by David Weber
No one ever knew for certain who actually fired the first shot in the Trellis System in 3343. Losses in the ensuing engagement were heavy on both sides, and each navy reported to its superiors—honestly, so far as it knew—that the other had attacked it. Not that it mattered in the end. All that mattered was that the shot was fired… and that both sides suddenly discovered the terrible magnitude of their errors. The Concordiat crushed the Empire’s frontier fleets with contemptuous ease, only to discover that they’d been only frontier fleets, light forces deployed to screen the true, ponderous might of the Imperial Navy, and the Empire, shocked by the actual superiority of Humanity’s war machines, panicked. The Emperor himself decreed that his navy must seek immediate and crushing victory, hammering the enemy into submission at any cost and by any means necessary, including terror tactics. Nor was the Empire alone in its panic, for the sudden revelation of the Imperial Navy’s size, coupled with the all-or-nothing tactics it adopted from the outset, sparked the same desperation within the Concordiat leadership.
And so what might have been no more than a border incident became something more dreadful than the galaxy had ever imagined. The Concordiat never produced enough of its superior weapons to defeat Melcon outright, but it produced more than enough to prevent the Empire from defeating it. And if the Concordiat’s deep strikes prevented the Empire from mobilizing its full reserves against Human-held worlds, it couldn’t stop the Melconian Navy from achieving a numerical superiority sufficient to offset its individual technical inferiorities. War raged across the light-centuries, and every clash was worse than the last as the two mightiest militaries in galactic history lunged at one another, each certain the other was the aggressor and each convinced its only options were victory or annihilation. The door to madness was opened by desperation, and the planning study known as Case Ragnarok was converted into something very different. It may be the Melconians had conducted a similar study—certainly their operations suggested they had—but no one will ever know, for the Melconian records, if any, no longer exist.
Yet the Human records do, and they permit no self-deception. Operation Ragnarok was launched only after the Melconian “demonstration strike” on New Vermont in 3349 killed every one of the planet’s billion inhabitants, but it was a deliberately planned strategy which had been developed at least twelve standard years earlier. It began at the orders of the Concordiat Senate… and ended one hundred and seventy-two standard years later, under the orders of God alone knew what fragments of local authority.
There are few records of Ragnarok’s final battles because, in all too many cases, there were no survivors… on either side. The ghastly mistakes of diplomats who misread their own importance and their adversaries’ will to fight, of intelligence analysts who underestimated their adversaries’ ability to fight, and of emperors and presidents who ultimately sought “simple” resolutions to their problems, might have bred the Final War, yet it was the soldiers who finished it. But then, it was always the soldiers who ended wars—and fought them, and died in them, and slaughtered their way through them, and tried desperately to survive them—and the Final War was no different from any other in that respect.
Yet it was different in one way. This time the soldiers didn’t simply finish the war; this time the war finished them, as well.
– Kenneth R. Cleary, Ph.D. From the introduction to Operation Ragnarok: Into the Abyss Cerberus Books, Ararat, 4056
1
Death came to the planet Ishark in the two hundred and eighth year of the Final War and the one hundred and sixty-seventh year of Operation Ragnarok. It came aboard the surviving ships of the XLIII Corps of the Republic, which had once been the XLIII Corps of the Star Union, and before that the XLIII Corps of the Confederacy, which had once been the Concordiat of Man. But whatever the government’s name, the ships were the same, for there was no one left to build new ones. There was no one left to build anything, for the Melconian Empire and its allies and the Concordiat and its allies had murdered one another.
Admiral Evelyn Trevor commanded the XLIII’s escort from her heavy cruiser flagship. Trevor had been a lieutenant commander when the XLIII set out, and the escort had been headed by no less than ten Terra-class superdreadnoughts and eight Victory-class carriers, but those days were gone. Now RNS Mikuma led her consorts in a blazing run against Ishark’s spaceborne defenders—the ragged remnants of three Melconian task forces which had rallied here because Ishark was the only planet left to defend. They outnumbered Trevor’s ships by four-to-one, but they were a hodgepodge force, and what Trevor’s command had lost in tonnage it had gained in experience… and savagery. Ishark was the last world on its list, and it came in behind a cloud of decoys better than anything the defenders had.
There was no tomorrow for either commander… and even if they could have had one, they might have turned their backs upon it. The Human and Melconian races had hurt one another too savagely, the blood hunger possessed them both, and neither side’s com officers could raise a single friendly planet. The Humans had nowhere to return to even if they lived; the Melconians were defending their last inhabited world; and even the warships’ AIs were caught up in the blood lust. The fleets lunged at one another, neither worried about preserving itself, each seeking only to destroy the other, and both succeeded. The last Human Fleet units died, but only three Melconian destroyers survived to attack the XLIII, and they perished without scoring a single hit when the Bolo transports intercepted them. Those transports were slow and ungainly by Fleet standards, but they carried Mark XXXIII Bolos on their docking racks. Each of those Bolos mounted the equivalent of a Repulse-class battlecruiser’s main battery weapons, and they used them to clear the way for the rest of the ships which had once lifted four divisions of mechanized infantry and two of manned armor, eight hundred assault shuttles, fifteen hundred trans-atmospheric fighters, sixteen thousand air-cav mounts, and the Eighty-Second Bolo Brigade from a world which was now so much rubble. Now the remaining transports carried less than twelve thousand Humans, a single composite brigade each of infantry and manned armor, two hundred aircraft of all types, and seven Bolos. That was all… but it was sufficient.
There were few fixed planetary defenses, because no sane prewar strategist would ever have considered Ishark a vital target. It was a world of farmers in a position of absolutely no strategic importance, the sort of planet which routinely surrendered, trusting the diplomats to determine its fate when the shooting ended. But no one in the XLIII requested a surrender, and no one on Ishark’s surface considered offering one. This wasn’t that sort of war.
One or two batteries got lucky, but despite the XLIII’s previous losses, it retained more than enough transports to disperse its remaining personnel widely. Only six hundred more Humans died as the ships swept down on their LZs to disgorge their cargos, and then Ishark’s continents burned. There was no finesse, for the combatants had lost the capacity for finesse. The days of kinetic bombardment platforms and surgical strikes on military targets were long gone. There were no platforms, and no one was interested in “surgery” any longer. There was only brute force and the merciless imperatives of Operation Ragnarok and its Melconian equivalent, and Humans and Melconians screamed their rage and agony and hate as they fought and killed and died. On Ishark, it was Melconian troopers who fought with desperate gallantry to preserve their civilians, as it had been Humans who fought to save their civilians on Trevor’s World and Indra and Matterhorn. And as the Humans had failed there, the Melconians failed here.
Team Shiva had the point for Alpha Force.
Team Shiva always had the point, because it was the best there was. Bolo XXXIII/D-1097-SHV was the last Bolo built by Bolo Prime on the moon known as Luna before the Melconian world burner blotted Terra—and Luna—away forever, and no one else in XLIII Corps could match his experience… except, perhaps, his Human Commander. Newly enlisted Private Diego Harigata had been sixteen years old when Terra died; now Major Harigata was forty-nine, wi
th thirty-two years of combat experience. All of them had been aboard the Bolo whose call sign was “Shiva,” and man and machine had fought their way together across half a hundred planets.
It was one of the ironies of the Final War that the deployment concept which matched each Bolo with a Human commander had reached a final state of perfection just in time for the Concordiat’s extermination. Mark XXXIII Bolos were fully capable of independent deployment—indeed, even more capable of it than any previous mark of Bolo—yet they were never actually deployed that way. The direct neural interfacing first introduced aboard the Mark XXXII and then perfected for the last and most powerful of the Concordiat’s Bolos, made them even more deadly than any of their cybernetic ancestors. They were no longer simply artificial intelligences built by Humans. Rather, a Mark XXXIII was an AI fused with a Human in a partnership which produced something the designers had neither predicted nor expected.
Humans had always possessed an instinctive ability to prioritize data which not even a Bolo in hyper-heuristic mode had been able to match. The designers had expected for that capability to be enhanced and shared. What they had not anticipated was the fashion in which Human ferocity had melded with the Bolos’ own inherent ferocity.
The Human-Bolo fusion thought with Bolo precision and total recall, intuited with Human acuity, communicated with its fellows in the Total Systems Data Sharing net with Bolo clarity, and analyzed data and devised tactics with Bolo speed and Human cunning, exactly as expected. But it also fought with a ferocity not even the Dinochrome Brigade had ever seen before.
The Brigade’s earlier psychotronic designers had hedged their work about with safeguards, for they had never allowed themselves to forget how horrendously destructive a “rogue Bolo” might become. And so, although Bolos had always had “bloodthirsty” personalities, as was only appropriate for machines whose function was to fight and die, the safeguards built into them had inhibited their ferocity. No one had suspected that, given the Brigade’s long history and endless battle honors and the ferocity its Bolos had displayed. Not until they saw the first Mark XXXII go into battle with its Human commander fused with its psychotronic Battle Comp… and realized that there were no inhibitory safeguards in the Human psyche.
The savagery which lurked just behind the Human forebrain’s veneer of civilization, that elemental drive—the ferocity which had turned a hairless, clawless, fangless biped into the most deadly predator of a planet—was available to the Mark XXXIIs and Mark XXXIIIs, for it was part of each team’s Human component, and Team Shiva called upon it now.
There were nineteen Bolos in the Eighty-Second Brigade when the XLIII was assigned to Operation Ragnarok. There should have been twenty-four, but the days of full strength units had been long past even then. Forty-one slaughtered worlds later, there were seven, split between the XLIII’s three LZs, and Team Shiva led the attack out of LZ One against Alpha Continent, the largest and most heavily populated—and defended—of Ishark’s three land masses.
The Melconians were waiting, and General Sharth Na-Yarma had hoarded men and munitions for years to meet this day. He’d “lost” units administratively and lied on readiness reports as the fighting ground towards Ishark, understating his strength when other planetary COs sent out frantic calls for reinforcements, for General Sharth had guessed the Imperial Navy would fail to stop the Humans short of Ishark. That was why he’d stockpiled every weapon he could lay hands on, praying that operations before Ishark would weaken the XLIII enough for him to stop it. He never expected to defeat it; he only hoped to take it with him in a mutual suicide pact while there was still someone alive on his world to rebuild when the wreckage cooled.
It was the only realistic strategy open to him, but it wasn’t enough. Not against Team Shiva and the horribly experienced world-killers of the XLIII.
We move down the valley with wary caution. The duality of our awareness sweeps the terrain before us through our sensors, and we seldom think of ourself as our component parts any longer. We are not a Bolo named Shiva and a Human named Harigata; we are simply Team Shiva, destroyer of worlds, and we embrace the ferocity of our function as we explode out of the LZ, thirty-two thousand tons of alloy and armor and weapons riding our counter-grav at five hundred KPH to hook around the Enemy flank through the mountains. Team Harpy and Team John lead the other prong of our advance, but their attack is secondary. It is our job to lead the true breakout, and we land on our tracks, killing our counter-grav and bringing up our battle screen, as the first Enemy Garm-class heavies appear on our sensors.
The Enemy’s war machines have improved greatly since the war began. His old Surtur-class heavies and Fenris-class mediums have been replaced by newer, more capable—and lethal—successors. Although his cybernetics remain significantly inferior to our own psychotronics, and although even now the Enemy possesses no equivalent of our own direct Bolo-Human neural interfacing capability, the new Garm-class heavies and Skoll-class mediums “think” as well as the old Mark XXV Bolos. Unlike earlier generations of Enemy combat mechs, they are fully capable of independent deployment, and they are also much more powerful. The Enemy’s final generation of war machines—the last he will ever build—use a cold-fusion power plant quite similar to our own. Indeed, one which was copied from our own. It is far more efficient than the ground-based hot-fusion reactors once available to him, and with that power available to him, he has moved away from his use of large numbers of lighter Hellbores to adopt the Concordiat’s own design philosophy, concentrating on the heaviest possible Hellbores he can mount.
Of course, Human designers did not simply sit idly by while the Enemy improved his capabilities, and the Mark XXXIII is the most deadly mobile fighting structure ever deployed for planetary combat.
There are, however, many more Enemy mechs than had been projected, and they roar up out of the very ground to vomit missiles and plasma at us. An entire battalion attacks from the ridge line at zero-two-five degrees while the remainder of its regiment rumbles out of deep, subterranean hides across an arc from two-two-seven to three-five-one degrees, and passive sensors detect the emissions of additional units approaching from directly ahead. A precise count is impossible, but our minimum estimate is that we face a reinforced heavy brigade, and Skoll-class mediums and Eagle-class scout cars sweep simultaneously out of the dead ground to our right rear and attack across a broad front, seeking to engage our supporting infantry. The force balance is unfavorable and retreat is impossible, but we are confident in the quality of our supports. We can trust them to cover our rear, and we hammer straight into the Enemy’s teeth as they deploy.
Hell comes to Ishark as we forge ahead, and we exult at its coming. We bring it with us, feel it in the orgiastic release as our missile hatches open and our fire blasts away. We turn one-zero degrees to port, opening our field of fire, and our main battery turrets traverse smoothly. Three two-hundred-centimeter Hellbores, each cycling in four-point-five-one seconds, sweep the Garm battalion which has skylined itself on the northeasterly ridge, and hunger and a terrible joy fill us as the explosions race down the Enemy’s line. We taste the blood lust in the rapid-fire hammering of our mortars and howitzers as we pound the Skolls and Eagles on our flanks, and we send our hate screaming from our Hellbores. Our battle screen flames under answering missiles and shells, and particle beams rip and gouge at us, heating our armor to white-hot incandescence, but Bolos are designed to survive such fire. Our conversion fields trap their energy, channeling it to feed our own systems, and we rejoice as that stolen power vomits back from our own weapons.
The Garm is less than half our size, and two-two-point-five seconds of main battery fire reduce the fifteen units of the first Enemy battalion to smoking rubble, yet two of its vehicles score upon us before they die. Pain sensors scream as their lighter plasma bolts burn through our battle screen, but they strike on an oblique, and our side armor suffices to turn them. Molten tears of duralloy weep down our flank as we turn upon our dead foes’ c
onsorts, but we feel only the joy, the hunger to smash and destroy. In the crucible of combat, we forget the despair, the knowledge of ultimate disaster, which oppresses us between battles. There is no memory now of the silence over the com nets, the awareness that the worlds which were once the Concordiat lie dead or dying behind us. Now there is purpose, vengeance, ferocity. The destruction of our foes cries out to us, giving us once again a reason to be, a function to fulfill… an Enemy to hate.
More of the Enemy’s heavies last long enough to drive their plasma bolts through our battle screen, and suicide teams pound away with plasma lances from point-blank range, yet he cannot stop us. A Garm fires from four-point-six-one kilometers and disables Number Three and Four Hellbores from our port lateral battery before it dies. A dug-in plasma team which has concealed itself so well that we approach within one-point-four-four kilometers before we detect it gets off a single shot that blows through our track shield to destroy two bogies from our outboard forward track system, and five Skoll-class medium mechs lunge out of a narrow defile at a range of only three-point-zero-two kilometers. The ravine walls hide them from our sensors until they actually engage, and their fifty-centimeter plasma cannon tear and crater forty-point-six meters of our starboard flank armor before we blow them all to ruin, and even as the last Skoll dies, Enemy missiles and shells deluge everything that moves.
The inferno grinds implacably forward, and we are not man and machine. We are the Man-Machine, smashing the Enemy’s defenses and turning mountain valleys into smoking wasteland. Our supporting elements crumple or fall back crippled, and a part of us knows still more of our Human comrades have died, will die, are dying in shrieking agony or the immolation of plasma. Yet it means no more to us than the deep, glowing wounds in our own flanks, and we refuse to halt or turn aside, for that which we cannot have we will extend to no others. All that remains to Human and Melconian alike is the Long Dark, and all that remains to us is to fight and kill and maim until our own dark comes down upon us.