by Jay Allan
When Hector got to one minute I had the mortar teams arm their warheads. At thirty seconds I had him broadcast the countdown to the whole battalion.
"Twenty-six, twenty-five, twenty-four..."
Had I done everything I could? Should I give those guys an extra minute to get back?
"Eighteen, seventeen, sixteen..."
No. I had to stick to the plan. If there were more bunkers behind these and we lost the surprise, our attack would run right into a meatgrinder. At fifteen I told the scouts to hug the ground.
"Twelve, eleven, ten..."
I dropped down myself. The whole battalion was prone, though most of us were far enough back to avoid the worst of the shockwaves.
"Five, four, three, two, one..."
Buttoned up in my suit in the middle of an alien blizzard I couldn't hear the shots go off. There was an eerie wait, maybe ten or twelve seconds while the rounds made their way to the target and then...
The swirling snow flared bright yellow for an instant and then vaporized.
"Everyone stay down until I give the order!" I had told them several times already, but it never hurt to make sure.
I could hear rocks and debris bouncing off the back of my suit as the shock waves reached my position. It only lasted a few seconds and then subsided. I slowly got up onto my hands and knees and looked out to see two small mushroom clouds. Hector gave me a breakdown of outside conditions. An unarmored man would have died instantly, probably first from the intense heat, though the heavy concentration of ammonia vapor and the radiation were also well beyond lethal levels.
I had Hector get me Jax on the line. "Jax, start your attack. Be careful, and monitor the heat levels. You should be fine, but just make sure no one gets into a hotspot and exceeds their suit tolerance."
"Yes sir. Attack commencing now."
This was definitely the same old Jax. He had the companies heading forward in 15 or 20 seconds, and they were moving quickly. After about two minutes I got a report.
"Major Cain, Jax here. We have visuals on the impact points. Significant craters and scattered plasti-crete debris. The bunkers are completely gone. No enemy presence, no hostile fire. Exterior temperature 923K."
I replied, "Thank you, Captain. Keep moving toward the center point. Report any structures or enemy action immediately. Continue monitoring outside conditions."
After he acknowledged, I got Frost on the line. He had the reserve company. "Frost, I'm attaching a heavy weapons team to your company. Move up and stay 3 klicks behind Jax's troops. I want you in position to react to any developments. I sent a couple of scouts around each flank to check on activity from the other bunkers, and then I got the request I was expecting but was dreading.
"Major? Captain Yoshi here. Request permission to move forward and observe the action."
I couldn't really refuse. he was here to observe, after all, and it wouldn't do to insult the courage of the PRC's representative. "Ok, Aoki, but I want you to stay with Frost's company. Hook up with his command element, and don't go any farther forward without checking with me."
"Yes major. Thank you, sir."
A few seconds later Jax commed me. "Major, I have enemy troops emerging from two, possibly three points. It appears they are coming out of several concrete structures. The bunkers are not large, sir, so my best guess is they are moving up from underground facilities."
We expected that most of the installations would be underground. Looks like that hypothesis was panning out. After a brief pause, Jax continued. "I have each company deployed in two lines, SAWs will be emplaced and engaged within 30 seconds. I detached a squad to each flank just in case we get any sallies from the perimeter bunkers to each side."
He'd just told me he already did everything I was going to order him to do. "Very well, captain. Outstanding. Carry on." I moved forward myself. Jax was over on the left, though he was controlling the whole line perfectly. I drifted over to the right and moved up to the second infantry line.
There was still a lot of residual heat, and the snow was being vaporized as it fell. There was a haze from the suddenly gaseous ammonia, but the visibility was significantly better than it had been. I could see the first line, and it looked like they were heavily engaged.
The fight was nasty, but we had the edge from the beginning. Jax had the troops perfectly deployed, and the enemy was rushing into formation. I figured we'd taken them by surprise with our nukes, and the only way they could stop us from getting to their access points was to come out and fight us on the surface. From my perspective, every one of them we killed up here was one we didn't have to dig out of some tunnel.
Jax had the company auto-cannons deployed in the center of each forward line. I ordered up the two heavy auto-cannons from the battalion reserve, positioning one on the extreme right flank and sending the other over to Jax to place wherever he thought he needed it.
We were definitely getting the better of the fight, but the enemy was still bringing out troops, and the fire was heavy. We were taking considerable losses, and with current conditions, most of them were KIAs. Right now, just about any hole in your armor was enough to kill you.
I wanted this fight over. I wasn't going to sit here and wage a battle of attrition where every minor wound was a death sentence. I ordered Frost to move his company over to the extreme right. About five minutes later his people were in position.
"Frost, we're going to swing around and hit these guys in the flank as they come forward. I want a section detached to keep those buildings and the immediate area around them under constant grenade attack. Give them something to think about as they are coming up."
Frost acknowledged and snapped out orders to one of the sections while I was still on the com.
"I want the rest of the company to wheel 90 degrees and advance on a perpendicular to our line." I had Hector add Sanchez to the com. He was commanding the company in line on the right. "Sanchez, Frost's company is going to flank the enemy. I want your people in the first line to key off their beacon. As they advance across your position move your troops in laterally to fill the holes further down the line. I don't want any friendly fire incidents. Understood?"
"Yes sir." His voice was strong, clear. God, I was proud of these troops. "Understood. Executing now."
The heat from the explosions was dissipating. In a few more minutes we'd be back in the middle of the blizzard. I wanted to make the best progress we could while we had relatively good visibility. Frost's company pivoted around, using the heavy auto-cannon as a hinge. When they were perpendicular to the rest of the line I ordered the auto-cannon redeployed further down. As Frost's people advanced, Sanchez' troops moved laterally by fire team, each group repositioning to specific areas at his direction. The shortening of his frontage allowed him to plug the gaps where casualties were heavy without committing the second line. I wanted those reserves kept fresh if possible. I suspected the surface battle was only phase one for us.
The enemy, disorganized already from trying to form up as they emerged, were caught in the crossfire, and the entire enemy left flank started to disintegrate. These weren't Janissaries, but they were good troops, and taking prisoners wasn't exactly feasible under these conditions anyway. As our flanking force advanced, the original line became shorter and denser, and the enemy was caught in a savage crossfire. We were losing some visibility - the ammonia was coming down as heavy rain now - but were hardly needed visibility to rake the enemy with fire.
Their left flank broke first. It started in small groups, but within a few minutes the entire enemy left was in full flight. I ordered Frost to pursue and prevent them from rallying, and I had Sanchez wheel his company as Frost had done earlier, flanking the enemy right, which was still heavily engaged with my first company. Their captain, Rijis, was down, so Jax took over direct command, and condensed his frontage as Sanchez's troops advanced laterally.
Caught in the crossfire, with half their troops already in flight, the rest of the enemy troop
s broke and ran. We had pretty much lost visibility in the slushy ammonia snow that was now falling, but we still had some scanner contact. I ordered Jax to take a platoon and pursue, linking up with Frost and taking overall command on the surface. I took the rest of Rijis' company and Sanchez' crew and headed to the central bunker. We were going underground.
I gave Jax the battalion heavy weapons - they wouldn't be much use underground anyway - and told him to keep the enemy off-balance, but to be very careful. I didn't want our troops getting strung out all over the place in conditions like these. But I also didn't want these enemy troops on the surface to reform and come down into the tunnels behind me.
There were two large, reinforced plasti-crete structures. Both seemed to be access points to the underground complex. I sent Sanchez to one with his company, and I went to the other with half of Rijis' crew and the battalion auxiliaries.
There were half a dozen guards in each building, so we had a quick firefight as we pushed our way in, suffering 4 more casualties before we wiped them out. The access points appeared to be large hatches over circular shafts about 4 meters wide. The shaft was about ten meters deep, and there was a large chamber at the bottom. There were 4 metal ladders, one at each compass point. It looked like there was also a bank of three lifts, but I wasn't about to trust to the enemy to keep the power on while we took the elevators. I lined up a section at each of the ladders, and ordered Sanchez to proceed the same way in his building.
We popped about a dozen grenades down the shaft to disrupt anyone waiting there - I didn't want any fire as we climbed down - and then the sections went over the edge. The first troopers got to the bottom quickly, climbing about halfway down and then jumping to the ground. The area at the bottom of the shaft was a large round chamber about 50 meters in diameter, clearly an assembly point for ingress and egress. There were large pipes along the ceiling with what looked like high powered air and water jets, probably for removing toxic, radioactive residue from armor and protective gear before entering the main complex. I'm afraid we were rude houseguests, though, and didn't stop to wipe our feet.
I commed Sanchez for a report, and it seemed like the chamber below the other bunker was similar but considerably smaller, probably an emergency or secondary ingress/egress point. I told him to proceed with caution. We'd killed a lot of their troops in the firefight, and even more of them were disordered and fleeing on the surface, cut off from at least these two re-entry points. But we still had no idea how many more troops they might have down here, and I wasn't taking any chances on either of our groups getting cut off and trapped.
The bank of lifts was along the wall not far from the ladder. They appeared to be large freight-sized elevators, and we had no idea how far down they went. We didn't need the enemy using them to bring troops up in our rear, so I had one of the rocket teams blast them. The cars were all somewhere on a lower level, but the explosions did more than enough damage to make the things unusable.
There were four doors leading out of the large chamber. One exit was a large set of double doors near the lifts, which appeared to be access to the mining areas. The other three were clustered on the opposite end of the chamber.
I checked with Sanchez, and his room didn't have the lifts or the large doors, just two smaller ones. I ordered him to move forward and clear one, leaving a strong guard on the other in case the enemy sallied out. I did the same thing on my end. I set up one of the SAW teams covering each door, and left a platoon in the chamber. Then we blasted open the door on the left and headed down the corridor.
The tunnel appeared to be bored out of solid rock and then covered with a white, plasti-crete coating. There was a long lighting track running down the center of the ceiling, but it looked like they'd cut the power. I had the lead troopers turn on their suit floodlights so we could get an actual look at the corridor and not just an infrared reconstruction. The tunnel had no branches, and we had no enemy contacts at all. We ended up in a single large room with rows of armor racks along the walls. There were half a dozen suits hanging, but the rest of the racks were empty. That didn't mean anything on its own - even if there was a whole army down here waiting for us, they'd be suited up by now.
I had Hector do an analysis the number of suit racks and estimates of the surface force we had engaged. His answer confirmed my initial guess. Most or all of the troops who'd suited up here were in the surface force. Of course, for all we knew there could be ten more rooms like this down here.
This was a dead end, so I was about to get everyone turned around and head back to the main chamber when I got started getting urgent reports. They had audio and scanner contacts on the other side of one of the doors. They were covering the entry with a SAW, and there was a squad against the wall next to the door.
I got everyone turned around in a hurry, and started back. I hadn't gotten 20 steps when I got the update. The door had been blown, and troops swarmed into the chamber. But the ID transponders flashed a warning to everyone, and at the last second no one fired. It wasn't the enemy, it was Sanchez' people pouring out of the doorway.
I commed him immediately for a report. It turns out the entry he'd taken his people through was in fact a secondary ingress/egress point. There were some storage areas directly under, but the only tunnel led straight back to the access chamber we were occupying, which was now crowded with both forces.
I sent Sanchez and one of his platoons down the middle corridor to check it out, but my gut said the double doors by the lifts were more important. While Sanchez was scouting I checked in with Jax for a surface report. The rout had continued, with small clusters of enemy troops rallying and fighting back, but most trying to escape. Jax estimated that there were less than 100 enemy troops left alive on the surface. He'd formed a command post and was sending search and destroy teams out to finish them off.
Good. Leaving Jax in charge of something was as good as seeing it done yourself. I also got an update from fleet command. Tyler Johnson's battalion had landed near the second planetary objective. Hopefully our reports would help them out. I had just signed off with fleet, when Sanchez commed me. The central corridor led to an extensive complex, which seemed to be mostly living quarters. They hadn't searched the whole place yet, but so far everywhere they'd been was deserted. It could take hours to go through every corridor and room in a complex that housed several thousand workers and troops. I wanted Sanchez back here before we went into that mine.
"Sanchez, have Sergeant Ho and one section systematically search the place to confirm it is deserted. Meanwhile, you get back here with the rest of your crew. We're going into the mine in ten minutes."
"Yes sir. On the way."
I started to get organized for entering the mines while two of the engineers prepped charges to blow the doors. When Sanchez got back we blasted our way in and started moving into the mine in three waves.
We might as well have walked through the front door of hell. For the next nine hours we fought step by step, level by level through the gigantic mazelike mine against a fanatical enemy determined to fight to the death. We made our way through booby traps and past hidden snipers. Our scanners and communication with the surface were out, the effect of the concentrations of super-heavy elements in the surrounding rock structures.
In one large chamber we found the bodies of the mine workers, the poor souls sentenced to this hell for one infraction or another. They were little better than slaves, and my first thought was someone decided they couldn't be trusted in this fight, and had them disposed of. But after looking I could see they'd been dead for quite some time.
The troops defending the tunnels were Mubarizun, elite Caliphate special forces that we certainly didn't expect to find there, and they fought us with suicidal determination. The combat was beyond savage, as bad or worse than anything during Achilles or Columbia, but in confined spaces deep underground. They collapsed tunnels on us and utilized their familiarity with the mazelike complex to try and outflank us. We fought w
ith every weapon we had, and in the tightest areas the battle came down to blades and even armored fists.
I sent a runner to call down Jax's troops after they'd cleared the surface, and Ho's group as well for reinforcements. Trying to direct an entire battalion strung out through kilometers of twisting tunnels is virtually impossible, even when your com is working. The sergeants and corporals earned their pay taking the initiative when orders from higher up couldn't reach them. By the time we'd cornered the last group and wiped them out we were exhausted and near the end of our endurance. I'd never seen troops fight more bravely than those I led that day, but I also knew the battalion was nearly broken.
I came close to not making it out myself. I ended up separated from my troops and surrounded by 4 of the enemy. They'd have taken me down for sure, but just in time two of them went down under a pair of blades slashing so quickly my eyes couldn't follow them. PRC troops carried a blade in each arm, not just the one, as we did. Their military maintained a tradition of fighting with the blade, and Aoki Yoshi was an expert. I whipped around and sliced one of the enemy troopers nearly in half, then spun and shot the other one in the head. That was how my liaison officer, Captain Aoki Yoshi saved my life on Eridu, despite the fact that I had told him ten times to stay out of the fighting.
When we hobbled out of the tunnels, now absent any living creature but us, and climbed slowly up the ladders to the surface, less than half of us were left standing. The survivors slowly gathered around the rally area, waiting silently for the shuttles to land, while the medics did what they could for the wounded in terrible conditions. Sanchez wasn't one of the survivors. He died fighting half a dozen enemies with his blade while his troops pulled their wounded back to safety. He'd be decorated posthumously, I would see to that. For all the miserable good it would do him.
As soon as I realized what we were up against, I'd sent runners back to the main chamber to contact fleet command so they could warn Major Johnson and his battalion before they went in. Unfortunately the warning was too late. The complex on the other side of the planet was a copy of the one we attacked, and it was also full of Mubarizun. Johnson's troops there were beaten back, and the general had to send in another battalion to reinforce them, which played havoc with the org chart for the rest of the campaign.