Onward, Drake!

by Mark L. Van Name

  The scout cars probably had armor, but it couldn’t be very heavy. Snow swirled from beneath the wheels. They were moving at about 40kph; Raney’s display would calculate the exact speed if she thought there was any reason to. She didn’t.

  Wetsam reported to the command in Mormont. Then he said, “Nothing for us, troopers. But I don’t guess it’ll be much longer.”

  The second scout car halted near the trackway to the farm where the Slammers waited. The leader continued toward Mormont, but the driver slowed to half his previous speed.

  The scout car was within a hundred meters of the town when light flickered from the upper stories of buildings on the edge of town. Moments later Raney heard the crackle of coil-guns and the distant whang-eeeee of ricochets.

  The scout car halted. Instead of turning, it accelerated straight back in the direction from which it had come: the vehicle had reversible steering.

  A much louder crash! sounded from somewhere within Mormont. The car at the farm junction exploded, gutted by a heavy slug which had pierced it the long way. Parts of the engine blew out through the plating and diesel fuel erupted over the road.

  The surviving vehicle fanned the deep red flames when it drove through them, still accelerating. It was going over 60kph as it vanished around a curve. That was probably its top speed.

  Wetsam took his hand from the shoulder of the trooper who had started to get up. “Not your business, Kenner,” the sergeant said. “Not till I tell you it is.”

  The anti-tank slug hitting the scout car had been louder than a high-speed collision, and the whump! of the fuel igniting had rattled windows in the house. The old man didn’t move, but the puppy ran out into the yard yapping. Celie sat up straight.

  “Did you kill the Filth?” she demanded. “Are we safe?”

  “Stay where you are, darling!” Raney said, because the girl looked as though she might try to run up into the yard. “No, it’s not over. Besides, that was your own people, not us.”

  Taggert must be hiding the Slammers’ presence for as long as possible. If they’d asked Raney, she would’ve told them to fool the Bessies into thinking that there were already too many Slammers in Mormont to dare attacking. The Bessies probably knew that only one transport had landed, though.

  Anyway, Taggert was the CO. It didn’t matter what a sergeant-gunner thought.

  “What kinda army do the locals have, anyway?” asked Kenner. He looked at the squad leader, but Wetsam just shrugged.

  “Small arms, pretty much,” said Raney, who always studied the briefing cubes on a deployment. “All but the cadre’s militia, though every male adult has some training. Those half-kilo slug guns are about all the heavy weapons they’ve got. The Bessies are mechanized, which is why the Commonwealth hired us.”

  “Who do the Bessies have working for them?” another trooper asked.

  “Nobody,” Raney said. “They figured it was a better use of their money to build hardware and use it themselves. They can’t afford mercs.”

  “We’ll ram their hardware straight up their asses!” Wetsam spat. Most of his troopers grunted agreement.

  In the long run that was probably true, Raney thought—if the Bessies didn’t capture the spaceport tonight. The trick was holding Mormont and whatever other roads led into the Commonwealth until the rest of the Regiment landed.

  Green fireballs sailed across the sky, heading south: the tail flares of Bessie bombardment rockets. The sharp ripping sound of the rockets’ passage was a half-second delayed from the lights’ passage overhead, but the second and third salvoes were so close behind the first that it all blurred into vicious chaos.

  Celie began to cry; the dog outside stood at the mouth of the cellar and yapped. The sound of both was lost in the roar of the bombardment.

  Warheads began to detonate. Only an experienced ear would have recognized that most of them were going off in the air instead of among the buildings of Mormont. Cyan light flickered across the rockets, setting them off. The high airbursts weren’t exactly harmless—fragments would be falling like steel hail across Mormont—but they wouldn’t damage the Slammers’ vehicles or infantry which had overhead cover.

  The tribarrels of the two combat cars were on air defense, slapping down incoming shells. The 2cm bolts—the same as the shoulder weapons of Wetsam’s troopers—packed enough energy to detonate the bursting charge of any shell, even armor-piercing rounds if for some reason the Bessies were using those.

  The sensors picked up movement on the road again. “All right, my children,” Wetsam said. “Time to take your places. Keep bloody below the wall till I tell you, or I’ll blow your bloody heads off myself.”

  Raney led the way up the stairs because Wetsam had assigned her to the northwestern corner of the farmyard. He was on the southwestern corner himself, with his five troopers spaced out the north-south length between the sergeants, parallel to the road.

  Raney low-crawled briskly toward her slot. The shallow furrows of the garden were frozen, turning the ground into a sheet of corrugated metal. At least there was no undergrowth. Humans had carried bamboo with them to more planets than they hadn’t; Raney would rather squirm through razor ribbon than a well-grown stand of the stuff.

  She wished that she’d thought to tell the little girl to stick by the old man, but the Commonwealth hadn’t hired the Slammers to babysit. They were well and truly about to earn their pay now.

  The fog was getting thick. Raney switched her helmet visuals to thermal imaging. The feeds from the sensors shifted automatically. She viewed the yard—mostly the stone wall—on the top half of the face-shield, and the view through the northernmost sensor on the bottom.

  You never wanted to watch only remote feeds and just assume everything in your immediate surroundings was fine. Raney had once had the hell bitten out of her by the local equivalent of ants, but that had been a cheap lesson. She’d known a guy on Warwick who’d been knifed by a local who moved very quietly.

  Bessie vehicles were coming down the road in column three abreast. The leading rank had eight wheels and turrets mounting big coil-guns. Those would throw projectiles at least as heavy as slugs from the anti-tank guns the National Guard had waiting for them in Mormont. Two pairs of wheels were well forward on the chassis, which meant that the frontal armor was thick enough for hard use.

  The second rank was of six-wheeled armored personnel carriers with automatic coil-guns in small turrets. The gun of the outer vehicle slewed toward the farm half a klick away. As the column rumbled forward, the APC fired short bursts toward the wall. The whole eastern file followed suit as each vehicle came far enough around the curve for their guns to bear on the farm.

  Raney squeezed as low as she could in the hard ground. If she could have fit in a furrow, she would have. Most of the bursts were high, but some projectiles ricocheted wildly from the stone.

  A few slugs were made from noble metals. They bounced off in vivid neon colors along with the usual orange-red sparks of steel.

  Bits shattered from the hard stone. Concentrated fire could knock holes in the wall as sure as a wrecking ball, but that wasn’t what was going on now. The Bessies weren’t firing at something, they were firing because they were nervous. Shooting made them feel that they were taking action.

  Raney knew that and knew that the sprayed projectiles weren’t a danger to the thick wall. She still didn’t like it.

  There were ten ranks of Bessie vehicles, maybe eleven—Raney was counting to take her mind off the situation, not because there was any real need. The third and last ranks were of the large gun vehicles. Besides the APCs, there were several APC chassis which mounted a short, 10cm barrel or thereabouts, in a turret in the middle of the hull.

  When the head of the column was within a kilometer of Mormont, the leaders stopped. The following vehicles spread to either side. The ground was lightly wooded, but even the APCs could bull their way through the brush.

  Unexpectedly, the final rank of APCs pulled left whe
n they reached the farm track. They started toward the house in line. The rear guard of gun vehicles waddled on toward Mormont.

  The light was gone by now, and the mist was heavy enough to swirl in vortices above the APC guns as they probed the wall and house beyond. Driving bands vaporized in the jolts of electricity that sent projectiles through the coil guns. Gaseous metal spurted skyward like smoke signals.

  The kid’ll be fine if she just stays in the cellar. If she can’t do that, she’s too dumb to live. Too bloody dumb!

  “On my word,” Wetsam said calmly on the squad frequency. He was a good sergeant; Raney wished she’d had more like him in her days as a trooper. “Turrets first, then tires. Squad . . . light ’em up!”

  The approaching vehicles had moved slightly out of line. The leader was within a hundred meters of the fence, the other two were only twenty meters behind. Raney rose with the others, but she didn’t have a useful target for her sub-machine gun yet.

  The coil gun of the second APC was firing, but that stopped when three cyan bolts hit the turret simultaneously. The copper plasma from a 2cm weapon had an enormous wallop. An orange fireball bloomed above the white droplets of molten armor. That must have been hydraulic fluid from the traversing mechanism, since the coil-gun didn’t have combustible ammunition.

  Two bolts hit the leader’s turret and one the turret of the last vehicle. Raney’s face-shield blacked out the plasma track; without filtering they would have been as dazzling in thermal imaging as they would to the unaided eye.

  The leading APC’s coil-gun fired another burst. Four plasma bolts, then a fifth, hit the turret, finishing what the first two bolts had failed to do. The vehicle stopped; the second APC collided with it while trying to turn right.

  The final APC turned left, presenting its broadside to Raney. She walked short bursts down the tires, one and the next and then the third.

  The tires had run-while-flat cores, but Raney’s bolts ignited the rubber casings. Foul blackness billowed from sullen flames. After a few moments the casings exploded, spewing doughnuts of smoke sideways.

  Bessie infantry in the body of the APC threw open the back hatch. Three soldiers stumbled out, unharmed but panicked by the ambush and the Whump! Whump! Whump! of their own tires. Raney began to shoot, aiming for the center of mass.

  Her second target vanished in a white flash and a bang so loud that it threw down part of the stone wall. The fellow must have been carrying a satchel of buzzbombs; a single warhead wouldn’t have caused such a blast.

  Raney rolled into a kneeling position again. As she did, something went off inside the leading APC. An orange flash ruptured the hull seams and lifted the turret from its ring. It hung skew for an instant, then slipped down inside the vehicle’s body.

  All three wrecks were burning. Figures, probably infantry from the second APC, moved blindly in the thick smoke. They were bright targets on Raney’s infrared display. She dropped one and saw the chest of another disintegrate at the impact of a 2cm bolt.

  Raney changed magazines. Her sub-machine gun’s iridium muzzle glowed white. She’d kept her bursts short, but a firefight like this was hard on guns and shooters both. She gulped air through her mouth despite the toxic foulness—smoke, ozone, and Lord knew what from the burning vehicles. She simply needed more air than her nose filters allowed her.

  Raney couldn’t see Mormont from her position, but she switched the bottom of her display to a sensor on the opposite corner of the farmyard while she scanned the road north to the border directly. The Bessie gun vehicles were moving into the town, wreathed in iridescence as their heavy coil-guns fired.

  Buildings collapsed, and a slug ricocheted a thousand meters in the air in an arc which wavered between magenta and violet. The sounds of the shots and the impacts was like the rush of a distant thunderstorm.

  The nearby APCs continued to burn, but the only movement around them was occasional debris wobbling in the air currents. Raney wondered how many personnel the vehicles held.

  However many there’d been, they were all dead now.

  The APCs which had gone down the road with the main attack were disgorging their infantry. The troops spread out, following the heavy armor in. The APCs fired their automatic weapons, aiming high to clear the dismounted infantry. Explosive shells from the support vehicles bloomed red on the distant roofs, but the sound of the bursting charges was lost in the sharp electrical cascade of the coil guns.

  Wetsam and two of his troopers had an angle on the force attacking Mormont. The nearest of the Bessies was over a kilometer away, but powergun bolts were line-straight. The 2cm weapons were heavy enough to be lethal to humans at any range. The sniping wouldn’t decide the battle, but bolts striking from behind would unsettle better soldiers than the Bessies who’d attacked the farm had seemed.

  Raney tried to link to the sensors in one of Taggert’s combat cars, but her helmet didn’t have the power to lock the signal. The amount of electronic hash from coil-guns and plasma would make commo difficult even for the Slammers within Mormont.

  Raney had been in a street battle like Mormont on her second—or was it the third?—deployment with the Slammers, on Puerto Miro, back before she’d transferred to combat cars. She remembered aiming up through a street-level window in the cellar and firing 2cm bolts into the overhang of a Central Government tank.

  She’d been trying to jam the turret. Instead she had set off stored ammunition in a blast that had brought the building down on top of her. Her back and breast armor had saved her life, but the six hours before her squadmates dug her out had been the longest of her life.

  The crew of that tank had had an even worse day, though; briefly, of course. The Bessies in Mormont tonight weren’t doing much better.

  Buzzbombs detonating in the town made the air flicker white. The Bessies and the National Guard used similar weapons, so the explosions could be from either party. The three orange gouts of ignited diesel fuel were Bessie casualties, though: probably the funeral pyres of heavy gun vehicles which had led the attack.

  Mormont’s streets weren’t wide to begin with, and buildings brought down by the Bessies’ own bombardment would have narrowed them even more. In a point-blank fight, the advantage was all with the defenders crouching in alleys with buzzbombs.

  “All Taggert elements,” said the commo helmet. “Bessie Command has ordered his forces to withdraw. Out!”

  “Whee-ha!” said one of Wetsam’s troopers. He must be the man nearest to Raney, because he hadn’t used helmet commo.

  “Wetsam, this is Command,” said Taggert’s voice. Because Raney was on the command net, she got the call also, though she doubted that the El-Tee meant to inform her directly. “Bring your squad back into town and report to me in the plaza. Move well to the east so you won’t meet the Bessies running the other way. Over.”

  “Sir, we’re in a good place to hammer ’em when they pass by on the road,” Wetsam said in an urgent tone. “We’ve taken out three APCs and their smoke covers us, over.”

  “Negative, Sergeant,” said Taggert. “They’ve got plenty left to roll over an outpost. If they start taking fire from the flank they’ll do just that. Get your asses back here soonest. Command out.”

  “Roger,” said Wetsam. “Out.”

  Apart from the signal from Central—which was obviously netted in to Bessie communications—Raney wouldn’t have been sure that the attackers were pulling back, but the fighting in Mormont had certainly quieted down. For an instant she regretted losing the chance to hit the Bessies from the flank, but the El-Tee was probably right to recall them. They were facing at least a full armored battalion, and Wetsam’s squad had lost the advantage of surprise.

  “Squad, we’re heading back,” Wetsam ordered. “We’ll swing a little wider out from the road this time and reenter town from the east. Watch the trooper in front of you, and if we run across any Bessie stragglers, waste them before they know who we are. Out.”

  Raney expected somebody to a
rgue, but the only responses were grunts and muttered Rogers. She was glad to get out. She’d agreed with the idea when Wetsam first suggested that they stay, but a moment for thought had showed her that the farm would be a deathtrap.

  Her opinion of Taggert went up a little. He was green, but he’d stayed cool after a nasty battle at knife range.

  Raney straightened—there was no reason to keep low now—and gasped with pain. Her left hip felt like she’d been bumped by a tank. When the satchel of buzzbombs went off, she must’ve hit the ground harder than she’d realized. She ought to replace the sub-machine gun barrel while she was at it.

  “Sarge,” called Blessing, bending over a trooper lying on the ground. “I got Sparky’s weapon and ammo. What do we do with the body?”

  “Leave him,” said Wetsam through helmet commo. “We’ll police him up after things quiet down, or anyway somebody will. How about his helmet, over?”

  “He took a round front to back through the forehead,” Blessing said, switching to commo. Though Raney was part of the squad’s net, her helmet wasn’t synched with medical readouts like those of the rest of the squad. “It’s no more use now than Sparky is. Out.”

  “Roger,” said Wetsam. He started for the farmhouse and the parked skimmers.

  If I’d taken one through the head, none of them might have noticed. Not that I’d be caring then either.

  A Bessie APC raced up the road. A tire was rubbing; it sounded like a long wail of terror. Raney wondered if the driver had bothered to reboard his troops before driving away and whether any of the troops from that vehicle had survived.

  She thought of what she could do if she’d had her gun jeep. And she thought about the chance that had fired a slug through Sparky’s skull and not her own . . . because that’s all it was, chance, when the Bessies had replied to the ambush with a blind fusillade.

  The puppy was running around, barking in terror. Raney hadn’t thought about the civilians since the shooting started. She felt a stab of guilt for forgetting the little girl, but what the hell was she supposed to have done?