by Peter Nealen
“What’s the word, Gaumarus?” Tillens asked. He was taking his turn up on the guns in the turret, letting Mertens sleep.
For a moment, Gaumarus just looked up at him, still unable to speak. Tillens turned and looked down at him, his frown only dimly visible in the early morning light. “Gaumarus?”
“We need to be ready to move in the next few minutes,” Gaumarus said hoarsely. “The general wants to address the entire Corps.”
Tillens studied him for a brief moment rather than replying. The two men had been friends for years, and Tillens could tell that something was wrong. But Gaumarus cleared his throat, took a deep breath, and said, “Let’s go, before Sergeant Verlot comes down on my head for shirking.”
Tillens just nodded. They’d talk later. Meanwhile, Gaumarus took another deep breath, and stepped over to Bryss and prodded him with his boot.
He needed to focus on the task at hand, just like Yuusen and Verlot had told him. He didn’t like it, and every fiber of his being screamed at him to run to the refugee camp and look for his family, but there was no other choice at the moment. His duty was here.
And if he survived, as a veteran of combat with the feared M’tait, maybe he could finally face down his grandfather.
General Rollo was one of the Lamans Family, another of the very first Families. The Lamans and the Pells had been friends and rivals off and on over the years, swinging wildly from a shared enmity for the indig and the Latecomers to bitter hatred over land disputes, particularly along the Oicidan Ridge, between the Monoyan Plain and the Procenn Plateau.
Rollo himself was nearly Waldenius Pell’s age. He was standing in the back of an open-topped staff car that was bouncing and lurching out onto the Plain in front of the still-ragged line of resistance. Unlike Waldenius, Rollo maintained an image of robust and cheerful health. His barrel chest filled his medal-bedecked dress uniform coat tightly, and his head was thrown back, one meaty hand clenching the rail on the car’s door as his driver tried to negotiate terrain that the staff car had never been designed to drive over. Two Order of the Tancredus Cluster skimmers flanked the car, each with its troop compartment full of armed and armored Knights.
Rollo lifted a loudspeaker disc to his mouth, and his voice boomed out across the line. “Brave soldiers of Provenia! It is no secret to any of us that this is a desperate hour. Cowardly terrorists and rebels have struck at our very heart, and our command structure is still reeling. I commend you for rallying to my call, as we face the most terrible threat that has ever menaced our beloved world!
“But as desperate as these times are, this will go down in history as our greatest and finest hour!” he continued. “We have gathered to strike at our enemy, these monsters called ‘M’tait,’ before they can spread out from their ships! They are not ready for us, or for our Knightly allies! If they were, they would have struck by now! They sit in their ships, waiting, watching our strength gather! The advantage is ours, my brave soldiers! They are concentrated in one place; one swift blow will cripple them! We will save Provenia and go down in history today!”
There was a ragged cheer, barely audible over the rumble of engines. It wasn’t much of a cheer either, and Gaumarus thought that it sounded forced. It was probably at the instigation of some of the more enthusiastic officers, probably only grudgingly indulged by their men. As for him, Gaumarus couldn’t see much to cheer about. He’d heard enough stories about the M’tait that he didn’t think General Rollo’s assessment was anything but inspired propaganda and rabble-rousing.
But he’d been wrong before, and he had to admit that none of them really had any kind of first-hand experience with the spacefaring monstrosities. Maybe the stories were overstated. Maybe they did have a chance to bottle the M’tait up in their ships and beat them.
Of course, the traitorous part of his mind that never accepted such things at face value had to remind him of Waldenius’s stories of similar nonsense spouted about the hill tribes, and the horrific massacres that had resulted when overconfident human militia had ventured into the Badlands.
“Now,” General Rollo said, as the cheering died away, “prime your weapons and steel your hearts, men! Glory awaits us! We launch the attack in thirty minutes!”
Gaumarus looked out across the plain. The M’tait ships were more clearly visible now. And they looked bigger and more ominous than before.
He stepped up onto the ramp and into the back of the halftrack. “Get ready,” he told his men. They nodded at him somberly, and he found his seat. He didn’t have much more to say. There really wasn’t much more to say.
In thirty minutes, they would start to advance, to face the most feared adversary in the galaxy.
6
Artillery thundered, the rocket-assisted projectiles howling overhead with a terrific ripping sound that was all but drowned out by the noise of the tracks and growling engines of the assaulting vehicles.
The barrage was barely coordinated, with different batteries firing at different times and with sometimes overlapping impact zones, though there were often gaps. Some of the grounded Hunterships took a pounding, heavy shells packed with explosives venting their fury against nearly impregnable hulls, while others stood untouched.
As the front line advanced, the hammering of the artillery continued, and the shriek of engines overhead heralded the arrival of the air support, fast scramjets scrambling from the main Capitol spaceport. There should have been more than the squadron and a half that arrowed toward the M’tait landing zone, but the mysterious terrorists—no one was calling them “rebels” any longer—had done their jobs well before they’d died.
Flight Officer Gastorius Vandresten scanned his instruments, but he almost needn’t have bothered. “Looks like the cannon cockers are getting their hits in today,” he said over his wing channel. “I can barely see the target zone.”
“I can see it well enough,” Flight Officer Frodhius Wauters replied wryly. “It’s that big cloud of dust and smoke coming up from the Plain.”
“Won’t do much good to just toss precision bombs into the big cloud, though,” Vandresten pointed out, looking down at his instruments again. He was going to have to use them anyway, and he’d always known it; the days of manually dropping bombs were long, long gone. They’d been past long before the Ancestors had left long fallen Earth. But every combat pilot, at least in Vandresten’s mind, longed to really see the targets he engaged, to aim and fire, feel the visceral satisfaction of coming to grips with their enemy, even from kilometers away.
He’d grown up on stories of those pilots who’d managed it, fighting the indig. There had been times where dropping from high up simply wasn’t practical, and the pilots had needed to get down into the weeds to make sure they got their ordnance on the indig fighters, instead of the Provenian militia. But those days, too, were past.
That black-and-brown pall of smoke and dust ahead was getting bigger, and his scramjet’s sensors were starting to pick the shapes of the M’tait Hunterships out of the murk. Glowing red wireframes outlined the ships in his heads-up display, even as similarly glowing golden lines traced the arcing trajectories of the artillery shells, often labeled with flashing red alert signs, warning him to avoid flying through an artillery battery’s line of fire.
“Arming missiles,” he reported as he touched the series of keys that told his weapons’ seeker heads where to go. He selected two of the closest Hunterships; not even M’tait ships should be able to stand up to the sheer impact of the Halcone missiles.
They were nearly in attack range. The missiles could be fired halfway around the planet, but the manual specified an attack range of no more than ten kilometers. They were too easily spoofed by electronic countermeasures. Already, he could see his displays starting to fuzz and jump as his sharp-edged lifting body aircraft sped toward the enemy. Whatever kind of sensor disruption the M’tait were employing, it was potent.
He was about to fire when his displays turned to random noise, and a sharp electr
onic shriek stabbed through his headset. He clapped his hands to his ears, but of course, the noise was coming from inside his helmet.
He couldn’t hear himself think, much less try to call his wingman. A brilliant flash outside his cockpit drew his eye, just in time to see the glowing shards that had been Wauters’s own scramjet tumbling down toward the ground below. There didn’t look like there was a single piece left the size of his hand.
Effectively blind, deafened by the roar of distorted electronic noise in his ears, Vandresten aimed his ship at the nearest Huntership, little more than a distant, vague shadow of a spike in the murk, but closing fast. Guessing rather than truly aiming, he ripple-fired every missile in his scramjet’s armament bay.
Not one got more than a hundred meters from his craft. With a ripple of explosions that blinded him and sent fragments sleeting through his hull and canopy, the missiles all detonated in front of his scramjet’s nose.
The fragments had already killed Flight Officer Vandresten by the time an ephemeral beam, barely visible in the light of day, turned his fighter-bomber into another cascade of glowing debris.
Not one of the Hunterships had been touched.
Tanker First Class Lebenius Lauvers did not see the fighter-bombers’ demises. He was jammed into his Audamnus main battle tank’s turret, fighting to keep from braining himself on the overhead as Tanker Second Class Boegaerts drove the tank far too fast for the terrain.
“Can he slow down?” Lauvers asked the tank commander, Corporal Segers. “He’s going to break a track.”
“We’re fine, Lauvers,” Segers growled, his face illuminated by the glow of his own targeting and command and control holo, his shoulders hunched. Segers was far too tall to be a tanker, but he’d been assigned to tanks anyway. He still loved the armored behemoths, and rumor had it that he loved the prestige of being one of those entrusted with the bare handful the PDF had on the entire planet even more. “If we slow down much more, we’re going to fall behind Thijs’s tank, and then I’ll never hear the end of it.”
“We’ll never hear the end of it if…ow…Boegaerts breaks a track and strands us in the middle of the battlefield, either,” Lauvers muttered, though he hoped he had kept his voice too low for Segers to hear. The tank’s tracks were certainly making enough noise, and the comms were alive with enough chatter, that he was pretty sure he’d gone unheard.
“First target coming up!” Segers called out. “Range one point three kilometers! Penetrator!”
“Penetrator!” Lauvers replied, punching the button that ordered the automatic loader to shove one of the hardened slugs into the railgun’s firing chamber. The round fed with a heavy clunk that vibrated through the turret, as the gun capacitors spooled up with a crackling whine.
I’m never going to be able to have kids after spending so many hours sitting next to this thing. Lauvers put his face to the gunsight and searched the murk ahead for the first Huntership.
He nearly got the top of his head taken off as the tank pitched forward, slamming him against the metal forward wall of the turret. “Boegaerts!” he snarled. “Watch for the damned craters!”
“There’s no way to avoid them!” Boegaerts replied. And as he uncrossed his eyes from his helmet’s skull-splitting impact on the coaming and peered through the sight again, Lauvers could see that he was right. The ground in front of the advancing tanks had been churned into an undulating carpet of craters and scorched debris. The tanks ahead of them were similarly rocking and grinding their way forward, slowed to a crawl by the pulverized ground.
If he hadn’t been as focused as he was on trying to get a firing solution for the railgun, Lauvers might have realized that all the Provenian artillery put together shouldn’t have been able to blast that much territory; they were still almost a kilometer out from their first target. But Lauvers wasn’t a deep thinker at the best of times, and with his head swimming and aching as the tank lurched and dipped around him, he didn’t notice.
Nor did he notice the sudden dark flicker of movement out in the dust and smoke. The sudden explosion as Thijs’s tank detonated only a few dozen meters ahead, however, certainly caught his attention.
“We’re taking fire!” Segers yelled. “Shoot back!”
“What do I shoot at?” Lauvers yelled in reply.
“There!” Segers exclaimed. “Movement, eleven o’clock!”
Lauvers spun the turret on its air bearings, the massive block of titanium and steel swiveling more smoothly than the rest of the tank was moving, looking for whatever Segers had seen. But there was only swirling, drifting smoke and dust in front of his sight.
“I don’t see anything!” A moment later, another tank erupted with a volcanic flash, power cells spewing white flame up through the back deck.
“More movement, three o’clock!” Segers called out. “Multiple sources!”
Lauvers swiveled the turret back, but whatever Segers had seen through the periscope scanner was gone by the time he got the gun on-line. He was starting to hear the tension in the corporal’s voice; he was getting close to cracking.
Not that Lauvers himself was in any better shape. He could feel the panic rising in his chest. As near as he could tell, there were only a half dozen of the ten tanks left.
Then something big, dark, and horrifyingly fast came bounding out of the murk right at the edge of his field of view. It had to be running at fifty kilometers an hour, at least.
Whatever it was leapt straight over the tank. A brilliant, pencil-thin line of energy lashed from one hanging limb and cut the tank in half.
Lauvers and Segers never even knew they were dead. Boegaerts had a few seconds of life left, in which he burned like a torch in the driver’s compartment, before death stilled his screams forever.
Capitan Godomar Mettieu wasn’t happy about going into battle in the ancient gun trucks that were all his men had for transportation. His men were infantry, and elite infantry at that. They should have dropped by jetpack into the midst of the enemy and wreaked havoc. It was what their ancestors had done among the indig during the worst of the territorial wars. It was what they trained for. In simulators, at least; there was rarely the time or the resources to do live drops.
He watched the skimmers loaded with Tancredus Cluster Knights howl past his trucks and disappear into the dust and smoke ahead, and let his lips thin. What he wouldn’t have given for some of those, if he was going to be stuck advancing as part of a major push like this. Get in fast and close, grab the enemy by the throat, and tear their guts out.
Mettieu wasn’t especially nervous about facing the galaxy’s bogeymen. He prided himself on being a man of pragmatism and reason; that was why he was an officer in the first place. In his mind, there were no undefeatable monsters; there were only enemies that hadn’t been defeated yet. He knew there was a way to defeat the M’tait, and suspected that terror was the primary reason that they had succeeded as much as they had over the centuries they’d been raiding among the stars.
Well, I won’t be terrified into defeat. And my example will galvanize my men. We’ll face these alien creatures, and when they see that we won’t be cowed, it will give them pause. And then we’ll have them.
Mettieu’s First Sergeant, Thegan Delhave, was in another truck off to the flank, glancing toward his capitan’s vehicle. Delhave was considerably more experienced than Mettieu, and often wondered what he had done wrong along the Way to have blundered into a unit with Mettieu in command. The man was certainly competent enough, in a basic way, but his supreme self-confidence worried the first sergeant. Mettieu hadn’t seen any serious action in his five years as a PDF officer; he hadn’t had to test his self-assurance against the brutal realities of combat. At least, not enough to truly make him take a step back.
Explosions were flashing in the murk ahead, even as the gun trucks entered the dust cloud, finding the ground pocked and churned by shell craters far sooner than expected. The lead truck suddenly slammed to a stop, the loud bang of its fr
ont axle snapping lost in the cacophony of weapons fire and explosions ahead. Some of that roar of noise was identifiable as Provenian railguns and micro-missiles, punctuated by the thunder of the Knights’ powerguns. Other sounds were stranger, odd howlings and cracklings almost drowned out by the rest.
Mettieu was cursing as his vehicle pulled up next to the crippled gun truck. They still had most of a kilometer to go to reach the first target. And if the rest of the terrain was as bad as this, the trucks were only going to fall farther and farther behind.
“All troops dismount!” Mettieu called over his command amplifier disc. “Form up by squads and prepare to advance, double-time!”
First Sergeant Delhave sighed as he swung his door open and climbed out. He was getting old and tired, and the thought of running forward in full kit was more daunting to him than actually facing an enemy none of them had ever seen, or even knew anything about aside from campfire spook stories.
It took far too long, by Mettieu’s way of thinking, to get the company formed up and ready to move. More of the Order’s skimmers had screamed past them as they’d been dismounting and forming up, and the halftracks of a Motor Infantry unit were rattling by off to their left flank. Mettieu was chewing the inside of his cheek in frustration by the time the last Section leader reported ready.
“Advance!” he all but screamed, suiting actions to words and jogging forward into the smoke and grit, his pistol in his hands. He knew other commanders who carried infantry coilguns like their men, but he had always felt that it was beneath the dignity of an officer to do so. His job was to lead, direct, and inspire, not to fight.
