Extremis (88 page)

Jen looked at McGee. “Will we coast in?”

The driver must have thought she was speaking to him. “Ma’am, this bucket has the glide characteristics of a brick. We’re going in—hard. And right now.”

Tank reached up, launched the breaching charge—which beat them to the wall by two seconds, blowing an immense divot out of its surface. Danilenko, ever-watchful in B mount, had evidently launched a split second later: his charge burrowed in behind the first.

It was hard to tell which mad bouncings were a product of the crash, and which wild gyrations were the result of being caught on the outer edges of the second charge’s detonation. Tank’s APC nosed in hard, then bounced up, shuddered, seemed ready to turn turtle, but ultimately crashed down on its belly.

Tank clawed his way over to the vision ports and saw that they had indeed plowed through Punt’s wall. The bow of their vehicle was in some kind of courtyard—across which at least two dozen armed Baldies were leaping in that long, gliding run of theirs. “Hostiles,” he shouted. “Engaging: danger close.” He slammed his palm down on the forward suppressive munitions relays.

Four cluster-bomblet tubes embedded in the vehicle’s glacis plate coughed in unison. The bombs, which would normally launch to a preset distance of seventy-five meters, could not finish out those trajectories: instead they exploded against, or first caromed off of, Punt’s interior walls, overhead arches, buttresses. In a moment, the courtyard was filled with explosions and viciously whining, needle-sized bits of shrapnel. The Baldies closest to the APC went down as if savaged by an invisible phalanx of chain saws. A few at the rear may have crawled away; McGee couldn’t be sure.

“Jon, get me a headcount of our people. Matto, reconfigure the PDF turret for automatic counterfire with operator override. Slave it to the driver’s console. And ripple fire the prismatic anti-laser dischargers until they’re dry. Jon?”

“Except for our outriders, the whole assault section reports a-okay and ready to go, Tank.”

“Jen, you okay?”

“I’m fine, Sandro. Let’s get out of this death trap.”

“Sounds good to me. Haika, crack the ramp.”

She did, lowering it just a few centimeters.

“Do you see B mount?”

“One meter behind us. If that. They look full function, Tank. Igor’s giving me a thumbs-up.”

“Okay, here’s the drill. The remote turrets cover us until we’re in. Then they’re on semiautonomous counterfire until our foot sloggers get here. At that point, the turrets and whatever is left in the CBM dispensers will provide a base of fire for the approaching infantry to get in under the cover of the walls.” He turned to the driver. “If you’re secure at that point, set up B mount as our forward HQ, and this one as a covered aid station. Now”—he turned to the rest of the Marines in his APC—“let’s do the job we came to do. Ramp down. Haika, lead us out.”

“
Marines lead the way!”
she howled and dropped the ramp as the rest of the squad echoed her battle cry in a pre-charge chorus.

And out they went.

* * *

Lentsul stopped, stunned by the urgency and fierce brevity of Mretlak’s send. The Resistance attack to the south had been a feint; the real attack had hit the north and had breached the wall of Punt itself. It was presumed that human troops were therefore entering the city even now. This thrust, and damage from the human bombardment, had cut off the approach Lentsul had planned on making to Safety Point Three.

Lentsul acknowledged Mretlak’s send and turned to consider the forces at his disposal. He had almost a hundred Enforcers and Intelligence operatives, as well as thirty semiautonomous weapons blisters and heavier defense drones. It would have to do.

Beckoning to them with a savage
selnarmic
command of his own, Lentsul entered the subsurface access corridors at a quick trot.

* * *

“Ankaht.”

“Yes, Mretlak?”

“Lentsul is on his way to you, but he will be delayed.”

“Why?”

“There are humans inside the city walls.”

“Down in West Shore?”

“No. In Punt proper.”

“You mean here, in the north?”

“Yes. You were right.”

“I was not right about anything, Mretlak, except that the first human assaults seemed…wrong, somehow.”

“Well, that assessment was correct. The first attacks were feints. Is the rest of the Council with you?”

“Those who are currently planetside, yes.”

“Good. May I ask you extend them the protection of your personal guards?”

“Temret has already stationed his Guardians in defensive positions. But they lack sufficient weapons. They only have machine-pistols. And they are not wearing any armor.”

Mretlak’s pause seemed very long. “Do you have a vocoder with you?”

“Yes.”

“I suggest you turn it on. You might wish to refresh the other Councilors in its operation.”

“They are reviewing its principles now, Mretlak. But if the humans have discerned that we—as represented by Iakkut and his renegades—are about to attack both their Resistance bases, they may not be inclined to talk.”

Mretlak’s pause was even longer. “You, Elder, have a distressing talent for understatement.”

Ankaht summoned (drollery) with some effort. “You, Mretlak, are not the first to tell me so.”

But,
she thought as the link closed,
you may very well be the last.

* * *

McGee burned off a whole cassette of 10 mm magnum discarding sabot rounds at the rude barricade of Baldy freight containers: the 5 mm superdense penetrator rods stitched a tight pattern of holes across the improvised defensive wall. McGee’s thermal-imaging goggles showed what transpired on the other side: even the Baldies that had been hunkered down out of sight had been blown not merely backward, but asunder.

“Clear,” McGee shouted, and the second assault team raced past him. One member of the first assault team was being patched up by Haika. Jon Wismer was checking the team’s other casualty—Matthew Maotulu. Jon turned, and even before he shook his helmeted head, McGee knew the verdict from the brief slump of his shoulders. Matto was dead.

Sloppy. I was sloppy,
thought McGee as he savagely threw away the empty cassette and snapped another into place.
If I had double-checked that barricade when we first saw it—

He felt a hand on his arm, heard the protecting vantbrass creak under the strain of a superhuman grip. It was Jen, forgetting her soothing hand was encased in a powered gauntlet. “Hey, hey. Easy there, Jen. You’re going to crack my armor open.”
The pressure eased—a little. “Jen—what is it?”

“She’s here. I can feel it.”

“Who’s here? What do you mea—?”

“Ankaht. She’s here. And she’s close.”

McGee looped two fingers in mid-air: all but the point- and rear-guards were to huddle up and listen. “You’ve detected Ankaht? Where? Which direction do we head now?” The Marines were already in a tight ring around them: at last, a target lock.

Jen shrugged. “It doesn’t work like that, Tank. It’s not so—so quantifiable. But generally, she’s in that direction.” She waved vaguely to the east. “And a little down, I think.”

“You heard the lady,” McGee shouted. “We’ve got a bearing on the target. Igor, time to distribute the suppressives.” Danilenko started passing out more grenades, along with pistol-sized, one-shot flamers: a three-second flamethrower that expedited fast movement through halls or tunnels. Tank gave orders as the Marines checked and stowed the new weapons: “Fast leapfrog advance. Second Team, you have our six. And keep up—we’re moving at the double time. Starting now!”

* * *

Ankaht had just convinced Tefnut ha sheri to shelter himself behind the tipped-over conference table when she felt a push at her
selnarm
, like a Youngling’s earliest efforts to make its feelings felt by others. And beside its weak, tentative projection, there was something else unusual about the contact—as if it wasn’t really a focused send, but rather an almost omnidirectional transmission. Which was strange to encounter at this particular moment, because the only time Ankaht could remember experiencing such a peculiar
selnarmic
contact was when she had been working with—

“Jennifer?” Ankaht snapped upright so quickly that several of her fellow Councilors started back. “Jennifer? Jennifer? Is that you? Are you there?”

But the faint pulse of contact—whether real or imagined—was gone.

* * *

“
Destoshaz’at
Iakkut, a distress call from Melantho.”

“From Melantho? Relay its contents to me.” Iakkut waited through the hasty overview of the ongoing human attack, the interdiction of the orbital support craft, the appearance of unprecedented and unexpected weapons of obvious military origin, the uncertain outlook for all of Punt, and the desperate plea for immediate assistance. He physically smiled; to a human, it would have looked like a rictus. “Excellent.”

“Excellent? What are we to do,
Destoshaz’at
?”

“Do? Why, we do absolutely nothing. The human attack is fortuitous. Consider. The great majority of the truly race-loyal inhabitants of Punt are here with us, and we are in possession of almost all the mobile military assets of the city. So what is the loss if the city falls and the Council is destroyed along with it? And conceive of the elegance of such an outcome. It will be the humans, now, who destroy the greatest of our race-traitors—the Council and Ankaht. And so the exchange of atrocities will have been initiated by the
griarfeksh
, not us. And with our esteemed Council, and senior elder, and high priest all dead at their hands, the rest of the Children of Illudor will not fail to join us in our sad—but very necessary—resolve to exterminate the perfidious
griarfeksh
. And now tell me—how are we faring against the human SAM sites?”

“Fairly well, Overseer, but we have lost over a dozen of our sleds.”

“They have held their military weapons back for such an eventuality. Impressive restraint for such an impetuous species. But their defenses are almost eliminated now, are they not?”

“The last of their missile batteries has just been silenced,
Destoshaz’at
.”

“Excellent. Signal the strike craft. They may commence their attack runs now.”

* * *

Heide watched as the last of the icons denoting his conventional SAM sites went from green to red to gone. At almost the same instant, the transatmospheric attack craft—which had slowed their rate of descent when Heide’s conventional defenses had showed their teeth—began dropping quickly, building speed as they dove in.

And they were diving in as one massive wedge.

Perfect. “Omega batteries: control?”

“Omega control here, sir.”

“Do you have telemetry on the inbound transatmospheric attack craft?”

“Yes, sir. We’ve had plenty of time for optical and passive tracking. Give the word and I can illuminate them with our active sensors. We’ll have lock in one, maybe two seconds.”

“Do so, and launch your HVMs in three waves.”

“As per preprogrammed protocol seven. Yes, sir.”

Heide’s communications specialist gulped. “But Captain Heide, what about the Baldy Security sleds?”

“Ignore them. The meteorological effects of the HVMs will get most of them.”

“But what about the rest of them, sir? At this range, they’ll chop us to pieces.”

Heide turned to look at the young man. “Yes, or—even if we don’t lift a finger to strike back—we’ll still be vaporized by a nuclear blast. Do you have a strong preference between the two experiences, corporal?”

The young man went so pale that he almost looked blue.

“So carry out your orders. Then get to your shelter.”
Because,
Heide thought with a grim smile,
if you
don’t
hurry, you may get to experience both forms of annihilation before this minute is over.

* * *

Iakkut blinked at the changes beneath him. One moment, the landscape a kilometer below seemed quiescent, beaten: a dozen thin tendrils of smoke stretched into the sky, marking the sites of now-destroyed defensive missile sites. The rest of the terrain—dotted here and there by small communities—appeared senseless, like a stunned opponent laid out to be slain by the final
skeerba
strike that was even now descending through the clouds.

And then, in one apocalyptic instant, everything changed: blue-white beams seemed to leap up from the surface of the planet itself. His lead sleds’ PDF systems had registered a flicker of something going past them—and then those vehicles were tumbling through the air, buffeted by the cyclonic side-winds and ferocious vortices left in the wake of whatever had ripped past them.

“Operations, report. What was—what are they?”

“Overseer, I am not sure. The sensors seemed to show readings consistent with a pseudo-velocity drive field. But it only lasted an insta—”

Iakkut knew. The humans had HVMs. He had read about them in the
griarfeksh
military manuals—once he was permitted to study them, that is. HVMs had seen extremely infrequent use since the Bug War because they were so widely destructive: their meteorological aftereffects threatened friend and foe alike. But the humans
couldn’t
have had a stockpile of HVMs all this time, because the
griarfeksh
would surely have used them before now—

“Destoshaz’at!”

The urgency of his operations prime told Iakkut what the incoming message was before it was relayed. “They have struck our transatmospheric attack craft.”

“Yes, sir. Half are—are gone, sir!”

Faint shockwaves from overhead—the exploding craft of the strike group—replaced the diminished buffeting of dying cyclones. “Ops: all sleds counterfire at all known or suspected HVM launch sites. Comms, send this to the remaining transatmospheric attack craft: new launch protocol, for immediate execution. One half of nuclear ordnance is to blanket map grids T 7 through X 42 with airbursting warheads at seventy meters mean altitude. Second half of nuclear ordnance to be directed against our pre-ranged target coordinates: do not wait for our laser designation. Ops, can we recalibrate our PDF’s to—?”