It took a lifetime before the endless pounding of the Hammer air attack died away. B Company had survived, the nearest bombs falling too far away to cause any casualties. Shaking a head thick with the aftereffects of repeated shock, his mouth dry with limestone dust blasted off the cave walls, Chiaou ordered recon teams out to make sure the Hammers were not waiting for them. Impatiently, he waited for word back. When it came, it was bad news. The Hammers had dropped blocking forces to the west; the air was thick with recon drones, their black shapes wheeling endlessly overhead. The protective forest had been reduced to matchwood, more marines were sweeping toward them from the coast, and the first of the Hammers' attack drones had been spotted, their lasers and fuel-air bomblets already at work, pounding anything remotely resembling an NRA formation.
After a quick briefing, Chiaou ordered his troopers out of hiding. He swore under his breath when he emerged into the morning light; even though the Hammers seemed to have no idea where he and his troopers had holed up, the situation did not look good. B Company had one chance: Whatever the cost, it would have to break through the Hammer containment lines and run for the safety of the forest beyond. If they stayed and fought out in the open, the Hammers would grind them to dust.
So be it, Chiaou thought, resigned to whatever fate had in store for him and B Company.
With an efficiency born of quiet desperation, the troopers formed up and moved off. Chiaou's plan laid no claim to subtlety. Outgunned and outnumbered, all he had left was surprise, speed, and ferocity. "Faster, faster," he screamed over his shoulder, waving his troopers into a sprint that slammed B Company into the containment line blocking their retreat to the west. For all the battlefield intelligence pouring down from the recon drones overhead, the marines were slow to react to the onslaught, letting B Company get far too close. When they did react, their response was a terrible thing, a blizzard of rifle and machine gun fire pouring into the NRA's ranks. Heedless, the survivors closed on the marines, the terrible losses ignored as they clawed their way into the marines' hastily prepared positions.
Shock, sheer momentum, and a suicidal disregard for personal safety did what lack of numbers could not; in only minutes, B Company had punched a hole through the Hammers' lines. Chiaou's orders had been clear: Anyone who made it through was to keep going, and so they did, those who could.
Those too badly wounded to follow whispered their farewells and prepared to die the only way they knew how. Only minutes after B Company had smashed into the Hammers' containment line, a microgrenade finished off the last NRA trooper still fighting, but not before she took a good many Hammers with her. When the trooper died, less than thirty of B Company had survived. Chiaou had not; with manic bravery, he and a handful of troopers had fought their way into the marines' command post, and there they, too, had died, along with most of the battalion's senior staff.
As silence fell, the Hammer battalion's new commander walked the ground, shaken by the ferocity of the morning's events and embittered by the loss of so many of his men. He had refused to believe his intelligence officer when told the battalion had faced a single reinforced NRA company. He shook his head as he studied the latest casualty report. Only a reinforced company? How could that be? He had never seen anything like it, and this was not the NRA's only operation that day. It had launched attacks on targets all across Maranzika: a factory manufacturing inertial navigation units, another producing air-to-air guided missiles, a third assembling heavy lander fusion power plants. They had assaulted DocSec security posts and support facilities, planetary ground defense supply depots, and a marine recruit induction center. It was unbelievable, every operation stamped with what were fast becoming the NRA's trademarks: audacity, speed, ferocity, and a willful disregard for self.
The battalion commander kicked the ground with the toe of his boot. Today was his first in combat against the NRA, a day he had not enjoyed. Something told him it would not be his last.
"Sir," one of his sergeants said.
"Yes?"
"Major Schmidt's compliments, sir. He has the prisoners ready for you."
"How many?"
"Five, sir."
"Five?" the battalion commander said, looking up sharply, his eyes narrowed in astonishment. "You sure? Five? That's all?"
"Yes, sir. I'm sure. Five."
"Kraa! So few. Okay, lead on."
The man followed his sergeant to a small rock-backed hollow in the valley wall. There lay the five NRA prisoners. They were a pitiful sight: every one badly wounded, combat overalls blood-drenched, wounds dressed with hastily applied field dressings. But it was their eyes that took his attention; wounded or not, hate blazed from all of them.
Schmidt came over to meet him. "Hard to believe, sir, but that's the lot. The rest are either dead or got away."
"They going to tell us anything useful?"
"Doubt it, sir. They won't say a word, any of them. Get too close, and all they do is spit at you."
"Kraa-damned sonsofbitches," the battalion commander said, voice harsh. "Screw them. We have better things to do. Shoot the bastards."
Schmidt's eyes flared wide in surprise. "Sir?"
"You heard me, Major. Shoot them. Then we pull out; planetary defense after-action teams are on their way to clean up."
"Sir!" Schmidt's voice rose in protest. "I don't believe that is a legal-"
"I'm not interested in what you believe, Major Schmidt. Either we shoot them or DocSec does. What difference does it make? So do it. That's an order."
"What DocSec does is their business and doesn't alter the fact that we are not permitted to shoot prisoners out of hand. I'm sorry, sir, but that's a fact."
The battalion commander stepped back a pace and unbuttoned the flap over the pistol at his waist. "You're sorry? You're sorry?" he said, voice rising as shock and stress let anger take control. "This is a battlefield, not a courtroom. It is for me, not you, to decide what is legal and what is not," he shouted, all self-control gone, spittle gathering white in the corners of his mouth. "Obey my order, Major. Obey it now, or I'll shoot you and then I'll shoot them myself. Make up your Kraa-damned mind, Major!"
The silence hung heavy, the major's mouth hanging half-open in stunned disbelief. "I'll make sure it's done, sir," he said at last, his head dropping in defeat.
The battalion commander holstered his pistol, turned, and walked away. He had gone only a few meters when the air behind him crackled with a short burst of rifle fire. The silence was broken by a single defiant shout of protest cut off in midsentence by one last shot. A soft moan of pain trailed off into silence.
The battalion commander walked on. Monday, August 20, 2401, UD FWSS Redwood, in orbit around Nyleth-B
"Okay, folks, let's get into it," Michael said. "Before I kick things off, any burning issues we need to talk about first… No? Good. Right, first the situation on Commitment, and in a word, it's good… good for us, that is. Not so good for Chief Councillor Polk and his government. Now, if you look at the holovid…"
Heads swiveled as a map of Maranzika, Commitment's largest continent, appeared on the holovid, a jagged-edged mass a good 17,000 kilometers long north to south, its center pinched in to a narrow neck less than 1,500 kilometers wide.
"The Nationalists' strategy is clear, even if achieving their military goals is proving difficult thanks to the fact that the Hammers have an air force and the NRA doesn't. In the west, they have attacked Bretonville, and our analysts are predicting that they will soon launch an attack on the towns of Perdan and Daleel to the east. The Hammers pushed the NRA out of Bretonville eventually, and the analysts think any attack on Perdan and Daleel will suffer the same fate, but I'm damn sure they'll be back to try again until they succeed. When they succeed, they will have cut Maranzika in half along a line"-Michael's pointer slashed across the holovid-"running east-west between the Branxton Ranges and the floodplains of the Oxus and Krommer rivers, about four hundred k's south of the capital, McNair. Not the end of the world for th
e Hammers, but a massive psychological win for the NRA. Janos?"
"Makes sense," Kallewi said. "This is not war as we marines think of it. It's about making the citizen in the street believe that there is a real alternative to the Hammer government. So every time the NRA has a win, the Hammers lose and the NRA gains credibility. Then Nationalist agitators call the mobs out onto the streets, and DocSec can't cope. That forces planetary defense onto the streets to try to maintain control of the cities, easing pressure on the NRA front line and eroding morale inside planetary defense. If planetary defense cannot contain the situation, the marines get called in, which they hate. We know from intelligence reports that not one marine, from the commanders down to the lowest grunt, signed on to fight unarmed civilians, and that erodes morale, which in turn allows the NRA to make more gains, and so on. From the Nationalist's point of view, it's a virtuous circle… but only so long as the NRA keeps delivering."
Kallewi paused. "Which brings us," he continued, "to the NRA's main problem: getting the weapons and supplies they need to support larger- and larger-scale operations. There's a limit to what the NRA and their Nationalist cadres can steal from the Hammers, and their lack of heavy ground-attack landers and air-superiority fliers is a major weakness. Once away from the Branxton Ranges, the NRA is vulnerable to Hammer air power. Bretonville showed that. They captured it but weren't able to hold on to it."
Michael nodded. Kallewi had put his finger on the NRA's weakness. "Mind you," he said, "the Hammers did a lot of damage in recapturing the city. I'm not sure the locals will be too happy about that, not happy at all."
"No, they wouldn't," Kallewi said. "History shows that the indiscriminate use of too much firepower alienates the locals, drives recruits into the arms of the NRA, enhances the moral authority of the Revival Party, and degrades intelligence assets. So Bretonville was a bit of a Pyrrhic victory for the Hammers. That's not the least of their problems. The Hammers outgun the NRA by a huge margin, but that only works for them if the NRA stands and fights the way it fought at Bretonville. The NRA has to avoid conventional battles and stick to what they do best: hit and run. That way, they embarrass the Hammers, making them look weak and in effective just when the Hammers most need to look strong and in control. Even so, the more hardware they can get, the better."
"Talking of hardware," Ferreira said, "I see from the latest intelligence summary that there are reports the NRA has established a manufacturing complex, a large one, so maybe they're not having to steal everything they need."
"Which brings me to my next point," Michael said. "If they have a secure manufacturing base, they'll have access to raw materials and power. If we supplied them with microfabs…"
Ferreira whistled softly. "Now you're talking, sir. What a difference that would make. The NRA will have proper gear, not that obsolete Hammer shit."
"And," Chief Fodor said, throwing an evil grin at Chief Chua, "it just so happens we know where to lay our hands on a few spare microfabs."
"Wouldn't happen to be down in the engineering workshops, would they, Chief?" Michael asked.
"They just might be, sir," Fodor said, "but getting them out won't be easy. Microfabs, my ass! Micro they might be, but small they are not."
"No, I know that, Chief, but we've talked long and hard about doing this because we can make a difference, and giving the NRA access to microfabs is the biggest difference we'll ever make. Those damn things can make anything, given enough time. So the question is, can we get them out?"
"Don't know how, but we will, sir," Fodor said. "I guarantee it."
"Glad to hear it. But what about the knowledge bases to drive them? A microfab is no good unless it knows what to produce."
"I might be able to help there," Chief Chua said. "One of my propulsion techs in the old Cordwainer married a woman from the Rogue Worlds. He set himself up as a knowledge broker. He'd know where to lay his hands on a library of microfab knowledge bases. Not as good as ours, but they'll be a damn sight better than anything the Hammers have."
Michael winced. "A Rogue Worlds knowledge broker? That won't be cheap, even if he is an old buddy of yours."
"He'll be fair, so let me see what he can do."
"Okay, good. The rest of the intelligence summary is unchanged, so I won't waste time repeating it all. Suffice it to say that things are not looking good for our man Polk. Next item. Jayla."
"Yes, sir?"
"The ops plan to achieve all this. Where are we up to?"
"We finished the latest draft of the plan last night. Operation Gladiator, I'm calling it, by the way. Now, the next step is to…"
"Right, folks. I think that just about does it. Anything else we need to talk about?"
"Yes, sir. One thing."
"Go ahead, Kat."
"As you know, Fleet's approved our request for a second Block 6 heavy lander," Sedova said. "Don't know how Admiral Jaruzelska swung it, but she's made it happen. The amended master equipment list came through this morning."
"Saw that," Michael said. "Even better, I received a personal comm from the admiral telling me we should have the lander within the week."
"Didn't think the string pulling would stop with the master equipment list, sir," Sedova said with a smile, "but that gives us a bit of a problem. The lander will have a command pilot, a recent graduate of combat flight school like me, plus a petty officer loadmaster and crew."
"Damn," Michael said. "The crew's no problem. We know how to handle them, when to bring them in on what we're doing, but the command pilot and loadmaster… um… they're a problem. Not sure what we do with them. Any thoughts?"
"Kat, may I?" Ferreira asked.
"Sure, go ahead."
"I know it'll be difficult," Ferreira said, "but we have to keep the command pilot and loadmaster in the dark until we brief the troops. It won't be easy, but I don't think we have any other option. We're all in this because we know you. More to the point, we know we can trust you. They won't, they can't; they're brand new. If we ask them the hard question, they'll say yes and two seconds later run off to the brass screaming 'mutiny, mutiny.' I know I would."
"I agree, sir," Sedova said. "The XO's right. It will be hard, but they have to stay ignorant until the last minute. Gives us time to work on them, though we have to be realistic. The chances of them committing to the craziest scheme in all of human history aren't good."
"I think that's right, Kat," Michael said. "So keep them in the dark, agreed?"-heads nodded in confirmation-"And plan for what happens if they do say no. Kat, what do you think?"
"I plan to spend a lot of time on the Nyleth assault lander training ranges with the new guys. That'll keep them off the ship. If they refuse to go along when the time comes, that might be an issue, but leave that to me. The command pilot will be the problem. Apart from me, you're the only one with a lander qualification."
"True," Michael said, "though mine is only a basic lander ticket. I never went through combat flight school, even if"-a bitter edge crept into Michael's voice; a combat flight qualification had been his one and only ambition once-"that's what I intended when I joined the Fleet. Still, I can fly, so that's a start."
"Like I say, sir. Leave it to me."
"Deal. Anything else… No? Okay, we're finished here. Let me see. What's next?"
"Running the latest version of the Gladiator ops plan through the simulator," Ferreira said, and the mood of the meeting changed, the cheerful optimism blown away in an instant.
"Good," Michael replied. "Let's hope we get a better result than last time."
"Couldn't be much worse." Ferreira's face betrayed her concern. "We have to find a way."
"If we can," Bienefelt said softly.
"We have to," Michael said. "Otherwise this whole business is a bust."
Heads nodded, but nobody said any more, and the meeting broke up. With a heavy heart Michael watched his officers leave. All the early enthusiasm had evaporated, boiled off by the brutal truth that dropping into a defende
d system-especially a well-protected one like the Hammer of Kraa's home planet, Commitment-and surviving long enough to get dirtside was at best close to impossible, at worst an exercise in suicide. Michael had no idea how much longer he could keep them on the rack. Their commitment to him, a commitment to join the most egregious crime in the history of the Federated Worlds, was not open-ended; he knew that. Either they found a way forward, preferably one that saved them from being incinerated by Hammer missiles while they fought their way dirtside, or he would have to call the whole business off. He hated to remind himself of the consequences of failure, but those consequences were his and his alone to deal with.
Struggling to shake off a growing certainty that the brutal realities of space warfare might in the end be too much to overcome, Michael followed his officers out of the meeting room. Screw it, he decided in a sudden burst of optimism, pushing all doubt aside. There had to be a way, and they would find it. It might not be easy, it might not be safe, it might not be guaranteed of success, but he was sure there would be a way. And when they found it, Anna would have a chance to escape Hartspring's vengeful brutality; for the first time since the colonel's awful message had ripped his life apart, he allowed himself to think that the nightmare would end, that he would see Anna again, that they might one day live their lives together. And if fate determined otherwise, at least he would die knowing that he had not simply thrown his hands up in despair, that he had done everything he could do to save Anna.
"End of simulation."
Nobody said a word, the awful hush dragging on for a long time. Sedova broke the silence. "I don't think it can be done, folks," she said.
"You might be right, Kat," Ferreira said. "If we follow Fleet standard operating procedures and drop spaceward of the Hammer's defenses to fight our way in, we're toast. There's no way in hell we can get across tens of thousands of kilometers of hostile space without having our asses kicked."
Another long silence followed.
The battle for Commitment planet hw-4 Page 7