He saw the three missiles streak straight up into the sky before turning and coming almost directly back down, except instead of falling back into the narrow valley in which Detroit’s topside entrance nestled, they hit the mountainside to the west. The missile payload delivered cluster munitions that divided and divided again until millions of fragmentation shards fell in a black rain of death over the mountainside. There was no shelter up there; no escape. From the valley floor, it looked as if a landslide was falling down the cliff. It was a landslide of shredded Hardit corpses, which left behind a mountain slick with blood.
“Aircraft are coming in for an attack run,” said Exelmans.
“Keep half our anti-air missiles in reserve,” Brandt ordered. “This is only the first wave.”
“Understood. Batteries Able, Baker, and Charlie, you heard the officer. That gives you half your assets to play with. Fire at will.”
From inside the redoubt, Brandt watched the deadly game of hunter-prey unfold across the skies above Detroit. Hardit gunships would dive into the valley and sweep over Detroit’s topside, strafing anything leaking an EM signature with the cannons mounted underneath their hulls, and the missile tubes in their noses. But Detroit was hunter as well as prey. Air-to–air ordnance, ripped from the carcasses of Detroit’s Marine air force and stuffed into makeshift silos, lanced through the enemy gunships. The autocannons that Force Mexico had hidden in the sheer faces of the mountainsides spat supersonic metal at gunships that flew too close.
Silent and sanitized, Brandt’s battlemap view made the duel look as bloodless as a friendly Scendence game. It was a game of deadly consequences, though. If the aliens won air superiority, they could advance their ground forces unmolested up to Gate Three, or try blasting a new way down from the surface.
Strong though the Marine anti-air defenses were, Brandt hadn’t expected to cope with such numbers. The few days they’d had to prepare left no time to strengthen the silos, or harden the signal and power cabling that connected their ramshackle defensive network.
Hardit gunships were being ripped from the sky.
But they could be replaced...
Another strafing run came in from a wing of six aircraft corkscrewing through the air. None survived, but Brandt’s battlemap locked for a second, before continuing with much jerkier updates than before.
“Exelmans, report!”
“Cannon shot us up,” answered Exelmans. “Kant and Zane dead. Still limited sensor feed available. Second wave coming in now… Third wave holding station ten klicks away. All missile batteries, as before save half your assets… Charlie Battery. Acknowledge!”
“They’re gone, Sergeant,” Brandt explained gently. “Don’t hold any reserve back. Fire every anti-air asset you’ve got left.”
Exelmans didn’t reply straight away. His hesitation stretched on uncomfortably. They both knew that committing anti-air reserves meant yielding air superiority to the waves of gunships that would follow. But without Beowulf they simply didn’t have the means to defend the skies against an air force that was throwing over a hundred gunships at Detroit. Why the hell did McEwan choose to denude them of their orbital defense? Maybe Beowulf’s secret weapon would have proved ineffective, but at least it would have given them hope.
“Yes, sir,” Exelmans eventually answered. His voice was calm, but Brandt could hear the undertone of dismay. Bernard Exelmans knew he was going to die.
Missiles streaked out of the makeshift silos at such short range that there was little the aircraft could do in response. Within seconds, the wave of gunships had taken heavy casualties, the survivors throwing everything they had into evading the missiles.
“That’s it, sir, we’re out of anti-air missiles.”
“Can we reconfigure more from the surface-to-surface role?”
“Unlikely and not enough to make much difference. Control links have been degraded by their strafing runs. What we have left won’t last seconds against their next air attack.”
“Fire whatever surface-to-surface assets you have left.”
A last barrage of anti-personnel missiles scoured the western slopes. But the bulk of the enemy’s forces had pulled back a safe distance from the mountainside… waiting.
Moments later, as if the Hardit commander knew the humans had expended their missiles, hidden sensors linked to Brandt’s battlemap spotted militia scouts approaching from a new direction: the mountains to the east.
Detroit’s valley cut north-south through the western edge of the Gjende mountain range, with a fertile plateau only a few miles farther west. To approach from the east, an army would have to track for many miles along treacherous narrow paths over deep chasms. Unless… Brandt suddenly thought — unless the enemy knew of secret underground passageways that emerged into hidden ledges in the rocky heights.
Brandt took a deep breath. He had nearly left the eastern approach unguarded. At the last moment, he had stripped a team of Marines away from their other defensive preparations to leave a surprise for any Hardits coming from the east. Maybe it would have been better if they had left it undefended.
Lieutenant Nhlappo had ordered him not to use anything noisier than Marine backs and boots to set up Detroit’s outer defenses. He’d obeyed that order to the letter when he’d sent a party out to set up their surprise booby trap. A very special bomb.
Brandt ordered the AI operator of his bomb to detonate at its discretion.
“Third wave of gunships inbound,” Exelmans reported. “They’re… shit! They aren’t swooping and jinking. They’re coming in slow and steady, stable gun platforms. It’s as if they know we’re defenseless. They’re gunning for… We’ve lost Able Battery.”
“No ‘as if’ about it, Sergeant. They’ve broken our signal encryption. That, or we have a collaborator spy. Or they can see into the future. You’ve done enough. Get out of there and join us at the redoubt.”
Exelmans hightailed it out of the observation post that had become a deathtrap, but the signal feed still supplied information to Brandt’s battlemap. The sergeant had been right: the enemy had feinted attacks to draw the venom out of the defenders’ bite. Their main force had waited until they had claimed the air above Detroit before launching the full assault.
From the western plateau beyond the Gjende Mountains the field artillery the Hardits had readied – and Brandt’s orders earlier had spared – now came into action. They were field railguns. As direct fire guns, they were useless at throwing their heavy darts at Detroit, sheltering as it did on the narrow valley floor. When the big guns did open fire, their purpose became clear. Their rounds exploded on the rocky mountain ground behind the Hardit infantry positions. It was the preferred means for Hardit commanders to motivate their reluctant conscripts: advance or die!
And advance they did: thousands of ground troops crawling down the mountainside.
In his mind’s eye, Brand brought up an image of Tawfiq Woomer-Calix. It’s not over yet, he told the imaginary Hardit. We still have other defenses that I wasn’t dumb enough to mention to Exelmans over an open channel. If you want Detroit, I’ll make you crawl through hellfire first.
Tawfiq, presumably, was far away in safety, unreachable in a bunker deep underground. The militia swarming down the mountainside had to suffice as the targets for human vengeance.
Despite only having a few days to ring a defensive line around Detroit, Force Mexico had done enough to decimate the enemy. Aircraft ordnance had been converted into mines and booby traps. Del-Marie Sandure had wired the explosives up to simple controller systems that used a variety of algorithms. As a result, the Hardits could never predict when the traps would blow, could never feel safe. One mine would blow after it detected thirty Hardits had passed by; another would be drilled into the rock, designed to blow five minutes after the first Hardit passed by, unleashing a cascading rockfall onto anyone below.
Soon, every Hardit knew that even if a dozen comrades had progressed safely beyond that next turn in the path,
an explosion might still blow the moment you stepped there.
The humans had also collapsed millennia-old mountain paths, carving out replacements that channeled confused Hardits into dead ends, killing grounds prepared for mines or one of the few autocannons pilfered from Detroit.
For every Hardit killed by the auto-defenses, another ten remained. If these were combat bots, or human Marines doped out on combat drugs, you could perform a cold calculation of the casualty numbers and conclude that the effectiveness of the Hardit units had been degraded, but no more than that.
These fearful conscripts were not disciplined soldiers, though. Hardit morale was shattered beyond any hope of rallying. Those who retained a shred of sense took cover and hid, cowering at whatever point they had reached when their shattered nerves had deserted them, too frightened to either move forward or retreat. The most panicked fled back up the slopes, triggering more traps as they scurried away. Any Hardit survivors who reached the top without succumbing to the humans’ hidden deathtraps were then blasted off the mountain by their own field artillery.
From his forward command post Brandt couldn’t see the individual dramas unfolding out on the approaches to Detroit, but his battlemap was sufficient to show an accurate summary of the ebb and flow of the attack. It also reported with chilling accuracy the second wave of militia units the Hardits now brought up to the edge of the western heights. More reserve units were forming up to their rear.
The bomb he’d planted near the main path from the east sent a countdown warning. Detonation in twenty seconds.
A shiver swept through Brandt. He’d been able to face overwhelming odds with coolness, because he knew deep in his bones that panicking wouldn’t help to keep his people alive.
But his bright idea to bury a bomb scared the drent out of him.
He had no idea what it would do.
Brandt himself had been one of the six-strong detail of Marines in powered armor who had crept out in the cover of the midday sun — the sun that the Hardits hated so much — and carried away one of the dropships that had taken the expeditionary force down from orbit.
Brandt ordered the orbital satellite to give him a close-up view of the Hardits streaming in from the east.
The dropship had complained that it was still dangerous, still not quite completed the discharge of the enormous energy it had absorbed in its stealthed descent through the atmosphere. Brandt had ordered the ship to be ripped from its tendril-like thermal dump cables that burrowed into the ground.
Four seconds to detonation…
They had buried the ship on the eastern approach, packed with E-7 explosives linked to an AI controller.
It was time.
The satellite showed a plume of fire from the explosion, a fireball about the diameter of his outstretched arms.
That was it. A single grenade would have had more impact.
The battlemap vanished.
Vauban gasped.
“The dropship did this?”
The answer came from the battlemap, which re-established itself in front of his eyes.
Brandt eagerly focused the display on the east. He scanned the heights and found only dead Hardit scouts. He pushed the display farther to the east where he expected to find the bulk of the Hardit attack. He found them all right. Whatever exotic emissions had been emitted by the damaged dropship had killed everything in the vicinity. All the Hardits were lying still, yet unbloodied. So too were the birds still falling from the sky.
Brandt hoped.
He scanned the western slopes and found the same scene of death. Then his first disappointment: the Hardit reserves kept back from the mountainside were unaffected.
And in the valley in between was another rain falling from the sky. Not of birds but Hardit gunships. Their motive power had failed. All of them were crashing down to the ground where they lay as still as the militia on the mountain.
Brandt’s hope grew into confidence. The battle was not over, but they had endured the worst.
His new belief dented, slightly, when another wave of Hardit gunships approached from the north. But after the hundreds of gunships they had already fought off, this new wave had just five. Surely these were the last of the enemy’s air reserves.
Then he groaned, because the battlemap reported the news he feared most of all. The Hardits were launching another attack. This time it was coming from the tunnels below the base.
The mines they’d laid in Level 9 had blown. If all had gone to plan, the tunnel had collapsed with it. They had mined all but one of the entrances leading up from the Trog tunnels – all that they were aware of anyway.
Sooner or later, the underground Hardit forces probing for a route into the human levels would discover the one passageway to the tunnels that remained unmined. It wasn’t undefended, though. Marines and dozens of Resistance fighters were guarding this entrance to the undercity.
Would they be enough?
The battlemap vanished.
Brandt’s only surprise was that the connection to the sensor system that fed the battlemap had lasted so long. Even so, the loss of his main focus was such a disorienting wrench that he would have fallen over if his suit AI, Vauban, hadn’t kept his balance for him.
Then his mind was thrust back into the physical reality of the command post.
In stark contrast to the battlemap’s ethereal ghostlight and AI-whispered statistics, Brandt suddenly found himself inside a damp bastion that stank of sweat, despair and stale urine.
The odors were either false or exaggerated. Vauban’s air filters would normally filter out anything that wasn’t tactically important. It must be Vauban panicking, the AI’s equivalent of giving his human a slap in the face.
We haven’t lost yet, Brandt admonished his AI.
In the artificial blue glow of Vauban’s low-light enhancement, he became aware of the attention from four armored figures, the other defenders of the position.
“The main action’s about to kick off downstairs,” he told them. “Stafford, Forbes, when Sergeant Exelmans gets here, tell him to hold this position. Khurana, Feria, with me.”
As the three of them rushed off to join the coming fight deep underground, Brandt knew the defenders he left behind could do no more than delay an attack in strength. But the route through Gate Three was a narrow one by design, and had many mines and other traps ready to punish an invading force. The makeshift defenses in the undercity were far weaker. If the Hardits broke through there, they would rapidly spread out through the city. Detroit would be lost.
Another concern gripped the lieutenant. If the Hardits penetrated the city, they might jam human signals. He made one last call while he still could.
“Sandure, report.”
“Our defenses are in place,” answered Del-Marie. “Civilians are all armed. We’re ready for the enemy.”
“They’re too strong, Del. If they reach you in the hangar, you’ll be overwhelmed by sheer numbers. Prepare the aircraft for immediate evac.”
“Are you ordering me to abandon my position, sir?”
“Negative. I still intend to win this fight. But be ready to bug out the instant you make contact. You’ll only manage a short hop because the skies belong to the monkeys with their frakking gunships. They’ve only a handful left, so you have a chance. Take care of our wounded and civilians, Del.”
“Don’t worry, sir. They’re safe with me. Sandure out.”
— Chapter 61 —
The wounded and civilians scattered through the hangar – stragglers all of this doomed campaign – tried to be cheerful and respectful toward him, but as the minutes ticked away without radio contact with the outside world, Del-Marie Sandure found it ever more difficult to face the people he had been assigned to protect.
Zug was among the wounded, heavily sedated on a stretcher. Del would give anything for his old friend to be fit e
nough to stand alongside him. Despite the throng of people, he’d never felt so alone.
The way Del saw it, they had two options: barricade themselves in one of the two barracks built into Detroit’s hangar complex, or sit in the patched-up T16B transport plane that waited, engines on standby, for a quick getaway.
Before losing radio contact, Brandt had told him that the enemy had overwhelming numbers and had already established control of the air.
Even before Brandt’s update, Del hadn’t liked either option. Barricading themselves in only made sense if relief was coming. Otherwise, they would only be choosing their place to die. And if Del did try to escape on the plane, as Brandt had suggested he should, the Hardits would shoot it out of the sky the moment it emerged from the hangar.
Not liking either solution, Del-Marie decided to keep both options open as long as possible, so he could choose the least worst one. It smacked of indecision, and that embarrassed him.
He had arranged ruined Stork-class shuttles to be scattered along the middle of the hangar deck. To any Hardits entering the hangar via the main approach from Detroit, the Storks should look like they had been abandoned in random locations. In fact, Del had organized them to be defensive positions with good, interlocking arcs of fire. The transport plane was ready for takeoff near the exit out to the waterfall, positioned to be shielded by the shuttles and their thick hull armor. With luck, the Storks would protect the plane from small arms fire.
Unfit civilians and the stretchered military wounded were waiting out on the hangar deck, between the plane and the barracks, ready to move to whichever position Del chose. Del had initially placed them halfway between the two, but after Brandt’s orders, had shifted them closer to the plane.
Everyone else was in one of the Stork hulls, cradling an SA-71 in their arms.
One of the babies started up again with its wailing. Sure enough, the other baby answered with its own piercing cries. Del hated the babies worst of all. Or rather, it wasn’t the babies he hated, but how helpless they made him feel.
Del’s suit AI flashed a warning. Someone was approaching the hangar.
Renegade Legion (The Human Legion Book 3) Page 23