Major Kewlett said, “Son, you see what’s going on over here?”
“Yes, Major.”
“Good.”
The connection went dead.
HARRE spoke to him. “Sir, are we going to attempt to engage and defeat the boilers in the valley?”
Karith triggered his first salvo of top-downs and sprinted off the hill just ahead of the counterfire, which ripped into the ground behind him until he made it into a wadi. He put his shoulder turrets onto automatic and sprinted along the gash in the ground.
“Harry, if we don’t stop them here, they’re going to plow into the Major’s rear area and they’re going to be slaughtering civilians the whole way in. This is it, my friend.”
Karith popped up to the top of a swelling hill and fired off another salvo of top-downs. The counterfire was slower this time, and he was well away before it hit.
“Sir, the boilers are still advancing.”
They were into the suburbs now. Karith moved carefully as he fired, trying to avoid stepping on the crushed and burned Panesthians scattered around the shells of their tunnels and buildings now cracked and open to the sky. He gritted his teeth and choked back the bile. Panesthians died easier than their smaller lookalikes from Earth, apparently.
A subsonic round from a tread he hadn’t seen in time slammed into his shoulder plate and knocked him over. Through the concussive haze he could feel a breeze playing around his feet. There really was a hole in his armor.
From flat on the ground he sent an armor-piercing round at the boiler tread. The bulbous shape jumped and exploded. Lucky hit. Another one rolled up behind it.
He regained his feet and ran on. With HARRE’s targeting help, he kept both armguns firing at once. Counterfire whipped around him, glancing off his armor.
He paused in a depression filled with trees, a wide spot along a stream bed.
“Fire off the rest of the sensor pods, Harry.”
“Including the reserves, sir?”
“Yes.”
HARRE launched the remaining eleven sensor pods from their racks. They arced out from Karith in a spreading cloud, came to earth, and dug in, leaving only their antennas protruding. The situation model sharpened up almost immediately. The boiler advance seemed to be clumped up before a small hill in the center of the valley. Beyond, he could see hundreds of unsteadily flying and scuttling Panesthian shapes fleeing overland.
He took a moment and ducked down to examine the inside of his cockpit. There, just to the right, down by his feet, was a jagged hole leaking daylight. He swore when he realized that he couldn’t use a sensor pod to examine the exterior because he’d just launched them all. It occurred to him to dismount and examine it but he discarded the idea before it had even fully formed. The smell of a summer afternoon wafted up to him, laced with that of burning plastic.
He sprinted out of the depression, running toward the hill, firing as he went.
He hadn’t gone ten steps before he broke through the top of a burrow-building and crashed to a stop. To his great relief, it was empty, a colorful mural on one wall looking down on bare floor.
The boilers were flowing around and over that hill now, moving on. He had to get in front of them somehow.
The machines were thick on the ground. His guns howled and screamed along with him as he stomped, smashed, and burned a thick swathe of destruction through the metal foe. Karith was no longer speaking aloud. Once again he and HARRE were one in dreadful destructive purpose.
Just before he reached the hill, a swarm of walkers, crawlers, and blasters erupted over a stone ridge and on top of him, metal limbs flashing with terrible speed. He caught a glimpse of one blaster’s stocky cylindrical body up close before it triggered its main weapon into his mech’s face.
The crash shocked him backwards. His flailing right hand latched onto a thick-limbed crawler and swung it around himself. He could feel the smashing impacts through the fabric of his suit.
Horrible clicking sounds came to him, through his external sensors and through the hole at his shins. He rolled frantically over, left hand clapping to the hole in his mech’s abdomen even as he pulled his real right leg up away from something moving down there, toes curling.
There was a boiler at the hole. He couldn’t see it; he could only feel it move under his metal left hand. He bore down, crushing hard. At the same moment he felt a deep terrible pain in his left leg. He stomped with his right and smashed something to the floor of his cockpit. Something withdrew as he pulled the boiler away. It was a walker, limp in his hand, holding a smoking monoblade cutter.
“Sir, there is a hollow in the top of that hill, a crater.”
And there were a dozen more boilers around him. He started shooting and crushing again, and began pounding his way toward that hilltop, left leg going numb.
“Harry! Have they stopped?”
“Yes, sir. You have occupied their attention sufficiently to stop their advance. They are coming for us now.” Blaster fire, waves of heat, washed over him, licking through the hole at his legs with sharp tongues as he ran.
“Good.”
A huge blow took his mech in the right arm and spun him around and down. One of the treads. He looked for it, blinking sweat out of his eyes, and fired one of his three remaining missiles. The noise pounded at him. He’d never had a hole all the way through into his cockpit before. A sharp burning smell came in through it. He felt like throwing up.
The hill loomed over him, and he strained back to his feet to fling himself at it. Moments later he tumbled into the crater at the top. It was full of boilers.
He curled reflexively around the hole in his middle, flesh cringing away from it. Blaster fire filled the crater with orange plasma.
“No! This is my crater now!” He put the hole out of his mind, straightened, and fired point-blank at the boilers swarming over him. He kicked a boiler clear over the edge of the hole and grabbed another in his left hand, using it to scrape the others out, smashing and flinging. His mech’s right arm twitched erratically as he fired its gun blindly. He smashed and stomped through the pain in his real leg, and fired until the boilers that were left in the hole were nothing but gears, cabling, and chunks of metal hull.
He blasted a few more as they came over the rim, launching them into the air in pieces.
“What’s going on out there, Harry?” He gasped at a sudden wave of pain from his left leg and stumbled. When he tried to put out his mech’s right hand to steady himself he fell against the wall of the crater as it only twitched limply. There was a sweet coppery smell heavy in the cockpit now.
“They are pausing in their assault of our position, sir. They are gathering.”
He closed his eyes for a moment, then snapped them open. Closing them was a bad idea.
He could see now it wasn’t really a crater. It was an excavation of some sort.
He tried to stand, but slipped. Glancing down, he saw among the shattered boilers a layer of dead Panesthians. Panesthians with equipment strapped to their bellies and fiery circles on their wingcasings. So that was why the boilers had stopped at this hill. Not all these boilers were his kills.
“Karith?” Nicolette spoke to him. “I’m coming, baby.”
The fire in his leg made him almost scream. “Harry, what’s she doing?”
“She is breaking formation to come to our aid, sir.”
“Stay where you are, Nic! That’s an order.”
“Go to hell, Karith!”
“Dammit, Nic, stay where you are. You gonna let the boilers break the line after I went to this much trouble? Stay where you are!” He filled his voice with as much energy as he could. In the background he could hear Kewlett bellowing at her.
“Fine,” she said. “You come to me then. Just run. You can make it.”
“Can’t do that, Nic.”
“Dammit, Karith!” He could hear tears in her voice.
“Hey, Nic.” He blasted a boiler off the rim and watched for another. None ca
me.
“What?” She sounded angry now.
“Tell Maragette and Karri I love them, okay?”
No answer but the roar of her engines and a long screaming curse. The noise filters kicked in.
“Harry, what are they doing out there?”
“They have located and destroyed seven of our sensors, sir, but they appear to be bypassing us.”
“What? They’re advancing again? Toward the city?” Karith had never felt this tired.
“Yes, sir.”
Karith chuckled, a sound weak in his own ears. “Up we get.”
He propped himself up on the rim of the hole and started shooting. Boilers fell and return fire shattered the crater rim around him but still they advanced.
He gasped for air. “We’re gonna have to…get them to…notice us again,…Harry.”
Karith gathered his legs under him, braced his left hand on the rim of the crater, grunted, and fell into blackness.
The mech froze.
“Sir?”
Karith did not answer. HARRE noted a thick stream of blood pouring from the hole in his armor. He used his emergency override to ease the mech back behind cover.
“Sir?” Still nothing.
“Karith?” Nicolette’s voice was frantic. “Your icon’s dark, Karith. Karith!”
HARRE answered. “He is unconscious, Captain Shepard.”
“Damn.” Her voice was thick. “Okay, you’re in charge now, Harry. Get him back here.”
“It is true that command falls to me if my pilot becomes incapacitated.”
“Why aren’t you on your way back already?” her voice held ominous overtones. “Get up into the hills and make your way back here or he’ll die.”
HARRE looked over the field, the fleeing clouds of Panesthians, the advancing boilers carving into them.
“It is true, ma’am, that Captain Marvudi has a much higher chance of survival if I return to headquarters at this time.”
“So go!” she screamed.
HARRE paused. Doctrine advised that he do as she said, but it was his call now. And he found…he found himself rebelling. As if Captain Marvudi were speaking to him. He knew, somehow, that Doctrine could be ignored. Had to be ignored.
“I can’t do that, ma’am.” He vaulted the crater edge and charged the boilers, all guns blazing. They noticed him, and turned to engage.
Sometime later the CambriaDawn took up orbit around Milacria and dropped another three companies of mechanized infantry onto Major Kewlett’s perimeter. Only forewarning and fast maneuvering saved her from the same fate as the MarsFree. Her Bombards destroyed the boiler railgun positions shortly thereafter.
Human forces pushed out to the east and the west. Captain Nicolette Shepard flew west, over the tangled wreckage of what seemed like thousands of broken boilers.
At a certain spot she lowered her airship to the ground and jumped out. Over thirty percent of her lift spheres were gone, and those that remained were discolored and ragged.
Karith Marvudi’s mech lay face down in a dry streambed surrounded by hundreds of dead boilers, like the center of a blast ring stretching for hundreds of meters.
Nicolette folded her helmet back as she ran. The stench of smoke, burning oil, and plasma assailed her nostrils. Ignoring the hot metal she scrambled up and forced her way past the dead boilers on the mech’s back. She tapped a code into the hatch’s touch plate. No response, not even a power light. She ran back to her ship and returned with tools. Sparks flew and tears boiled off the metal as she began cutting.
Ethan Skarstedt is a Sergeant First Class in the Utah National Guard and has deployed to Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Senegal. He has written a military SF novel as well as many short stories in several genres, and he occasionally blogs about things at ethanskar.com. In addition to his other projects, Skarstedt is in the midst of co-authoring a military SF novel with Brandon Sanderson.
Brandon Sanderson has published seven solo novels with Tor Books and Gollancz—Elantris, the Mistborn series, Warbreaker, and The Way of Kings—as well as four books in the middle-grade Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians series from Scholastic. He was chosen to complete Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series; 2009’s The Gathering Storm and 2010’s Towers of Midnight will be followed by the final book in the series, A Memory of Light, in 2012. In addition to his writing, Brandon continues to teach aspiring authors.
Don Quixote
Carrie Vaughn
The distant thunder and subtle earthquake of a bombardment shouldn’t have bothered me. I’d stayed in Madrid through the siege, three years starting in ’thirty-six, and a man didn’t forget a thing like that. My gut didn’t turn over at the noise, but at its implications. The war was supposed to be all but over now. So why the bombing?
Joe and I had left the main army to drive a truck along the river, looking for a vantage where we could watch the defenders’ last stand. Most of the other reporters had already fled the country. I imagined I’d follow soon enough. As soon as I got that one great story. There had to be some kind of nobility in the face of defeat. Some kind of lesson for the future.
We stopped at a ridge and looked out over the river valley, trying to guess Franco’s army’s next move. Without getting too close, of course. I shaded my eyes. Another rumble of thunder rolled over us, and columns of smoke rose up from around the next hill.
Joe squinted into the sky. “Where’re those bombs coming from? I don’t see any planes—”
“It’s not planes.”
“Then what is it, artillery?”
It didn’t feel like artillery; the ground wasn’t thumping with every report. “Want to find out?”
“You drive; I’ll get my camera.”
We left the overlook and drove until we found a turn off leading toward all that smoke.
I gripped the steering wheel; the truck lurched over potholes, the shocks squealing. Joe held the dash with one hand and his camera with the other, waiting for his shot. Not that there was anything to see—the landscape was barren of trees and vegetation. Not a spot of green. The battle had passed by here already, some time ago.
When we circled the next hill and came into an open stretch, the world changed. The battle here had been recent. Battle—more like a rout. Evidence suggested a massive aerial bombardment: tanks broken into pieces, treads shattered and turrets ripped from chassis; craters dotting the field like paint spatters; platoons reduced to scattered body parts. Vegetation still smoldered, and smoke rose up from wrecked ground. If I didn’t know better, I’d have said this was someplace on the Western Front, twenty years ago. It’s what happened when you took a thousand pounds of explosives and used them to scrape the land clean.
We had expected to find the crumpled remains of a defeated army. The fascists had pushed the Republican defenders back to the edges of their territory. The war was just about over, with Franco the victor. Everyone said so. Without outside aid, the Republicans didn’t have a chance. But any potential allies had just turned their backs by making peace with Hitler. So-called peace, however long it lasted.
Somehow, I couldn’t turn away from the disaster.
“Something’s not right,” I said finally.
“You just now noticed?”
“No—look at those rifles, the markings. These guys are Nationalists. Franco’s army.”
“Wait—aren’t they supposed to be winning?”
“Yeah.”
Joe got excited. “Then it’s true—the loyalists came up with some secret weapon. They’re going to turn it around after all.”
I thought it really was too late—you had to have territory before you could defend it, and the loyalists didn’t have much of that at all at this point. But if they did have a secret weapon—why wait until now to use it? “Something doesn’t add up.”
Crows circled. The air was starting to stink. There wasn’t even anybody left to retrieve bodies, as if Franco’s army hadn’t yet figured out it had suffered such a defeat.
“Wait a minute.” I grabbed binoculars from my bag on the seat next to me and peered out.
The road we were on hugged the hill and looped away from the plain where the battle had taken place. On the far side, beyond the destruction, another road stretched away: fresh, cut into the hard earth, an unpaved destructive swathe trampling vegetation to pulp. It was as wide as two tanks driving abreast.
Of course we had to follow it.
We took the truck as far as we could across the battlefield, which wasn’t far at all. Weaving around debris, we avoided most obstacles but got stalled in a deep-cut rut. Ten minutes of spinning our tires in mud didn’t get us anywhere. After an argument, we decided to continue on, to follow the story.
What I figured: the weapon was mobile—the rectangular sections of treads had dug into the ground, leaving an obvious path to follow. It was big, heavy. And it had to be pretty fast, because even through the binoculars, I couldn’t find a sign of it ahead.
“It must be a tank,” Joe said.
“Too big,” I answered. “Too wide.” I’d been a cub reporter in the Great War and had seen up close what tanks could do, which was quite a lot, but not this much. Unless, as Joe said, some genius had made improvements. “I don’t know of any tank that carries enough shells to level a battalion like that.”
“A couple of tanks maybe? A whole squad of them?”
But there was only one path leading out, one pair of treads traveling onward, a helpful dotted line guiding the way.
The sun started toward the west. We had canteens of water, some bread and sardines stuffed in our packs, but no blankets, nothing for camping out. Not even a flashlight. I thought about suggesting we turn around, then decided to wait until Joe suggested it first.
“You hear that?” Joe said, in our second hour of slogging.
I stopped, and heard it: the metallic grinding of gears, the bass chortle of a diesel engine. If I’d been back in the states, close to a town, I’d have assumed I was near a construction site, jackhammers and cranes working at full capacity.
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