Space Knights- Last on the Line
Page 20
The sight was one to impress, even Charles, who’d seen plenty both in life and in the media files ferreted from the Quinn library by the house AI. Hundreds of men, still as faceless and mechanical as when he first dropped above them, milled and shouted at one another amongst the squares, some sitting in groups around tall charging stations or caught up in the storm of light and thunder that issued from melees in progress.
Shields hummed to all sides as Laus led them in among the pits. Men in armor, Squires distinctly separated into the three classes, heavies, mediums, and lights, moved about on the packed earth between the pits, and where the shields enclosed them for simulated battle the soldiers maneuvered amongst scorched boulders and the very low depressions formed by almost constant fighting. Black char marks showed where plasma had burnt away what grass had once grown in those pits and glassy half slagged sand marked places plasma lances had attempted to carve through cover to the reach the men hiding behind it. Everywhere there was a taste of soot in the air.
“Have you had any injuries?” Ryker asked as they watched a melee begin. Men sprinted from their starting positions for cover while heavies opened fire. They shot long lances of brilliant plasma across the field that burnt into Charles’ retinas as the gunners hosed the opposing squires. Two lances converged on one heavy gunners and the man fell as the plasma found the chink in his shield where he hadn’t deactivated his own gun soon enough for the shield to seal up in time.
“Not so many as we might. We have them on dummy rounds, even the plasma torches, which means the AI’s are simulating what the shields will do in actual combat should they meet real plasma fire. The plasma is still hot, don’t get me wrong, and there have been some melted components, a few with scarred armor, but the gas is not nearly as dense in the dummy rounds, which makes impact look more dramatic than it really is. Of course it’s hard to simulate a kinetic round.”
On the field the light squires had taken up positions in the low divots and behind boulders to trade fire from carbines that were fed from magazine’s of slugs, bullets that were as close as could be achieved to “shield busters”, incapable of actually punching through the warped space of a shield, but with enough oomph to translate that force straight into the manipulator manifold on most Marain built shields. It meant a managing AI had to put more power into stabilizing thel singularity at the heart of each shield, a black hole smaller than a quark which allowed the shield to manipulate Marain’s natural gravity field to the point it could support the shield’s ion sheath. The shields were designed with safety cut offs, a process that dissipated the singularity by plugging it in a high physics reaction that Charles, and most of his design teams, weren’t fully cognizant of, but the end result was clear enough. If the singularity’s resonance reached a point the containment field couldn’t handle, the shield shut down.
The tech was imported, like many of the methods imported for breaking it, copied from what they’d seen on the battlefield in the Kamele’s first assault, or, like the shields, a transplant from their old combat technology, developed in the war with the Kidawas. The Kamele didn’t carry kinetic rifles like the light squires, at least not that they’d seen, and there was a chance it would prove as effective as throwing Cherubs at them, but they could drive a soldier back if you hit them in the right part of their shield, or cut off a man’s hands if you missed, or blow a turret off a shoulder if you could get an angle down the gun port. So the weapons still had some effect and in the battle in front of them they were serving as the aggressive division of either teams squires.
“We’re playing catch up here.” Laus said as they watched. “The Kamele brought trained troops, experienced, so we can assume, tested in their revolutionary wars with the original Kamele dynasties. If there are a few injuries on the training field, its an injury that won’t be incurred on the battlefield where it will mean men’s lives.”
As the heavies on the field disengaged the huge plasma projectors and hunkered towards cover, the mediums added their instrument’s voice to the song of violence across the training field. Where the lights were meant for up close and personal, the mediums were, theoretically, intended for much longer range than the melee field’s permitted. Precision rifles that partnered with the AI to plant a variety of types of shot through gaps in an enemy’s shield, taking advantage of the chaos caused by all the rest of the guns. The turning, point, if Charles was any judge, between victory and defeat. The sharp edge of the military knife was in those men’s rifles when they were supported by the rest of the infantry, much the way battles amongst automata turned on the effect of the hound’s kinetic weapons while the shock troops served to crack them open for the guns.
Charles tried to imagine Irenaeus amongst them, an anonymous armored figure, pressed into the dirt while solid beams of burning air hosed overhead, kinetics sprayed dirt around him, and explosive bolts from the medium’s gun’s sought the gap the AI used to fire his turret through. He saw a man stiffen when a dummy round pinged off the armor and imagined what his mother would say.
“Have you been keeping a record of technological failures? Training errors?” Charles asked. The real reason he was here.
“We have.We have.” Laus said with a frown. “Not that I’ve had a chance to read them all. Ten thousand AI all monitoring their armor and men, sending reports of a thousand kinds through the command computer. You can understand. If there’s one thing we don’t lack, it’s data.”
“We’re behind the enemy technologically as well as in military experience.” Charles said, turning in his saddle to face the field commander. The scenes of conflict formed a surreal backdrop to Stanislaus’ disgruntled expression. “If we’re going to win this war, we’re going to need recommendations for improvements, upgrades, weapons the kamele haven’t thought of. Anything that might turn the advantage our own way.”
“Surely you don’t expect one man-” Laus began.
“You’ve an army of subordinates.” Falkye said in a smooth tone. “Surely a few of them could offer their opinions to our design staff. We want to win this war, not lose because we weren’t able to think of that one thing to take them off balance, the way they did when they arrived.”
“It’s the real reason we’re here.” Ryker added. “Not to assess your efficiency at running the place, though I admit, I do admire what you’ve accomplished in so little time.”
“Then it will be done.” The field commander said with a proud twist of his hat. “I will assign a group of my most qualified officers to the task. In the meantime, would you like to see the Team Melee field? It’s just ahead, a splendid light show if nothing else. Squires and knights in pitched battles. It may give you some ideas for improvement. I know most of the engineers you sent down here have been scurrying around that quarter pretty much exclusively since they arrived.”
“Show us.” Charles said.
For the next few hours they rode all around the camp, from the latrines to the staff office, a small medical bay where he met a soldier recovering from a snapped tendon when he’d ordered his suit to take him at a speed he wasn’t prepared for, and another whose face had lost the skin along the right side of his face when his suit had absorbed the lightning strobe from a sword improperly so that it arched when he took his helmet off. They watched a team melee, a sword melee, duels, saw the target range where the men trained with real ammunition for an hour or so each day. They sped across the empty pampas between the two camps at two hundred miles per hour and examined the automata pens and talked to the cavalry officers, the men, mostly boys, assigned to accompany the hounds into battle.
Those officers were their one innovation over the Kamele, as far as Charles was concerned. He had no idea how it would turn out, and simulations couldn’t account for the effect human command presence would have on the hounds, but with so many hounds, and so few men, it was an experiment he didn’t think it would hurt to try. By the end, when they’d seen almost everything, Stanislaus led them to a low hill in the kennels t
o look at the enemy camp, visible across the pampas under a shimmering dome a mile or two distant.
“You said that you were a colonial prospector before you were made the war executive for this office.” Charles said to the field commander as they sat astride their mounts and observed the field.
“That’s correct Mr. Quinn. Did my time looking for likely spots and cultivating a community. Buildin it up in the hopes it would be a profit to the company some day.”
“Well it certainly has turned out that way hasn’t it.” Charles said. “I imagine a man who builds a community from our imported diaspora knows people fairly well.”
“Oh certainly. Have to in order to make people happy, or make them think they’ll be happy keeping law and order and organization and everything while they support your family. Make them respect the land, and the lords of it, least ways long as your the lord of it that is.”
“What do they want?” Charles waved to the enemy encampment. “What are they here for?”
“Oh what everybody wants with a corporation I suppose. Power, or more power. Ownership over their piece of the galaxy, same as I want with my city grant.”
“I don’t mean their leaders.” Charles said. “I mean their people. That’s an army over there. Thousands of soldiers by our estimate. What brought all of those individuals to Marain in the first place?”
Laus scratched at the bald spot on the top of his head. “I can’t rightly say. I’d say they might want many things. But chiefly what all men want. A warm bed, a beautiful woman, good food and an easy life. Or in some cases perhaps a life of accomplishment, perhaps a few who sold their swords for power like their leaders, or glory, to hear their own name in tales of courage and bravery, a few looking for adventure, same as our lot, only a lot farther in on the whole deal. Ours can always go home. Theirs, well, they won’t be going back to a place they’d recognize, though it’s not likely they’d know it, not all of them. Not in their hearts. They might still think they’re fighting for home too.”
“Do you think they would sell their swords to us for any of those things? A bed? Money? Power?”
“Mayhaps. Though I’d expect not at the first. Not while their blood is up and they think themselves invincible. It’s an army out there, sure enough, but they’re a long way from home. They’ve got no wives here, no friends, no place to retreat to except back into space, and they’ve got no friends to come to their rescue. They are all that there is going to be. One good fight, one battle in our favor, and they’ll fall apart around the edges. There’s no reason for them to be here. I believe it will show, in the end.”
Of course, if Charles wanted to pick up those tattered edges there would be a need for spies, information on what was going on inside the camp, more than just a city prospector turned commander’s point of view. What did Irenaeus want here, he thought, adventure? Certainly, but he’d also mentioned the family, his place in the world. War was a world everyone could find a place, Charles supposed. Of course, some of those places didn’t want you. Irenaeus would probably make very little difference on the battlefield, but he might make the difference Charles needed in the boardroom by being there.
“And what about me?” He asked the field commander. “What would you say I want?”
“Well, I’d say you want to defend what your father’s built. Same as me.” Laus replied. “You’ve a dynasty here. That’s more than power. That’s blood, and blood runs thicker than water, so it’s said.”
“Is that something our men will fight for? Give their lives for?”
“Ours, oh, aye. They’ve a family here as well. Of course some of them joined up to get away from those families, or for fun. Some of them won’t last so long I’m afeared. But they’ll fight all the same, and a few battles in we’ll weed out the worst of em.”
Irenaeus was trying to run to the war, he and his friends, a place they could fight alongside one another, for one another, the definition of adventure in a way. An adverse venture, a test of who you are. Charles could remember the last time he’d felt like he had a friend, in the year before his brother’s engagement, the slow death of any desire to be around people, his family most of all. Reminders of its impermanence, the futility of all bonds, water or blood. The irony of standing on a hill hoping to defend it all tasted bitter. They would fight all the same. All the same he would fight.
The wind, a gentle reminder of the long arms the southern hurricanes had sent across the Pampas in the winter season, died for a moment and the singing of this strange grass faded. “There’s a fortune to be made in weapons technology from this war.” Charles said turning to Laus. “If we win it. Crash factories won us major contracts after the Kidawa conflict a hundred years ago, improvements to the Kamele designs as well as data on human performance on the battlefield will also mean serious shares in other system corporations that want it. There’s a dynasty in it for you, shares in that technology, if you can give the corporation a victory here on Marain.”
“A Kaczmarek dynasty.” Laus said as though tasting the words. “I do like the sound of that.”
“Then get us that victory.” Charles turned his mount back towards the camp where they’d left the flitter and they made their return in silence.
“One more thing.” Charles said after the field commander had made his farewells and they were climbing onto the aircraft. “I’ve got four dynasty kids who are looking for a way into the war. I’m going to send them to you. Use them to read those reports, send them to watch battles and make reports of their own. No fighting for them though, no weapons training, you understand? I won’t have them killed.” He wouldn’t, at the very least, order them killed.
“Yes sir. I’ll put them to work.”
“One of them is my little brother Laus.” Charles said, looking at him levelly. “They’re young and sharp. They may see what we need to win the war but they’ll also be itching for trouble.”
“I’ll make sure nothing happens to them.” Laus replied.
Charles nodded. “I’ll send them in a few days.”
With that he was in the air and composing his thoughts on what to say to his mother and his brother. Irenaeus would do well here, learn things that no other Quinn was ever going to learn. If the dynasty and the corporation were going to go interstellar on the backs of a military proficiency, perhaps as mercenaries or through leases to battle tested designs, it would need a CEO with experience on the field. Charles would need an heir after all, and he didn’t see a very high likelihood of having one anytime soon. He could do worse than to prepare his brother for the role. He was young enough to be Charles’ son after all. But there was no need to tell him all of that, no need to make it official just yet. Let them win the war first, then think of exporting the Quinn Corporation to the stars. For now he would work on his brother.
Chapter 13: Moses // Running
That night when they were dismissed from the melee fields Moses stayed in his suit and jogged out to the edge of the camp where large shield generator drones bobbed low in the air beneath the semi constant barrage of artillery fire. A few hoppers could still be seen coming and going in the part of the sky that had succumbed to the twilight and turned to night, a few fighting craft dueling along the northern horizon where the mountains carved a ragged edge across the otherwise unbroken flatness of the pampas, yet despite the signs of war, the edge of camp seemed tranquil after a day spent fighting with his suit and his opponents.
“Where are we going?” The AI asked him as they jogged into a stretch of untrampled grass.
“Tell me something.” Moses said. “When we were fighting what was the maximum speed we ever reached?”
“The maximum speed I accelerated you to was fifteen miles per hour.”
“And what is our maximum speed?”
“My maximum speed with an occupant is thirty five miles per hour.”
“We’re going to reach that speed.”
“I find it unadvisable.”
“Argo.”
“Then you’ll need to coach me through it.” Moses said. “I want the speed. I want it now, I want it before we go into battle. Teach me.”
“As you wish.’”
The AI coached him, slowly, while the twilight deepened and his tired limbs beat out a hard rhythm in the grass. There was an art to running smoothly in the suit at high speeds. In the melees he’d run rough and tumble as he charged. His legs got in the way of the suit’s augmentation as he applied too much force or attempted to twist his limbs in mid motion and jerked the action of the motors around each joint. Running a long track around the camp he learned to trust the suit’s controls. He learned to let it run him once he’d set in in motion, to use the small movements required to optimize the suit’s action and to communicate with the AI through his body rather than his voice.
When he stopped trying to push each leg through its steps at the higher speeds, ten and twelve miles per hour according to the AI, the AI told him it would begin to take him to the higher speeds. “Do not try to control your balance.” It warned him. “You must trust me to keep you upright even when we tilt. I have significantly more weight to control than you would be used to, and these speeds are dangerous.”
“Alright.” Moses said. “Take me.”
His legs began to pump faster, then faster, until it felt as though they were going to fly off of him. Grass and rock shot past him, and the feeling that he had been riding the suit swiftly changed to a feeling of being ridden by the suit instead.
“As your legs accelerate you will feel your heart and lungs accelerate to compensate.”