by CH Gideon
“Enemy warships are moving off,” Tactical reported. “They’re sending retrieval craft to collect the life pods.”
“Transmit on standard hailing frequencies that we will not fire on them during rescue operations,” Guan declared with another disdainful sigh.
“Dietrich Bonhoeffer is transmitting a similar message, Captain,” the comm stander said promptly.
“The Bonhoeffer has significant damage to its forward hull, Captain,” Sensors reported. “They’re showing engine damage and are leaking breathable gases.”
“Inform Bonhoeffer Actual we will deploy our mechs and assume a support posture as needed,” Captain Guan replied before swiveling his chair toward Jenkins. “It would appear our drop window has just been opened, Colonel Jenkins. We will be in position to deploy Clover Battalion in four hours and six minutes.”
“We’ll be ready,” Jenkins said with a confident nod, knowing that for the first time in years, he would be directly linked to his own mech during combat instead of relying on Chaps. Chaps was the better Jock, but Jenkins would have been lying if he’d denied that he was eagerly anticipating the chance to clear his own guns.
He checked the planetary sensor feeds and felt his heart catch in his throat at the staggering amount of fire being exchanged down there.
His people needed him—perhaps now more than ever—but for the moment all he could do was sit back and watch the battle unfold.
16
Xi Bao, Goddess of War
The sky above Elvira was a special circle of hell, ablaze with the clash of weapons hundreds of meters above the Brick’s surface. Waves of inbound enemy missiles were intercepted by Trapper’s dug-in defensive platforms and the constantly-moving mechs of Dragon Brigade. The conflagration was equally glorious and terrifying.
Thousands of rounds of intercepting fire pierced the sky, scrubbing dozens of missiles and sending their wreckage to the rust-colored surface in a seemingly endless rain of shrapnel. Each of the incoming missiles was powerful enough to destroy all but the mightiest mechs in the brigade or to kill a fortified nest and its team of Pounders. Every shot counted, every position was vital, and every Terran on the Brick acted like they were part of a single vicious, insatiable engine of war with Captain Xi Bao at its head.
Xi had never felt so alive in her entire life.
“Permission to activate the Mole Hill,” requested Winters as 3rd Company’s mechs engaged inbound missiles with counterfire.
“Negative, Generally,” Xi replied as she cleared Elvira’s guns on a four-vehicle Finjou formation to the south, which was part of the same group Blink Dog had reported crossing the line earlier. “Hold the Mole Hill until they’ve put birds in the air.”
“Incoming fire density is getting heavy,” Winters said tersely, and she didn’t need to look at the feeds to know he was right. She could feel it almost subconsciously as she processed the incoming streams of information. It had nothing to do with the neural linkage, and everything to do with peripheral awareness. For the first time in her life, Xi Bao was one with the battlefield. “They’re going to start sneaking some through, Captain,” he added grimly.
“Understood, Lieutenant,” she said tightly, bracketing a second four-vehicle formation with eight SRMs and loosing them from Elvira’s tubes. “You have your orders.”
“Copy that,” Winters acknowledged coldly as his people shot missile after missile from the sky. The enemy understood the importance of the lowlands where 3rd Company had dug in just as well as Xi did and had diverted fully half its arsenal toward Winters’ position. Winters’ mechs scrambled in seemingly erratic patterns, evading what little artillery and ‘dumb-fire’ came their way.
Elvira’s artillery shells struck the ground in front of their targets, but both were near-misses that caused significant damage to the lightly-armored vehicles. Thus far, none of the Finjou ground vehicles had opened fire with anything bigger than anti-personnel weaponry, which only served to amplify her concern. She was beginning to think they either carried nukes or some form of knife-range-only weaponry she did not want to let into range.
Her SRMs slammed home, faring better than the artillery strikes with two of the eight missiles cratering their targets and two more near-missing to devastating effect.
The first enemy missile touched down on Winters’ position, near-missing Cleaver close enough to scorch the battlewagon’s paint. A second missile went wider, throwing a shower of dust and debris onto Winters’ company-command mech, Generally.
But the third to land struck true, annihilating the flat-bodied quadrupedal recon-grade Gecko, leaving only its stern quarter intact.
Trapper’s people sent a dozen outbound SRMs streaking toward a distant enemy formation. The missiles were mostly intercepted by those vehicles’ counterfire, but one snuck through and eliminated an enemy vehicle in a shower of molten debris.
On the southern quadrant of the field, Blink Dog was still hunkered down behind the plateau Xi had ordered it toward. He had a clear line of sight on the two remaining vehicles from the formation she had struck with her SRMs, and his voice predictably came over the line. “Requesting permission to engage Targets Two-Two and Two-Three, Captain.”
“Negative, Blink Dog,” she replied shortly, pausing mid-sentence to clear her guns on the flagging vehicles. “I’ve got them. Stay in cover until I call you out.”
“Acknowledged,” Blinky said, his voice taut with eager anticipation.
“Captain Xi.” Ford’s voice crackled in her ear. “I’ve got Captain Chow confirming status.”
“Confirmed, Forktail,” Xi called down as the first enemy missiles touched down nearby, hammering an anti-missile nest manned by four Pounders. “I’ll call for him when he’s needed. These birdbrains haven’t made a serious move for second base yet. We’re still just necking. Hold fast.”
Another enemy missile impacted, this one near-missing a missile battery. Heedless of their near-death experience, that battery’s crew sent four anti-missile rockets streaking skyward. Two of them intercepted more inbound ordnance.
The initial wave passed, which meant a second wave was imminent. Her people had done well, but it was far from over. One of the last Finjou missiles to touch down wrecked Grasshopper, a recon mech assigned to 2nd Company. Surprisingly the crew reported in as alive a few seconds after their mech died.
Two dozen icons appeared on the edge of Elvira’s sensor range, streaking in at speeds exceeding two thousand kilometers per hour. This was it: they were bypassing second and heading straight for third with a devastating aerial strike.
“All right, fuckers,” Xi snarled, “my turn.” She raised the aerospace fighter commander. “Captain Chow, intercept inbound bogeys.”
No sooner had she uttered the last syllable than eight of Chow’s aerospace fighters’ engines ignited beneath them. Pointed skyward like rockets, which was precisely how they had landed after transferring from the Bonhoeffer to the Brick’s surface, the sleek aerospace fighters lifted off and raced to intercept the enemy craft.
The aerospace fighters, which were versatile enough to operate in either void or atmospheric conditions, would need to rely almost completely on their rocket motors for thrust.
Judging by the inbound Finjou craft profile, they were driving their birds at max burn too, which meant that Chow’s people might have a slight but tactically significant edge in maneuverability.
Xi switched to a channel specifically linked to only those mechs with railguns. “Railroaders, charge your capacitors but hold fire until your solutions are greater than ninety percent. Let Chow and his people make the first pass,” she instructed, her thumb wavering on the launch control for the last six of her Blue Boy interceptor missiles. “We’ll clean up the rest.”
The Finjou were an avian species that heavily emphasized aerial superiority in all recorded engagements. Their ground forces were mostly for support and cleanup, which meant that the encroaching vehicles she and her people were still bracke
ting were likely not the main attack.
Those two dozen inbound bogeys, on the other hand, probably packed enough firepower to end the battle in a single pass.
She noted that Bahamut Zero, aside from adding to the general interceptor fire, had not yet engaged the enemy. A greater show of support she could not imagine receiving than to have the most decorated warrior in the Metal Legion stand down while she conducted the battle.
Chow’s fighters sped off, breaking into four pairs as they neared intercept range. The inbound bogeys responded with a perfectly choreographed split-wing maneuver, breaking into four sub-groups of their own.
The icon representing Sam Kolt flashed, and Xi’s tactical readout populated with the report of weapons fire. A bolt of pure Terran fury leapt from the Kolt’s capital-grade railgun, vaporizing a pair of inbound bogeys with what was probably the luckiest and best-laid shot Xi would ever witness in real-time.
Xi was about to reprimand him for firing before Chow’s people, but the Sam Kolt’s Jock preempted her. “Targeting solution was 185%, Captain. I couldn’t hold back.”
“We’ll meet after class, Gunslinger,” Xi quipped, making the Jock’s new callsign official by using it in battle. By any reasonable measure, he’d just earned it twice over.
Then Captain Chow’s people engaged the inbound fighter craft and the entire first exchange was decided in one-point-two seconds.
Armed with a pair of railguns each, Chow’s pilots spat sixteen bolts of superheated tungsten at the inbound bogeys. Each went to a different target, and of the sixteen bolts, just five struck true while the rest missed the rolling, twisting enemy aircraft.
In reply, the Finjou unleashed a storm of precise laser fire that tore into the thin fuselages of the Viper-class fighters. Five of the Vipers were struck and two splashed outright, with the other three breaking formation. That left just three of Chow’s fighters on-target as they entered knife-range, and those Terran aircraft unleashed a hail of ninety micro-rockets at the inbound fighters.
With the human craft twisting, rolling, looping and otherwise taking full advantage of the lateral thrust afforded them by their atmospheric engines, they almost totally avoided the second wave of counterfire. Almost, but not quite. One of the three Vipers went into a tailspin, its pilot ejecting less than a second before her craft exploded against the endless sea of rust-red dust.
Then the Terran micro-rockets arrived with devastating force.
The Finjou countermeasures were exceptional, sniping sixty-eight of the ninety rockets from the air. But the remaining twenty-two slammed home, scrapping twelve of the remaining twenty-two Finjou craft as the enemy birds finally reached optimal railgun range.
Twenty-one railguns roared at the ten Finjou aircraft, sending hypervelocity projectiles skyward at the precise moment the Finjou dropped eight missiles apiece. Four of the enemy craft were sniped by railgun fire, while the remaining six pulled up and burned for low orbit.
“Oh no, you don’t,” Xi growled, activating a special link-up that the Zero’s technicians had completed for her less than an hour earlier.
Six of the original thirty-nine fortified installations DuPont’s people had built on this hemisphere remained after the combined Terran-Finjou effort to remove them, but each of those six was armed with four low-orbit-capable interceptor missiles, which Xi primed for launch with the flick of a switch. Three seconds later those missiles erupted from the ground, burning toward the fleeing Finjou fighters.
Rising skyward, the first of the interceptor missiles would take two minutes to reach their fleeing targets, which made them less than effective at their designed purpose. Xi didn’t need them to hit their targets, though. She just needed them to press the Finjou skyward, where they would come under the Bonhoeffer’s guns if they didn’t turn back and risk her battalion’s ground-fire.
She switched her focus back to the inbound flight of eighty enemy missiles, which set off a series of alarms as the Terran sensors picked up indications that there were tactical nukes among those warheads.
Xi switched to Generally’s direct line and barked, “Activate the Mole Hill!”
“Mole Hill active,” he acknowledged. A second later, three hundred anti-missile rockets tore loose from their moorings, on target for the inbound warheads.
The interception would be close, but the entire engagement had been a close-run affair. If just one of the Finjou’s standard twenty-kiloton nukes slipped through, it could potentially destroy a handful of her mechs outright. She had spread her people out to minimize the effect of such weapons, but the broken terrain made it difficult to remain in mutually-supporting positions while also maintaining defensive separation.
“Anti-missile weapons free,” Xi commanded in a raised voice over the battalion-wide. “Fire! Fire! Fire!”
Xi sent eight of Elvira’s anti-missile rockets out to join the Mole Hill’s formidable wave of counterfire, and throughout the brigade, the Legionnaires did likewise, including the Bahamut Zero from the north face. All told, 634 anti-missile rockets streaked through the Brick’s tortured, smoke-filled atmosphere to meet the Finjou warheads.
When the first nuke erupted overhead, the world around Xi’s neural-linked senses exploded into absolute chaos. After a brief moment of overwhelming feedback, Elvira’s neural link cut out, leaving Xi disoriented and gasping for air for reasons not immediately apparent to her.
Then she realized what had happened; one of the enemy’s tactical nukes had touched off on the patch of the southern slope where Elvira was stationed. Her mech’s systems resumed their previous input feeds, and Xi was relieved to see that no permanent damage had been inflicted on the venerable mech.
White Wizard and Leatherhead, however, had been totally annihilated by the blast, which left nothing but a shrapnel-strewn crater to mark their passing.
A frantic check of the converted drop-cans that housed the rebel colonists filled Xi with relief when she saw that while they had been on the edge of the blast zone, the cans had suffered no serious damage from the strike.
Xi saw that another pair of nukes had gone off a few hundred meters above the surface, and the EMPs they had generated had knocked several of the lower-technology mechs’ main systems offline. Her attention immediately snapped to the airborne Finjou craft, which seemed to have decided that taking their chances with the Bonhoeffer was their best bet. Xi had received damage reports from the assault carrier, and it seemed their weaponry had been all but knocked offline. They were having difficulty maintaining station due to engine troubles. She couldn’t count on them to engage the fleeing fighters and, worse yet, it was possible those fighters still packed enough firepower to do serious damage to the already battered warship.
Then, just as she had hoped, the enemy fighters broke formation and peeled back like the skin of a banana. Their new course brought them toward the Brick’s surface again, where they would attempt to evade the inbound interceptors head-on instead of testing the Metal Legion’s flagship.
Before the Finjou had the chance to accelerate out of their turns, the Legion’s ground-based railguns fired in unison, tearing three of the six remaining fighters from the sky and leaving the other three in a panicked flight for their lives.
Which was precisely what Captain Chow and his wingman ended after acquiring target lock with their railguns.
Four railgun bolts sliced through the three remaining Finjou fighters, wiping the sky clean of the enemy aircraft.
“Dragon Actual, this is Wasp One,” Captain Chow’s voice came over the line as two of his fighter craft returned to the floor of the Gash. “We have established air supremacy. Wasp One and Wasp Six are bingo fuel. We’re putting down twenty-two klicks south of your position. We have six hours of life support.”
“Roger, Wasp One,” Xi acknowledged as the pair of aerospace fighters made emergency landings. “I’ve got a vehicle in your region, but we’ll need to cut a path for him first.”
“Take your time, Elvira,” Capta
in Chow replied.
Xi switched to the battalion-wide. “All crews, this is the captain.” She felt a thrill of anticipation as she saw that the encroaching Finjou vehicles had broken and were withdrawing at best speed, so it was with unmasked relish that she gave the next order. “Acknowledge readiness for Heaven Denies formation.”
Acknowledgments flickered across her HUD, showing that only three of the twenty-eight vehicles assigned to countercharge Heaven Denies were down-checked.
Twenty-five is more than enough, she thought fiercely as she queued up Demons & Wizards’ track of the same name as the counterattack.
“Execute Heaven Denies countercharge on my order,” she declared as the shredding metal track filled Elvira’s cabin. “Charge!”
Mechs of the Metal Legion leaped out of their foxholes, easily clearing the ridges behind which they had taken cover from the enemy’s direct-fire weapons.
Elvira was not the fastest mech on the field and the Finjou vehicles were capable of out-pacing her, but her position gave her the unique ability to address both the southern and western approaches. Both of which were rich with fleeing Finjou vehicles, only one of which Xi intended to fire on.
The Legion had a surprise in store for the Finjou on the western front.
The guns of Dragon Brigade thundered toward the south, dropping shell after shell in the midst of the fleeing Finjou. A handful of direct hits preceded a wave of near-misses, some of which saw Finjou track-based vehicles crash into fresh craters with devastating effect.
Xi sent HE shells downrange to the south while leading her mechs to the west at top speed. Near-misses were all she could manage as the enemy vehicles began evasive maneuvers, zig-zagging erratically to avoid the indirect fire of the Terran artillery.