by Moshe Ben-Or
Now, as for Colonel Weismann…
That was a special case, thought X. The FPA rated more than the usual disruptions in police logistics and general administrative chaos. For the FPA he was willing to take some risks. Colonel Weismann didn’t need manuals. What he needed were tools.
“What can I plausibly give you, Colonel?” mused X as he called up his industrial reports. “What can I arrange?”
* * *
Lieutenant Ya’akov Ranan Tellman sneaks his scout bot around the jagged edge of the ice hummock. They are almost on top of the pressure ridge now. A bit over a hundred meters more to the crest. Nothing but downhill from there.
Zastrugi. Barkans. Old craters. Hummocks here and there. Everything just like the imagery.
The Zin position is anchored on the nunatak up ahead. The bastards have dug themselves in to a fare-thee-well ‘round here. Surface to space missiles, lasers, minefields, the works. Heavy artillery all over the place. They really think they can hold out in this hedgehog of theirs long enough for their fleet to come rescue their asses. Launch a counterattack when it does. Relieve their buddies down in the city.
The Navy has tried to to bomb them out, but that didn’t go so well. They can’t just nuke the place into dust, or blast holes in the crust with kinetics and cause an eruption, tempting as that may be. The whole area is an ecological control zone. Even if it wasn’t, the glacier would melt, and then every position in the outer ring around Kiryas Yoel would end up flat, and nine meters underwater. They’d lost two destroyers trying to plink around with chicken seed, to no useful effect whatsoever.
The brass had been planning a big old deliberate assault. But Grandpa Mordechai has talked ‘em out of it, at least for the time being. A deliberate assault on this damned fortress would cost half the division. This is Tellman land. Grandpa Mordechai knows it like the back of his hand, Winter, Summer and everything in between. He knows where the Zin have anchored their key positions. There’s a smarter way.
It’s his birthday today, thinks the lieutenant. His nineteenth. Rochel had promised to bake him a cake. Black forest, just like he liked. Real Paradisian organic cocoa. She’d sent him video of her buying it in San Cristobal. Too bad he’ll never taste it now.
“Problem, mefaked?”
Leave it to Eliezer, thinks the lieutenant. Always in a hurry, just like his sister, may she rest in peace.
“No problem,” he links back, overlaying his finalized routes on the terrain snapshot, “Check it out.”
He’ll take the southern half with the command group. Eliezer will take the northern half with the second command group. The teams will all meet up in the assault position, just short of the rock. The key is to cut enough paths through the minefield and sensor grid for the rest of the battalion to follow all at once. Quiet and peaceful-like, so the sweet little kitties don’t wake from their slumber. The first the sweet little kitties should know about something being amiss is when the whole battalion comes swarming all over that nunatak. And then the bitches can all fucking die. To the very last one. No exceptions.
As of last month, he needs a general’s written exemption to policy in order to take Zin prisoners. Grandpa Mordechai isn’t inclined to sign one. Even if he was, there isn’t an officer in the brigade inclined to request one. He’d sooner spare one of the giant phalanx millipedes from Grandma Leah’s farms.
The millipedes are just bugs. They can’t help being vicious, nasty, dangerous pests.
The Zin are sentient beings. They’d chosen to come here and invade his world. They’d chosen to murder his kin and his neighbors. They’d chosen to murder his father and mother, his aunts, his uncles, his brothers, his sisters. They’d chosen to murder Rochel. The halacha is ancient and clear when it comes to their ilk. Lieutenant Ya’akov Tellman has no sympathy for the hatultsim.
Come Spring, when the glacier pulls back, Grandma Leah will plant fungal mat and lichen up here again, and the bugs will come swarming all over. None of the critters will mind thawed-out kitty corpses mixed in with the till, and the plants won’t either. A bit of armor won’t be a problem. Larva and hyphae will find their way in through the holes soon enough. Great fertilizer for the crops; and a fine harvest it will be.
Last time he’d harvested this land, the Forbidden Palace itself had sent in an order for pests. Four thousand premium free-range millipedes, weighing no less than three and a half kilos each at capture, to be shipped live to Tiantiju for their meeting with the bubbling water and boiling oil.
The Son of Heaven had paid seven grand a kilo in Imperial credits for the piece de resistance served at his diamond anniversary feast, plus shipping, handling and organic offset. The rest of the live millipedes had gone for somewhere between five and eight grand a kilo, depending on quality. Once word went out that the Forbidden Palace was ordering from Grandma Leah, you could beat Imperial customers off with a stick. A tidy profit altogether, even when you subtracted the fuel Uncle Moshe’s clippers had burned rushing the disgusting, foul-tempered nasties to Tiantiju. The mushrooms hadn’t sold too badly, either.
It’ll be a fine harvest, but first they have to kill the fertilizer. Hard work, and dangerous, but that’s what men are for.
The lovely late-Autumn weather will really help with the job. When the wind gusts, you can hardly see your hand in front of your face for the blizzard, poncho assist be damned. Accumulation has just nosed over forty-two centimeters. Seventeen have fallen over the past hour alone. Forecast is promising seventy, altogether. Started out as graupel. Now it’s mostly snow.
Temperature has dropped twenty-three degrees in two hours. Still falling like a rock. It’s supposed to bottom out at sixty below, by the time the cold front settles in. Wind is at twenty-three meters per second, with gusts well past twenty-eight.
Enemy sensor nanites are toast in this mess. Smashed up, buried, frozen out, or simply blown off station. All the hatultsim have left are their mines, their seismic net and the big UGS they’ve mixed in with the minefield. And even those are having problems. Zin gear just isn’t made for the fine Havenite climate. Mamzerim should’ve stayed the fuck home.
“Looks good to me,” answers Eliezer after a moment’s pause.
He’s quick, like his whole family, thinks Ya’akov. Could’ve found himself a nicer billet than volunteer light infantry. But he’d been close to his baby sister. Took it hard and wanted blood, the way a real man should.
Military intelligence was simply too far away from real combat, electronic assault too indirect, field artillery just too damned impersonal and there weren’t enough tanks to go ‘round. Then the war up and came to him, Shock Corps Basic dumped everybody right back into the Militia, and he’d ended up here in the Ninth Volunteers with his slacker fourth cousin Ya’akov. And then the casualties started piling up.
So here Eliezer Yehudah ben Talia Ma’ayan Tellman is, four and a half months later, a Junior Lieutenant at seventeen, a deputy platoon commander, a Brigade Commander’s Valorous Conduct Citation on his chest and older than half the men in the battalion. His slacker fourth cousin hasn’t done too badly for himself, either. Short life expectancy in this job, but they’ve both been lucky so far.
“Roots deep,” orders the lieutenant, pushing the finalized overlay out onto the platoon network. “Squad leaders, report when all water bags are at zero degrees.”
This is the last point to cool down. Once they start crawling over the ridge, it’ll be full stealth all the way. He’s ordered six-liter reservoirs for this mission. The absorption capacity is worth the little bit of extra weight. Still, things are bound to get ugly.
The paradox of stealth, thinks lieutenant Tellman. The colder it gets outside, the faster you cook under the poncho. The bigger you are, the more heat you make. The harder you work, the faster you broil. Physics is a cast-iron bitch, sometimes.
Minutes tick like hours amid the driving snow. The cold under the poncho is just barely above the shiver point. Any colder, and his teeth will start
to chatter.
“A couple of hours from now,” thinks Ya’akov, “I’ll be fondly remembering this cold.”
Third squad reports ready. They’re the last.
“Roots shallow. Breaching bots forward,” orders the lieutenant. “Electronic Assault, execute Phase One.”
A swarm of forearm-long mechanical centipedes comes pouring out of the crates behind him. A few dozen scurry right over his body, stealthing up and disappearing as they climb the pressure ridge.
The war centipedes are modeled after the vicious predators Grandma Leah uses to keep vermin under control down on her farms. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Ya’akov Tellman isn’t really sure which came first, the bot or the bug. In size and temperament, the two are a perfect match.
These particular ones are packed chock-full of nanites instead of the usual explosives. Between crashing thunder, howling wind, pattering snow and rattling graupel, Zin sensor nets can’t tell their stealthy, semi-random footfalls from ambient noise.
A horde of palm-sized networking tarantulas scurries behind the attack centipedes, trailing a web of hair-thin fiberoptic lines. Bot transmit power is down as low as it will go for this mission. Wired command nodes are the way to do business here. Zin radio recon can’t detect what doesn’t come across the aether.
Electronic assault antennas creep slowly upwards until they poke, just barely, up over the crest of the ridge. Network penetration teams sing a sweet lullaby to the enemy mines.
Minutes pass. Time stretches and drips, like honey from a jar.
The Battle of the Minefield is silent and bloodless, but no less vicious for all that. As the war centipedes advance, each slaughtered enemy node is replaced, instantly and seamlessly, by a two-faced, human-controlled doppelgänger.
“It’s just static and wind, little kitties,” grins lieutenant Tellman as he watches little blue icons creep inexorably forward across the glacier, “Just storm damage and flashing lightning. Nothing to worry about. Nothing going on. Sleep tight.”
The centipedes have reached the far end of the field. The last threads of the enemy seismic net fall to their nanite poison.
“Advance by teams,” orders the lieutenant.
His men creep forward, silent and ghostly on full stealth. A menagerie of mechanical centipedes skitters alongside them, timing their semi-random movements to the humans they are deployed to protect. More centipedes poke their heads from hives on the heavy cargo sleds they pull behind. There were literally too many to walk in the lane all at once.
Spider bots perch atop the stacks of centipede hives. Submachinegun turrets horned with grenade launcher clusters swivel this way and that as they scan for threats. The war spiders are too heavy and clumsy to sneak alongside the men. But their firepower will come in handy when the red wine is served.
The polymer-metallic bugs aren’t much smarter than their chitinous analogs. Expensive heavy infantry bots they are not. But they don’t need to be smart, for this mission. They just need to be cheap, and expendable. Their quantity has a quality all its own.
There is great advantage in fighting a truly alien enemy, thinks the platoon commander. No need for the elaborate bot control measures of prior conflicts. No need for complex IFF and close supervision by highly-trained operators. No need for expensive processors, huge, power-hungry neural networks and standalone electronic brains almost as smart as a smart dog, or a stupid three-year-old.
The electronic bugs can tell friend from foe by silhouette. They can tell man from Zin by gait and motion. They can fight autonomously here.
He’s been issued three mechanical spiders for every man in the platoon. War centipedes, Supply had handed out by the fifty-count crate.
Robotic swarms are Mishpocha Tellman’s primary business. The clan’s factories, finally fully operational again in their Winter shelters, have been very busy this past month.
Ya’akov Tellman slithers behind Second Squad’s Gimel Team, keeping an eye on the southern groups’ progress as he follows his poncho’s slow, semi-random beats.
The platoon network is broken by terrain, stealthed up to the max as they are, and low to the ground. But he is certain that Eliezer’s northern group is doing as well as his own. If they weren’t, he’d be the first to know.
The nunatak looms just ahead now. Mere meters remain between him and the Zin.
This close, he can see the embrasures of the bunkers, hidden behind their camo tarps. The guns are well back inside the rock. Everything by the book, and expertly set up. Even when they fire, the tarps hide the signatures. There are multiple positions for every gun, too. They have where to jump after a few near misses.
Crossing that field in the open day would be murder, artillery and armor support or no. It got bad enough during the initial recon by fire.
The platoon is all here. Most of Aleph Company is at the assault positions, it looks like. The rest of the battalion is following through the breaches.
“All right so far,” thinks Ya’akov, working to quietly catch his breath. “Baruch Hashem.”
It’s already warm under his poncho. It’ll get hotter soon enough.
“Bots out,” he orders.
The ground creeps with robotic insects pouring off the cargo sleds.
There is a flash out in the minefield. A half-second later, the wind brings the sound of the bang.
“Son of a whore!” curses lieutenant Tellman, rising up to fire a tri-burst at the nearest embrasure. “Loose the bots! Fire the star cluster!”
A war centipede is instantly at the embrasure, slashing and tearing at the camo tarp with razor-sharp mandibles and powerful metallic claws. A split-second’s struggle, and it skitters inside. The blast comes an instant later, showering lieutenant Tellman with granite pebbles and razor-sharp shards of ice as it raises a cloud of powdery snow.
A brace of spider bots scrambles through the embrasure even as the bang is still ringing in the air. A double-handful of war centipedes follows. Grenades explode. Bot submachineguns rattle in the darkness.
There’s a maze of tunnels down there, connecting the bunkers and covered trenches. It’s about to become a very unhealthy place to be, if you’re a cat.
The engineer squad behind him has already popped the lids on its beehives. The war bees struggle against the gale-force wind, but they don’t have far to go. It’s mere meters to the enemy embrasures.
Man proposes – Hashem disposes. It doesn’t matter what happened. A route guard missing a randomly patrolling mine. A still-living portion of the Zin seismic net figuring things out. Somebody blundering off the path. Who knows? Who cares, at this point?
Got to get at the enemy, that’s the important thing. Get at ‘em fast, like Grandpa Mordechai said. Get inside the trenches. Get inside the bunkers. Get inside the tunnels with the Zin. Swarm them with the bots. Don’t let them use their heavy weapons. Get within grenade range. Within bayonet range. Force them to fight point-blank. Force them to fight hand-to-hand. Everybody’s armored here. Their claws and teeth don’t mean jack shit.
His men are better close-quarters fighters. Every one of them has held gun and vibro in his hands since he was four. Every one of them has drilled tunnel fighting since grade school.
There are more men here than cats already, anyway, and the men have brought a heck of a lot more mechanical friends. Three things Haven has never been short of, for good and ill – bots, guns and young men willing to fight to the death for land and mishpocha.
Explosions rattle like firecrackers out on the glacier as hordes of war centipedes throw themselves at scrambling enemy mines. The breach corridors are suddenly alive with running men and swarming bots. The snow is already splotched with red.
Stealth is useless now. The jig is up. The only way out is forward.
The entire eastern horizon erupts in sheets of flame. Every piece of artillery from Division on down is firing to isolate and suppress. Blue fireballs streak overhead, in handfuls and bunches. Grandma Leah is right behi
nd her boys, as always.
A hail of cargo bomblets bursts above the crest of the nunatak. A Zin plasma generator begins to flare blue lightning off in the distance. Not every war bot in this battle is big enough to see with the naked eye.
A pair of heavy infantry bots take aim trough the firing slit of the camouflaged covered trench just ahead. The cats alongside them are still scrambling for their weapons. But the observation post never fires a single flechette. A pair of mechanical spiders is already in the trench with them. Submachineguns chatter. Exploding war centipedes flash in the darkness. The Zin and their machines never stood a chance.
“Mortars!” screams Eliezer, rising to one knee as he fires at the next embrasure over, “Got to silence their automortars first!” Bots scramble forward, cueing off his burst.
“Right!” thinks Ya’akov. Now is the time. By surprise, while the hatultsim are still waking up. It’s not that far to the top of the rock. Let’s see the fuckers work their tubes with a whole platoonfull of volunteers jumping down into the pits with ‘em. Take the crest and rear slope first, then work backwards to link up with follow-on forces.
A flick of his eyes throws a new platoon objective out onto the COP. The robotic swarm surges forward all around him.
“Aharai!” yells the platoon commander, springing to his feet as red star clusters light up the night sky all around the nunatak.
“KEDMA-A-A-A!” roar the men, as the platoon rises for the attack.
* * *
“FILTHY COWARD!!!” thundered Sayf al-Masrikh.
“Please, saydikh, the battle was lost! I saved the ships!” stuttered the lieutenant. “What more could I have done?”
“Take him out of my sight!” roared the admiral. “Strike off his head!”
“Mercy, saydikh!” wept the lieutenant as marine guards dragged him away. “Mercy!”
“Allakh damn that highborn prick Khurrsayn al-Mrrlikikh!” thought the Strong Right Arm of the Ahmirr. “May he burn in eternal hellfire with his blow-dried fur and his prime organic mutton and his fine estate valerian and his fancy connections at Court!”