Trial by Fire - eARC (61 page)

At that moment, the lady
bule
came out of the ruined storefront, hands extended to either side as she balanced her way over the shattered masonry in the doorway. The Sloth did not appear behind her. “Are we still prisoners?” Adi asked.

“No,” she said, dusting off her hands as she reached the level plane of the macadam.

“But where is the Hkh’Rkh?”

“He’s not coming.”

Chapter Forty-One

North of the Ciliwung waterway, Central Jakarta, Earth

“Where’s Chou?” asked Opal.

O’Garran looked out the window and into the street where a third of the tunnel rats he’d come ashore with lay in the strangely twisted poses of death. “He’s out there. For good.”

Damn.
“He was a fine officer.”
And he was also the only one of the mainlanders who outranked Wu. So if Wu insists on becoming the new second senior officer and the mainlanders resist—

“Don’t burn out your clutch, Major.”

“Huh?”

“I can see those wheels turning between your ears. Don’t sweat the Taiwanese-mainlander thing. The mainlanders saw Wu in action, taking orders from Chou, not complaining. They’re all right with him now.” O’Garran started swapping out the hotjuice cylinders on his CoBro liquimix carbine. “So what now? Looks like we bagged half a platoon of the Sloth fire brigade, scattered the rest. I’m pretty sure we’ve got their attention.”

“Yep. Which means it’s time for us to go underground. Here.” She pointed at the screen of O’Garran’s palmcomp. A long, green line of dashes went from their current position, under the Ciliwung Waterway, did a doglegged sidestep that dodged the back entrance of the Royal palace and emerged in a sub-basement of the Ministry of Administrative and Bureaucratic Reform.

“You’ve looked at the floor plans?”

Opal nodded. “Yeah. We come out next to a flight of stairs leading straight up into this small rear courtyard. Or we can take these service stairs which run all the way up to the top floor of the building.”

“And how come I wasn’t clued in on this attack option before they put us ashore?”

“Secrecy firewall,” Opal lied. “That way, if you were captured, you couldn’t alert the bad guys to this back door into their center of operations.” And while she smiled confidence at her XO, Opal wondered.
I wonder if any of the other tunnel rat teams
are
tasked with this attack route? Probably not. It’s an unconventional entry and tight quarters, so it was probably dismissed as too risky.

O’Garran was still frowning at the schematic. He clearly didn’t like the assignment, but he apparently didn’t suspect any duplicity on her part. “So once we’re in, what’s the game plan?”

“No way to know,” she answered truthfully, handing the portable back to him. “All our intel on the compound is from prewar documents and surveys. We’ve got no way of knowing where they’ve set up HQ, C4I, fire direction control, local air traffic control, internal security monitoring. So first we’ll check if we can detect basement monitors. If not, we send some of our littlest rats up into the ventilation shaft, to see what they can see, keeping an eye out for local workers we can debrief. But I’m betting we might get some orders on the way in. It’s just about time to start the final act.”

Two missiles roared down overhead, descending sharply toward the compound, five hundred meters south of them. PDF fire shrilled at one. Its detonation shook plaster down from the ceiling and broke the last few intact windows on the block. The other rocket plunged down into the compound; the explosion was more muffled, but the ground shook slightly under their feet.

“Yup,” agreed O’Garran,” any time now.”

Presidential Palace, Jakarta, Earth

The whole room shook. Half the lights went out. The sound of shattering glass and tumbling debris—and mortally desperate trilling—came in from the door that opened on the main corridor.

Darzhee Kut rose from the floor as the defense operator announced, “PDF down to forty percent.” His invariably down-adjusting updates had become a means of measuring just how uncertain the outcome of the battle was becoming.

Darzhee Kut moved closer to Hu’urs Khraam, who seemed, in the past hour, to have grown noticeably more feeble and grimly silent. “First Delegate, we await further orders.”

Hu’urs Khraam waved a careless claw, spoke more loudly than he should have. “There are no new orders to give. We endure down here, hoping one half of our ships give us the supporting fire we need to survive, and that the other half will prevail against the human fleet. What can be done has been done.” He sounded like he wanted to go to sleep.

As Darzhee Kut feared, he had been overheard. “Surely this is not the limit of leadership in the alliance to which we have pledged ourselves.” First Voice’s observation was not impatient, but it was not kind. “Pressing matters remain. What is to be done about our perimeter?”

“I am surprised at your question, esteemed First Voice,” answered Hu’urs Khraam. “Did you not tell me that you would soon have control of that situation?”

The implied barb of the retort did not escape the notice of First Voice’s retinue. Several rose up higher, their crests stiffening. Their leader gestured downward with his claws. They and their crests complied. “Regular units are sweeping the streets. My elite formations are working as emergency response teams to counteract more serious threats. But to fully control the situation, you must cede me authority to alter the rules of engagement. This you have not done. And so we do not have complete control.”

Hu’urs Khraam’s lids slowly closed, did not open. “First Voice, what you demanded was that you have
no
rules of engagement, not control of them.”

“Semantics. If I do not have the power to cancel them at will, I do not have control over them. Consequently, our objective of securing a one-kilometer radius free of enemy activity has not been attained. Securing only a five-hundred-meter radius has cost me twenty percent of my forces in this area of operations. If I continue in this fashion, I will have no combat-capable troops left by morning.”

“Your counsel?”

“My counsel you know. Pull all our ground forces back to this compound and call in deadfall munitions on the surrounding neighborhoods, starting one hundred fifty meters back from the walls of our compound. We level the closer structures with conventional support weapons once the orbital bombardment is done.”

Hu’urs Khraam’s lenses remained concealed, the crabshell eye-covers tightly shut against the words of First Voice. “I wish counsel that
follows
the rules of engagement.”

“Then I counsel this: find your knife and fall on it.”

The room was very still: even the constant exchanges with Fleetmaster R’sudkaat’s flagship seemed to pause for a moment. Hu’urs Khraam’s lids opened. “First Voice, explain this counsel.”

The calm response seemed to also confer the right to resume breathing. Only Caine, Darzhee Kut noticed, had not become tense. Of course, perhaps he did not understand either of the languages. On the other hand, what more could a human wish to hear than profound discord at the heart of his enemies’ alliance?

First Voice seemed unsurprised by Hu’urs Khraam’s calm reply, and Darzhee Kut wondered if, perhaps, only they themselves had understood—by the subtle code that seemed to exist among leaders of the most senior rank—that the Hkh’Rkh’s statement had not been intended as a challenge or disrespectful gibe, but a serious message in metaphorical form. First Voice’s neck oscillated once. “If we continue to follow the current rules of engagement, the outcome of this battle is uncertain. We are a hard target, yes, and the humans suffer terrible losses every time they try to face us. But I attend the declining PDF availability, the difficulty of providing adequate air support, the increasing reports of infiltrated commando teams either leading insurgents or operating independently, and the impossibility of holding whatever advantages we win by blood in these endless streets. Bold action is now required. If you do not wish to conduct general orbital interdiction of the surrounding city, then we must be permitted to use incendiary devices to support our troops—”

“—and burn down the city with us in it.”

“Our compound can be adequately protected, if we establish a fifty-meter firebreak.”

“How?”

“Conventional destruction of all surrounding structures.”

Hu’urs Khraam’s eyes closed again. “We cannot afford the risk of these tactics. If the Dornaani learn about them—”

“The Dornaani are not here,” First Voice emphasized. “They have become so weak-willed that they may
never
come. And I cannot see how, once we have been bold enough to invade the humans’ homeworld, that these tactics will even warrant special mention. Seen alongside the other violations of the Accord which brought us to this place, they are invisibly small.”

“Do not think it,” Hu’urs Khraam warned. “The Dornaani are not so degenerate as you suppose, and they will separate our actions into two categories: what we decided to do, and how we went about doing it. Valid, or at least reasonable, political arguments can be adduced to explain the decision to invade human space. But if we conduct ourselves viciously in the course of that action, this will constitute a second, and perhaps greater crime in their eyes.”

“But their eyes are not here to see, nor there ears here to listen.”

“So you think. I have reason, and counsel, that prompts me to think otherise. But enough. Do you have another plan that remains within the constraints of our rules of engagement?”

At first, Darzhee Kut thought that First Voice was going to evert his claws in frustration and turn his back on the Arat Kur leader, but instead, the Hkh’Rkh lowered his head in thought.
He can tell that Hu’urs Khraam wishes to find an efficacious alternative, even given the constraints. First Voice will push the limits of the law, now.

The Hkh’Rkh leader’s head rose. “Hunter-killer teams.”

“I do not understand.”

“At present, we have a standoff in the perimeter we are attempting to establish. We clear the humans that attempt to stand against us. They infiltrate back into the area because we do not have the forces to secure so large and porous a perimeter. We have emergency response teams that react specifically to these infiltrators. But since the humans feel confident reentering the area again, this method is insufficient.”

“Go on.”

“So we do to them what they have been doing to us. We do not try to engage them conventionally, but rather, send out many small teams charged with only one objective: seek and kill humans. Any and all that appear within one kilometer of this compound.”

“And this achieves what?” asked Urzueth Ragh.

Yaargraukh pony-nodded his support of First Voice’s idea. “It achieves a balance of terror. We cannot hold the one-kilometer perimeter because we are trying to hold territory rather than destroy the enemy. And while moving from flashpoint to flashpoint, our troops must worry about what lies behind every window, every door, in every building. Now, we shall use the humans’ own tactics against them: hunt and ambush them indiscriminately throughout the zone. Then the humans will have reason to fear every door and window. Only the most resolute opponents will stand against our trained warriors for very long, and those few we can surround and destroy. However, it will require a great many of our best troopers to accomplish this task.”

Graagkhruud came to stand by First Voice. “This plan has another benefit. In those sectors where we have lost most of our clearing units, this gives us a new means of scouting and preempting any assault forces the humans might be gathering there. We will need five hundred additional warriors for these squad-sized hunter-killer teams.”

Yaargraukh studied the city map. “We will need fifteen hundred.”

Graagkhruud sneered. “Again, your admiration of the humans makes you truly their best Advocate.”

“This time, I admire the clock, First Fist. We will need a round-the-clock action cycle. That means at least three shifts of five hundred Warriors. And even if we split each shift into two four-hour patrols, such unrelenting pursuit and combat will drain our troops quickly. As it stands, we do not have enough troops to sustain so extensive an operation, not while maintaining a full defensive force here.”

Graagkhruud swept that objection aside with a careless claw. “We will draw additional troops from internal security.”

Yaargraukh looked at First Fist. “That is a dangerous step, First Fist.”

“Were you not thought by so many to be brave, I would say your prudence could be heard as cowardice, Advocate for
s’fet
.”

Yaargraukh was very quiet. As Darzhee Kut understood it, Graagkhruud had almost uttered a Challenge insult—but not quite. The Advocate turned back to the map. “We seem to have little choice but to do as you recommend, First Fist. In addition, I would also suggest we start making use of the humans’ weapons.”

“In the field?”

“For softer, easier targets, yes. And for suppressive fire, most certainly. Our own ammunition expenditure is alarming. However, if we relegate secondary-fire missions to captured human weapons, we will be able to extend our own stocks of ammunition by using them only in those engagements where their superior killing power and range matter most.”

“The weapons you refer to, the AKs, are like children’s toys. We cannot hold them properly.”

“I have studied these rifles, First Fist. They will be serviceable if the technical support troops cut away the hand-grips and trigger guards.”

First Voice nodded at Yaargraukh then at Graagkhruud. “Together, your points are sound. See to their implementation and then return here. Yaargraukh, honor us by personally overseeing the technical logistics of your recommendations.”

“First Voice speaks and I obey.” As Yaargraukh exited, he and Caine pointedly did not look at each other. But Darzhee Kut sensed their mutual avoidance was motivated by a desire to protect each other, rather than antipathy.

Urzueth Ragh edged closer to Hu’urs Khraam, who noticed. “You have news?”