The overpressure from the exploding grain dust burst the compartments and tore through surrounding areas in a wave of destruction, ripping apart floors, walls, and ceilings and turning their fragments into deadly projectiles.
The shock wave hit Mele in the back, hurling her forward. She went into a tumble to break her fall, trying to stay low so none of the shrapnel bouncing off the surviving nearby structure would hit her.
She paused, trying to catch her breath, her arms shaking, trying to figure out if any parts of her had been hit. Air was rushing past as the atmosphere left in this part of the facility vented through the holes torn by the blasts, making it harder to focus her impact-rattled brain. But aside from an ache in her back where the shock wave had probably planted a massive bruise she seemed to be intact.
The buzzing in her ears resolved into frantic calls. “Captain? Captain!”
“Here,” Mele said. She got to her feet, grimacing at the effort, and looked back at the mass of wreckage behind her. “I’m okay. You guys?”
“We’re all with militia units, Captain.”
It was Giddings calling, Mele realized. “I’ll be with you soon.”
She started moving down the corridor, wincing, picking up speed as she moved. By the time she reached a wide-open area where three corridors met Mele thought she was moving almost normally.
Hands waved her toward an improvised barricade at the far side of the area. There she found more than a dozen militia, as well as Giddings and Lamar. The militia were posted along the barricade, while Giddings was a short distance behind, kneeling beside Lamar as he checked her injury.
“What was that?” someone asked Mele.
She turned to see a man with lieutenant insignia and anxious eyes. “The compartments for grain storage blew. I, um, guess that’s what happened.”
“How did they—? Never mind. They took maybe thirty or forty of the enemy with them,” the lieutenant said. “And stopped their attack cold.”
“Good,” Mele said, trying to decide whether to sit down or not. Uncertain whether she’d be able to stand up quickly again, she elected to remain standing. “What are your orders?”
The lieutenant gazed back at her, his distress growing.
“Your orders,” Mele prompted. “What has Major Brazos told you to do now?”
“Major Brazos . . .” The lieutenant gestured back toward the areas now held by the enemy. “He was up front, at the forward defensive positions. We haven’t heard . . . he told the people with him to fall back, and he’d cover them. We think . . . we think he’s dead. Holding off the enemy.”
Mele barely held back uttering one of her most vicious curses. “Dead?”
“We think . . .”
“Who’s in command now?” The militia officer gazed back at her blankly. “Lieutenant! Who is in command of Kosatka’s militia forces on this facility?”
“We don’t know,” he replied, sounding helpless.
“How can you not know?” Mele demanded, making an effort to calm herself. “Who’s the senior surviving officer?”
“All of us! There’re three lieutenants, and we all got our militia appointments at the same time.”
Mele slumped back against the nearest wall. “Call Commander Derian on the Shark. Ask him to designate one of you as the militia commander.”
“Yeah! Good idea!” Happy to be given clear instructions on what to do, the lieutenant hunched over, speaking rapidly into a comm link, but after a few moments turned to Mele again. “Commander Derian wants to talk to you privately, Captain.”
“Me?” Mele exhaled heavily in frustration before clicking on the proper circuit. “Captain Darcy here, sir.”
Derian replied in tones so heavy that each word seemed to have extra weight. “Captain, we have a problem.”
“We do?” Mele couldn’t help replying.
“Major Brazos died valiantly—”
“Major Brazos chickened out,” Mele replied, her anger boiling over. “He knew he wasn’t suited to command this defense. That’s why he gave me so much trouble. And that’s why, when the fight began, he went to the farthest forward position he could so he could do what he knew how to do, die valiantly! And leave his soldiers without a commander!”
Derian paused before replying. “I understand.”
“He’ll be remembered as a hero but he left his people in the lurch,” Mele finished bitterly. “Now that I’ve vented I won’t say that again. Please excuse my candor, sir.”
“I understand,” Derian repeated. “Here’s the problem. I’ve got three lieutenants who could command the militia. None of them are suited for it.”
“Sir—”
“Listen to me, Captain Darcy! I can tell when someone lacks confidence in themselves. Those three lieutenants got rank pinned on them along with a lot of responsibility, but they don’t have the training or experience to command combat troops. They know it, and the rest of the militia knows it.”
Mele did her best to rein in her temper again. “Commander, with all due respect, those three lieutenants are all you’ve got.”
“No. I’ve also got you.”
“I can’t be placed in command of Kosatka forces!” Mele almost yelled in reply. “I have no legal basis to give them orders!”
“I’m the senior surviving officer of Kosatka’s forces on this facility!” Derian yelled back. “As such, I invoke emergency powers and place the remaining Kosatka militia aboard this facility under your command, Captain! And if the government of Kosatka disagrees with my decision, assuming a government of Kosatka still exists, and assuming that government continues to exist, they can take it up with me after this is over! I will save my ship and crew, Captain! And that means I need you to hold off those attackers!”
Mele stared at nothing as she thought.
Derian spoke again, his voice calmer, but insistent. “And if you need a personal incentive to take command, Captain Darcy, I think you’ll agree with me that unless you do so, the odds of you and your Marines surviving this engagement are too small to measure.”
Still slumped against the wall, Mele looked over the militia, reading their body language. It wasn’t only the lieutenants who lacked confidence in themselves. “They have to accept me,” Mele said, knowing that was a weak comeback. “They have to be willing to take orders from me.”
“Ask them,” Derian said. “Thank you, Captain.”
“Just get that damned ship of yours fixed!” Mele snapped in reply. “Sir!”
She ended the call and turned to the lieutenant, who was waiting with obvious concern. “Commander Derian has appointed me your commander,” Mele said.
The reaction startled her. The lieutenant’s eyes lit with hope, and he straightened as if given renewed strength. “You’re in command? Can I—? May I inform the troops, Captain?”
“Yeah,” Mele said, calling up all the information her display had on the militia positions. “Gamba, how are the militia where you are?”
“Shaky,” Corporal Gamba replied. “Hold on. Something’s happening. They’re showing a lot more confidence. Buckland, ask them— What? Captain Darcy? You’re in overall command now?”
“I guess so.” Mele forced herself out of her slump, seeing the militia near her looking far more ready to fight. Intangibles. You could calculate weapons and numbers and supplies and distances, but those didn’t always win battles. “Fighting spirit” didn’t always win battles, either, though coupled with poor leadership it could produce massive friendly losses. But soldiers without confidence in those leading them didn’t win many fights, and these militia seemed to have confidence in her. Like that Old Earth guy Sun Tzu had said: “Because such a general regards his men as infants they will march with him into the deepest valleys. He treats them as his own beloved sons . . .
. . . and they will die with him.”
“Listen up!” Mele said over the command circuit. “We’ve been hurt, but we’ve hurt them worse. We stopped them once, and we can stop them again. As we get closer to the dock area, the available approach routes for the enemy are going to neck down so we have to defend fewer spots. Give me all you’ve got and we’ll kick these scum all the way back to Apulu!”
Switching to another part of the circuit, she spoke to the three lieutenants in charge of what were now the farthest forward militia positions. “Send out scouts to see how many routes are blocked by damage from those blasts. We need to know which routes are still open because the enemy is looking for those as well. If you’ve got any portable surveillance devices, plant them in the open routes and link them to the command net.”
Mele spent another moment looking over the situation on her display, her eyes lingering on the final defensive positions just short of the dock area. If the enemy got that far, those militia would have to hold no matter how many losses Mele, her Marines, and the other militia had already suffered.
There was something she could do about that.
Walking back to where Giddings was still fussing over Lamar, Mele gestured toward the lieutenant. “Get with him and make sure I have full access to what’s left of the command net. Then see if you can break into the enemy net.”
Giddings straightened up, saluting quickly. “I’ve done everything I can for Private Lamar, Captain.”
“Thanks, Glitch,” Lamar called up to him.
As Giddings hastened over to the lieutenant, Mele knelt by Lamar, studying the wounded private. Her left leg was sealed into a full-limb battle bandage that had hardened into a cast. There was still atmosphere here, so Lamar’s faceplate hung open, revealing her strained face with beads of sweat spotting it. “How you doing, Marine?”
“Okay,” Lamar said, the gasp in the single word robbing it of its intended meaning. “I just got some more pain meds. Be ready for action in a minute.”
“Good. I’ve got a job for you,” Mele said. “Back toward the dock.”
Lamar shook her head stubbornly. “Captain, I can still fight. I should stay up here with the rest of you.”
“You can still fight,” Mele agreed. “What you can’t do is run. Which makes you perfect for this job. I’m going to have a couple of the militia get you back—”
“Captain—!”
“Shut up. Back to this final defensive position. See? A squad of militia holding the area just short of the dock where that broke-butt warship is sitting. You’re going there. If the fight reaches you, and I’m not there and Gamba and Giddings and Yoshida and Buckland aren’t there, it’s going to be up to you to stiffen the spines of those militia and make sure that position holds until the Shark gets away.”
Lamar blinked at Mele, confused, then with growing understanding. “You mean if I’m the last Marine left, I need to make sure those militia hold?”
“Yeah. Show ’em how it’s done.”
“But . . . Captain, I’m just a private.”
“You’re a Marine. Which means you get the job done and done right.” Mele studied Lamar, wondering if she’d be up to the task. “Understand?”
A pause, then Lamar nodded. “Yes, Captain. I understand.”
“You’ll show those militia how to hold their ground.”
“I’ll show them.”
“Good.” Mele stood up. “And you get to be carried there, so that’s a bonus.”
“I always like to arrive in style,” Lamar said, grinning. The expression was too anxious, too tight with worry and the pain getting past the meds, but also laced with determination. “I won’t let you down. Not any of the others, either.”
Mele waited impatiently, not knowing how much time she had before the enemy regrouped, while a couple of militia members ran up with a mobile med bed and hoisted Lamar onto it. She gave Lamar an encouraging wave as the private was taken back toward the dock area.
The rest of the Marines took the news of Lamar’s new assignment stoically. All except for Yoshida, whose grumble carried easily across the comm circuit. “She owes me a twenty I lent her until next payday.”
“Maybe she’ll survive and be able to pay you back,” Giddings said.
“Yeah,” Yoshida said, cheering up.
“Yoshida,” Mele said, “have you found anything else in this facility that will blow up on command?”
“No, Captain,” Yoshida said, sounding annoyed this time. “They seem to have off-loaded everything useful over the last week.”
“That’s bad,” Gamba commented. “The grain dust explosions saved us back there.”
“There’s a good part,” Mele reminded them. “The enemy doesn’t know we don’t have any more big explosions ready and waiting for them. They lost a good number of people when the grain compartments blew. They’ll be worried that more traps like that have been set up.”
“Which means they’ll advance more cautiously,” Giddings said. “Right?”
“Right. They’re going to be more cautious, slower to follow up when we pull back, and spend more time checking out areas before they enter them. That’s all good for us.”
“Captain?” Yoshida said, sounding worried. “You meant anything that could blow up except the fuel cells, right?”
“The fuel cells?” Mele asked.
“There’s a bunch located in secure storage near the dock. To refuel ships.”
“Those make a really big bang when they blow, right? Why did you think I wouldn’t want to know about those?”
“Because,” Yoshida explained, “if we blow the fuel cells, they’ll take this whole facility with them. They’d blow it all into really little pieces. And everyone on it would be blown into little pieces, too.”
“Like us?” Giddings asked.
“We can’t control it?” Mele said. “Like, blow one cell or part of one fuel cell?”
“No, Captain,” Yoshida said. “If you disrupt a fuel cell, the whole thing goes. And if we set off one, it’d probably cause the others nearby to blow as well.”
Gamba’s words came out with careful precision, as if she wanted to ensure there was no chance of anything being misheard. “So blowing fuel cells would be a very bad idea.”
“Here it would be, yes,” Yoshida agreed. “It would also be the last very bad idea of whoever did it. Guaranteed.”
“Okay,” Mele said. “Understood. We don’t blow the fuel cells.” But inside she was wondering what to do if defeat was inevitable, if the enemy was about to seize the facility and Shark. Wouldn’t it make sense then to trigger a detonation of those cells as a last dying gesture to ensure that the enemy didn’t profit from their triumph? Should she . . . ?
Was that the sort of legacy she’d want to leave her Marines who were still at Glenlyon? Not just giving their all to win but accepting certain death if they lost? Did she want Marines following that example in the future, committing grand suicidal gestures rather than surrender?
Hell, she already didn’t like the idea. Suppose she went through with it and people decided to do the same thing because she’d established that precedent? How many would refuse surrender and fight to the death, senselessly, because Mele Darcy had done the same thing even though she hadn’t really?
Mele looked around at those with her, realizing that it was one thing to demand their best of people, because that would not only give the best chance of success but also the best chance of them living through the fight. But it was a very different thing to demand their deaths. That was a step she wouldn’t take. None of that victory or death garbage. The dead couldn’t win the next fight. What had that Clausewitz guy called it? Husbanding resources. As in don’t waste the lives of your own troops.
“Captain?”
Mele realized that she’d been lost in thought for long enough to worry her Marines. “Sorry. I was thinking. Listen up. My reaction force plan didn’t work. There aren’t enough of us. We need to disperse among the militia to stiffen them. I’m staying with this bunch along with Giddings. Gamba, you take that group on the far right of our positions. Buckland and Yoshida, I want you to stay with the group you’re in.”
Mele paused, knowing her next words had to be phrased right. “All of the militia are going to be looking to you. The officers, too. Yeah, you’re corporals and privates, but you’re all veterans of years of service. You’re used to someone else telling you what to do when the bubble breaks, but now you have to be that someone and let the militia know what you think should be done. I’m going to be monitoring as much as I can, and giving you orders when necessary, but if I’m out of loop because of jamming, you make the calls for what to do. Use your heads, remember your training, and remember that these people are looking to you for examples and hope. Gamba, if I’m cut off and you’re still linked in, give the orders you think are right. If Gamba is cut off, Giddings takes over. Any questions?”
“Why did I volunteer for this?” Giddings asked, causing laughter from the others.
“Find out what the scouts are reporting back to the militia lieutenants with you,” Mele ordered. “Giddings, get me into the enemy net. I want to know what they’re doing and where they are.”
“Captain?” Mele turned as the lieutenant approached her. “I’ve got something that’s probably important.”
“What is it?” Mele asked. “What’s your name?”
“Freeman. Lieutenant John Freeman, Kosatka Defense Militia,” he replied. “Um, we’ve got some good code monkeys in this group, and they were looking at what we were picking up of the enemy signals before the explosions.” Freeman pointed to data on his pad. “See here? They’re thinking this node indicates the enemy commander was there, and this other one maybe the second-in-command since it seemed to be mirroring the commander’s signals.”
Mele studied the images with growing hope. “Those were both inside the blast zones. They were leading from the front.”
“We’re thinking maybe one of them, maybe both, got killed.”
“You might be right. That’d explain why they’re taking awhile to resume the attack. Whoever is third in line is trying to figure out what happened and trying to assume command.” Mele paused as her helmet display updated, the schematics of the station taking on numerous damage markers. “I’m getting some of the reports the scouts are sending back. Good.”
“Captain, do you think we can do this?”
Mele focused on Freeman, knowing her next words would be important. “Hell, yes, we can do this. You and your soldiers are equal to this challenge.”
“Thank you.” Freeman smiled, saluted, and went off to talk to his fellow militia.
Damn, I’m a good liar, Mele thought to herself, as Giddings called in.
“Captain, I got a few snapshots of the enemy net before they closed me out. Here they are.”
Mele examined them, unhappy with the number of remaining enemy soldiers shown. But the casualty count was gratifyingly high and might limit the enthusiasm of the enemy to keep pushing the attack. And the enemy force was still clearly disorganized and trying to re-form after the grain compartment blasts that had torn up both the leading elements of the enemy force and substantial parts of the facility they now occupied.
Unfortunately, there didn’t seem a lot else she could do at this point but try to spot new attacks developing and try to stop them, or at least hold them up as long as possible. “Lieutenant Freeman, can you give me a comm link to the Saber? I ought to report in while I have a chance.”
“Oh, sure, Captain. We should be able to run a link through Shark. Hold on. Yeah. Circuit six.”
“Thanks.” Mele switched over to six. “Saber, this is Captain Darcy. Is Commodore Geary available?”
Geary himself responded. “I’m glad to hear from you. How are you doing, Mele?”
“I’m not dead yet.”
“We worried when we saw a big chunk of that facility blow out. Was that your work?”
“Maybe. It slowed down the bad guys pretty good. How’s life in the fleet?”
Rob Geary sounded frustrated. “The good news is that the Bruce Monroe made it to the jump point for Tantalus and is on her way to find help for us. Otherwise, we’re stuck here keeping that enemy destroyer off Shark. The only good part of that is the enemy warship is tied up tying us up, so they can’t support any other part of the invasion. From what we could see, the initial invasion drop lost a lot of shuttles to the defenders. Those losses wouldn’t have been nearly as bad if enemy warships had been covering the invasion force from low orbit.”
“So you are accomplishing something.”
“Yeah. But I wish we could do a lot more. Shark will be ready in only another twenty-three hours, but that’s a very long time under current circumstances. How are you and Commander Derian getting along?”
“We may get married when this is over,” Mele said, unable to resist.
“What?”
“Kidding. He’s in charge. He put me in charge of the militia.”
“Kosatka’s militia? He can do that?” Rob asked.
“He says he can, and he made some compelling arguments for why I should agree,” Mele said. “Once I did, he gave me an impossible job to do. Sort of a pattern for me. I need to change how I look for bosses.”
“Sorry about that,” Rob said. “Why do you keep looking for that kind of boss?”
“I don’t know. Maybe there’s a reason why Marine and masochist both start with m.”
“Good luck, Mele.”
“Same. Out.” She took a moment to mentally regroup, then turned to Lieutenant Freeman. “All right. The scouts are spotting the routes the enemy will have to use to move forward. Let’s set up some forward firing positions to hit them as soon as they stick their noses out. It’ll take them awhile to realize we’re not holding any spot near the wreckage in strength.”
“Should we move everyone forward?” Freeman asked, gazing at the schematic of damage to the facility.
“No,” Mele said. “Look at the possible routes and what’s around them. We’d also be limited in our routes, so if the enemy breaks through at any one point everyone else would be trapped, unable to withdraw to good positions in time.”
“Oh. Yeah. So, two-person teams for the forward positions?”
“Right,” Mele said, pleased that Freeman was listening and learning. “Let me get the other two lieutenants going on this as well. Send some of your people to cover these three spots.”
“How will they know when to fall back?” Freeman asked, anxious again at the thought of some of his militia being trapped.
“I’ll make that call,” Mele said.
“Then I know they’ll be okay,” Freeman said, turning to get his teams sent forward, pausing to turn back and salute before rushing off.
Wondering how long it would take messy reality to tarnish Freeman’s total confidence in her, Mele talked to the other militia commanders and got things moving. It would have been nice to sit down and rest after that, but her bruised back was threatening to stiffen up so Mele had to keep walking and stretching.
“We’re getting an increase in enemy net traffic,” Freeman called to her.
“They’re getting ready to move,” Mele told him, alerting the other lieutenants.
She checked the time. Twenty-two and a half hours left. Less than a day. But it looked like it was going to be a very long less than a day.
Carmen was roused before dawn by one of the soldiers who was going from person to person waking them. The stars above the darkened city were still clearly visible in the small patches of sky that could be seen between the branches and leaves of the trees in the park. She caught a glimpse of a small, oddly regular constellation of unfamiliar stars and realized it must be the enemy ships in orbit about this planet, illuminated by the sun that hadn’t risen for those on the surface.
“We’re moving out in half an hour,” Dominic told her when she joined him. “Headquarters is trying to set up a counterattack in the government district.”
“Why?” she asked before stifling a yawn. “Didn’t we talk about that yesterday? The government completely evacuated that area. There’s no there there.”
“Which is why the enemy left a relatively small force to hold it. We think we might be able to overrun them.”
“I’ll see what I can find out,” Carmen said, trying to link to one of the surviving intelligence coordination nets.
She finally linked up using a buried landline that the enemy apparently hadn’t discovered yet. The official picture offered was fragmentary, dismaying, and hopeful all at once. Lodz was no longer a single city but a collection of areas, some controlled by the invaders and some still in the hands of Kosatka’s defenders. The edges of the areas weren’t clean lines but blurs where one side’s control faded and eventually yielded at vague boundaries to the presence of the other side. Humans liked clearly defined boundaries, and given enough time would end up with them, where a single street would mark the border between one side and the other as it did in most places on Mars. But Carmen could see Loren Yeresh’s quantum mechanics background in these assessments. Given how little was known and how fluid the situation was, enemy positions and strengths and areas of control were defined as much by uncertainties as they were by precise information.
“Here’s what we’ve got,” she told Dominic.
He squinted at the image. “It’s too bad we don’t have more soldiers. The enemy hasn’t linked up the places they’ve captured. We could hit them while they’re still isolated from each other.”
“That’s probably why we’re aiming to recapture the government complex,” Carmen said. “See? It’s between this industrial area that’s been captured and the spaceport. If we retake the government area, we’ll be between those two areas so they can’t link up.”
A moment later the full implications of that hit her. “We’ll be between two strong enemy forces.”
“Yeah,” Dominic agreed. “A number of other units are going in with us. But it will feel like being in a nutcracker, won’t it?” He hesitated. “Red, why don’t you—”
“I’m staying with you.”
“The attack is going to be hazardous, and afterward the enemy is going to be hitting us hard from at least two sides,” Dominic argued.
“It sounds like you’ll need me there,” Carmen said.
“Red, please . . .”
“Domi, I spent my childhood fighting my battles alone. And I promised myself then that if I ever found someone I could count on, no matter what, that I would never let them fight alone.”
He gazed back at her silently for a long moment before sighing and nodding. “All right. I can tell you’re not going to give in.”
“Smart man.” Carmen smiled in what she hoped was a reassuring way. “Get back to leading your unit. I’ll see if I can find out anything else before we move away from here and I’m dependent on wireless again.”
“All right,” Dominic said again. “I wish you’d never left Albuquerque. You’d be safe there.”
“Safe? You obviously don’t know much about Albuquerque. This sort of thing is just a typical quiet Saturday night in Albuquerque.”
They set off before sunrise, the men and women of Dominic’s unit moving in small groups from cover to cover, keeping careful watch on the silent buildings around them and the sky above where newly placed enemy satellites might already be watching these streets. Carmen took a look back at the park, wondering how much longer those trees would stand. If the fight went on for long inside the city, the enemy would realize those leaves offered too much concealment. A single overpressure munition would strip the trees of leaves and bark and smaller branches, leaving bare trunks where a small, cultivated forest had once stood.
Somehow the thought of that bothered her more than the craters in the streets and the holes in some of the buildings.
They’d been warned to avoid the subway tunnels and the other underground passages. Those were such obvious means to sneak through the city that the invaders had quickly laced them with sensors and automated sentries. “Why don’t they use those automated sentry robots aboveground?” one of those with Carmen and Dominic asked. “Why didn’t we ever use them against the rebels?”
“I read up on them,” Dominic replied, his eye never halting in their search of their surroundings. “Even after all the work on artificial intelligence those things still end up targeting the wrong people and getting jammed. As panicky and confused as humans with weapons can get, they’re still a lot more reliable when it comes to choosing the right targets. But down in the subway and maintenance tunnels the only people they should encounter right now are defenders like you and me.”
“There’s another reason they don’t get used,” Carmen said. “Hacking.”
“They can get taken over by the other side?”
“Any AI can get taken over. Rewritten. Modified. Earth and the other places in Sol Star System try new ones out sometimes on Mars to see how long it takes the Reds to hack them.” Carmen smiled, baring her teeth. “It usually doesn’t take long.”
Dominic eyed her. “Do we have people working on that? Against these guys?”
“Maybe,” Carmen said. “If I knew, I couldn’t talk about it.”
“Sure.”
A warning alert pulsed through their headsets and everyone froze, gazing about cautiously. “All units,” the report came through bursts of static caused by enemy jamming, “shuttles on their way to the surface.”
Crouched against the nearest building, Carmen gazed upward, seeing the just-risen sun illuminating a wave of specks growing in size rapidly as they dropped toward the city. There weren’t nearly as many as yesterday. The enemy must have lost a lot of shuttles during the initial invasion.
“They’re still coming down in waves,” Dominic said beside her. “Escorted by their own warbirds. That means they’re still worried about our warbirds. We must have a few left.”
As the shuttles neared the surface they broke into smaller groups, heading for parts of the city already held by the invaders. The enemy warbirds escorting them stayed higher, circling protectively.
“I wonder if we’re going to hit them?” Carmen asked Dominic.
Her answer came in the form of a sudden high-pitched whine growing rapidly in volume. A warbird tore past just overhead, jinking between higher buildings at the lowest altitude it could manage at that speed, aiming for the enemy shuttles on their final landing approach.
The roar of weaponry sounded, followed by one of the shuttles exploding. A second shuttle tried to reverse its drop and climb, but hits ripped holes in it. Out of control, the shuttle nosed over and dove into the ground, vanishing from Carmen’s sight. The blast from its impact could be seen, heard, and felt even from this far off.
A barely audible cheer sounded from Dominic’s soldiers as the warbird dashed away to avoid enemy warbirds diving toward it. Carmen watched the warbirds for only a few seconds before the running fight was blocked from her view by intervening buildings.
“Pilots,” Dominic remarked. “They’re all crazy.”
“Whatever was in that one shuttle made a big explosion,” Carmen said. “Maybe power cell replacements for their battle armor?”
“It was something important to them,” Dominic said. “And it’s gone. So that’s good. I hope that crazy pilot got away.”
Carmen focused on her pad as an alert appeared. “I’ve got a feed from one of our drones! It’s . . . gone.”
“Jamming?”
“Looked more like a swat.” Drones had combat life spans so short that they made mayflies look long-lived by comparison. Once people had figured out that even little drones moving through the air made fairly easy targets for the right sensors to spot, sensors modeled on the ways that creatures like frogs detected and tracked the movement of small flying insects, drones became the pawns of battles, quickly sacrificed in the opening moves. Any that survived the initial engagement, or new ones constructed afterward, had to face an array of antidrone systems collectively known as flyswatters, as well as the same sort of jamming that every other system had to deal with.
Which meant that Carmen was happy to get even one useful image from a friendly drone before it was swatted. “It’s the Central Coordination Building.” An unpoetic name for the large structure built to house the offices of a lot of people doing unpoetic but necessary government work. “There aren’t defenses visible on the outside. Something must have taken down that drone, though, so they must have sensors and some weapons hidden on the exterior.”
Dominic studied the picture before nodding. “What we heard is right, then. They’re forted up inside the buildings.”
“And those shuttles that were shot down were trying to land in the central courtyard on the other side of this building. See the smoke rising from behind it?”
“Some of their reinforcements didn’t make it.” Dominic smiled. “Come on, everyone. Move it. We need to get into position to hit them before they get any more help sent their way.”
But when they had finally made their way cautiously to buildings on the street facing the government complex, the order came to wait. Everyone sat or lay down among the abandoned, everyday trappings of the buildings they were hiding in. Work desks piled with once-urgent tasks, displays without power, shelves of clothing or other goods that had been too bulky or heavy to haul out of the city before the invaders landed. Carmen lay flat on a carpet in a comfortable office area, occasionally gazing up at a bare ceiling whose lights were as dead as the rest of the city. The rest of the time she worked at trying to pick up anything she could of friendly net traffic or enemy activity. “There’s something going on,” she told Dominic. “All kinds of activity nearby on just about every frequency.”
“Any idea what—?” Dominic paused as the muffled sound of weapons suddenly came from outside. “How far off is that?”
“Not far at all,” Carmen said, staring at her screen. “It’s underground.”
“In the subway and maintenance tunnels?” Dominic hesitated, listening to something on his command circuit. “You called it, Red.” Switching circuits, he transmitted to his unit. “Most of the automated sentry bots the enemy placed in the underground approaches have been turned by our hackers. They’ve been ordered to assault the enemy forces they were guarding. We’re going to give the enemy five more minutes to send their troops down to fight their own bots, then we’re going in on the surface. We’re promised a chaff cloud cover for the assault. Everyone be ready to assault the Central Coord Building when I give the command.”
Carmen sat up, readying herself and wishing she had a sidearm. Her rifle wasn’t well suited for the sort of close-in work that would soon be necessary.
Concealed inside the buildings facing their objective, Carmen and the others didn’t hear the incoming chaff rounds. Enemy counterfire aimed at the rounds missed as the chaff detonated short of the enemy positions. Clouds of smoke filled with glittering metallic strands and glowing “fireflies” that created heat decoys filled the street as if a sudden, mystical fog had been summoned by magical means. The sunlight, striving to pass through chaff designed to scatter and confuse any radiation, could create only a dim glow in the street like a suddenly fallen night.
“Go! Everyone go!” Dominic called into his command circuit as he bolted for the nearest door onto the street.
He’d probably hoped to lose her in the fog, Carmen thought. Lose her so she’d lag behind looking for him and not be in as much danger. But she stayed right next to him as they ran. The chaff clouds blocked everything so their own command circuits and pads and all else went dead, leaving them isolated in the glowing cloud.
An enemy shot tore through the cloud, passing uncomfortably close to Carmen, as the invaders fired blindly into the chaff in hopes of hitting someone or at least slowing down the attack. The curb on the other side of the street suddenly appeared underfoot, nearly tripping her, then the sidewalk and just beyond that the Central Coordination Building, constructed of sturdy materials using the latest architectural techniques. The latest techniques available here in the down and out, anyway. A strong building, meant to stand for a long time, but not designed to serve as a fort.
Wide, low windows on the ground floor, their polymer glass already blown out in many cases by earlier fighting, gave easy access to the soldiers of Dominic’s unit and the other Kosatka defenders. The chaff filling the street had drifted in through the openings, blinding defenders of Kosatka and invaders alike. Carmen flinched as she came through one of the windows in the face of a storm of unaimed enemy fire, but her luck held and nothing hit her.
Several steps into the large ground floor reception area, the chaff thinning around her, Carmen saw figures crouched behind a row of desks that had been turned into a barricade. She and Dominic dove for the floor to avoid the invaders’ fire as some of Dominic’s soldiers tossed grenades. Smart rounds would have been confused by the drifts of chaff, but simple, dumb grenades went where they were thrown, behind the desks to ravage the ranks of the invading troops.
She came over the tops of the desks, seeing a wounded enemy soldier trying to bring his weapon around to shoot at her. By chance her rifle was nearly pointed at him already, so Carmen was able to aim and shoot before the soldier could. He fell back, the weapon dropping from his hands.
There were other wounded behind the desks, along with several dead. Carmen covered them as the wounded who could raise their hands in surrender did so. She risked a few glances around, realizing that she’d lost Dominic. The sound of fighting was receding through the building as the fight went deeper inside, up to higher floors and down toward where the rattle of bot sentry weapons could still be occasionally heard.
Carmen realized that she was shaking with reaction and sudden weariness after the assault. She sat down on an undamaged section on the top of one of the desks, keeping her rifle canted toward the wounded invaders who’d surrendered. “When the medics get here they’ll take a look at you,” she told them. “Try any funny, you dead,” Carmen added, deliberately reverting to Red street speech.
None of them appeared to question her willingness to carry out her threat. That didn’t surprise her. She’d learned as a girl back in Shandakar that threats had to be delivered in ways that left no doubt about their sincerity.
Running her gaze across the prisoners as the remnants of the chaff drifted past in thin wisps and the racket of battle continued elsewhere in the building, Carmen couldn’t tell where they were from in their mix of armor and equipment. Two had reacted to her Red talk with recognition, though.
“Wherefrom?” she asked the nearest of those two.
Might as well do her job of collecting intelligence while Dominic and his soldiers did theirs. Carmen wondered how many of those soldiers had already been lost trying to capture this building and how many more of Kosatka’s defenders would die holding off the inevitable counterattacks by the invaders.
“Benway,” the invader she’d asked spat in reply.
Carmen gave the woman her coldest smile. Benway. A simple way of saying the acronym BNW. Brave New World. The unofficial, ironic, all-purpose, angry motto of Mars, also employed as an obscenity. “Not this world,” she told her prisoner. “You won’t bring that here.”
Brave words. But the scars of battle around her and the continuing sound of fighting told Carmen that the doom of Mars had already been brought to Kosatka. The question was whether it would stay here, or be stopped dead.
“I’ve lost contact with forward post seven!”
Mele Darcy checked the position of the two militia soldiers who had either just died or been captured. “Get everybody else back!” she ordered all three militia lieutenants. “Withdraw them to the main defensive positions.”
Lieutenant Freeman, with her, immediately began transmitting the orders to his forward posts. “But the rest are still holding,” one of the other lieutenants protested.
“They’ll get cut off! Bring them back now and make it quick.” Mele watched movement popping up in a dozen places on disposable sensors seeded in corridors and tunnels. Whoever was in charge on the other side now had been smart enough to set up and launch a broad front attack. She wouldn’t be able to concentrate her forces against a single enemy thrust. But there was still a bright side to that.
“They’re spread out,” Mele transmitted to her Marines and the militia. “They won’t be able to hit any point of ours with overwhelming strength. We can hold them, and the longer we hold them here, the more time Shark’ll have to get going.”
“Here they come!” Corporal Gamba called.
Mele spotted motion in the corridor leading toward the improvised defensive position where she waited with Lieutenant Freeman’s militia. She leveled her weapon, aiming carefully.
Suddenly there were enemies everywhere to the front, enemy fire slamming into the mix of desks and chairs and cabinets that formed a bulwark for the defenders. Mele fired. A moment later the militia around her also opened up.