Frozen Fire

by C H Gideon

  “Target lock,” she declared. “On the way!”

  Elvira’s dual artillery cannons thundered in rapid succession, driving the Scorpion-class mech’s legs a full foot into the ice from the recoil. She had laid her guns according to temperature, atmospherics, the worldlet’s gravity—which was sixty percent of the human standard, and every other variable she had learned to account for.

  The shells took parabolic arcs toward their target, whistling through the thin air as they flew. The Owl drone assigned to 4th Platoon put its eyes on the impact site two seconds before the shells turned the pristine ice-field into a shower of icy shards and snowy powder. The impact report registered several seconds later as the faintest tickle on Xi’s forearms, and when the frozen cloud had settled, nothing but a misshapen crater remained in the ice field.

  “Missile point-of-origin destroyed,” Xi declared, but she knew that it was unlikely in the extreme she had actually struck the vehicle responsible for launching the MRM. Humans had mastered the art of firing vehicle-mounted missiles, and even artillery, on the run several hundred years ago. The Jemmin were superior in terms of technological advances, so it was foolish to hope they would succumb to something as simplistic as counter-battery fire.

  “Copy that, Captain,” acknowledged Heavy Metal Jesus’ Jock. “I’m moving the Owl in for a closer look.”

  “Jemmin use ceramics and noble metal composites,” Xi reminded him as the Owl swooped down toward the impact site. “Some of their stealthier vehicles also employ special polymer skins which redirect light and give them visual-spectrum cloaking capability.”

  “On it, Captain,” HMJ’s Jock affirmed as he directed the Owl-class drone down to a height of just two hundred meters above the crater. “Scanning the site…” he reported as streams of data came back from the Owl. “Negative, Captain,” he finally declared, “nothing but salty ice here.”

  Xi noted that there had, a few seconds earlier, been some small quantity of liquid water at the bottom of the oblong crater. But as the Owl had conducted its inspection, the water had re-frozen into a flat, placid-looking pool.

  “Bring the Owl home,” Xi ordered. “They’re still just fucking with us. Let’s be ready when they come back for seconds.”

  Her platoon Jocks acknowledged her command, and she switched her P2P to link up with Colonel Jenkins.

  “Jenkins, go,” the colonel greeted.

  “We need to use the Bonhoeffer’s sensors, Colonel,” Xi urged. “There’s no way for us to overcome their stealth capabilities from down here.”

  “The Jemmin in orbit aren’t making it easy for them to support us,” Jenkins replied. “They’ve deployed some kind of drone-cloud in the upper atmosphere which interferes with the Bonhoeffer’s systems. Our people are forwarding whatever telemetry they can, but it’s been hit-and-miss for the last hour or so. And frankly, I can’t trust we’re receiving accurate data from them. If the Jemmin are able to interfere with our communications gear, we have to assume that even our P2P net is potentially compromised. We can’t count on their sensor support, but Styles is working on cracking the Jemmin stealth systems.”

  “Good enough for me,” Xi acknowledged, knowing there was nothing else to be said. If the Jemmin could break the high-security P2P network, which was nearly unthinkable, it would severely hamper the battalion’s coordination. The colonel wouldn’t have suggested such a thing was possible without good reason, and Xi had learned it was usually smart to follow her CO’s lead.

  “Contact,” Cave Troll reported a few seconds before Elvira’s sensors registered a pair of icons nine kilometers from 4th Platoon. “Engaging.”

  Cave Troll launched four short-range missiles at the encroaching targets, and those targets winked off the board less than a second before the SRMs struck the icy ground where they had been.

  “Moving Owl into position,” reported Heavy Metal Jesus. A few seconds later, the ice crater came into view. And just as before, nothing but ice and fast-freezing water. “Negative debris.”

  Xi’s sense of “smell” was suddenly overpowered by thirty new missile signatures. Originating from three previously-unmarked locations, she locked onto one and barked, “On the way!”

  Elvira’s guns roared, sending high-explosive shells at the target twelve kilometers from her position. Xi locked onto eight of the inbound missiles, half of which were aimed directly at 4th Platoon, and launched sixteen anti-missile rockets.

  The rockets sliced through the frigid air, fanning out in pairs to engage the inbound missiles. Bolts of light stabbed up from 5th Platoon at the opposite end of the teardrop-shaped patrol route, and four missiles were snuffed by Holy Diver’s precise railguns.

  Elvira’s anti-missile rockets tore into the approaching missiles, scrubbing eight-of-eight from the sky.

  A warning indicator screamed at the edge of her hearing, and Xi was temporarily disoriented by it before realizing what it was. “I’ve got a reload failure on Two Launcher,” she snapped.

  “Forty seconds, Captain,” Lu replied, and she would have upbraided him, but another wave of thirty missiles appeared at the edge of her vision.

  Reloading the other launcher with fresh anti-missile rockets, Xi locked onto four of those missiles and fired, sending her interceptors into the sky.

  “Engage missiles, HMJ,” she called out as her mech’s anti-missile rockets reloaded at a painfully slow rate.

  “Engaging,” Heavy Metal Jesus acknowledged, sending hyper-velocity tungsten bolts into the approaching missile swarm from the humanoid mech’s dual railguns.

  Another pair of icons appeared just three kilometers from 4th Platoon’s position, and Cave Troll growled, “Plasma cannons engaging.”

  The squat, humanoid Cave Troll, which nearly displaced as much as Elvira, raised its thick weapon arms in preparation to fire. The thrum of Cave Troll’s charging capacitors vibrated the ice so powerfully that Xi could feel it through Elvira’s seismic sensors. Three seconds after Cave Troll’s charge cycle began, both guns belched roaring gouts of relatively sluggish plasma streams. The blue-white flames tore through the air, leaving a thick trail of smoke as they gently arced toward the three-kilometers-distant targets.

  The plasma streams incinerated the impact site, sending a geyser of steam bursting hundreds of meters into the air.

  Heavy Metal Jesus engaged two more missiles with its railguns, sniping them from the sky. The distant Holy Diver did likewise, scrubbing four missiles. Combined with unexpected support from HQ, the second wave of missiles was neutralized.

  Xi barely had time to catch her breath before Elvira’s alarms once again screamed in warning: thirty missiles inbound.

  With Two Launcher still down for at least another fifteen seconds, Xi had no choice but to launch just half of her mech’s potential arsenal of rockets from the still-functioning tubes. “4th Platoon, intercept missiles,” she barked, knowing that this time, it would be difficult to snipe them all before they arrived. “Fire! Fire! Fire!”

  Eight rockets sprang forth from Elvira’s functioning launcher and were soon joined by twelve from Cave Troll. Even with twenty rockets in the air, only ten of the inbound missiles would be met by anti-missile rockets. The engagement book was clear on this point: no fewer than two rockets were to be sent against any given Jemmin missile. She had already seen a twenty percent miss rate on her own rockets, so Xi knew that the book was right.

  Jemmin ordnance was so potent that it only took one missile strike to scrub a mech. Even one as robust as Elvira.

  Railguns stabbed into the sky from every mech in range to lend fire support. 4th Platoon’s anti-missile rockets tore all ten of their targets down, and the railguns brought another eight down. But the railguns were beginning to miss nearly half the time, and she had just three seconds before the missiles would impact.

  Unleashing the interception drones that had arrived via drop-can mere hours earlier, Xi activated thirty of the already-flying devices, putting them on intercept cour
ses with the inbound missiles.

  Blinding flashes and deafening reports overpowered her senses, which were protected from the harsh inputs by Elvira’s neural link filters. But those filters rendered Xi blind for a full second before the streams resumed.

  And when they did, she saw that Gym Cricket was nothing but a smoldering wreck with debris scattered across and around an icy crater.

  Her mind instantly tried to grasp the hope that the crew might have survived, but she pushed the foolish wishful thinking from her mind. Gym Cricket and its crew were dead. She wanted to feel sorry for them, to mourn them as they deserved, but she knew that doing so would only endanger the rest of her platoon.

  “Elvira to HQ,” she said, projecting as much stoicism as she could muster, “Gym Cricket is down. Maintaining posture and moving drones to inspect impact sites.”

  Elvira’s second missile launcher finally came back online, but it was too late. The damage had been done. The Jemmin had killed Terrans, but thus far, Xi was unable to confirm that a single Jemmin had been harmed in reply.

  And that was unac-fucking-ceptable.

  “Copy that, Elvira,” came Colonel Jenkins’ near-emotionless reply. “Perform search-and-rescue before resuming patrol. HQ out.”

  “Blinky,” Xi called over her shoulder, “take a bio-scanner and search that wreck for survivors. And be quick about it.”

  “On it, Captain,” Staubach acknowledged, and a few seconds later, he was out the hatch. Naturally, he was followed by Sarah Samuels’ video drones.

  “Ms. Samuels,” Xi called, raising her voice, “up here.”

  The reporter arrived in the cockpit, her face no longer the perfectly-composed mask it had been during the earlier “interview.” This woman understood the magnitude of what had just happened, and what it might mean for the Terran Republic. Had Xi not seen that realization on the other woman’s face, she would have been even harsher than she decided to be.

  “I know you’re here to take pictures,” Xi said, making firm eye contact, “but you need to remember that those men were sons of the Terran Republic who gave their lives to safeguard it. Be respectful with whatever images you gather. Do I need to spell that out for you?”

  Surprisingly, Samuels shook her head and held Xi’s gaze unflinchingly. “No, you don’t. I met the Gym Cricket’s crew aboard the Dietrich Bonhoeffer…” she trailed off, and Xi found herself actively hoping the reporter was just putting on a show. But it seemed she was genuinely shaken by the deaths of the mech and its crew, so Xi decided to let it be.

  Two minutes later, Private Staubach returned to Elvira’s cabin with a grim expression as he carefully replaced the bio-scanner to its locker. “All crew accounted for, Captain…no survivors.”

  “4th Platoon,” Xi grunted, “resume patrol. Stay on your toes. We’ve got three hours to go before we return to the barn.”

  As Samuels and Staubach returned to their respective seats within the mech’s cabin, Xi did her best to conceal the brief stream of tears she shed for the Gym Cricket’s crew.

  “Captain,” came Heavy Metal Jesus’ report, “I’m reading ceramic fragments and trace polymer residue in Cave Troll’s target zone.”

  “The SRMs or the plasma cannons?” Xi asked, her spirits suddenly buoyed by the good news.

  “Plasma cannons, ma’am,” replied HMJ. “I don’t think it was enough for a full Specter, but it was definitely from a vehicle of some kind. I’m logging the spot and would like to request an APC be deployed for immediate inspection and retrieval of the debris.”

  “Permission granted.” Xi nodded. “Looks like we just got our first Jemmin trophy. Good shooting, Cave Troll. You just notched an entry in the history books: first human to scratch a Jemmin.”

  “Thank you, Captain,” Cave Troll replied.

  “It looks like the rest of us get to play catch-up,” Xi continued. “You’ve got a target on your back, Cave Troll. Hope you can handle the pressure.”

  With that, the patrol resumed without incident as they eventually returned to HQ, where they restocked munitions and prepped for their next turn on the circuit.

  “Report, Lieutenant,” Jenkins greeted as he boarded Lieutenant Koch’s mech, Kochtopussy.

  Debris fragments, most of which were smaller than a human torso, were neatly arranged on the shop floor at the mech’s center. Koch gestured to a few of the larger bits. “It definitely had some kind of light-bending skin on it before the plasma melted it away, and it’s also pretty clearly Jemmin design. We don’t know a lot about Jemmin technology, but their ships use ceramic composites similar to this stuff.” He picked up a shard the length of his forearm and handed it to Jenkins.

  Jenkins’ eyebrows rose in surprise. “It’s barely two centimeters thick.”

  “And it’s ruined.” Koch nodded bitterly. “But this kind of stuff has been theorized for centuries as being potentially stronger against impacts than thirty centimeters of conventional composite armor like what we use on most of the battalion’s mechs.”

  “Good against kinetics,” Jenkins mused, “but weak to sustained thermal attacks.”

  “Weak is a relative term,” Koch snorted. “This stuff is still better than our best material at soaking up and dispersing heat, but anything over six thousand degrees will strip the camo skin right off it. Without camouflage, its only advantage would be speed and maneuverability.”

  “How big was this vehicle?”

  “Hard to say for sure…” Koch cocked his head skeptically. “But I’d wager it was two and a half, maybe three meters long and a third as wide.”

  “Airborne?” Jenkins clarified.

  “Almost certainly.” Koch nodded, waving a shard of the vehicle’s ceramic skin. “And given how lightweight this stuff is, it wouldn’t take much thrust to get it off the ground. But we still don’t know much about their drive tech, and it seems that whatever system propelled this vehicle was destroyed by the plasma strike.”

  “A fortunate coincidence for the Jemmin,” Jenkins mused.

  “Probably not a coincidence at all.” Koch shook his head firmly. “And Fellows has gone over this debris with a fine-toothed comb. There is zero organic residue anywhere.”

  Jenkins’ brow quirked in surprise. “That’s strange.”

  “Indeed, it is,” Koch agreed. “If this thing was handled by a Jemmin at any point in the past, there should be some kind of residue. Shed skin cells, secretions, saliva, something. But there’s nothing here. Fellows even took a few of the best-preserved pieces and made a culture bath to try to find some kind of organic traces, but his preliminary results suggest he won’t find anything.”

  “Questions upon questions,” Jenkins mused.

  “Oh, and with Gym Cricket down,” Koch added, “we’ve only got one bridge-building mech left, the Jamboree. Frankly, with all the crevasses near this mountain, we’ll need it operational if we want to perform time-sensitive retrieval operations. I think it would be prudent to reassign Jamboree to my command and keep it here at HQ.”

  “You’re probably right,” Jenkins agreed, having debated the inclusion of Gym Cricket and Jamboree on the patrols before ultimately deciding to include them. Jamboree’s pair of SRM launchers were probably less valuable on patrol than its bridge-building capability would be later on. Especially if they ended up investigating one of the Vorr underwater shafts.

  “Were they specifically targeting the Gym Cricket?” Koch asked, breaking Jenkins from his brief reverie.

  “We don’t know,” Jenkins replied. “Jemmin missiles corkscrew in flight, and make erratic flight path adjustments to throw off antimissile attacks. There’s no way to know which mech they were targeting.”

  “But they did stop attacking once they scrubbed it,” Koch observed.

  “They did.” Jenkins didn’t want to indulge this particular line of dialogue just now, and thankfully Koch took the hint.

  “I’m sending up the next batch of parts requests to the Bonhoeffer.” Koch changed sub
jects. “Is there anything you’d like me to include?”

  Jenkins snorted. “Other than a crystal ball?”

  Koch laughed. “They hit us, we hit them back. It’s what we came here to do. Shake it off, Colonel. We stood tall, and at the end of the day that might be the most important thing to come out of this: that the Terran Republic will stand up for what it thinks is right, no matter how steep the climb might be.”

  “I know.” Jenkins ran a hand through his hair. “Keep looking over this debris and update me with any new findings.”

  “Will do, sir.”

  Jenkins disembarked the Kochtopussy, returning to the frigid, serene exterior of Shiva’s Wrath. Before he had taken three steps, he was ambushed by Sarah Samuels.

  “Colonel Jenkins, a moment please?” she asked in that annoying yet somehow commanding way that all journalists seemed to master.

  “Walk with me, Ms. Samuels,” he replied, knowing it was a full three minutes’ walk to his next destination. He could give her that much time. God knew Xi had been forced to deal with her for more than ninety-eight percent of the woman’s time in the battalion, which made her a more patient person than Jenkins would ever be.

  “Do you believe the Jemmin attacked the Gym Cricket specifically?” she asked, surprising Jenkins with the acuity of her thought process.

  “We don’t have any reason to believe that at this time,” he replied, hoping he could stall her by overloading the conversation with technical information. “Jemmin missiles release multiple micro-warheads before impact; there’s no way to know precisely which vehicle was their target, given the altitude at which they were met by the interceptor drones.”

  “Why would the Jemmin openly antagonize Terran military forces on a human-controlled world?” she pressed, easily switching gears and not falling for his trap.

  “That’s unknown at this time,” he said flatly. “We have conducted ourselves in accordance with every applicable ordinance, including Terran, Solar, Illumination League, and even Jemmin doctrines governing the peacetime deployment of military assets. The Jemmin violated two dozen interstellar treaties with their blatant hostility here on Shiva’s Wrath, and I’m confident those who occupy the Terran Republic’s highest offices will lodge a formal complaint with the Illumination League after we’ve reported this incident.”