"Cowardice is of two sorts, personal and tactical. A personal coward is someone who will not do something because she fears rape, pain, or death. We despise personal cowardice in ourselves because cowardice makes us weak. We despise personal cowardice in others because when someone else is cowardly, she hurts her sisters.
Rantings about tactical cowardice are the ravings of testosterone-poisoned male minds fixated on medieval ideas of chivalry invented by tin-plated morons. A cowardly tactic is a tactic that works the best way -- it doesn't give the enemy a chance to fight back. That's why biological and chemical weapons are wonderful inventions. The enemy dies, and you are someplace else. The best place to shoot enemy soldiers is in the back, attacking from the direction they are not looking. Shooting them in the back while they are running away is even better. They aren’t under cover. Little boys are taught: Don't kick an opponent while he's down. That’s the tin-plate moron wrong answer. MinuteGirls are taught the right answer: Knock him down from behind. Then kick his skull in."
MinuteGirl Manual, Third Edition, 2040, from Section Three "Practical Ethics"
TARGET AREA NUMBER SEVENTEEN
SOUTH HARBIN STATE FOREST
HARBIN, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
October 20, 2174, 8:07 PM HLT
"Wonderchick, Spider and Cloudshadow groups are ready," Stars' message whispered through Wonderchick's bonephone. Wonderchick stared at the twilight clearing. Every recce team had now taken up positions. It was all Dreadstar's plans -- with a lot of collaboration with other troop leaders. Now, all at the same time, they would see what they had uncovered. Pond and stone slabs still looked completely innocent to her. In a few moments, either she would become a famous hero -- or she would make a total and utter fool of herself, so much a fool that Major Rubenstein would never stop using her as the ultimate example of foolishness.
"GO. GO. GO," she tapped on her palm pad. A spiderweb-thin optical cable trailed behind her to the superwidebandwidth transmitter behind Ghost Pine Ridge. Signals transformed from mechanical impacts to photons to radio waves. Across Harbin, Girl Guides and friends moved forward.
Ever so slowly, ultracamo garment working at peak efficiency in early twilight, Wonderchick and companions circled the pond. Her companions doubtless wished they had more backup, for all that they were facing at most a half-dozen infiltrators. They'd been lucky to get away with what they were doing. Dreadstar had innocently asked the Major if they could reconnoiter inside the border, on their own time, to see if there really were any ChiComm infiltrators beyond the security zone. The Major was not impressed by Dreadstar's analysis of the situation. Repeating 'On our own time' had done it. The Major pointedly reminded the troop about State Forest and Private Property restrictions, about checking through every service's CommNet to be sure they didn't shoot up a group of MinuteBoys on an outing, about what American citizens thought of spies and peepy poachers, and let them go on their way. The Troop had been rotated off-line yesterday, so free time had finally arrived.
The Major hadn't told Dreadstar that Dreadstar wasn't allowed to recruit helpers from other troops. With Wonderchick's name as a cachet, recruitment had proven remarkably easy. After all, Wonderchick had wiped out two ChiComm squads by herself, and rumors of her nighttime stunt at the Flying Crane Spa--a bedroom romp with numbers of exhausted MinuteBoys by rumor ranging from three to eight--were in wide circulation. Now they had traced the trails, found convergence points, and identified odd terrain features, terrain features that to patrolling Tarantulas appeared to be well-masked large natural caves.
"Tarantula at entrance," Stars' voice whispered at Wonderchick. "No IR bumps. No sounds. Mass spec -- got to get inside -- OK, bunch of organics. 'Underwashed male'. 'Really underwashed male'. Yuck! Tarantulas rolling ahead in slow line. Damnittoheckandback! Really deep trench. Circular. All the way around the cave entrance, 25 feet inside. Three feet deep. A big step across. Smooth beyond. Can't infiltrate Tarantulas further, not with current rigs."
"SPARROW?" tapped Wonderchick. The flying/perching probes were extremely vulnerable to counterfire unless visibility was very poor, but emplaced early did great overwatch.
"Didn't bring one. This was supposed to be a grelking cave. OK, make note for the future," Stars whispered again.
"GOING IN," announced Wonderchick. The pond bottom was very flat, polished stone under a few inches of water. Likely as not the conveniently placed rocks just above the water level were wired, so those inside would know someone was coming -- assuming someone was inside. A shame she wasn't stepping on them. Wonderchick's heart tapped its rapid beat. So far, things were positive. This was a cave, not a shallow cranny, and someone had passed through. Probably several someones.
Inconspicuous silent wading was challenging. She reached the entrance, stared in, let goggles ramp up on their gain and bandwidth. The tunnel was not dark. "GLOW?" she tapped.
"Luminescent fungus," responded the servile in her helmet. "Emission centered at wavelengths..."
She cut the servile off. She was sure given time it would reach culinary issues. Was the fungus planted? Or natural? A dark-adapted human might see by it, even without goggles. A search for electronics would reveal nothing, but the tunnel was well-lit. There were the Tarantulas, and there was the trench. The sides and bottom of the trench were remarkably flat. Broadband false color on her goggles reported only natural-looking stone. If it was a doorway, the door was well hidden.
She passed her cloak over the tarantulas, which took the cue to swarm up her boots, a half-dozen pounds of plastic gripping each leg. They didn't hang on nearly as tightly as a Minuteboy, she noted, but with the new air-fuel power cells they didn't run down after an hour or two either. A broad step, being very careful to clear the indentation, brought her to the far side. The tarantulas trotted off her boots and down the corridor.
Once upon a time, people might have expected Tarantulas to be armed, but several interesting experiences with self-annealing minefields -- one of which had turned Great Falls to a ghost town for six months -- had convinced more than enough people that some technologies were not worth their risk. Besides, Tarantulas weighed less than a combat rifle, and were too compact to mount a decent barrel.
"There's a 75 yard run and an apparent corridor end," Stars reported from her station outside the cave. "Can't tell more until they're there." The girls waited impatiently, letting the two machines do their exploring for them. "At the end," Stars finally reported. "Really dark in places. OK, risking a batsqueak." The trail tarantula emitted short, soft directional pulses of ultrasonic sound, their profiles carefully matched to the squeak of a local bat. Phase sensitive acoustic arrays on the two Tarantulas recorded the echo profiles, downloaded the information along their trailing optical cables, and waited. The servile in Stars's pack computed the shape of the cave. "Got a big gap here," she reported. "Rescanning." A tarantula fired another pulse of ultrasound into the unseen area. "Long cave. Dark. Real hard to spot from up the corridor."
Stars nudged the Tarantula forward, the arhythmic walk of its acoustically damped footpads taking it down the cave's sidebranch. "Organics getting more concentrated," she announced. "Still underwashed male." The Tarantula continued forward. "Oopsie!"
Wonderchick's nostrils pinched. Her goggles weren't showing anything new or different, even in the infrared.
"Drastic change in floor surface. Tarantula stopped without entering. I'm using the bat call. Hmmh." An image formed on Stars' display. "Lookatthatlookathtat!" she whispered. "All sides flat. Rectangular. It's a grelking machined corridor! Funny size. No, make it -- FEU dimensioned. 2.5 FEU yards tall, 3.5 FEU yards wide, a good hundred yards deep. And a vertical shaft, right next to the entrance, going straight up. Must stop within a couple yards of the surface -- right at a turnabout on an old ChiComm road, the map says."
Wonderchick glanced at her rear view. Princess and Smart Blonde were right where they should be. "STARS? TRAPS? CAMERAS?" she tapped on her glovepad. She really wishe
d she dared talk, but a passive mike -- way too hard to find quickly -- could pick up her voice. Their footsteps would be harder to detect. They'd drilled arhythmic walking until they sleepwalked arythmically.
"Nothing," came Stars' whisper. "Sending in a Tarantula." Stars tensed. The floor appeared to be solid rock. A masked pressure mine could wreck the tarantula -- no big deal even if the Major hit her for the $35,000 they each cost -- and give away that the ChiComms had visitors --- a very big deal indeed.
The mechanical insect tiptoed forward, following exactly the path Wonderchick would take. The second tarantula, a dozen yards behind the first, stayed near the other corridor wall, on the line Princess and Smart Blonde would take. The machines advanced. Tiptoe. Tiptoe. Tiptoe. Goggles displayed exact points on which to step. Cameras operating in the far IR showed corridor walls clearly, but reported no sign of active power cables or traces where someone had walked. The corridor bent. There was another vertical shaft -- again, it finished within a yard of the surface near a very old road.
Now a glow could be seen ahead in the distance. Visible light. Scanning spectrometer reported to Stars 'Black Body at 3500 F'. A thermal light source? The ChiComms were fond of those. She whispered her findings to Wonderchick.
"WE MOVE UP TO CORRIDOR BEND", Wonderchick tapped back. "MOVING AHEAD NOW." Star Commando Jill might have charged in, guns blazing, Wonderchick thought. She wanted some targeting data first.
Stars thought for a few moments. Contact mines planted so close to your own people that your people would be deafened by the explosion sounded unlikely. Rapier mines fired by sentries, well, perhaps, but only if sentries thought something was there. She set one of the Tarantulas to slow advance, leaving the other on overwatch.
Images became clearer as the Tarantula closed. There was a very small glow lamp. Someone waited in a chair, back to the corridor, sitting where the lamplight illuminated a book. Stars paused the Tarantula. One of her display underlays was toggling, an underlay she didn't ever remember using. She let it unwrap. Acoustic voice? The fellow was talking to himself, loudly enough to be heard several dozen yards down the corridor. And saying? What was that nonsense? Was he drunk? If it had been comprehensible English, the screen would have converted all to text. The servile locked in to his words. He was talking to himself in Chinese, repeating -- her servile found the record -- from the "Illustrious Analects of Chairman Fu". He was a ChiComm for sure, and a truly bad sentry.
The Tarantulas patiently swept the area. One sentry. His back to the corridor. No sign of electronic support. "Ran a final check," Stars reported. "Cave is unrecorded. Property owner just confirmed 'if they're on my property, not telling me, just take them out'." Wonderchick gestured for her team-mates to cover while she edged behind the sentry. They could have shot him, but not and maintain silence. For a few instants, the sentry was paralyzed by blinding pain. Then for him all went dark. Wonderchick eased his body to the ground. Knifing a man was much more stressful, she decided, when you had to sneak up on him first.
The chamber was perhaps ten yards across. In the faint light, Wonderchick could see a corridor beyond. Indentations in the portals looked like places where you could mount blast doors -- but clearly no one had done so. Tarantulas swarmed ahead, the three women following. "I've cranked up their speed all the way," Stars reported. "The ChiComms can't not miss losing a sentry, not for long." Wonderchick wasn't quite so sure. If someone was checking on him, would he really spend his time reading? If he had been worried about visitors, wouldn't he have been more alert?
The next corridor ran another fifty yards. Regularly spaced side portals stopped with bare rock within a few yards. Someone had had expansive plans, Smart Blonde typed, but never got to finish them. At corridor's end was a flat piece of cloth. "Darkroom curtain," whispered Stars. "Lots of light on the other side. Hung at the top -- slides in from either side. Can't look around edge without jostling curtain. It's acoustically damped -- I'm getting no echo back from beyond the curtain. But I get voices -- can't resolve what's being said. Potentially there's a wall close behind the curtain -- a grenade tossed through the curtain may roll back at you."
"SB. P." Wonderchick signaled her team mates. "TAKE LEFT OF CURTAIN. I GO RIGHT. SB LEFT FLANK, P STRAIGHT, W RIGHT FLANK. IT'S A ROOM. CLEAR IT." They took positions. "GO ON 3. 1. 2. 3."
Wonderchick swept the curtain aside. She lost a fraction of a second to surprise. The space beyond was larger than a spaceship hangar, well lit, with flat floor and vaulted roof. There was no echo because the further wall was too far away. Five yards in front of her, a Chinese officer was glancing at unexpected motion to his side. Beyond the officer, seated in neat rows at long tables at the bottom of a four-foot slope, was a company of Chinese Popular Volunteers, all eating their noodles while listening to their commander lecture.
The officer shouted and pointed to Wonderchick's left. Her team-mates had stepped through the curtain, she realized, and were in plain sight. Wonderchick gave the officer a two-round shot group in the chest. "Stars!" She shouted. "ChiComm infantry company!" Thumb dropped selector to 'grenade'. She targeted the further perimeter of the tables, firing a seven-round grenade clip as quickly as possible.
One-handed full auto fire was a hot dog move. Major Rubenstein had chewed her out more than once for doing it -- but paid up when Cadre collected on the bet that she could do a clean horizontal sweep while firing. The rear firing yoke made that trick a lot easier than it looked as fifty rounds sailed into the tables. Left hand snapped down to waist, grabbed a second grenade clip, reloaded. The sounds to her left had to be Smart Blonde and Princess, engaging someone. Her third grenade clip followed the second, explosions marching through rapidly emptying mess assembly.
Counterfire? Counterfire? Her training screamed at her. Sooner or later these guys would remember their personal weapons. Hand reached to waist. The Taifun antipersonel weapon was as close as you could get to a hand-held rapier mine. The front of the device was a wasp's nest, hundreds of near parallel carbon monofilament tubes being loaded with explosive and a trio of miniflechettes each. Sequential detonation used recoil to sweep the line of fire horizontally. An optical scanner with some reliability triggered individual tubes as they bore on an enemy. An inertial guidance chip timed the firing sequence. The recoil might break your arm but with reasonable care would not deflect the firing direction out of line.
She brought the Taifun up, locked left elbow and wrist, right foot snapping back to brace. The impact pounded hard on her shoulder. Reach for waist. Grab Taifun. Brace. Sweep right. Fire. Repeat. Reach for waist. Grab Taifun. Brace. Sweep right. Fire. Repeat. Reach for waist. Brace, shoulder protesting. Sweep right. Fire. Stars had questioned carrying even one of the heavy, clumsy, weapons. Wonderchick dearly wished she could have found another four. They were walking a mile, not doing a two-day death march. What was a little extra weight? From appearances everyone in the target zone was disabled or dead.
"Here comes their watch squad!" Princess screamed. Sounds from out of sight to the left had to be Princess, Smart Blonde, and a stack of Chinese. Her team mates were significantly beyond the curtain's edge. She'd preferred to keep closer to cover. Bullet resistant, thought Wonderchick. Ultracamo is bullet resistant, not bullet proof. This was the moment to dream for power armor. She began shooting anyone who moved.
Bullets smacked the further side of the curtain. She dropped to the ground at curtain's edge, sighted along the chamber wall. The last few rounds passed too close to her head. 'Large aircraft hangar' came to mind, with masses of boxes at the far end. How had the boxes gotten here? Not by bearer, not through the border defenses.
Wonderchick checked over her left shoulder. There was a low berm, waist height earth, piled in a semicircle around the entrance. Why? Intuition said 'ersatz reviewing stand'. Smart Blonde and Princess had taken cover behind it and were firing off to the left. An increasing volume of fire was coming the other way. To judge from bursts of dust rising from the right wall, the
Chinese weren't yet certain where the three women were hidden.
"They're mostly all in the cube shed!" Princess said. Her headcam forwarded an image to Wonderchick's video display. A circling line drawn by fingercursor gave emphasis. Patches of colored haze marked estimated firing locations. Passive scan could only do so much. Going to active search with the headcam would give away their locations, not to mention that modern faceted ceramic bullets were poor radar or acoustic targets.
"Must be concrete," said Smart Blonde. "High magnification shows dimples not holes where I hit it. Now they're working out to the left where the floor isn't flat. At least two dozen of them." There were several explosions. "Rifle grenades pinned them for a moment."
Wonderchick scanned her side of the bunker. There were no signs of motion. The people at lunch were dead, or excellently faking it. "Can I have suppressing fire? I've got the answer here."
"Ready? On three." Princess counted down, then let loose with autofire and a clip of launched grenades. Wonderchick threw herself over the berm, fell five feet to the ground, and rolled to land flat, body perpendicular to the berm, Vixen AT rocket over her left shoulder and parallel to the ground. She sighted and fired. Superheated gravel sprayed her goggles. She reached across her shoulder and pulled a second AT rocket. The first hit the cube shed, its detonation momentarily drowning out all other battlefield noise. The cube shed was long; the second rocket blew apart the further end, sending huge clouds of paper billowing in all directions. Chinese suppressive fire came to a stop.
"You can't fire a Vixen in an enclosed space," Smart Blonde shouted the training mantra. Her team-mates wondered if Smart Blonde was whispering under her breath or if they were halfway deaf. Bullets whicked into the ground near Wonderchick. A sharp slap on her rump was a grazing shot, deflected by her ultracamo cloak. She looked back at her end of the bunker. Chinese were running out of several cross-corridors.
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