Horovitz waved a dismissive hand. “The marines can look after themselves. They have combat engineers, don’t they?”
“Ah, no they don’t, General. Combat engineering support is our responsibility, planetary defense’s responsibility.”
Horovitz waved his hand again. “Well, that’s not my problem. Ours have better things to do than sanitizing an airport. Anyway, the NRA aren’t miracle workers. Even they can’t mine Kraa knows how many hectares of ceramcrete, and if they did, even the dumbest marine could see what they’d been up to. Provided the marines stay well clear of the buildings and don’t touch anything, I can’t see a problem. Kraa, what am I saying? They should know that.”
“Yes, sir.”
Horovitz waited patiently while his chief of staff went off to issue the orders to the marines. “Done?” he said when the man returned.
“Yes, sir. They’ll start pulling back inside the hour. They’re not happy about the lack of combat engineering support, but Brigadier Agnelli says he can cope.”
“Pleased to hear it,” Horovitz said venomously. “I’d be happy if we never worked with those arrogant pricks ever again. How are we doing interdicting the NRA withdrawal?”
“Well, sir. We are dropping blocking forces right across their egress routes back to the Branxtons as we speak, backed up by ground-attack fliers—”
“Do I detect a note of disapproval?” Horovitz said. “Yes, Colonel … yes, I think I do.”
“No, sir,” Madani protested. “I made my point at the time, sir. You made your decision, I accepted it then, I accept it now. There’s nothing more to say.”
Horovitz glared at his chief of staff. He refused to trust the man any farther than he could spit. The fact that Colonel Madani belonged to a clan with higher-placed connections than his was a constant irritation. He would have gotten rid of him months ago otherwise. Horovitz’s nephew, a young and ambitious man, was ideal for the position, and it galled him that he had not been able to persuade the PGDF’s commanding general to sack Madani.
“Don’t think I don’t know what you’re thinking, Colonel,” Horovitz said finally. “I know you wanted the blocking forces dropped into position early. In my opinion, that was too risky. We needed to secure Perdan first. I thought I had made myself clear.”
“Yes, sir, you did.”
“Good. If I hear my decision being criticized, I’ll know whom to blame. So, you were saying?”
Loneliness threatened to overwhelm Trooper Chou; he had never felt so cut off, so isolated, so exposed, his only connection to the small handful of NRA troopers left behind in Perdan a hastily buried fiber-optic cable. Tucked away under his chromaflage cape, he was hidden in rubble around a fire-damaged ware house positioned on a small ridge overlooking Perdan’s airport, a tangle of ceramsteel beams balanced overhead to form a precarious roof. The airport’s sprawling ceramcrete aprons were a shambolic mess of abandoned equipment scattered between the blast-blackened wrecks of planetary defense trucks and light armor. Long after the last of the NRA had pulled out, nothing had moved except for the rain dropped by a passing monsoonal rainstorm. Soon afterward, a gray light announced the arrival of a new day. Recon drones arrived overhead, then attack drones, and then the first chromaflaged shapes drifted into view, indistinct blurs that Chou struggled to identify. Backed up by armor, some moved past the shattered ruins of the airport’s terminal buildings before spreading out to secure a perimeter while the rest made their way out onto the aprons and taxiways. Hammer marines, Chou decided, judging by their obvious discipline and efficiency.
Some time later, things began to pick up. First, a second convoy of marine armor arrived, followed by a steady stream of marine units on foot until the airport apron was crowded. Heart in mouth, Chou watched one marine start to rearrange a pile of mortar-shell boxes into the makings of a crude shelter. He did not get far before a passing corporal yelled at him, abuse pouring down much like the rain. Chou smiled. The corporal was dead right. Fiddling with battlefield debris that had not been declared safe by the combat engineers was bad for one’s health. Relieved, he watched the corporal harangue the miscreant to rejoin the rest of his unit.
Chou waited. Hour after hour, unit after unit, the marines kept coming until the ceramcrete aprons were thick with marines sprawled out in untidy lines as they waited for their rides home, a sea of combat-armored bodies interrupted by laagers of every vehicle in the marines’ air-mobile inventory. Chou licked his lips, his throat parched ash-dry. He had never seen this many Hammer marines in one place before; it was a frightening sight. “Kraa help us,” he whispered as an awful truth hit him. What he was staring at was a small part, a tiny fraction, of the Hammer war machine the NRA faced. The NRA could kill every last marine sitting on the airport aprons, and what difference would it make? There were thousands more, tens, hundreds of thousands more marines where these had come from. All of a sudden, victory seemed a long way away.
The distant rumble of incoming landers broke the silence, distant dots appearing, quickly taking the unmistakable shape of Hammer heavy transport landers. This was as good as it was going to get, he decided. Chou activated his whisper mike.
“Jackass, this is Joker Three Four,” he said.
“Joker Three Four, Jackass.”
“I have multiple heavy landers inbound. Estimate fifteen hundred marines plus support vehicles on the apron. Recommend we go when the landers touch down.”
“Jackass, roger that. Stand by.”
Chou said a quiet word of thanks to the Feds; they had provided the fiber-optic network connecting the observers to each other and to their improvised charges. He still was not sure about them, but the communications gear coming out of their microfabs was a hundred times better than anything the NRA had been able to steal from the Kraa-damned Hammers.
The faceless NRA trooper controlling the operation was gone only a minute. “Joker Three Four, Jackass.”
“Joker Three Four.”
“Joker Three Four, Jackass. Concur. Go when the first lander hits the ground. Stand by … Joker Niner One, Jackass. Activate. I say again, activate all charges. Report when ready to fire.”
Chou set to work, and one by one the truckbot fusion microplants came to life. The die was cast. Once fusion started, there was no stopping it. The safety interlocks had been just so much dead weight; they had been ripped off and discarded. All Chou needed to do was wait until they came to full power; then he either fired them or five minutes later they would lose containment anyway. It was a while, but finally he had all green lights.
“Jackass, Joker Three Four.”
“Joker Three Four, Jackass.”
“All charges online. Ready to fire.”
“Roger, Three Four. Joker Niner One, this is Jackass. All stations stand by to fire on Joker Three Four’s command. Joker Three Four, you copy? Try to get the landers.”
Chou gulped; this was not in the plan. He took a deep breath to steady himself. “Affirmative, Jackass, firing on my command. Joker Niner One, this is Three Four, stand by to fire.”
With agonizing slowness, the first of the marine landers banked hard, wings flexing under the load, before it settled down to make its final approach. Behind it, the second lander followed suit, the two landers running toward the threshold, rock-steady, as if on rails.
“Joker Niner One, this is Joker Three Four … firing in five, four, three, two, one, now!”
Truckbot microfusion plants scattered beside the runway and across the airport apron exploded in a single searing flash of pure energy, the blast scouring the ceramcrete clean, every living thing destroyed in an instant. The two marine landers never had a chance; picked up bodily, they were thrown over onto their sides. Before their pilots had time to react, first their wings and then their hulls plowed into the close-cropped grass flanking the main runway, the shock of impact blowing huge clouds of rain-sodden dirt high into the air before they tumbled end over end, gouging massive scars into the ground before coming t
o a stop.
Chou did not live long enough to see what he had achieved. Before the first lander even drove into the ground, what was left of the ware house, weakened by fire, gave way in the face of the blast, its collapse toppling tons of ceramcrete onto his position.
As he died, towering columns of ionized gas climbed away into the sky all across Perdan before they were driven away by the latest rainstorm, shredded skeins of fast-cooling gas blown twisting away into the distance.
Friday, November 23, 2401, UD
Branxton Ranges, south of Perdan, Commitment
Separated from the rest of the 120th during a vicious firefight with the Hammers, Anna and Michael walked on alone. Even the Hammer recon drones that had forced them to slow down to a crawl had disappeared, and the battlesats had been blinded by thick gray cloud scudding overhead. Michael was happy to see the cloud; the intermittent rain it brought with it was a small price to pay.
Where the rest of the regiment had gotten to, they had no idea. All Michael knew was that they were not where they were supposed to be, rally point after rally point populated only by trees. Soon they abandoned any idea of finding them. Before he, too, vanished into the darkness, a straggler from the 48th had told them the rest of his regiment was somewhere ahead of them, and Michael still hoped they would catch up with them. It was not a good feeling, just the two of them alone in a vast forest infested with vengeful Hammers.
Fifty meters short of the next ridge, the characteristic buzz of a recon drone caught his attention. As he paused to see where the damn thing was, some deep-seated atavistic instinct shocked him out of the endless one-foot-after-another trudge away from Perdan, and in an instant he knew with absolute, unshakable certainty that he and Anna had to get off the track.
“Move!” he screamed as he leaped for Anna, provoked by instinct alone. Grabbing her backpack, he crash-tackled her off the path and into a twisting, rolling, crashing slide down through the undergrowth and into a narrow ravine. There Michael came to a crunching stop, the dead weight of Anna’s body dropping on top of him, driving the air out of his lungs with a whooof.
“Michael!” Anna snapped. “What the fu—”
A fast-moving flight of four marine landers roared overhead, black shapes smeared across a predawn sky torn to shreds by the appalling noise of their engines as they accelerated away, a noise that was nothing compared to the blast from the pattern of fuel-air bombs that exploded an instant later. The shock wave was a malignant living force, the overpressure unstoppable, ripping and tearing at the ground, driving debris outward in a lethal storm of razor-sharp shards of wood. Michael was shaken to his core, unable to refill his lungs, every fiber of his body screaming in protest, his body pounded into the dirt, slammed up and then back when the shock wave ripped through the ground, rocks, dirt, and debris cascading down across them.
Ears ringing, confused and disoriented, Michael lay there for a long time, tortured lungs fighting for air. He could not hear much over the ringing in his ears; he could only feel the slow skittering of debris dropping onto his helmet. When his brain rebooted, he rolled Anna off his back and struggled to sit upright.
“Anna, you okay?” he mumbled past a tongue thick with dirt and dust; he tried to shake a sick fuzziness out of his head without success. He felt sick.
“Piss off,” she mumbled. “Leave me alone. Don’t want to move.”
“Come on, Anna,” Michael said, standing up. “We can’t stay here. They must have spotted some of us, so they may be back. Come on”—urgently now, he shook her shoulder—“we need to keep moving.”
“Bastard.” She sat up, brushing dirt off her chromaflage cape. With an effort, she climbed to her feet, swaying unsteadily while she organized herself.
“You okay?”
Anna nodded. “Yeah. Bit woozy is all. FABs are no fun at all.”
Michael had to agree. Like every Fed spacer, he had watched a live fuel-air bomb drop during his training—from a safe distance—and he had experienced the damn things firsthand when the Hammers were hunting him on Serhati. He hated them then, and he hated them now.
Settling his gear and grabbing his rifle, Michael scrambled out of the shallow ravine. The sight that greeted him shocked him to his core. He and Anna had been lucky; the Hammer landers had dropped their bombs just over the heavily wooded ridge they had been climbing on their way south to safety, leaving the ground leading to the ridge a shattered mess. The blast had sheared the tops of trees off, scattering branches and tree trunks across the ground in careless profusion.
“Not good,” he said.
“No,” Anna said. “I wonder how things look on the other side.”
They soon found out, Michael offering a silent prayer of thanks that he and Anna had been protected from the worst of the blast by the ridge. The ground ran down to a small stream, then climbed to the next ridge. Before the Hammers had arrived, the valley would have been close to idyllic: well wooded, cool under trees undisturbed since the planetary engineers had seeded them into the ground, a stream running cold and clear across water-worn granite, rich with plants, birds, and wild animals.
The valley had been a small piece of paradise on a screwed-up world. Now it was hell.
For hundreds of meters upstream and downstream from where Michael and Anna stood, the valley was a nightmare of shattered trees, the ground a shambles of blast-tossed trunks blown into untidy heaps interlaced with branches stripped bare of leaves, the air thick with the acrid smell of charred wood and burned fuel, thin skeins of blue smoke drifting, twisting away into the sky.
Nothing moved, the silence oppressive. Michael scanned the valley for any sign of life. “Nothing,” he said after a while. “You see anything?”
“No. Any poor bastard caught down there would have had no chance. You think they were after the 48th?” Anna asked.
“I hope not,” Michael said with a heavy heart, “though the Hammers must have seen something to justify a four-lander strike. Come on, they’ll have sent recon drones on their way back to count bodies … if they can find any left to count, that is,” he added bitterly.
With a heavy heart Michael followed Anna. The Hammers’ ability to rain death and destruction down on the NRA wherever and whenever they chose reinforced his growing fear that this war might be unwinnable. The prospect sickened him; for all its faults, humanspace deserved better than a victorious Hammer of Kraa: a vengeful, bloody-handed, and ruthless instrument of death.
Anna led the way back into the cool of the forest, forcing the pace now that the forest canopy minimized any chance they might be detected by battlesats or recon drones. Two more days should see them out of the granite country and back into the karst; another day after that and they would be home.
So Michael hoped.
Saturday, November 24, 2401, UD
Branxton Ranges, south of Perdan, Commitment
“I’m sure I saw something,” Anna whispered. “Here, check it out.”
She spit on the inside of her wrist and pressed her forearm to his. Michael’s neuronics went online with Anna’s; a second later he was looking through her optronics-enhanced eyes at a tumbled cluster of boulders overgrown with thick strands of creeper, a tangled green nightmare.
“Okay,” he said, staring at the scarlet target icon Anna had laid over the image, “but what am I supposed to be seeing?”
“Keep looking.”
Hard as he tried, all he saw was greenery. He shifted his optronics filters up and down the wavelengths, stopping in the infrared. Then he saw it, a patch of exposed rock toward the top of the outcrop that showed up a few degrees warmer than the rest. After a while he worked out what he was looking at: the infrared signature of a man’s buttocks, a figure eight lying on its side.
“Nice work, Anna,” he said. “Someone was sitting in that damn rock not long ago.”
“He was. We don’t know if they are expecting us or not. We may have triggered a sensor,” she said, head swiveling around slowly to check t
heir surroundings. “Though I don’t think so as I’m not picking up any radio transmissions from any sensor lines. We were very careful coming in.”
“I’m glad we knew about it. We owe those sensor recon teams a beer.”
“We do,” Anna said. “Anyway, we need to get the hell out of here. Back the way we came before heading west … fast. If the NRA intel is correct, five klicks will take us around the end of this sensor line. If they did detect us coming south, we should be clear by the time they work out that we’re not going to walk into their ambush. Let’s go.”
Nerves jangling, Michael slid backward with infinite care, his every movement slow and deliberate, paced to ensure that he never overtaxed his chromaflage, that nothing except the sounds and sights of the forest reached the line of holocams and acoustic sensors the Hammers had strung across their path.
Once out of sight of the boulders and well clear of the sensor line, he and Anna turned. Moving fast now, they made their way to the end of the line of Hammer sensors before turning south again.
Finally clear, Anna stopped and waved Michael forward. “Okay?” she whispered.
“Yup.”
“I think we’re clear. Your neuronics picking up any radio transmissions?”
“No, still nothing.”
“Good. That means the Hammers haven’t air-dropped any remote sensors. Let’s go.”
With that, she was on her feet, moving quietly through the trees, the need for speed tempered by the need to stay quiet. The NRA knew the locations of the Hammers’ fixed sensor lines; where they might have dropped thousands of short-lived microsensors to try to pick up the retreating NRA was another matter. Scattered at random in the thousands in the aftermath of any big NRA operation, the microsensors were card-sized boxes packed with a wide-angle holocam and microphone, an optical and acoustic signal processor, a power supply good for a week’s operation, and a simple radio transmitter, all attached to a cable and cross-frame aerial designed to snag in the trees. Simple, cheap, and crude—just like the Hammers, Michael always thought—the microsensors would hang in the trees waiting to shout for help if something out of the ordinary walked past.
Helfort’s War Book 4: The Battle for Commitment Planet Page 28