Natalya Kamova had made her way to the Danilov’s yurt. The Danilovs were all dead, but the two surviving Cummings Brigade volunteers within their yurt were laying down a withering crossfire from a twin anti-aircraft mount, and the area around the tent was a killing zone for any Saurons who had dared approach. Natalya only saw two Sauron bodies; evidently they learned as quickly as they moved.
The Cummings troopers--a husband and wife--had been only too glad to see Natalya, immediately thrusting a weapon into the young girl’s hands. Now Natalya sat atop the yurt with a SLaG of her own, an old Imperial weapon called a Viper. Despairing of ever hearing the lock-on signal when matching the Viper against the counter-measures systems of the Sauron-modified helicopters, she had finally begun aiming by eye and firing; the Cummings volunteers had given her a considerable supply of rockets for the Viper; and judging by the roar of automatic weapons from beneath her, their own views on ammunition usage were just as liberal.
Natalya watched as one of the helicopters, buffeted by the growing winds, turned to bear down on the last small knot of her people’s horsemen. Firing, she saw the missile close on the helo, which dropped to avoid being hit, and in so doing lost its aim; the horsemen passed safely under it.
“Ha!” she spat, quickly slapping in another missile. Returning the Viper to her shoulder, she began tracking it across the fields, waiting for another of the helicopters to pass in front of her field vision. She would have to get lucky sometime.
Over the din of battle, Natalya suddenly thought she heard a bird; then she realized it was the detection signal of the viper’s radar. There before her, still miles off, was a slowly moving dot, then another, and another; eventually she saw that the four Sauron fighters that had opened the attack were returning, and three of them were being tracked by the Viper’s targeting sensors.
Natalya didn’t know why the Viper was getting through the fighter’s counter-measures; she could not know that the Viper had been specifically designed to deal with supra-orbital fighters, particularly those whose emissions identified them as Sauron. Against the less-advanced designs of Havener helicopters appropriated by the Saurons, the Viper was hopelessly overqualified; it was, in effect, blind.
None of this even occurred to Natalya. All she knew was that she would have a wonderful surprise waiting for those fighters when they got in range.
Besides having reached the relative safety of the volunteer-held yurt, Natalya’s greater piece of fortune was simply this: The Sauron fighters’ counter-measures were not defeating the Viper’s sensors because they were not operating. Stahler’s squadron was getting low on fuel when Bohren had recalled them to take over for the helicopters, and having encountered nothing but small arms fire previously; Stahler’s wingmen had seen no point in draining their energy supplies by running deflectors against such primitive--if robust--weaponry as these cattle had evidenced. Stahler, as a matter of course, was running his deflectors at full power. He had always been a cautious pilot, which was one of the reasons he was still alive.
“Units three and four,” Stahler instructed, “Break right and slow to ten knots ground speed; destroy the remaining mounted force. Unit two, stay on me. Target that tent with the anti-aircraft unit.” Stahler glanced at his long-range sensor screen. The storm front would be on them in minutes, and that would pretty much decide the issue. His fighters could not stay up much longer than the helicopters, but by the time atmospheric conditions were bad enough to force them to break off, Stahler’s fighters could wipe out the Haveners completely.
Which only makes me wonder why the hell we didn’t handle it this way in the first place, Stahler thought. But he knew the answer to that. The Citadel needed the women of these human norms, needed their horses . . . and needed their men too, come to that. The Saurons lacked for nothing except more Saurons, but that was a lack which would doom them as a species if it were not remedied.
So we’ll have to contain them while our men on the ground close in and take them prisoner in the rain, Stahler considered. For Assault Leader Bohren’s sake, he hoped that could be done. Stahler did not have clear information on the status of the battle, but simple visual observation told him that in terms of captives gained balanced against Soldiers lost, this operation was already running at a deficit.
The yurt which Stahler and his wingman were approaching was the source of suppressive fire that was pinning the majority of the Sauron ground force. Stahler began blinking to activate his targeter, when he saw an impossibly familiar figure turn slightly toward him, then disappear in a cloud of smoke and flash of light.
“What in God’s name--”
Fighter Rank Arias, Stahler’s wingman, shouted something over the communications link that sounded like a denial, and then he was gone. An explosion along his starboard wing batted his fighter aside like a toy to smash it into Stahler’s own craft.
The intakes on Stahler’s machine whined, their pitch rising crazily as the stabilizers sought to keep his craft level on its vertical thrusters. They would have been equal to the task despite the damage Stahler’s craft had suffered in the collision, but at that moment the storm hit.
The force of electrical storms on the steppes of Haven, and the ruination they are capable of visiting upon any known product of human endeavor, are best left to the imagination. No parallel exists for them on any world settled by man, and the destructive energies released at their height have made prudence in bad weather part of the steppes-Havener character--to say nothing of an intimate familiarity with the principles of lightning rods.
At least three dozen lightning strikes heralded the forward edge of the storm, nine of them within a half-mile area centered on the combat zone. One struck the wreckage of Fighter Rank Arias’ craft, skipped across thirty feet of air and discharged into Stahler’s fighter before scouring a thirty-foot diameter area of grass.
Stahler’s fighter bucked, the engines whined and spurted again, and the craft plowed into the ground with a sudden burst of speed that ripped the craft and two yurts in its path to shreds. There was just enough kinetic energy left in the smoking mass of metal to overturn the Danilov’s yurt, spilling Natalya to the ground for the second time that day and bouncing the inhabitants and their weapon mount off the inside walls several times before the tent came to rest, axles up, half covering the wrecked fighter craft.
Stahler no longer had to worry about living down the harassment of his fellow Saurons.
“Who is commanding this debacle?” Sargun asked in a voice that was very nearly a snarl. “If the First Ra-- the First Citizen does not order his eradication, I will do it myself.”
Eradication was the ultimate punishment in Sauron society. Not limited to the mere execution of the offending Sauron, it extended to the sterilization of his progeny and utter removal of his genotype from the societal gene pool. Valuable aspects of such a Sauron would of course remain, but the unique genetic combination of DNA molecules which comprised him and his offspring, which defined them and would have proclaimed their line’s achievements to future generations, was gone. Forever.
“Unknown,” Stern answered, “But it is not going well.”
Sargun signaled Cyborg Philomon to bring up the Mark VII. “Even for a Cyborg, Stern,” Sargun announced in a jest only another Cyborg could appreciate, “that is an understatement.”
Philomon was at his side instantly. “Cyborg Sargun.”
Sargun looked again through the OpEn. The monstrous waste of Soldier assets he was now watching was a godsend to Cyborg Koln’s position of release for the Super Soldiers from the Breedmasters’ control. Whoever the First Citizen had assigned to this assault was botching it so badly that he was doing what might be permanent damage to the colony here on Haven. Surely the Cyborgs could not be blamed for intervention which could not fail to turn the tide and win the day?
He turned to Philomon. “The Mark VII is fully charged?”
“Yes.”
“Move in and destroy the Haveners. Staggered series of three sh
ots at ten meter intervals to break up their mounted formation as we close.”
“Engagement parameters?” Stern asked for the squad.
“Deploy and kill at will.”
The Cyborgs took no joy in such an order, no satisfaction; they had as much eagerness for the coming battle as they did fear of it. Which was to say, none at all. If they felt anything, it was relief from the boredom of their salvage mission. This was their true field of expertise, and like any intelligent creature, they were most content when doing what they knew best.
Sargun’s unit of Cyborgs was one mile away from the fighting. Less than a thirty second run before they would be in the midst of the Haveners.
The Cyborgs--taller, broader than their Sauron counterparts--rose up from the ground like wraiths in grey, moving so rapidly across the steppe as to appear squalls of the rain now flowing around them. In fifteen seconds they were halfway to the battle. In twenty-five, Cyborg Philomon discharged three shots in rapid succession from the Mark VII manpack fusion gun, each shot precisely ten meters apart, each shot a blinding, roiling mass of heat and light, carving into the body of cossack horsemen with a fury that the survivors would remember in nightmares for years to come.
Sergei and Nikolai watched the fireballs rolling toward them across the plain, each detonating closer than the last, one of which embraced two riders less than ten feet from them. Putin and his brother-in-law, Myasischlev, were suddenly lit so brightly they were a rosy pink, then an Earth-summery yellow-white through which Sergei could make out details of their skulls, their ribs, even the pocket watch Myasischlev carried under his left breast. Sergei and Nikolai saw the illumination increase until Putin, Myasischlev and their mounts were but the faintest outlines in the white sphere before them; then even the outlines were gone and the sphere dissipated almost instantly, leaving no sign that men or horses had ever been there at all.
Three seconds after the last shot from the fusion gun had detonated among the remaining cossacks, the Cyborgs reached the area where the first shot had impacted. Slowing, they were at the second impact zone five seconds after that, and some were noticing that the ground surface was doing something odd. In another five seconds, the Cyborgs, whose comprehension was as rapid as everything else about them, were aware that they had made a grave mistake.
From the command helicopter, Bohren had monitored the events of the past few minutes with growing apprehension, culminating in the awful moment when he recognized the blast signature of the Mark VII, and realized that a fusion weapon could only mean Pathfinder Cyborgs.
Bohren watched in amazed horror as the Super Soldiers charged across the burned-out, superheated steppe into the mass of surviving Haveners. He watched as they slowed to take up a circular formation which would, in typical Cyborg fashion, obliterate every resisting human norm or device it came in contact with.
And Bohren watched too, as the ground beneath the Cyborgs abruptly collapsed, dropping eighteen feet to the sunken water table as fast as it could fall, the surface suddenly darkening as the permafrost, melted by the heat of the fusion gun’s discharges, turned the crumbly Haven steppe soil into a syrupy mass of slick, grasping mud, into which every Cyborg--and a good many fast-thinking Sauron regulars who had decided to follow up the Super Soldiers’ advance--instantly disappeared from the chest down into a quagmire of their own making.
The Havener nomads were spared by the grim coincidence that those not killed outright by the Mark VII’s contained-fusion effect were those outside its blast radius, and thus outside the perimeter of the sinkholes it had created. Cossack horses screamed in terror, partly at the savagery of the weapons all around them, partly from the shock of finding themselves suddenly standing at the crumbling edge of an abyss, and partly from the storm which was now upon them in all its fury.
Lightning strikes, far more severe than anything Bohren had experienced within the mountain-sheltered expanses of the Shangri-La valley, were tearing into the ground all about. Rain was coming down in sheets which utterly obscured vision and, Bohren could see from the sensor screens, was adding to the nightmare of the quicksand in which at least a dozen of his men--and all but two of those damnable Cyborgs!--were now floundering.
Messages were flooding his Communications Ranker’s screen; the remaining fighters were breaking off to escape the storm; the gunships which had landed to wait it out were literally being held down by their crews, as Saurons began tying down the aircraft to steel poles driven hastily into the ground; ground troops were reporting that the surviving Havener horsemen were becoming impossible to engage in the rain, and those Saurons trapped in the sinkholes began calmly requesting assistance, as the Haveners were riding along the crater rims, firing down at them to great effect.
Bohren was an organizational genius. So long as events remained within the parameters he had anticipated, he could deal with virtually any contingency. But, like many Saurons of his late-war crèche, he could do nothing he had not been trained to do. And while Sauron training encompassed a great many variables, its emphasis for the last twenty years had been on dealing with Imperials on known worlds. Sauron contingency planning had always revolved around combat on worlds someone would actually want; it had therefore rarely anticipated fighting for an environment like Haven.
Faced with a situation obviously beyond his capacities, Bohren’s training did at least tell him when to cut his losses.
“Order a general disengagement, all channels.” He felt the command helicopter rock under him as a sudden gust of wind slammed into it; outside, Soldiers hurriedly re-set two of the stakes securing it to the ground. “All forces to extricate themselves by paths leading past those sinkholes to aid Cyborgs and Soldiers trapped there. Troops to continue onward and make for The Citadel.”
He had to shout the last order several times, as the crash of thunder all around them was beyond even the Sauron ears of his Communications Ranker to overcome.
From a vantage point several miles to the north, General Cummings watched the battle, and Colonel Kettler watched General Cummings.
Four days, Kettler thought. Four days riding dispatch horses, motorcycles and a stolen river-speeder, then eight hours of stark terror in a stolen rotary-wing at ten feet off the ground, just to spend another twelve hours driving like demons in a kidney-killing runabout to get to here.
But as the self-appointed leader of Haven resistance, Cummings had been determined to see this first hand. The older man was silent as he swept the starlight scope back and forth across the distant carnage. Finally, he switched off the power pack and closed the unit in its case.
“All right, let’s go,” Cummings told Kettler. They slid back from the rim of the low hill and rose into low crouches, making their way toward two small four-wheel drive runabouts. The driver saluted as Cummings and Kettler climbed in; around them, six camouflaged troopers festooned with steppe grasses appeared from their firing positions and clambered into another vehicle of their own.
Cummings’ runabout bounced away through the worsening storm, the driver seemingly oblivious to the near-zero visibility.
“Where will the nomads head next?” Cummings asked. He had to shout over the rattling of the vehicle and the roar of the wind, rain and thunder.
“They’ll make their way north, to the sea, and follow the coastline westward. They should link up with the mobile aid station we promised them in about a week.”
Cummings shrugged, sat back.
“You realize, General, that in a week, their wounded will probably have already died.”
Cummings looked straight ahead. “There’s not a lot of medicines available, Colonel. The strong will survive; the weak--” he looked out the window at the roaring downpour--”the weak will not.”
“And does that include our own volunteers, sir?” Kettler asked. He noticed that the driver’s eyes flickered to the rear-view mirror.
“Everybody dies, son,” Cummings said quietly. “That’s why they were volunteers.”
Kettler didn’t speak for a long time. “That’s something a Sauron might say, General.”
Cummings gave a short, mirthless laugh. “That’s something every Sauron says, every day of his life, Colonel Kettler. That’s why they’ll win if we don’t fight them on their terms.”
Kettler turned to him. “And what will we win, General? In the end?”
Cummings fixed him with a long look. “We’ll win a world without Saurons, Colonel Kettler.”
Kettler nodded, and turned away, thinking: I wonder . . .
Sergei Kamov found his son Lavrenti, dropped from his saddle and fell onto the corpse of his boy, weeping in rage and grief. Nikolai wheeled his own mount in a circle, orbiting his father and brother, watching the casualty-strewn field of battle around them. A grim prosecutor, he was more than ready to shoot the first thing that moved.
A riderless horse galloped by, disappearing with an equine shriek as another bolt of lightning lit the scene around them. Through the rain, Nikolai heard shouts.
“Pomogite . . . help . . .”
“Who is that?” Nikolai shouted into the rain.
Shapes stumbled toward them, wounded men supporting their fellows. A Cummings volunteer in the distinctive butternut camouflage was being carried by two dismounted cossacks. A dozen more of Nikolai’s people trailed behind.
“Look; it’s Kamov!” one cried, and the mass changed direction and began shambling toward them.
Nikolai intercepted them before they could reach his father. “What do you want?” the youth shouted harshly.
“We need Kamov; the headmen . . . the council are all dead. He’s the new headman, now . . . what should we do?”
Nikolai looked over his shoulder to see his father standing up from Lavrenti’s body. Sergei took off the boy’s coat and draped it gently over his son’s face, then crossed the field toward them, rubbing the rain into his face briskly with both hands as he came. Nikolai rode up to him, and spoke in as low a voice as could be heard over the downpour. “Father; the council is dead . . . they are saying you are the new headman now.”
War World IV: Invasion Page 11