The Rhino regulars fought well, very well, but they faced the elite of the Breakers, highly trained and experienced veterans of many battles, men and women so expert, so cool and comfortable in the chaos that they might have been simply playing a VR combat game.
Consummate professionals, none of the Breakers wavered, and they made few mistakes.
Unfortunately, none of the Rhino infantry surrendered. They seemed completely fanatical, unlike the vehicle crews, who appeared capable of fear. The Breaker battlesuiters had to hunt all the infantry down and execute each and every one of the infantry, or they kept firing.
Straker’s rising respect for the enemy soldiers plummeted as he realized this wasn’t courage or dedicated defense of their homeland against invaders—it was programmed insanity. The infantry were obviously given the most crazy-making version of the biotech. They might as well be Hok.
Tyranny always seem to head down the same road, he thought to himself. He used the Hok troops he had because the alternative was worse—to euthanize them or employ them as work slaves—but he would never create any more. It was immoral.
But given the opportunity, the Rhino leaders had taken their own young men and made their own Hok—soulless cannon fodder, things to be used, and used up.
It made him feel better about this war and his part in it. It reminded him of a soldier’s purpose: to defend the weak and the innocent and to right a few wrongs if lucky.
Within five minutes, Straker’s vehicle kill-count topped twenty and the enemy armor was in full retreat. A check of his HUD showed several mechsuits damaged, but none destroyed and no pilots lost. One was crippled and without mobility—the pilot had to dismount.
Fortunately, Straker had mandated wear of battlesuits within the mechsuits. The pilots disliked this double-layer—it added weight and inhibited movement by a few percent—but it dramatically improved survivability. The pilot in question would be blessing him now as he leaped aboard a handy mechsuit for a ride across the radioactive battlefield.
Straker checked his suit status. His LADA was destroyed, and his armor showed a patchwork of damage ranging from four percent to over eighty percent in a few spots. The self-repair nanotech embedded in the armor was in high gear, reconstructing the superconducting duralloy molecule by molecule, but that would take time. His fuel status showed thirty-three percent, with ammo at forty-one percent for the force-cannon, twenty-two percent for the gatlings.
“Reform and keep pushing toward First Battalion,” Straker ordered. “They’re facing three brigades to our one.”
As he started moving again, he checked the battlefield on his HUD. Clearly, the info was spotty and late to update. The datalink network only made connections one-tenth of the time, briefly passing data from suit to suit, the SAIs constantly trying to maintain a coherent picture.
From what he could see, the remnants of the enemy brigade to the Guard’s front right—northeastward—had broken and retreated eastward, into the river valley he believed to be mined with nukes and ambushes. The Rhinos’ center and west-side brigades were holding, though, and they had to be cleared. “Winter, this is Straker.”
“Winter here.”
“Converge on the enemy’s center. We’ll break them, then turn to hit their west. As soon as your companies are clear of engagement, send them south at full speed toward friendly lines. Begin the withdrawal from the farthest north and pass through in a leapfrog maneuver, company by company, each covering the next. Copy? Nobody gets left behind.”
“Roger wilco, sir. We’ll get it done.”
Straker checked the fuel and ammo states of the First Battalion mechsuits. Those he could see were lower than the Guard. “Once you’re moving, the Guard will cover you. You travel at speed, most-efficient profile, and try to get your suits across the line before they run out of fuel. Your one task will be to get home, understand?”
“Understood.”
“Good luck. Straker out.”
Chapter 20
Premdor-2 battlefield
Colonel Winter’s fuel projections—current state minus what it would take to get home—hovered in the yellow as he ordered his troops into battle against the Rhinos. Every pilot’s SAI would be advising them, trying to economize, reminding them to conserve.
It made for a restrained sort of fighting, where every shot must count and every leap, every sprint used up valuable energy. It reminded him of the late stage of a long football game, where the winning players conserved their strength in order to avoid making mistakes and losing what they’d already won.
Fortunately, the Rhino troops were stunned from the Breaker nukes, and his combat teams reaped them like wheat in a field. The carnage was appalling. The battlefield was littered with broken vehicles, and whole platoons of infantry were flash-fried by blaster plasma or chopped to bits by gatling bullets.
H Company’s Sledgehammers seemed unstoppable. Every railgun penetrator and particle beam destroyed an enemy heavy tank. The Rhinos simply had nothing to stand against mechsuits, and the enemy division disintegrated—as long as they had fuel and ammo.
The first battle was over in ten minutes.
“Hotel One, advance due south,” Winter ordered. “Pass through the Guard’s lines and take point, efficiency protocols. Golf One, remain with me. We’ll be last.”
“You sure, sir?” replied Major Wilkott, the H Company commander.
“Not used to taking point, eh, Fredric?”
“Well, Sledgehammers aren’t the most agile critters in the battalion, sir. Not good scouts.”
“Alpha Company’s next, and they’ll overtake you soon enough. Use your battlesuiters for scouts if you have to. Execute.”
“Wilco, sir.”
“Winter out. Break-break, Alpha One, you copy?”
“Alpha one copy, sir.”
“Keep mopping up for two minutes, then head south, efficiency protocols. Overtake Hotel and then you take point.”
“Roger, sir.”
Winter switched his comlink to battalion-wide. “First Bat, listen up. Manage your fuel states carefully. If anyone has to ditch their suit due to lack of fuel, they won’t have a suit next time, got it? I want every pilot, every battlesuiter, every mechsuit to make it home. Battlesuiters, your equipment is replaceable, but you aren’t, so if you’re running out of juice, find a mechsuit to ride and power down. Bottom line, do what you need to do to get back. Break unit integrity if you have to. Winter out.”
There. That should make his intent clear enough.
His companies turned south and left the battlefield one by one, passing through General Straker’s watchful Guard which was spread out on the military crest of a north-facing ridgeline. They loped over the hills and wove between towns—ignoring the small-arms fire spraying from their edges. The puny weapons couldn’t hurt a mechsuit, and it would take an extremely lucky shot to damage a battlesuiter, not worth the energy of shooting back.
He and Golf Company passed through last. He paused next to Straker, the pair of Jackhammers resembling two men having a casual morning conversation. The illusion was only spoiled by proportional cups of caff absent from their giant hands. “I wonder, why no more nukes?”
Straker grunted. “They may not know we used all ours up on the ground, so they don’t want to provoke us… or maybe my orbital bluff worked.”
“Orbital bluff?”
“Our fleet made it clear we were ready to wipe them off the continent. We’re invading aliens, remember? They’ll believe the worst of us. They don’t want that guillotine blade to fall.”
“I see.” Winter briefly suspended his mechsuit’s physical mimicry of his body movements so he could roll his shoulders and stretch within his cockpit. “Glad they believed you.”
“Yeah. Get going, Martin. The Guard will keep them off your backs.”
“With respect, sir, that’s a bad idea. You didn’t get a resupply. My Golf Company has the best fuel state of all our suiters. I kept them on a tight leash with t
his in mind, so they’re in the best fighting shape. You must be near bingo.”
Straker seemed to think that over. “All right. We’ll cruise south and take charge of the linkup with the rest of the brigade. You play rearguard. Get everybody home.”
“Will do, sir.”
The Liberator’s mechsuit turned to lope away, and the Guard followed, leaving Golf Company spread out and waiting in the dawn’s early light.
Two minutes later, when the Guard was five kilometers on its way, Winter sent Golf Company ahead and followed, keeping one eye behind him.
* * *
Straker babied his mechsuit and insisted the others in the Guard do the same—sticking to the easy routes, avoiding quick turns and use of their jump jets—anything to save fuel. They were covering well-traveled ground, retracing the steps of their northward advance.
In fact, the lack of opposition was eerie. Even the Rhino militia seemed to have given up on shooting. Maybe they’d run low on ammo.
Something was up, though. He could feel it. Some sense of the battlefield showing on his HUD told him the enemy had at least one more surprise in store.
The intel reaching his SAI and the rest of the battle-network was better now, and it showed everything on the continent was converging at a point roughly where the southbound mechsuits and the northbound Breakers would meet, about two hundred kilometers north of the wetlands. There was a flat plain of croplands there, with a shallow, lazy river in the middle flowing toward the sea.
Projections told him everyone would make it through the narrowing gap by a comfortable margin—perhaps an hour—as long as fuel held out. Should he order the resupply drop? But the Rhinos might be tempted to nuke the drop site.
That’s what he would do in their place.
No. Better to abandon a few suits if he had to.
“Alpha One to Breaker One,” Straker heard. This revealed the standard comlinks were functioning now that the storm of missiles above their heads had abated—along with its attendant comms interference.
“Straker here. Go ahead, Major Hajiro.”
“Sir, Alpha Company’s at the north edge of this flood plain here.” Straker’s HUD zoomed in on the map view. “Got eyeballs on something weird.”
“Go on.”
“At first I thought the plain was flooded with water…then I thought it was herd animals…but sir…”
“Spit it out, man.”
“Sir, it’s Rhinos. Millions of them, tens of millions, my SAI says. See for yourself.”
Straker’s HUD switched to a vidfeed of the Alpha commander. He kicked the fidelity up to the VR-HUD inside his brainlink, which seemed to put him there with the direct feed to his optic nerves. Suddenly, he was looking down from a low hill onto a plain, twenty kilometers across at least, seething with movement.
Rhinos. As Hajiro said, tens of millions of them, like centaurs. Maybe a hundred million, packed almost shoulder to shoulder, like a herd of bison on the plains of Old Earth before the coming of the repeating rifle.
“Indy,” Straker said. “You see this?”
“Yes, General.”
“What’s it mean? Are they soldiers?”
“Some are. Some are civilians. All are male.”
“All of them?”
“I can detect no females. Also, no children.”
“Elderly?”
“The biotech rejuvenated their elderly. All Rhinos now appear in their prime of life.”
“Weapons?”
“About ten percent are armed.” Icons flashed, highlighting areas of the plain. “Here are platoons of militia, some with crew-served weapons. Nothing that will take down mechsuits by themselves.”
“What the hell are they doing?” Straker asked as suddenly the Rhinos all sat like dogs, their rumps on the ground, their forelimbs—their hands—lifted toward the eastern sky. They bowed, and then raised their hands again. Bowed, then raised.
“If I had to venture a guess, I’d say they were praying.”
“The Rhinos are religious too?”
“It appears so. The Salamanders worship truth. From my survey of Rhino media, they worship light. The sun, the concept, the metaphor of goodness. To them, the Salamanders are creatures of the half-darkness, the twilight. Not devils, but not as worthy as the faithful Rhinos. Subhuman, you would say.”
“And let me guess. The biotech played right into this species-superiority thing.”
“Yes.”
“That’s all very interesting, but how do we get across this plain? We don’t have the fuel to go around.” Straker clipped down the VR vid-feed to his brain. “Can you drop the resupply on the edge of the plain? They won’t nuke millions of their own people. We refuel, then make an end run.”
“That will take too much time. There are nineteen Rhino divisions converging on the area. Four will arrive within an hour. General, you must immediately travel directly across the plain, with no delay.”
“What, just run through those people?”
“They are all males. Many are armed. I’ve intercepted and decoded enough communications to lead me to believe the Rhino leaders are considering killing two birds with one stone here. They may destroy some or all of your force, and they’re getting rid of excess males in the process—relieving population pressure. General, there’s only one way out. You must run across the plain at speed. It’s kill or be killed.”
“Seems weird to hear that, coming from you.”
“The conditioning programmed into me by the Mindspark Device’s builders was broken when you forced me to destroy enemy ships and crews, Derek. Now, I’m no different from you—except I can see the projections clearly. You have over seven hundred personnel in suits, trapped north of the plain. Crossing the plain, even if you don’t shoot, will result in roughly three thousand Rhino deaths, simply from being crushed—but you didn’t put them there. Even their civilians aren’t noncombatants anymore. Their regime has cast them in the role of combat troops. Now, you must decide.”
“Boss, Indy patched me in. I was listening,” Loco said. “Screw the Rhinos. Their leaders want them to die. They want to die. If we lose even one Breaker because we’re pussies, how’re we gonna face the rest? The families? We’re at war. It’s not our job to be nice.”
“There’s always proportionality, Loco. We don’t burn a town of a thousand just to kill one enemy.”
“How about a village of fifty? Or a house with five?”
“You want us to go full-bore?”
“Hell yeah. This is war, Derek. You put us here. Your only job is to get us out. If you can’t do that, you shouldn’t have put us in.”
There’s no choice at all, Straker thought. War is hell. “Okay. We go through. As soon as all of us reach the plain, we’ll sprint across like we’re running through fire ants.”
“Noted,” Indy replied. “I feel compelled to tell you that attacking them from the rear with the Breaker armored battalions will significantly improve chances of mission success.”
“Killing how many more?”
“Hundreds of thousands.”
Straker sighed. “Not yet. We’ll do what we have to do, but no more. Straker out.”
He checked the chrono. Ten minutes until the Guard reached the plain. Twenty minutes until Colonel Winter and the rearguard caught up…and every minute burning fuel. “I’ll issue orders once I’ve seen it for myself.”
When he reached the northern edge of the plain, the presence of millions of Rhinos smote him like a punch in the gut. They were still praying to the sun, or the dawn or whatever.
Preparing themselves to die? It reminded him of docu-vids of Old Earth and the jihad wars, before mankind had spread to the stars. A fanatical determination to attack and kill was his sense of it, rather than a respectable, stubborn defense of a homeland. Alien thinking, by aliens, yet human enough…and still, he had a feeling he hadn’t yet seen the whole picture.
That the Rhinos had one more surprise for him.
How to
do it? Spread out and run, or charge in a mass, a phalanx, or a line?
Tick tock.
He had to ignore the creatures underfoot, as a man might ignore a carpet of insects. Don’t think about it.
Do what had to be done, and damn the nightmares.
Straker keyed the general channel. “All Breaker suiters, listen up. We’ll go in columns of companies, each company in skirmish formation, in order: Alpha through Hotel, then the Guard. Jog through, keep moving. Don’t fire unless you need to. Battlesuits, stay on the mechsuits. If you get knocked off, they might swamp you with sheer numbers. Our only goal here is to get across alive. Initiate in one minute: Mark. Company commanders, how copy, over?”
After receiving acknowledgements from each company commander, he continued, “Breaker armored battalions will advance from the south to direct-fire range and stand by. Defend yourselves if attacked, but do not attack the crowd yet. Battalion commanders, how copy?”
By the time he was sure his orders got through to every single commander, Alpha Company began its advance, speeding up to run as a diamond of diamonds—four mechsuit squads of three or four each, battlesuits riding on their backs and shoulders like imps.
The crowd recoiled at first, and then surged forward, crowding toward the companies even as each step of a mechsuit crushed Rhinos underfoot. The impact of fifty tons smashing downward squashed the creatures like bugs into the flat ground, slowing the mechsuits not at all.
Flesh couldn’t stand against polymeric musculature, wrapped in duralloy, powered by fusion.
Thirty seconds later, Bravo Company started in Alpha’s wake, then Charlie, then Delta. Small arms and crew-served gunfire from various points in the crowd lanced out, aimed at the mechsuits, but there were no heavy weapons. Scattered antitank rockets leaped up, only to be knocked down by Breaker LADA or pinpoint-accurate gatlings.
Battlesuits sometimes fired back, but Straker saw no real effect. The shots were swallowed up in a sea of Rhinos.
One unlucky shot knocked a battlesuiter off his perch, and he fell into the crowd. Rhino bodies surged toward the human, their mouths open with bloodlust. Straker could see the soldier firing his jump jets, frantically trying to get free, as dozens of alien hands wrestled with his suit.
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