by Weston Ochse
Thus was born Project Vulcan Logic, named by a pair of Trek-loving BCT techs when they realized they’d had the answer in front of them all along. They’d been so locked into the idea of using the Vulcans to protect the artillery pieces that they’d failed to see the guns’ usefulness to the quickly moving EXOs. Why not a mobile air defense system? Twin Vulcan cannons could be mounted on a wheeled sled, to be pulled and operated by members of the infantry companies. They’d move towards cover in the village, waiting until the drones were in line like fighters coming in for a bombing run. Once online, the Vulcans would open up with two 20mm cannons capable of slinging 6600 rounds per minute towards the drones. BCT OMBRA only had SAPHEI rounds—incendiary rounds with a delayed high explosive package and a follow-on zirconium pellet—but that was fine for the purposes. It was a wonder they hadn’t thought of this in the first place.
They began preparing Project Vulcan Logic immediately, with the goal of having it ready to move by nightfall. Word had already gone out and rumors were abounding. Everyone had taken to calling it the Big Show, and it was reckoned that it would be the make it or break it moment.
BCT OMBRA had thirty Vulcans and several conexes filled with ammunition from which to draw for their new experiment. Until now they hadn’t been used, but they had been prepared for air defense operations by the infantry companies. Each weapon system had been modified with mini-Faradays to protect them against EMPs.
Or at least we hoped they were protected. The lights, the repair equipment and the ventilation system were powered by an immense group of hydro fuel generators that leeched water from an underground river seventy-five feet below the surface. Not only were they necessities, but they were one of the last links we had to the civilization we once had.
MacKenzie had seen the generators and had commented on them. “These Task Force OMBRA lads seem to have a lot of science behind them. One of these days I need to ask why they been keeping it to themselves.”
None of us had needed to ask what he meant. We’d all been thinking the same thing. The planning, the technology, the knowledge of the Cray, all pointed to a group with a major investment in the alien attack. Of course there wasn’t any larger payoff than being responsible for the survival of your own species. I, for one, was thrilled to be a part of it. Why wouldn’t I be? The alternative wasn’t acceptable.
The next day was spent war-gaming and planning a variety of attacks. I kept checking the clocks, eager for night to fall. I couldn’t wait to see what an entire airplane could do to the alien mound.
The RSM gave the official word just after sundown.
Most of the battalions were satisfied to stand and watch the events unfold on the battery of screens, but the Recon squads and several of the infantry platoons wanted to see it firsthand.
In fact, Olivares called everyone into the squad bay and had everyone don their EXOs. “You want to see it on a television, then use your HUD,” he said. “This kamikaze mission might just work, you know? And if it does, the Cray are going to be pissed. Looks like we’re the only humans within several hundred miles to take it out on, so you take a guess where they’ll come when we piss them off.”
“Hey, Thompson.” Olivares turned to the former drummer boy. “What happens when you shake a hornet’s nest?”
“You piss the hornets off, Sarge.”
“What happens to a bee keeper who ain’t ready?” Olivares asked no one in particular as he affixed the servos to his legs.
“He runs or he gets stung,” Ohirra said, already in her suit and going through system checks.
“And what happens if he’s ready?”
“They can’t sting him through his suit,” MacKenzie said.
“That’s right. For a time in hell we’re beekeepers. We’re going to disturb their hive and see what happens.”
“Damn big bees, or hornets, or aliens, or whatever you want to call them,” I said as I slid my helmet into place.
After we suited up, we checked each other. Each of us had three status lights on the exterior of the left side. Green was good and red was dead. We could also check the status from our individual HUDs. Gaze tech, similar to what jet pilots had used, allowed us to select suit information on our own suits as well as every member of the team’s, making each system accessible by the other.
“Incoming ten miles,” came the voice through our comms.
“Romeo Three, positions.”
We moved in file from the bay, up the gangway and to Trench One. The steel covers had been pulled partially aside, leaving just enough room for us to climb out. Olivares pulled himself up first, and soon we were all standing tall, side by side, and staring at the western sky. My minigun was swung forward and ready, my blade was charged, and my missiles were primed.
Activity around the mound was dying down. Less than a handful of Cray were circling lazily overhead. Far less than the usual hundred or so that blanketed the sky during the day.
“Five miles.”
“They said that the pilot is Japanese,” Ohirra said. “I used to hate Memorial Day, because they’d play all those old World War Two movies on television, making the Japanese look so stupid. So mean. So hopeless.”
The pilots were Egyptian, but I kept my mouth shut.
“But now I feel different,” she said.
“Three miles.”
“I get it now. I understand why they flew their planes into ships. It was a last act of defiance.”
“There it is.” Thompson pointed towards the west at a pinpoint of black.
Our HUDs tracked the incoming Boeing 727 jet. We watched it grow larger until we saw it nose down as it headed for the mound. If it missed, we’d been warned that debris from the plane could pose a danger to anyone on the ground. We didn’t care. We’d rather have front row seats.
The plane was from some African airline I didn’t recognize. I could envision the inside with all empty seats, the brochures and puke bags in the back of the seat pockets, never to be used again.
“One mile.”
The Cray finally noticed the inbound aircraft, dropping at a forty-five degree angle. We could hear the scream of the engines through the amplification systems inside our helmets. The drones in the air turned to meet the incoming plane. EMP flashes lit the sky as they flew towards it. More Cray shot from the launch ramps on either side until the air was swarming with activity.
The plane tore through a phalanx of drones like they were nothing.
A cheer went up from inside the caverns.
Ohirra raised a fist into the air, and the rest of us joined her.
More and more Cray attacked the plane. I couldn’t figure out why they were even trying, until my telemetric showed that it was now off-course. The fuselage would miss the mound.
Five, four, three, two, one.
The plane struck the mound high on its upper third. A last minute correction by the pilot made the fuselage strike a glancing blow. The left wing shattered as it hit, then the plane broke apart. Pieces of it rained down on the plain between the mound and the village. The amplified sound was a terrible cacophony of carnage. The tail section landed just this side of the mound, burrowing into the African soil.
We stared at the Cray hive, waiting for the dramatic collapse.
But nothing happened.
Nothing.
“More incoming,” comms declared.
“We weren’t sure if they were going to follow through,” Olivares said. “A consortium, of sorts: bush pilots, mercenaries, and contract pilots.”
Our telemetry began tracking thirty-two additional aircraft. These were all small single- and twin-engine jobs, the kind used to puddle-jump and carry tourists and hunters back and forth across Kenya and Tanzania. We watched as they angled towards the mound. Our HUDs mapped their ballistic paths, showing the various locations they would strike the mound.
But where the drones had no effect on the larger plane, they obliterated the smaller ones. Pulses of EMP killed electronics, making the pl
anes nothing more than bombs with wings. The drones attacked in midair, ripping away wings, tearing free engine housings and jerking pilots from shattered windscreens. Not a single one of the planes made it to its target, each one crashing and littering the African floor with pieces of what could have been something special.
All except one.
A single plane still soared, out-maneuvering each of the drones. My HUD told me it was a P51 Mustang. World War Two vintage, it was used for long range bombing and reconnaissance against the Japanese. It had to be versatile to outmaneuver the Japanese Zeros, and now I watched as it dipped and twisted and somersaulted its way over and through the Cray. Here and there it opened fire, sending rounds scything through the drones.
The Mustang was unaffected by the EMP because it had no electronics. It was pure combustion engine, through and through. I wanted to cheer as I watched it, but I held my breath instead. It was getting closer and closer until finally, it hammered midway into the side of the mound.
The front of the plane crumpled as the propeller shattered. One of the wings snapped free. Then the plane tumbled unceremoniously to the ground.
The mound remained intact.
We stood there for several moments, staring at the terrible monolith, waiting for it to collapse, or break apart, or something. Anything to show that the lives of the men and women flying the planes hadn’t gone to waste. But nothing happened. Nothing.
Then, instead of attacking, the Cray returned to their hive. Soon the air was free of them and the empty, unprotected night sky laughed at us. It was galling. The aliens didn’t even have the courtesy to attack us back for what we’d just done, as if it had meant nothing. In fact, one could argue, that was exactly it.
Olivares was the first to leave the trench. We followed him in silence. No one said a word as we returned to our squad bay. We sat for a long time and said nothing.
A warrior is free to be a hero and pull off daring do and the soldier is irresponsible if he does it.
C. J. Cherryh
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
ABOARD SHIP ON the way to Africa, OMBRA Techs provided lessons on electromagnetic pulses. The pulses created by the Cray were a result of high energy generation transmitted through biological mechanisms, characteristically similar to high energy radio frequency (HERF) weapons that had been researched but never successfully fielded on Earth. Because of the diminishing strength of the EMPs local to a mound, the techs projected that the power locus for the pulses was contained within the mound, and that the drones were capable of storing and transmitting the pulses much like a HERF weapon, but at a diminished capacity.
Our mission was to plant ground-penetrating sonar and radar detectors as close to the mound as possible. We needed to know what they were doing inside. How large was the interior? What sort of complex did they have? If the Cray didn’t self-generate their EMPs, was there a central location within the interior that provided them access to power, like a charging station? Basically, we need to know anything and everything. Without the availability of human reconnaissance reporting, our only hope was the single-use machines, which would transmit data seconds after operation. We had little hope that they’d last past the first EMP pulse, but if they could give us an understanding of the internal layout, we’d at least have a target. Right now all we had to aim at was the impervious shell of the mound.
Four recon platoons, Romeos One, Three, Six, and Eleven, were partnered with two infantry platoons. While the infantry platoons’ job was to provide covering support in the retrograde, ours was to plant the devices in a prescribed pattern around the mound. Each of us carried two devices. Their pre-designated locations were programmed into our HUDs.
First platoon was assigned to Romeo One and Eleven. They had the most difficult mission, depositing their devices on the far side of the mound. Second platoon was assigned to Romeo Three and Six and had the easiest of it. We were also fielding the sled-pulled Vulcan cannons, AKA Project Vulcan Logic. The techs had promised that they were shielded and would be fully functional in the middle of the attack, but like most everything promised by a tech, we wouldn’t know whether it was good or bad until we were in the middle of the shit.
A lone Cray flyer circled the mound; a black silhouette against an even blacker sky. We poised on the edge of our trenches, now more than ever like our World War I predecessors. Except when our predecessors rushed their opponents, it was with throaty yells and fixed bayonets. Recon, on the other hand, had to keep silent, each gripping the handle of a gator box securing the device we had to implant.
We waited for the signal.
A beep filled my ears. I pulled myself up and began to run. My target was the half-wrecked concrete building in Boma Ng’ombe. My composite-shod feet tore across the desert scrabble, faster than I could move outside the suit. The distance was two miles; I covered it in eight minutes, breathing no harder than if I’d run a quarter of that distance. I pulled up against one of the remaining walls and put my back to it. I couldn’t see what was going on from this vantage point, so I accessed Olivares’s feed, as his position had been midway between the village and the trenches. The drone still circled lazily, as if it had all the time in the world.
The view shifted as Olivares turned to Thompson.
“Move out.”
Thompson got up from where he was crouching beside Olivares and ran towards me. I switched to Thompson’s feed. Watching me get closer from his aspect was unsettling; we’d practiced aboard ship, but I didn’t know if I’d ever get used to it. When he was about ten meters away, I switched back to my own feed.
Systems check. Ninety-five percent power. All green.
In thirty seconds all members of Romeo Three were in place.
We were situated at the east end of the village. The main drag ran east to west before curving south, as if it knew it had to miss the mound. On the other side of the dusty road lay several collapsed huts, among the standing structures. One minute later, Romeo Six had leap-frogged us and was in place on the other side of the village.
The next rendezvous point was the wing of the 727, the largest piece of the aircraft still intact. But we were to stay in place in the meantime until after two things happened.
The first was Romeos One and Eleven getting into position. They were working their way to the far side and required far more time. Moving in traveling overwatch, their ETA was forty-one minutes.
The second was rendezvousing with the Vulcan sleds. Four sleds, each with two Vulcan cannons and operators, were to set up in the village. Their mission was to protect Romeo elements from air attack.
Although untested, we were counting on their firepower. Hell, I knew I was counting on it.
I tuned in and switched views from the Vulcan teams to different members of One and Eleven, then back to ourselves. I saw Olivares gazing at Aquinas and tried to check into his view, but was locked out.
Hey. Not cool. I wondered what the hell he was talking to her about.
I was about to say something, when Olivares contacted me.
“Move forward with Aquinas and put visual on the mound. I want full magnification.”
I acknowledged, and Aquinas and I settled on the Chevy Bel Air. She’d take the front and I’d take the rear. We moved as silently as silk and were soon in place.
Telemetry said there was nothing else moving in the sky except for the single drone, but I didn’t believe it. The idea that it had seen us and had done nothing was incomprehensible. Either the Cray were preparing for something, or they didn’t care enough about us to do anything. I’m not sure which was worse.
I settled in and occasionally glanced over my shoulder. Although I couldn’t see her face, I knew enough of what she looked like for my imagination to begin working. I keyed Aquinas on a private channel. “Old car like this would be good for a date.”
She ignored me.
“Put the top down. Turn on some tunes. Watch the lights.”
“Stay on mission.”
“Maybe listen to a little end-of-the-world radio,” I said. “You and me could get comfortable and—”
“You’d have a better chance with a drone,” she said, shaking her head.
I laughed.
“What’s so funny?”
“At least I have a chance,” I said.
She sighed.
“Concentrate, you grunts.” As squad leader, Olivares had the access to listen in on everyone if he so chose. Even though he had last word, as stern as it had sounded, I could have sworn that it was delivered with a smile.
I turned my attention to the mound and zoomed in. I had to fiddle with the sharpening tools to get any clarity, which wasn’t as easy as it should have been. Flipping back and forth between vision modes, I decided that as the mound wasn’t putting off any heat it would have to be the green and black universe of Starlight mode. It didn’t take long to figure out that there was nothing going on. Just shadows and that lone flyer above the mound.
I was about to say as much when Aquinas’s worried whisper made me start. “The shadows... they’re moving.”
I concentrated on the mound.
“They’re crawling on the outside,” I said.
“They’re not taking to the air. They must have figured out we can track them,” Aquinas said.
“Like they can sense the radar.”
My mind was in a dozen different places. If they knew about the telemetry and they were moving stealthily, it meant that they weren’t ignoring us. In fact, they were preparing for our attack.
The Cray clung to the outside of the mound, flattened against the surface as though trying to hide, their wings plastered against their backs.
“All Romeo elements, key in on my optic. Cray are outside the mound and waiting. They know we’re coming. I say again, they know we are coming.”
What followed was a barrage of orders and comments, from the members of Romeo Three and Six. One and Eleven remained silent, awaiting orders.