Frozen Fire

by C H Gideon

  “Artillery solution plotted,” Xi declared after taking precious seconds to confirm her onboard computer’s firing solution. “Transmitting now. Fire! Fire! Fire!”

  Elvira and Widowmaker, sporting a pair of fifteen-kilo guns apiece, sent HE shells downrange using Xi’s hand-calculated solution. The shells burst in a near-perfect diamond pattern, showering the area with shrapnel and exposing two Jemmin vehicles. Unfortunately, neither was the heavy Specter.

  “APs up,” she declared, zeroing in on the now-visible targets. “On the way!”

  She cleared her guns a quarter-second before Widowmaker, and both targets were destroyed in radiant displays that briefly illuminated the other two Jemmin vehicles. But just as quickly as they appeared, the enemy craft faded off-screen and out of view.

  Eclipse’s flare rockets, moving low and slow by design, reached the target and exploded directly over the briefly-illuminated vehicles’ location shortly after the Jemmin disappeared. The entire area was showered in superheated metal fragments, which scattered like Founding Day fireworks over the town square. An oblong dome of ice was covered by the flare residue, and sure enough, Eclipse’s theory proved out as both Jemmin vehicles were revealed by the relatively crude devices.

  “Good shot, Eclipse!” Xi congratulated as she loaded a pair of HE shells into her fifteens.

  Elvira bucked as her guns cleared, sending explosive shells to the slow-moving Specter’s location. Widowmaker’s guns cleared beside her just as the Specter flew apart in an eminently satisfying shower of glowing ceramic shards. The smaller vehicle was also scrubbed before it could repair its camouflage systems, and for a moment, Xi thought they had wiped out every enemy in the area.

  Then the railguns struck from above.

  Widowmaker, the only vehicle in the patrol larger than Elvira, was struck by four precisely-aimed tungsten bolts, which skewered it center-mass. One of those slivers of hyper-velocity tungsten pierced Widowmaker’s power core, which exploded with a force equivalent to three kilotons. The heaviest vehicle in the patrol had been destroyed before its crew even realized they’d been hit.

  Only Forktail was close enough to be struck by destructive shrapnel from Widowmaker’s death throes, but its low profile kept it from anything but fist-sized shards of the dead mech’s hull.

  “Target lock,” Eclipse declared, and Xi saw a fire solution appear on her HUD.

  “Firing,” she snarled in rage at having her patrol so badly hit by the enemy, with one mech destroyed outright. SRMs leapt out of their tubes with murderous intent, and the quartet of offending Jemmin aircraft were destroyed before they could evade the fast-moving missiles.

  “All bogeys down, Captain,” reported Eclipse. “Scanning local area.”

  “This is Forktail,” Lieutenant Ford said anxiously. “Our fusion reactor containment is critical. Shutting it down and requesting pickup.”

  “Moving to your position, Forktail,” Xi said urgently as she turned her mech and used its remaining five legs to walk as fast as possible to Ford’s mech. As she did so, she checked on HQ’s status and saw that they were still taking fire from enemy positions on the far side of the ice-field. Her weaponry would barely let her engage at those ranges against relatively stationary targets, so there was little point in worrying about lending fire support from here.

  It looked like Bahamut Zero was making its presence known to both friend and foe alike. Icon after icon of enemy positions winked out while the platform delivered devastation to the Jemmin attackers.

  But before she could pore over the combat logs, her board erupted in another burst of signals.

  “Contacts,” she instinctively called out as six distinct signatures erupted from the ice-field around her battered patrol. Where a few minutes earlier she’d had six mechs, now she was down to four, and just two of those were undamaged.

  But instead of Jemmin signatures, it was bug vehicles crawling up from their ice tunnels.

  “Cave Troll.” She smirked while pivoting Elvira to face the nearest insect vehicle. “Clear one of those.”

  “With pleasure,” Cave Troll acknowledged, and soon the ice beneath Elvira began to vibrate. Cave Troll’s ultra-powerful, limited-range plasma cannon belched a gout of blue-white fire that annihilated the bug. But unlike previous kills from the dual cannons, this single shot left behind enough wreckage to positively identify what it had been.

  White Zombie squared off on two of the insect-like vehicles. The metal plates over that humanoid mech’s shoulder sections folded back to reveal a variety of SRM and MRM launchers, which fired four SRMs and two MRMs on each of the bugs. Xi approved of the enthusiasm, though the MRMs were probably a bit more than she would have touched off given the choice.

  The left bug was hit by one MRM and two SRMs, which sent it skittering across the smooth ice-field. It came to a stop nearly eighty meters from its previous position. It reoriented itself head-on to White Zombie, and its “mouth” began to glow as its fellows’ had done prior to firing plasma streams.

  The right bug was missed by both MRMs, but the SRMs struck and blew the thing apart in a shower of gooey, metallic chitin. It was the first time Terran missiles had killed one of the things outright, and Xi felt no small measure of satisfaction watching the thing die.

  But as she squared off against another bug, she noticed something curious: two of the six bugs were hanging back, relatively motionless, while the other two survivors pressed the attack with their plasma cannons.

  “What are you waiting for?” she sneered, loading HE shells and locking onto the bug that White Zombie had sent skittering across the field. Raising Elvira’s stern to get a close-quarters firing angle, Xi’s dual-fifteens thundered and delivered their shells into the already-wounded thing a quarter-second after it sent a stream of plasma at White Zombie.

  The artillery shredded the bug’s armor, with thirty-centimeter wide gaps appearing across its surface, and Eclipse added to the weight of fire with its twin chain guns. Two hundred rounds per second poured into the unprotected holes in its armor, and Cave Troll soon added its own coilguns to the mix and poured thousands of rounds into the thing before it shuddered, fell over, and died.

  The two bugs that had been hanging back scurried down their holes, disappearing before Xi could react to their flight. “Dammit,” she growled, but even as she spoke, the last remaining bug squared off against her.

  Again, there was something about its posture which gave her pause, and she suddenly suspected the thing was trying to communicate something with its posture.

  The ground beneath Elvira’s legs began to thrum, and it took her a fraction of a second too long to realize Cave Troll was prepping to fire.

  “No, wait—” she began, only to be silenced when Cave Troll’s plasma cannon incinerated the last bug vehicle on the field.

  “Repeat your last, Elvira?” Cave Troll’s Jock asked after the steam had dissipated, leaving nothing but the smoking ruin of the fourth bug vehicle behind.

  Xi bit her tongue, knowing that to explain what she had meant to say would compromise the mission’s secrecy. “Nothing, Cave Troll,” she replied as lightly as possible. “I was just going to say that one was mine.”

  “I think you’ve notched more than your share of kills down here, Captain,” Cave Troll chuckled.

  “This is Elvira,” she raised HQ, “requesting R&R at current position.”

  “R&R inbound, Elvira,” acknowledged Styles. “ETA: fifty-three minutes. Will you need medevac?”

  “Negative, HQ,” she said firmly. “Widowmaker was lost with all hands, but the rest of us are alive and well. We’ll be limping back to the barn.”

  “Copy that, Elvira,” Styles acknowledged. “Good work out there.”

  In spite of the obvious fact that he was right, Xi couldn’t help thinking that she had just made a catastrophic error by not stopping Cave Troll in time to investigate the bugs’ strange behavior.

  She could only hope she would get a chance to
redeem herself. But first, she needed to figure out if she was jumping at shadows or if the bug had been attempting some form of communication.

  13

  Command Decisions

  “After the Jemmin Assault destroyed thirty percent of our radiation meds,” Doc Fellows reported in the privacy of Jenkins’ cabin, “we’re down to just three days before the exposed men and women start suffering permanent radiation damage.”

  “We can’t extract the infantry to the Bonhoeffer…” Jenkins shook his head bitterly. “Not with the Jemmin lurking out there.”

  Fellows’ expression darkened. “Then unless you can neutralize their anti-aircraft capability, men and women are going to start dying within the week, Colonel. And when they do, it’s not going to be pretty.”

  Styles leaned forward. “We’re working on some theories for neutralizing the Jemmin, Doc.”

  “It’s time to put them into action.” Fellows snorted. “You don’t want men and women dying on this rock from rad poisoning…and you don’t want pictures of their deaths making their way back home,” he added pointedly.

  “Frankly, fuck the political fallout,” Jenkins grunted, slicing a look over at the cramped room’s lone silent occupant, Sergeant Major Trapper Sr. “But you’re right…something has to give down here. Soon. Is there anything else?”

  “The mech crews should be able to stretch their deployments out to another ten or twelve days before they start suffering effects.” Fellows nodded. “If you could somehow extract the infantry, you could stretch that timeline out to two or three months with our remaining supply of meds.”

  Jenkins was not about to put Trapper on the spot, but he needed some kind of input from his infantry commander. “Your thoughts?”

  Trapper smirked, looking precisely like his son as he did so. “I’m just here to fight, Colonel.”

  “I know you don’t outrank me, Sergeant Major,” Jenkins retorted mildly. “Combined with the difference in our respective field experience, I have greatly appreciated your deference to this point when it comes to my command decisions. But right now, I need the best counsel available to me to make my next call, and that counsel includes the honest opinion of the most experienced soldier on this hunk of ice.”

  Trapper nodded in thought for a long while. “My boys and girls aren’t plagued by the targeting problems your mechs have had. We only had a twenty percent miss rate when those Jemmin hover-fighters ambushed us from inside HQ,” he finally said. “To remove the infantry, even though we’re fatally wounded to a man, would be to abandon you and your clankers to an enemy that has the tactical upper hand.” He shook his head with finality. “We knew what we signed up for when we came down here, and we’re going to stand our posts until ordered to do otherwise. That’s not some veiled plea for you to give me an out,” he added, his eyes as hard as diamonds. “As long as Armor Corps shares this rock with hostiles, my troopers are staying put.”

  “I appreciate your stalwart support,” Jenkins said with feeling.

  “Besides…” Trapper’s smirk turned mischievous. “We’re not about to walk off the line in front of the brass.”

  Jenkins chuckled, recalling his brief but important meeting with General Akinouye. During that meeting, the general had made two things abundantly clear: Armor Corps was here until this situation was resolved, and he had no intention of assuming operational command. The first bit had been expected since their last conversation prior to Bahamut Zero’s arrival, but the second was a shock. How often did the longest-tenured officer in the armed forces abdicate operational command to a lieutenant colonel on his first official deployment under his branch’s banner?

  It was a hell of a recommendation, and Jenkins felt every pound of pressure that recommendation placed upon his shoulders.

  “All right.” Jenkins nodded approvingly. “Then for the time being, we’re staying put.” He turned to Styles. “But I want our best extraction packages presented for my review in twelve hours.”

  “You’ll have them.”

  “Good. Thank you, Doctor.” Jenkins nodded to Fellows, then stood to salute the older man. “Sergeant Major.”

  Trapper returned the salute, and the two departed the cabin.

  “My simulation packages can’t produce better than a sixty percent withdrawal success rate,” Styles said grimly after they had gone.

  “Which means that, with three heavy lifters aboard the Bonhoeffer,” Jenkins grumbled, “the odds are we’ll only get the troopers off this rock before the last of our lifters is shot down.”

  “Leaving us stranded unless or until the Bonhoeffer can go get fresh lifters.” Styles nodded knowingly.

  “During which time, the Jemmin will doubtless return and finish us off from orbit.” Jenkins rubbed the bridge of his nose before moving his fingertips to the dark semicircles beneath his eyes. “The only reason they haven’t already done so is because of the political fallout they’d suffer.”

  “It seems their control of the Illumination League is a lot more tenuous than most people believe,” Styles observed. “Otherwise why not just drop a nuke on us from orbit and then claim we violated some obscure law, before offering the Republic a token of contrition?”

  “They’re afraid of something…” Jenkins agreed. “And whatever they hoped to find down here is part of it.”

  “It has to be evidence of something. But what?” Styles asked frustratedly.

  “We don’t have time to indulge in further speculation,” Jenkins said, feeling his resolve strengthen now that he had a new clock to work under. “Let’s see your latest idea on neutralizing the Jemmin.”

  “All right…” Styles hesitated before producing a data slate and sliding it across the table. “But you’re not going to like it.”

  Stifling the urge to groan, Jenkins picked up the slate and began to examine its contents. A few minutes later, he muttered, “I’m starting to hate how often you’re right.”

  “Lu, Staubach,” Xi called after parking Elvira following their latest patrol and disconnecting the neural link, “to the cockpit.”

  Her mech’s crew reported, with Staubach predictably arriving first in spite of having farther to come from the rearmost seat in the mech’s cabin.

  “Reporting, Captain,” Staubach declared, bracing at attention.

  “At ease,” Xi said, resisting the urge to smile at his infectious enthusiasm while Lu made his leisurely way to the cockpit. “All right,” she declared, “I think it’s time to switch things up a bit. Chief Lu—” She turned to the middle-aged mechanic. “—you’ve done everything I’ve asked of you since joining my command.”

  “Thank you, Captain,” he replied in his usual, flat fashion.

  “Also,” she continued neutrally, “Private Staubach has gone above and beyond on multiple occasions, including live-fire hull walks to expedite repairs.”

  Lu stiffened. “Captain, you can’t order me to take those kinds of risks. The Uniform Code...”

  “I’m well aware of the Code, Chief,” she interrupted. “I’m also well aware that, as the ranking officer in this company, it is my prerogative to confirm duty posts and roster assignments. I think Elvira will function better in combat if we had you and Blinky switch posts for a deployment or two. I know you’re capable of being my Wrench,” she continued, ignoring the growing look of resentment on Lu’s face, “but I want to see if Blinky is as well. With all the casualties and material damage the battalion has suffered on Shiva’s Wrath, it’s going to be critical going forward to examine who can and can’t demonstrate flexibility under fire.” She drew a short breath. “To be blunt, you’re a known quantity. You’re predictable. You’re reliable. I appreciate reliability. But Blinky has picked up the slack for you on several occasions and has gone out of his way to make your job easier. I haven’t seen you reciprocate, and that’s concerning to me. This is your chance to pay him back,” she finished, pointedly not adding, “to say nothing of actually trying to impress your CO for the first time
in your service together.”

  Lu braced to stiff attention. “Yes, Captain.”

  “Carry on,” Xi acknowledged, returning the salute and subtly gesturing for them to exit the cockpit. While she had spoken the truth to Lu about his change in assignment, Xi knew that some part of her decision had been due to the nagging thought that Lu simply couldn’t measure up to Podsy. And judging from the early returns, it was possible that Blinky could. Xi and Podsy had completed Durgan’s Folly together, just two people in a mech designed to be run by a crew of three. She missed that efficiency almost as much as she missed Podsy himself.

  A few seconds after Lu had departed the cockpit, Ms. Samuels entered through the open door and nodded approvingly. “I was wondering when you’d do that.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Oh, come on.” Samuels lowered her voice to just above a whisper. “It’s plain as day that Lu’s been sandbagging, doing the bare minimum. It must be a relief to snap him up after all this time. I’ve seen the way your jaw muscles bunch when he shows less enthusiasm than Private Staubach.”

  Xi shook her head in amazement. “How can you be the Fourth Estate’s spear-tip if you can’t see what’s going on here?”

  “Help me understand,” Samuels urged, leisurely propping herself against the bulkhead.

  “We’re in the middle of a fight, Ms. Samuels,” Xi said, fighting to keep her emotions reined in. “Now is not the time for upbraiding or public floggings. Wars are won and lost in the temples. They just play out on the field like a Rube Goldberg machine.”

  “I don’t think that’s quite what Sun Tzu meant.” Samuels offered the hint of a smile.

  “I think it is.” Xi shrugged. “There’s no sense arguing with the laws of physics, and there’s no sense trying to make someone into something he’ll never be. I’m not being punitive with Lu, I told him the truth. I need to see how Blinky performs for a few full shifts as a dedicated Wrench, and I’d like to see how Lu responds to what he probably sees as a demotion. Staubach’s obviously over-qualified to be a Monkey, and both his neural batteries and tactical reasoning show enough promise that he might even make Jock soon. As a potential bonus, I might also reignite the same passion in Lu that saw him enlist two days after the atrocity at New Australia became public knowledge. But that didn’t factor into my decision,” she said with conviction she didn’t entirely feel. “Any commander who lets personal feelings or grudges influence her command decisions doesn’t belong in the big chair. This is the best move not just for Elvira and her crew individually, but for the battalion as a whole, and I’ll stand by it if and when Chief Lu submits my order for official review.”