“Not yet, anyway.”
“Yeah… Not yet.”
Chapter 17
Colonel Winter, Rhino continent, Premdor-2
Colonel Martin Winter let his mechsuit and his body do the work while his mind stayed on the battlefield. His HUD and SAI were struggling to keep pace, but they were losing their total situational awareness as First Battalion slashed deeper and deeper into enemy territory. The Breakers squadron was doing its best to cover them from high orbit, but by doing so—by firing beams and railgun bullets downward into the atmosphere, keeping the enemy off his back—they were blanketing the area with interference. He was reduced to what his own suits could see, hardly different from pre-tech Old Earth, when men used their Mark 1 Eyeballs.
Even so, he’d demolished three more Rhino combat formations without loss, using up two-thirds of his ammo and half his fuel in the process. Now, after five hundred kilometers of breakneck-speed blitzkrieg, First Battalion reached its first decision point: a civilian auxiliary airport. A small but clear paved spot on the terrain, it had the advantage of being undefended, deserted, and easy to find—even without orbital assistance. Terrain association and translation of Rhino signs led him right to it, on time.
Now to see if the vacuum jockeys could deliver on target.
He circled the airport and deployed his forces facing outward precisely one minute before the appointed time. Suit sensors showed nothing within twenty kilometers, but direct fire wasn’t his worry.
The Rhinos’ ballistic artillery had proven useless against mechsuits that would move a thousand meters between shot and fall. Mechsuits were equipped with Laser Aerospace Defense Artillery, or LADA, systems that could give warning and blind guided warheads. The Rhinos’ hyper-missiles, however, were surprisingly good. Not terribly accurate, but terrifyingly fast, and launched in low, low trajectories that screamed over the treetops and provided little warning.
It was these that Colonel Winter worried about. As soon as the Rhinos figured out their enemies had stopped moving, he expected a storm of missiles to come calling.
Above, the Breaker warships would be dropping into low orbit, armored noses aimed straight downward, capacitors full, fusion reactors running above spec, crews and SAIs ready. They deliberately risked themselves against the hundreds of missiles that leaped up at them in wave after wave, hundreds that added up to thousands over time. The Rhino continental stocks seemed inexhaustible.
Winter wished the Breaker fleet luck as they fired their own dumb weapons at maximum rate—beams and bullets, all replaceable. They’d have been more effective if they’d used up their own missiles, but they had to conserve those for contingencies.
Even so, they must’ve dropped at least one max-yield nuke in high atmo as his sensors whited out and EMP plucked at the fringes of his mechsuit’s shielded systems. With luck, that would degrade the Rhinos for a while.
When the photonic overload cleared, his HUD showed a ring of interdiction fifty kilometers in radius around the airport. Railgun bullets from above met missiles and beams from below, while more beams probed from orbit... and in the center of it, four specially rigged armored landers fell.
Pilotless, of course. Even the hotshot flyboys weren’t stupid enough to think they could lift off into that storm of fire, so these were expendable machines on a one-way trip.
They came in accelerating, upside-down until the last three thousand meters of altitude, when they flipped and fired their retros. A few missiles and beams reached out from enemy emplacements that had somehow escaped the suppressive fire, and one lander wobbled, tumbled, and augered into the pavement, leaving a crater a hundred meters across.
The other three made it down in blasts of fusion rocketry, slamming to the surface harder than living troops could have survived—but their cargo was rugged, deliberately designed for this kind of resupply mission.
“Go,” Winter said. With that single word, the waiting squads of battlesuiters rushed in to the three surviving landers, which had already dropped their ramps, front and back.
Inside, the battlesuiters grabbed the coffin-like resupply modules and hustled them out in all directions like demented pallbearers. They dropped them in a rough circle inside the mechsuits’ defensive perimeter just as the first of the expected missiles blazed low over the tree line to the north.
LADAs engaged with their blinding lasers, but the weapons were so fast, it hardly mattered. Their seeker eyes had no time to acquire targets anyway; in this nap-of-the-ground mode, they became unguided warheads. They’d hit or miss by dumb luck.
The battlesuits passed through the mechsuit circle and took covered positions farther out as the first two missiles impacted. One plowed up empty turf, while the other blew a maintenance shed to smithereens. Ignoring them, every second mechsuit hurried to a module and squatted atop it. Automated systems mated. Fuel isotopes and ammo flowed through ports into the mechsuits.
Three more rockets landed, one of them near directly atop a Ripper. The battlesuiter vanished in the explosion, shredded, the battalion’s first casualty. The squad’s other four Rippers rolled to their feet shaken but unhurt to take cover again.
As the first round of mechsuits topped off their stores, the second round moved into position—including Winter himself. A second nuke went off above, suppressing the missile fire for valuable minutes.
He wondered if—or when—the Rhinos would decide it was worth nuking their own territory in order to hurt First Battalion. From what he knew of the species and their crazy-making biotech, it shouldn’t be too long. That was why this would be the only resupply.
It was also why he hadn’t used his own small supply of tactical nukes. There was a logic to these things—a reluctance to be the first to escalate to wiping out whole areas, towns or cities with weapons of mass destruction. This was especially true in one’s own back yard, but once one side did it odds were the floodgates would be opened.
While the Rhinos would pay a higher price, strictly speaking they could more afford to pay it than the Breakers.
The missiles were starting to fall once more as he sent the battlesuiters to recharge their own systems. They were last to top off because they were too small to carry fusion reactors. They only had capacitors, ultra-dense high-power storage batteries. Until now, they’d conserved their power by riding the mechsuits, but as soon as they had to fight, they’d need every joule.
“Phase Two, execute,” Winter said calmly as soon as his HUD showed the last Ripper resupplied. “Good hunting, gentlemen.”
He followed his own instructions, taking Golf and Hotel companies and heading toward the closest of the four target factories—the ones producing the poisonous chemical compound designated Tango.
His own goal was intentionally the closest, because his team included H Company, consisting of sixteen Sledgehammers. He’d discussed with General Straker the idea of swapping the 70-ton heavies out for lighter, 50-ton Foehammers. They were a little slower in travel mode, a lot slower in sprint mode—but they were his heaviest guns, and he was loath to leave them behind. Besides, putting Sledgehammer pilots back in Foehammers would mean those particular people would be less accustomed to their machines.
No, better to accept a little loss of speed to avoid last-minute changes. Troops could put up with changes in mission, in deployment, even in commanders without batting an eyelash, but take away their familiar combat equipment and they became profoundly uneasy, almost superstitious.
They might ride machines, but they were still human. That was why Winter’s target was closest, only about thirty-five kilometers away. The others, each in a different direction, ranged outward to about 110 kilometers’ distance for the farthest, assigned to the two-company Alpha-Bravo team of Foehammers. Charlie-Delta, also Foehammers, got the next, while Echo-Foxtrot, consisting of heavier, slightly slower Jackhammers, got the next nearest.
The Foehammers were the lightest and fastest, yet they had the hardest task. Winter had decided to help them a little by carefu
lly timing his attacks, drawing some fire away from them by hitting the closest targets first with his own team.
As he jogged along, he took a moment to check on the Liberator’s Guard, which was securing his line of extraction.
* * *
Straker’s HUD showed only scattered updates, but his parallel planning mode showed First Battalion should be resupplied by now and split into four two-company teams, each heading to its own Tango factory. He keyed his FTL comlink, avoiding the electromagnetic interference of the battle raging above his head. “Indy?”
“Here, General.”
“SITREP on Winter?”
“I have no direct sensor data. Indirect indications from Rhino aim points and the extrapolated center of the running battle indicate successful resupply and Phase Two in progress. Our warships are coming out of their low pass and will resume high geostationary orbit in order to avoid further damage.”
“What was the butcher’s bill for the fleet?”
“General degradation ranging from seven to thirteen percent. No crew deaths, a few radiation and heat injuries. Commodore Gray is being careful. Of course, we must expect more casualties if the ground forces need further help. The Rhino ADA shows no sign of slackening. In fact, it’s becoming more effective as they recall reserves and activate more units. They also learn about us as we learn about them.”
“Anything you can do?”
“We can de-orbit more mining asteroids, but to be effective, we have to aim them at targets the Rhinos value.”
“Cities, in other words? Calculate our odds of actually hitting the cities with the asteroids.”
“Five to ten percent of at least one piece of one asteroid destroying a city and inflicting at least one hundred thousand civilian casualties.”
Straker sighed. That meant he had a ninety percent chance of not murdering hundreds of thousands of innocent people… but if it happened, could he live with it?
On the other hand, what if the mission failed? There might be millions of Salamander deaths, not to mention turning their clients against the Breakers for not meeting their contract—which meant no pay and no home.
“This is why you wear the stars, Derek,” Straker muttered to himself. “Okay, Indy, pass the word to Gray to de-orbit more asteroids. Do your best, but if the worst happens it’s my decision, my responsibility. Make that plain. The mission comes first.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
“And find me another target near our line of march. We need to divert as much pressure as possible from First Battalion.”
“There’s a strategic missile base about ninety kilometers to the east, if you’re willing to deviate that much.”
“Push the package to me.”
“Pushing now. Indy out.”
Straker’s FTL-datalink throughput capacity was far lower than that of an ordinary datalink, so it took nearly a minute for the package to buffer and appear in his HUD, even at low-res. It showed a hexagonally shaped installation, with missile pits and retractable launchers arranged like flowers all around the central control bunker.
The Guard raced toward its target, snaking wide among towns and villages, each of which seemed to have militia willing to attack without hesitation or regard for their own lives. It became a matter of conserving power and ammunition—not bothering to shoot back but simply racing past.
The Rhinos as yet seemed unwilling to inflict collateral damage on their own civilians by dropping too much ordnance on the Guard, but Straker was well aware his movements were known to the enemy. As he crested a series of low hills to view the missile base, he ordered the battlesuits to dismount, and he remained extremely vigilant.
That vigilance may have saved his life. Before his SAI even identified the threat, Straker’s instinct spotted the heavy launch rails aimed directly at him, depressed lower than he thought they could go.
“Cover!” he roared, and threw himself backward, curling into a ball and hoping to roll down the reverse slope of the hill.
The Rhino hypervelocity missiles were so fast he barely made it behind the crest before they tore chunks out of the hilltop, battering him with shockwaves and showering him with rocks and dirt. “Major 24, spread out to the flanks and scout,” he ordered as he backed farther down into the hollow where he sheltered. “Cadre, can we get some gnats to take a look?”
“Roger wilco, sir,” Cadre’s commander replied. Seconds later, a pair of tiny short-range drones skimmed over the hill at an altitude of less than one meter. They were immediately blinded by LADA. “Their ADA is too good, sir. We need some suppression.”
“Let’s see what we can get. Indy, what can you give us to rattle these guys’ cages?”
“Another low pass from our warships will cost in damage, but it can be done. I advise against it, though. In my assessment, your target is not important enough to pay that cost.”
“What about our ground force perimeter?”
“I remind you that you decided not to deploy the divisional heavy artillery battalion, in favor of lighter, more mobile forces. I can relay a call for fire from the missile tracks available, but most of the warheads will be intercepted.”
“How good is the Rhino target-discrimination system? Is it smart enough to accurately choose the highest-threat ordnance?”
“Substandard. They seem to be shooting down anything in the air, based on proximity and size rather than effectiveness.”
“So larger and closer things get priority?”
“Generally, yes.”
Straker mulled this over, an idea forming. “All right. Can our heavy tanks lob dumb shells this far?”
“At maximum turret elevation? Barely…”
“All right. Here’s the plan…”
Five minutes later, he was ready, with the Guard spread out well back from the missile base, in a semicircle to the south: 34 mechsuits and 160 battlesuits standing by.
“Initiate,” he told Indy.
“Shot, over,” she replied, indicating the indirect fire was on its way—shells from the heavy tanks, with their railguns elevated to maximum, followed by guided missiles from the brigade’s medium crawler tracks. The missiles would be programmed and timed to closely follow the shells at the point of impact.
A short wait.
“Five seconds,” Indy reported.
Straker counted to three. “Guard, throw!”
Every suit, whether mech or battle, launched rocks and boulders toward the missile base—the old-fashioned way, like cavemen, with their powered arms and gauntlets. Some threw one-handed, some two, but each rapid-fired chunks of stone over the crests of the hills to add hundreds more airborne targets to the enemy’s sensor screens.
Above them in the night sky, flashes of explosions crawled up from the south like fireworks, approaching the missile base with the flight of the ordnance. Each small burst represented an interception, but with the heavy tank shells and the rocks running interference for the Breaker missiles, it looked like some would get through.
The Cadre sent two more gnats over the hill. This time, they survived to provide targeting data to the mechsuit SAI network. 34 HUDs displayed 34 specific targets for antitank missiles.
“Antitank volley, make ready, ultra-low profile,” Straker barked. While the battlesuiters continued to throw their rocks over the hills, mechsuit pilots confirmed their targets, leaning over to place their gauntlets on their knees. “Two rounds each. Fire!”
From concealed bays between their shoulders, a volley of antitank missiles sprung into the air and darted along the ground, skimming just above the crests of the hills toward the Rhino missile base. One exploded as its computer misjudged its route and struck some obstacle. Four others were blinded by enemy LADA, but the rest slammed into their targets, the Rhino missile launchers.
Another volley followed, updated by the gnats, searching out undamaged targets.
It was an expensive tactic, to fire off hundreds of shells and dozens of missiles from the rear merely to satura
te the defenses, but it had worked. The gnats showed all of the enemy launchers pointing toward the Guard had been destroyed.
“Advance in line,” Straker said, forcing himself to be calm as he strode forward. “Choose your targets. Conserve your ammo and power. Battlesuits, keep your eyes open and let the mechsuits do the damage.”
The line of Foehammers surmounted their hills and walked downward, with Straker and Loco at the extreme left and right flanks keeping an eye out for surprises. Straker tempered his urge to shoot something by reminding himself he was the commander. His responsibility was to watch the whole situation, not to have fun.
This time it didn’t matter. The launchers aimed the Guard’s way lay in ruins. Huge accelerators fifty meters long and set permanently in the ground, but facing elsewhere, were swinging laboriously in their direction. They were far too slow and too late. The Foehammers simply targeted the missiles waiting on the rails and blew them up, letting the secondary explosions of the warheads destroy the launchers themselves.
Small ground-defense emplacements—slugthrower and laser nests—fell quickly to battlesuit blasters and Foehammer gatling bursts. The Guard split left and right to roll them up in both directions around the perimeter. They left the central control bunker alone. It was too heavily armored, not worth the power and ammo it would take to batter through it.
“Cadre, Hok, spread out and maintain security. Pilots, put a force-cannon shot down each launcher silo,” Straker ordered, “then we extract along a bearing of zero-five-one to Waypoint Delta. Make it fast.”
Although the external launchers were destroyed, the silos that reloaded them from the underground magazines remained largely intact. The best he could do at short notice was to damage or seal the reloading tubes, putting them out of action for several days.
As the Breakers finished mopping up, the doors to the central bunker opened. Twenty or thirty Rhinos with nothing but sidearms charged into the open, shooting wildly. Straker’s Hok instantly cut them down with precision blaster fire.
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