by Ian Douglas
Unless…
Vaughn turned his optical sensors onto the railed walkway halfway up the hangar's walls, mentally tagging doors and access hatchways, and trying to gauge the strength of the catwalk's steel supports. Well… the worst that could happen was that it would collapse under his weight.
He jumped, firing his meta thrusters, sailing in a long, flat arc that brought him into a scrambling collision with the railing. He extended tentacles to grapple with the structure, hauling himself upright as the walk creaked alarmingly beneath his massive feet.
"Vaughn!" Vanderkamp yelled. "What the hell are you doing?"
"Just getting a different perspective, Lieutenant," he replied. From up here, he had a good line of sight on the door where the Hoshi striders were trying to force their way through. More important, the enemy machines were facing Vanderkamp and Hallman and the rest of his squadron, which meant he had a clear shot past the armored mushroom caps protecting their prows. Locking on to the lead target, he triggered his particle cannons, sending sheets of artificial lightning slashing into the Hoshi war machine below.
The lead machine staggered back, colliding with one of its fellows. Vaughn opened up then with a stream of high-velocity deplur slugs, and the enemy strider's Naga armor matrix began to shred. It spun, elevating its prow, searching for Vaughn… and exposed its right side to a fusillade of deadly fire from Hallman and Talmud, firing side by side.
The fire pierced the enemy strider's power plant, and the machine exploded in a white blast of savage noise and flame.
Warstrider combat had never been intended for the confines of manmade structures, the inside of a building however large. The surrounding walls, solid steel and ferroplas, were becoming heavily cratered and pocked, with massive scorch and burn marks.
"Heads up, everyone," Vaughn called. "I'm going to nano-D!"
"Negative, Green One!" Vanderkamp shot back. "The space is too enclosed!"
"Best place to use it, lieutenant!" And he opened fire.
"Damn it, Vaughn, that's against SOD!"
SOD—Standard Operational Doctrine—was holy writ for warstrider squadrons, the basic rules of engagement. Other than for a few specific exceptions, the use of nano-disassembler weaponry was prohibited inside closed-in spaces like the interiors of buildings or spacecraft. There was too great a chance that the higher concentrations of nano-disassemblers would score own-goals against friendlies… or eat the deck out from beneath their feet.
"Get the hell out!" Vaughn yelled. "We have what we came for.…"
Extending his strider's ordnance launcher, he selected the nano-D load-out, targeted the confused mass of Hoshi machines struggling in the doorway below, and triggered a long, rolling burst. Each shell detonated meters from the targets, firing like miniature shotguns while in flight. Each released a high-velocity cloud of micro-disassembler robots, a swarm of sub-micron-sized machines programmed to break down the molecular bonds of whatever they hit, reducing its material to a thin haze of gas and a lot of heat.
The only defense was counter-nano, even tinier robots programmed to seek out nano-D and break it down. "Popping counter-N!" Hallman shouted. Gas launchers mounted on the exterior of the Confederation warstriders began firing off clouds of counter-nano, enveloping the rebel machines in a gray cloud of smoke. The Hoshi striders were firing counter-N as well, but several of the machines had already begun to dissolve in the highly corrosive cloud from Vaughn's fire. The lead Hoshi strider collapsed on the floor, large black chunks breaking from its body, its outlines softening. Its cockpit opened suddenly, blossoming like a flower… and the pilot struggled to get free.
The man was shrieking, his legs deforming.…
Vaughn forced himself to concentrate on the other enemy striders, to ignore the thrashing, dying pilot. Sometimes—not often, but sometimes—modern combat became horribly, nightmarishly personal. You didn't think, normally, about there being people inside the war machines you were engaging, didn't think about what happened to flesh and blood and human nervous systems when they were exposed to the raw savagery of advanced weaponry.
The pilot was still trying to crawl to safety, but his legs were almost gone, now, bright red streaks on the flooring. Somebody shot the terribly wounded man and he stopped moving; Vaughn thought the shot had come from one of the Hoshi machines, but wasn't sure.
Two more Japanese striders collapsed, their hulls dissolving, and the others began pulling back. Vaughn sent a stream of deplur slugs through the doorway after them. "Lieutenant!" he shouted. "I respectfully suggest we get the gok out of here!"
For moment, he thought was going to balk, but then she sounded the squadron recall, a bright tone transmitted through each pilot's implant. "Fall back!" she ordered. "All striders, fall back!"
But before they could move, six more Japanese striders began spilling out onto the catwalk across the hangar from Vaughn's position. From their vantage points overlooking the hangar floor, they began spraying the rebel machines below with heavy fire. Vaughn targeted the ferroplas supports beneath the other catwalk, hammering at them with particle cannon fire. The enemy returned his fire, and he felt the shock as depleted uranium slugs hammered into his strider's hull.
From the floor below, Talmand opened up on the newly emerged enemy, pounding at one of the machines overhead with her particle-beam cannon, chewing through the safety railing on the catwalk, and holing the walk itself in several places. The Hoshikumiai strider, a bulky two-seater Hariken, twisted aside from Talmand's volley, collided with a smaller Arashikaze, trying to bring its weapons to bear, and then the catwalk gave way beneath its ponderous feet, sending all six warstriders tumbling noisily five meters to the floor below.
The clash and clang of falling heavy combat machines thundered through the hangar. The other Black Griffins were on the way out, firing their meta thrusters one after the other to boost their jumps up through the hole in the roof.
Vaughn pushed through the guardrail on his own section of catwalk, snapping it, then dropped to the floor using a burst from his meta thrusters to control his fall. He landed, flexing his legs to absorb the shock, then positioned himself beneath the broad, circular opening overhead leading to the outside world. More Hoshi striders were spilling into the huge compartment, now. Several of his comrades were firing down through the opening, now, trying to hold back the flood.
Vanderkamp was the only friendly strider left on the floor. Vaughn joined her, turning to open up on the advancing Hoshi machines. He selected a string of M-720 high explosive missiles—conventional warheads, not nukes—and sent three of them twisting through the close space of the compartment and into the doorway twenty meters distant.
"Tad, you need to get out now!" Hallman shouted from overhead, and Vaughn triggered his thrusters as he flexed and jumped, going airborne as enemy fire snapped and hissed past him. Vanderkamp followed an instant later, as the other Griffins grabbed hold of the ascending striders and dragged them up through the hole.
The missiles were detonating below, savage thumps that felt like slams through the fortress's upper deck. Smoke billowed from the opening at their feet.
"Put more missiles down there!" Vanderkamp ordered, and several of the waiting machines began firing conventional warheads in rapid-fire bursts. A Hellbrand, Vaughn thought, would go a long way toward ending the mobile fort's career… but that might make the E&E—Escape and Evasion—a bit of a problem.
"Random dispersion." Vanderkamp ordered. "Stay low, stay fast, and rendezvous at Point Alfa. Now kick it!"
Vaughn moved to the edge of the fortress deck, taking in the magnificent Abundancian panorama, towering waterfalls, the sprawl of the city, the golden clouds piled high in a violet sky. Other warstriders were visible—lots of them, rebel machines deploying across the plains between the city and the cliffs.
He plunged off the fortress, morphing his warstrider into its ascraft configuration and kicking on the main jets.
Behind him, the fortress exploded in f
lame and fountaining pillars of smoke and debris.
* * *
"My God, people," Hallman bellowed, waving his drink, "we kicked some major Dai Nihon ass today!"
They were in El Tambor Roto, a club, bar, and restaurant located on La Calle de Las Vertudes near the center of the city sprawl. Much of the establishment was actually underground, which meant it had been spared the worst of the bombardment from the Japanese mobile fortresses… but floor-to-ceiling viewalls inside displayed an aerial view of the Cataratas Cliffs, looking down into a sea of mist complete with a deeply red-shifted rainbow.
Two days had passed since the wild battle at the mobile fortress, and the Black Griffins had earned a bit of down-time. The Japanese had pulled out, unable or unwilling to face the Confederation reinforcements that continued to stream down from orbit. The surviving mobile forts had been pulled back. The latest reports said they were under attack from orbit nearly fifty kilometers to the west.
The city of Asunción was safe… at least for the moment.
"We did okay," Laris Palmer said. She laughed. "Maybe that's why the scuttlebutt about them making us into officers!"
"Gok it!" Vaughn said with considerable, alcohol-lubricated feeling. "I don't want to be an officer!"
"It would mean more pay," Talmand said, looking into her drink as if to find answers there. "More prestige. What's not to like?" She didn't sound happy about it, however.
"It puts us up there on the same level with Red One, for one thing," Hallman said. Red One was the squadron designation for Doreen Vanderkamp. "I don't think Tad likes that!"
" 'S hysterical," Jackowicz said. He frowned, considered his words, then tried again. "I mean historical. Ever since ancient Rome, flight ossifers've been ossifers.…"
Seven of them had had rendezvoused at the Tambor Roto that evening, all of them members of the Black Griffins—the survivors of Green flight, Vaughn, Talmand, Hallman, and Palmer, plus three from Red: Pardoe, Jackowicz, and Falcone. The manager of the place had greeted them effusively and grandly declared that their meals were en la casa—on the house. It seemed that the Griffins were heroes so far as the locals were concerned.
Vaughn wasn't entirely sure they were going to make it as far as the free food, however. They'd started the drinking a couple of hours earlier at a different bar up the street, and since arriving here had been burning through the Tambor's hard stuff at a prodigious rate.
"Jacko," Vaughn said carefully, considering Jackowicz's statement, "I really don't think the ancient Romans had flight officers."
"Well, if they had, they all would've been ossi… off-i-cers. Am I right?"
"And why do we have to do what the ancient Romans did?" Corporal Don Falcone said.
"Well, when in Rome…" Pardoe began.
Vaughn shook his head. "Uh-uh. We're not in Rome." He blinked, replaying the conversation, or at least as much as he could remember of it. He was having a little trouble keeping up. Damn, what did the locals put in these drinks? They called the stuff tequila, but to make it they fermented the juice of a local plant, a spiky, brown, scraggly looking thing with a carbon chemistry similar to Earth's, but which had never been within eighty light years of Mexico or the agave azul. The stuff had a kick like a Newbraskan gruffalo.
"So what happens," Vaughn asked, "if they go to officer pilots, huh?"
"One of two things," Hallman replied. "Either they make us into officers…"
"Unacceptible," Pardoe put in.
"…or they make us non-strider infantry with a battlefield life expectancy of roughly three minutes."
"Y'know," Vaughn said slowly, "I don't think I like that."
"Not a whole lot of good choices, there," Falcone said.
"Man, I don't want to be an officer!" Hallman said.
"Copy that," Vaughn said. "Some of us prefer to work for a living.…"
In practice, and despite what the military propaganda said, the Confederation military was far from a unified whole. Different member worlds had different traditions, and different ways of organizing their armed forces. The Navy, always traditionalist in the extreme, still used officers exclusively to crew their air/space fighters. The army often—but not in every case—tended toward the more modern approach, which was to use enlisted personnel in their war striders, with an officer, usually a chu-i, or senior lieutenant, commanding each squadron. The old designation of officers as people who'd received advanced education—college or a military academy—had begun breaking down a couple of centuries earlier, as more and more people began picking up complex technical training through direct cerebral download rather than classwork.
The Black Griffins had been made up of enlisted personnel since its inception ten years before, and the system had worked well. Now, according to scuttlebutt, the Griffin's parent unit, the 451st Aerospace Warstrider Brigade, was going to be switching to the older officer-and-a-gentleman nonsense. Vaughn had to admit that that the extra credits would be nice; officers received almost five times the pay of enlisted personnel. But the extra spit-and-polish, the added responsibility, the additional politics that wormed its way into everything officers did… it just wasn't worth it.
Of course, no one had bothered to ask the personnel who'd be directly affected by the decision what they thought.
"Choices," Jackowicz said with solemn dignity. "We need more gokking choices."
"Well, we don't have to worry about it now," Talmand pointed out. "They wouldn't make a change like that while we're in the middle of a deployment, right? They'll wait until we're pulled back to New America."
"Makes sense," Hallman said. He absently fingered the silver gunso rank device on his collar. "Officers, huh?"
"Ah, look at the bright side," Vaughn said. "If they do make us officers, we'll be able to kick Vanderkamp's ass."
Talmand giggled. "You're just still pissed that she reamed you a new one."
" 'Ignoring accepted tactical doctrine,' " Vaughn recited, leaning back in the chair and closing his eyes. " 'Disobedience to lawful orders during combat.' "
"Ah, she won't be able to make that one stick," Hallman said.
"Maybe not," Vaughn said, "but you gotta believe that I'm on Red One's shit list."
Doreen Vanderkamp was an OCD micromanager with a long history of making the troops under her command miserable. She could be sarcastic, mean, and petty, individually or all at once, and scuttlebutt had it that she'd twice been reprimanded for the Black Griffins' low morale.
But there wasn't much that could be done, at least from the enlisted perspective. The wing CO, Major Holcomb, didn't like interfering in squadron affairs, and generally let the troops sort out their problems themselves. Trying to go over Vanderkamp's head would just get the complaint bumped back to her desk… and land the complainer in some very hot water indeed.
The manager of the Tambor herself and a couple of her human assistants brought their meals, rather than leaving it to the robotic servers. "Por los heroés," she said grandly, setting a plate of enchiladas in front of Palmer. "Y con mil gracias.…"
But Vaughn wasn't feeling much like a hero. He kept remembering that bunch of civilians trapped in the church… and his paralyzed uncertainty about what to do. That whole incident had taken only seconds, but had felt like an eternity.
He never did find out what had happened to those people. When he got back to the church, after the fighting was over, the church had been reduced to rubble. Had the civilians escaped, or had they been trapped inside? There was no way of knowing, though Vaughn feared they'd stayed put as he'd told them… and been buried.
Damn, damn, damn…
"¡Que lo paséis bien!" the manager exclaimed after their meals had been served, and she led her coterie off.
"You know," Vaughn said with a quietly intense deliberation, "I really hate this war."
He started eating. Like the tequila, his camarones Mexicanos had never been within light years of Mexico. The shrimp weren't shrimp at all, but a kind of mobile, segment
ed fungus native to Abundancia.
"Who doesn't? It sucks." Talmand said. She took a bite of her own food. "Ooh. That's good."
"Yeah," Hallman added. "The one hope we had of coming out on top in this thing got shit-canned at the Catarata Cliffs."
Vaughn sagged a bit inside. For two days, no one in the squadron had been talking about that. It was as though the Hojo striders with Naga symbiosis were taboo, a matter strictly off-limits even for speculation.
"I wasn't talking about that, actually," he said. "I'd just like to know… well… what the hell are we fighting for, anyway?"
"Freedom, of course," Falcone said. He raised his glass. "Liberté, egalité, fraternité…"
"Freedom from Dai Nihon," Pardoe added. "Down with Imperial Japan!"
"So," Vaughn asked, "does it even matter to the Abunduncias whether their planet is part of the Confederation, or Dai Nihon?"
"Heresy!" Palmer exclaimed, laughing.
"Careful there, Buddy," Hallman said. "You don't want the BMOs to hear talk like that." The Battalion Morale Officers seemed to be everywhere lately, poking into what the troops were saying, what they were thinking.
"You don't want Vanderkamp to hear you talk like that," Pardoe added.
"Well gok 'em," Vaughn said. "Gok 'em all." He downed his glass of ersatz tequila, felt the harsh desert burn in his throat, shuddered once, and slammed the glass back on the table. "Gok 'em," he added once more, quietly, but with deadly emphasis.
Vaughn tended to stay away from politics, especially in squadron bull sessions. Just discussing politics generally ended up as a lose-lose proposition, so far as he was concerned.
He knew the military civics lectures well enough. The Confederation was a constitutional republic founded on principles arising from the former United States of America—in particular the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence. He knew that, and even believed it.