by B. V. Larson
They left their loaders wherever they happened to be, scattered with the variety of freight containers across their designated cargo bay. This was completely intentional; Heiser wanted the operation to seem casual and inefficient, typical for a provincial frigate manned by mediocre personnel.
His people fanned out and relaxed. Some headed into the frigate to retrieve food from the mess. Some broke out cards and games. Some found places to nap. All would use the time to study the commodore’s message that told them where to put their particular items.
“Whattaya want, Spear?” asked Karst. “Sandwich?”
“Don’t matter. Whatever they got. Just make sure you bring enough.” Like many of the Breakers, Heiser had eaten far too much nutritional paste lately, so real food from the galley seemed like heaven.
“Sure, Spear, I gotcha. Double helpings.” Karst strolled off. Twenty minutes later, he returned with disposable boxes and bottles of bright red fruit drink.
Heiser ate, taking his time, reviewing and re-reviewing the plan. His chrono ticked over far too slowly, but finally the moment came to move. “Let’s go,” he called, rising and clapping his huge hands.
Still without haste, his people sorted themselves out, and with deceptive skill drove their loaders out of the cargo bay and into the fortress. Each headed for his or her designated place, mostly intersections that needed to be controlled, to drop off something nearby.
Heiser stayed in the cargo bay in case he had to coordinate or react, though it took an effort of will. He hadn’t lived in the Mutuality, so he had the wrong accent and command of jargon to risk interacting with the fortress personnel. The loader drivers and handlers would do their jobs, dropping off trailers, supersized containers and even entire loaders at specific locations.
Some loaders had fake work orders attached, as if they had broken down and were awaiting field repair. Other items had forged pre-placement authorizations to wait until the morning shift came in. The lateness of the hour and the accustomed stifling bureaucracy should cover the situation for long enough.
At least, that was the commodore’s plan.
Heiser counted everyone as they returned, marking them off on his roster until he was certain none had been detained. He sent them all into the Chun Wei to wait for zero hour.
Chapter 11
Sachsen Fortress
Straker rolled out of his sleep cube and knocked on Loco’s hatch. The short-term rental boxes, each equipped with a bed, a holo-display, and little else, had seemed the best place to wait out of the public eye until the appointed time.
He checked his chrono as Loco popped the door and climbed out of his own cube, rubbing his eyes. Like any good combat troop, Straker’s best friend could sleep anywhere, any time.
Smoothing his uniform, Straker settled his cap on his head and put a no-nonsense expression on his face. “Let’s roll,” he said, and began to walk toward his destiny.
“Uh-oh. You got that look, boss.”
“Yes, because the shit is about to hit the airflow turbine—shit I started.”
“At least we’ll be in ’suits. Better than the rest of the Breakers.”
Straker stopped and turned. “You think I’m happy to be inside armor while they’re not?”
Loco grinned. “I know you are—and so am I. Not that you want them exposed, but it’s always better to be the hammer than the nail... Foehammers, in this case.”
Battlesuits weren’t the self-contained monsters that mechsuits were, but they had armor enough to resist small arms, powered polymeric muscular assistance, and SAIs with comlinked HUDs that raised their situational awareness far above a straight-leg infantry trooper.
But the Breakers had only a handful of those. Instead, they would be relying on surprise, preparation, superior tactics, and a popular uprising to win the day today.
Along with two Foehammer mechsuits.
“If I could put everybody in a mechsuit,” Straker replied, “or at least battlesuits, I would.”
“I know, I know.” Loco slapped Straker’s arm. “Don’t get all self-righteous on me, boss. You know you keep me around to say the shit you can’t.”
Straker nodded, but remained grim. “As long as it’s between us…but the troops won’t take it that way. They’ll think you’re cavalier with their lives—and these are all volunteers. I don’t need anyone with grudges against you and your mouth.”
“Okay, okay.”
“You hear from Zaxby yet?”
“Nope,” said Loco, checking his comlink.
“Damn. I hope he’s…”
“Not dead?”
Straker coughed. “Yeah.”
“So we don’t know if he got the malware into the battlecruisers.”
“Not for sure. But that doesn’t change anything. The plan goes forward.” Straker resumed walking.
At five minutes before 0300, Straker and Loco reached the critical intersection. Two huge loaders sat parked out of the way, work order tags in their windows and standard intermodal cargo containers clamped to their rear decks. The two men popped the clamps and punched in the codes to the boxes.
As they did so, other Breakers began filtering in from several directions. They quickly destroyed all the cameras and sensors they could identify. Most had already retrieved their weapons from the cache sites established six hours earlier. Some were in half-armor, and most had comlinks or full combat helmets. A half-dozen wore battlesuits, the men who’d demonstrated the highest ability with them.
The first oversized container’s doors swung open to reveal the head-like sensor cluster of Straker’s Foehammer mechsuit. The war machine lay flat on its back, with room to spare above its chest, overlapping clamshell doors already opened.
Straker clambered into the ’suit and punched in the activation code, wishing once again his brainlink would synch up fully with the Foehammer’s SAI. The best Murdock had been able to achieve was a limited connection no better than that of the public VR booth he’d used earlier.
Still, that was better than nothing. It would give him improved cueing over the optical HUD. Aiming and firing, though, would remain on manual, with the complex suite of sensors causing the mechsuit to mimic his body’s movements and its feedback mechanisms inducing touches of discomfort to tell him what was happening to the machine he rode.
Once sealed in, Straker lifted his gauntlets and pushed slowly on the interior of the cargo container. The top and sides fell open, allowing him to sit, dismount from the loader, and then stand on the smoothed stone deck.
As part of the cargo tunnel access system, the intersection reached high enough to allow him a comfortable distance above his head. Still, the scale of the mechsuit against the available space gave the impression of a large man occupying a long rectangular room, a room with four big entrances at the corners and eight small ones spaced between.
By now, alarms had begun sounding throughout the fortress. Even if those in the control center saw nothing, the widespread destruction of sensors would have alerted them to something amiss. And, if Straker’s plan were being carried out properly, the ordinary Sachsen citizens, alerted by the local resistance movement and prompted by the Ritter brothers, would be wreaking havoc everywhere they could.
The Ritter brothers and their fellows would also have set up a cell with access to the malware-infected network, allowing them to control many functions of the fortress—airflow, power and gravplating being the most important. Even now, the atmospheric pressure was being reduced enough to cause doors to slam shut. They might be overridden, but that would take time and command access.
The resistance cell should also be setting the gravplating to triple-Gs in some areas, which would also slow down any response. Combined with selected power outages, Straker hoped—no, he’d bet this operation—that his two hundred Breakers, properly prepared and led, could overcome thousands of defenders. He’d even taken care to try to minimize casualties, at least among the unaltered humans.
The Hok, t
hough, were another story. The parasitic biotech that made them what they were had long since wiped out all trace of humanity, leaving them as high-functioning combat-zombies, bereft of fear or will. That made them incredibly dangerous, because they would never surrender, or even flinch. They had to be finished off to the last, or ordered to stand down by an authority they recognized.
Straker and Loco backed up into the two cargo tunnels that led toward the command center. These, along with the two smaller passageways between them, must be defended at all costs, because behind the Breakers were their combat engineers, who would be trying to cut their way into the fortress’s headquarters.
And that would take some time. Sealed behind massive doors, the command center had been built to resist an assault. Yet, no defense was proof against time and tools.
The engineers had the tools. It was up to the Breakers to buy them the time.
Opposite the tunnels and passageways were similar openings that led in the direction of the Hok barracks. It was from that direction that the main attack would come.
Straker keyed his comlink. “Battlesuiters, I want you between us, defending the personnel passageways.”
“Roger, sir,” came the answer from Karst. The corporal’s Sledgehammer was too finicky and unwieldy for this operation, and he’d proven to be superb with a battlesuit, so he’d ended up in charge of the few they had.
“Spear, you got the squads in place?”
“On the way, sir,” said Heiser. Two squads of Breaker infantry trotted to take positions behind the mechsuits. They would ambush any Hok that made it past the Foehammers. One more squad, split into fireteams, backed up the battlesuiters.
Two teams of Breakers pulled crates out of the containers that had concealed the mechsuits. They broke these open and set up high-powered slugthrowers that used liquid propellant to fire armor-piercing bullets at extreme rates of fire.
These were usually mounted on armored vehicles, for they expended fuel and ammo so prodigiously that no infantry could carry enough for resupply. But in this case, extra coffers of each had been brought in on the loaders.
A couple of the squad leaders set up Killmores, command-detonated directional mines, These were nasty things with their own holo-generators that concealed themselves. From the front—where most of their explosive darts would be sent—they matched their holograms to the deck plating behind them, becoming effectively invisible.
The rest of the Breakers, a short company of a hundred or so, set up similar, larger-scale holo-generators that masked everyone on that side, the right side as the defenders looked at it, from view. They then took cover behind the loaders and cases full of extra hull plating, pre-positioned there for that purpose.
All of the artificial barriers had been parked along the right-side wall. When combined with the blocking force, this created a classic L-shaped ambush. The whole exercise took less than three minutes, for the Breakers had practiced their roles dozens of times.
“Everyone fade back to concealment,” Straker called over his comlink. “Pop up only upon my order. We want as many in the kill zone as possible.”
Double-clicks of silent acknowledgement came back to him, and Straker pulled back as well, deep into one of the darkened tunnels. Behind him, an explosion shook the air, and a fine mist of dust and a few pebbles fell from the bored-out rock ceilings.
That would be the combat engineers beginning their work to blast through to the command center. Combined with laser drills and thermal lances, they would cut through as quickly as they could—the faster the better. Taking the control nexus intact was a high priority. And if not intact… well, a headless base was better than one with the enemy in charge.
“I’ve got movement,” said one of the scouts. He’d been monitoring the spy-eyes stuck to the passageways leading into the intersection. “Two main tunnels, two personnel passages. Hok point men, deliberate pace.”
“Nobody move,” Straker reiterated. “Nobody get antsy.”
Hok in full battlesuits padded warily into view, one in each of the tunnels opposite those of the defenders. Straker had hoped they’d be stupid enough to charge forward to rescue their endangered command center, but hadn’t really expected that. The loss of the sensor network had obviously alerted them to something amiss, and they were proceeding as if through enemy territory.
Involuntarily holding his breath, as if that would matter, Straker watched through spy-eyes as the four continued out into the open intersection. They maintained their spacing with perfect discipline, heading for the opposite tunnels. Behind them, more Hok came into view, single columns in the personnel tunnels and double columns in the cargo tunnels.
“Troops,” Straker said, “pull back even farther into the tunnels and let their scouts get inside. When you can’t wait any longer, pop them quick and clean. Loco, use a gatling round, single shot. I want the rest of the Hok focused on our tunnels, convinced we’re waiting deep within them, as if we’re weak and trying to delay them from the best defensive position possible.”
The main enemy force held up at the entrance to the crossroads, until their scouts entered the tunnels leading toward the command center. When they did, the lines of troops began to cross, weapons pointed in all directions. Fireteams peeled off and headed for the four personnel tunnels on the flanks.
Unfortunately, that meant two of those teams were heading straight for the holo-camouflaged Breakers.
Well, no battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy, Straker thought. “Blow the Killmores!” he barked, and stepped forward, refining his aim on the Hok coming toward him.
The Hok was quick, and loosed a burst of needles even as Straker’s single gatling round, a bullet sized to penetrate light armor, blew a fist-sized hole in his chest. The cloud of metal slivers scraped some nano-camouflage off his Foehammer, but that was all.
At the same time, the Killmores detonated. Capacitors within each dumped enough electrical charge into them to turn a bimetallic superconductor into a short-lived electromagnet. This accelerated seven hundred darts in perfect 120-degree fans that overlapped and slammed into the front half of the Hok troops. Most of these projectiles were turned by the superb Hok armor, but enough found joints and weak spots to wound a quarter of them, and the rest were briefly surprised.
“Open fire, tunnels one through four only!” Straker called, just in case any Breakers were wondering about the next move. “Side ambushers, continue to hold!”
He strode forward just enough to see into the intersection, but remained in darkness in hopes that the enemy wouldn’t yet divine that they faced mechsuits. He used his gatling to hose down the enemy. Loco did the same from his tunnel, and the Breakers in the two middle personnel passages opened up with their small arms.
The combination of fire pummeled the initial Hok force badly, but not badly enough to convince them to retreat. Instead, the remainder of the Hok charged, firing at the passageways in front of them, apparently convinced that aggression and firepower would win through.
“Tunnels, fall back, feign retreat!” Straker said. He backed up and waited, hoping the sweeper squad behind him would maintain their discipline and let him take the brunt of the enemy attack.
As half a dozen Hok charged into his tunnel, Straker let them get fully inside, and then cut them down with a buzz-saw of gatling fire. The enemy troopers’ fire smashed into his skin, stinging him through his biofeedback sensors. He hardly felt it, though, as nothing even came close to seriously damaging him. Some of it would have gotten past him, though, and he hoped his backup squad had kept their heads down.
Switching his attention back to the spy-eyes, he saw the remaining Hok force leap out of their tunnels, dispersing and firing into the passageways opposite them. Some readied rocket launchers and grenades.
“Initiate, now!” Straker said, and the concealed force on the long side of the “L” of the ambush opened fire, apparently out of thin air.
The Breakers’ two heavy slugthrowers cut
swaths through the Hok, the destruction mitigated only by the fact that the enemy had spread out as much as possible. Between the crew-served weapons, a hundred Breakers loosed a storm of death composed of bullets and beams of antipersonnel lasers, creating a shooting gallery.
But the calculus of war is often random, and is always cruel. In even the perfect ambush, some targets will survive, miraculously untouched. Those Hok, without the fear that might have rendered other creatures helpless, instantly turned and attacked into the ambushing Breakers, their only possible response.
Human troops went down from the fully automatic Hok slugthrowers and from high-powered lasers with triggers held down to fire continuously. At least a score of men and women were cut in half or blown to bits before Straker, Loco and the friendly battlesuiters advanced to place the enemy in a crossfire. Several more Breakers died to explosions as dying Hok activated vengeance grenades before the scene of carnage fell abruptly silent.
A few Hok made it back to the corridors from whence they’d come, and Straker sent a force-cannon round into the tunnel opposite him, filling it with hot plasma that ignited even the paint on the walls. Loco did the same from beside him, and together their gatlings and the heavy slugthrowers sent a few hundred more rounds into the passageways to chase the Hok back.
“Scouts, push your spy-eyes out!” Straker snapped. “Medics, check the casualties and evac to the Chun Wei. Squad leaders, secure your designated checkpoints and mission objectives. Spear, you still with us?”
“Breathing, sir,” said Heiser, waving from where he squatted next to one of the fallen.
“Coordinate with the Ritters if you can. Try to minimize fratricide and see if there’s anything they can’t handle. And make sure to protect those engineers.”
“Roger wilco,” said Heiser.
“Loco, we’re going after those Hok, keep them on the run.”
“Okay, boss,” said Loco.
“We’ll split up and search-and-destroy in the large tunnels. Karst, divide your battlesuiters into two teams and come along to watch our backs.”