Still in a daze, he saw a dozen of his soldiers were gone, crushed under the weight of the trench machine and the ceiling that had caved in. His head cleared in a moment, soon enough to realize that if there was another Vonnegan trench machine, there must also be another squad of Vonnegan troopers…
That was when blaster fire erupted everywhere. Screaming. Chaos. Vibro blades glowing into life. Half of Hector’s forces were dead and more were joining them with every blaster shot.
“No,” he screamed. “No!”
Without bothering to try and coordinate a counter attack, he raced forward and began slicing down Vonnegan troopers with the glowing blade of his staff. When three Vonnegan troopers clung to his weapon, he released it and picked up one of the soldiers, throwing him against the tunnel wall hard enough that the purple armor cracked. Another he punched with so much force that the trooper’s helmet caved in. The third he pounced on top of and let his energy disk disintegrate the top half of the enemy.
Still there were Vonnegan blasters firing everywhere around him. Hector’s soldiers, while returning fire, were dying, one after another.
“No,” he screamed again, racing toward another group of Vonnegan troops.
79
“Still no report of any activity in zone one of the battlefield,” Pistol said.
Vere shook her head. “I know, I know.”
Every time the main command center sent a communication, which was every ten seconds now, it included the same glaring fact. No one had seen or heard from the Gur-Khan since the previous night. That entire region of their defenses had been left unprotected.
Traskk hissed that the Gur-Khan had never intended to fight alongside her other allies. Instead, they had demanded one entire portion of the battlefield just so they could betray Vere.
All she could tell him in response was, “Well, I hope you’re wrong. Let’s not lose faith in them yet.”
The next update came through: No contact with Gur-Khan. Wall extremely vulnerable.
It was the same thing, over and over.
Vere pressed her fingertips into both sides of her forehead and groaned. It was as if the generals on the other side of the wall thought she wasn’t paying attention to what was going on, as if she had somehow missed the previous hundred updates as they had been passed along. She was the one outside the wall, not them. It was her planet and her people’s homes that would be destroyed today if things didn’t go as planned, not theirs.
Yet another update: Kaiser Doom’s general threatening to move all troops over to zone one.
If his forces did move from where they were, it would just take valuable soldiers from zone two and weaken that area. Mowbray would readjust and the entire line would be compromised.
“Tell him to keep his forces where they are.”
The next update: Gerchin the Suspicious demanding reassurance that his forces are not at risk because of the empty zone one.
Not at risk? They had arrived to Edsall Dark with the knowledge that there would likely be an all-out war. Already, shots had been fired in space, every part of the fields of Aromath the Solemn were ablaze with explosions and laser blasts, and there were reports of skirmishes in the underground tunnels. Not at risk? Everyone was at risk—that was why they were here.
“Tell him everything will be fine.”
The next update was from one of her own generals: Recommend bringing limited number of Solar Carriers down to guard zone one.
Was he crazy? Having the skies swarming with Thunderbolts and Llyushin fighters was one thing. For the most part, they negated each other, ensuring neither was effective at attacking the other side’s ground troops. But if Mowbray saw Solar Carriers descend toward the planet’s surface, he would be forced to call in his Athens Destroyers to do the same. Even if Vere won the battle, all of CamaLon and much of Edsall Dark would be obliterated.
“Absolutely not,” she said, turning from the screen.
When Pistol began to read the next alert, she held up a hand for him to be silent.
“Tell them,” she said, “that I’m very aware of the situation. Remind them they are on the safe side of the wall. I’m here, where the fighting is, and I’m sure the Gur-Khan will do what they promised.”
Pistol nodded. Instead of vocalizing the message, his eyes began to glow, and the message was sent directly from his internal system to the command center.
This only satisfied the leaders and generals for another two minutes. After that, more alerts began to come through at an even faster pace. These communications all noted the progress that Mowbray’s mechs were making. At first, it had appeared that only a dozen such armored units were trying to cross the field. But as each wave was destroyed, another swerved around it and advanced. Now, waves and waves of armored mechs were moving across the fields. As many laser cannons as the allied forces were firing, it didn’t appear to be enough to shoot every mech in every part of the rolling hills. And the Llyushin fighters weren’t able to offer air support because the Thunderbolts were keeping them busy. To add to that, almost all of the mechs had changed course and were now moving toward zone one of the battlefield, where there was no resistance at all.
Without anything else to aim at, the cannons in zone three stopped firing. Meanwhile, the cannons in the middle of the battlefield had to choose between the armored mechs in front of them or the ones to their right. If they focused on the mechs coming straight at them, it would be a matter of time until the unchallenged mechs in zone one came up and breached the capital wall or else swept the Round Table defenses from the side. If they instead focused only on the untouched mechs in zone one, the middle mechs would get too close and tear them apart. But if they split their focus between both groups, they wouldn’t have enough firepower to prevent every mech from both zones and two thirds of the battlefield would be compromised.
A rapid succession of messages continued to come across the comm system. Some offering sensible suggestions, others proposing tactics that, if enacted, would mean utter defeat for everyone she knew. The few times she acknowledged them, it was always to reiterate her belief that the Gur-Khan would fulfill their duties.
No matter how adamant she was, though, doubt began to creep into the back of her head. Rather than her own internal monologue, the skepticism took the form of Morgan’s voice. She imagined her friend reminding her that they had relied on other armies to assist them two years earlier and it had ended in disaster. She imagined Morgan telling her that it had been absurd all along to leave one entire portion of the battlefield to a mere ten fighters. Most of all, Morgan would say, it was crazy to keep believing in a bad plan even as reality demonstrated that armored mechs were encountering no resistance on their way toward zone one of the capital wall.
She closed her eyes and steadied her breathing. Almost immediately, the sounds and activities of the forward command bunker faded away, replaced by the void of nothingness. A moment later, she got the feeling that another presence had joined her. Mortimous had appeared. As she kept herself centered, she sensed that additional presences were also there. Were they members of that alien race, so advanced they existed beyond time and space, or were they other searchers like herself, Galen, and her mother?
Mortimous nodded and answered her question even before she could ask it: “You are doing the right thing, Vere. Trust in your instincts.”
“But what about two years ago?”
Mortimous chuckled. “By what stretch of the imagination did you think Arc-Mi-Die and the gangster Ballona were your allies? You deceived yourself into believing they were there to help.”
“And now?”
The wise old man’s smile could be heard when he spoke. “And now you are deceiving yourself into believing the forces that have arrived aren’t actually here to help.”
“How am I supposed to know what’s right and what’s wrong?”
“Calm your mind,” he said. “When you are at peace, the answer will be clear.” Then, pointing at her, he adde
d, “What does your heart tell you now?”
“That the Gur-Khan will be here. That they will help.”
Mortimous smiled, then began to fade away. As he did, his voice lingered: “Very good.”
When she opened her eyes, she was back in the forward command bunker, where her body had been the entire time.
A new message came through the comm system: What do you want us to do?
New message: We have to do something?
New Message: If we don’t do something soon, the battle will be lost.
As she watched, the cannons in front of her began alternating between firing at the armored mechs straight ahead and the ones to her right in zone one. Mechs were crashing to the ground when their hover fields failed. Others blew up into pieces while still floating just above the ground. But there were just too many of them. They were getting closer and closer. And even some of the ones that had been destroyed had a limited number of Vonnegan troopers in heavy armor who got out of the machine and used it for cover as they began firing at the Round Table forces. Everywhere she looked across the field, there were streaks of laser blasts, explosions, and the roar of battle.
New message: They’re going to breach the wall in a matter of minutes if we don’t do something.
New message: If they get to the wall in zone one, they’ll wipe out the other two zones in quick fashion.
New message: Are you there? We have to do something!
Pistol looked at her expectantly.
“They’ll be there,” she said, looking to where the Gur-Khan were supposed to be. “They’ll be there.”
80
At least for Quickly, the firefight over the fields of Aromath the Solemn wasn’t so much a battle for life and death, as it was an annoyance. There was nothing that dozens of Thunderbolts could do to him that he couldn’t handle.
The problem was that while he wasn’t afraid of any of the Vonnegan pilots, no matter how good they might be, there were too many of them for him to do much else than destroy them one by one. Each time he tried to pull away from the battle between Llyushin fighters and Thunderbolts in order to assist the Round Table forces on the ground, a pair of Vonnegan fighters would follow. Instead of being able to dive down toward the ground and send some proton torpedoes at the waves of armored mechs that were making their way across the battlefield, he had to immediately swerve away and begin planning for how to put two more Thunderbolts out of commission.
He watched with helpless frustration as the mechs got closer and closer to CamaLon’s perimeter wall. Just as he was about to swoop down and shoot a pair of them, a trio of Thunderbolts began taking aim at his engines. An alert let him know his shields were still fine—for now—but that he couldn’t afford to let any more Vonnegan ships behind him.
The worst part was that because he was flying above the battlefield he could clearly see one entire zone of the Round Table defenses was undefended. Mowbray’s mechs had a clear path to getting into the capital or else attacking Vere’s forces from the side. And yet, right after evading the three Thunderbolts and setting his weapons systems to target the largest cluster of mechs, another Thunderbolt hit the left wing of his Llyushin fighter with a pair of laser blasts before he could send any proton torpedoes down to the ground.
Surrey, in a Llyushin fighter on the far side of the battle, said into the comm for all the other pilots to hear: “I just blew a Thunderbolt into so many pieces I don’t even think there’ll be debris left over.”
While Quickly liked to remain silent so he could focus on the task at hand, Surrey was the exact opposite. He couldn’t shut up, using the microphone to give a running commentary of everything he did and saw.
“I swear, the Thunderbolt pilot behind me has to have the worst aim of any fighter pilot I’ve ever seen,” Surrey announced with a chuckle.
Far overhead, in the space above Edsall Dark, Quickly saw a lone Solar Carrier and a lone Athens Destroyer break away from the rest of their respective fleets. From the way the other ships in both armadas remained in formation, he could tell that neither vessel had permission to do what they intended. Instead of having a duel between the two great flagships, the rest of the Vonnegan fleet locked their cannons on the Solar Carrier, easily wiping it away. The fleet of Solar Carriers did the same to the lone Athens Destroyer.
The rest of the captains, seeing what happened when they broke from formation, stayed exactly where they were supposed to be.
“I could be blindfolded and I’d have better aim than this poor sucker behind me,” Surrey said.
Down below, the fields of Aromath the Solemn were obscured by explosions, so many that Quickly couldn’t always tell who was firing at who or what was being destroyed.
As he turned to assess another section of the fighting, a jolt caused his Llyushin fighter to shake as it flew. An alarm began to sound. Another pair of Thunderbolts had come up behind him and shot the top of his ship. Each area of his shields was getting weak.
Shaking his head, Quickly abandoned the idea of giving any help to those down below on the ground and flew next to a Thunderbolt that had no idea he was there until the two Thunderbolts behind him, still firing, accidently hit their fellow Vonnegan ship.
“Partner,” Surrey said, “You need any help over there?”
“I’m fine,” Quickly said.
Surrey laughed again.
81
Frustrated with how long it had taken the trench machine to burrow to the Vonnegan side of the field and sure that Mowbray’s forces would be ready for her squad to burst through the surface there, Morgan decided a change of plans was called for.
“Here,” she said to her soldiers, looking at her wrist display.
The device’s visual indicated that a Vonnegan trench machine had passed directly over them minutes earlier. Rather than continue walking behind her own machine and bursting out of an opening that the Vonnegan troopers would be able to detect ahead of time, she told her logistics specialist to have their trench digger alter its course slightly so it would connect with the tunnel already dug by the enemy trencher.
Signaling to her soldiers, she had them back away a safe distance on the chance that the ceiling might collapse when her trench machine tried to connect to the existing Vonnegan tunnel. Once it did and she was sure the path was clear, they would have a clear shot to the heart of the Vonnegan side of the battlefield. She would be within striking distance of Mowbray within minutes.
The plan worked. At least for two minutes.
“Do you hear something?” one of her soldiers asked almost as soon as they were beginning to make their way through the Vonnegan tunnel.
Without a trencher in front of them, they could all now hear each other without the need for the earpiece communicator.
Impatient and wanting to kill Mowbray as soon as possible, she barely paused in her stride. She was just about to say she didn’t hear anything when she stopped.
“I hear it too,” another soldier announced.
The ground began to tremble but her feet were still numb due to walking behind a trench machine for so long. She wasn’t sure if the tunnel actually was shaking until she reached over and touched the wall.
“It’s getting louder,” one of the soldiers said.
Each CasterLan squad member was looking at her to tell them what to do, but she couldn’t tell what the noise was or why it was getting louder. The Vonnegan trench machine had already passed by and was almost a mile further up the way. That much she was sure of. The Vonnegan troops that would be following behind it would also be in the opposite direction, getting further away from her rather than nearer. Yet, the noise her soldiers had heard was getting louder. And although she couldn’t be sure, she thought the intensity of the tremors was increasing.
Then she saw it. A hundreds yards away, in the darkness.
A second Vonnegan trench machine was coming through the same tunnel that the first machine had carved out. It wasn’t registering on her display, however, prob
ably because it was still near the Vonnegan epicenter and the Round Table forces charged with detecting underground threats hadn’t yet detected it.
She groaned and shook her head.
Her soldiers were still looking at her to tell them what to do. Why hadn’t she thought of it before? If she were organizing the trench machines, she would have done the same thing. This way, a second machine could pass through the already created tunnel at a faster pace, then alter directions and create a secondary tunnel just before reaching the CasterLan forces on the other side of the field.
The trench machine couldn’t be missed now. It didn’t have lights on the front of it because anything other than the drills and cutters and compression plates would be ripped apart by the rocks and dirt that the machine was funneling away. The machine relied purely on internal sensors. Sensors that wouldn’t stop if a group of people were standing in its way.
“General Le Fay?” one of the soldiers said.
They could head back the way they had come, but her own trench machine was now blocking their way back where she had it merge paths with the Vonnegan tunnel.
The approaching trench machine was close now, a black mass of deadly sounds thundering through the dark tunnel, a steady tremor like a constant earthquake. The knees of everyone around Morgan were shaking from the force of the quivering ground as much as from fear.
“Back up,” she told them, also motioning with her hand in case the machine was too loud for them to hear her through their speakers.
Turning to face the trench machine, she shook out her hands like a prize fighter between rounds, forcing herself to relax. There was nowhere to go on either side of the machine, no possibility of sneaking past it. The trencher filled every inch of space in the tunnel. There was only the machine itself and the ground that encircled it. The giant trencher came closer and closer.
The Round Table (Space Lore Book 3) Page 24