky, “I’m receiving telemetry from the Bonhoeffer forwarding fresh target locks on nine Jemmin Specters…and one Jemmin Poltergeist.”
“A Poltergeist?” Jenkins repeated in surprise as heads turned all around the compartment.
Jemmin Poltergeists were the rarest of Jemmin vehicles, rumored to be the command vehicles for planetary-scale invasion forces and only cataloged once before in Terran history. Many Terran military theorists suggested that a Poltergeist was worth more than three of their standard Wraith-class warships, like the one the Bonhoeffer had destroyed. If a Poltergeist was here, then destroying it would certainly prove decisive in the outcome of this engagement.
It might even end the conflict outright, depending on which theories of Jemmin society were correct. Jenkins and his people were about to put some of those theories to the test.