Extremis (87 page)

“And the nuclear munitions?”

“Awaiting your release order for activation.”

Iakkut let his mounting wave of (triumph, pride) fill the command vehicle and willed it outward through the general
selnarm
link to the rest of the attack forces. “In the name of the Martyrs—and especially in memory of my discarnate friend, Torhok—I instruct you to arm the warheads.”

* * *

Heide inspected his portable battle-comp’s display: the
faux
-3-D representation in its flat screen rotated slowly to show the approaching two-lobed swarm of Baldy craft. The first group had come from Punt and was approaching at low altitude. Grav attack platforms, no doubt: they would attempt to suppress his defenses and designate targets for the second force. That latter cell of enemy craft—which had come down from orbit—was probably carrying the hammer with which the Arduans intended to flatten the main Resistance base.

Heide considered his defensive grid. It would probably be most prudent to engage the lead flight with his conventional systems—thereby inviting them to believe that the Resistance had fairly limited AA capabilities. “Sites Victor One through Twelve, prepare to engage the first enemy wave on my mark.”

Montaño’s breathless voice cut into his command channel. “Sir, the facility is not yet evacuated. And if the Baldies should launch nuclear weapons while the evacuees are still in the smugglers’ tunnel…”

“Understood, Ensign.” Heide could envision the blast effects clearly: before the old subterranean river tunnel collapsed, the ground-bursting wave of superheated plasma would rush into and through the tube, making it a mile-long blast furnace that would vaporize anyone and anything still inside. He toggled the open circuit. “It seems we must hold these attackers a little longer. Sites Victor One through Victor Twelve, you will have to engage the lead targets before they reach optimal range. We need to convince the Baldies to stand off and duel with us, clear us out before they risk bringing in their decisive ordnance. This means that, before we can use our HVMs, we will take more casualties, and they will take fewer than they might—far fewer. Is that understood?”

The conventional launch sites began signaling their affirmatives. And as Heide watched the green lights collect on his status board, he thought:
Strange. Now that death is certain—either from nuclear or conventional ordnance, it hardly matters—my fear is gone.
Now, in its place, Heide had just one grim, driving impulse: he had to get as many of his people to safety as possible. But there was one particular life that it was imperative to preserve, that of a small child who should never have been in a hidden military base at all. Unfortunately, one of Julian Heide’s petty and insecure machinations had put that little life in what was now mortal and immediate danger.

No,
Heide swore to whatever power marked the oaths of doomed warriors,
that little boy is going to live…even if it’s the last thing I ever do.

Which,
he conceded,
it might very well be.

* * *

McGee waved to Kapinski, senior among the “outriders”: members of the assault team for whom there were no seats left in either mount. “Juan, get your people down. A suborbital strike could get pretty nasty if our AA weapons experts don’t get their timing just right.” The Marines under Juan’s nominal command did not wait for his orders, though. At McGee’s warning, they threw themselves flat in the narrow space between the two overburdened house-trailers.

The sonic booms overhead became more numerous. Thirty, forty, maybe fifty: Baldy fast movers, descending to smite whatever motley collection of humans had the unmitigated and apparently insane gall to attack Punt.…

McGee counted the seconds; too many seemed to go by. He looked toward the taller buildings back beyond the periphery of the littered no-man’s-land and felt his heart begin to race. If those fast movers got a chance to launch their ordnance…

From several dozen buildings 100–150 meters behind the zone’s rim of demolished structures, blinding white-hot rays stabbed skyward. High overhead, each ended in a brilliant ball of distant destruction.

But McGee and the other thousands of Resistance fighters who were sheltering desperately close to the ground never heard the tardy thunder of those explosions, because they were deafened instead by dozens of small cyclones. The vicious mid-air maelstroms had been spawned by each HVM, which, in a single instant, reached and annihilated the inbound Baldy attack craft, multiple sonic booms chasing up behind it into the light blue morning sky. The consequent vortices howled at, and jostled against, each other, spawning split-second tornadoes here and there. Lightning arced sideways between them and across a sky alight with burning columns of spontaneously combusting air that marked where the HVMs had passed but an instant before.

Poking her head up through the open hatch of the A mount, and looking out a window of one of the half-houses, Jen gaped. “What the hell were
those
?” she breathed.

“Hyper-velocity missiles,” supplied McGee as he swept his binoculars across the smoke-filled no-man’s-land. “They use a tiny pseudo-velocity drive generator that lasts only a fraction of a second. That’s why they look like a big laser beam. Your eye doesn’t work fast enough to see an object traveling thirty thousand kilometers per second. And even the Baldy defense systems can’t react fast enough to shoot them down. If our operators hit their marks, they just engaged the first wave of Baldy fast movers at an altitude of twenty-five kilometers, give or take. That means there was a little less than a 0.001 second delay between each HVM’s launch and its target intercept.”

“So what will the Arduans do now?”

As McGee started answering, another rumble of multiple sonic booms began sounding overhead. “If they’re stupid—or didn’t get good sensor data—they’ll try a second wave, which it sounds like they’re about to do. And they’ll get pretty much the same results.”

“And what then?”

“Well, they’ll figure out that they have to hit this whole area with something that stops our HVMs. They might try a massive EMP strike, which won’t work, because HVMs are battle-hardened. Of course, if they choose to make that EMP strike the old-fashioned way—with air-bursted nukes fired from orbit—then we’re done for.”

“Because they’ll be killing our HVMs before they can launch.”

“That—and because they’ll be killing all the rest of us, too. And that’s pretty much all the time we’ve got for explanations.”

“Uh—how much time
do
we have?”

“Not enough to stand around wondering about it, that’s for sure.”

McGee motioned for Jen to drop down through the hatch. As she did, he left his observation post—just inside the side window of the half-house—and then slid down the ladder into A mount right after her. “Let’s go,” he shouted and grabbed a handhold with all the magnified force his armor could generate.

As more HVMs slashed skyward, and more cyclones whipped around their wakes, two Marine grav APCs came ripping out of the ends of the two house halves. As if ferociously glad to be finally liberated from their concealment inside those flimsy structures, the wedge-shaped vehicles sprayed plywood and siding outward in a broad arc. The outriders—six Marines who were unable to fit inside the troop compartments—clung to the special netting on the sharply sloped rears of their respective craft with one hand, held their lashing lines tightly with the other.

As the two armored vehicles sped low and fast for the northern extents of Punt’s walls, another barrage of 78 mm vertical-tube missiles arced over toward the Baldy city. The alien PDF systems knocked them down, creating a momentary tempest of flame and smoke high over the no-man’s-land. A second later, the northernmost of the Baldy defense emplacements discovered that, while engaged with the missiles, they had failed to immediately detect the two grav APCs that were now screaming closer in nap-of-the-earth flight mode, only four meters off the ground.

At that moment, under the dense roof of rippling flame, energies, and smoke that hung over the secure zone, the main assault force—eight battalions of Marine-cadred Resistance fighters who had advanced to the edge of the dense white and black billows that ran along the ground—charged in response to a collective shrilling of athletic whistles. The Baldy weapon emplacements were not slow to respond, and the ubiquitous autonomous defense blisters rose up by the dozens to pepper away at the advancing fireteams.

But the wreckage of the automated vehicles
now provided cover and concealment to the leapfrogging combat groups. From vantage points beyond the edge of the secure zone, human heavy weapons spoke: for every two Resistance fighters that sprawled in the smoke and were still, a Baldy or one of their blisters fell permanently silent.

The general attack made the fastest progress on the north extents—largely because the Baldy PDF systems in that salient had already combined their firepower with the anti-vehicle missiles that were racing toward the two grav APCs. The Resistance foot soldiers took swift advantage of the overtaxed Baldy defenses: shoulder-fired missiles of staggering power found and silenced more alien weapon emplacements. Cluster-rocket launchers saturated the intercept sensors of the enemy PDF computers, forcing them to choose between an imminent threat to their own survival or the onrushing grav vehicles. With the Baldies thus overloaded in the north end of their line, the lighter human infantry there was able to advance under only half the amount of defensive fire that the assault was encountering elsewhere.

Inside A Mount, from the squad compartment, Jennifer watched their now-careening approach through the narrow plasteel vision slits that served as the vehicle’s cockpit. Overhead, the APC’s remote-turreted PDF mount whined through its nonstop sequence of target acquisitions, each quick buzz-saw pulse of its hopper-fed, high-speed coil gun preceding a corresponding missile detonation along the intended path of the grav vehicle. They had been airborne for maybe nine seconds; in that time, they had blasted down at least forty inbound missiles.

“ETA?” yelled Tank.

“Thirty seconds,” the driver shouted over the stuttering roar of dozens of nearby detonations.

Two missiles loomed in front of them. Overhead, the coil gun screeched, and one of the missiles became an orange fireball. The other—seen straight on—grew from the size of a pinhead to a penny as the remote turret whined, tracking, the coil gun shrieking again—

The sound of the blast was simultaneous with a fierce sideways wrench. Alert tones started sounding from the control panel; smoke was coming into the passenger compartment; firefighting canisters spewed their contents in a single, reactive spasm; the vehicle seemed to list for a second before righting itself.

Tank turned urgently to Jon Wismer, who was watching out the rear-vision port. “Kapinski? The other outriders?”

Wismer turned back to look at Tank and shook his head.

Jen thought she was going to throw up.
It all happens so fast. So terribly fast. Young, vibrant Juan Kapinski: ever the optimist with his head in the clouds and his heart on his sleeve. Now dead. One second he was part of the team, just like always; the next he’s gone and we have to move on. As though it didn’t matter. As though he’d never existed. Because it all happens so terribly, terribly fast.

* * *

“Tank’s APC—is it still…?”

Chong nodded sharply, eyes fixed to his binoculars. “Yes, Cap. A mount is still airborne, back on course. Close, though. The blast scraped all the outriders off.”

Cap stared through the smoke. “How far do you make the walls, Roon?”

Kelakos—who knew from Chong’s report that Juan was dead—spoke through gritted teeth. “Two hundred meters, sir.”

“Pass the word: ready on the line. Smoke grenades, just like we practiced. The first set is hand-tossed to fifty meters. The second set is by launcher to one hundred fifty meters. Chong, you and I had better split up. It wouldn’t do losing both of us during the final approach.”

Chong was still for a moment. “Cap, isn’t it a little early to start the advance? You’re gambling that Tank’s APCs are going to make it and that their breaching charges are going to work against that city wall.”

Cap’s face was livid, but Roon knew it was anger at the circumstances, not Chong. The old soldier had turned back upon his executive officer, and his eyes were bright and unblinking. “William, if those APCs don’t make it, we’re all dead anyway. But if they do, they’ll need us in behind them ASAP. So we’re going. Now.”

And Chong smiled. “Aye, aye, Cap. Lead the way.”

Cap smiled back, blew his whistle three times, then lifted his rifle over his head. Whistles shrilled back.

“Marines!” he roared in a voice that somehow was audible above the explosions and gunfire.

“Oo-rah!” came the loud, grim chorus along the line.

“Follow me!” Cap Peters jumped up, waving them on with his free hand—

—just as a single hypervelocity 15 mm Baldy shell ripped through the center of his cuirass and exited the backplate in a blast of blood, bones, and lung.

Chong stared at Captain Tibor Peters’s upward staring and unblinking eyes for a full half second and then vaulted over the charred truck chassis behind which they’d been hiding. He charged toward the walls of Punt city, screaming, howling, crying like the wounded human animal that he was.

Within a moment, nearly a thousand throats took up that cry, and like a seething, rageful horde, the human Resistance fighters of Bellerophon began racing through their detonating smoke grenades toward the walls that sheltered their oppressors.

* * *

The driver turned toward Tank. “El-Tee, we’re in. We’re under their missile arcs. I think we—”

That was when McGee saw the faint ionizing sparkle of a Baldy PDF laser only one hundred meters to the right. Metal squealed and the vehicle pitched sharply down to that side.

“Primary lifter out, Tank. I can’t hold it. Gonna be a rough landing.”

Shit.
“How much longer can we stay up?”

“Ten seconds. Maybe.”