“And we destroy their launchers.”
Tuxae scratched his mandibles, fretting. “Which means we are digging tunnels in sand. Unless it is a salvo launcher, the humans rarely launch more than four rockets from a single location, but never less than two.”
“Odd.”
“Perhaps not.”
H’toor trilled uncertainty. “I do not understand.”
Tuxae forced himself to be patient with his tactically unsophisticated friend, whose comic songs made him an even more popular crewmember than he was an expert communications operator. “When the humans launch one missile, our automated intercept systems have been reprogrammed to temporarily ignore the source. We would be constantly interdicting bare ground if we counterfired at every rocket’s point of origin. But two missiles arising from the same place? That could signify the location of a more sophisticated and capacitous launcher, a target that our intercept system cannot afford to ignore.”
“So, by launching at least two rockets per location, the humans are forcing our systems to spend time acquiring coordinates for every site.”
“Exactly. They are making us waste time, effort, and ammunition.” Tuxae felt the multiple lenses of his eyes slide and tighten against each other in hyperfocused consternation. “This sudden, large attack is not merely unprecedented. It has been carefully planned. The humans have watched us, timed us, have measured what we can and cannot do in response, and how long it takes us. I fear…”
H’toor shifted slightly to look over at his suddenly still friend. “What do you fear, Tuxae? The accuracy of their calculations?”
“That, too. But mostly, I fear their prior silence.”
“Again, I do not understand.”
Tuxae clacked his claws “The humans were capable of waiting many weeks to commence this attack—of waiting, watching, measuring while many of them died, and all of them feared. But now they are striking back with weapons we did not detect, at terribly close ranges, and at a time of their choosing. And so I fear.”
“That they are ready?”
“No. That we are not.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
“Spooky Hollow”restricted area, north of Perth, Earth
Downing studied the scattered reports trickling in from Java’s cities. General revolts were underway in all of them, initially targeted at the most hated and vulnerable adversaries: Optigene’s clone-soldier regiments. The attacks had been extremely successful, spearheaded by cadre-led insurgent groups that had been waiting for the rocket barrage as their jumpoff signal. The barrage had, in turn, been unleashed only upon the arrival of the fleet codenamed Rescue Task Force One: the material fulfillment of Case Leo Gap, Nolan Corcoran’s carefully orchestrated matrix of strategic deceptions and sacrifices. However, the day’s greatest challenge and uncertainty remained: effectively coordinating the myriad and disparate elements of this day’s fateful attack. But, so far, so good.
Downing, ever wary of operational optimism, shook off that thought. “Mr. Rinehart?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Give me an update on our tactical picture. Are we good to go to the next step?”
“Reports indicate that, as predicted, the invader’s combat air patrols on the maritime approaches to Jakarta and Surabaja have been pulled off that duty and redeployed to engage the new ground threats around those cities. All approaching cargo ships have been ordered to hold position. They report clear skies.
“Also, our covert observers on Java are Morse-signaling that the Arat Kur PDF sensors seem unable to operationally discriminate more than a fraction of the targets, probably because their tracking arrays are overwhelmed. We are getting scattered reports that their antimissile counterfire is becoming increasingly autonomous and decentralized. Their individual PDF systems are falling out of the integrated defense grid at the same pace that their cooling and reload intervals are becoming problems. We are good to go, sir.”
“Very good, Mr. Rinehart. Remember, when the Arat Kur see what we do next, their orbital interdiction assets will shift back to our larger ships—and to the aerial threats they’ll be seeing momentarily. When that targeting shift occurs, let me know. Immediately. Timing is everything—everything—if this plan is to work.”
“Very good, sir. Awaiting your order to take the next step.”
Downing drew a deep breath. “Mr. Rinehart, send the following signal to our assault-enabled cargo ships: ‘salvo all’ in one minute, on my mark—mark.”
Standing off Jakarta Bay, Java Sea, Earth
Cesar Pinero, master of the twenty-thousand-ton freighter Maldive Reckoner, watched the last of the two-stage rockets lance away from the deck of the heavily barnacled schooner that was just two hundred meters off his starboard bow. The weapons’ launch exhausts washed in through the already shattered windows of the pilot house, setting its interior on fire. The boat’s captain and first mate were already speeding away in a much-patched Zodiac, slaloming around the canvas covers under which the rockets had been hidden until three minutes earlier. Pinero checked his watch: fifty-seven seconds to his own launch. And in the meantime, it would be instructive to learn how long it took for the Arat Kur to respond to the schooner’s actions. Pinero started a silent countdown: one-one-thousand; two-one-thousand; three-one-thousand—
Looking port and starboard, bow and stern, the rest of the ponderous grain freighters seemed to loom larger in their immobility, having been signaled by the Arat Kur to stop and hold position. So they had done—and watched as the invaders blew every offending smaller ship to kindling.
Four-one-thousand, five-one-thousand…
Pinero checked his watch, looked down from the conning tower at his new second mate, on loan from the Japanese Navy, and nodded. The mate waved to the deck hands, who rose up from among the long crates arrayed on the Reckoner’s deck in a neat single-layer, row-and-column grid. They hastily inserted crowbars into the broadly gapped seams of the crates.
Six-one-thousand, seven-one-thousand…
The sides and ends fell away as deckhands flung clear the crates’ lids. In seconds, the four-by-six checkerboard of overlong wooden cargo boxes had been snatched away to reveal twenty-four missiles of diverse types and capabilities. Pinero blew the whistle he held in his teeth; all but the second mate and two of the deckhands raced toward the gunwales. The engineering section, already there, started the lemminglike rush over the side, hurtling feet-first toward the water over twenty feet below.
Eight-one-thousand, Nine-one-thousand…
Strange how calm it all seemed, how orderly. Half of the small boats had already been reduced to flotsam and jetsam by kinetic kill warheads fired from orbit. Hundreds of long plumes marked the path of the missiles they had launched, which—in their fiery, scalded-cat leaps into the air—had destroyed the decks and ruined the pilot houses of the ships that had carried them to this place. Some of those missiles were exploding in the air: orbital laser or long-range, ground-based PDF interdiction. More dwindled and down-Dopplered into the gray horizon haze that marked the periphery of Jakarta. From behind, dozens of other missiles converged on that target zone. The ships still clustered beyond the fifty-kilometer limit had started unloading, also. Pinero had worried that he would be paralyzed by fear when this moment came, but instead he felt strangely detached, as if he were simply a spectator, even to his own actions.
Ten-one-thous—
The blinding white-hot downstroke looked like an impossibly straight bolt of lightning, yet was almost perfectly silent, because the sound generated by the super-heated hyper-velocity kinetic kill warhead was still struggling to catch up through the soupy atmosphere. The sound and shock of the schooner exploding—flying instantly into an angry, roiling cloud of debris—hit his ears the same moment as the up-dopplering sonic boom of the warhead’s shrieking descent.
Small metal fragments—hissing hot and spinning viciously—spattered the starboard hull, a few spanging off the chest-high rail encircling the Maldive Reckoner�
��s pilot deck. Pinero shrugged out of his windbreaker, checked the straps on his life jacket, popped the cap on the shark-repellent, and calculated. It had taken the schooner five seconds to launch her four missiles, and ten seconds for the Arat Kur to identify and successfully interdict her. So, all told, it was about a fifteen-second response time, from first launch to arrival of counterfire munitions. Of course, the little boats had fewer missiles to launch, and that gave their masters and lately-added weapons-specialists more time to escape. The crews were sent over the side before firing commenced, with orders to stay far away from any other hulls. But on the bigger ships like the Maldive Reckoner, it would take at least twice the time to see all the munitions off the deck. It would be a narrow thing, indeed.
Pinero checked his watch, waved to the second mate, who waved back. All weapons checked and cleared. He pressed the remote signals operation button on his palmtop. Twenty feet overhead, the radio mast of the Maldive Reckoner was sending out a single coded string that announced that she would be deploying her payload in precisely twenty seconds. He checked his watch again, waved to the one remaining deckhand, who had joined the second mate at the bow, crouched low. The deckhand jumped up, hefted a tightly bound canvas package over the port bow. Pinero saw its line tighten and then loosen. Good. The self-inflating raft had pulled free of its canvas sleeve and was now in the water. In ten seconds it would be ready for passengers. He moved to the portside elbow of the weather-walk, estimated the jump to the water at just above ten meters. He didn’t like heights, so he didn’t look for more than a moment.
He checked his watch: twenty seconds.
It had been a strange five weeks, the busiest, most terrifying, and yet strangely rewarding of his life. The Reckoner had made three trips from Shanghai to Jakarta, carrying rice: just rice. On the second trip, there must have been a sub sneaking in beneath them. Pinero had been instructed to hold a dead-straight heading from one hundred kilometers beyond the blockade line to within fifteen kilometers of the Tangjun Pasir headland. That, and the close crowding of ships around him during that voyage made him wonder if it was all part of an attempt to block, confuse, overtax the Roaches’ overhead sensors. But today, it was all over. The grand mission of mercy was, in its last moments, transmogrifying into a grand ambush. The ships that had carried food to Indonesia were now carrying death to it instead.
Twelve seconds.
The small ships had launched first so that the self-teaching Arat Kur computers and their operators would initially identify the little, indigenous boats as being more dangerous, both because they were the only observed source of launches and were harder to hit. Once the computers had finished that recategorization of their targets, it would likely take several precious seconds, and possibly a direct operator override, to shift the firing priority to the freighters, once those larger hulls started unleashing their massive payloads. By the time that shift occurred, there would be too many large, lethal rockets on the way in for the overworked invaders’ PDF systems to handle. At least, that had been the theory. Time to see how Reckoner would fare as one of the first big hulls to unload.
Five seconds.
Pinero raised his hand, then crouched down. The solid metal weather-rail and its height above the deck protected him from the launch exhausts, but that sudden cyclone was likely to send fragments of the crates sleeting and skittering in all directions.
Zero and launch.
Pinero cut downward with his whole arm and hunched lower.
The rearmost rank of rockets and missiles launched first. Their simultaneous exhausts hit the lower extents of the Maldive Reckoner’s superstructure, imparting a blow akin to a hefty bow-wave. Pinero came up just in time to duck again as the heat of their rapidly dwindling wash came level with the bridge. They were well over the bows and climbing into shallow ballistic arcs that would take them into or past Jakarta.
The second launch’s tsunami of white hot exhaust blew Pinero’s hat off and cracked two of the bridge windows behind him. The thickest of these four missiles rode off its ramp like it was skating upright on its tail, cleared the bows and then climbed at a fifty or even sixty-degree angle. From what the Japanese techs told him, that was either a pod carrier which would deploy six semiautonomous remote operated vehicles into Jakarta’s airspace, or a decoy dispenser which would scatter five times that number of smaller vehicles which, by dint of electronic and radar signature, would mimic ROVs, or even larger, more lethal drones.
As the third and fourth waves went up, and shattered and scorched bits of wood casing spattered against or spun down into the weather walk, Pinero checked his watch. They were twelve seconds into the launch sequence. He put a hand atop the rail, wished he had remembered to take off his pants before it had all started. He didn’t want any extra weight on him when he went into the water.
The fifth wave of missiles shrieked off the deck, catching up the ramps and debris from the previous launches in a complicated tornado of overlapping shock waves. It looked like a house of cards being hit by several different garden hoses all at once. He felt a strange, urgent pressure in his calves and behind his knees, but knew he couldn’t obey it yet, couldn’t get up on the rail and plummet down into the marginally greater safety of the water. He and the deck techs had to wait, to be prepared to correct a misfire.
And they got one on the last launch. The far starboard weapon—a thrice-handed-down fourth-generation Yingji missile that should have been junked three decades ago—remained inert in its rack, shaking as the rebounding backwash from the other three jarred it. The second mate, turning back from his face-away crouch and uncovering his ears, saw the missile, then looked at the bridge.
Pinero glanced at his watch: seventeen seconds. They had no time left. But they also had their orders. He waved twice to the second mate, who sprinted to the remaining missile while waving off the deckhand—who went over the side. Good, one more life that might be saved. Pinero glanced at his watch, missed what the Japanese missile tech was doing: twenty seconds. They were living on borrowed time. Pinero looked down. The second mate was scrambling away, trailing a wire, waving. Time to go.
As Pinero rose, so did the Yingji, wailing away with an initial sputter. Pinero, staggered by the comparatively light backwash, missed making a quick hop to the top of the weather rail. As he climbed up again, he saw the second mate end his sprint to the portside gunwale with a long horizontal leap that cleared it. He wasn’t wasting any time.
Pinero’s knees shook as he got up on the weather rail’s wide top. Ten meters to the water looked more like a kilometer…
A blinding white light, like a laser, stabbed down into the Maldive Reckoner, lancing it amidships, splitting the keel dead center, and folding her like a hyperkinetic jackknife. As he was thrown from the superstructure, Pinero felt a brief but sharp increase in heat—
By the time the supersonic thunder of the warhead’s descent arrived behind the heat and then shockwave of the impact, Cesar Pinero was not there to hear it. The few cells that remained of his body were insensate to the secondary explosions which vaporized them, too.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Central Jakarta, Earth
“Christ! What a stink!”
Tygg turned toward Gavin with a raised eyebrow. “You wanker. It’s a sewer. What do you expect?”
“Petunias, Lieutenant, bleeding petunias.”
Tygg shook his head, looked up the ladder past Trevor. “What are you seeing, Mr. Cruz?”
Carlos turned his head away from the ring of daylight above them. “Not much but smoke, sir. Lots of dead clones. And I mean lots. Locals running around with AK’s, pistols. Never in groups larger than three or four. No sign of organized units.”
Tygg nodded. “Because they’re hunkered down, waiting to see if the tactical repeater net will activate and call the general attack.”
“Well, we’ll all find out about that soon enough,” Trevor asserted. He tapped Carlos on the calf, who slid down the street-access ladd
er. Trevor climbed up to their street-level OP, stuck his head up into the halo of daylight—
—And almost bumped his head against the underside of the manhole cover that they had propped up on four bricks like a roof. The car they had pushed atop the manhole was angled so the wheels didn’t obstruct their view of the enemy compound. Most important, they were all but undetectable and the street overhead was an excellent bunker against stray missiles.
Trevor checked his watch again before he could recall his resolve to stop doing so. It just made the rest of the team nervous as they all tried not to think the same, dire thought: what if the tactical cell net didn’t activate? What if something had gone wrong? If it didn’t activate, there was no way for the organized insurgency cells to coordinate their actions with the far more numerous but less organized resistance fighters, or for those fighters to be assured of mounting their decisive attack simultaneously. Scattered, random attacks would be costly, easily suppressed, doomed to failure and mean that the professionally led infiltration forces of the final attack would have a much harder job to do, with a lower chance of success. But if the entirety of the locals’ organized resistance arose at once, was on the same clock, and was also plugged into command updates from offshore, then—
Trevor’s tiny pager—their link to the tactical repeater net—illuminated and then chirped twice. He managed to keep his voice calm, level. “That was the circuit test. Stand by for full activation of the tactical net and commencement of the general attack in thirty seconds. Stosh, keep the clock.”
“Marking thirty seconds, Skipper.”
Trev felt a tug on his pants leg, turned. Tygg handed up a mil-spec transceiver toward him. “We’ve got the first coded sitrep and update from offshore.”
Trevor shook his head. “You read it out so everyone can hear it.” And distract them while we wait to see if the tactical repeater net flies or flops. Because talking to the outside world is not how we’re going to win this battle. Itt’s our ability to update each other in-country which will make or break us.
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