by Mike Sheriff
“We’ve lost our primary communications with the watchtowers and other defensive positions,” Slabidan said.
“But we still have our tactical tiles,” Hyro added.
“Which can receive reports from the most distant outstations,” Slabidan said, “but lack the transmission power to reach them!”
“Hang the most distant outstations!” Hyro said. “The entire mongrel assault force is right here!”
Daoren stepped in to cool the heated exchange. “Do we have enough firepower atop the wall to fend of this attack?”
Hyro and Slabidan traded grave looks instead of cutting words.
Daoren didn’t need to hear anything more. “Order the aeroshrikes into the fight!”
Slabidan nodded. “That’s what I was going to suggest, Unum.” He tugged out his tactical tile and relayed the order.
Daoren cast his gaze over the southern parapet.
Within seconds, four aeroshrikes turned north and accelerated toward the wall.
He petitioned Sha that he hadn’t left the decision too late.
10
A Second Front
JULINIAN HUMMED TO herself, gazed fixed through one of the control gondola’s missing windows. The cullcraft’s forward speed generated a pleasant breeze, buffeting her shenyi. The airflow provoked a shiver—or perhaps it was the thrill of racing toward the border in the company of forty more cullcraft. Whatever the reason, it felt good to be moving again.
Daoren had finally committed his aeroshrikes to the fight. Four of the immense vessels hovered over the wall. They rained a withering barrage of barometric rounds upon the latest wave of mongrel assault craft. Even from five miles away, the effect was heart-stopping.
Colossal plumes of sand erupted every few seconds, reducing visibility and masking the ebb and flow of battle. Each blast surely marked the demise of scores of bowpods and untold numbers of shocktroops. Not five minutes earlier, two flights of gyroblades had reached the wall; some of the craft had even deployed penetrator spikes along its upper battlement. But each passing second saw more and more fall to the aeroshrikes’ point-defense weapons. The gyroblades’ grievous losses had one upside; the aeroshrikes were now within range of the only mongrel weapon that could destroy them.
Massum paced forward and joined her at the window. He absorbed the unfolding carnage before speaking. “The plasma-beam is powered up.”
Julinian felt no need to acknowledge the report. She continued to hum, adjusting the melody’s tempo to keep time with the thump-thump-thump of barometric rounds.
“You seem content for someone who’s losing a battle.”
“There’s losing,” she said, irked at having to abandon the tune, “and then there’s losing.”
Massum scoffed. “We’ve lost most of our gyroblades and bowpods. Our shocktroops are being slaughtered.”
“They’re your gyroblades, bowpods, and shocktroops.”
“On which our victory relies,” he countered. “Even if we breach the wall within the next few minutes, we no longer have the forces needed to take and hold the rest of the city-state.”
“I know.”
“You know?”
She wheeled to Massum. It was time to quell his doubts. It was time to show him who was really leading this incursion. “I knew from the moment we started planning this operation that a frontal assault would be necessary, but futile.”
His eyes narrowed. “What?”
“No mongrel incursion has ever penetrated the wall,” she said. “Not once in the more than two centuries since it was erected. Did you expect it to succeed now?”
Massum bared his teeth. He balled his hands into fists.
Julinian ignored the warning signs. Like the cullcraft on either side of the gondola, she committed to her course of action and plowed onward. “Its defenses are too formidable. There are too many layers to penetrate, each one grinding you down, thinning your numbers, sapping your will to fight.”
“Then why did you commit us to a frontal assault?”
“Because you trusted me.”
Massum reached for the small of his back. A blur of motion brought his khukuri’s honed edge to her neck. “Itta was right! You’ve been leading us into a trap this whole time!”
Julinian swallowed the icy panic edging up her throat. She hadn’t anticipated the rash reaction—Massum had never raised so much as his voice to her, let alone his khukuri. Had she overplayed her hand at the very moment success was in her grasp? She steadied her breathing. “Before you open my windpipe, would you allow me to make one call on my quantum tile?”
He craned forward, huffing quick, cutting breaths. “Who do you need to call?”
Stinging heat emanated from the side of her neck—the blade had drawn blood—but she maintained a neutral expression. “A friend of ours inside the wall.”
“No one in Daqin Guojin is my friend!”
She willed a smile onto her lips. “I assure you, Massum, this person is your best friend.”
His breathing slowed and grew more shallow. The blade’s pressure eased. “Make your call.”
She pulled the quantum tile from her shenyi’s pocket. The antenna needed to port the call through the cullcraft’s transceiver remained in the tile’s slot. A tap of the screen established the connection.
A crackling voice ebbed from the tile. “Is it time?”
“It is,” she said.
“Sha blesses the bold.”
Julinian ended the call and pocketed the tile. She locked her gaze onto Massum and hitched her lips in a defiant smirk. “That’s all I had to say. Now you may open my throat . . . if you must.”
Massum sneered. “Was that some Guojinian trick?” The blade’s pressure increased, triggering another bloom of stinging heat. “What time is it?”
“To open a second front, of course.”
HAI MARCHED UP the transway at the head of an armed column, each step taking him closer to the shuddering aftershocks of barometric rounds. Less than half a mile away, four shadow-black aeroshrikes held station above the border wall. They unleashed direct fire at a devastating rate on unseen targets to the north.
The awesome sight shrank his skin—he could only imagine how the day’s events had affected the residents of Nansilafu Cheng. Since leaving the storechamber, he’d seen only a handful of denizens fleeing south. One family of Slavvs had blanched at the sight of one thousand armed Asianoids and scrambled to seek shelter. They needn’t have worried. He and his people had no interest in carrying out random culling. They had specific targets in mind.
He raised his sonic rifle and peered through its optical sight.
The transway ran another five hundred feet to the north and terminated at the cull zone. No Jireni were visible, but that meant nothing. They were out there—most likely in one or more of the cloisters and courtyards abutting the transway or hidden away in the adjacent structures. For now, they had the advantage of concealment. He and his people had the advantage of surprise.
Hai halted the column and waved his assault team forward. Six men assembled before him, a mix of personal weapons slung on their shoulders. “We’ll proceed on our own from here and flush out any resistance,” he said. “The rest of the column will move up once we’ve cleared the route. Any questions?”
The men shook their heads. Each had been hand-selected for their particular set of skills. Each was a serving or former member of the Jireni caste. They’d spent months spiriting an arsenal of weapons out of various arms depots, then trained the others in their tactical employment. Hai had spent three weeks in the wastelands near Rhyger’s Cliffs learning the intricacies of the sonic rifle and hand-held proximity charges. His brothers had undergone the same indoctrination, albeit with less enthusiasm.
He squeezed the rifle’s crystalline stock, relishing its firmness. For the first time since Daoren’s ascension, he felt the glow of empowerment. For the past eight months, he’d offered the Unum sycophantic smiles, ingratiating rasplaughter, and wh
atever assistance he asked of him. All the while he’d supplanted his disgust, burying it deeper and deeper, waiting for the day he could excavate his fury.
Today was that day. Today, he finally felt authentic.
He led the assault team toward the cull zone, favoring the east side of the transway, mindful to keep his finger off the rifle’s trigger lest he discharge an accidental round. Half the team kept watch on the western structures as they advanced. Each cloister and courtyard received a thorough scan before proceeding. They encountered no targets until the final fifty feet.
Ten Jireni occupied a courtyard on the east side of the transway. They huddled behind waist-high blast shields set up before an idling Hexalite levicart. Each carried a dart gun—the personal weapon favored by the security force.
Hai signaled the find to the rest of the team. As they crept to his location, he scanned the Jireni position.
No crew-served weapons were visible, but the levicart posed a major problem. Its sonic cannon would make short work of the armed column unless he and the assault team knocked it out of action. To do so, they’d need to get close enough to use proximity charges.
Hai waved Wonn forward, the most senior assaulter. “How many charges do you have?”
Wonn reached into an opaque waist satchel. His hand came out holding an ovoid device a little larger than his palm. The proximity charge could deliver lethal acoustic overpressure out to a radius of twenty feet. “I have six more in the satchel.”
“One should be enough to cull the levicart’s crew,” Hai said. “We’ll suppress the dismounted Jireni while you deliver the charge.”
Wonn nodded. The others gripped their weapons, knuckles white. Hai raised his rifle. “Open fire on my mark . . .”
He centered a Jiren in his optical sight. A trill of excitement resonated in his chest—he was about to take an unsuspecting life. The heady sensation accelerated his heart rate. He held his breath and tightened his finger around the trigger. Recoil drove the rifle’s butt into his shoulder, startling him.
The targeted Jiren pitched forward into the blast shield and slumped to the ground. The others whirled, scanning for the threat.
He centered another target in his optical sight. Before he could squeeze the trigger, the rest of the assault team opened fire. A cacophony of percussive reports reverberated off the courtyard’s surrounding façades.
Hai’s vision tunneled. His sense of time seemed to slow. He squeezed the trigger and watched another Jiren fall. Before he could find another target, a piercing screech announced a proximity charge’s detonation. His gaze found the levicart.
Wonn straddled an open access hatch atop the levicart’s gun turret. He swung his sonic rifle toward the handful of Jireni still in the open.
A volley of sonic rounds spun him off his feet. He dropped ten feet onto the ground.
A glint of light beyond Wonn’s body snared Hai’s attention.
Twenty feet past the levicart, six Jireni dashed from a structure’s vaulted doorway. The barrels of their sonic rifles gleamed.
Hai snap-aimed his rifle and squeezed the trigger. The crystalline butt thumped his shoulder, again and again.
Sonic rounds tore through the leading Jiren, dropping her mid-stride. Two more fell, braying in agony. The trailing Jireni trained their rifles in his direction.
A high-velocity sound round smashed into the structure to their rear. Spectraglass shrapnel exploded from the impact point, cutting the men down.
Hai glanced to the left.
One of his assaulters lowered a sound cannon from his shoulder. He offered a resolute nod.
Hai returned it, then pumped a torrent of sonic rounds through the doorway to dissuade any other Jireni from exiting. “Hit it again!”
The Asianoid hoisted the sound cannon onto his shoulder and fired another round. It streaked through the doorway trailing a toroidal vapor trail. The resulting detonation shattered every window in the six-level structure. Its exterior façade fractured and collapsed seconds later, burying the levicart and dead Jireni in heaps of splintered spectraglass.
“We need to keep moving!” Hai called out to the assault team. He backtracked onto the transway and signaled the rest of the column. “Press on to the cull zone!”
The column reacted to the command as one cohesive unit. A thousand Asianoids hoisted their weapons and sprinted toward the objective.
“I’M SURE IT was nothing more than an echo!”
Daoren cupped his ears, but barely made out Slabidan’s reply over the ear-splitting crump of barometric rounds and unceasing chatter of the aeroshrikes’ point-defense weapons.
Five hundred feet above the battlement, the vessels hovered like four blackened fingers. Their gun turrets spat sonic and kinetic rounds at a furious pace, targeting bowpods and gyroblades with equal accuracy and deadly effect. The airspace north of the wall seethed with shimmering contrails and nullglass debris.
Another barrage of barometric rounds unseated thousands of pounds of sand, scattering the ejecta over hundreds of feet. Shockwave after shockwave buffeted the battlement, thudding into Daoren’s chest like a flurry of closed fists.
A minute earlier, however, he could have sworn he heard a solitary detonation south of the wall. Not as powerful as a barometric blast, but just as distinctive in its aural characteristics. “It sounded like it came from the south!” he shouted. “Have your Jireni reported any fighting in Nansilafu Cheng?”
“There’s been no penetration!” Slabidan said. “Nor will there be now that the aeroshrikes are in the fight!”
Daoren was inclined to agree. Though larger and more intensive, the mongrels’ latest attack had floundered less than five hundred feet from the wall’s archways thanks to the firepower carried by the four aeroshrikes.
The automated-weapon systems atop the wall maintained a steady, albeit reduced rate of fire. Half the quad-cannons and thunder mortars had run out of munitions. Slabidan had doubled the number of crew-served chain guns to make up for the shortfall, but the Jireni manning them had suffered a terrible toll.
In every direction, the dead sprawled upon the walkway. The pace of the attack had been so intense, medical aides and casualty clearers hadn’t had time to remove the bodies.
Commander Hyro dashed over from the watchtower base where she’d set up a sheltered comms center using five Jireni and a handful of tactical tiles. She raised her hand and pointed north as she ran. “The mongrels are moving up their cullcraft!”
Daoren peered over the parapet. He squinted to penetrate the swirling haze of sand and smoke.
An extended line of thirty or forty cullcraft hugged the dunes, three miles distant. They’d made no attempt to gain a height advantage over the aeroshrikes. The tactic struck him as odd. “Why are they advancing?”
“Suicidal, I expect,” Slabidan said. “Some mongrels would rather die than return to Havoc in the shame of defeat. I feel it’s our duty to help them in that respect.” He raised his tactical tile to his mouth. “This is Commander Slabidan. All aeroshrikes press forward and engage the cullcraft fleet!”
A foreboding pang stabbed Daoren’s gut. Five aeroshrikes had been felled by the mongrels in the last twenty-four hours. His instincts told him to keep the four vessels in their screening position above the wall. He opened his mouth to countermand the order.
Slabidan raised a hand, seemingly anticipating his concern. “I know it’s a risk, but if we destroy their cullcraft we’ll end this incursion right now!”
Daoren glanced at Hyro to gauge her reaction.
She pursed her lips and nodded. “It would mark the turning point, Unum.”
He stilled his protest, yielding to their more extensive combat experience, and craned his neck skyward.
The aeroshrikes surged forward, airscrews howling with increased power. The leading vessel’s barometric cannons thundered.
Three roiling contrails streaked across the three-mile gap. Three cullcraft transformed into little more than sparkl
ing clouds of debris.
Slabidan hooted. “That’s it! Hit them again!”
All four aeroshrikes unleashed a synchronized salvo. Its effect was even more devastating—seven cullcraft blew apart and plunged into the dunes. The surviving cullcraft kept pressing forward, seemingly unperturbed by the losses.
“Why aren’t the breaking off the—”
A blinding flash emanated from the formation’s central cullcraft. The brilliant yellow beam struck the leading aeroshrike, shearing the bridge gondola from its envelope. The enclosure tumbled five hundred feet to the desert and smashed to pieces.
“Merciful Sha!” Slabidan said. “They’ve taken out the vessel’s entire command team!”
Daoren grabbed Slabidan’s shoulder. “If we don’t destroy that cullcraft we’ll—”
A second beam lit up the sky—this one fired from a cullcraft on the eastern extremity of the line of advance.
The beam sliced through a second aeroshrike’s starboard airscrew mounting. It sheared away and plummeted from the envelope, landing less than one hundred feet from the smashed bridge gondola.
Daoren shivered—in less than five seconds, two aeroshrikes had suffered mission-culling damage. “We need to bring every weapon to bear on those two cullcraft!”
“I’ll coordinate the attack from the command post inside the watchtower.” Slabidan gripped Hyro’s shoulder. “You remain here with the Unum!”
Hyro nodded. “Go!”
Slabidan covered the one hundred feet to the watchtower in less than ten seconds. Hyro turned to Daoren. “We may need to think about evacuating you and Zhenggong Heqet!”
“I’m not going anywhere!” he said. “I’m staying here until this battle is won or lost!”
Hyro rolled her eyes. “Your wife isn’t the only obstinate one. You’re just as—”
“Daoren!”
Daoren spun to the familiar voice.
Heqet dashed hunchbacked across the walkway with her Slavvic guard in pursuit. The pair reached Daoren and Hyro a few seconds later. “What are you doing out in the open?” he asked.