Out of the Black (Odyssey One, Book 4) (39 page)

For a Confederation Kilo Kilo the principles are entirely the same. The “stone” is a one-ton chunk of meteor steel harvested from the system’s asteroid belt, and the “sling” is the Earth itself. The satellite holding the weapons simply had to “drop” them in order to deploy.

From de-orbit drop to impact is just a few minutes, impact speed surpassing hypersonic levels. Accuracy was largely determined by simple ballistics and minor course adjustments using smart fins welded to the projectile.

The weapons Eric Weston ordered dropped on Detroit appeared in the pre-dawn sky a little less than three minutes after his order.

Thundering trails of fire lit across the sky, announcing the strikes to anyone with eyes or ears for a hundred miles around. Most of those in Weston’s company involuntarily ducked as the rolling thunder shook the ground around them, but he kept eyes open as the first of six slammed into the city of Detroit with a white flash.

Eric anchored himself, knowing what was to come, the difference between the speed of light and the speed of sound actually being nearly as deadly as the impact itself. It took seven seconds for the clap of thunder to shake the world around him, knocking several to the ground and blowing out the glass in every building for miles, and by that time three more Kilo Kilos had slammed into Detroit.

The impact weapons were designed as bunker busters, and that was how they’d targeted them, aiming to take out nests that were forming through the city more than the drones crawling around the surface. Collateral shock waves should eliminate most of those as well, but the rest would be left to Eric and his team.

“Roll out!” he ordered over the tactical network as he climbed into the cockpit of the mechanical armor the military had supplied him. “Time to go work.”

They were rolling before the last Kilo Kilo impacted, face into the fires as the shock waves rumbled over them. Eric took the vanguard position, using the advanced instrumentation in his armor to scout out the range ahead of them as they headed into Motor City amidst secondary explosions and thunderclaps from the fallout of the orbital strikes.

He led the column north into Detroit along the I-75, though they were more paralleling the freeway than actually driving on it. It wasn’t quite as irredeemably blocked as the city streets in New York had been, but there were still more than enough abandoned cars to make it effectively impassable if they wanted to maintain their pace.

“Squad Two, break left and secure the manufacturing centers. Three, go right. I want the raw materials in those warehouses under our control within the hour,” he ordered.

While manufacturing had largely decentralized in the Confederation over the last few decades, there were always exceptions. Munitions and the like were among those few, mostly by design. Mobile and personal manufacturing machines were quite capable of building small arms and munitions (though many required aftermarket hacking to do so), but they were most emphatically not up to building high explosives and the complex mechanisms inherent in modern battlefield weaponry.

So when the munitions manufacturing had moved into Detroit, retooling the failed auto industry’s abandoned factories, it made a lot of sense to consolidate many parts of the process for efficiency’s sake, though not entirely, of course. The Detroit area was home to five separate defense industry “campuses,” and Eric was well aware that he and his company would have to secure as many of them as possible in advance of the arrival of the National Guard and the volunteer workforce.

“Captain, we’ve been spotted.”

That announcement brought his attention back to the present, and Eric quickly noted that they had indeed been spotted quite clearly. His HUD showed at least a dozen hot spots moving fast in the column’s direction. It may have been his imagination, but they looked
pissed
for some undefined red blobs on a computer display.

“Lock them in. Let them get closer,” he ordered. “Excaliburs, stand ready.”

The Excalibur armored artillery vehicles were among the most powerful but also most vulnerable assets in his convoy. They were heavily armed and armored, but due to the size and weight of each Excalibur, they were slow and unable to fire on the move like the Abrams M7 MBTs. That made them sitting ducks just when they were being employed, but their firepower made them absolutely invaluable.

“Excaliburs copy,” the major in charge of the artillery group acknowledged. “Coordinates locked in. Ready for TOT.”

“Abrams, watch their backs,” Eric ordered. “Mobile Armor, you’re with me. We attack the second the TOT lands.”

Both groups acknowledged the orders as Eric led the Mobile Armor squads out, pushing the vanguard ahead of the group as the main battle tanks took up guard positions for the armored artillery vehicles. The Excaliburs shuddered to a halt, their stabilized cannons the only part of the big machines that weren’t shaking as they planted themselves and lifted the big barrels high.

“Excaliburs ready.”

“Fire,” Eric ordered.

A sonic boom shook the dust off the armored vehicles as all the networked cannons fired as one. The cannons were
already dropping as the round left the bore, and they all boomed again a split second later. Then a third time, and a fourth, before the fifth and final shot roared out on an almost flat trajectory that shook Eric’s team right through their armored suits as it passed barely over their heads.

The TOT, or Time On Target, barrage was one of the most useful and lethal tools in the toolbox of the artilleryman. The idea was to fire rounds at different angles and speeds so that every single shot arrived on target at once, thus eliminating the chance of the enemy being able to duck for cover after the first shot landed. It was a process raised to an art form by modern artillery, which could land dozens of rounds on a target zone within the same second.

Another incredibly lethal technique, though a great deal harder in some ways and certainly more dangerous, was commonly known as Shock and Awe. More technically, it was referred to as “Establishing Battlefield Dominance” by Western militaries, and it basically amounted to an ever-increasing refinement of tactics first perfected by the Nazi war machine during the Second World War.

There were many ways to do this, but one of the most effective and dangerous was to time a TOT barrage and an attack to happen almost simultaneously. If you made an error, your attack could land too late and the enemy might be prepared. Or worse, you could arrive too early and be caught in your own artillery barrage.

If you timed it right, however, as Eric had, then you and your troops would charge into the charnel waste of the artillery TOT barrage and be almost entirely unopposed as you mopped up the stunned and disoriented survivors.

They charged right into the mushrooming cloud of smoke and debris, blinded for an instant by the dust rolling
past them, with weapons ready. Thermal was blinded by the explosions, heat scrambling the instrumentation to uselessness, so Eric had the radar incorporated into the EXO-13 armor running on full power. The results echoed over the network.

“Three o’clock,” Eric said, pivoting slightly in the walking armor to open fire, sending a short burst through the smoke and dust from the tri-barrel cannon mounted on his right arm. Inside the EXO-13, Eric’s armor-shod fists gripped the control sticks tightly as he shifted back on target and continued to lead in.

A blob of movement appeared on his nine o’clock, but a burst of fire from Blake’s assault weapon roared, joined quickly by a second short burst from Lyssa’s. The blob stopped moving, so Eric continued looking for other targets while Blake and Lyssa stepped forward to confirm the kill.

The dust was settling by then, the heat from the blasts dissipating, and their thermal was coming back.

Eric could only imagine how they looked to the enemy, if the Drasin were even capable of seeing them in the way a human might. Shadows appearing from the darkness, amid the utter devastation of the first attack, firing as they walked out of the smoke like wraiths from some old legend. It brought a smile to his face as he opened fire with the tri-barrel, the whine of the high-speed cannon tearing the air itself asunder as the others joined in, finishing the fight that had started only seconds earlier.

“Clear right,” Alexander called just as Janet planted a foot on a twitching drone and emptied the remainder of her mag into it.

“Real clear,” she chuckled.

“Clear left,” Blake answered.

Eric paused the EXO-13, slowly circling it as he scanned with every detection system he had. Finally he nodded. “Clear. Get the column moving again. We need to secure the Beta objective.”

“Roger that, Cap’n,” the major of the armored artillery squadron answered, the Excaliburs shuddering back to life as he did.

In a few moments the rest of the column were moving again, and Eric had his squadron once more in the vanguard as they headed north to the city.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

IN THE PAST month President Conner had lost twenty-three pounds, at least a decade off the end of his life, and four cities that were ostensibly under his protection. The death toll might never be completely known, but he was sure now that it was in the hundreds of thousands across the Confederation, and it was possible that they’d lost a million people or more in Mexico City alone.