by Gavin Smith
Miska contacted the commander of fourth platoon, their weapons platoon, and started splitting up his railgun, assault and mortar sections to support second and third platoon, leaving some with her to go after the CP, or command post. She was checking the feed from the rotor drones as she did so.
The Triple S mechs and the Heavy Bastards were exchanging heavy, hurried and therefore often inaccurate fire as they tried to close on each other. In the few moments that she had been concentrating on reiterating the orders to the Offensive Bastards, the jungle behind the Triple S mechs had become a burning mess of splintered branches and dense, bullet-ridden wood. The north part of town had all but been destroyed.
‘Well, shit,’ Miska muttered quietly.
Pegasus 1’s ramp came down as the assault shuttle circled over the Triple S base. Miska caught a glimpse of the Heavy Bastards closing with the Triple S mechs. Outside everything was thunder. Her audio dampeners kicked in, filtering out the excesses of hypersonic booms from large calibre railguns and mass drivers. Below her, on the hillside base, she could see third and fourth platoon securing the landing zone. They were engaged, taking fire. As Pegasus 1 came down to land she watched a la-la, fired from a back-mounted launcher worn by a member of one of the assault sections from the weapons platoon, arc into a concrete strong point and destroy it. Pegasus 1 touched down. She let second platoon rush out ahead of her. They split into three squads and went to cover. Miska and Nyukuti strode out after them.
‘Hangman-Two-Actual to all call signs, please be advised we have an enemy stealthed Satyr somewhere in the city. Last engaged on the corner of Sixth and Pleasant.’ Her dad’s voice. His call sign was ad-hoc but everyone recognised his voice. His addition to the mission might have been last-minute opportunism but it seemed to be working out.
Pegasus 1 took off, leaving Miska and Nyukuti kneeling down in the shuttle’s dust cloud. Miska heard and felt the snap of hypersonic rounds passing nearby. The noise of the incoming rounds was drowned out by one of fourth platoon’s railgunners opening up. She saw strobing red light from one of the assault section’s laser carbines. With all the shit in the air the lasers wouldn’t be nearly as effective.
‘Heavy-One-Actual to Heavy-One-Five and Heavy-Two-Five, detach from the platoon and hunt that enemy Satyr,’ Mass said over the comms link. He sounded distracted. Miska was impressed he’d had the presence of mind to give that order. She glanced north. The Medusa that Mass was piloting flung an eighteen-wheeler at the head of one of the enemy Medusas. The truck caught the enemy mech high on its torso with enough force to send it to the ground hard. Miska was pretty sure she had felt the impact through the earth.
She was glad to see there was only a minimum of fucking about while second and third platoon were each joined by a railgun squad, an assault squad armed with the back-mounted la-las, and a mortar squad, before beginning their sweep north and south along the hilltop base, respectively.
Despite being blinded by dust she knew her surroundings from the surveillance images she’d studied while planning the mission, and the footage shot by the rotor drones. This part of the hillside base consisted of a series of fortified pre-fabricated cabins, known as hooches, used as barracks for the Triple S troops. They were connected by shallow defensive trenches and, in an excavated hollow defended by smartcrete barriers, there was a bunker with a commanding view of both the town and the jungle. She was pleased to note that the point defence systems, on this side of the hill anyway, had all been taken out.
She was left with a railgun squad, assault squad and mortar squad.
‘Get set up, I want—’ Miska started. Rounds impacting the earth all around interrupted her. She scrambled for the closest trench, Nyukuti by her side. The eleven men from fourth platoon did likewise. Further along the stretch Miska saw their attackers. A Triple S fire team. Miska immediately had her carbine to her shoulder and was advancing towards them. There was a loud pop as she fired the carbine’s 30mm grenade launcher, filling the trench with razor sharp flechettes.
‘—mortar set up, targeted on the bunker, la-las the same, stay well clear of the western approach, fire on my mark,’ Miska continued as she stalked through the trench firing the laser, the beam beating the flechettes to their mark, possibly even burning a few out of the air en route. Nyukuti was following her down the trench, his SAW at the ready but there wasn’t enough room to fire around her. The laser superheated the hard armour plate, causing it to explode. The flechettes found exposed skin. Steaming flesh blew out through destroyed armour. The fire team either went down or scrambled around the corner in the trench. One of the assault shuttles flew overhead raining down railgun fire on some unseen target.
‘Railguns to provide security,’ she finished as she reached the corner of her trench, slipping in steaming viscera, a humid blood mist hanging in the air over the corpses. The battery icon for her carbine was blinking in her IVD. She’d had to up the weapon’s power to cut through all the crap in the air.
‘Reloading,’ she told Nyukuti. She heard railgun fire from nearby. Nyukuti nodded and came round her as she replaced the battery in her carbine, checking the rotor drones to see if either of them had eyes on her position. They didn’t, and she didn’t want to re-task them. She listened for a moment but even with her dampener she couldn’t hear anything from around the corner of the trench. She removed a 30mm fragmentation grenade from one of the loops on her webbing.
‘Frag out,’ she warned Nyukuti, then knocked off the safety cap with her thumb, depressed the arming stud and threw it into the next trench. They were showered in more dirt as the frag exploded and then Nyukuti was around the corner, firing burst after hypersonic burst from his SAW. Miska followed, her carbine at the ready.
‘Offensive-Four-Two-Three-Actual to Hangman-One-Actual. We have a drone in the air and a targeting solution for the CP,’ said the corporal in command of the mortar squad she had been left with. Miska tapped Nyukuti on the shoulder to stop him. Both of them hunkered down in the trench, Nyukuti covering forward, Miska covering back the way they’d just come. The red miasma still hung in the air behind them. Nyukuti had made two more bodies in the trench in front of them. Miska checked the feeds from the rotor drones. As she watched, Heavy-Two-Two tackled one of the enemy mechs and brought it to the ground. Moments later she heard the clanging of metal hitting metal. Miska was pretty sure it was the last thing the Triple S mech-jockey had expected. He was flailing to get up. Heavy-Two-Two knelt on the enemy mech and extended the synthetic diamond-toothed chainsaw blades from his forearms. They were intended as arbocultural tools – the mechs used them as machetes when operating in the thick jungle. Heavy-Two-Two repurposed them, pushing the spinning blades into the armoured torso of the enemy mech in a fountain of sparks.
Heavy-Two-One, Hemi’s Medusa, wrapped its arms low around the legs of the enemy mech he was fighting and then straightened up. With enormous mechanical strength Heavy-Two-One lifted the Triple S Medusa into the air and, with a clearly audible scream of protesting metal, dropped the mech over his back and onto its head. Miska couldn’t help but grimace, there was no way that wouldn’t have damaged some of Hemi’s weapon systems.
Heavy-One-Two was covering one of the enemy mechs that was down on its knees, hands in the air.
Heavy-One-Actual, Mass’s mech, was stamping on the Triple S mech that it had knocked over with the thrown truck. In many ways that was the problem with the Triple S mech jockeys. They treated their mechs as moving weapon platforms and thought in terms of strategy and tactics. Her Bastards, on the other hand, were thinking of this as a scaled-up prison yard brawl. They weren’t interested in the ‘rules’ of mech combat. They didn’t know better than to think of the mechs as anything other than thirty-foot-tall, armoured extensions of their own bodies. The Triple S jockeys had come for a war and got a street fight. It had worked in the Bastards’ favour this time.
Miska checked on Heavy-One-Three and Heavy-Two-Three. They were both still covering the landing pad
s. As she watched, Heavy-One-Three fired its Vengeance railgun over Port Turquoise’s rooftops, shredding a moving VTOL transport like it was so much confetti.
‘Hangman-One-Actual to Heavy-One-Actual, can I borrow Heavy-Two-Three, please? He looks bored,’ Miska asked.
‘Be my guest,’ Mass answered. He sounded out of breath.
Miska told the corporal in charge of the mortar section to send the targeting package to Heavy-Two-Three. Heavy-Two-Three stood up and started making its way through Port Turquoise towards the CP. A line of earth and powdered concrete erupted into the air from the impact of the 200mm projectile fired from the approaching Medusa’s shoulder-mounted mass driver. The tungsten-cored penetrator left a glowing trench in its wake. The hypersonic round tore open the reinforced concrete front of the bunker. Miska let the assault squad fire a few la-las through the hole. Then she ordered the mortar section to start dropping the bombs in, and not stop until the CP surrendered. She heard the familiar pop of the mortars firing. This was followed moments later by an explosion and more dust filled the air.
‘This is Miska Corbin. I’m assuming you all know who I am. You’ve got until the approaching mech reaches the CP to surrender,’ she said over an open frequency. ‘Or I burn you out.’
Heavy-Two-Three hadn’t even covered half the distance before she received a message from the Triple S commander surrendering.
Chapter 5
Triple S’s command staff had stumbled out of the command post into the waiting arms of Miska’s Bastards. They were covered in powdered concrete, their eyes were bloodshot and they were more than a little dazed. The highest-ranking surviving officer from the mass-driver-gutted bunker staggered towards her, stuttering something about the articles of conflict. Miska reassured her that that they would be followed even as the Triple S officer was pushed down to her knees by one of the railgun squad’s assistant gunners. All of this in the shadow of the Medusa. The mech, cradling its railgun/flame-thrower combination weapon as though it was an oversized carbine, looked for all the world like another legionnaire, a giant in combat armour.
Everything was in hand. Miska walked past the mech to look out over Port Turquoise. It was quiet now the Triple S rank-and-file had seemed eager to follow the order to surrender. The northern corner of town where her stolen mechs and their Triple S counterparts had fought was a mess. Rubble everywhere, buildings that looked as though somebody had taken a bite out of them, and huge craters in the surface of the road.
‘Well, balls,’ Miska muttered. She had been tight on the ROE, the rules of engagement. She had told Mass and the other mech jockeys to check their backgrounds when firing their weapons, to try and keep collateral damage to a minimum. That was probably why they had closed for hand-to-hand fighting so quickly. She hadn’t liked making the ROE so tight. Her responsibility was to her legionnaires first and foremost, to give them the best possible chance to survive, but Port Turquoise was peopled by the very colonists that had hired them. It was difficult to liberate dead people.
She was aware of Torricone heading down the hill towards the town about a hundred feet to the north of her. Miska quickly checked her IVD. Two of her Bastards were KIA and several more were injured. She would review the gun-and helm-cam footage along with the footage from the drones and find out what happened. What they all could have done differently.
‘What are you doing?’ Miska asked Torricone over a direct link. ‘We’ve got wounded.’
‘They volunteered,’ Torricone answered and then severed the link. She’d heard disgust in his voice. It was a flagrant disregard for her orders and he was going to have to be dealt with sooner rather than later. She didn’t think Torricone felt that the last two missions, during which they’d both been in some pretty tight scrapes together, had bought him any slack. He just didn’t seem to care any more. Not since they had come back from Barney Prime. What she couldn’t work out was why he hadn’t just elected to stay in suspended animation.
Miska saw the Cyclops war droid that her father’s electronic spirit inhabited running on all six of its limbs through the hillside base towards her. The two Pegasus assault shuttles were still circling overhead. Doubtless Triple S relief forces were en route but forces employed by the Colonial Administration had set out in an ad-hoc flotilla of ferries, cargo boats, and a few ageing riverine patrol craft to occupy Port Turquoise the moment the attack had started. All the river craft were loaded to the gunwales with mercenary troops in the employ of Military Active Command Ephesus sent to relieve the Bastards. Miska had made it clear when she had gone to work for MACE that, like the USMC with whom she had served, they were an expeditionary force, a fighting force, not a garrison unit. They would be relieved.
‘You know that whole galloping thing looks undignified, don’t you?’ Miska said as the Cyclops reached her.
‘Gets me places quicker though. Being in this metal body, I don’t know why we don’t just let drones do all the fighting these days,’ her dad said.
‘Hacking, upkeep, and frankly humans are cheaper and more surprising.’
‘I certainly think we were that. Where’s he going?’ The Cyclops pointed at Torricone with a metal thumb, a human gesture that seemed incongruous coming from the armoured war droid.
‘See if he can help anyone in town,’ Miska told her dad.
‘You sign off on that?’
‘Sure,’ Miska lied. She had the disconcerting feeling that the Cyclops was staring at her. She was grateful that her dad didn’t push the matter. Torricone was becoming a real problem, in more ways than one.
‘ETA on your relief?’ her dad asked instead.
‘The forward elements are about twenty minutes out,’ she told him, magnifying her vision, checking the river, but it seemed that the flotilla was still over the horizon. ‘MACE have got a couple of high altitude surveillance drones up. No sign of Triple S response yet.’ They would know that this situation wasn’t going to be solved with a few shuttles full of their QRF. The captured mercenaries would complicate things as well. Their contracts would have stipulations as regarded the risks they would have to take from their own forces counterattacking in just such an eventuality. They might risk an air strike, though. Triple S definitely had air superiority in this particular conflict but that advantage was limited because of the terrain. ‘How’re things down in town?’ she asked.
‘Some of the Triple S combatants managed to make a break for it, but frankly I can’t see them coming back, and they’re just making their own repatriation that much harder. That said, we’re keeping an eye out for them. We’re keeping all the prisoners in the plaza where we landed. There’s quite a lot of them.’
It wasn’t quite a criticism. They had always known they were going to be outnumbered. It was more a warning that, although it might have gone their way this time, it could have easily gone the other way. She was aware of the recklessness of her plan. She was of the opinion that said awareness showed how much she’d grown as a person.
‘You strip all their gear from them? Weapons, ammo, armour?’ she asked. She particularly wanted the man-portable plasma weapons the Triple S troops had been using.
‘Yes, but that’s part of the problem. The gear we’re taking off the troops, guarding the enemy mechs, the airfield, the raw materials for their military printer, securing the vehicles. We’re stretched pretty thin.’
As ever, her dad wasn’t wrong.
‘I know that, Dad. This morning’s smash and grab isn’t me going back to my bad old ways, I promise. No more Barney-Prime-style clusterfucks but we couldn’t turn our nose up at this. We desperately need the gear and this will be the last chance we get to rob on such a scale.’
‘Because the next time they’ll have booby traps, literal and electronic,’ he said.
Miska nodded. It was a worry. Triple S (electronic) would have their hackers going after the systems of all the hardware they had taken this morning, and she was light on the net support side because of the threat criminal hackers
posed to her. As soon as they managed to get all their stolen war machines back to base, everything would be shut down until she had personally had the opportunity to purge their systems of malicious code and back doors.
‘You found a weakness and you exploited it tactically.’
‘Still need to work on strategy, huh?’ Miska asked, smiling.
‘Keep playing chess with Major Cofino,’ her dad suggested. Miska had caught him and Uncle V playing a few games as well. That was the biggest threat posed by Vido Cofino, he made it very difficult not to like him.
‘I hate chess,’ Miska griped.
‘Well done today, it was a ballsy move but it paid off.’
‘By balls I’m assuming you mean ovaries?’ she asked.
It was downright disconcerting hearing the war droid chuckling with her dad’s voice.
‘Prioritise the vehicles, only take things that are multi-role, and can be used in combat. Dump all the soft-skinned bullshit and I’ll have Mass task the Satyrs to patrol for the ones that got away. We get back to Badajoz we’re going to stand down for a day or two, and then no more hairy shit.’
‘Understood,’ her dad said. The Cyclops’s head turned towards the river. ‘Looks like our relief is here.’
Her IVD headache had become a two-day-long net fatigue headache. They had turned Port Turquoise over to the allied mercenaries in the relief force. There had been some wrangling over the ‘spoils of war’ but nobody had really wanted to tangle with Miska over it, so the Bastards had got their hardware. A staggered airlift had followed as they ferried the remaining VTOL gunships and atmosphere transports that the Medusas hadn’t destroyed; the printer raw materials; captured arms and ammunitions, including some plasma weapons that Miska was very excited about; every single last piece of mech spare part they could find; the least damaged mech and the few armoured vehicles that hadn’t been destroyed. They had also recovered the missing Medusa, which had got bogged down in the Turquoise River. All the vehicles and a number of the weapon systems had required checking for back doors, viral mines and other surprises that Triple S’s electronic warriors might have left behind. It was exactly the sort of work that she hated. Simultaneously boring and repetitive but requiring a great deal of attention to detail, and she was the only one who could do it. The lack of combat hackers that she could trust, or intimidate to the extent she was sure they wouldn’t betray her, was becoming more and more of an issue. She had discussed with her dad the idea of hiring actual mercenaries to work for them, combat-capable hackers that didn’t have N-bombs in their heads, but that had its own set of security concerns.