Extremis (86 page)

Jen’s teeth chattered as she averred, “Which is where I should be.” She didn’t look much braver than she sounded—or McGee himself felt.

However, McGee mustered a reassuring smile even as he wondered when he had become such a good actor. He hopped down to slip into his own armor under cover—just in case Baldy satellites were tasked to conduct full-time look-down surveillance of the perimeter around Punt. As he wriggled into the stiff suit, he called the others to him. “Okay, listen up. Last review. We go in hot, dismount, leave the driver plus one with the troop carriers to provide a base of fire and act as a beacon for the main attack force. We follow our Baldy specialist”—he rubbed the immense, smooth pauldron perched atop Jen’s narrow right shoulder—“wherever she leads us. We’ve got no maps, so stay alert and be prepared to improvise. As soon as we’re inside, you activate your UV dye dispensers. That’s how the follow-up assault will find our trail and follow us in.”

“Lieutenant,” asked Ramirez, who was a last-minute replacement, “why not just radio back the coordinates as we go?”

“Good question, Ben. Sorry we didn’t cover that for you. Without maps, coordinates aren’t going to help much inside a city. Second—and probably more important—we can’t count on our radios working more than thirty seconds after we turn them on. We may have milspec transceivers and scramblers in these suits, but Baldy will be all around us, with big fixed ground stations and honest-to-god specialists manning them. I expect we’ll lose the EW battle in one minute or less, so we don’t go active until we are at target.” McGee looked around the group. “Which is why we can’t assume that any com-links are going to work. No biomed updates, no telemetry, no personal transponders. Which, in turn, is why we can’t start relying on our HUD displays for squad-position data. We could find ourselves relying on info that we could lose at any second. So we do this old school—hand signals, verbal commands, and your best sensor is the Mark I eyeball.”

Roon Kelakos’s comment was more grumble than words. “At least with our hardened goggles, we can see in the dark if they turn the lights off.”

“Maybe, Roon—but maybe not.”

“Whaddya mean?”

“I mean if things get bad, they may call in EMP strikes on us—and then we might lose all our electronics, night-vision goggles along with the rest. And that includes any of our weapons that require juice.”

Battisti clucked his tongue once. “Ah, so that is why no plasma guns, and only a few of the coil guns.”

“Right. Baldy can’t turn off chemical propellants. So that’s why you’re almost all carrying the old-fashioned cannons”—he nodded to their almost uniform armament: 10 mm magnum caseless assault guns with Serrie Sights and an underslung grenade launcher—“with a triple load of ammo, hand grenades, and not much else. Those ten-millimeter rounds go straight through Baldy drones and blisters, and you won’t even feel the recoil inside your armor, so you can shoot on the run. And speed is going to be our watchword, Marines.”

Wismer hefted his coil gun, the flexible ammo cassette bunching slightly. “So if Baldy hits us with EMP, I use this as a club?”

Jen held up a pair of very short, caseless carbines. “No, you come get a working gun from me, Jon. But Tank, what about our suits?” She moved her arm—which made a faint whirring noise. “If the EMP knocks out
all
electronics…”

McGee smiled at her, glad to see that her nerves didn’t keep her from thinking straight. “The suit works like a big Faraday cage for everything inside it—which is already triple-hardened. Don’t worry, Jen. As they tell us in Basic: ‘Even if the enemy uses nukes, your suit will still work when everything else is dead.’ ” He left off the end of the training axiom: “—including
you
.” Instead, he offered what reassurance he could. “With any luck, Baldy won’t EMP us. Their equipment doesn’t show much evidence of being hardened against a big pulse. But then again, there’s a lot about their military circuitry and control mechanisms we don’t understand because of their machine-mind interfaces. So it’s all guesswork, at this point. Any questions?”

The twenty-three Marines—and Jen—were silent. “Okay, then, strike teams into the mounts. Outriders, strap on. It’s time to start the party.”

As the Marines disappeared up into the two half-houses sitting on trailers with flat tires, Sandro stretched out one arm, holding aloft a second yellow pennant to flutter alongside the first. He held them both there for fifteen seconds, then lowered the one he was holding and pulled down the first.

Before he had hopped down from his covered watchpost, a swelling, ragged susurration arose from about a kilometer behind the edge of the Baldy no-man’s-land: more precisely, it was a sustained rumble of dull, fast-paced coughs, and a constant sputtering of rushing skyward whispers. The sounds—generated by hopper-fed mortars and 78 mm vertical disposatube rockets, respectively—continued to grow as their first salvos began raining down toward Punt.

The Baldy positions seemed stunned for a moment, then responded. The distant sparkling crackles of their PDF lasers began a split second before dozens, and then hundreds, of the human munitions began exploding in mid-air, filling the sky above the no-man’s-land with smoke and thunder. Enforcer sleds—far fewer than originally anticipated—began rising up from Punt’s airfield and spaceport, swiveling defense blisters and turrets in the direction of the human attackers.

As they rose up, the shattered edge of human suburbia seemed to discharge a veritable wall of volleyed fire, much as had the serried ranks of Napoleonic infantry. But instead of a fusillade of muskets, this was a horizontal torrent of anti-armor rockets with self-seeking warheads. The Baldy sleds tried to evade and destroyed dozens of the inbound missiles with their own PDF systems—but dozens more of the weapons got through. White and orange flashes denoted stricken sleds, some exploding to fragments in mid-air.

The perimeter PDF systems of the Baldies shifted, reallocating some of Punt’s overall intercept capability to cover the remaining sleds’ attempts to withdraw back under the defensive berm that ringed their hangars and landing pads. But as soon as the Arduan PDF systems shifted their efforts, a second barrage of “fire-and-forget” rockets rushed outward—this time, directly toward the PDF emplacements themselves.

Those Baldy defense systems tried to retask to handle the new threat—and did, partially. But many of the Baldy weapon emplacements were overtaxed, or caught in that instant when they were changing from one set of targets to another—and jets of dirt and flame marked their destruction.

At the same moment, rocket salvos leaped out from the edge of Punt’s defenses, and deeper in the city as well, unerringly targeted at the human launch sites. Which, if the Marine-led Resistance was doing their job, had nothing left in them but now-emptied control-by-wire launchers, their human operators located at quiet points along the line, or in second- and third-story observation points well back from it.

As the bow-wave of the murderous Baldy salvo began savaging the edge of the no-man’s-land perimeter, a last flurry of human rockets jetted from those launch sites—and only covered half the distance to the city before they vaporized themselves in a brief, actinic flare. At that exact instant, the running lights on the house-trailer winked out.

“Our EMP strike went in,” Tank called down to his assault team.

“Yeah, but did it work on the Baldies?” Harry Li’s question was borne up toward him on a chorus of guttural, curious mutters.

“Well,” McGee shouted down to his Marines as a dust cloud—kicked up by human vehicles—began rising from the southernmost edges of the no-man’s-land, “we’ll be the first to know.”

* * *

As the rumble of Arduan rockets rose up, and half the lights in Punt went out, Ankaht felt Mretlak’s
selnarm
spike abruptly into her own. “Elder, the human attack is in earnest.”

The sturdy deorbited bulkhead that was the outer wall of Punt City quivered as she sent (worry) but with a (wry) twist. “This I have surmised, Overseer.”

“Then you are to immediately evacuate to Safe Point Three.”

“Farther north into the center of Punt? But why—?”

“Elder, I only have time for the briefest update. Human vehicles have been sighted heading toward your old facility in the West Shore District, beyond our primary walls. Perhaps they still expect to find you there, and eliminate you.”

“That makes little sense.”

“I agree. The other reason they may choose that as the starting point for the attack is because they are familiar with the area’s layout. They may believe they can exploit their native knowledge of the district to their advantage a second time.”

Ankaht doubted that, too, but continued to attend to Mretlak’s report. “At any rate, they launched an EMP assault against the city.”

“But I thought they had no such—”

“Evidently, our estimates regarding the weapons available to the humans were in serious error.”

“How propitious. We choose to employ doomsday devices on each other on precisely the same day.”

“I doubt it is luck, Elder. I suspect the timing of the radicals’ move was determined by our own timetable for isolating and then protecting the Resistance. At any rate, the human EMP attack has had only a moderate impact upon us. Our reinforced systems were undamaged. However, secondary and retrofitted systems may have been compromised.”

“Such as the doors that were added planetside,” amended Ankaht as she unsuccessfully ordered one of the lighter, nonbulkhead portals in her meeting room to open.

“Yes, such as new doors and lights and other fixtures that were added after we deorbited Punt. Perhaps this is another reason their main attack seems to be focused on West Shore. All the electronics there did overload and no longer function.”

Ankaht still found the focus on the human-built southern extents of Punt suspicious. “How many troops do the humans seem to be advancing toward the West Shore District?”

“Impossible to say yet, Elder. Although we have taken—and continue to take—losses to our overburdened defensive systems, we remain prepared to intercept any human movement across our security zone—particularly in the south.”

“And have they made no attacks elsewhere—not even feints or probes?”

She could feel Mretlak pause. Since the normal Security leadership had deserted to join the strike against the Resistance bases, this was probably the first time he had stopped to consider the human attack from a broader perspective. “Yes, Elder, it is most curious that the humans have not also—”

But then Temret was tugging urgently—physically—at her. “Revered Sleeper, we must go—now. Our route to Safe Point Three is now twice as long. The missile and EMP damage has blocked our primary pathways. We must improvise—and therefore, must start now.”

“Understood. Mretlak, I—”

“Go. I perceive—and concur with—your suspicions regarding the pattern of the human attacks. Now relocate yourself quickly.”

* * *

McGee watched ten seconds count down on his mechanical watch and looked up.

As he did, a growl of additional motors drowned out the almost-stilled sputter and crump of human rockets and mortars. That growl crescendoed and then broke free of the long, smoke-lined periphery of the no-man’s-land in the shape of dozens—no, hundreds—of wheeled cars, rovers, ATVs, and utility trucks. They arrowed straight toward the walls of Punt. Mixed in with them were skimmers and sleds and grav cargo lifters and every species of airborne vehicle that the Arduans had forbidden from the very first days of their occupation.

Again, the Baldy defensive fire lagged for a moment or three before engaging—and devastating—this motley armada of vehicles. Easily targeted, each one was smashed or knocked down by Baldy missiles. They crashed, rolled, tumbled, and in so doing came apart spectacularly—and with suspicious ease, littering and making irregular the once-smooth field of the secure zone. As each battered hulk rolled to a stop, no humans emerged from the chassis—which invariably began to smoke in an unusual fashion, emitting a miniature cumulus cloud of dense, white vapor.

McGee smiled. That smoke—an IR-refractive compound that rendered almost all thermal imaging useless—was swiftly obscuring the wreck-strewn ground that hemmed in Punt like a semicircular junkyard. The twisted frames of the slain vehicles also burned surprisingly well, sending greasy black plumes through the white billows: each chassis had been inundated with motor oil, which, once aflame, burned long and low. Those fires not only played further havoc with the enemy’s targeting sensors, but also sent up an acrid pall that hung over the Baldies’ security zone—which had, only ten minutes before, been as clear and flat and easily viewed as a billiard table.

Perfect
, thought McGee. “Jon,” he called out, “have you identified the remaining Baldy PDF systems here on the northern extents?”

“Every one, Tank.”

“And you’ve plotted the limits of their arcs of fire?”

“You bet.”

“Okay, then, Marines: helmets on and seal up. You outriders will need to hunker down for a minute or two—just like the main attack forces are doing right now.”

“Why?” asked Ben Ramirez.

“Because, Ben, if my guess is right, the real Baldy response is going to be arriving just about now—”

As the word “now” left McGee’s mouth, they heard—high above—the first, faint rumble of a sonic boom. And then another.

“Enemy air! Inbound!” McGee yelled, and then ducked down in his watchpost.

* * *

“Overseer Iakkut?”

“Yes?”

“We will be in effective range of our target in ten minutes.”

“The other strike force?”

“The second formation will come to effective range of the
griarfeksh
island base approximately four minutes after we reach our target here.”

“And our readiness?”

“Excellent,
Destoshaz’at
. All PDF systems are online and showing full function. Suppressive munitions are slaved to target designation systems: they will interdict any Resistance air defenses. Our forward air-control links for target identification and confirmation have been tested and are in constant communication with the exoatmospheric attack craft.”