by CH Gideon
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 increasingly 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.
Jenkins shook the thought from his mind as the aircar merged with a lane of flying traffic several hundred meters above the tallest buildings in the central-most rings of Chengdou. His eyes scanned the sharp cheekbones of the car’s pilot and the woman wearing the astronomical cheongsam. He had no way of knowing if they were in fact sisters cultivated from a common fertilized egg or if they were clones whose life had been granted through an outlawed process.
For that matter, he had no idea if either of them was the same woman he had met the day before. And it was that thought which he came to suspect was the Chairman’s purpose in having them escort him to his destination.
Nothing here is what it appears, he thought, understanding Kong’s message. It was far from a comforting notion, but it was at least mildly reassuring that the Chairman was taking sufficient interest in their negotiations to pass him such a subtle note.
The aircar dipped, merging into an even more heavily-trafficked lane of flying vehicles. Traveling at speeds in excess of two hundred kph and completely unobstructed by traffic, it did not take long to reach Sector Nine of the Jingzhou District.
Located in one of the industrial parks squeezed between a quartet of ring communities, Jingzhou district featured towering exhaust stacks that served to purify the power plants’ emissions and cool them before they were released back into the atmosphere. For all the human activity in and around Chengdou, the air was immaculate, cleaner than even that of Jenkins’ native New America. For all their potentially objectionable social programs, Terra Han’s inhabitants took pristine care of their planet and had no reservations in reminding the rest of the Republic’s colonies that none of them surpassed Terra Han’s dedication to preserving the environment.
As the aircar gently lowered to the ground, Jenkins sighted a trio of men wearing the uniforms of Terra Han’s Colonial Guard, a supporting branch of the Terra Han PDF. One was a major, the others lieutenants. As Jenkins stepped out of the car, the major stepped forward.
The square-jawed, blue-eyed man greeted him with a salute. “Lieutenant Colonel Jenkins, I’m Major John Brighton, Terra Han Colonial Guard.”
“Major Brighton.” Jenkins returned the salute.
“These men,” Major Brighton turned, “are with the Guard’s Special Projects team. Lieutenant Chin,” he gestured to the shorter of the two before addressing the taller, thinner man, “and Lieutenant Matsuzaka.”
“Lieutenants,” Jenkins acknowledged with a nod. “I don’t mean to be curt, Major, but I’d prefer we get down to business.”
“Of course, Colonel.” Brighton gestured to a nearby building. “This way, sir.”
He followed the trio while the Falcon Interworks escort remained on the landing pad. The building before them was a standard low-rent concrete structure like those which housed thousands of mid-sized factories throughout the Terran Republic. The door was already open as they approached, and the building’
s interior was revealed to be a vast nearly-empty warehouse, a pair of vehicles at the far end the only feature.
“Follow me, Colonel,” Brighton urged as he led them the length of the building to where the vehicles waited.
One was a track-based light-duty vehicle not unlike some of the mechs Jenkins had deployed on Durgan’s Folly. Twin anti-personnel chain guns, a nine-kilo main cannon, and a pair of bolt-on SRM tubes were fixed to the stern. All in all, a fairly meager piece of machinery compared to the gear Jenkins had fielded on Shiva’s Wrath and what Captain Xi presently commanded on the Brick.
The other was more promising, but not by much. A versatile humanoid mech designed in the early days of Terra Han, it was a hybrid capable of urban pacification or battlefield support work. Its official design name was “Jackrabbit” due to the long reverse-kneed legs and the pair of versatile weapon mounts situated above its head, which to some apparently resembled backward-sweeping rabbit ears. But without modern protective armor, neither of these mechs would be much use to the Metal Legion as anything but support vehicles, and overhauling their armor would be expensive and time-consuming.
“These have seen better days,” Jenkins remarked as Brighton led him past the pair of outdated weapon systems.
“Yes, sir,” Major Brighton agreed before arriving at a patch of nondescript concrete floor behind the vehicles. He keyed in a command to his wrist-link and the seemingly ordinary floor parted at a nearly invisible seam to reveal a dimly-illuminated vehicle-grade lift platform measuring nearly thirty meters across.