by CH Gideon
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—” Gordon 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 th
e 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!”
“Affirmative, Captain,” Podsy agreed darkly. “And I’m guessing they’re not the only bits of equipment the rebels have that we’ll trace back to Sol.”
“Lock this information down immediately and go directly to the general,” Xi ordered; technically she was permitted to issue direct orders to Podsy. His capacity aboard the Bonhoeffer was more of a liaison between Dragon Brigade and the ship than an official crewman, which meant that he fell into a decidedly gray area in terms of where his link went in the chain of command.
“Yes, Captain,” he replied, and something in his voice told Xi that he would need to be brought into the loop on the Jemmin conspiracy sooner rather than later. That particular call was above her pay grade, though. Either the general or Colonel Jenkins would need to decide whether or not Podsy could be included. For now, all she could do was send him directly to the brass and let them decide.
After the line went dead, she raised Styles via a P2P relay established at Trapper’s base camp on the Gash’s southern slope. It took over half a minute before the Chief Warrant Officer finally replied, “Styles here, Captain.”
“Lock this line down,” she urged, closing the hatch behind her to keep Gordon from hearing the upcoming conversation.
“Stand by,” Styles acknowledged, and a few seconds later his image appeared on her screen as he took a seat inside an APC’s cab. “All right, Captain, this is as secure as I can make it down here.”
“I’m forwarding a data packet for you to review,” she explained, squirting the data to him. “Reply once you see the link.”
Unsurprisingly, it took Styles less time than Xi to recognize the meaning of the data, but his eyes went as wide as hers had when he did. “Is this accurate?”
“Podsy cross-checked every available telemetry feed on their flight paths,” she said grimly. “It’s accurate.”
The chief leaned back in the APC’s co-pilot chair and contemplatively rubbed his forehead. “This complicates things…maybe a lot.”
“I agree.” She nodded, wondering if she would have touched off the mega-nuke had she known the Solarians were somehow involved with the rebels on the Brick.
Much to her satisfaction, that particular doubt was short-lived and cast aside as soon as it arose.
“Ok, we’re going to need to call down fresh supplies,” Styles explained. “Solarian missile tech is decades ahead of ours, which means anti-Jemmin systems are the first order of business. And ever since Chairman Xing’s ‘One Star’ speech back in the mid-twenty-first, Sol’s government has had a nasty history of deploying bioweapons when things don’t go their way. We’ll need antivirals, quarantine gear, disinfection booths…”
Xi shuddered as he rattled off
the list of supplies. She recalled shocking stories of Sol’s government deploying targeted hemorrhagic viruses against its own citizens during some of the more contentious rebellions that came while the wormholes were down. The entire Europa colony had been wiped out by such an attack, and half of Mars’ population of eight million had died from a similar “outbreak” that could have never occurred without the government’s complicity or outright sponsorship.
“…and above all, we’re going to have to lock down our people even tighter than we did back on Shiva’s Wrath,” Styles finished, his fear-filled voice hardening with each word until he was once again speaking like a calm, seasoned professional rather than an understandably terrified person contemplating death by hemorrhagic fever.
“No breathable atmosphere on the Brick,” Xi quipped, “which means it shouldn’t be too hard to keep the doors shut. Forward the new requisitions and I’ll send them up to Chief Rimmer ASAP.”
Styles nodded. “I’ll have the rough outline in five minutes, and detailed forms in twenty.”
“Good work, Chief,” Xi acknowledged. “Sometimes it sucks to be the only ones who know things.”
9
Eviction Notice
After a meeting with the general which boiled down to orders along the lines of “Try to keep a lid on the Solarian angle as long as possible, kid,” Podsy was hard at work packing the latest round of requisitions into the cans. As the crews went about their work, there was an air of tension throughout the compartment. The drop-deck was generally the last group on the Bonhoeffer to receive intel updates, but after receiving the latest revisions to their drop schedule, it didn’t take a genius to figure out the possible reasons for the latest changes.