by Ian Douglas
"Christ of the Cosmos!" Sublieutenant Martin called, the words jerked from his thoughts. "We can't attack that thing! We gotta get out of here!"
"Steady, Chet!" Katya snapped back over the Ghostrider's link intercom.
"It's no good! It's no good!" She could sense him fumbling with the mental codes that would release his link.
Sharply, she took full control of the link network, blocking Martin's shutdown, electronically pinning him in place. "Negative, Sublieutenant!" she said. "You can do it or you can come along for the ride, but you're staying right where you are!"
"We . . . we . . . "
Thunder cracked and rolled outside the Ghostrider's hull, as treads ground stone to sand.
"We can do it, damn it! We can take that monster! But we have to stay together, do you understand?" When silence answered her, Katya nudged the volume of her mental voice up a notch. "Are you linked?"
The old recruit training gimmick knifed through Martin's panic. "Uh . . . linked, sir!"
"What was that?"
"LINKED, SIR!"
"Okay! Now you take the chin laser, right? I'm going to be busy!"
"Yes, sir."
"Iceworld, Chet! We can do this."
Now if you could just believe that yourself. . . .
"So! Are you linked, Sub?"
"Linked!" Hesitation. "I . . . I'm sorry, Colonel. . . ."
"Deleted and forgotten. Just pull yourself together. Let's not let the Impies think they're up against an undisciplined rabble!"
"I won't let you down, sir."
"I know you won't."
Courage, Katya knew, was nothing more than the willingness to press ahead despite the terror that turned knees weak, mouths dry, and stomachs to twisting emptiness. Her own fear was as sharp as Martin's but was held under more rigid control.
Still, there had to come that moment, scant seconds away, now, when she would have to give the order and step out from under cover. Worse, still, she would give the order that would assure the deaths of members of this platoon, people she knew and had fought with.
She thought she understood Dev now, his vacillation when it came to wholeheartedly supporting the rebellion. Where was the value in bravery, in sacrifice, in attacks that were little short of suicide, when nothing useful could be accomplished? All the courage in the Shichiju would count for nothing if, minutes from now, her eight warstriders were blazing, hull-torn hulks, and the Imperial crawler was continuing its ponderous advance up the Gaither Valley.
Yet something had to be tried. Do nothing, and failure was certain. The Confederation would be crushed.
Pushing the darkness back in her mind, Katya braced to give the order.
Chapter 17
Section I: TANK HUNTING.
THE ADVANTAGES ARE WITH THE HUNTER. The big game sometimes hunted . . . are tanks. Like any other kind of big game hunting, the advantages are with the hunter; he almost always is the winner; but there is enough danger to keep the hunter on his toes. With courage and determination [he] can use his weapons to hunt down and destroy 80,000 pounds of fighting steel.
—Basic Field Manual
Engineer Soldier's Handbook
FM21-105, Chapter 7, Section 1
mid-twentieth century
A warstrider close-assault was the Confederation's sole remaining chance to stop the crawler short of Stone Mountain, a last-ditch effort before it reached the fortress's static defenses. Hours before, a powerful mine hidden in the monster's path had been detected by the Impies and detonated harmlessly. Then a defensive line of Ranger and militia warstriders behind a fabricrete barricade had been swept aside, the wall smashed through.
A savage strider-to-strider battle at the wall had stopped most of the Imperial striders escorting the crawler, but the tracked combat machine's armor had proven too thick for the rebel weapons. It had continued its relentless advance up the valley, alone now save for intermittent strikes by covering ascraft and a light support force of three Tachis and a Katana. Intelligence reports told of more Imperial warstriders massing a few kilometers to the southeast, pushing forward in the crawler's wake. They would be the enemy's final assault force, meant to overrun the Confederation compound once the crawler had breached its inner perimeter.
And then . . . hope! Unexpected and vanishingly slender the hope might be, yet remote-jacked surveillance drones had spotted damage to the crawler's hull after the fight at the breach. Hits had scored after all, weaknesses been revealed. An ambush plan had been worked up, hastily planned, more hastily laid. The town of Anversen offered the last place along the crawler's expected route where a strider close-assault team could be hidden with a chance of reaching the crawler's side.
The ambush plan called for crippling the monster, if possible, by disabling its driver wheel with planted packs of high explosive, or by adding to the destruction amidships already wreaked by Starhawk and Strikers.
"Okay, team," Katya broadcast over the tactical net. "Full power! Let's do it! Now!"
She urged the Ghostrider forward, smashing through the sheltering face of a flame-scorched wall in an explosion of rubble and dust. The crawler, alerted, perhaps, by her radio emissions, bathed her emerging machine in radar and laser illumination, as point defense weapons pivoted swiftly to track and bring her down.
Katya triggered her Kv-70 weapons packs, hurling a salvo of M-490 rockets at nearly point-blank range. They struck dead on target in stuttering, flare-streaked bursts, their warheads alternating high explosives with charges of duralloy-devouring nano-D. Martin fired the hundred-megawatt chin laser in a ripple of quick-pulsed bursts, taking out a line of point defense lasers and hivel cannons on the monster's flank, then triggered a smoke screen of antilaser aerosols. White fog blanketed Katya's view, thinning as she sent the Ghostrider forward with ground-eating sweeps of its long legs.
To left and right, seven other warstriders in her ad hoc assault platoon emerged from cover as well, hammering away at the behemoth with everything from laser and CPG fire to high-speed deplur rounds from shrieking rotary cannons. Missiles scratched and flashed through the sky, slamming home in thunderous detonations. The night was filled with white flame and violence.
As Katya raced forward, her Ghostrider's long legs scissoring through the smoke, she had a clear shot at the lead driver wheel and concentrated her fire on that. The damaged section of the crawler's hull was a good fifty meters farther back along that curving, black cliff, and high enough up on the thing's broad and thickly armored deck that she would not have a clear shot at it.
Tucked in close behind the Ghostrider's chin turret was a McEverett Pack, a tubular, plastic satchel filled with one hundred kilos of C-30 plastic explosives and a fusion detonator with time and pressure triggers. An arm with gripper manipulators had been plugged into the Ghostrider's number-three auxiliary link-interfaced hardpoint. As Katya moved, she mentally shifted link control for her left arm from the strider's left-side weapons pack to the remote arm, passing the weapons pod to Chet's control. With a shrill whine of servomotors, the arm unfolded, dangling heavily between the strider's legs and dragging the heavy pack with it.
Together, she and Chet kept up their barrage against the crawler. Shots struck home, flashing and cracking with savage detonations, but to little outward effect. The wheel and its bearings were heavily shielded, the track itself composed of nanowoven diacarb fifteen centimeters thick. Even as her first shots slammed into armor, point defense lasers mounted in teardrop barbettes above the skirt swiveled to take the Ghostrider under fire.
Katya pushed harder as hundred-megawatt bursts of coherent light snapped into the Ghost's starboard hull, melting armor in glittering puffs of vapor. Warning flags flashed in her mind: power loss . . . damage to the right weapons pack . . . damage to the right motivator array . . .
At least the McEverett Pack was still okay. Touch that with a laser and there'd be little left of the Ghostrider save scrap.
Closer! She had to get closer! If the bi
g main guns were able to depress far enough to track her, she and the other seven striders were already dead. "Closer everyone!" she yelled over the tactical link channel. "Get in closer!"
"I'm with you!" Captain Phillad Jobrey's Scoutstrider stilted past her on the right, its CA-5000 high-velocity auto cannon slamming rounds, two a second, squarely into the target. Pawlovski's Ghostrider, forty meters away, crumbled in a fusillade of close-up bursts, writhing as lightning played across its hull. Then the other strider's explosives pack detonated, the blast filling the air with hurtling chunks of hot metal, the concussion jolting Katya and nearly making her stumble.
The crawler's skirts and track were like a sheer cliff now, just ahead. Lightning grated against her eyes, painful even as her strider's AI stepped down the illumination to safe levels, and a volcano's thunder pealed. For a horrible instant she thought she'd been hit. Then she realized that she'd witnessed the muzzle discharge of the crawler's main gun, a particle cannon as powerful as those mounted by a light cruiser. Its target, a Confederation gun emplacement on the face of Stone Mountain fifteen kilometers away vanished in a dazzling pulse of pure light and the forked, blue-white stab of grounding charge.
The last of her right-side M-490 rockets slammed into the crawler's driver wheel from a range of fifteen meters, still without effect. Enough nano-D must be clinging to that armor by now to eat a hole through a dragonship's hull, but clouds of anti-nano were already boiling down the vehicle's curved side like dry ice fog, neutralizing the corrosive vapor before it had more than pitted the duralloy's surface.
All she had now was her chin turret laser, and its hundred-megawatt bursts would no more than scratch the surface of the thing. Snapping an order to Martin to keep firing, she tried to move closer. If she could just get close enough to plant the McEverett charge in the port-side tread. . . .
Ozawa watched the rebel close-assault waver with an inward nod of satisfaction. Again, the rebels had been unable to properly coordinate their attack. So few striders offered little threat to the crawler and would be easy targets for the supporting Imperial warstriders outside and for the crawler's own guns.
There was a likely target, a LaG-42 Ghostrider sprinting into his watch area. He swung the targeting cursor for his big, two hundred-megawatt laser onto the target. Lock! He triggered the weapon. . . .
A laser bolt slashed into the Ghostrider's upper hull as Katya lunged forward. Smoke erupted from a red-hot crater. Warning flags danced at the borders of her vision. Fire erupted from the Ghostrider's left shoulder assembly; Chet engaged the fire control dispensers, bathing the strider's upper works in an icy fog.
Damage? Some armor lost, but nothing serious . . . yet. Another such hit would boil through the strider's internal circuits like a railgun bolt through tissue.
She was still lugging the McEverett Pack, but she wouldn't be able to use it unless she could get all the way up to the crawler's side. The volume of laser fire from the huge vehicle was frightful; twenty meters to go. . . .
By the flaring light of rapid-fire explosions, she saw truth. They were never going to wade through fire this heavy. Close-assaulting a crawler required a regiment of warstriders, not a single, ragged platoon.
Yet to retreat was unthinkable. Safety was in the hulking lee of the giant; to move back was to move into the target lock of heavy lasers and the buzz saw caress of hivel rotaries.
"Colonel!" Jobrey called. "We've got Imperial ascraft, coming in at three-zero-zero!"
From the other side of this slow-moving duralloy mountain. Craning a hull sensor, she searched the night sky.
There! They dropped out of heaven like black, stub-winged bats, illuminated from beneath by the crawler's searchlights. Katya groaned as she saw them . . . three . . . no, four ascraft, a Typhoon and three Skywinds. Each could hold a number of warstriders, or a bellyfull of armored infantry. If this was the crawler's infantry support, moved up to close with its attackers, then the battle was nearly over. The close-assault force was down to five machines. They couldn't face the crawler and a company of Imperial striders as well. . . .
Tracers and laser beams snapped toward the newcomers, but Katya's orders snapped louder. "Never mind them! Kill the crawler, damn it! We've got to kill the crawler!"
If they could . . . before the reinforcements landed.
Ozawa cursed as he saw the LaG-42 stagger, then continue moving. The enemy machine was so close that hitting the damned thing was almost impossible, a tight deflection shot against a swiftly moving target.
One last chance. The Ghostrider was moving more slowly now, clearly damaged, and Ozawa's cursor slid onto the machine's torso and flashed red, the signal for a target lock.
The rebels really were a pathetic lot. Even if they managed to get too close for the crawler's point defense weapons, the aircraft hovering overhead would pick them off easily. He began forming the command to fire. . . .
The jolt was unexpected, an earthquake shuddering up through the siege crawler's treads, unfelt by the men in link but noticeable as the landscape outside shuddered. An instant later, power failed with a burst of static, and Ozawa was kicked off-line . . .
. . . to awaken an instant later in a searing, flaming hell, his legs already withering away in the blast furnace heat of molten metal spilling into the jacker compartment. Hideki Ozawa had time for a single shriek of agony before he died, still wondering what had gone wrong.
The lead ascraft balanced in on shrill-hissing jets of superheated plasma, hovering fifty meters above and behind the crawler. The laser bolts that seared into the giant ground combat machine's back numbed the senses, numbed the mind, so startling, so completely unexpected were they. The other flyers were joining in, lancing shot after shot into the already damaged sections of the crawler's armor, striking and striking and striking as explosions lit up the sky.
Smoke was boiling from the old Starhawk wound, now, and an interior explosion sent bits of burning metal hurtling high into the air. Point defense lasers swiveled, bearing on this new and devastating threat from above. In an exchange too quick to follow, hundreds of laser bolts crisscrossed through the dark. Laser turrets flared white-hot and melted; one ascraft circled toward the south, wing holed and smoke pouring from a savaged engine, but now the defense lasers had ceased firing, their control systems knocked off-line. The ascraft hovered lower, their belly turrets scant meters above their targets as they continued to fire.
"God!" Jobrey called over the Confederation net, awe turning his voice ragged. "Colonel, who are those people?"
"Never mind! never mind! Just plant the goking charges!"
Delight leaped and thrilled in Katya's thoughts . . . and excitement. "That," she said, "has got to be Devis Cameron! No one else I know would take on a siege crawler with transports!"
To her left, Lauber's aging Calliopede exploded, red flames licking up into the night. "Colonel!" Chet yelled over the link. "Check your nine!"
As quickly as it had come, delight and excitement were gone, replaced by the battle-keen awareness of danger. Movement, silhouetted against the burning night. Warstriders, Imperial warstriders, were racing toward her from the left. The crawler's support force had been spread out farther ahead but was reacting now to the rebel close-assault with a thundering charge. As the skeleton of Lauber's Calliopede crumbled in the flames, a pair of Tachis opened fire on Katya's Ghostrider, their twin, 88mm lasers in a flat dorsal turret lancing through the smoke- and dust-laden air.
A KR-9 Manta, Gerris Fitzhugh's machine, staggered beneath the touch of diamond-hard laser light. His left weapons pod detonated, a reserve of chemflamer fuel ignited. The wreckage flared, then burned like a torch. Katya saw none of the crew eject.
Then the Tachis were on her. Concentrating fire from her chin laser on the closest one, she saw it stagger, its dorsal turret flaming. Rockets slammed in from somewhere, toppling the machine as she shifted her targeting to the second Tachi.
Explosions flashed like lightning, and their thunde
r was an endless, keening roar. Something hit her Ghostrider hard, square in the torso, and the ready light for her laser winked out.
She was completely unarmed now, save for the McEverett Pack, and the surviving Tachi was blocking her path.
From behind a tumbled-down wall, Tharby rose, the satchel charge clutched in one hand. "Let's go!"
The genies weren't supposed to be here, weren't supposed to be anywhere within ten kilometers of the fighting, but when he'd heard that the Colonel had volunteered to try to take down the moving, armored mountain he and the others had seen in the valley, Tharby had known that, once again, the genies were going to demonstrate their newfound capability for disobedience. The Port Jefferson Scouts had slipped out of their encampment shortly after Colonel Alessandro had departed, hours before. They'd trailed her at a safe distance, then found hiding places of their own in the ruins. Tharby knew in principle what those huge McEverett Packs were supposed to do, since he and some of the other techies had helped assemble them. It had been simple to put together smaller packs of HE, massing thirty kilos apiece and easily genie-portable.
The initial flash and thunder as the ambush erupted had caught all of the genies by surprise, and several had scurried away into the night. More had fled with the approach of the ascraft, or with the attack of the Imperial stilters seconds later.
Tharby and four other techies had held on, however, eyes narrowed to yellow slits against the glare, hands cupped over ears as peal followed deafening peal. No one, genie or full human, could survive unprotected in that hell of fire and noise, but Tharby was determined to wait for his chance. . . .
Then he'd seen the Colonel's machine engage one of the stilters and knock it down. There was a whirlwind exchange of fire. Flame roared; the Colonel's machine had been hit, and hit hard.
"Now!" he yelled, leaping forward. "Take th' bastards!"
Their original idea had been to attack the siege crawler, but watching the monster lumber forward out of the night, Tharby was realist enough to know that his paltry, thirty-kilo charges were not going to even scratch that massive armor. But another target had presented itself . . . the small strider squaring off now against the Colonel's bigger machine.