by J. F. Holmes
“Major Crichton, I want you to spread your company out to the west,” he ordered, using the articulated left hand of the Sentinel to point across its body to the approach leading up from the business center of Argos. He’d resisted using the right arm since a massive Electro-Thermal Chemical cannon was slaved to it, and he retained his grandfather’s advice of never pointing a gun at anything you weren’t willing to destroy. “Hundred-meter intervals, and use cover where you can find it, concealment where you can’t.” Cover wasn’t an easy commodity for a twelve-meter-tall war machine.
“Of course, sir,” Crichton responded almost automatically.
He could see the officer’s jowly, hound-dog face in the communications display screen off to the left of his cockpit’s canopy, seeming incongruous in the neural control helmet, as if one of his old Academy professors had strapped into armor and picked up a rifle.
“What about the approach from the spaceport, sir?” the older officer wondered. Outside Jaimie’s canopy, Crichton’s vaguely man-shaped Vindicator faced off to the left, where a narrow road wound through the forested parkland to the east, leading out to the landing field of the Argos Spaceport. “Didn’t the traitor’s forces land there? It would seem to be the most direct route to the palace.”
“Captain Cordova and his Rangers are mining the road,” he explained, fighting back an instant’s irritation. It was a good question, and you wanted leaders under you who asked good questions. “They couldn’t stop a concerted mecha assault, but the approaches are narrow enough we’d have plenty of warning.” He paused, but continued, deciding it would be best the old man have the whole plan, even if he thought little of his fighting abilities after having led a ceremonial guard for the last ten years. “The mobile artillery and fixed weapons emplacements under Major Kline should hold the road to the west through the industrial district, while the main force of armor, Colonel Travers’ 20th Home Guard, will probably face the main enemy thrust through the center streets. You’re here as a fail-safe, in case any of Lambert’s mecha make it through their lines.”
“And you’ll be up front with the Home Guard, Colonel,” Crichton presumed, a shrewd smile passing across his otherwise dull features, “as befits the man who would be guardian.”
Jaimie glanced sharply at the major, suspicious he was being mocked, but Crichton was already shaking his head in denial, as if he could read the younger man’s mind.
“Sir, I worked here in the capital for the last ten years. If I speak of the political importance of your role in the coming battle, it’s only because I understand it more deeply than most.” He nodded in a gesture that could only be taken as respectful. “May the flames of Mithra and the horns of power be with you this night.” Another smile, this one more open. “And I pray just as fervently that I may also serve by merely standing and waiting. I’m too old for this shit.”
***
The bunker was ugly and utilitarian, a stark contrast to the dignified grandeur of the palace above. Bare stone reinforced by vaulted ribs as sturdy as a starship’s hull, benches of identical grey stone that could serve as cover from gunfire at need, in the event someone could breach a circular hatch centimeters thick, a ton of tungsten-carbide.
Perhaps, she thought, it was so sparely decorated to impress upon those sheltered within the seriousness of the situation.
Mission accomplished.
The nominal military personnel seemed most afraid, perhaps because they knew what could happen, even if they lacked the combat training to deal with it. Clerks, computer technicians, and maintenance workers in an odd mixture of stained coveralls and precision-starched dress uniforms, they huddled together shoulder-to-shoulder, whispering worst-case possibilities to each other in low tones.
The household staff was equally nervous, though perhaps for different reasons. Those with families to go home to had been sent to the public shelters, and those who remained were alone…and mistrustful of their fellows. There had been treason and regicide, and who knew which of the household staff might have been complicit?
Well, Anna. She trusted Anna nearly as much as she trusted her own husband. The old woman had been Jaimie’s nanny, and now she helped care for his sons. She was scared as well, Maggie could see it in the furtive glances toward the door, the way she repeatedly smoothed at her rumpled skirts and pulled at the split ends of her greying hair. But she was scared for the children; they were nearly as much hers as they were hers and Jaimie’s.
The children, perhaps ironically, were least afraid because they understood the least. Terrin looked worried, but then he always did. He gnawed at a problem in his mind until he solved it, as she had as a student, and later as an astrophysicist working for the university’s research wing. Logan knew his father had gone off to fight, but he was as confident in his father’s ability to come home victorious as he was in his own mettle on the imaginary battlefields he and his friends conquered on the playground. He was off in a corner even now, trying to coax his little brother into playing mech-jocks.
“I will be outside the door with my guards,” Blake was telling her, trying to act comforting and solicitous, and doing a poor job of it. He motioned through the hatch at the four security troops he’d brought with him, three men and a woman he insisted he could trust. “We won’t let anyone past us.”
“If the relief forces don’t arrive in time,” she reminded him, her voice harder and colder than she’d intended, “it won’t matter.”
He nodded, his left eye twitching, perhaps fighting off fear in his own manner. “The traitor’s allies among the Starkad Supremacy were quite clever and timely in drawing our expeditionary forces away from Sparta. It was only by Mithra’s mercy we were able to contact any before they made the jump.”
“Then may Mithra get them back here while my husband still holds the line.”
Blake nodded and started to turn, but she stopped him with an upturned hand.
“Your gun, Colonel.”
“Ma’am?” He cocked his head at her as if she’d spoken a foreign language.
“It may be I’m the last line between the enemy and my children.” Maggie motioned to the officer’s holstered handgun. “Give me your pistol. You can draw another from the armory.”
His face screwed up in what might justifiably have been called a pout, but he obeyed, unbuckling the pistol belt and handing it to her, holster and all. She strapped it around her waist, tightening it to fit, and the unfamiliar weight of it seemed to drag her down with massive responsibility.
“All right, Colonel,” she told him, motioning to the corridor without. “Lock us in.”
***
“In black eclipse,” Jaimie Brannigan murmured in the privacy of his cockpit, “light after light goes out. One evil star, luridly glaring through the smoke of war, as in the dream of the Apocalypse, drags others down.”
He’d read the poem as a child, and that bit had stuck with him even though the rest had sailed away on the winds of memory. It fit the night, the darkened city, lights extinguished in desperate haste as civilians made their way to emergency shelters not used since the Reconstruction Wars. And it fit the glow of battle piercing the smoke in Memorial Square only a kilometer ahead.
The clouds were black and greasy, products of chemical generators in the rebel support vehicles, so thick the actinic flashes of lasers and the red flares of tracer rounds could only light up narrow corridors of ionized gas through the smoke. Those dazzling bursts of preternatural balefire threw the shadows of titans onto the inky clouds, striding amidst the twenty-story office buildings of downtown Argos like children walking through a scale-model playset.
Ready to knock the whole thing over out of a childlike love of destruction, the father of two young sons thought.
It was a shadowy, uncertain battlefield on visible light view, but the Sentinel’s command systems took in radar, lidar, thermal filters, and infrared, and wove them into as clear a picture as it could produce. The rebel armor was pressing on the far
side of Memorial Square with a heavy company of mecha, sixteen in all, if he was reading the count right. Two were already burning hulks in the center of the garden, twisted at the foot of the sequoias brought here centuries ago by the first colonists. They were light mecha, scouts most likely, and Colonel Travers and his troops had taken them out as they’d entered the square.
Mistake.
He should have let them run through the lines and drawn the rest of the enemy mecha into the killing zone, but someone had gotten trigger-happy, and now it was a total Charlie Foxtrot. The enemy company had spread out and taken cover behind the buildings, a temporary solution, but one that would buy them time and force Travers to move first, or risk being either outflanked or simply bypassed. The solution was clear to Jaimie, but Travers had chosen a different one.
“Second and Third platoons, fall back to alternate designated firing positions at the Zocalo,” the woman droned, her voice as phlegmatic and stolid as the expression on her square-jawed, broad-cheeked face in the communications display. “First platoon, maintain covering fire. Arbalests, lay down suppressive missile fire at closest enemy positions.”
The threat display told the story, the blue IFF icons backing out of their primary firing positions and moving in teams of two out of the square and through the next intersection over a kilometer back to the Zocalo, the open market where the local farmers outside the city would bring fresh produce for those who preferred it to processed food. The center platoon stood its ground, pouring laser and cannon fire into targets they could barely see, while the Arbalests, the missile platform mecha, hung back another half a kilometer behind his current position and opened fire. Thermal flares bloomed on his sensor readings as each of them launched a pair of long-range missiles.
Waste of ammo, he reflected with an innate frugality. With the electrostatic smoke screen scrambling radar and lidar, all the high-explosive warheads would accomplish was more property damage.
He had no clear identifiers for the enemy, just lidar and radar blips, fuzzy and uncertain through the raging heat and electrostatic smoke screens, but he could guess how they would react. He knew their commander, at least by reputation, and the man was considered aggressive to the point of recklessness, which was what had caused him to fall out of favor with the guardian to begin with, and had likely driven him into the arms of Lambert and his rebels.
Major Giovani Elytus was going to charge through Travers’ First platoon, risking their fire and the missile launches to break through the center before Second and Third could get set. There was only one way to stop it, and it was going to piss Travers off.
Oh, well.
“First platoon,” he bellowed in a command voice no one had questioned even when he was a butterbar sub-lieutenant straight out of the Academy, “form up on me and charge!”
The Sentinel was a big mass of metal and took a few steps to get its momentum, but once it did, there was little that could stop it. He passed through Travers’ line at forty kilometers an hour, squeezing between a pair of cargo trucks parked end to end across the street as a barricade, and he imagined he could see her face through the cockpit canopy of her broad-shouldered Agamemnon. The consternation in those beady, dark eyes was obvious in the communications display, even if he couldn’t make it out with the Mark I eyeball, but she was too shocked to object.
The impact of footpads on pavement was a Lambeg drumbeat leading warriors to battle, and if no one else followed its call, he’d damned well do it himself. And for a long moment, it seemed he’d have to do exactly that. Lasers ripped the smoky blackness around him apart, cannon fire punched through the gaps, seeking him out, and warning lights flashed yellow at the corner of his vision as something struck home on his right chest plastron, burning off a hundred kilograms of armor in half a second. The enemy force was rushing the center of the line, knowing it was one rank thick, just five mecha between them and an open road to the palace.
Five plus one. The view through the transparent aluminum of his cockpit canopy shook wildly with every earthquake footfall, but the view in the targeting camera remained as steady as if he were standing still, the reticle floating over the shadowy, troll-like silhouette of a Golem assault mech only a hundred meters away. Jaimie squeezed the trigger. The recoil from the hypervelocity tungsten slug shoved his Sentinel’s upper torso backwards, throwing it off-stride, and a wash of yellow flame engulfed the end of the strike mech’s right arm.
The ETC was an old design, predating the Reconstruction Wars, predating even the long-fallen Empire of Hellas. It had persisted, because it just worked. An electrical pulse ignited the propellant into plasma in the ignition chamber, sending the 20mm tungsten slug out of the barrel at hypersonic velocities. It cored the Golem like an apple, slicing through the cockpit and on through the shielding of the machine’s reactor, sending plumes of plasma gushing from entry and exit holes, sun-bright blood. The machine tumbled forward, pavement spraying up in showers where its shoulder dug into the surface of the road.
Jaimie was moving before the smaller mech came to its mortal halt, side-stepping with the grace of a boxer. In battle, movement was life, movement was victory, his grandfather had taught him the lesson long before his instructors at the Academy had reinforced it. The searing, blinding brilliance of a plasma blast passed only meters from his mech’s right shoulder, trailed closely by a hail of slugs from a conventional Vulcan rotary cannon. But other shapes loomed in the glowing fog, more of them than a few sidesteps could overcome; as he shifted his aim and touched the trigger again, he had time to wonder if he’d go down in the history books as a hero, or a villain…or simply another victim.
He flinched at the sudden blaze of harsh light around him, tensing for the fatal shot he’d been expecting, before he realized the fire was coming from behind him, aimed at the enemy. On his cockpit HUD, he saw the blue IFF icons coming on line beside him: First platoon hadn’t let him down. A flight of short-range missiles burst out of the launch pod on the shoulder of a man-shaped Vindicator assault mech only twenty meters to his right, streaking out at almost point-blank range, barely enough space for the warheads to arm before they slammed into the chest of another rebel Golem. Flame wreathed the squat, ugly machine’s torso, distracting the pilot long enough for Jaimie to pump a round from his ETC cannon right through the joint of its left hip. The left leg blew off in a shower of sparks, and the assault mech crashed to the ground, a redwood felled by a storm.
“Nice shot, sir,” the Vindicator pilot commented, calm and collected as if it were a simulator program despite the column of enemy armor still charging toward them. His name, Jaimie noted from the readout beside the IFF transponder, was Lt. Anders, and he reminded himself to keep an eye on the man’s career if they both survived the night.
“Pour it on!” Jaimie urged, following his own order and laying down a wall of fire from every weapon the Sentinel carried.
He could only aim at one at a time, but the rebels were less than a hundred meters away and charging in a column. It was a tactical mistake, probably made in the heat of the moment by the second mech in line when their commander had ordered them to rush the line. He should have gone into a wedge formation, but he’d lined up in a file, and the others had just come straight on behind him, like ducks in a shooting gallery.
And while Jaimie and First platoon could only bring their weapons to bear on one of the rebels at a time, they could all shoot at the lead mech, while the ones further back in the file couldn’t fire at them. Lasers, ETC cannon rounds, short-range missiles, and 30mm Vulcan slugs ripped into the third machine in line, an ostrich-legged Myrmidon, shredding armor from its legs and chest. Jaimie couldn’t tell for sure which blow was the fatal one; by the time the mech went down with both legs severed at the hips, the cockpit was a charred and smoking hole.
He could sense the turn of the charge like a shift in the wind on a stormy day. The rebel column broke and dispersed, either on orders or out of desperation, thundering to each side to gra
b cover behind the buildings surrounding the square. And Jaimie suddenly realized just how exposed the five of them were, standing in the middle of Memorial Plaza in front of God and everybody.
“Fall back!” he snapped, not turning, but beginning to back up.
Walking backwards in a fifteen-meter tall mech wasn’t impossible, just highly improbable. He’d practiced it in simulators since he was ten years old, a mascot of sorts for the warriors at the base outside Argos where his father had come to train. His father had died fighting Starkad out on the Periphery, but he’d kept coming to the base, kept training in that simulator every week until he’d left for the Academy.
Jaimie fired off volley after volley of short-range missiles from the launch pod on his mech’s right shoulder, not confident of hitting anything except city statuary and the façades of office buildings. The idea was to attract the return fire to himself instead of the backs of the retreating First platoon, and it worked a bit better than he’d hoped. He hadn’t quite made it halfway back to the barricade before half a dozen lines of cannon fire began to converge on him, chewing up concrete, carefully-tended lawn, and a line of personal vehicles parked along the curb.
Trying to sidestep while walking backwards in a fifteen-meter-tall anthropomorphized tank was even more improbable—feeling like ice-skating backwards in a spacesuit—but he managed it for thirty or forty meters, until the inevitable. Jaimie understood it all in retrospect, seconds later, but in the moment, everything was light and sound and out-of-control spinning and the sickening feeling of knowing you were about to fall yet not being able to stop it. The impact threw him against his restraints and slammed the side of his neural helmet against the ring of padding behind his neck. Explosions of light filled his vision, and if he was grateful for a mild concussion, it was only because the alternative would have been a broken neck.