by Mike Sheriff
“You should have insisted she continue on to the Librarium!” Slabidan said.
The Slavv shrank from the shout. “I did, sire, but—”
“But what?”
“But she hit me,” he said, averting his gaze.
Daoren noted a blush of red skin on the hapless Jiren’s turned cheek. He realized it wasn’t from exertion or embarrassment; it was the aftereffect of a palm strike. He took Heqet’s hands, as much in tenderness as in the desire to avoid a similar slap. “You can’t stay here, Heqet.”
“I can do whatever I damn well please,” she said. “If this incursion is as large as we suspect, what use is there in cowering at the Librarium?”
“You’ll be safer there!”
“But only for a while.” Her eyes pooled and her voice shed its barbed edge. “If anything ill is going to happen to you or me or Mako, I’d prefer it happen while the three of us are together.”
Daoren sighed. Every instinct he possessed told him to get his wife and unborn son as far from the border as possible, but she had a point.
If the mongrels gained a foothold in the city-state, it would only be because he and every Jireni atop the wall was dead. If that was the case, nothing would stop them from rolling south and culling most of the population . . . or worse. Maybe it would be best if Heqet and little Mako succumbed to—
He elbowed the dark, defeatist thoughts aside. He’d never let it come to that. Keeping her and Mako by his side might be a blessing—he’d fight that much harder to protect them. And who knows? Heqet might even save his life—as she’d done on numerous occasions during their missions to find the seed vault and overthrow the Unum. “Very well,” he said. “You can stay here.”
“I know I can,” she said, eyes narrowing to hardened slits. “I’m not asking for your permission!”
“For the love of Sha, you’re such a—”
A high-pitched howl stilled Daoren’s voice. He spun to the desert.
The sound grew louder and shriller. Heqet inched closer and clutched his sleeve. “What’s that noise?” she asked.
Slabidan pointed skyward. “There!”
Daoren followed Slabidan’s outstretched hand.
A solitary white contrail scribed the sky, one thousand feet above the desert. It traced a ballistic path as it plummeted, its howl increasing by the second. Its trajectory terminated amid a crop circle two miles from the wall’s northern face.
The projectile detonated upon impact, heaving up a conical curtain of sand and vegetation. The discharge’s apex reached the height of the battlement. Its shockwave struck seconds later, triggering a transient quiver in the parapet’s crystalline slabs.
“Merciful Sha,” Heqet whispered.
“It has begun,” Slabidan said.
“Do you think?” Hyro asked, tone dripping with sarcasm.
Another howl tore through the air. Two more ballistic projectiles landed one hundred feet east of the first, bracketing a buried levicart. Ragged sand plumes geysered from the impact points. The extreme pressure differential wrenched the levicart’s gun turret from side to side. It didn’t readjust its bearing.
Hyro sucked her teeth. “You can mark that levicart crew as our first casualties.”
“Can anyone see shocktroops?” Daoren asked once the twin blasts had faded.
A Jiren beside the command post aimed a tripod-mounted optical lens. He squinted through its eyepiece. “Nothing visual, Unum.”
“The troopships will have landed beyond visual range,” Slabidan said. “The mongrels will want to soften our defenses before they—”
Discordant shrieks blotted out the rest of the statement. Daoren’s gaze streaked skyward.
Sinewy contrails stitched the air—far too many to count.
He grabbed Heqet’s arm and yanked her down behind the parapet. “Incoming rounds!”
No sooner were the words out of his mouth than the Earth reached up and shook him senseless.
JULINIAN LINGERED BY the aft bulkhead, palms pressed against her ears. Forty mongrel cullcraft bracketed her, arrayed in a line-abreast formation that spanned one linear mile on both sides of the control gondola.
The vessels hovered fifty feet above the desert, mooring cables straining to anchor them in place. Angled rail cannons atop their gas envelopes glowed red from friction, unleashing another furious barrage of nullglass projectiles. Crackling shockwaves transformed the ambient air to a semi-solid state. The percussive din was made even more deafening thanks to the gondola’s shattered windows.
Ten miles distant, the Great Northern Border spanned the horizon like a funereal shroud. Continuous ground bursts blotted the wall’s features—impacts from the opening salvo in what would be the most focused mongrel attack ever mounted upon Daqin Guojin. She couldn’t refrain from smiling.
Massum joined her, index fingers stuffed in his ears. Judging by his bulging eyes and gaping mouth, the awesome display was powerful enough to overcome his reticence. “I’ve ordered the gyroblades and bowpods to deploy!” he shouted over the bone-jarring reports.
Julinian nodded her assent, ignoring the statement’s inaccuracy. In fact, she’d given the order to bring the assault craft into the fight. Massum had merely relayed it to the cullcraft and troopships . . . and only after she’d convinced him they still possessed enough offensive force to carry the day.
During the hour that had passed since downing the two aeroshrikes, the mongrel commander had lapsed into brooding quietude. She couldn’t be certain if Itta’s death or the loss of so many tactical assets was the reason. Of the sixty-one cullcraft that launched from Havoc, twenty had been destroyed or suffered mission-culling damage that forced their return to the colony. Three hundred gyroblades had been lost. The dead hadn’t yet been tallied, but the number must be in the thousands.
She’d known from the beginning that the invasion would exact a steep price—at least in terms of mongrel lives—but they’d passed their first test. They’d proven that Hai al Kong’s plasma-beam could bring down an aeroshrike despite its more modest power reserves. It should have been cause for elation, not despondency—the city-state’s aeroshrikes represented the direst threat to a successful invasion.
But would Daoren the Usurper deploy the aeroshrike fleet to defend the wall? Would he risk putting them within range of the plasma-beam weapon? She tried to project herself into his mind.
He was a cunning tactician—as illustrated by his defeat of her uncle and cousin. His use of screw mines aboard an unmanned geology aerostat was a brilliant ploy; part of her admired him for the daring. A small part. The rest of her longed to see his head on a glass spike and his body in a grooll pod. Of course, there were other denizens who’d suffer the consequences of siding with him. She’d taken to rolling the names around in her head, changing the order in which she’d have them culled. One name, however, never slipped from its premier position. Not Daoren the Usurper, but his glinty—
Hundreds of gyroblades whisked by the control gondola, hugging the dunes. The rail-cannon barrage masked the frenetic whine of their rotors, but their blinding speed startled her nonetheless. Five seconds later, the first wave of sand-skimming bowpods broached the cullcraft firing line.
Though much slower than the gyroblades, the mongrel bowpods thrilled her no less. The sixty-foot assault craft featured shallow-V planing hulls that would look at home plying the acidic waters of the Sea of Storms. Their nullglass freeboards stood twenty-feet high at the bow, then sloped downward to twelve-feet high at the stern. Tan-colored anechoic cladding dappled the matte-brown glacis plates enveloping their one-hundred-seat shocktroop compartments.
According to Massum, the armored material was capable of absorbing sonic rounds from the wall’s most powerful automated weapons—at least beyond the range of two thousand feet. Time would tell if his assessment was accurate. With a top speed of two hundred miles per hour, the bowpods would take less than three minutes to traverse the dunes between the cullcraft and the wall.
<
br /> Julinian turned to the aft windows—or the warped nullglass frames that once held the windows.
A mile to the rear, one hundred silver-skinned troopships disgorged section after section of bowpods. Concentrating so many troopships in so small an area had never been attempted by the mongrels. It called for precise coordination between all elements of the attack—a skill-set for which the mongrels were neither accustomed nor well equipped.
From their point of view, her battle plan carried grave risks. Executed correctly, however, it offered tremendous rewards. Restricting the main assault to such a small front was akin to using a dagger’s pointed tip to pierce segmented armor. If her plan worked, the concentration of force would make it possible to penetrate the wall.
“How long do we keep up this barrage?” Massum shouted, fingers still jammed in his ears.
“Until the bowpods are within two thousand feet of the wall!” she said. “Then we move the cullcraft fleet forward and join them!”
“And if the Jireni bring their aeroshrikes into the fight?”
She motioned to the plasma-beam console. “Then we destroy them.”
One thousand feet to the front, five enormous sand plumes erupted, traversing the dunes from left to right. The leading wave of bowpods threaded the resulting craters and surged onward toward the wall.
Five shockwaves hammered the gondola. Massum flinched as each one passed. “I’m not sure about your tactics!”
“They’re only ranging rounds from the wall’s thunder mortars! There’s no need to worry!”
“No need to worry?” he shouted back. “We’ve lost a third of our cullcraft and a quarter of our gyroblades in just getting here!”
“I can do the math! Did you happen to notice all the troopships arrived unscathed?”
“That’s not the point!”
She glared at him. “What part of invasion don’t you understand, Massum? It doesn’t mean you go halfway and then turn back!”
“And what part of dying don’t you understand? You think it won’t visit you because you wear a fancy shenyi and have never known an empty belly?” He removed his fingers from his ears and sneered. “Let me illuminate your ignorance. Death doesn’t give an artisan’s excrement about your culture and lineage. You can die just as randomly and horribly as the rest of us.”
Julinian lowered her hands and sneered back. “The difference between you and me is I don’t give an artisan’s excrement about dying.”
Massum blinked. After a moment, a wan grin found his lips. It conveyed more bitterness than mirth. “What are you hiding from me?”
“What makes you think I’m hiding something.”
“Only a lunatic would exude confidence in the face of these odds . . . or someone with a trick up her sleeve.” His eyes narrowed. “You’ve never struck me as a lunatic.”
“That’s because I keep those tendencies hidden.”
She paced to the gondola’s forward bulkhead, content to let Massum puzzle over her response.
NULLGLASS PROJECTILES RAINED down upon the crop circles, saturating the air with ear-splitting thunderclaps. The ground bursts arrived so close together, it was impossible to tell where one ended and another began.
Each shockwave resonated deep in Daoren’s chest, making it difficult to breathe without coughing. He crouched behind the wall’s northern parapet—the same position he’d held for the last three minutes—and squeezed Heqet to his side.
She clamped her eyes shut. Her jaw clenched, distorting the delicate lines of micro-studs implanted in her cheeks.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
She opened her eyes and flashed a grim smile. “I won’t be able to hear for a week.”
Commander Hyro crouched behind them. She folded an arm around Heqet’s shoulder as if to offer an extra layer of protection, however ineffectual her gesture would be against the threat. “I’d wager the mongrels have elected to conduct a focused attack!”
Heqet’s voice was shrill enough to penetrate the din. “And I’d wager we’re right in its path!”
Ten more projectiles detonated in rapid succession, jolting the parapet. The roiling reports faded. Daoren tensed, anticipating the next salvo.
It didn’t come. The foreign silence stretched to ten seconds, then twenty, then thirty. . . .
“Have they stopped the assault?” Heqet asked.
Hyro craned forward, arm still draped around Heqet. “They didn’t travel one hundred-ninety miles to lob a few hundred nullglass projectiles at us.”
Daoren leaned to the side and peered through a vertical crenel. Despite the restricted field of view beyond the narrow opening, what he glimpsed provoked a gasp.
Ragged impact craters replaced the well-delineated crop circles. The denuded landscape stretched for miles. Most of the buried levicarts appeared to have survived the barrage intact. Several crews milled outside the vehicles, taking advantage of the lull to inspect for damage.
Twenty feet to Daoren’s left, Commander Slabidan departed the command post and darted hunchbacked to the parapet. He pinched his nose and exhaled as if to clear his ears. “I knew they couldn’t maintain that rate of fire for long.”
“Why were they firing short?” Daoren asked. “They could have targeted the weapon systems atop the wall.”
“Their cullcraft lack long-range accuracy. The best they could do was uproot some plants.”
Hyro rose with a weary groan and scanned the northern approaches. “They were softening the ground,” she said. “Preparing it for the next phase of the attack.”
Daoren helped Heqet to her feet and peered at the shimmering horizon beyond the crater field. Nothing moved.
“It’s so eerie,” Heqet whispered. “So . . . calm.”
Slabidan’s tactical tile chirped. He raised it to his mouth. “Go.”
“Watchtower Alpha reporting, sire. We hold multiple gyroblades, approaching from the north.”
Daoren grunted—where else would they be coming from? He squinted.
Beyond the ruined crops, a blue-tinted cloud rolled across the sand. Within seconds, it drew close enough to resolve hundreds of aerial objects.
Gyroblades.
Daoren made a quick tally—there must be hundreds of them, arrayed in three distinct waves. Below the battlement, the exposed levicart crews scrambled to man their vehicles.
Fifty feet down the walkway, an automated quad-cannon whirred to life atop its pedestal. The four-barreled turret cluster jittered left and right, syncing its bearing to the targeting data received by its internal search lidar.
Heqet glanced at the whining weapon. “It sounds as though it has too many choices to make.”
She echoed Daoren’s thinking word for word. “Can the weapon systems handle this many targets?”
“We’ll soon find out,” Slabidan said. “The levicarts will thin the numbers in a moment.”
No sooner had the words left his mouth when the levicarts opened fire. The unmistakable thump-crack of their sonic cannons echoed across the desert.
Sonic rounds tore into the leading wave of gyroblades, knocking dozens out of the sky. The surviving craft climbed, transitioning from dune height to two hundred feet in an eye-blink. Each released a glinting cylinder from its lower hullform upon reaching the higher altitude.
“They’re deploying penetrators!” Hyro said.
Daoren looked on, mesmerized, as dozens of penetrators descended toward the desert. Half found their targets.
The penetrators’ combat-hardened tips punched through the levicarts’ armor cladding like a dagger through gleamglass. Their sonic charges detonated moments later. In the space of three seconds, twenty levicarts blew apart, triggering claps of high-pressure air that sounded eerily akin to applause.
He suppressed a shiver. In the space of three seconds, half the levicarts deployed beyond the wall had been destroyed.
Slabidan raised the tactical tile to his mouth. “All counter-batteries open fire!”
The
automatic weapons and crew-served chain guns along the battlement fired in unison. Their overlapping chatter added a new level of tumult to the battle. Below, the remaining levicarts pumped out a furious rate of fire, creating a crosshatched pattern of supersonic contrails above the desert.
The leading wave of gyroblades broke off the attack. They heeled into a breakneck turn, carving their own contrails a thousand feet from the wall. At least twenty of them fractured mid-turn, struck by the maelstrom of sonic and kinetic rounds. The damaged craft corkscrewed through the air and augured into the dunes, flinging up clots of sand and shards of nullglass.
Slabidan flashed a rare smile. “It’s a shooting gallery!”
Heqet tugged Daoren’s sleeve. “What’s that in the distance?”
Doreen squinted, peering through a gauzy haze of airborne sand.
Hundreds of dark objects blotted the desert, five miles distant. They whisked closer, churning up thick clouds of spindrift.
“Bowpods approaching,” Hyro said. “There’s at least three hundred of them!”
“I see them,” Slabidan raised his tactical tile. “All positions, this is Commander Slabidan. Weapons are free. I say again, weapons are free.”
Daoren leaned toward Hyro. “What does that mean?”
“It means each Jiren can make his or her own choice on which threats to target.”
“We hold up to three hundred bowpods approaching from the north,” Slabidan continued, still addressing the defensive positions through his tile. “Watch for shocktroop deployments and deconflict your targets as required. Slabidan, out.”
“How many shocktroops does a bowpod carry?” Heqet asked.
“One hundred,” Hyro said. She clasped her hands behind her back and gazed over the parapet. “But they can cram up to one hundred-fifty inside if they don’t mind standing.”
Heqet squeezed Daoren’s hand. “Do you think we can hold them off?”
He puffed his chest and adopted an air of confidence. “Of course.”
Inside, he had his doubts. Even if each bowpod held only one hundred shocktroops, thirty thousand mongrels would be within spitting distance of the wall’s archways in less than a minute. Those numbers alone might overwhelm the weapons available atop the battlement.