by Ian Douglas
"IFF code D983, this is Taisa Hasegawa, of the Imperial light cruiser Yubari."
This time there was no time lag during which Dev could gather his thoughts. Yubari was only a few tens of thousands of kilometers distant.
Dev bowed deeply. This situation called more for tact than for bluster. "Konichiwa, Taisasan. Taisa Ihara, Imperial destroyer Arasi. How can I be of service?"
"Just welcoming you on station, Taisasan." Hasegawa's manner was correct, but friendly. "And looking for news. Did you just arrive from Earth?"
Dev considered before answering. He'd expected to be quizzed by curious Imperials about his origin. Some Imperials here would know Arasi had last been stationed at Chi Draconis. Eridu to Earth was twenty-five and a quarter lights, Earth to New America almost forty-nine, for a travel time of something like seventy-four days at the minimum . . . plus a couple of weeks at least for in-system maneuvers and servicing. The real Arasi could have made that roundabout hop in the intervening months, but it was much safer to say that she'd made the run straight to 26 Draconis from Eridu, a hop of just over thirty-six lights. It was unlikely that any of the ships in Ohka Squadron had been to Eridu recently enough to see that lie.
"We came from Eridu, Taisasan," he told Hasegawa. "A courier from Earth rendezvoused with us there, with special orders."
"Ah. And the news from Eridu? Of the landings there?"
The news chilled, a prickling of worry at the back of Dev's mind. Had the Imperials broken the Eridu truce at last? It made sense, certainly; if they were ready to confront the Confederation head-on by invading their most important world, there was nothing to stop them from snatching Eridu back from the local rebels and restoring the Imperial Peace.
Unfortunately, Hasegawa knew more about the Imperial plans than Dev did. Had Ohka Squadron already received word, by fast courier or by the arrival of ships—such as the real Arasi—that the landings on Eridu had already begun? Or was Hasegawa simply alluding to information acquired on Earth about a landing that was supposed to take place at a certain date, and he was now asking about what Ihara ought to know?
A wrong answer could ruin everything.
"The operation is proceeding according to schedule," Dev said simply, and ambiguously. "Arasi would not have been released to come here were it otherwise, neh?"
"Itarimae-yo!" Hasegawa replied, nodding. "Of course!"
"What is the situation here?"
"All goes well. The initial landings were made with surprisingly light casualties and succeeded in capturing the kaizoku spaceport and landing zones near their capital. We captured the capital itself not long after that. Since then, the rebels have been fighting a guerrilla war from bases in the mountains. From what I've been told, the ground forces expect to capture their military headquarters within the next few days."
"Yatta!" Dev said. "That's great!"
And he meant it. He was not too late! This told him nothing about whether the Confederation government survived . . . or Katya was still alive, but there was still a chance!
"Would you care to exchange downloads, Taisasan?"
"I am very sorry," Dev replied. That was one courtesy he could not afford to engage in . . . a direct sharing of RAM data between the two ship captains. While Dev would have loved to get a download from Hasegawa—on Imperial deployments in-system, for example, or on the current military schedule—Yubari's captain would need only a glimpse into Dev's personal RAM to see through this entire charade. "I cannot."
"Eh?" Hasegawa's eyes narrowed. "Is there some problem?"
It was not impolite, exactly, to refuse a sharing of RAM, since that sharing could be extremely personal. Still, it was an honor for a lower-ranking person to have the request from someone above him, and in the military, especially, such a request was rarely refused.
Unless the person refusing had something to hide.
Dev bowed. "Taisasan, I would be honored to share memories with you. Unfortunately, time is pressing. I have . . . a small problem to attend to, aboard Arasi. Perhaps we could exchange data later."
"Of course," Hasegawa said, bowing in reply. "You must have much to attend to, having just entered orbit."
It was a polite dismissal.
"Thank you, Taisasan. I look forward to talking with you more fully later."
He broke the ViRcom link and awoke weightless in a bridge link module aboard the Eagle. Sweat clung to his forehead. A single bead drifted off the tip of his nose, a tiny, gleaming sphere adrift like a miniature planet. He didn't think Hasegawa was suspicious; more likely, the older man was simply hungry for news. That bespoke much of the organization within Ohka Squadron—and of rumors and stories passed from captain to captain, but little effort at the top of the pyramid to tell them what was really going on.
It made Eagle's deception somewhat easier.
Reentering the ship's linkage network, he alerted Lara and the rest of the bridge officers that it was time to proceed with the plan.
Hours later, Dev was jacked into another slot, bucking a VK-180 Sky wind down from orbit. The big ascraft was brand-new, one of the ships lifted from the Daikoku Shipyard, so new that its hull, though nanocoated for radar and visual stealth, had not yet been painted with group or unit markings. As Dev watched the flow of piloting data scrolling past his mind's-eye view of the reentry fireball, green diamonds marked the probable locations of the seven other ascraft. Other diamonds marked possible contacts. During reentry, all data from outside the fireball was suspect. Ionization trails stretched out for kilometers astern through night side darkness, glowing a vivid green-gold. Then the craft thumped into thicker sky, the fireball fading away as the ascraft's speed dropped below Mach 7.
Moonlight—far brighter here than beneath a full moon on Earth—turned clouds ahead and below to streaks and swirls of molten silver. To port and starboard, the other seven ascraft maintained their formation. It was a lonely feeling, for each ascraft carried but a single crewman, its pilot. No transmissions passed between them, not when the Imperials were certain to be monitoring all such. Aboard Eagle, before launch, Dev had carefully briefed the other pilots on Imperial flight formations and techniques. Their descent toward New America now was nearly flight-academy perfect, a drill for Imperial pilots.
Far below, contrails scratched ivory lines ruler-straight above the clouds. Imperials, those, almost certainly. Would they challenge the intruders, or assume that they were what they seemed to be and let them pass?
Dev shifted his attention to an inset mental view of the ground, a map graphic updated continually by radar and low-wattage laser scans. According to the display, the ascraft were over the Forrestal Sea, with Stone Mountain to the southeast, less than five thousand kilometers ahead.
They had to be at Stone Mountain. The old Hegemony arsenal there was the best defensive position on the planet, and he knew that the government had had contingency plans for moving there should Jefferson fall. There would be plenty of room in the old underground bunkers and warehouses for a government-in-exile, sheltered beneath meters of hard granite. He kept watching the inset display; as the cloud deck broke up beneath the ascraft's belly, low-power laser scans began returning high-definition imagery of the ground and matching it with what the ascraft had stored on New American terrain. Excellent. On course . . . on time. A coastline, then a village—scattered buildings, some outlying farms—flashed by thirty kilometers below.
"Ascraft flight, IFF D369, this is Sorataka Flight Kondoru." The words, clipped and precise, sounded in Dev's mind. Shifting his gaze, Dev could see the Se-280s, four of them, sleek and deadly and taking up positions above and behind the larger, slower ascraft. "Please identify yourself."
"Kondoru, this is ascraft flight Tozan." The flight identifier, a poetic form meaning "Eastern Mountain," had been agreed upon by Dev and the other pilots only hours earlier. "Transmitting code."
Again, the code had been drawn from the signals protocols Lloyd had revealed at Daikoku. Had any of them been changed?
>
"Tozan, Kondoru. What is your mission, over?"
"Reinforcements for Special Assault Group One. We should have advance clearance from Gensui Munimori."
There was danger here, a danger that grew deeper as the silence stretched out. "Special Assault Group One" was fiction, as was the advance clearance. By speaking of them as though the Se-280 squadron ought to know about them, however, Dev was placing the responsibility of checking squarely with the squadron's skipper. He could radio his headquarters for verification . . . and either lose face because he didn't have the proper information, or, worse, make his commander lose face because he didn't have the proper information.
Or he could assume that the ascraft were what they appeared to be . . . a flight of Imperial ascraft carrying reinforcements to the battle at Stone Mountain.
Hell, what else could they be? Throwing in Munimori's name merely provided an extra bit of incentive. Few squadron commanders would dare call headquarters for verification!
"Tozan, this is Kondoru. You are cleared for your approach. Be careful in Grid 57 slash 10. There's been heavy fighting there all night."
"Affirmative, Kondoru. Thank you."
Together, the four Se-280s stood on their stubby, dihedral wings and arced sharply toward the south. In seconds, the night swallowed even the flare of their exhausts.
At an altitude now of less than ten kilometers, Dev thought he could see the battle ahead. Mountains wrinkled and puckered in the darkness, backlit by the silent flare of explosions. They were past the Nihonjin outriders protecting the battle zone itself. Now all they needed to do was make contact with the Confederation forces . . .
. . . without getting shot out of the sky as Japanese.
Ragnarok—the final battle of the gods—had come to New America. The approaches to Stone Mountain, particularly the broad, gently curving glacial excavation called Gaither Valley, was lit by the near constant strobings of pulse lasers and rocket fire, by the savage detonations of long-range artillery, and by whiplashing swarms of rockets arrowing through the sky on trails of golden light.
Once a town called Anversen had stood here, a farming community on the main road to Stone Mountain. After an earlier Imperial air bombardment little remained but the shattered shells of buildings, jagged black walls upthrust against the dazzling flash and flare of battle. Smoke—both the battle haze of antilaser aerosols and the thicker, darker pillars rising from burning vehicles and buildings—hung heavy across the battlefield, as depressions in the ground filled with the deadly white sheen of nano-D.
The DYN-12 Kyodaina siege crawler had already left a trail through half the ruin of the town, a path not so much of destruction as of complete and utter annihilation. Walls struck by that duralloy behemoth were toppled effortlessly, then ground beneath three-meter tracks that reduced stone blocks and pavement to rubble and mashed the remnants into a pulp of churned earth and gravel. Designed as much for the terror it instilled as for power, the crawler moved slowly, a few kilometers per hour, and it chose its path forward with care. Unlike warstriders, a crawler was restricted to certain types of terrain, to ground solid enough to support its titan's weight, and open enough to admit its breadth.
Very little could stand against it, however. So large a vehicle could carry tons of onboard munitions, anti—nano-D, and the power to charge and fire lasers and particle cannons worthy of a small spaceship. Multiple fusion plants yielded energy and to spare to move wheels four meters across, bearing the weight of meter-thick durasheath armor, slabs of duralloy interspersed with layers of polyceramics, woven diamond monofilament, and superconducting mesh.
Jacked into the long line of onboard control modules, Tai-i Hideki Ozawa, formerly of Blue Company, First Battalion of the Zugaikotsu Regiment, had decided that he definitely preferred warstriders to this crawling monster of a fortress. It was so slow. No matter if this behemoth packed a thousand times the firepower of a single warstrider, he'd much rather be jacking a quick-stepping Tachi.
Ozawa's duty as assault company CO had come to a sudden end at the rebel spaceport, when a Starhawk missile had screamed in from the south, its detonation ripping his Tachi's left leg from its joint and touching off his remaining rockets. He'd punched out, ejecting just as the shattered warstrider had crumpled to the ground and exploded; a week later, with more combat striderjacks available than working machines to pilot, Shosa Yoshitomi had assigned him to the crew detailed to assemble the massive pieces of the siege crawler as they were brought down one by one from orbit. When it had come time to tell off a crew for the beast, Ozawa had immediately volunteered.
He'd seen the beginning of this campaign. Now he wanted to see the end of it. The rebel forces so far had revealed an almost laughable disorganization—contriving at one point a brilliant ambush of his new-landed assault force, then throwing it all away moments later by a hasty and ill-advised retreat. Ozawa still couldn't believe his luck; his force had been trapped and in danger of being utterly crushed when the rebel attack had simply fallen apart.
In the past few weeks, the rebel capital had fallen and several more attacks had been beaten off. As the crawler had grumbled north out of Jefferson, a furious enemy attack had destroyed several of the crawler's supporting warstriders and even managed to put a Starhawk into the monster's upper deck, but they'd been completely unable even to slow the Kyodaina's march. One more good push ought to do it.
But the damned crawler was so slow. . . .
Outwardly, the crawler was much as the genie patrol had described it—flat, broad lower hull supported by six sets of treads, two to either side set one ahead of the other, two more grumbling along within a cavernous well down the center of its belly; and on top, curve-sided domes, barbettes, turrets, and guntowers, the firepower of a small starship grinding up the valley toward Stone Mountain.
Katya watched, her Ghostrider crouched in the sheltering rubble of a half-collapsed building as the land-crawling leviathan passed her position, a scant fifty meters to the north. She could sense the ground trembling as the monster rumbled passed, noted plaster dust spilling from the walls around her in time to the thing's earthquaking rumble.
Gods, it was big! The massive, sprocketed wheels half-glimpsed beneath the port-side armor skirts each were taller than her warstrider. Scanner dishes and the muzzles of weapons pivoted this way and that, seeking targets, and Katya knew a piercing fear, sharp as any dread of night or closeness, as she wondered if the small army of Imperial Marines linked into the behemoth's AI system saw her now.
Unlikely, that. The ambush platoon had been carefully planted here, beneath the covering screens of antisensor aerosols, and crouched now at near total power-down, with only life-support and AI-link network systems on-line. Four enemy striders had already stalked past in close formation and seen nothing. Too, the Imperial crawl-jackers would be concentrating on their target kilometers ahead, the outer ring of the Stone Mountain static defenses, rather than searching for rebels gone to ground.
Her trained eye spotted weakness against the strength, however. It had taken damage during the past hours of combat—a guntower on the starboard side reduced to scrap by a trio of Striker missiles; a gaping, jagged-edge cavern where a Starhawk had nearly scored a kill.
"Christ of the Cosmos!" Sublieutenant Martin called, the words jerked from his thoughts. "We can't attack that thing! We gotta get out of here!"
"Steady, Chet!" Katya snapped back over the Ghostrider's link intercom.
"It's no good! It's no good!" She could sense him fumbling with the mental codes that would release his link.
Sharply, she took full control of the link network, blocking Martin's shutdown, electronically pinning him in place. "Negative, Sublieutenant!" she said. "You can do it or you can come along for the ride, but you're staying right where you are!"
"We . . . we . . . "
Thunder cracked and rolled outside the Ghostrider's hull, as treads ground stone to sand.
"We can do it, damn it! We can take t
hat monster! But we have to stay together, do you understand?" When silence answered her, Katya nudged the volume of her mental voice up a notch. "Are you linked?"
The old recruit training gimmick knifed through Martin's panic. "Uh . . . linked, sir!"
"What was that?"
"LINKED, SIR!"
"Okay! Now you take the chin laser, right? I'm going to be busy!"
"Yes, sir."
"Iceworld, Chet! We can do this."
Now if you could just believe that yourself. . . .
"So! Are you linked, Sub?"
"Linked!" Hesitation. "I . . . I'm sorry, Colonel. . . ."
"Deleted and forgotten. Just pull yourself together. Let's not let the Impies think they're up against an undisciplined rabble!"
"I won't let you down, sir."
"I know you won't."
Courage, Katya knew, was nothing more than the willingness to press ahead despite the terror that turned knees weak, mouths dry, and stomachs to twisting emptiness. Her own fear was as sharp as Martin's but was held under more rigid control.
Still, there had to come that moment, scant seconds away, now, when she would have to give the order and step out from under cover. Worse, still, she would give the order that would assure the deaths of members of this platoon, people she knew and had fought with.
She thought she understood Dev now, his vacillation when it came to wholeheartedly supporting the rebellion. Where was the value in bravery, in sacrifice, in attacks that were little short of suicide, when nothing useful could be accomplished? All the courage in the Shichiju would count for nothing if, minutes from now, her eight warstriders were blazing, hull-torn hulks, and the Imperial crawler was continuing its ponderous advance up the Gaither Valley.
Yet something had to be tried. Do nothing, and failure was certain. The Confederation would be crushed.
Pushing the darkness back in her mind, Katya braced to give the order.
Chapter 17
Section I: TANK HUNTING.