by C H Gideon
Xi hoped she would not have to call on those fighters, and had painstakingly crafted her battalion’s battle plans in order to minimize their reliance on air support. But in her brief career, she had learned that while battle plans were nice, they tended to disintegrate shortly after the first shots were exchanged.
“Captain,” Chief Gordon called, “the ambient radiation is causing some trouble with the onboard data relays.”
“What kind of trouble?” Xi asked in alarm.
“Primarily, we’re getting brief delays in targeting solution plots due to interrupts in the cross-talk between parallel systems,” Gordon explained. “Recommend we request two cans of isolating gel for each mech, and when we receive them, we coat every unhardened vehicle-critical data system in the battalion.”
“I thought the extra anti-rad coating we applied to the hulls pre-drop was supposed to counteract the Brick’s ambient radiation?” Xi scowled.
“Theoretically, it should have,” Gordon agreed, “but I’m still getting enough leakage to cause our systems trouble. Have everyone run radiation sweeps in their cabins, but Elvira’s looks tight enough for us to stay locked down for months before we accumulate enough to give our bodies trouble. It’s the targeting systems that have me concerned.”
“I’ve just added the requisition to the latest form,” Xi assured him, having done so via her neural link with a few seconds’ thought. “Good work, Gordon.”
“Thank you, Captain.”
Another hour passed, during which time the convoy rolled steadily nearer to the Gash. Thrasher led the way, sweeping a path clear of any potential IEDs and thankfully encountering none, while the rest of the column moved at a relative snail’s pace. In another hour, Xi would take First Company to secure the South Channel, their best approach to the Gash’s floor, where the TBM would be deployed.
Then the enemy announced their defiance.
“Incoming!” Xi snapped, her board lighting up with mixed missiles and artillery. “All mechs, Intercept Package Gray. I say again: Intercept Package Gray.”
Acknowledgments streamed in, and the battalion never missed a beat as railguns and anti-missile rockets launched a stream of countermeasures at the inbound ordnance. Explosive shells burst hundreds of meters in the air, intercepted by precision railgun fire. Missiles were expertly torn down by the battalion’s rockets, and for a moment it seemed like the enemy had just foolishly revealed the locations of over two dozen heavy weapon emplacements.
Then the salvo’s purpose became clear.
“Multiple contacts at knife range!” Styles called over the battalion-wide as a hundred different vehicle signatures sprang to life—some less than ninety meters from the column.
“Engage targets,” Xi barked, spraying her chain guns at anything that moved out to five hundred meters. Two rebel surface drones were torn apart in the opening seconds, while the rest of the column spewed out a terrifying display of close-in firepower. In four seconds, thirty thousand rounds were spat by the battalion’s anti-personnel weaponry, and a hundred SRMs were loosed from their moorings. Fifty surface drones were reduced to scrap metal in those seconds, while the rest unleashed their relatively meager arsenals against the column.
Fortunately, the enemy failed to prioritize the TBM haulers. Unfortunately, a hundred micro-rockets could pierce even the most robust armor fielded by the Terran Republic.
“Blackjack is down,” reported Lieutenant Ford grimly as the light humanoid recon mech was scrapped by a hail of surprisingly effective micro-rockets. Unlike those Xi’s people had received at the plateau fortress, these tiny missiles carried warheads capable of penetrating all but the heaviest armor. Blackjack fell, but the battalion’s guns shredded the remaining drones in knife range before they could add to the butcher’s bill.
Then the second enemy salvo took flight.
“Incoming,” Styles reported, thankfully taking control of battalion communications from his temporary post aboard Cyclops, one of the recent additions to the battalion.
“Intercept Package Gray,” Xi called, but this time the amount of inbound ordnance was triple that of the first flight. Some of this new ordnance originated from points nearly two hundred kilometers from the column’s current spot. “Clear the board,” she snarled, loosing Elvira’s full complement of anti-missile rockets while the battalion’s railguns spat tungsten bolts at the incoming artillery shells. After unloading her rockets, Xi assigned two dozen targets within range of the column’s SRMs. “All crews, engage targets. Fire! Fire! Fire!” she barked as the first inbound enemy ordnance struck the Legion.
Elvira’s guns thundered, sending extended-range shells onto an artillery placement thirty-one kilometers to the north. A few seconds after clearing her guns, Xi’s mech rocked from a direct hit. The impact threw the crew against their restraints, strobed the lights, and shook the old girl like a rag doll.
An explosion on the mech’s right flank caused a shower of sparks to erupt inside the cabin. Warning alarms screamed in protest, and alert indicators strobed urgently on her virtual HUD.
“Leg Five is down,” Gordon reported in a rising voice, “and the starboard power coupler is off-line. I’m rerouting everything through the port coupler.”
Xi slowly pivoted her mech toward the source of the shot which had hit them. She was so focused on returning the favor to her would-be killers that she barely registered that her last two ER shells had scrubbed their targets. “Bracketing,” she declared, using the sensor link with the Bonhoeffer to isolate the artillery shell’s point of origin. It was fifty-three kilometers downrange, which put it near the limit of her ER HE shells. “Fuck it!” She grunted, silently issuing the loading command via her neural link. “ER HE up. On the way!”
Elvira bucked with the dual recoils, tilting slightly to the right due to the offline Leg Five failing to evenly distribute the shock as her guns sent their massive loads downrange. Rocket-assisted extended-range shells screamed through the air toward the enemy artillery bunker. Xi had personally inspected each and every shell in her mech’s magazine, and part of her inspection was the individual marking of the shells with distinct phrases.
The first of the shells was marked “Terran Diplomacy,” which perhaps unsurprisingly missed the mark by about thirty meters. The second shell, marked “Bend Over and Say ‘Ah’” struck true, collapsing the rebel artillery’s ten-meter-deep pit and spiking the gun within.
Throughout the battalion, every mech expended ordnance at the cyclic rate as enemy missiles and artillery tore into the Metal Legion’s vehicles. Six Terran mechs were downed, three destroyed outright, as missile after missile exploded against the best armor produced by the Republic. Rebel shell after rebel shell fell through the interception shield, overwhelming the relatively slow-firing railguns that were the only systems capable of reliably sniping them from the sky.
Throughout it all, Xi wanted to scream in frustration—to give voice to her anger at the men and women dying beside her under enemy fire—but she knew that wasn’t what they needed from her.
What they needed was focus and a plan to hit the enemy back.
Xi knew what she had to do.
“Bonhoeffer CIG, this is Dragon Actual,” Xi called over the priority P2P line while transmitting the priority targets up the same channel. “Requesting aerial support against indicated targets.”
“Dragon Actual, Bonhoeffer CIG,” replied the CIG. “Confirm targets package, over.”
“Targets confirmed,” she acknowledged, double-checking the pips on her HUD and affirming her previous transmission with a digital signature.
“Viper Squadron inbound,” the CIG declared. “Time to target eighteen seconds.”
“Eighteen seconds, copy,” Xi acknowledged as another of her mechs died. Please don’t be too long.
Legion artillery and missiles destroyed thirty-one embankments in all, removing over half of the rebel platforms as they methodically expanded their field of fire to include the increasingl
y distant enemy targets. All the surface drones had been eliminated, but the longest-range artillery was still wreaking havoc on the column.
One of Sergeant Major Trapper’s APCs was hit by inbound artillery, fragging the vehicle and killing all forty-three of the grunts it carried. Xi’s people dealt fiery retribution for their losses, but the ambush had already cost them half a company of mechs and one of their six APCs.
Then the air support arrived.
“Cease fire on aerial targets. Clear the skies, people. The cavalry has arrived,” Xi ordered.
Stabbing down from the sky in the span of four seconds, sixteen bolts of hyper-velocity tungsten tore into the ground concealing the last of the enemy embankments. After the initial strike, the fighters of Viper Squadron broke formation, each peeling off toward its own target as the Terran interceptors swept from one side of the engagement zone to the other. As the pilots dealt swift destruction to the automated placements, the phrase “death from above” took on a personal, profound meaning to Xi and, she suspected, to the rest of the brigade.
A bolt of yellow light stabbed upward from a previously-concealed platform next, slicing through Viper Three and transforming the death-dealing fighter craft into a fiery inferno which consumed its pilot before she could eject.
The three remaining Viper pilots broke evasively, two climbing high into the pale blue sky and the third zeroing in on the source of the anti-aircraft fire. Without so much as a word, the pilot sent a pair of railgun bolts into the offending emplacement, annihilating everything within it.
“Dragon Actual, this is Viper One,” came the voice of the squadron’s commander. “The board is clear.”
“Copy that, Viper One,” Xi acknowledged, her voice as tight as her nerves. “Thanks for the assist.”
“Any time, Elvira,” the pilot replied in a tone that sounded so detached from the loss of a fellow pilot that, for a moment, Xi was consumed by a single thought:
I hope I never sound like that after losing people.
She gathered her wits, knowing that the warriors under her command needed her to coordinate their efforts. “Lieutenant Koch, deploy your R&R teams,” she commanded. “Sergeant Major Trapper, support with search and rescue of all downed vehicles. Dr. Fellows, prepare to receive wounded.”
Acknowledgments came across her screen, and after thirty minutes all survivors had been rescued, and the three salvageable mechs were aboard the recovery vehicles as the column resumed its march toward the Gash.
After sorting through the details of the engagement, two things became abundantly clear to Captain Xi Bao: the rebels were dug in a lot deeper than they had suspected, and they were much better armed than they should have been. That meant the operation was going to be a lot more complicated than anyone had thought.
And that was if they managed to avoid Jemmin entanglements.
5
Tempting Bait or Unique Opportunity?
“Colonel Jenkins,” the same docent who had met him at Falcon Interworks’ headquarters the previous day greeted him.
“Ma’am.” Jenkins nodded, having spent the last twelve hours poring over every scrap of information he could find on the remaining stops on his scheduled trip throughout the Terran colonies. He was prepared to meet with Chairman Kong’s contacts, but he had little hope that he would get anything meaningful done.
“The Chairman has directed me to escort you to our offices in Jingzhou District, Sector Nine,” she explained, gesturing to the hallway that led to one of Ivory Spire One’s many lifts.
Jenkins followed her down the hallway, boarding the lift which took them down several floors to a transit station. They made their way to an aircar platform several times the size of the one he had landed on the day before, and when they reached it, there was a vehicle with the Falcon Interworks logo awaiting them.
In spite of having already seen it, Jenkins was still captivated by the seemingly endless sprawl of Chengdou’s myriad ring-shaped sub-sectors. Three hundred million humans, living in what he considered miserably cramped conditions, formed the beating heart of Terra Han.
And some had convincingly argued that Terra Han was the beating heart of the Republic.
Jenkins put those thoughts from his mind as he entered the aircar and quickly made eye contact with its pilot: a woman whose features were identical to those of the docent who had greeted him.
He looked back and forth between them with a wan smile. “I thought cloning was forbidden under Terran law?”
“We are not clones,” the pilot replied while the docent smiled mischievously. “And neither are our fourteen sisters.”
“Early embryonic division.” Jenkins nodded knowingly as he sat down in the aircar’s seat.
“Technically not cloning,” the docent agreed, taking the seat across from him.
“And therefore not illegal,” the pilot added as the aircar lifted off from the platform and began its journey toward one of the outermost rings of Chengdou.
Jenkins knew about the various loopholes and legal trickery Terra Han had employed since its founding. Ever since the wormholes had gone offline, cutting the colonies off from Sol, the far-flung human settlements needed to expand far faster than the human norm. Even the more aggressively-reproductive families produced only five or six children, which was nowhere near enough to establish fully self-sufficient societies on the disparate Terran-colonized worlds.
New America and New Australia had adopted particularly clever reimbursement schemes which rewarded the parents of productive children with a relatively small portion of their offspring’s earnings. Such reimbursements were exceptionally clever in that they were only collected if the children thought their parents deserved them.
The social fabric had been strengthened to unprecedented levels as a result, with each generation taking an active interest in every facet of all others, and families began rightfully viewing the role of full-time parent as one of the most productive careers they could pursue. New Australia and New America had revolutionized the redistribution of wealth from one population to another, and the government was no longer concerned with cross-distributing effort from one geographically-defined community to another, but rather from one generationally-defined community to another. It was an overhaul of epic proportions and had transformed the way many Terrans viewed their roles in society.
Terra Han approached the situation from a different angle.
Built on the most Earth-like planet in the entire Republic, Terra Han had enjoyed major advantages in its early establishment and advances. Technology developed on Earth needed little modification to function here and, as a result, the early inhabitants were able to hit the ground running. Industrial-scale fusion plants were up in weeks, not years, and biotech corporations anchored their interests on Terra Han to take advantage of the early infrastructure edge. This gave Terra Han’s residents access to the best medicine and food in all non-Solar human-controlled space.
One of the key developments of Terra Han’s early society was safe, cheap access to artificial wombs. No longer were men and women required to pair up in order to procreate. On Terra Han, for the cost of an average year’s salary, anyone could purchase an artificial womb and install it in their home. Some of the more expensive models were the size of a backpack and could even be carried around without fear of harming the developing child within.
Taking advantage of these reproductive amplifiers, Terra Han’s government spun its propaganda machine into overdrive. Everyone was encouraged to participate in the act of procreation, with the government going so far as to subsidize womb purchases or leases for those deemed likely to be high-quality parents. For those not so fortunate, artificial wombs were still readily accessible and relatively cheap, with financing available at reasonable interest rates.
The early days of this wide-open reproductive marketplace featured “genetic material” exchanges where anyone could submit his or her genes for inspection, grading, and rank order. Limitations were imposed
on the number of offspring any individual person could author through the system, but the marketplace made the process of acquiring genetically-compatible donor material far easier—and less cryptic—than anything humanity had previously known.
In just a few decades, nearly all genetic diseases had been wiped out—not by forced eugenics, but by the revelation of the cold, hard reality of what every person’s genes contained. Some called it inhuman, others a necessary step that neatly avoided the issues of direct genetic modification, a crime on par with cloning. Darwin would have considered it a warped process of natural selection, probably condemning it as unnatural.
Careful selection and pairing of donors eventually saw the incidence of predisposition to hereditary diseases plummet to near-zero. Things like diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and even many of the worst kinds of mental illness all but vanished in Terra Han’s earliest “home-grown” children or, as they are less flatteringly referred to, “can kids” (an epithet often hurled at Terra Han’s citizens by certain antisocial sub-communities in the Solarian Republic). Life spans increased, health care needs declined, and productivity skyrocketed for all of Terra Han’s citizens. The system was so successful that eventually all Terran colonies had genetic databases and exchanges, although none permitted the freedom and aggressive trading that Terra Han encouraged.
The result? In less than two centuries, Terra Han’s initial population of four hundred thousand had exploded to over a billion.
In truth, in his early life, Jenkins had considered moving from New America to Terra Han so he could independently raise a child under the system, but that had been before he met the woman who became his wife.