“Don’t you think you should have talked to me first?” Michael asked a touch plaintively. If he had learned anything about Anna, it was the utter futility of trying to change her mind when she decided to do what she believed was right.
“Talk to you first? Why?” she said, shaking her head, baffled. “For chrissakes, Michael, why would I do that? All you’d have done is try to talk me out of it, I’d have insisted, we’d have had a massive fight, back and forth until you gave up and saw things my way. Trust me, this is much easier.”
Michael grunted, disappointed and scared at the same time.
“Michael,” Anna said softly, “I have to do what’s right. If I’ve learned anything from you, it’s that. So get over it. I’m joining the 120th, okay?”
“Okay,” Michael said woodenly, a mass of despair.
“Good,” Anna said, mouth opening wide into a cheerful grin, “but there’s one more thing.”
Michael rolled his eyes in despair. “I can’t take much more of this, Anna. What? A one-woman suicide mission to assassinate Chief Councillor Polk? What?”
“Now you’re being stupid,” Anna said. “No, remember when we snatched some leave and went to Neu Kelheim? Just before we were deployed to Salvation?”
Michael nodded. He would never forget; it was the last time he and Anna had been truly happy together. “Yup,” he said.
“You asked me to marry you.”
“Yes,” Michael said glumly. “I remember. You said wait until the war’s over, as you do every time.”
“Well, I’ve changed my mind. I want—”
“Whoa!” Michael said, sitting bolt upright. “Hold on one second. What are you saying?”
“Yes, you dimwit. I am saying yes. A bit late, but yes. Yes!”
Michael shook his head in confusion; Anna’s effortless ability to change the subject was breathtaking. “Yes?” he said. “You mean, yes, let’s get married?”
“Yes, Michael. Yes, let’s get married. Screw this damn war; the way things are going, it could go on forever. If we wait, we’ll be too damn old.”
“Oh.”
“That’s it? That’s all you can say? Oh?” Anna punched his arm hard.
“Ow! Sorry. Yes, yes, okay,” Michael said; he crushed his face into her neck. “Let’s get married, but when?” he mumbled.
“Tomorrow.”
Michael pushed her away. “Tomorrow? Shit, Anna! When you change your mind, you change your mind.”
“Time’s not on our side, Michael,” she said, all of a sudden grim-faced, “so let’s not waste the time we have.”
“Deal,” Michael said, and folded her into his arms.
Anna and Michael stayed that way for a long time, a tiny island of sanity and hope set in an ocean of barbaric madness.
Sunday, October 14, 2401, UD
Sector Juliet, Branxton Base, Commitment
“Well, Mr. Michael Helfort.”
“Yes, Mrs. Anna Cheung Helfort?”
“I think I have to go. Lieutenant Kallewi’s looking grumpy.”
Michael’s stomach had solidified into a sullen ball of lead. “Go, and for chrissakes, be careful,” he said. “I want you back in one piece.”
“Screw you, Michael Helfort,” Anna said. She settled her helmet on her head with a firm tap and picked up her pack and rifle. “Who the hell are you to talk?”
“Anna!”
“I’ll be careful, promise. Love you.”
With a fleeting peck on the cheek, Anna turned and fell in, her slight figure incongruous amid the bulky shapes of Kallewi’s marines. Michael commed Kallewi. “Look after her, Janos.”
“I’ll do my best.”
Sergeant Tchiang’s voice cut through the desultory chatter, and the marines were off, their ranks swollen with Fed spacers. In seconds, they were gone, swallowed by the darkness, and soon the soft tramp of booted feet faded away. Michael stood and stared down the tunnel for a long time. At last, with a heartfelt sigh, he turned and started to make his way back to ENCOMM. He could worry all he liked, and it made no difference. All he could do was hope that Anna was smart enough not to take too many stupid chances, that she would keep her head down, that she never volunteered for anything.
“Fat chance,” he said under his breath, and climbed into the sled. Bloody woman was born to volunteer.
ENCOMM was quiet when he walked in; he scanned the boards to see what was happening in the real world. Nothing important, he decided after a moment’s study. Right across the countryside around McNair, DocSec sweeps were in progress. Michael shook his head. Sweeps were the most counterproductive operations the Hammers undertook, and not a day passed without dozens combing their way through towns and villages all across Commitment. As far as Michael could work out, the sweeps created an illusion of effective counterinsurgency activity. In truth, they achieved little and pissed the locals off a lot. Thanks to DocSec’s appalling operational security, anyone DocSec wanted to lay their hands on was usually long gone.
Not that the NRA was sitting back. Six operations were under way: four supply convoy ambushes, the assassination of a DocSec officer stupid enough to think he would be safe visiting his mother in a remote village, and a human-wave attack—Michael, like all the Feds, hated them, but they worked—on a planetary defense force support base close to the town of Perdan. He wished the faceless NRA troopers luck and made his way through the clutter of workstations to where Major Hok was sitting.
“Major Hok.”
“Ah,” Hok said, pushing her seat back to look at Michael, a sly grin on her face. “The romantic one returns. How’s the lovely Mrs. Helfort?”
Michael grimaced. “On her way with the rest of our marines to join the 120th.”
“So soon?” Hok shook her head. “Kraa! I must pay attention. Anyway, don’t worry. The 120th is in good hands. Colonel Haadith is a good man.”
“I hope so, Major.”
“Trust me, he is. Now, Operation Pendulum.”
“The simulation’s all set. We’ll be ready.”
It was Hok’s turn to grimace. “Have to tell you that I still have trouble with those Kraa-damned AIs you Feds seem to like so much. It’s been what? Over a century since they were proscribed? That’s one hell of a lot of brainwashing.”
“It is,” Michael said, “but they’re just fancy computers. Anyway, wait until they start to save the lives of your troopers.”
“That’s why the Resistance Council okayed them, so they’d better do just that. Now, there are a couple of things we need to finalize before we run the sim. First …”
General Vaas walked to the front of the makeshift conference room. He turned and scanned the faces of the commanders responsible for the success—or failure—of Operation Pendulum. Michael sucked his breath in. He did not have to be Einstein to work out that Vaas was both angry and embarrassed.
“Thanks to our Fed friends,” Vaas said, “we know that the NRA is not capable of running anything as complicated as a brigade-strength operation against a fixed objective defended by our old pals in planetary defense. And that”—he paused for effect—“is exactly what Pendulum is. Problem is, folks, if we can’t make an operation like Pendulum work, we should just pack up and hand ourselves over to DocSec … which”—his voice hardened to a razor-edged snarl—“I will not allow. So, we will run this damn sim until we learn how to run complex operations. If we are ever to bring the Hammer government down, everything we do has to count, every trooper’s life has to count. We have to make this work. Is that understood?”
A rumble of agreement filled the room, the undercurrents of controlled ferocity, a fierce determination to make a difference, a burning desire to put a stop to centuries of xenophobia-fueled repression, all so strong that Michael could feel them ebb and flow until Vaas’s hand went up to restore quiet.
“Good,” he said. “Let’s do it. I want commanders’ after-action reports in time for a detailed wash-up at 18:00. We’ll change the ops plan if we have to, but
I want the next sim ready to go by midnight. That’s it.”
Resigned to another night’s work, Michael stifled a groan and climbed to his feet. Did Vaas ever sleep?
“End of exercise,” the AI’s disembodied voice said.
Thank goodness for that, Michael said to himself. Two high-intensity, adrenaline-fueled sims in less than twenty-four hours, never mind the intellectual demands of the planning process, and even a man like Vaas must feel tired. The second sim had been a big improvement over the first; surely the man would call it a day.
Vaas bounded to the front of the room, shifting from foot to foot as he waited for the room to fill. “Oh, no,” Michael whispered when he sensed the energy and confidence radiating from the man. Something told him it would be hours before anyone managed any sleep.
“The good news is that was better,” Vaas said. “The bad news is that it wasn’t good enough. So I want commanders’ after-action reports …”
Vaas had run his people into the ground; Michael—and everyone else—was beyond exhausted, his craving for sleep close to irresistible. Vaas had been relentless, but Michael had to concede the man had a point. Time was not on Vaas’s side; the NRA must defeat the Hammers before the people of the Hammer Worlds lost faith in the Nationalists. The good news was that each iteration of the sim had been better than the one before it. NRA commanders used to small, single-unit operations were coming to grips with the need to coordinate what they were doing with the other units involved.
Maybe Pendulum would not be the disaster he had feared. With a quick prayer that Anna was safe—by now she and Kallewi’s marines should be well on the way to the 120th Regiment’s base in the northwestern Branxtons—he slid into an exhausted sleep, and the darkness overwhelmed him.
Monday, October 15, 2401, UD
Branxton Ranges, Commitment
With billions of synapses telling him he was about to die, Michael could not help himself, flinching back into his seat in an autonomic reaction to the wall of rock bearing down on them at frightening speed.
“Breaking left.” Mother’s voice was admirably calm as she threw Widowmaker bodily onto its port side. Michael’s heart shot into his mouth as the ground rushed up to meet them. Only seconds from disaster, the AI smashed the lander back level. Running fast meters above the forest canopy, twin plumes of raw energy blasting the valley behind them, Widowmaker streaked out of the canyon into clear air; an instant later, the threat plot burst into an ugly mess of red radar intercepts from the air-defense stations around McNair. Putting the nose down and engines at full power, Mother drove the lander down hard toward the floor of the floodplain, its bulk tearing apart the early-morning fog of a calm Commitment morning before it leveled out meters above the dirt.
“Command, tac.” Michael was impressed; Ferreira’s voice was no less calm than Mother’s. Considering her often repeated dislike of landers, that was something.
“Command.”
“Alley Kat and Hell Bent are airborne and nominal. We have tactical update and target confirmation from ENCOMM.”
“Command, roger. Weaps?”
“Target set,” Chief Bienefelt said.
“Command, Sensors. Lock up, battlesat fire-control radar. No threat; spaceborne lasers in effective.”
“Command, roger. This overcast will hold?”
“Yes, sir. Forecast says it won’t burn off until midmorning.”
By which time we’ll either be a smoking wreck or home safe, Michael said to himself. He made himself settle down, suppressing the inevitable urge to take manual control. Despite its human crew, Widowmaker was largely in Mother’s hands, and she was in the hands of a cluster of AIs that controlled every system from flight control down to air-conditioning. Given how fast Widowmaker was moving, that was for the best. The ground under the lander was a green and brown blur, objects disappearing before the brain had even begun to register their existence, the occasional settlement vanishing below them in a gray streak.
“Stand by IP … now!”
Widowmaker slammed over onto its side and into a hard turn to starboard, foamalloy wings flexing upward as g forces built, the starboard wingtip centimeters from the ground before Mother flipped the lander back level to run right at the target: DocSec’s Millfield base, a large cluster of ceramcrete buildings arranged around a parade ground crowded with a mass of black jumpsuited troopers, neat lines of trucks, armored personnel carriers, and lightly armored urban warfare vehicles. Michael’s heart tried to beat its way out of his chest as the range closed, the certain fact that Widowmaker was about to rain death down on one of the bigger DocSec bases in the Oxus valley flooding his system with adrenaline.
“Stand by … bays open … clusterbots gone … cleaning up, coming right to new track. Target 2 in one minute.”
Through the rear holocams, Michael watched Widowmaker’s lethal load of fin-retarded clusterbots—supplied by the NRA and, like most NRA’s ordnance, stolen by Nationalist agents or captured from the Hammer convoys; Michael wondered if they would even work—open out. Sprouting fins, they aerobraked savagely before spewing hordes of tiny black shapes onto the hapless DocSec base, an unstoppable swarm of smart bomblets programmed to sterilize the entire base, to scour it clean of men, trucks, and armor. An instant later, the base disappeared behind a mat of dirty gray-black smoke shot through with yellow and red flame, exploding fusion plants ramming misty white shock waves away through the damp morning air. That’s the way to do it, Michael thought.
“Command, sensors. New intercept. Multiple air search radars at Red 20 … stand by … confirmed Locusts inbound from Amokran.”
“Command, roger.” No surprises there, Michael decided. He watched the threat plot update. If things—
“Command, sensors”—Carmellini’s voice was thick with stress—“new intercept. Multiple airborne search radars at Red 40. Confirmed Kingfishers. Stand by range.”
Already alerted by the threat plot, Michael was on it. “Abort, abort,” he barked, gritting his teeth when Mother threw Widowmaker into one of its trademark screaming turns that had the foamalloy wings screeching in protest, mashing the main engines to emergency power to send the lander fleeing for safety: Kingfishers and their long-range hypersonic Alaric air-to-air missiles were a lethal threat to a light lander. Their only hope was to get away; engines capable of driving a fully loaded lander into orbit now accelerated the lander through Mach 5 and beyond, air superheated by compression overwhelming the heat sinks, the lander’s leading edges turning cherry-red.
Where had the Kingfishers come from? ENCOMM’s intelligence people had said nothing about them. There was only one place, Michael decided; they had to have come from McNair spaceport north of the city, the only facility within a thousand kilometers that has runways long enough to launch fully loaded Kingfishers.
“Command, tac. ENCOMM has cleared us inbound direct to Bravo-26.”
“Roger.” Michael ran through the math in his head to make sure the command plot had it right. It had: just. It would be close, very close. The lander would be tucked away below Bravo-26’s limestone slab by the time the Alarics had reached them. With a quick prayer that Alley Kat and Hell Bent were okay—he resisted the temptation to check; Widowmaker came first—he watched intently as Mother cut the power, one eye on the command plot to make sure the Alarics were where they were supposed to be. Flaring the lander and extending the wings, Mother allowed the lander’s speed to wash off before she restored power to drive it through the slab-sided canyon leading to Bravo-26.
“Command, tac. ENCOMM reports kinetics inbound.”
Michael stiffened; this might be bad. “They have vectors yet?”
“Working on it … yes, shit … sorry, sir. Time of flight 42 seconds. Impact datum is 3 klicks north of Bravo-26, where the canyon splits.”
Michael stifled a curse. The karst that covered so much of the Branxtons was riddled with caves, arching holes in the limestone valley walls, thousands of which were big enough to a
ccommodate a light lander. Even so, the Hammers had managed to narrow the target area down to a point just short of Bravo-26, almost certainly attracted by a large cave that could well have been a lander refuge were it not a dead end. Too great a risk of entrapment, the ENCOMM planners had said, so strictly for emergency use only. Michael had no intention of straying anywhere near it.
The instant Widowmaker reached the junction, Mother turned hard left to make the final run into Bravo-26; it was a closely run thing. Ten seconds later the Hammer’s kinetics smashed to ground, the impact shock visible as a rippling wave racing across the ground, the impact zone disappearing behind a boiling wall of vaporized rock. “Holy shit,” Michael muttered. Decelerating savagely now, the lander flared nose up and then leveled out before easing into the safety of the cave. “Thankchrist for that,” Michael muttered as Mother dropped the lander to the ground, its speed down to a sedate walking pace that took Widowmaker deep underground.
Five thousand meters in, Mother braked Widowmaker to a stop and shut down. Releasing his straps, Michael climbed stiffly out of his seat, his combat space suit stiff and awkward. He hated the damn thing, but procedures were procedures, though the chances of a combat space suit keeping him alive if Widowmaker bought it were slim. “Okay, folks,” he said to the rest of the lander’s flight deck crew, “I’ll go and plug into the network. We need to see how the rest of the op went. Jayla, can you check on the tug? I think we’re moving to Bravo-16.”
“Yes, sir. We are. It’s a long way, so I’ll let you know when the tug’s hooked up. Be a long walk otherwise.”
“Thanks,” Michael said, struggling out of his space suit before dropping down the ladder to the cargo bay to exit the lander, the familiar smell of burned rock greeting him, the heat radiating off Widowmaker’s armored skin forcing him to duck his head on the way past. He found the commander of the local security detachment waiting for him.
Helfort’s War Book 4: The Battle for Commitment Planet Page 23