Glory Main (22 page)

Movers and other vehicles rolled in every direction, work crews and formations of soldiers were marching to and fro, and an enemy scout screamed down to land even as they watched. Cargo carriers with lowered ramps disgorged barrels and crates in a seemingly endless supply, and mountains of both were being built on every available space. Just before losing sight of the drome, Mortas believed he spotted at least one of the Wren-­style shuttles that they would need to steal.

The colony's defensive perimeter followed the layout he'd been taught in officer training, with a wide cement ditch as the first obstacle. Area denial had become such a mainstay of war on the Hab planets that both sides could lay a minefield in a matter of minutes and so the ground outside the ditch would have been sewn with man-­killers shortly after the initial attack. Inside the ditch was a double wall of defensive wire, but this was no standard cattle fence.

This barbed wire was reactive, attracted by the electricity in armored vehicles, fighting suits, and even the naked human form. Some of it was stationary, some of it was loose, but its tendrils could reach out and snag anything with an electric field that came near it. Trying to blow it down with rocket fire or bombs was pretty pointless, as even severed segments were known to snake across the ground in search of electrons. Once they'd found and ensnared a vehicle or an individual, the reactive wire strands had one more trick to them. They would emit a signal calling the fire of larger Sim weapons, or glow hotly to attract the attention of spotters and infantry relying on the naked eye. It was bad enough that the fiendish stuff would trap its victim, but it was pure hell that it would then basically scream, “Over here! Shoot over here!” for every weapon in range.

Mortas felt his muscles tensing up as they crossed the open ground, his eyes taking in the irregular holes where different types of mines had either detonated outright or sprung into action. Like the reactive wire, some of these were static and others diabolically active. Detecting the same electric field as the wire, one variety would fly up in the air and explode while another actually rolled across the ground to effect maximum damage on whatever had attracted it. He didn't see any debris or body parts, and so he wondered if the Sims had detonated the devices themselves when the reinforcements arrived. Looking down at the captured recon vehicle that was now his ride, he experienced a sinking thrill at the thought that they might have overlooked one of the explosives and left it live.

Trent leaned in close to shout over the engine. “Look ahead! Maybe Shalley should have let us do a recon for him after all!”

Mortas pulled his eyes off of the ground and felt them widen in disbelief. As they neared the enemy settlement, details of the initial bombardment from space began to come into focus. Clearly the place had taken an awful beating before the attack had been called off, and the first sign of this was the absolute wreck of the ditch. Precision fire, most likely from attack craft launched from orbit, had blasted the steep sides until the waterless moat was nothing more than a gentle depression as far as the eye could see.

Likewise, the reactive wire was practically all gone. Mortas spotted several burnt-­out barrels scattered on the settlement side of the moat, wrapped with scorched segments of enemy wire, and recognized them as human countermeasures. The war had been going on for a long time, and the reactive wire was not a recent development. The barrels used the wire's obsession with electric fields to its disadvantage, and a variety of delivery systems could drop these canisters right into the obstacle belt. Shorting out any strands that reached them, and spinning in place to pull down the static coils, they could denude an enemy defensive wall in only a few minutes if left to work unopposed. As they got closer, he was able to make out the holes that Sim gunners had shot into the barrels, no doubt firing directly at the glowing, thrashing tendrils engaged in the mechanical life-­or-­death struggle with the rolling canisters.

“These guys got caught with their pants down!” He yelled, pulling Trent and Gorman closer so they could both hear. “Our ­people seriously worked them over before they got their reaction going!”

“Maybe.” Gorman wasn't shouting, but his words were loud enough. “Or maybe they wanted the assault force to come straight at them. They had that new ordnance to try out, and they wouldn't need anything else if it worked.”

The lead vehicles were reaching the ditch now, and they all squinted into the raised dust as the movers downshifted and then crossed the depression. A small formation of Sim armored carriers was moving out to their right, and there was also some kind of vehicular traffic to their front, so it was almost impossible to see what kind of guard force was waiting for them. The grit flew up into his eyes, but Mortas kept his arms around Gorman and Trent, turning his head this way and that in a vain effort to avoid the dirt. The others used their free hands to shield themselves, and he finally couldn't take it anymore.

“What do you see? What do you see? Who's guarding the gate? How are they arranged?”

Gorman began laughing out loud at that point, and Trent soon joined in. She was still laughing when she rested her head on his shoulder and spoke as if preparing to fall into a deep sleep. “What guards? There's nobody there. The place is wide open.”

T
he mirth was short-­lived. They next rolled past a concrete bunker holding a heavy weapon of some kind, but they hardly noticed the massive barrel or the ghostly defenders seated around it. The Sim gun crew was even worse off than the infantry riding by; they sat with their backs against the chipped, sloping stone of the fighting position showing hollow eyes that barely registered life.

The humans didn't look at the exhausted enemy for too long. With their obstacle belt destroyed in the first bombardment they'd erected temporary defenses closer to the emplacement. Mortas had seen footage of these primitive devices, basically girders cut into long segments and welded together to form a metal tumbleweed. Reactive wire was strung between and among the tumbleweeds, and the ends of the girders were festooned with explosives that would detonate upon contact with a vehicle or upon command if human infantry clustered around it for cover.

Even the deadly bombs on the spokes of the tumbleweeds didn't hold their attention, however, as it was soon clear that a remnant of the walking infantry company from the initial assault had met its end right there. Different spots on the flat ground near the bunker were littered with burnt-­out coils of the reactive wire, and closer inspection showed that many of them were wrapped around the remains of human troops. Some of these were so badly shot or burned that they could only be identified by their mangled body armor or ruined weapons.

Closer to the bunker, the bodies of several humans had been spread-­eagled on the enemy obstacles. Their armor and weapons were gone, many of them had been dismembered, and all of them showed ugly wounds and dark smears of blood on what was left of their uniforms. Whether they were meant to serve as trophies announcing victory or scarecrows warding off further attack was unclear.

As they passed the Sim emplacement, Mortas noted the marks of a close assault on the angled rock that protected the heavy weapon. Chips had been knocked out in numerous places, and one entire corner of the bunker was gone. Fragments of stone were ranged on the ground in front of the fracture, which showed black smudges radiating from most of its edges. The human infantry had come close to taking this particular position, as the missing corner had been a rounded firing slit before someone had managed to stuff an explosive inside. To do that, the attackers would have had to maneuver right up to it, most likely under cover of darkness, and with almost no chance of retreat if they failed to capture the emplacement.

His own experience at crossing so many miles of this planet, sometimes in the canyons and other times crawling on his belly, painted the picture for him. He saw a dozen or more humans, hungry and filthy and tired, rigged out in the shoulder-­and-­torso armor of the walking infantry, sliding forward across the open toward the silent enemy position in the middle of the night. Guts tight with the fear of being spotted and the knowledge that their only warning would be the enemy weapons opening up on them. Different teams carrying the explosive bags, creeping all the way up to the grim walls while the others waited a short distance away, ready to provide covering fire or to charge into the breach if the bombs did their work.

Now we know why they were so bent on filling in the ravines.

Mortas turned and craned his neck to see the reaction of the Sim troops riding the next vehicle, and was only mildly surprised to see little approval for the mistreatment of the human dead. Once again he saw the shaking of a head or two, and decided that these soldiers had been locked in combat with the survivors of the assault force long enough to have gained some kind of respect for them. Either that, or they'd seen so much killing that they found excesses like these repulsive.

The settlement itself rose into life shortly after that, but the devastation simply got worse. Sim work crews were everywhere, moving piles of broken rock and smashed equipment. The domes Mortas had seen from afar had been hit by a special kind of ordnance, something that penetrated the curved roof and then detonated deep inside. All that damage would have occurred in the initial bombardment, but apparently the besieged defenders had been too busy surviving to deal with it at the time. They'd hastily pushed the wreckage off to the sides of the main thoroughfares, and now they were sifting through the detritus looking for long-­dead casualties. The smell of the decaying flesh rose up over the chemical scent of the mover's engine, and as Mortas watched, a dead Sim was pulled from the rubble in two pieces.

They reached what appeared to be the town square, and Sim military police stopped the column without appearing to have much interest in it. Mortas looked around, trying to determine the reason for the holdup. A haggard file of civilians was shuffling through a chow line across the square, and yet another column of vehicles was parked next to one of the few undamaged structures. Sim casualties were being carried from the building on stretchers and loaded on the movers, and he decided it must have been some kind of hospital during the siege. The medical vehicles rolled off in short order, and he was thrilled to see the military police directing them to follow.

“They're being evacuated, I bet they're going to the drome.” He hugged Trent and Gorman tightly, speaking just loud enough to be heard over the engine. “We just might get lucky enough to ride the whole way there.”

T
hey were passing the enemy rocket batteries when the question about staying with the column became moot. The delivery tubes that had changed the hard dirt into mud under the human assault force and then, later, rained death on the scavengers on that same ground were in the very center of the settlement. Unlike the enemy bunkers, they were huge half-­spheres of concrete with sliding double-­door openings on four sides. They'd been hit by something heavy, probably in the first day's bombardment, as most of them displayed wide cracks and black smudges, but their engineering had obviously been sufficient protection. Mortas was studying them when he saw the doors on one side begin to open, and a moment later he realized what it was. The open mouths of a multi-­launch rocket system emerged from behind the doors, dark and hungry.

Someone had called for fire support, and the rocket turrets were about to go into action.

“Get ready! They're about to fire a mission, and I bet these things are loud!”

Trent leaned across him urgently, speaking to both of them. “Cover your ears and open your mouths! Concussion's the real killer!”

They didn't get the chance to do either of those things, as the drivers in the column had noticed the gun activity as well. Instead of stopping and dismounting the exposed troops riding with them, they simply took off at top speed. The three humans barely had enough time to grab handholds on the scout car's carapace before they were barreling along, bouncing in the air with each rut and rise. They weren't past the gun emplacements when the firing started, and it was all Mortas could do to force himself to keep his hands gripping the vehicle. The rockets belched forth with an explosion so loud that he could have sworn someone had just ice-­picked him in the eardrums, and the rush of air was a full-­body slap that threatened to tear him loose from the car.

The three of them flattened as best they could, trying to bury their ears in one another's torso, and the nightmare ride continued with a bone-­rattling succession of jolts from above and below as the firing continued and the vehicles jumped in flight. Mortas managed to press one of his boots against the recon vehicle's headlight grill, finally keeping himself from flying up in the air with each bounce, but the others had no such luck and so they landed on him more often than not. He heard a low, mewling cry very close to his damaged ears and was looking to see who was making that sound when he realized it was coming from his own mouth. The terrifying succession of explosions, wind slaps, and buffets from the armor was reaching a climax that he feared he would not survive when the racing vehicle came to a screeching halt.

Gorman lost his hold and shot forward, skimming across the car's hood and bouncing off the rear end of the towing mover before disappearing between the two stopped vehicles like a rag doll. Trent called out his name in horror before pushing herself off of Mortas and sliding down after him. Taking in huge, panicked breaths, Mortas forced himself to release his grip on the handholds and look around as the rockets fired one more salvo somewhere behind the convoy.

He saw what had caused them to stop, and knew that this was their chance. One of the captured vehicles farther up the line had flipped over in the convoy's headlong flight, yanking its mover to a stop and also crushing one of the Sim troops who'd been riding it. He craned his neck to see better, and made out several limp forms in the dirt around the stricken carrier. Sims from ahead and behind were now running to aid the injured, and he stood up to get his bearings before sliding down to help Trent.