by C H Gideon
“Are you ready?” Oxblood asked, pointedly waving a syringe.
Jenkins wordlessly nodded, knowing that there was no way he could survive the flight without going under a general anesthetic that would reduce his bio-functions sufficiently that he would suffer little physical harm. Oxblood and other courier pilots underwent extensive cybernetic augmentation specifically so they could maintain consciousness for extended periods during flight, but even a courier pilot was unable to withstand the stresses indefinitely.
Human beings simply weren’t designed for high-speed interstellar flight, and until someone finally cracked artificial gravity, it was unlikely that the experience would be any more pleasant than what Lee Jenkins was about to experience.
“As always,” Oxblood explained before injecting the cocktail into a purpose-built port in Jenkins’ suit, “this will take a few minutes to kick in, and when it does, the ship’s life support system will cut the engines out if your vital signs become unstable. We’ll be pushing fifteen gees on this flight, which should last about nineteen hours before we reach the first gate. The second flight to the Nexus will take just four hours. Nod twice if you’re ready.”
Jenkins nodded twice in reply and immediately felt the wave of lethargy wash over him. Everything tingled from his nose to his toes, but in spite of the bizarre feeling, he felt as completely at peace with it as he had the previous three times the doctor-turned-pilot had administered the drugs.
As his consciousness slowly faded, Jenkins was haunted by lingering doubt that he had in fact made the right choice on Terra Han.
8
Negotiations
Elvira’s comm board lit up with an incoming transmission, waking Xi from her hard-earned shuteye. The signal was in the open on standard Terran hailing frequencies, and Xi rubbed her tired, itchy eyes before focusing more intently on the signal’s characteristics.
The battalion was on comm blackout save for misinformation broadcasts and P2P linkage, which meant either someone was breaking protocol…
Or someone else on the planet was trying to contact her.
She switched to the inbound channel and hesitated before opting to forward the exchange to the rest of the battalion via the P2P. “This is Captain Xi Bao, commander of the Terran Armor Corps currently deployed on this world. Who is this?”
“My name is Jean-Philippe DuPont the Fourth,” came the reply in a decidedly French accent. “You have invaded our home world and attacked our defensive installations without provocation. Why do you come here? We’ve done nothing to the Terran people. We simply wish to be left alone.”
“Your presence here is a violation of multiple interstellar treaties, Mr. DuPont,” Xi retorted, fighting down the urge to mention the sixty-one Terran men and women who had already died on the Brick, most of them because of his people. “The Terran government has treated with this world’s human inhabitants on no fewer than thirty-two occasions to facilitate your withdrawal, but those efforts have not produced the emigration of a single member of your community.”
“This is our home, Captain Xi Bao,” DuPont said fiercely. “You are invaders who destroyed one of our most important defensive installations without receiving so much as an active sensor-sweep in your direction.”
“You failed to respond to our official hails,” Xi shot back, “and Terran Armed Forces protocol for situations like this are clear, Mr. DuPont: while outside Terran territory, the failure of Terran citizens to respond to an official communique from duly-recognized representatives of the Terran Republic must be viewed as an act of rebellion. Your people have covered half this planet with installations like the one we were forced to deal with, and we were unable to establish a secure position without neutralizing that facility.”
“You bureaucrats are all alike,” DuPont snarled. “You think that with writs and waivers you can coerce compliance from people who want nothing more than to be left alone. And when your paper-waving fails to convince people who disagree with your authority, you abandon any pretense of civility and open fire. What you cannot take by intimidation, you take by bloody force.”
“The Terran Republic has authorized Armor Corps to secure this planet and facilitate the evacuation of its inhabitants, Mr. DuPont. And talking of force, you had an excessive amount of firepower available to you, the purchase of which violated a number of interstellar laws,” Xi said, her face flush with anger at the man’s absurd suggestion that she of all people was a pen-wielding pencil-neck bureaucrat who sought to curtail the freedoms of others. “As the ranking Armor Corps officer on the ground, my orders in this matter are clear. I suggest you cooperate so we can find a peaceful resolution to this situation. No one else needs to die.”
A lengthy pause ensued. “I am disinclined to oblige your demand, especially since it comes at gunpoint, but my people insist that I meet with you and listen to what you have to say. They would have never believed that fellow Terrans would come here to destroy what we have worked so hard to build, but your hostilities have had some fraction of the desired effect upon them. I am transmitting coordinates for a meeting place where we may discuss this matter in person. But I warn you,” DuPont’s voice rose sharply, “if you are determined to fight, I will demonstrate my willingness to oblige that particular impulse. Be there in fourteen hours. Alone.”
The channel went dead, and she heard Gordon chuckle from the Wrench’s station. “How are you going to play this, Captain?”
Xi smirked. “With every bit as much sincerity as Mr. DuPont. But we’re here to safeguard the dig-site. If that means hanging a little ass in the wind to buy some time, that’s precisely what we’ll do.”
“You’re not seriously going to march down there alone?” Gordon scoffed.
“I said ‘a little ass,’ Chief,” she chided as she prepared an official missive to the Bonhoeffer’s CIG. “Not the whole thing.”
After a thirteen-hour slog across the Brick’s broken terrain, the Scorpion-class mech arrived at the meeting site with less than ten minutes to spare. The site was a crater four kilometers in diameter, likely made sometime in the last half-million years. It was the perfect spot for an ambush, but the Bonhoeffer’s sensors showed no recent activity anywhere near the crater.
Still, the pop-up artillery embankments and missile launchers had also eluded the Bonhoeffer’s scans, so it was possible the crater had been turned into a kill-box by the renegade colonists. As Xi guided the mech to the center of the depression, she saw no sign of the other party through the vehicle’s various sensors.
“Come on,” Xi muttered, biting her lip as a peculiar bit of feedback in her neural link sent an unwelcome buzz up and down her body. “Come out, come out, wherever you are…”
“Negative contacts, Captain,” reported Gordon as the timer counted down to three minutes to go before the fourteen hours expired. “They’re not going to show.”
“A bottle of Koch’s worst says they arrive on schedule,” Xi challenged.
Gordon scoffed. “Koch’s best is barely fit for human consumption. No way I’d agree to down a whole bottle of the worst. For a gearhead, he’s not very good at brewing moonshine.”
“I understand,” Xi quipped. “Your mouth’s bigger than your stomach. I’ll be sure to bear that in mind.”
“Fine, fine.” Gordon sighed. “You’ve got two minutes and eight seconds before you have to down the damned thing.”
“Done,” Xi agreed, and they waited while the countdown neared zero. As it did, the mech sat motionless to spare Xi the discomfort of the neural link’s bizarre feedback sensation. Doing so left the vehicle exposed and unresponsive, but if she was right about Mr. DuPont’s intentions, it wouldn’t matter whether the mech was combat-ready or completely shut down.
When the clock hit zero, Xi reactivated the linkage. “This is Captain Xi of the Terran Armor Corps’ Dragon Brigade. By my watch, the fourteen hours are up, so unless you keep time differently down here—“
“I’m reading something—” Go
rdon reported urgently before the Scorpion-class mech was enveloped in a blinding flash of light. Radiological alarms went off, indicating the crater had just been hit by a low-yield nuclear explosion of about sixty kilotons. When the dust settled, nothing was left of the Armor Corps vehicle which had occupied the crater’s center but a field of half-molten shrapnel.
Xi ran a series of confirmation checks on the sensor feeds, and the initial findings were validated. A nuclear device had indeed destroyed the mech, although it had been the damaged Devil Crab 2 and not Elvira.
“Bonhoeffer Control, this is Dragon Actual,” Xi called over the secure P2P. “Execute Operation Ares Descendant. Confirm.”
“Dragon Actual, this is Bonhoeffer Actual,” came the stern voice of Colonel Li. “We are green for Ares Descendant and awaiting your mark.”
She flashed secure instructions to the rest of the battalion, with every vehicle promptly acknowledging readiness to proceed. “This is Dragon Actual,” she declared with relish as she prepared to send the fire order to her people. “Ares Descendant on my mark: three…two…one…mark.”
The Dietrich Bonhoeffer, having dipped to the lowest permitted altitude above the red surface of the Brick, reoriented itself until its primary weapons arrays were trained on a pair of hidden fortresses like the one the battalion had destroyed a few days earlier.
When the Assault Carrier’s weapons were on-target, they unleashed their pent-up fury on the world below.
Capital-grade railguns tore into the hillocks and mountains that housed a pair of mutually-supportive fortifications even more robust than those Xi’s people had already neutralized. The thin atmosphere was torched by the bolts of hyper-velocity tungsten that left billowing trails of brownish smoke in their wake before they slammed into the surface of the planet with kiloton upon kiloton of raw destructive force. Like chain gun rounds slowly but surely drilling through a half-meter of solid steel, each railgun strike dug deeper than the last into the thick layer of rock.
Explosions rippled across the ground surrounding the pair of heavily-fortified installations, indirectly confirming the presence of a vast subterranean power grid that suffered catastrophic failure under the Bonhoeffer’s guns. Hundreds of kilotons of explosive force were released when fusion reactors failed spectacularly, sending geysers of stone and dust several kilometers into the pale-blue sky.
Precisely three seconds after the first railgun strikes kissed the Brick’s ruddy crust, Dragon Brigade unleashed a hail of extended-range artillery, MRMs, and LRMs on secondary targets surrounding the main fortresses.
In reply, twenty-nine rebel anti-orbital missiles surged upward from concealed silos, soaring with murderous intent toward the Bonhoeffer, which continued to bombard the fortresses with hypervelocity spears of death.
The Metal Legion’s mech-based railguns tore into the volley of missiles, rending eleven of them from the sky before they reached three kilometers’ altitude. Xi would have sent interceptor missiles after the rest, but the Bonhoeffer’s CIG had denied her the chance.
His people were going to show the rebels what they were capable of. And frankly, Xi was excited to see how they acquitted themselves.
All sixty of the Bonhoeffer’s void fighters were on sortie in preparation for Ares Descendant and the rebels’ predictable counterattack. Roving in squadrons of four, the void fighters buzzed around the Bonhoeffer’s position like hornets patrolling their nest as the missiles surged upward. Each rebel missile was capable of carrying a warhead powerful enough to destroy the assault carrier outright.
Without breaking formation or even seeming to acknowledge the approaching engines of death, the void fighters unleashed interceptor rockets that raced down to meet the upcoming missiles.
The rockets were laughably small in comparison to the intercontinental-range missiles, measuring just under a tenth the length and less than one percent the mass of the larger would-be ship-killers. A single interceptor rocket slotted in against each of the eighteen remaining missiles, showing either careless disregard for the dangerous missiles or absolute confidence in the rockets’ efficacy.
As Xi’s ground-based ordnance began to tear into the silos and other hidden weapon placements, the void fighters’ rockets validated the latter.
The interceptors collided with their targets in devastating if anticlimactic fashion. No nuclear flares swept across the sky, and only a pair of fiery explosions registered on Elvira’s visual feeds. One by one, and with ruthless precision, the rebel missiles were scrubbed from the board until it was as though the enemy counterattack never happened.
Then, just as the last of Dragon Brigade’s ordnance fell upon its targets, the Dietrich Bonhoeffer provided the period to the end of the sentence.
And it did so in truly terrifying fashion.
A lone missile was launched from the orbiting assault carrier, and it fell toward the Brick with a seemingly peculiar target: the same crater where Devil Crab 2 had been scrapped.
The missile’s primary motors engaged, igniting a trail of plasma several times as long as the missile. The nose of the weapon turned red, then orange, then white as it drove through the Brick’s thin atmosphere. Like the spear of the Archangel Michael, made to deliver God’s wrath, the weapon plunged toward the ruined crater.
In the final seconds of the missile’s flight, Xi winced in spite of herself at what was to come. One hundred and four meters above the ground, the weapon exploded in a miniature nova that made the rebels’ sixty kiloton device look like a firecracker.
Even the thin atmosphere collapsed against itself, forming layer after layer of compressed gas as a faint but distinct mushroom cloud roared skyward, and the blast wave swept the ground clean for kilometers in all directions. Fifty megatons of fusion-powered fury permanently transformed the bowl-shaped crater that had previously featured so prominently on the Brick’s chaotic solar-wind-blasted landscape. It was overkill, and anyone with functioning eyeballs knew it.
That was the point.
The rebels had thought they would break Armor Corps’ resolve by deploying a thermonuclear device, but that bomb had only been a tenth of a percent as destructive as the device delivered by the Bonhoeffer. In this latest display of resolve, neither side had backed down from its former position, and Armor Corps had significantly raised the stakes.
She keyed up the hailing frequencies and threaded her voice with iron. “I trust you’ll believe me when I reiterate that the Terran Armor Corps is absolutely committed to this mission, Mr. DuPont. We’re here to oversee the evacuation of every living Terran from this rock in accordance with interstellar law, and that’s precisely what we’ll do. You’ve got twelve hours to think about exactly how you want the rest of your time here to be spent and, if you’re capable, to think about what everyone who looks up to you wants. Dragon Actual, out.”
“I know I’m supposed to be stoic,” Gordon said with an awestruck tremble in his voice, “but that sent chills down my spine…and I don’t think it was for all the right reasons.”
“Ditto,” she replied, torn between satisfaction at a job well done and the fear of irrational people turning this situation into a mass slaughter.
She had discussed Ares Descendant with both General Akinouye and Colonel Li, and while they had initially advised a less severe immediate escalation, she had won them over. Her reasoning had been based on the psychosocial makeup of men like DuPont, who would rather martyr themselves than give up on the things they had worked so hard to build. By letting him live but destroying his world, the odds would skew back to their favor that he’d surrender. She felt for him, but the Terran presence on the Brick was one of many factors which could contribute to an interstellar war between the reclusive Finjou and the Terran Republic.
And right now, the Republic needed as few enemies as possible.
She cut the line and called up to the Bonhoeffer on P2P. “Bonhoeffer Control, Dragon Actual. Ares Descendant is complete. Remind me to buy Gunnery a fresh cow to cook up
,” she said, venturing outside the bounds of strict comm discipline since she decided it was important to express her appreciation for their expert and crucial support.
The pause that followed was agonizing, but after eight of the longest seconds in her life, the inflectionless reply finally came back. “Dragon Actual, Bonhoeffer Control. Standing down and resuming geostationary overwatch. Havoc says, ‘Don’t forget the Worcestershire.’ Bonhoeffer Control, out.”
The line went dark, and Xi laughed in genuine surprise at the reply. She suddenly felt as though half the weight on her shoulders had been lifted. It made no sense to the rational side of her mind that she should feel that way. Nothing had changed on the ground, but knowing that the men and women in the sky over her head were with her bolstered her spirits in an unexpected way.
The Bonhoeffer’s P2P resumed, and when she accepted the connection, she was greeted by Podsy’s voice. “Dragon Actual, have you got a minute?”
“Affirmative, Lieutenant,” she replied warily. “What is it?”
“I found something in the sensor logs you need to see,” Podsy said, and the grim tone of his voice was so uncharacteristic that all of Xi’s previous elation vanished instantly. “I’m forwarding it now.”
Her screen populated with a stream of data, which took her a few moments to digest before she understood what she was looking at.
The data featured flight profiles of the missiles that the Bonhoeffer’s Combat Interceptor Patrol, or CIP, had destroyed with their impressively simple-but-effective counter-rockets. The acceleration numbers and apparent fuel consumption of the anti-orbital platforms’ motors were highlighted, and those figures were connected to others found on a series of attached technical diagrams.
It took her nine seconds to understand Podsy’s meaning, at which point her teeth clenched in a mixture of anger and surprise.
“Those motors…” she muttered over the secure line to Podsy. “They’re not Terran tech. They’re Solarian!”