Gateway War

by Jack Colrain

  “I’ve got contact with Hope. She says they’re in some cave overlooking this position. Everybody, keep your eyes open.”

  It took only a couple of minutes to find footprints heading west, but they didn’t last very long before the ground became too solid to have taken prints. At least Daniel had some idea of where to start with the drone, however, and he directed it to the west, making longer north-south passes with each increment of distance out from the wrecked APC.

  ‘I see the drone!’ Hope’s excitement came through clearly. ‘It’s passing left to right, so if you bank left, you should head straight for us.’ Daniel had the drone turned towards the foothills of the cliffs about a mile away, and immediately spotted a bright orange, high-visibility blanket from the APC’s emergency supplies kit.

  Delighted, Daniel beckoned to Kate Kinsella. “Sergeant Kinsella, assemble a rifle team of six. One sniper, one RPG handler, four suits. I’m coming with you. Superman, you’re in charge of the rest of the team. Protect the APC long enough for Stewart to figure out if anything’s worth salvaging and get that done.”

  “Right, sir,” Bailey said with a nod.

  “Stewart, Cole, same deal as with the Mike Boats: once you’ve freed up anything useful, break down as much of the machine as can be used as raw material to replenish railgun ammo.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  ‘Hope, we see your position.’

  ‘Great! We have a solid defensive position, so just come get us.’

  ‘We’re on our way.’ Daniel wasn’t too surprised to see that there were some dark cavities in the cliff face ahead. He bent to pick up the blanket and carried it with him as he lined up the cave, or what he guessed might be a tunnel mouth in the slate-like cliff face, that most directly lined up with both the blanket’s position and the wrecked APC. Tiny hissing creatures flickered past—the Gresian planet’s equivalent of insects.

  Even before they entered the tunnel, a relieved-looking Hope emerged. “Dan! I didn’t expect you this soon.”

  “Oh, you haven’t tidied the holiday home?”

  “I hope your car has a lot of spare seats.”

  “Room isn’t an issue, but I think your no-claims bonus is shot to hell,” Daniel said, almost too relieved to keep his voice stable. Erik Palmer and Mili Svoboda were just inside the cave mouth with another half dozen soldiers. Behind them, several uniformed bodies were laid out with blankets over their faces. At the sight, Daniel felt his heart sink. It was always sad to lose someone under his command. And that had nothing to do with manpower needed for the mission, either. “Palmer!”

  “Sorry for the worry, sir,” Palmer rasped. “Didn’t want to give the enemy the chance to snatch any of our people, even the dead.”

  “I get you.” Daniel shone a moonbeam deeper into the cave, and saw that it was split into several tunnels at the back. “Lucky these were here.”

  “We tried to explore them a little,” Palmer said, “just in case they were anything like the tunnels on Lyonesse. Which they are. And we didn’t want anything sneaking up on us.”

  Daniel nodded, knowing he was quite correct.

  “They seem to go on and on,” Hope said. “We didn’t want to risk getting lost in them when we—I—knew you would be looking for us.”

  “They do remind me of Lyonesse,” Palmer went on. “They branch all over the place, and some of them end up in pretty big underground rooms. It’s a big structure.”

  “Rooms?” Daniel echoed. “Or caves?”

  “Definitely rooms,” Hope said. “Artificially cut.”

  Palmer nodded. “The Gresians do like their tunnels, don’t they? There’s no telling how extensive this tunnel network is… which makes me think about where and how they really live, and how they plan.”

  “Go on, Palmer,” Daniel prompted him.

  “If the Gresians have dug a tunnel network this extensive in the middle of nowhere, what have they done in their populated areas? Subways, catacombs, whole other sub-surface cities?”

  “Yeah…. It’s pretty weird for what look more like a climbing or arboreal species.”

  “Maybe there are two sides to them,” Hope suggested. “A duality. High up and down low.”

  “Or just one side,” Kinsella said thoughtfully. “Keeping off of the surface level in between.”

  “The surface level being where we humans go,” Doug Wilson finally commented. “And that can’t just be for our benefit. All these structures pre-date their knowledge of us. These were probably Shaldine tunnels originally.”

  “And the Gresians inherited the tunnels from the Shaldine, so now us surface walkers might be the meat in a Gresian sandwich. Let’s try to avoid that,” Daniel said. In his opinion, the tunnels were a cause for concern. He went and squatted beside the bodies of the fallen soldiers, and started collecting their dog tags. “We can’t take the bodies with us. There won’t be enough room in Trap One for all of us as is.”

  “Shall I form a burial party, sir?” Palmer asked.

  “No. I’ll collect the tags, and then Cole can demolish this tunnel. That’ll give them the best burial we can manage here, and stop anyone coming down this tunnel from the other end if they figure out we were here.”

  While Daniel collected the dog tags and Sergeant Cole ran over from the surviving APC with a demolitions kit, Hope’s team gathered up the weapons and supplies they had brought with them from their wrecked vehicle. Daniel was done quickly, and helped Hope to carry the dead soldiers’ weapons away, given that they’d still be useful. “What exactly happened?” he asked her.

  “We were attacked by two Gresian fighters. Their pilots seem to be quite good—they went for a dive-bomb approach, not a strafing one. We were hit before we even knew they were there.”

  “Hopefully, they won’t get much chance to do that again,” Daniel said. Then Cole appeared from the rear of the cave, trailing some wires and a detonation circuit box. “All set?”

  “Ready to blow,” Cole confirmed. He looked sadly at the five still forms. “I wish we could send them home.”

  “So do I,” Daniel said quietly. “Wish I had some good words to say over them, too.”

  “You will have, sir. That’s what the memorial service is for.”

  “I guess so.”

  Once they’d made sure that everyone had left the tunnel, Sergeant Cole turned a dial on his control box and then pressed a switch. There was a distant sharp thump that Daniel could feel between his ears, in his chest, and in the back of his neck, and then a rumble that forced smoke and dust out of the cave mouth. When the dust blew gently away, there was no cave mouth at all—just a spillage of rocks and dirt from where it had once been. .

  The soldiers jogged back to Trap One and found that Sergeant Stewart had finished breaking down the wreckage of Trap Two, and begun turning its components into ammunitions on a molecular level via nanoforge.

  While the nanites did their thing automatically, Daniel gathered everyone around Trap One. “Unfortunately, there’s no more room on the bus. Professor Wilson and everyone not in an Exo-suit—basically, that means Torres, Andrews, and Steffen, gets a free ride. The rest of us will rotate in and out of the vehicle in groups of eight, like good old-fashioned tank infantry. Eight of us will jog alongside the APC for an hour, then swap for another eight for an hour…. Get it?”

  “Got it,” several voices said in unison.

  “Good,” Wilson said crisply. “Now, when do we start? We do still have a mission to complete.”

  “As soon as Stewart’s nanocube has filled our ammo-carrying capacity, we’re on the road again. We don’t have the time to stop now. We’ve got work to do.”

  Twenty-One

  Once they were back on the road, so to speak—though they were still in open country, and Daniel would have given half his monthly paycheck for something as smooth as an actual road at this point—Daniel took a turn jogging for the first hour alongside the APC, with Hope, Svoboda, and several others.

  Afte
r an hour of heading northwards, Daniel swapped back into the APC and called Colonel Barnett on the Sydney. “Greyhound here, sir.”

  “Reading you five by five, Greyhound.”

  “We’re back to strength, sir.”

  “Including the professor?” Barnett asked eagerly.

  “Yes, sir. We’re continuing as ordered now.” Daniel paused. “There’s something else that needs to be fed into the intel chain.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “We’ve found part of a network of tunnels large enough for Gresians—and even ATV-sized vehicles—to pass through. If these tunnels are replicated elsewhere, they could be used by Gresian soldiers to harry or counterattack.”

  “Roger that, Greyhound,” Barnett replied, though his voice sounded as if he was merely receiving confirmation of an existing theory. “Other units have made similar reports. We’re landing extra sappers, and bringing in ground-penetrating radar mounted on drones. These damned things are all over the place.”

  “Can’t say I’m too surprised, based on what we saw. The Gresians themselves have proved to be arboreal in nature, though.”

  “We believe the previous Shaldine inhabitants were underground dwellers. We’re getting other reports that some are big enough to drive large vehicles through, so we’re considering using them to move our own forces forward. So far, we’ve seen no sign of actual Gresian activity in them.”

  “None?” That surprised Daniel. Why would the Gresians not exploit a good tactical tool left behind for them? They were far from stupid, he’d noticed.

  “Not so far,” Barnett confirmed. “They seem abandoned, for the most part, and the intel analysts think that maybe they don’t have a full useful map of the network, or else maybe it’s another one of those religious things for them.” Daniel glanced at Lizzie, raising a questioning eyebrow. She shook her head. “So far, touch wood, it doesn’t seem to be anything to be too concerned about, but, as I said, we’re checking them out via sappers and GPR to see if we can use them.”

  “Be careful, sir. We’ve seen the Gresians exploit Shaldine tunnels before.”

  “Noted, Dan. What’s your current position?”

  “We’re on the move right now. According to the GPS, we’re less than a hundred miles away from our target.”

  “A hundred and forty-seven klicks,” Hope said.

  “A hund—”

  “I heard Captain Ying, Dan. It’s OK.”

  “Absent any other interference or problems, we should be there within three hours, maybe even two.”

  “Good to hear,” Barnett replied approvingly. “The situation in space is settling down. The Gresians’ orbital defense platforms are out of business, and their fighter cover has been thinned out. Most of their fleet has pulled back. Reports from the battalion commanders say that Gresian ground forces are in retreat. It’s almost a rout.”

  Daniel was pleased to hear that, but something niggled at him. “Sir, the AI tells me that the Gresians as a culture are entirely military. The whole adult population has extensive military training, and any analysis of the situation needs to take that into account. It’s their whole cultural identity.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning…. Sir, I hate to say it, but everything I’ve experienced with the Gresians—their tenacity and their training—gives me a hard time believing that they’re going to go down without any more fight. Get killed in repeated attacks and be thinned out of numbers, sure, but not just pull back and give it up.”

  “That’s what they’re doing,” Barnett insisted. “All over the planet.”

  “Yes, sir, I hear you…. I just don’t believe it. The ambush they lured us into involved them having supposedly abandoned a town. And then making a massive surprise attack.”

  “And that ambush at the town was bad enough,” Barnett said understandingly.

  “Actually, no, sir, it wasn’t.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  Daniel wasn’t quite sure how to explain himself. “It means those were civilians, all ex-Gresian military, yes, but still civilians, without military-grade weapons. The next group will be fully-armed Gresian soldiers.”

  “You’ve fought them before.”

  “On unfamiliar ground, in cramped conditions. Here, they’re in open country, and on their home turf. They have the advantage in familiarity, and motivation in fighting for their home soil. And that’s a big motivator.”

  “We’ll take your concerns on board, Lieutenant. Sydney out.”

  And throw them over the side as soon as we leave port, Daniel thought, continuing what Barnett had implied, but left unsaid. He had hoped that a good man like Barnett would have listened, and it was both dismaying and infuriating that he hadn’t. Then again, why should he? If all the available evidence showed one thing, why would he choose to believe the exact opposite? It was the curse of rationality.

  Standing up through the hatch as they travelled, Daniel scanned the horizon for signs of enemy activity, but there were simply plain, rolling hills with the low cliffs getting close on one side, and another river on the other. It was as if the topography of the planet was funneling them towards their objective, which Daniel knew he should be pleased about… but he still couldn’t help feeling a vague nausea and buzzing between his shoulder blades.

  It was the tunnels he was thinking about, and he wished he’d taken a closer look back where they’d picked up Hope and Palmer and the others. There were junctions in them, and Palmer and Hope had both described large rooms rather than caves…. He didn’t like it.

  Suddenly, Mary Jefferson, taking her turn at the Super-Bradley’s radio while Bailey was running along outside, shouted. “Distress beacon, sir!”

  “Let’s hear it,” Daniel ordered. She put it on speaker and a rapid, repeatedly-falling tone filled the transport.

  “That’s a fighter distress beacon,” Hope supplied, her voice tense.

  “The beacon’s transmitting from approximately ten miles east.”

  “Do we have a voice?” Daniel asked.

  “Mayday, mayday,” the voice came, as if on cue, “this is Hawk Four, repeat, Hawk Four. My ship is down; I ejected. There are Gresians everywhere—”

  Hope, being a fighter pilot herself, immediately went on high alert. “What do you think, Daniel? If it’s true, we need to pick him up. After that shuttle fake-out, though—”

  “No,” Daniel said. “My money’s on it being another Gresian fake. Let’s call it in first, see if there really is a downed fighter in the area.

  “And if there is?” Hope asked tensely. “What if it’s real? One fake doesn’t mean they all are.”

  Daniel knew that, and hated to be so skeptical. “If there’s a single pilot, he’s going to be better spotted from the air. Or at least the Gresians pinning him down—if they exist—are.” He called up to the Sydney. “This is Greyhound; we’re picking up a downed fighter beacon ten miles east of our position. Claims to be a Hawk Four. Can we get any confirmation of a downed fighter—”

  “Stand by, Greyhound,” the officer on the Sydney’s radio snapped, sounding a little frazzled. Daniel didn’t like the sound of that, either. Then Jefferson started in her seat.

  “What is it?” Daniel asked.

  “Another fighter beacon—no, wait, a shuttle beacon. Both...” Her eyes widened, and over the radio, Daniel and everyone in the vehicle could hear the tinny sounds of more and more distress beacons.

  “What the hell....” Daniel whispered. “Lizzie, can you patch me in?”

  “You’re not going to like it,” she said, and with that she dropped him into hell.

  Dozens of voices were yelling at once over the communications networks: “Under heavy fire… Gresian armor inbound … Where the fuck did they come from? … My whole wing is gone! … They’re coming out of the ground!” Daniel’s ears pricked up at that last. The tunnels, of course. “They’re behind us … The third sector has fallen … Jesus, was that the fuel store?! … We can’t ge
t back there, we’re ten miles ahead of … Didn’t we already clear that town? … Fall back to Beachhead ... Return to Landing Zone Two...”

  And Daniel realized from what had happened: The invasion had gone too well, and they had over-confidently advanced too quickly into Gresian territory; in the process, they’d overextended themselves.

  The radio chatter was still telling it all: “They’re coming out of the ground … They’re coming out of the walls … Swarming from those burned-out buildings, but nothing could have survived the air strike...” Daniel understood it all too well: The Gresians were coming from tunnels all over the continent. The rout Barnett had spoken of hadn’t been a rout, at all; it had been a lure, and the humans had taken the bait. Now it was all going horribly wrong.

  “We need medevac, grid reference…. Any shuttles available to pull us out? … Waiting at Landing Zone for evacuation...”

  The shuttles didn’t seem to be coming down, though, and Daniel wondered why.

  The question vanished from his mind, though, when the APC was suddenly bounced hard off the ground, and rang deafeningly throughout. It ground to a halt, and Daniel ushered everyone out before it could be hit again. He didn’t know what had hit it, but he knew something had. Something pretty powerful, too.

  Twenty-Two

  The Super-Bradley was smoldering from whatever had hit it, with plasma bolts still bursting from the red moss and weeds of a rolling hillside two hundred yards away. Erik Palmer was yelling orders and hustling Wilson into the cover of a ditch, escorted by Bailey and Kinsella. Svoboda crouched at the rear corner of the APC, sniping at the sources of the plasma fire, though Daniel couldn’t make out the Gresians that clearly must be there.

  Beswick, in the APC’s turret, started banging cannon shells into the hillside; as he did so, the explosions of earth and moss revealed a dark surface underneath, with lines delineating where the blocks from which it had been built had been placed together.