Frozen Fire

by C H Gideon

  One of the HE shells missed high, exploding nearly a kilometer behind the target. But the other struck one of the massive rents caused by its predecessors, and the resulting shower of gore was a thing of beauty as the bug vehicle exploded in all directions.

  “One-on-one,” she said triumphantly, turning Elvira toward the last remaining bug vehicle.

  The enemy vehicle seemed confused, milling this way and that for a few seconds while Xi loaded fresh ordnance into her fifteens. She ran a quick diagnostic on her errant left gun’s targeting system while staying the right gun for a moment. “Lu,” she called over Elvira’s intercom, “check the gimble and the mount points for the left gun. Blinky, open up the targeting computer and tell me what you see.”

  Xi crab-walked Elvira to the right as her crew worked to diagnose the targeting problem. The bug vehicle, somewhat surprisingly, mirrored her movement and the two began to circle for several long, tense seconds while Elvira’s systems diagnosed the problem with the left fifteen. Just a hundred and twenty meters separated the vehicles, and Xi suddenly realized that unlike its previous, side-on posture, the hunch-backed, pillbug-looking vehicle was facing Elvira head-on.

  “It’s mirroring my posture…” she muttered in mixed alarm and curiosity. She stopped her right-ward progress, and the bug immediately did likewise. She slowly moved Elvira back five meters and, again, the enemy vehicle uncannily mirrored her movements.

  Gritting her teeth, she knew there was something significant to the thing’s maneuver. But what was it? The thing had ambushed them, torn two of her mechs down, and now it wanted to dance?

  “Targeting computer looks good, Captain,” Blinky reported.

  “The gimbal’s fine, Captain,” Lu added, “but the mounts were tweaked when the SRMs blew. I’m inputting the new position into the computer,” he said as those figures appeared on Xi’s HUD.

  “Good work.” She nodded, confirming the HE shells up in her guns were ready to fire. She was less confident than she had been a minute earlier, but she knew that this bug needed to die. Now. “On the way,” she declared, sending another pair of HE shells into the bug vehicle.

  Both shells struck the mark, but shockingly, neither seemed to do significant damage. The thing’s carapace was bent and now sported several length-wise cracks, but unlike previous strikes, there were no meter-wide holes in the thing’s armored skin.

  But even more surprising was the fact that, instead of returning fire with its plasma cannon, it skittered toward the nearest ice-hole from which one of its companions had emerged at the fight’s outset.

  “Oh, no, you don’t.” Xi grimaced, reloading HE shells. “HE up.” She sneered as the thing’s front-half moved into the tunnel. “On the way!”

  Her guns thundered, sending their ordnance into the tunnel’s mouth, but from the angle of impact, she doubted she’d hit the thing.

  “Dammit!” she screamed in frustration.

  And then a meter-wide beam of light stabbed into that tunnel from directly overhead, slicing through the ice-field like a scalpel as the ice boiled straight into steam. The constant laser gouged deeper and deeper into the ice, like a needle pursuing a splinter lodged beneath the skin, and it tore a three-hundred-meter long, fifty-meter-deep chasm in the ice before finally disappearing.

  Steam boiled skyward and liquid water fell to the bottom of the chasm, most of which froze before it reached the floor of the icy gash.

  The fallen Masamune was dangerously close to the newly-formed ravine and fell several meters down the gentler top-most section of its steep walls before coming to a stop. Cave Troll, on the other hand, had fallen far from the beam’s path and was unaffected by the suddenly-unstable patch of ice surrounding the orbital strike’s impact zone.

  “Masamune, Cave Troll, respond,” Xi called out over the P2P, but she knew that neither of the vehicles’ point-to-point comm systems were likely to function after the Purgatory strike.

  It would take relatively minor but critical repairs to their lateral P2P transceivers before they functioned properly. Still, the protocol was usually protocol for very good reasons, which meant she needed to try raising them at least three times before dispatching her crews in a search-and-rescue mission.

  “Masamune, Cave Troll, respond,” she repeated while walking over to the nearer Cave Troll, but again, she received no reply. “Masamune, Cave Troll, respond,” she called for the third time before switching to Elvira’s intercom. “Lu, Blinky, Samuels: grab your gear and head over to Cave Troll in search of survivors. On the double,” she snapped, unlocking Elvira’s hatch and knowing that she was poisoning them all with radioactive dust by doing so, “we’ve got two downed mechs whose crews need our help. Move!”

  “Yes, Captain,” came Blinky’s immediate reply, while both Lu and Samuels were much more belated in their acknowledgment of her orders.

  “HQ, this is Elvira.” Xi raised the battalion on the priority channel. “I’ve got two downed mechs in need of retrieval. Cave Troll and Masamune crew condition currently unknown. We’re conducting emergency support at this time. Requesting immediate medevac, over.”

  “Copy that, Elvira,” Styles acknowledged. “R&R team notified. ETA forty-five minutes.”

  “Be advised,” she continued, careful not to make direct reference to the still-unrecognized alien species, “Jemmin warship opened fire on a fleeing vehicle.”

  “Repeat your last, Elvira,” Styles said neutrally.

  “Jemmin warship opened fire with capital-grade lasers on the last hostile as it fled beneath the ice, and the strike-zone was danger-close to Masamune,” she reiterated, again careful not to refer to the bug vehicle. All official logs would be processed at a later date by Terran Armed Forces oversight agencies, and this mission was supposed to be as secretive as they could manage. “Suggest you notify Colonel Jenkins immediately.”

  “Copy that, Elvira,” Styles acknowledged. “I’m sending Second Platoon out to replace 4th Platoon in the patrol. ETA: seventy-one minutes.”

  “Roger, Headquarters,” she replied. “Holding position here.”

  Twenty minutes later, the final tally was in: all three of Cave Troll’s crew were dead, killed by crab-cakes that had somehow penetrated the cabin before the Purgatory struck. But the mech was largely intact, and with a new crew could probably be put back in service in a day or two.

  Masamune’s crew had all survived, but their mech would need more extensive repairs than Cave Troll. Still, given enough time, Lieutenant Koch assured Xi that it would be back on its feet within the week.

  As Xi moved Elvira back to the barn, her crew prepared to tear apart every single system related to her targeting controls. Something was affecting them at the most inopportune moments, and she intended to find out what it was before it cost any more of her people their lives.

  Cave Troll’s death was a direct result of those targeting systems failing in the middle of combat. She was responsible for not taking more severe action after the SRM misses during the first bug engagement, and now three good warriors were dead due to her failure.

  It wouldn’t happen again.

  10

  Jemmin Assault

  “Orbital strikes inbound!” Styles called out a few minutes after Jenkins had donned his uniform and entered Roy’s command center.

  “All crews to their stations. Active sensors to maximum. Prepare to receive Jemmin missiles,” Jenkins barked, perhaps unnecessarily as it seemed Styles had already coordinated as much. “Where are they hitting?”

  “Four of our six APCs are down, sir,” Styles reported tightly as he pored over the sensor logs. “Two were shuttling troopers back to the mines, and the others were on standby.”

  Jenkins quickly checked to find that the hospital APC was not among the targeted vehicles. Yet.

  “Incoming missiles,” Styles called out in a raised voice.

  “All mechs, engage anti-missile countermeasures at will,” Jenkins ordered, knowing that he would pour at least
four times as much counterfire by giving the individual mechs their heads, but he also knew after talking with Xi and examining the evidence that the Jemmin had seemingly caused all manner of problems with various systems throughout the battalion.

  Better to waste a little ammo than let missiles through.

  “At will, aye,” Styles acknowledged as Roy’s own anti-missile rockets tore from their mounts and soared into the sky to meet the enemy ordnance. “Missiles engaged…twenty-five scrubs…thirty-four…forty-two...”

  Roy was rocked by an impact so powerful that it nearly launched Jenkins into the far bulkhead.

  “Preacher,” Jenkins snapped, “prepare to return fire on all priority Jemmin targets.”

  “Priority targets, aye,” Preacher acknowledged.

  “All crews,” Jenkins continued, “this is the Colonel. Execute fire package Hades. I say again, fire package Hades is authorized.”

  Explosions erupted throughout HQ as fifteen out of two hundred Jemmin missiles slipped through the missile shield. Most of the missiles were near-misses, but a handful hit their targets with devastating effect.

  Holy Diver was struck twice, knocking all four of its railguns off the board as its status changed to critically-damaged. The downed Cave Troll was struck once, but its robust armor protected it from being taken out of commission. Hawkeye and White Snake were destroyed outright by precise missiles strikes, and even Kochtopussy suffered a near-miss that blew two of the relatively unarmored legs clear off its chassis. Dozens of troopers were killed in five separate nests built around anti-missile rockets and micro-railguns.

  Then, with a degree of precision and timing that would make any commander proud, Jenkins’ people executed fire package Hades in four seconds from start to finish.

  Five hundred SRMs and MRMs flew from their mounts, and artillery cannons spat fifty shells of depleted uranium fury. The missiles streaked outward in nearly all directions, and the artillery screamed through the thin air of Shiva’s Wrath, as Jenkins’ people showed the Jemmin how humanity replied to her enemies. There was enough conventional ordnance in fire package Hades to destroy a mid-sized warship or to completely devastate all but the biggest Terran metropolis. That combined firepower was the most destructive fire order of Lieutenant Colonel Jenkins’ career.

  But the beating heart of fire package Hades were Preacher’s four tactical nuclear devices, which were aimed at the four most likely Jemmin stronghold locations. In addition to the nukes were four Purgatory-class air-bursters, which would illuminate secondary points of interest that might be hiding the stealthy Jemmin vehicles. The Purgatories would, at the very least, shred the camo-skins from any Jemmin vehicles and make them much easier to target with conventional weaponry.

  The Terran anti-missile shield continued to pour fire into the sky, sniping ninety-five percent of the inbound Jemmin missiles as their human counterparts tore through the frigid air toward their targets. For a moment it seemed as though the Terran missiles would reach their targets unmolested, as enemy counterfire failed to intercept at the optimal point of those projectiles’ flights.

  But then, with chilling precision, laser beams erupted from two of the most-likely Jemmin base-camps, sniping nearly every single missile bound for them. Luckily, the Purgatory and nuclear missiles were more heavily-armored, and one of each pierced the Jemmin missile shields.

  The Purgatory blossomed, its flames rolling outward with terrifying speed until the blast zone was briefly transformed into the gaping maw of Hell. Steam exploded outward, propagating the blast wave even faster than would normally be possible in such a thin atmosphere. The fireball managed to stay ahead of the steam cloud while seemingly gathering strength from it. Three distinct Jemmin vehicles were outlined by the blast-wave, their camo-skins stripped away by the raging inferno, and Jenkins’ mech crews immediately bracketed and eliminated the exposed hostiles with combined artillery and railgun strikes.

  The tactical nuke was, predictably, even more devastating. Flaring with the luminosity of a short-lived star, the light-wash forced every sensor system in the battalion to self-protectively deactivate for two seconds. When they resumed operation, it was clear that at least two more Jemmin vehicles had been scrubbed by the one-hundred-fifty-five kiloton device.

  Another dozen confirmed Jemmin kills flashed across Jenkins’ board, bringing the confirmed kill total to seventeen. Unfortunately, he had no way of knowing what class each of those vehicle kills had been, which meant he didn’t know how much damage he had actually dealt to the enemy.

  Roy lurched from left-to-right as impact alarms rang out through the cabin.

  “Railgun strike,” Styles reported urgently. “Point-of-origin…bearing two-one-niner, azimuth…forty-three degrees. Distance: eight kilometers.”

  “Devil Crab 2,” Jenkins commanded the battalion’s second Scorpion-class mech, “scrub that bird.”

  “Engaging,” Devil Crab’s Jock declared, and surface-to-air rockets streaked up into the sky in pursuit of the flying vehicle. Another railgun strike hit a nearby mech, the Fistandantalus, and blew one of its four legs off at the mid-joint.

  “Widowmaker,” Jenkins called with forced calm, “return fire on second bogey with your railguns.”

  “Railguns hot,” Widowmaker acknowledged before sending a pair of tungsten bolts into the sky in the opposite direction of the first airborne target. “Target neutralized,” Widowmaker reported with satisfaction as an intense explosion marked the Jemmin flyer’s end.

  Devil Crab 2’s rockets failed to hit the mark, causing its Jock to report, “Negative impact on target, Roy. Oh-for-eight.”

  “Seismics!” yelled Styles. “Emergence points throughout the camp!”

  The tactical plotter filled with two dozen unique signatures as Jemmin vehicles emerged from the ice. They immediately opened fire with rockets and railguns, causing HQ to erupt into total chaos.

  “All vehicles, maintain missile shield and engage local targets,” Jenkins commanded as Chaps put Roy’s coilguns on target and smoked a Jemmin vehicle that looked identical to the one whose hull fragments had been examined by Koch. He was pleased with the tweaks to their sensors that allowed the system to gain lock on stealthed technology. It was small, less than four meters long and a quarter as wide, but bore both rockets and railguns that it used to destroy a nearby infantry nest before Chaps tore it apart with coilgun fire.

  The roar of rotary chain guns filled the camp as guns cycled at maximum speed. Twenty Jemmin targets were whittled down to ten in a matter of seconds, but then more Jemmin vehicles emerged from the tunnels and soon more than fifty of the teardrop-shaped, hovering platforms filled the camp.

  Roy’s coilguns killed another, and another, but a trio of railgun strikes tore into the command vehicle’s right flank. Myriad system failure alarms went off as Jenkins’ mechs moved into mutually-reinforcing positions from which to fight off the invaders.

  Roy tilted dangerously to the right and Chaps yelled, “I’ve got failures on Two and Four Legs. Fix them or we’re sitting ducks!”

  The Jemmin seemed to have correctly identified the command vehicle’s importance, and soon four more railguns stabbed into Roy’s left flank and stern. Rockets tore into its already-exposed flanks, causing even more alarms to go off.

  “All guns, this is the colonel,” Jenkins declared over the battalion-wide P2P net, “calling in strikes on all enemy targets inside HQ perimeter. Fire! Fire! Fire!”

  Coilguns whirred and chain guns roared, but their accuracy began to plummet as the enemy circled their primary targets and ruthlessly set about the task of eliminating them.

  Then Jenkins’ people answered his call, and the Terran base camp’s former chaos gave way to apocalypse.

  Dozens of artillery shells slammed into the ice, tearing five-meter-deep craters out of the formerly-pristine surface. SRMs struck the ice near enemy vehicles, with even near-misses knocking Jemmin fighters to the ground. A dozen Jemmin vehicles, half of which had pre
viously fired on Roy, were scrubbed from the board and another dozen fell in the ensuing seconds as they tried and failed to resume their jerky, evasive maneuvering before being bracketed by Terran guns.

  Somewhat alarmingly, the few Terran infantrymen who survived the initial attack proved to be the most effective at countering the Jemmin vehicles. RPGs were more than eighty percent accurate, with each one destroying a Jemmin fighter as the Terran infantry turned their weapons on HQ’s interior. Crew-served machine guns spat depleted uranium slugs at Jemmin fighters, and even those relatively light weapons were able to do enough damage to turn the tide of battle against the alien vehicles when they slowed their erratic, evasive movements enough for the mechs’ larger guns to sweep through and finish them off.

  Slowly, but surely, the Terran forces began to push the Jemmin incursion back. Roy’s damaged drive systems were temporarily repaired, and the command vehicle waded toward the heaviest concentration of enemy with coilguns spewing high-velocity pellets at anything that moved.

  Enemy rockets and railguns returned fire, skewering the more lightly-armored mechs at Roy’s back and knocking several out of the fight. Wolverine collapsed with its hip badly damaged by railguns, and White Zombie fell to concentrated rocket fire on its left foot that rendered it immobile and sent it to the deck. But even with those recent casualties, the Jemmin push had been halted. Now it was only a matter of time before the Terran armor ground them to dust.

  Which was why Jenkins was anything but surprised when the Jemmin turned and fled down their holes. He didn’t need to give the order to intensify fire on the fleeing fighters, but he did feel it necessary to remind Styles, “Expect another wave of missiles, Chief.”

  “All units acknowledge ready to intercept,” Styles replied promptly.

  “Return fire on all missile points-of-origin as they appear,” Jenkins commanded as the last Jemmin disappeared beneath the ice. “I’m authorizing use of our remaining Purgatories on high-confidence targets.”