The shovelheads came on.
Ten seconds.
Five.
“Fire!”
Twenty-four mechsuits with force-cannon and electric gatlings laid a storm of fire on the shovelheads. Beneath the converging destruction, a company of Hok marines poured plasma blaster bolts into the boiling clouds of exploding meat. They turned blood to steam and bone to shards.
The locals joined in, firing their slugthrowers and blasters and hunting rifles. Straker wondered how long it would be before they ran themselves out of ammo.
From higher still, twelve landers played their lasers across the front of the herd. The greenish beams were small by the standards of space combat, but each one was the size of a crew-served infantry weapon and limited only by the fuel available to generate their energy. Above it all, Zaxby’s skimmer and Jilani’s sloop strafed laterally, up and down the battlefield. First, from the defenders’ left to right and then swooping back right to left as the edge of the herd came closer and closer—seething with hellish destruction.
Four hundred meters. Three hundred.
Two hundred.
“Citizens, fall back! Fall back to the next wall!” Straker roared on his loudspeaker.
A few nearby turned to run, but most didn’t. They kept firing at the oncoming nightmares—probably they couldn’t hear him, not without comlinks.
Straker overrode the network and projected his voice through the loudspeakers of all of the mechsuits. “Citizens, Utopians, Italians, fall back! Retreat!”
He shifted fire from his own weapons farther into the herd, as other shooters were already turning the forward edge of the shovelheads into an inferno, but the animals weren’t stopping.
One hundred meters.
Finally, most of the locals ran, some of them abandoning heavy blasters or ammo packs. The shovelheads kept on coming, those in the rear simply running over the top of those who had died in front. Straker’s overhead view showed him less than one percent of the mass in front of them had been destroyed—and that mass was only a tiny fraction of the overall herd.
He wondered whether he should’ve allowed Zaxby to nuke them after all. If the locals had all run for the caves first thing... but Zaxby’s assessment of a thousand dead must’ve taken into account the impossibility of getting all civilians under cover.
Now, it was looking like one thousand dead might have been a bargain.
Chapter 28
Straker in Utopia
“Try to hold them at the wall!” Straker ordered as he continued to kill shovelheads and resisted the usual urge to yell. Veterans didn’t yell over comlinks. Cool and deadly, that was the mechsuiter way. Observe, aim, fire, move, all simultaneous, without losing focus or panicking.
Right. Straker told himself these things were less dangerous than heavy tanks, but the herd’s advance felt so...
Implacable.
“Major 24 use jump jets to disengage when needed to preserve your troops. Fall back to the second wall at your discretion.” Without that order, some of the Hok might die in place. They were too literal-minded, most of them. “Mortar team, leave the mortar and withdraw now.” They would easily carry the weapon, but not the crates of mortar bombs. Besides, the overall effect of the weapon had been minimal, despite at least a thousand shovelheads killed by bombs alone.
For long seconds their massed fire held the shovelheads at the wall. The barrier slowed them, and the mechsuits ambushed them as they leaked through the holes where the weapon pits used to be. The landers hovered by brute force on their jets, ripping holes in the herd that instantly refilled with an endless wave of animals.
Straker’s HUD told him they’d killed at least 100,000 shovelheads—but four or five million had taken it into their piggy brains to attack the irritating two-legged creatures on the hillside that rose up against the wall of the world. At this rate it would take hours to slaughter them all—but the defenders would be out of ammo and fuel long before.
“Landers… bounce back, and set up to cover the next wall. Land and take positions on higher ground if you can—save fuel for lasers, not flying. Major 24, leapfrog back and continue firing. Execute now.”
The landers and Hok retreated, and suddenly the shovelheads poured through the holes and past the wall. Parts of the barrier crumbled as the animals scattered the stones with their shoveling heads. In moments, they’d leveled the obstruction as if it weren’t even there, with a cooperation almost like ants—or perhaps it was a shared rage at anything that opposed them.
The Hok retreated—leapfrogging by squads and firing on the run with perfect discipline, while the shovelheads swirled around the mechsuits’ legs.
What could they do to a sixty-ton duralloy monster? Straker strode among them, stomping and shooting them. He kicked them like rats and they flew broken through the air—until he slipped in the accumulated bloody meat and almost fell. His stabilizer jets caught him, but he wondered what would happen if he hit the ground and stayed down. At the very least, they would eventually break his LADA lenses and damage some of the fixtures—the jets, the stubby protruding gatling barrels, the magnetic emitter tubes on the tips of his force-cannon.
Would the relentless battering of millions of shovelheads be enough to eventually destroy a suit? He didn’t want to find out.
“Mechsuits, withdraw,” he ordered. “Use your jets if you have to. Whatever you do, don’t fall.”
His words were prophetic as he saw one suit slip, trip, flail and go down like a man trying to keep his feet atop a sheet of marbles. Straker fired his force-cannon left and right of the fallen mechsuiter and burned far too much ammo from his gatlings keeping the man clear of the shovelheads.
The mechsuiter somersaulted backward and bounced to his feet with superb athleticism. He saw it was Lieutenant Hetson—a pilot who’d been one of the four to survive the battle on the Crystal megaship. He’d transferred into the Guard to replace one of the pilots killed on Premdor.
“Quit fucking around, Hetson, and withdraw to the wall,” Straker barked. “Don’t make me regret saving your sorry ass—again!”
“Roger that, sir,” came the cheerful reply, and the Jackhammer turned to leap and lope ahead of the herd.
Straker followed his own advice, triggering a short jet burst to shake loose of the snapping, ramming animals and get momentum toward the second line of defense. He checked his fuel state: forty percent. The drop had used a lot of isotopes—too much, in hindsight. By chance and happenstance, his hurry to liberate the people of Utopia had hurt, not helped, his cause. How much easier it would have been to come tomorrow, when the Korveni and the locals would have carried out their organized defense against this devastating surge of fauna.
Those emplaced autocannon, while not high-tech, would have been perfect against the herd. As long as they had ammo, they could have fired continuously, endlessly, thousands of rounds per minute. Set to grazing fire at shoulder level to the animals, each bullet would penetrate two, three, even four at a time. A little math in his head showed the Korveni’s specialized setup would’ve killed the critters five to ten times faster than the Guard could. He’d seen the ammo cases stacked high, along with the mortars, enough to heat their barrels to the melting point before it was gone... but that was all water under the bridge now.
Yet why spend so much effort defending their slaves? That Erbaccia must be valuable stuff.
But it was all trampled now. Something about the situation seemed out of place, to make no sense, but Straker was far too busy to think about it right now.
He stepped carefully over the second wall, making sure he didn’t crush anyone on the other side, and then turned back. The shovelheads had already covered half the thousand-meter distance. There were a few locals still running, winded, trying to make it back—but they were out of time.
The herd swallowed them as it thundered closer.
There was nothing to be done.
“Stand by to fire on my order,” Straker comlinked. T
hen, he overrode the loudspeakers again to tell the gaggle of locals waiting with their pitiful remaining weapons, “You Italians fall back and get in your caves. You’re brave, but you’ll only die when they reach this wall.”
The herd was a little more ragged this time, broken up by casualties and delays at the first wall. Some groups charged onward while other bunches stopped to attack and eat fallen fellows—confirmation of their shark-like behavior. From his elevated position he could see swirls and eddies in the herd that indicated other feeding frenzies behind the charging line.
They had no fear, but they did seem to be ravenous, so perhaps a change in tactics was in order.
“Landers, target the herd fifty meters behind the line. Sweep your lasers side to side, fast, in order to wound rather than kill. Open fire.”
Straker hoped the wounded would distract the rest to turn on their buddies and savage them for food.
“Hok, open fire on the front line, now. Mechsuits, delay five seconds, then use selective fire on groups. Make each shot count and conserve ammo.”
Again the front line of shovelheads dissolved into an inferno, while behind the landers’ beams swept the herd from above— cutting trenches in their flesh like medical lasers rather than blowing holes in them with their concentrated heat.
Where the greenish beams touched, animals squealed, snapped and faltered. As Straker hoped, others nearby were drawn by the smell of roasted meat and turned to take advantage of their weak brothers and attacked their nearest meal.
This delayed the assault by a full minute, but eventually the pressure of millions of ravening shovelheads rolled over the feeding frenzies in another wave, seemingly untouched.
“Do it again,” Straker barked. “Fire!”
Again, the lander beams licked out above as the Hok shot the critters in the face. Those that made it through the Hok blasters were cut down or blown up by careful mechsuit fire. The delay of the feeding frenzies allowed the Guard to demolish the attacking wave and provide a brief respite before another came on again.
So, his tactical improvement had worked... but was it enough?
The herd ground ever closer, gaining a hundred meters each wave before the pause, the eating, the resurgence of the endless numbers. Straker checked his HUD again and fought despair. While the semicircle of the second wall made for a smaller perimeter, it was still too long—over two kilometers to defend.
“Landers, fall back again to overwatch positions—now.” Best to get them set up and ready first—but as they moved, their fire lost accuracy and effectiveness. The mass came on even faster.
One hundred meters.
Fifty.
Straker’s HUD blinked at him. Thirty-one percent fuel—not too bad—but his gatlings hit twenty percent as the spools of duralloy wire supplying the six-barreled railguns with slugs neared depletion. He’d fired off over a ton of metal in gatling bullets.
And his force-cannons weren’t far behind. Fewer than seventy two-kilo bimetallic discs left out of three hundred—plenty for most battlefields, but this...
The herd rushed the wall, a little looser now, a little less of a mass, but the thinning-out from fire and feeding was counteracted by the contracting semicircle of the attack, which concentrated the shovelheads more and more. Had the Breakers unlimited ammo, Straker would say they were winning—but it wouldn’t be long before they’d be reduced to throwing rocks.
“Major 24, fall back by squads to the third wall. Execute!” For a straightforward operation like this, the Hok were the best soldiers imaginable—lacking initiative, but fearless and precise. They peeled off, odd-numbered squads first to bound backward and cover, then even-numbered squads, fifty meters at a time.
While they did it, the mechsuiters covered them—thinning and slowing the heard if only slightly.
“Mechsuits, deliberate withdrawal. Walk backward, maximum speed without jets. All forces, lay fire on the top of the wall as targets appear. Conserve ammo.” Straker felt like he’d been repeating that last phrase too much, but he couldn’t help himself.
When his Jackhammer was halfway to the third redoubt, this one only five hundred meters back, the shovelheads began to boil over the top of the second wall. Hok and mechsuits aimed blasters and single shots at the creatures as they scrambled to get over. That slowed them for a long minute, until the wall itself suddenly crumbled in a dozen places as the shovelheads dug through.
Lander lasers angling down from their positions on the hillside above raked the creatures. The resulting feeding frenzy bought the defenders another minute. All the while, Zaxby’s skimmer and Jilani’s sloop strafed with multiple lasers from above. Straker wished—no, he thirsted for reinforcements as a parched man craved water under a burning sky. Where were the rest of the skimmers, or Gray’s small craft?
“Zaxby, how long until we get some help?”
“More than thirty minutes. It’s been only twenty-three minutes since this engagement began,” Zaxby replied.
“I don’t believe it.” But it was true. By Straker’s chrono, they hadn’t been fighting for even half an hour. “We can’t hold out.”
“I predicted this result. Now, you must decide what your goal is here.”
“Meaning?”
“Most of the locals are in the caves. The landers retain enough fuel to fly to the hub, but barely. Your ground forces can retreat up the world-wall until it becomes so steep the shovelheads will fail to climb—but you must do so now, before your fuel is exhausted. However, all the vital facilities in the settlement will be lost: the storehouses, the water tanks and processing, the buildings, the workshops, tools, machinery... All will be leveled.”
“Can you still nuke the herd and save the village?”
“I can’t use a nuclear weapon. The yield is too imprecise. I can use one of my two remaining antimatter bombs, and most of the facilities will survive. My systems indicate fewer than two hundred locals remain alive outside the caves, but farther back. Some should survive.”
“Two hundred. How many locals died in the fight?”
“At least four hundred, no more than six hundred.”
Straker sighed. “Then I made the right decision. We saved at least two hundred, maybe more—and those we did lose died fighting for their families and their people.”
“That’s admirable sentiment, Derek Straker, but I advise immediate antimatter employment.”
Straker took one last look at the situation. “Add a little for a buffer, Zaxby—an extra couple hundred meters of distance. We’ll finish off what’s left, and maybe a few more people will live. And make sure Jilani’s out of the way too.”
“Understood,” Zaxby said. “Chiara Jilani’s ship is departing.”
There was a long minute’s pause as the Cassiel rocketed skyward and away, and the skimmer rode high—both in order to get clear of the worst blast effects.
“Dropping the weapon… It’s falling true… Detonation in ten... nine...”
“All forces take cover in five—nuclear protocols! Mark!”
Still firing into the herd, Straker waited until Zaxby’s countdown hit two. Then he spun away from the blast and lay prone to minimize the damage to his suit.
The world was lit up by a blinding flash. The various shockwaves arrived with near-simultaneity, and his HUD told him the half-kiloton blast was only two kilometers distant. Tiny by mass-destruction standards, yet the explosion was equivalent to five hundred tons of conventional explosives, a stack the size of a house, set off all at once.
The jolt knocked the shovelheads near Straker off their feet. Behind them, it did progressively more damage the closer to the blast the animals were. By according distances they were knocked down, tumbled, pounded, blinded, burned, shredded, ripped apart or annihilated. Bodies were thrown into the air as if launched by catapults to spin like dolls, meat puppets in the hands of some mad child-god.
“On your feet!” Straker roared. “Finish them off now. Shoot the sons of bitches coming our w
ay, but let the rest go.”
The shovelheads milled in disarray. Those undamaged enough to scramble to their feet were dazed, stumbling or running in all directions. Every one of them that headed toward the settlement, a Hok shot with precision. Straker didn’t bother to use his own ammo or fuel except to boot a few of them out of the way as he ranged the battlefield. The Hok were doing fine.
“That’s broken them,” Zaxby comlinked. “I estimate the blast killed or severely injured over four million of the beasts. We could have saved a great deal of fuel and ammunition if we’d done that sooner.”
“And lost two hundred more locals. Quit second-guessing everything, Zaxby. What’s done is done.”
“But second-guessing is one of my strengths. In fact, I’d go so far as to say—”
“—And I’d say well done, but shut up. Take charge of the reinforcements and resupply, Commodore.”
“Commodore? It’s very kind of you to promote me thus, Derek Straker—though I was, after all, Grand Marshal of Ruxin—”
“Shut up, I said! Straker out.” He cut off the channel to Zaxby and switched to the Guard freq. “Reorganize and redistribute what’s left of ammo and fuel.”
Mechsuits could cross-supply ammo and buddy-refuel their fusion isotopes, though in practice it wasn’t often done. Battlesuits could also parasitize direct power from mechsuits to recharge if needed. Several Hok were already plugging cables into armored sockets near the mechsuits’ neckless “heads.”
The Hok must be nearly out of juice. It made Straker feel a little better about his decision to use the antimatter bomb... until he turned to see dozens of civilians lying on the ground behind the third wall, fallen as they ran toward the nearest buildings or the shelter of the caves. Even if they weren’t thrown at high speed into something solid, the sonic shock might have killed them, bursting their lungs, their arteries, their eyeballs. A few lucky ones might merely be deafened...
If only he’d ordered them all to the caves first thing, unequivocally. But he had no idea. Herd animals? Who feared herd animals?
Straker's Breakers Page 31