Pagan and Morag were covering our ascent. At least I assumed they were. I could see nothing as they were wearing reactive camouflage and were presumably completely still against the ice. I heard one of the seals flop out of the water and onto the ice below us. I stopped my ascender; a moment later Mudge’s went quiet as well. I stayed very still, hoping that the reactive camouflage would hide us. Hoping that we’d hidden the dive sheaths well enough. I glanced down and I saw one of the huge, sleek, vicious-looking augmented seals flopping around among the blood and food remains. There was nothing to do but wait and hope.
I was getting nervous, almost shaky. Something was different. Everyone gets scared, unless they’re a psycho or have had too much meat replaced with metal, but this was different. I wasn’t handling this reasonably low-stress situation well. I did a mild sedative from my internal drugs reservoir to calm me down. This wasn’t good. How much damage had they done to me? I wished I’d asked Mudge to score me some Slaughter.
There was a splash below. I glanced down to see the pool rippling. The seal had cocked its head and was looking at the water. I think someone had thrown something from above. The seal waddled rapidly to the edge and then slid into the pool, disappearing below the surface. It didn’t seem very bright. Mudge and I quickly and quietly finished our ascent.
Dinas Emrys, yesterday
‘There’s only so far we can stealth. As soon as we’re compromised it’s all over,’ Merle said.
‘Not if they’re worried about other things and not if you’ve got fire support,’ Mother said. Tailgunner, resplendent in his feathered cloak, glanced over at her worriedly.
‘That’s a …’ Cat started. She didn’t say death sentence. The Citadel was basically a minor arcology, or to put it another way, a fortress of ice the size of a small city and very heavily defended. It was designed to withstand a prolonged siege from Them.
‘So don’t fuck it up,’ Mother said grimly. I wondered if this was what I’d seen the whanau talking about.
‘You’re a mech down,’ Merle said.
‘Soloso used to pilot mechs in the mines. We’ve been bringing him up to speed,’ Mother told us. Even on Annis’s horrible face I could see a look of worry. ‘What we’ll need is accurate info, which means good forward observation.’
‘We’ll be comms black,’ I said.
Tailgunner shook his head. ‘No, we’ve got an idea about that.’
‘Rannu and I can FO,’ Pagan said. It made sense, as an ex-RASF combat air controller he had the most experience.
Few things make you feel less like a hardened combat cyborg commando than wearing adult diapers. They may have been made from the latest smart fabric. They may lock all the moisture away from your skin. They may in fact be the very pinnacle of modern nappy technology, but despite the initial warm feeling there’s something deeply pathetic about a grown man pissing himself whatever the reason. It may be part of the discipline of running long-term OPs, sniper stalking or in this case a difficult infiltration. That didn’t make it any better. At least we’d taken something to constipate ourselves and eaten high-energy food sparingly the day before.
The Citadel was ahead of us. It was a flat-topped terraced pyramid. Large though it was, the cavern it was in dwarfed it. This meant a lot of open space all around the arcology, which provided clear fields of fire. There were also only a few ways into the large cavern, which would further bottleneck any attack. We knew that each of the terraces was basically a heavily defended trench made of super-hardened ice. Even from here I could see the various weapon systems – cannon, missile batteries, point-defence systems – bristling from the pyramid-shaped complex. Fully magnifying my lenses, I could make out combat drones circling the fortress as well as patrolling gunships and exo-armour squads.
What the fuck were we thinking? I started to shake again. I had to get this under control. We had a long way to go. I dropped the high magnification and the Citadel became a glow in an otherwise dark cavern.
There was no wild fauna on Lalande 2 with the exception of a few hardy rats that had adapted to the high G and were frankly terrifying. Rats shouldn’t have that much muscle. That meant that the Citadel’s defenders could surround it with motion detectors and motion-triggered anti-personnel mines, as well as much larger anti-armour mines. The anti-armour mines wouldn’t bother us but they would be a problem for the mechs.
They had EM, heat and sound sensors as well as security lenses, but if we triggered them we deserved to fail. The problem was always going to be the motion sensors. There was only one way to trick them and that was to move very, very slowly. This meant that a journey of just over a mile was going to take us the better part of twenty-eight hours of crawling over cold stone, hence the inevitability of wetting myself. This would take incredible co-ordination and discipline, as we wouldn’t even be able to see each other. We also needed to map the anti-armour mines for the mechs. Our initial movement was around the edges of the cavern so we could start from the whanau’s entry point.
It was long, it was cold and it was boring. The highlights of the crawl were exo-armour or drone patrols passing overhead. They always made it easier to piss yourself. I was on downers to deal with the constant tension. As soon as we got close I’d have to counteract the downers with stims. I only hoped that nothing happened before then, as the downers would affect combat performance until I stimmed myself. All we had to look forward to on this miserable crawl were cold rations and the thrill of occasionally bumping into each other.
I had a lot of time to think about the insanity of what we were doing, thinking thoughts that would fuck me up. Not the sort of thoughts I would normally think while operational. I was worried I would set off the motion detectors if I got the shakes. The Citadel grew larger and larger in my vision as we inched closer. The closer I got, the more I could see the weapons, the men, the machines, and the more I realised the futility of what we were trying to do.
Rolleston had done a good job on me. I wondered how Rannu was holding up. I had betrayed these people once. I wasn’t going to do it again. It was my responsibility to them that kept me moving. That was how I dealt with it. Kept me crawling over the smooth stone between the mines and sensors. Concealment wasn’t required, as they had achieved near-total area denial. Or so they thought. Fortunately they hadn’t reckoned on anything as stupid as what we were planning.
I also knew that what the whanau were going to do had to count for something. I wondered how they could operate with the near total certainty of death.
Dinas Emrys, yesterday
‘They’ll know we hacked them,’ Cat said. This was good. This was her job – to come up with as many objections as possible so we could overcome them.
‘We need to make it look like something else and we need to knock out all visual surveillance in the lower boardroom,’ Annis said. As she did she expanded the part of the arcology that showed us the lower boardroom. It looked a long way from our point of entry.
‘Sabotage,’ I suggested.
‘Assassination attempt,’ Merle suggested.
‘We don’t even know if any of their command will be there,’ Cat pointed out.
‘Sabotage then. I think we should take any opportunity to fuck with their machine that we get,’ I said.
‘And take any opportunities for assassination that present themselves,’ Merle added. I had to agree.
‘Not at the expense of getting the data,’ Annis said, looking at Cat.
I glanced at Pagan. Even in his Druidic icon he looked subdued. I wondered who was running the Ungentlemanly side of the operation now.
Cat nodded. ‘Agreed. The info is our priority.’
‘Even though we’ve got no way to get it out?’ Merle asked.
‘Information always helps,’ Mudge pointed out.
‘And currently we know next to nothing,’ Annis added.
‘Okay, this is all pretty fucking slim,’ Cat said.
‘We’ve been out on hairier,’ I said. R
annu was nodding in agreement.
‘Okay. Let’s set up a full action plan and begin prep,’ Cat replied. There were smiles from all but the New Zealand contingent and Pagan.
‘There’s one other thing. We need to do this fast. We’ve got next to no solid intel but it can’t take them much longer to prep for the attack on Earth,’ Pagan told us.
Cat gave this some consideration.
‘All right. If we’re doing this then we are ready to go at 0500 tomorrow, understood? That means if we need more gear from Merle’s caches we get it today,’ she said.
Now we started to whinge. We were squaddies, that’s what we’re supposed to do. We whinged and then we went and got on with it.
We were close now after more than an Earth day of crawling. Our internal heating systems were running low to mask our heat signatures. I was cold and I ached. I’d had no sleep. Counteracting tiredness with amphetamines, which made me jittery, and then confusing my mind with downers to counteract the tension.
Twenty-five hours in, things had stopped making sense, which was good. This meant I could deal with the imminence of possible death. I could hear the soldiers talking now and smell their food. Soon we’d be trying to kill each other. Shame when we had so much in common. Pity we couldn’t just go after the leaders, on both sides.
At least Rannu and Pagan had had something to do. They had plotted a line of anti-armour mines from the mechs’ point of entry to the Citadel. The plan was for Rannu and Pagan to rendezvous just before the attack and use the palm interfaces on their smartlinks to swap information. Pagan would also be using his smartlink and internal targeting systems to passively plot firing solutions for the mechs. Most crucially they needed solutions plotted for the point-defence systems. Pagan was also looking at the main vehicle entrance on this side of the arcology and using his guncam to record details.
When he had all the information he required he sent it as a packet on a UV tight beam link to a transponder we’d set up at a prearranged location. That receiver was hard-wired via a cable run through a small hole drilled in solid rock to the whanau’s position. Using tight beam communication meant that the Black Squadrons would have to have something interposed between the receiver and us. Also they had no reason to be scanning UV frequencies.
I checked the time displays on my IVD. One showed the actual time. The other was a countdown. I looked up at the large entrance to the vehicle bay. All that was between the entrance and us were three lines of trenches and then the terraced trenches above the door.
New Utu Pa, yesterday
‘I want two fireteams,’ Cat told us. We were in one of the smaller caves. Soloso and Big Henry were just inside the entrance discouraging people from paying attention to us. ‘Fireteam Alpha is me, Merle and Morag. Fireteam Bravo is Jakob running it, Mudge, Rannu and Pagan.’
I would have liked to turn over command to Rannu but I’d done that once and I couldn’t afford to be seen as a weak link again, as I suspected that Cat would actually drop me from the mission. I didn’t want to work with Pagan. I couldn’t trust him. Actually that wasn’t true. I knew he’d do his job, but I didn’t want to trust him.
‘Looks like we’ve got all the fuck-ups,’ Mudge said.
‘Shut up, Mudge,’ I told him.
‘Right, Rannu and I are going to start the killing before zero point. We’re going after officers, NCOs, heavy-weapon crews, but we’re going to be doing it quietly,’ Merle said. He seemed happier with Cat in command.
‘Then we move on my go and we are fucking quick or dead. Everyone understand?’ Cat told us.
We all nodded. I looked over at Mother and Tailgunner. They may as well have been carved out of mahogany. It was like looking at ghosts. After everything Mother had said I still couldn’t work out why. I’d spoken to Mudge about it. He’d said that sometimes you just had to draw a line against what the bad guys were allowed to get away with.
‘Is that my Void Eagle?’ Merle demanded. I looked down at the massive automatic holstered on my chest.
‘What, you want to argue about it now?’ I asked. We were just about to go operational.
‘I’ll be having that back,’ he snapped. Crucially Cat didn’t order me to give it back. In fact she was smiling.
‘There’s a reason the British army are called the Borrowers,’ Mudge told him. Rannu was laughing.
A new recruit had brought in a collection of antique weapons. Mudge had bartered with him for a pre-FHC assault shotgun for me. I’d added an external targeting system for the smartlink, which would be less than ideal, and I’d also had to make a few adjustments for the shotgun to fire caseless, but it would serve as a secondary weapon.
Watching the countdown I was shaking. When the klaxons and the red lights came on, for a moment I thought we were compromised but this was all part of the plan. I watched gunships laden with troops and exo-armour take to the air. The rest of Mother’s forces, along with whatever fighting elements of the resistance and Moa City gangs we’d managed to make contact with, had attacked targets in the city and its vicinity, hoping to draw elements of the Black Squadrons away from the Citadel.
I watched the gunships and flight-capable exo-armour head out of the big cavern. This helped but there was still a lot of men and hardware left. I knew we had to let them get to their targets. As soon as that happened our forces would pull back and hopefully melt into the background.
My breathing sounded impossibly loud in my ears but I didn’t dare risk a sedative now. I just wanted things to start – get it over with, break the tension. I was shaking quite badly now. Even under my camouflage I was sure I must have been visible as a quivering piece of rock, but nothing happened, though as a result of the alert the guards seemed more on the ball. The soldiers in the external defences were all New Zealand regulars.
I don’t think I noticed when the killing started. I knew that the others would be watching the synchronised countdown, getting ready to go. My heart was hammering at my ribcage. I didn’t hear the firing; I just saw an officer’s face cave in and he slumped to the ground. The man next to him had a moment to look surprised and then his face turned red just underneath his helmet. Rannu with a borrowed suppressed, long-barrel Steyr marksman’s rifle and Merle with his custom gauss rifle firing at subsonic speed. Every shot someone died. They were aiming and killing so quickly that none of the defenders had had time to raise the alarm yet.
The countdown reached zero. The explosion rolled across the cavern, echoing back and forth at the speed of sound. It was like standing in thunder. The ground shook as my audio dampeners managed the noise down to tolerable levels. This got their attention.
I knew that behind me a cliff face had just been turned to powder. One of the NCOs under Mother’s command was old enough to have worked mines in this area before the Citadel was built. He’d been able to guide us to mine shafts big enough for the mechs and close enough to the Citadel to blow a path through with a lot of stolen mining explosives.
They hadn’t even sounded the alarm when the Citadel started taking hits. My audio dampeners struggled with the hypersonic booms as 300mm rounds from the Apakura’s mass driver cannon began impacting into the Citadel. The rapid hits penetrated deep into the hardened ice causing massive explosions of shards hard enough to cause shrapnel wounds. Water rained down on us from where the kinetic energy of the impacts had melted the dense ice. The ice burned where plasma rounds hit. The plasma had been fired by Kopuwai and Whakatau, the two Landsknecht-class bipedal mechs piloted by Soloso and Big Henry respectively. Every round from the plasma cannons sent up huge plumes of steam. All three mechs were targeting the Citadel’s point defence with their direct-fire weapons.
Rannu and Merle used the chaos to kill more and more as the defenders instinctively dived for cover in the face of the mech onslaught. My audio filters managed to pick up the rip of rotary railguns and the sound of rapidly staggered explosions. Apakura drew a wall of fire between her and the Citadel as she used the information
provided by Pagan to detonate anti-armour mines with her rapid-firing belly railguns.
The Citadel’s point defences on our side were destroyed in moments. The Citadel had not even returned fire yet. The two Landsknechts and the Bismarck-class mech then fired half their missiles. Contrails filled the air in the huge cavern.
I opened my mouth and kept my head down. I’d been dangerously close to missile strikes before. Conventional and plasma warheads impacted. The ground jumped and tilted and I realised the impacts had blown me into the air and turned me on my side. None of the defenders had noticed; they’d had other things to worry about.
We were targeting the Citadel’s heavy-weapons systems and gunship landing areas. It looked like one whole side of the pyramid had thrown itself up into the air. Steam, water, shards and huge chunks of ice rained down on us. Several plasma warheads had detonated in the vehicle bay and it was burning with white fire. I could hear the secondary explosions of ammo cooking off. I was shaking like a leaf. I didn’t need a stim. I was wired. I needed something to take the edge off.
Each of us was a ghost, disrupting the steam and smoke as we stood up and ran towards the Citadel, killing as we went. The massive blast doors to the burning vehicle bay were starting to move, closing slowly. I sent a frag grenade from my launcher into the first trench. It exploded. I was oblivious to the screams. I glanced behind me. The Apakura, Kopuwai and Whakatau were emerging from the rolling cloud of dust, firing, seemingly unstoppable. Ahead of them Apakura’s belly rotary railguns were hosing the ground down left and right, detonating the anti-armour mines closest to the Citadel. For a second I caught a glimpse of a small mech running towards us.
War in Heaven Page 54