Absen watched with mixed feelings as the Aerospace missile strikes went home against the orbital weapons platforms. He’d ordered the missile fusing to detonate them farther away than normal in hopes of just knocking them out and sparing at least some survivors. He was less conflicted as weapons struck the three moon-based Meme command centers, vaporizing them in bright expanding balls of stripped ions and particles. Those were manned mostly by Purelings. “Excellent,” he said aloud in relief, and then glanced a question toward Scoggins at Sensors.
“Sorry, sir,” she said. “I don’t have anything on the assault landing. They should already be down, but the rock and the plasma is blocking the view and cutting off all signals.” She turned toward Rick Johnstone at CyberComm.
Rick shrugged apologetically, worry creasing his face. “She’s right. I got no contact. They’re on their own.”
Absen sat back stoically, wishing he could do something that mattered. Ford continued to take desultory potshots at any target that presented itself, but at this range hits were few and far between. Even the Weapon below would hardly have been able to light a match at twenty million klicks.
“Bring us in on conventional drive to five million, outside of the Weapon’s targeting arc,” Absen said. Maybe the flare of Conquest’s engines would attract some fire away from the Crows, though those should be rapidly running away to rendezvous in deep space with the grabships and the refueling pinnace Conquest had dropped off hours ago.
At least at five million klicks Conquest’s weapons might do a bit more than tickle the enemy. He’d settle for blinding them, disrupting their systems, hopefully leaving humans intact. It wasn’t a body count he wanted: it was hearts and minds. This assault was ultimately more about recruiting reinforcements than it was a military operation.
***
“Ten seconds!” Bull heard Flight Warrant Butler snap over the Marine frequency. “Breach is open and clear, but we got no data on the LZ.” The assault sled shuddered and bucked with hard deceleration.
“Crash protocols,” Sergeant Major Repeth ordered. In response, seventy-eight suits of Avenger battle armor froze in place, clamping down on the bodies of the Marines and Ryss inside them.
“Taking fire,” Butler snarled as he wrenched the assault sled down to a slewing, shuddering slide across the subterranean floor of the enemy base. Something caught the edge of the heavily armored shuttle and it rolled several times, finally coming to rest upside-down and half buried in a bulkhead.
“Everyone out, go go go!” Bull roared into the comm as his suit came under his control again. The rear of the sled opened like a flower with four petals. One petal dropped to the floor while the other three spread wide, allowing easy exit. The front could do the same, but right now it was obstructed.
Bull rolled to his feet and watched as the rest of the command squad did the same. He let Reaper get people moving as he checked the overall HUD picture.
“Come on, Massimo, haul ass,” Reaper grunted as she helped the heavy weapons team leader unbolt his semi-portables from what was now the overhead. In the light gravity, the lack of dexterity from her gauntlets counted more than the mass of the crew-served weapons. “Butler, get that Recluse up.” The big spider-shaped battle drone, folded into its external pod, was the closest thing they had to an armored vehicle.
“We’re upside-down, Reap,” Butler replied. “The sled’s sitting on top of it.”
“Let’s fix that, shall we?” Repeth replied. “You four – yes, you, you, you and you,” she pointed, “and you too, Bull, get out and grab the edge of the sled. We’re going to roll it over.” Like people tipping a ground car, the six lined up and slid their armored hands beneath it. “All together, one, two, three, lift.”
Servos groaned as six tons of powered armor, backed by the Marines’ internal cybernetics and nanotechnology, levered the heavy sled upward. Had Io’s gravity not been approximately that of Luna, about one sixth of a G, this would have been impossible, but they manhandled the vehicle, rolling it crunching over wreckage until it fell with a crash onto its long ferrocrystal skids.
Exposed and free, the armored blister housing the Recluse battle drone burst open as Butler blew its explosive bolts, and the mechanical spider unfolded itself to stand next to the personnel carrier. It lifted one of its two small waldoes to wave, and then unlimbered a heavy pulse cannon and spun it around in a three-sixty as Butler tested out its systems. “Good to go,” the pilot said.
Suddenly an explosion knocked down one of Massimo’s gunners, and Bull dove for cover, his plasma rifle belching sunfire while the rest of the Marines hit the deck. “Reaper, Massimo, get those semis working while I cover you!” Looking through his HUD, Bull fired and moved toward the next sled where line Marines already blazed away into the haze from kneeling positions. He tried to tell what they were shooting at even as carets appeared in front of his eyes marking the enemy positions, the suit’s systems backtracking the shots. Behind him, the Recluse picked its way over the rubble, its gun swiveling to fire above the big Marine’s head.
In front of him, one of Bull’s Marines spun and fell, her weapon and the arm holding it blown to bits by some kind of high-velocity shell. The hard suit would tourniquet the limb, pumping her full of drugs and extra nano. In a few minutes, she should be back on her feet, and assuming she survived the next hour or two, in a few months she would have her arm back, courtesy of the Eden Plague.
“Keep low and use your HUDs, diggers,” Bull snarled as he took his own advice, placing his targeting reticle over the caret marking the source of incoming fire. Triggering a long burst, he was rewarded with a secondary explosion as something, probably a powerpack, blew. “Trust your active sensors and keep firing,” he continued.
Conquest’s railgun-plus-particle-beam sledgehammer had ignited everything flammable just as expected, filling the enemy base with thick, oily smoke. Bull’s surroundings continued to clarify as sonar, radar, IR lidar and several other sensors pumped energies into the burning haze. Friendlies flickered like ghosts to his left and right, while squat ugly shapes moved in front of him.
“Reaper, we got some kinda tanks out here,” Bull commed as he fired another long blast of blue plasma. The ravening flame washed over the armored vehicle nosing through the gloom just before it swiveled its turret toward him. Pulse cannon shots from the Recluse hammered at the enemy, but its front glacis shrugged off the fire. Its antipersonnel rounds knocked Marines over, but the new battlesuits seemed tough enough to take it.
“Down!” Bull yelled as the tank’s main gun spoke. Its high-explosive shell struck the ground and threw him several meters to the left. His head rang and he saw double, bruised all along his side. “They’re using HEAT,” he groaned, surprised they would face such low tech as high explosive anti-tank shells. On the other hand, old-fashioned high-velocity tank guns were rugged, much more so than railguns, and a straight-on hit from one would kill just as dead as something fancier.
“Anti-armor teams, engage,” he heard someone order as he struggled to clear his head. As far as he could see on his HUD as he lay there, the enemy tanks had survived the immolating fire, but he saw no enemy infantry, nor even war drones. The sledgehammer had done its work.
Needles stabbed him and his suit pumped a speedball cocktail of stim, painkiller and nutrient solution into his veins. His head cleared after a moment and his heart hammered as if it would burst, but at least it put him on his feet again.
Several rocket teams fired, striking the enemy tanks but not stopping them. Their guns might be outdated, but the tanks’ armor was thick, much thicker than mere battle suits. Marines had tanks, but there had been no way to bring any of their own along on a fast hot assault like this. The big carrier craft needed would not have made it down. Instead, the Marines relied on the attached heavy weapons team and the Recluses. The battle drone covering Bull sidled to the left, attempting to get a flank shot on the nearest tank.
“Come on, Reaper, we’re about to get massacred,” Bull called as he rolled to his knees and fired. He saw one digger blown apart from a direct HEAT round strike. The tanks must have their own sensors, probably thermal sights, and one had targeted a Marine using his own temperature differential.
Tracers work both ways, the old adage came to mind. Bull was just about to flame the tank in front of him again in hopes of blinding it for a moment when it shook to a tremendous blast that picked it bodily off the ground and tossed it on its side, a smoking ruin.
“How you like that, asshole?” came the gravely voice of Warrant Officer Krebs, one of the sled pilots.
“Was that a breaching missile?” Bull asked him.
“Damn skippy, boss. Didn’t need it to blast our way in, so...”
“Good thinking. Remind me to give you a medal if you live.”
“Always needin’ Aerospace to pull your nuts out of the fire, huh, sir?”
“Shut up, Krebs,” Bull replied. “Reaper –”
“We’re here, Bull,” came Reaper’s voice as she strode up beside him. “Massimo should be opening up right about now. I’ll fill in while you get this mob organized.” Bull realized that he had been getting too involved in the firefight and had lost control of the overall picture.
While fire raged back and forth at close range through the wreckage of the base’s big rooms and wide tunnels, Bull hunkered down to look over the tactical situation on his HUD. His squad leaders were doing a good job of fending off the tanks, keeping them under continuous fire, blinding their sensors and burning off their secondary weapons while the enemy kept firing main guns at point-blank range, hoping to get lucky. Unfortunately, they had, too often. A quarter of his Marine icons showed KIA already.
Bull keyed the general freq. “We need to get plunging fire on the tops of those tanks. Rocket teams, look for places up high and jump. Massimo –”
“Firing now, boss.” On cue, a bright orange beam stabbed through the smoke from Bull’s left to strike the turret of the nearest tank. At the same time, a heavy rocket slammed into the same armored vehicle from the side, mangling its treads.
Bull heard Massimo call, “Mobility kill on target one. Keep that beam on the gun, Jock. If you can get it hot enough...” Just then, the turret exploded. Either the laser had burned its way through to the ammo, or the stabbing light had damaged the mechanism enough so when the enemy fired their next HEAT round, it had jammed and detonated inside. In either case, that tank was dead.
“Good job. Squad leaders, keep the pressure on. Take them down one by one. Flank them and finish them.” Confident the company could run itself for a moment, Bull checked his HUD for the Ryss. They had landed last, covered by the Marines, and their pilots had set them down as far to the right flank as possible. If this base was laid out the same as the one they had taken on Afrana’s moon, there should be subsurface tunnels connecting to the Weapon there.
Bull wished them luck.
***
Slask had snarled in embarrassment as War Leader Bull insisted he follow the dishonorable “plan” and leave the first attack. Instead of allowing Ryss warriors to fight alongside the Apes on the battle line, Slask and his young males had been sent away like kits, good for nothing more than nuisance raids on the enemy’s rear. Still, orders were orders, and though he had no fear of death, the dishonor of disobedience was greater still than the shame of his assigned role.
He knew why Bull had given the Ryss this task: because he considered them weak and inferior. Without the life code tinkering and the nanomachines and the cybernetic implants, the Apes would be punier than Ryss. When Slask had pleaded with Trissk to allow him to receive similar upgrades, the elder warrior had cuffed his head like a kit.
But Slask wanted to be strong, like the Ape warriors. What did tradition matter when honor and victory were at stake? Warriors of the older generation were too inflexible, set in their ways from the ages they had spent aboard Desolator. The future belonged to the young, those who could change with modern times.
The one consolation of this mission was that their females had been allowed to enter their seasons, and his warriors had been glorified once more before combat. That was a proper sendoff! The memory of his mate’s yowls of pleasure as she received him threatened to distract Slask from his mission, and he cuffed his wandering mind back to the task at hand.
Leading his six paws of warriors from the front, Slask hurried down the side tunnel until its end, and then turned left in the direction of the Weapon. If this corridor led to the huge laser as he hoped, the Ryss would erase their shame with a great triumph. If the One above All smiled on him, he might even seize it intact and functional, enshrining his name in the Paradise of Heroes.
If not...Slask thought of the egg of atomic destruction heavy on his back. That was another route to immortality. He would show the Elders and the Apes just what it meant to be Ryss.
His hope of victory was based on the layout of the Weapon the Apes had seized in the Gliese 370 system. This corridor should lead to a maintenance tunnel, which in turn might give access to the interior of the fortified laser base.
Before him loomed an armored door, a seldom-used connector between the Weapon complex and the Meme command center.
“Burn through,” Slask ordered the equally young warriors with the laser cutter, another shameful necessity. They should be using hotblades, but the metal was too thick. Warriors were not technologists, to employ such workers’ tools. That was the province of females. Still, the two with the cutter had been trained to use it, cudgeled by War Leader Bull’s meaty naked paws when they complained. That one was strong; terrifying, the Ryss admitted to himself. Even without the cheating technologies he used, the big Ape would be one to fear.
Soon they had sliced through the metal as they had been taught and the door swung open, its locking mechanism severed. In front of him Slask could see dim lights glowing here and there. “Use vision enhancement,” he growled, and switched his own HUD’s function to help him see. Now this kind of technology he liked. It reminded him of the nighttime raids he had performed as a kit under the moon on New Ryss, the world the Apes called Afrana, creeping through the tall grass to within marking distance, and then slashing claws down the haunch of some unsuspecting comrade.
Shouldering the cutting team aside, Slask prowled forward among pipes and conduits. He expected to see steam leak or water drip from condensation, but all here was clean and quiet. From his briefings, that meant robot maintenance. Machines did not get lazy or careless, or dislike the work they were assigned. Machines had no honor.
“Be vigilant for repair drones,” Slask said. “These spaces are cramped, but well kept. If you see one, try to kill it with your hotblades. Do not fire unless you must. This is a raid until they notice us. Then it becomes an attack.” There. That rationalized their actions well enough. Bull had said a leader must pay attention to the thoughts of his warriors, and inspire them.
“Your troops are not machines,” the great Ape had explained. “They must be led. When you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.” Slask was not entirely sure what that meant, for there were no females waiting as rewards for bravery here. The Apes’ manner of speech was often peculiar. Still, Slask found he very much wanted to show himself worthy of War Leader Bull’s approval.
A moment later Slask heard the whine of a hotblade, and then the sizzle of something meeting an electrical death behind him. “Follow me,” he snarled. “The Purelings and their masters will begin to wonder why their maintenance drones are malfunctioning.” He jogged forward, his armored body brushing against the machinery, until he found another door.
“This is the access,” Slask told his First Paw. These five warriors he had placed before the rest – the bravest and boldest, if not the brightest, and likely the first to be killed. For a moment he saw the contradiction inherent in this arrangement, and then the odd thought fled him in the heat of imminent combat.
Unlike the other hatch, this simple door seemed thin, though it was code-locked. Hotblades would do. “Cut through, quickly.” Slask hefted his own hotblade in one paw, his pulse-gun in the other. A compromise weapon, it used laser fusion to ignite pellets of tritium, powering tiny penetrators from its barrel at inconceivable speeds. The resulting plasma also blasted forward like a short-ranged flamethrower. Between the two effects, armored Purelings and small war drones should fall.
For anything else, they had grenades and rockets.
Two of his First Paw cut along the edges of the frame, high to low, while Slask shifted his pulse gun to his other hand and sliced the top. When finished, he kicked the door in with a crash and bounded through. He found himself in a transverse curving corridor, a section of an outer circle.
“First through Third Paws, follow me rightward. The others, go left. We meet at the Weapon.” Slask raced ahead, looking for a way toward the center, which should be on his left.
Suddenly, figures poured out of doorways ahead and turned toward him. He didn’t hesitate, but fired bursts on automatic, accompanied by a feline killing scream. To his left and right, his warriors did the same, filling the wide corridor with death.
Purelings fell, chopped into meat as ferrocrystal penetrators sliced through their lightweight armor. But the slaughter was not all one-sided. Return fire from the fanatical defenders, shooting over the mass of bloody bodies, cut down two of his warriors with high-powered lasers. If they lived, they would have to fend for themselves, relying on their suits to pump them full of stimulants and healing drugs. Again Slask cursed the conservative traditions of his elders, wishing for the bloodborne combat nanites or even the disease the Apes called the Paradise Epidemic. That was another nonsense name, and Slask wondered if something wasn’t lost in translation.
Slask led his remaining twelve warriors to leap and scramble easily over the pile of bodies, hotblades executing all who moved beneath them. Even were mercy a Ryss battle trait, these Purelings were genetically programmed never to surrender. They may look like Apes, but they were really cloned Meme mitoses, Blended into similarly cloned Human bodies. The killing stroke was pure warrior’s joy.
The curving corridor now revealed the tunnel he wanted, to the left toward the center where the Weapon must lie. Another group of fanatical Purelings fell before Ryss pulse-guns and hotblades. This time the fight turned hand-to-hand as the enemy burst out of side corridors, firing railguns and lasers. The Ryss’ Avenger armor stood them in good stead, as did their blazing crystal swords, heated white above the melting temperature of steel. Even so, Slask had to leave two more wounded warriors behind to live or die as they would.
There was no time. The Weapon must fall. War Leader Bull had made that clear.
Ahead, the corridors curved ever more sharply as Slask and his ten blasted their way past Purelings determined to die for their masters. Nine remained, then eight, before the Ryss burst into the great room housing the massive interface between the generator and the Weapon. A structure the size of a building large enough to hold a thousand Ape dwellings, Slask knew below lay the generator that converted volcanic heat into exawatts of power, which poured upward into red crystal tubes in their array of thousands. After that, the coherent light was manipulated and focused into domes or beams or anything between, in strength sufficient to vaporize any material known to Ryss, Hippo, Ape or Meme.
Across the way, Slask saw a firefight in progress as the other half of his force fought its way into the vast room. One sight of the backs of his enemies was all his warriors needed to charge forward, spreading out into a bounding line. Unfortunately, that put the Purelings precisely between the two Ryss forces, and stray shots blasted chunks from the concrete near his feet.
“Flank them left!” Slask roared. “Kill none of your fellows this day!” The Ryss scrabbled obliquely until they had the defenders in a crossfire and continued to advance.
And then there were seven, then six. Five...and all the Purelings had fallen. Seven from the other group joined Slask and exulted, celebrating by firing toward the ceiling high above until he made them stop. “Follow me. We must disable the Weapon. Prepare rockets.” Turning toward the center structure, Slask wondered at how easily they had won through. He had hoped, but given the odds... Perhaps all the defenders had been sent to deal with the Apes. Perhaps that had been War Leader Bull’s intent.
Slask’s curiosity and hope died together as openings in the vast machine appeared. Silvery spiders with turrets on top, each machine the size of three Ryss, swarmed out of the structure in their dozens, then their hundreds to aim down at the pitiful band of warriors below. Yet, they did not fire.
Now Slask understood. Purelings with outdated armaments had been used as cannon fodder to slow down the Ryss advance, while these advanced war drones were activated and positioned to defend the prize. Perhaps they held fire to capture him and his warriors for vile Meme enslavement, or to rip operational knowledge from his mind.
Bull had been clever after all, for of course he would preserve his own kind while expending Ryss lives on this suicide mission. Sadly, Slask would not live to pass this admirable lesson of cunning to his kits.
“I do not care,” Slask said aloud. His warriors’ advance had ground to a halt at the array of firepower in front of them, and they looked to him.
“Command us, and we will die like heroes,” one said, his eyes hot with the nearness of oblivion. The rest murmured agreement.
“Yes,” Slask said. “We shall be remembered by our ancestors in the Halls of Paradise, so let us die together, as warriors.” Activating the device he carried and setting it for ten seconds, he drew a great breath, waved his hotblade and roared a challenge to his enemies.
“CHARGE!”
***
Jill Repeth felt the shock through her feet as the floor rippled like a live thing, flinging dust, debris and wreckage into the air to drift slowly downward in the low gravity. “Finish them off!” she yelled, dragging an unsteady digger to his feet and shoving him into firing position. “Massimo, where’s that rocket?”
As if in response a bang and a whoosh came from her left, and a streak of flame crossed in front of her to blow the turret from the last tank they faced. “Anyone see any more?” she asked over the general comm freq. “Squad leaders, report!”
“Negative,” came the first reply, echoed by several more.
Repeth still couldn’t see anything optically except billowing dust, made even worse by the last heavy shock she had felt. She thought she knew what that was: tactical nukes at close range had a distinctive feel. “Bull, was that the Ryss bomb?”
“Think so, Reap. Either that, or something just as big.” Repeth could hear Bull’s labored breathing over the suitcomm, and then he went on. “Get the wounded back to the sleds. I need all effectives to confirm status on HUDs and rally on me.”
Soon Repeth and Bull were surrounded by a loose tactical formation of thirteen Marines and three remaining Recluse battle drones. The machines had taken losses heavier than the troops, exposing themselves to more danger and thus drawing more fire, as intended.
Nine wounded showed on Repeth’s HUD tracker, and the rest were KIA. She quickly reorganized the surviving effectives into two squads, one a man short.
Two squads left out of six.
“Shit. Two-thirds casualties, boss,” Repeth said over a private channel.
“Yeah, Reap. I can count. We knew it would be hard, but not this hard. The Ryss just gave their all, though, so I’m having trouble with comparisons,” Bull replied bitterly.
“They were good kids, those cats. You trained them well.”
“We trained them well. Damn straight we did. Then we used them up.”
“You can’t blame yourself. You stuck up for them. You gave them the easier mission. Slash was supposed to get in, set that thing and get out. Maybe he did. We don’t know they’re all dead.”
Bull turned away, visible only on active sensors as a fuzzy blob with an icon, and his voice hardened. “If they’d gotten out, we’d see more of them on the HUD. I can only find a couple of intermittent contacts.” He cleared his throat. “We’ll find out soon enough. Fortunes of war. Now let’s finish this party, ’cause it may not be over.” He gestured with his plasma rifle. “Command center should be that way. Stay alert.”
***
“Hard rad and thermal spike on the Weapon’s position, Captain,” Scoggins cried exultantly. “Detonation consistent with Marine tac nuke.”
“I’m not celebrating until I know that wasn’t a Final Option scenario, Commander.”
“Of course, sir. But even if it was...”
“I know.” Absen didn’t want to think about the potential cost. “Move in carefully. I want to be damn sure that monster is down. Scoggins, send a sensor drone to take a look, no stealth. Let them see it.”
Five minutes later the high-velocity sensor drone crossed over the Weapon’s position, drawing no fire. “Readings show subsidence on the surface. Looks like the laser is toast, sir,” Scoggins reported.
“Outstanding. Bring us in low over the command center. Johnstone, try to punch a signal through to the Marines. Ford, have your gun crews keep a sharp lookout on point defense. We still have Sentries, mines and active orbital platforms out there.”
“And if the orbitals fire on us?” Ford asked with upraised eyebrow.
“Defensive fire only. In a very short time, those may be our allies.”