by Jake Elwood
“-Orbit above Novograd.” The face vanished, and the voice descended into static. The voice came back, a bit scratchy, but there were no more clear views of her face. It appeared in brief, distorted flickers only.
“-To retake the planet if we can. We have a … In the system but the planet … Strong defences. It is our intention to support you … Need you to weaken the planetary defence system. Their ground-based guns …”
Alice and the guerillas looked at one another. A man said, “What-”
Luke held up his hand. “It gets clearer in a-”
“… Guns are too strong for us to make a landing,” the projector said. “It's a race now to see who can reinforce the system first. We'll stay as long as we. We have … To help you, but not until … Destroy those guns.”
She continued speaking for another thirty seconds, with only the occasional fragment of a word breaking through the static. Finally the transmission ended.
“That's it,” said Luke, and turned projector off.
Alice said, “What did she mean about planetary defences?”
Luke took out a data pad and fiddled with it. He turned the projector back on, and a model of the northern continent appeared. A dozen red lights showed, some in clusters, some scattered across the continent. “They installed guns,” Luke said. “Big ones. Big enough to do serious damage to a ship in orbit. There's more on the far side of the planet, but we don't know the details about those.”
He manipulated the tablet, and the display changed. A photograph appeared, rotating so everyone could get a view. At first Alice took thought the image was an ordinary gun turret like you might see mounted on any armed ship. Then she looked near the base of the turret, where she saw a building and a couple of trees. Her sense of scale shifted, and she gasped.
The gun was huge. It was monstrous. She couldn't have wrapped both arms around the barrel. Hell, she could have joined hands with Bridger and Ham and they still wouldn't have been able to encircle that massive barrel. She said, “What does it fire?”
“Pulsed energy shots,” Luke said. It was like a blast rifle, then, but built on a gargantuan scale. It was the kind of gun you only saw in ground installations. The energy and cooling requirements made pulsed energy weapons hopelessly impractical on spaceships.
But if you could feed the gun enough power, and find a way to cool it off, it would dish out incredible damage at close or medium range.
A man said, “I wish we could hear the rest of the message.”
“We heard enough,” Luke said. “The bluecoats are ready to invade, but they can't get close enough. They need the groundside militias to soften up the planetary defences.”
“They didn't say they were invading. All they said was they wanted to help.”
Luke shrugged. “Then they'll drop guns and ammo and decent equipment. Maybe some support people to train us.” He spread his hands expressively. “God knows we could use the matériel.” He gestured to the bench where Alice had been sitting. “We're trying to unlock captured guns. We’ve barely got ammunition for the guns we do have. A supply drop from the bluecoats would be fantastic.”
“All we have to do is take out some planetary defence guns.” The red-haired man leaned back, folded his arms, and sneered. “Nothing to it, right?”
Luke matched him sneer for sneer. “You joined the Prairie Dogs because you thought it would be easy?”
“We can't take out that many guns!”
Luke waved a dismissive hand. “We're not the only militia on the planet. And we don't need to destroy them all. Just thin them out.”
“We can't-”
“One gun,” Luke said. “That's our fair share. We'll take out the gun at Sunshine Crossing.”
Another man spoke up. “You mean, we'll get killed trying. You know what the defences are like!”
Luke picked up his data pad. “We can do it,” he said stubbornly. “Every time we fight the uglies, we kick their ass.”
“Because we pick our targets carefully,” said the red-haired man. “We hit them where they’re weak. Not where they’re strong.”
The display above the projector changed to a 3D simulation of a walled compound with a massive planetary defence gun in the center. The compound held a strategic location where a narrow strip of land separated a pair of lakes. The walls in the projection were transparent wireframes. Inside the compound, Alice could see anti-aircraft batteries, barracks, and a handful of small buildings. More guns bristled from turrets mounted on towers at the corners of the walls.
She gulped. It was a lot of firepower.
“It won't be easy,” Luke said. “But it's not impossible, either.”
“We've never tried to hit a target like that,” someone said.
“That's why it’ll work. They won't expect it.” The words were bold enough, but Luke no longer sounded certain. He had the air of a man trying to convince himself as much as the others.
“Face it, Luke,” said the red-haired man. “It's a beautiful big nut, but we can't crack it.”
“Nonsense.”
Alice turned. The front door was open, and Sharpe stood there, hands on her hips. “It's absolutely crackable,” she said. “And we’ll do it, when the time is right.” She looked at their faces. “Is the time right? What's happened?”
Luke played her the recording.
When it was over, Sharpe spent a minute staring into space. Then she nodded to herself and grinned. “We finally got a big pot.” She leaned forward, planting both hands on the table. “It's time to bet all our chips, boys.” She glanced at Alice. “And girl.”
Alice nodded. Not one thing had changed, but Alice knew, in a way she couldn't explain, that the attack would go ahead.
And it would succeed.
The same irrational confidence was reflected in the eyes of the men around the table. How does she do it? Alice wondered. How does she inspire people so completely? The walls are just as high as they were a moment ago. There's just as many guns in that compound. Why do I suddenly feel like it's going to be easy?
“We've been preparing for this day for months,” Sharpe declared. “Oh, not this situation exactly. But something like this. We've laid a very thorough groundwork.” She lifted her right hand from the table and tapped the side of her head. “Up here.”
She straightened up. “We've trained the uglies. They know we only attack when we're sure we can win. We've never varied from that pattern. We've earned ourselves a massive bluff, and now it's time to cash in.” She looked at the red-haired man. “I want all the trucks brought to Fordtown. How many have we got? I'm talking about big trucks. The four-tonne grain haulers.”
“We've got two on hand,” he said. “I can get three more on short notice.”
“Do it,” she told him.
“But why?” Luke said. “We can fit every fighter we've got into one truck.”
“You know that, and I know that.” Sharpe’s smile was smug. “The uglies don't know that. When they see a five-truck convoy coming at them, they're going to shit their britches.”
“We'll have to leave the Mother Hen at home,” someone said, indicating the anti-aircraft guns.
“Nonsense.” Sharpe stuck a hand into the projection. “The barrels are below the walls, to keep us from hitting the guns from the ground. So long as the Hen stays low, the guns won't be able to bear on her. We'll bring the Hen in, if for no other reason than to make them wonder what we're up to.” Her smile showed every tooth in her head. “The walls went up four weeks ago. Those poor slobs have spent twenty-eight days wondering when the hammer is going to fall. When they see us coming, they're going to think it's the apocalypse. They're going to run like kittens in a rainstorm. We might not even have to fire a shot.”
That was optimistic, but Sharpe made it clear she wasn't counting on a best-case scenario. In the next thirty minutes she hashed out the basics of an assault plan and got everyone busy on preparations. Luke took extensive notes on things that needed to be resea
rched and things that needed further discussion. Over the next eighteen hours or so, the plan would be dissected and analysed by a couple of dozen people.
A few minor changes might be made, but Alice had no doubt the basic plan would remain the same.
A couple of hours after that, the attack would begin.
The meeting broke up and Sharpe swept out. The men went their separate ways, preparing to work on the various tasks she'd given them. Alice watched them leave, full of a fierce pride. Novograd would be liberated, so long as there were freedom fighters like Karen Sharpe to lead the way.
She reminds me of Tom. They both have that knack of facing an impossible challenge and turning it around. They can both take a disorganized group of frightened people and somehow turn them into a capable, determined force that's ready to charge Hell with a bucket of water.
And they both keep succeeding.
It felt odd to draw comparisons between two such different people. Sharpe, she was now convinced, was absolutely essential to the eventual liberation of Novograd. She was as effective a leader as Alice had ever encountered. But I don't think we’ll be friends after the war. Sharpe frightened her more than a little. She remembered the danger she'd felt when the militia had segregated and detained Gabrielle and the rest of the tanker crew.
If Tom hadn't been there …
Tom inspired his followers in a fundamentally different way, she realized. Karen Sharpe was dedicated to driving the Dawn Alliance from Novograd, no matter what the cost. That was a cause Alice heartily endorsed.
Tom, though, was dedicated to doing the right thing. In this case, the end result was the same. He was less effective than Sharpe, she realized. He would never have killed prisoners. However, nor would he ever devour the innocent in passing. Good people would always be safe when Tom was around.
I'll follow Sharpe, she decided, for as long as the Dawn Alliance occupies Novograd. I'll do everything in my power to keep her alive, because Novograd needs her badly.
But when the war’s over, Tom is the person I would actually want to be with.
Chapter 14
The gunner’s seat on top of the grain truck wasn't much for comfort.
It wasn't a proper gun turret. Like so many things in the colonies, it was improvised and repurposed. There was no integrated seat, for example. Tom sat in a wooden chair bolted to the aluminum cover over the top of the grain box.
The gun had once been part of an armored vehicle. They'd captured the vehicle largely undamaged, but there wasn't time to override the security settings that disabled the machine's engine. The militia had settled for stealing the gun and tires and destroying the rest.
Tom was protected now by a mix of the gun's original armor and some steel plates welded on to cover the worst of the gaps.
The gun could swivel, but not far. Since he no longer had a rotating turret, Tom's field of fire was reduced to thirty degrees on either side of dead ahead. He could shoot at anything he wanted, so long as it was pretty much directly in front of the truck.
It was a slug thrower, with an impressively high rate of fire. He could have fired thousands of rounds per minute, if he'd had thousands of rounds. He had fewer than two hundred rounds, which meant the gun was good for one quick squirt and that was it.
He glanced over his shoulder at the convoy of trucks trailing behind him, reflecting that the other gunners had it worse. The ancient and rusty truck behind him, instead of a turret, had an entire armored scout vehicle sitting on the box behind the cab. The wheels were long gone, the hubs welded to braces across the top of the truck box.
The last three trucks were even worse. One had a gun similar to Tom's, but with no ammunition at all. The last two trucks had contraptions made of pipe and plate metal. From a distance they looked like guns, but they were nothing but decoys.
A hundred troops could have fit in the back of each truck. Instead, there were twenty people in each of the first two trucks, plus two more in the cab. The last three trucks had only a driver in the cab and a spotter pretending to man the gun turret.
Dear God, what am I doing? It was much too late to back out, so he shook his head and tried to focus on the coming battle.
“Hang on, Commodore, it's about to get bumpy.”
“Copy,” said Tom, and pushed against the box cover beneath him, lifting his rear end off the chair. He wore a helmet, scrounged from God knew where, with an integrated radio link to a spacer named Kress in the cab of the truck. A handful of the Icicle crew had been brought back to participate in this assault. Kress was one of them.
He could see the compound dead ahead. There was a pretty good road under the truck's wheels; the gap between the lakes was a pinch point that drew a lot of traffic. The Dawn Alliance had built a squat concrete guardhouse to block the road a hundred meters before the looming walls of the gun compound.
The truck slowed fifty or so meters from the guard hut, then turned and rolled into the ditch. Tom clutched the armor plate in front of him as the truck rocked and swayed. Soon it reached level ground again, and the speed picked up.
He kept most of his weight on his legs, muttering a curse when the truck hit a rock and the seat slammed into him.
“What was that, Commodore?”
“I said, it's bumpy, but don't slow down.”
He looked behind him, rising out of his seat so he could peer over the sheet of steel that protected his back. The rest of the convoy was lurching through the ditch and forming up in a line. He didn't know whether the huge, dilapidated, rusting farm vehicles made a terrifying sight or a ridiculous one.
Assume the enemy is terrified. And try to look fierce, in case they're looking at you through a telescope.
Or a sniper scope.
That was a disconcerting thought, and he relaxed his legs, lowering himself fully onto the chair and slouching so his head was below the steel plate in front. A couple of good bumps jarred his entire body, and he gave up and once again rose half out of the seat. I'm probably bouncing around too much for a sniper to hit me.
The gun had a display screen, and he tapped it to life. There were no complex electronics for automatic targeting. There was, however, an electronic scope. Tom used it to scan the compound.
From a distance their target didn't look like much. The walls were just a dull brown rectangle on the horizon, the planetary defence gun an innocuous tower rising from the center.
When he zoomed in with the scope, however, an unsettling wealth of detail appeared. The scope had a limited ability to compensate for movement, and the image on the screen only bounced and wobbled a bit as he focused on the nearest corner tower. Four gun barrels pointed directly toward him, poking through holes in a sheet of armor plating. He scanned downward, and a soldier's head poked briefly above the top of the wall before ducking down.
They aren't fleeing. That could be bad. It means they're ready for an attack by hundreds of troops.
We don't have hundreds of troops.
He started to mutter another curse, remembered the helmet microphone, and stopped himself. We're committed now. There's nothing to do but keep going.
The near wall of the compound loomed dead ahead, growing closer with maddening slowness. These farm trucks simply weren't built for speed. Tom could see two of the corner towers, and he braced himself, knowing that soon they must open fire.
When the defence of the compound began, however, it was not the tower turrets that fired. Tom caught a flash of motion high above the walls, heard a faint high-pitched whine, then cried out as an explosion sent clods of dirt flying half a dozen meters ahead of the truck and a couple of meters to the left.
The truck swerved right for an instant, the driver reacting on instinct. Training kicked in a moment later, and Tom bounced against the armor plating around him as the truck swerved back to the left.
Sure enough, the mortar overcorrected. The next shell hit behind the truck and well to the right.
Kress let out a whoop, then muttered, “Sorry, S
ir.”
Tom grinned, not bothering to answer. He ignored the gun he was supposed to be operating, instead gripping the top of an armor plate with one hand and a support strut with the other as the truck shook him like a bean in a maraca.
A soft-edged shadow engulfed the truck, and Tom glanced up as the Mother Hen flashed overhead so close he felt the wash of the rotors against his face. The Hen raced toward the walls, hugging the ground and weaving from side to side to make a poorer target.
It wasn't enough. The turrets on both towers at last came to life, pouring rounds at the aircraft. Tracers made jagged red lines that stretched toward the Hen, missing by the tiniest of margins. The ship jerked left and right, rose long enough to let a barrage of rounds pass underneath, then dropped so quickly her undercarriage bounced on the ground and tore up a clod of dirt. Rounds from the nearest tower hit an armored plate and bounced away. The turret atop the aircraft fired a long burst that ricocheted from the side of one tower.
Then the fire from both towers converged, and the Hen's front left rotor tore apart in a cloud of jagged metal. The aircraft dropped, the demolished rotor slamming into the ground an instant before the rest of the Hen hit. The cowling around the left rear rotor dented inward, then tore apart as the spinning blades ripped into it.
The rotors on the right-hand side continued to spin, throwing great clouds of dust into the air. The Mother Hen, however, would never fly again.
Tom swore, his voice blending with a stream of curses from Kress. Tom slid sideways out of his chair as the truck began a sharp turn. The driver was breaking off the attack.
A hundred thoughts flashed through Tom's mind. He wanted to retreat, wanted it desperately. The attack, already hopeless, was now suicidal. Running for the hills was the only sane option.