The Halls of Montezuma

by Christopher G. Nuttall

  Commander Archer pushed past her as they made their way down to the elevator pod. Rachel felt a hot flash of contempt, mingled with irritation that her safety depended on an imbecile with wandering hands. Commander Archer deserved to have an accident, perhaps several accidents ... she shook her head as they reached the pod. She’d have a chance to do even more damage, if she kept her head down and paid attention to her surroundings. Who knew? They might be so desperate for trained and experienced personnel they wouldn’t pay any attention to glaring red flags.

  She kept her implants connected to the datanet as they boarded the pod and strapped themselves in. The fleet - the incoming fleet - was lost in a haze of sensor distortion. She guessed, from the damage to the system, that all of the Pathfinders had performed individual acts of sabotage. She prayed, silently, that they’d make it out of the fire. Phelps and the others owed her drinks. She probably owed them drinks too.

  The pod lurched, then fell towards the planet. Rachel closed her eyes and tried to get some rest. There was nothing else to do. Whatever happened in the future, she knew that - for the moment - she was out of the fight.

  Chapter Sixteen

  It’s easy to argue that this isn’t fair. The poor lumberjack on the bottom has only realised a tiny percentage of the value. He has a mere ten percent of the carpenter’s earnings and an even smaller one percent of the builder’s earnings. A simplistic mind, looking at this, would declare it unconscionable.

  - Professor Leo Caesius, The Rise and Fall of Interstellar Capitalism

  General Devoid Ganister was not having a good day.

  In fact, he reflected sourly as he sat in the command pit, he’d not been having a good month. It hadn’t been easy to get his young relative Julia into a position of some considerable power and trust, an exercise that had cost the family subset a great deal of trouble at the time and even more when she returned in defeat. The Ganister branch of the family had seriously considered disowning her and swearing blind she’d never been one of them ... a tactic they would have used without hesitation if they’d thought it would have worked. Instead ... he put the thought out of his head as the battle unfolded on the big display. The enemy, the marines or whoever they were, had done a hell of a lot of damage in the first few seconds of war.

  His eyes tracked hundreds of pieces of debris falling towards the surface. Most of them would burn up in the atmosphere, but a number were large enough to hit the ground and do real damage. The PDCs were already engaging them, even though it limited the amount of firepower they could deploy to assist the orbital defences. The enemy fleet itself was within range, but just far enough from the planet to be hard to hit. And it was a multitude ... he was entirely sure that the vast majority of enemy contacts were nothing more than sensor decoys, if only because the enemy wouldn’t have had to pussyfoot around if they had thousands of starships under their control, but it wasn’t easy to separate the real contacts from the fakes. It was impossible ...

  Alarms howled. “General!”

  Devoid spun to face Commander Ringo. “What?”

  “They’re targeting us, sir,” Ringo said. “They’re launching missiles at us.”

  For a moment, Devoid honestly didn’t believe what he’d been told. Missiles? Shipkiller missiles? Deploying them against a planetary surface was a violation of every law in the book. There was a better than even chance of causing an atrocity that would give the Bombardment of Kali a run for its money. And yet ... he blanched as he saw the trails lancing towards the PDC. The enemies were mad! They were insane! They were going to kill a sizable percentage of the planet’s population ...

  “Priority orders,” he snapped. “Retarget all systems. Take those missiles out!”

  “Aye, sir,” Ringo said.

  Devoid forced himself to think through his shock. The enemies were utterly insane. They could have drenched the PDC in KEWs and been fairly sure of doing real damage, without putting the rest of the planet at risk. An object striking the surface at a reasonable percentage of the speed of light ... it would take out the PDC, he supposed, as well as most of the surrounding area. The Imperial Navy had experimented with all sorts of anti-PDC weapons. Thankfully, most of them had been field-tested on uninhabited worlds.

  He reached for his console to send an alert, then stopped himself. There was no point. There were no precautions that could be taken, in a handful of minutes, that could make a difference. The disaster was going to shake the entire world. The people lucky enough to have bunkers might discover they’d become death traps. And the people outside the bunkers might discover the living would envy the dead ...

  Two missiles vanished from the display, picked off by the planetary defences. Two more kept coming, followed by a wave of KEWs. Devoid snorted. The invaders had moved well beyond mere overkill. The PDC was buried within a mountain, the fusion cores and living quarters well below the surface, but the impact would be enough to tear the complex open and kill everyone inside. There was no time to order an evacuation. Even trying to get his people out would expose them to enemy fire. And yet ... he frowned. Something didn’t quite make sense.

  The display blanked. “What?”

  “The enemy warhead detonated, sir,” Commander Thistle reported. “They did considerable damage to the sensor arrays ...”

  Devoid stared at her as she continued her report. It made no sense. Why fire a shipkiller at the planet and detonate it a moment before it hit its target? They’d blasted the mountain with nuclear fire, roasting anyone unlucky enough to be in the open, but they could have cracked the PDC open like an eggshell. Why ... they’d damaged the sensors and melted the point defence, but it could be fixed. The main communications trunk was safely below the ground. The PDC had been damaged, yet ...

  The ground shook. He recalled, too late, the KEWs. Understanding dawned. The invaders had used the shipkillers as a distraction - they’d threatened the entire planet as a distraction - without ever intending to let them hit the ground. The KEWs ... the entire complex shook, time and time again, as the projectiles smashed into the armour. Devoid cursed as he looked at the damage reports. The upper levels had been devastated. The heavy weapons and sensors had been smashed beyond repair. They’d even cracked the plasma containment chambers. Fires were raging over the scorched mountaintop. There was no hope of opening the airlocks and escaping before the fires died.

  He shook his head as more and more reports flashed in front of him. The PDC was still technically intact, but it didn’t matter. They could no longer engage the enemy. They were, for better or worse, out of the fight.

  And that means they have a clear path to the surface, he thought. He had no doubt what was coming next. They’re going to invade.

  ***

  “Captain,” Lieutenant Tomas said. “I can confirm that two of the enemy PDCs have been disabled. A third is still operating, but appears damaged. Its rate of fire has been significantly reduced.”

  Kerri allowed herself a moment of relief. Using shipkillers to engage a planetary target had been risky. They’d worked as many safety precautions into the programming as possible, to the point they’d taken the risk of not inflicting enough damage on the PDCs to blind them. And yet ... she smiled. The risk wasn’t one she wanted to take again, but it had worked.

  “Signal the dumpsters,” she ordered. The skies were as clear as they were going to be. The enemy were clearly trying to redirect their remaining defence stations into position to close the gap, but they didn’t have the time. “Tell them to drop.”

  “Aye, Captain,” Ensign Perkins said.

  “The marines have boarded the anchor station,” Lieutenant Tomas added. “They’ve secured the command and control system. Captain ... they report that the station has been locked out of the main network and the datanodes have been partly destroyed.”

  “Unsurprising,” Kerri said. She’d hoped they’d capture the enemy command network intact, allowing them to shut it down completely, but she hadn’t counted on it. No de
fence planner worthy of the name would leave such a glaring weakness in place, even on a world as interconnected as Onge. “Order them to secure the cable, then wait.”

  She turned her attention to the display. The transports were moving into position, deploying the dumpsters one by one. The technique was centuries old, but it was rare for humans to ride the dumpsters down to the surface. An impact that would damage a piece of solid equipment would kill a human ... she shook her head. The enemy had done it and made it work. Anything they could do, the marines could do better.

  And Haydn is in the first wave. She’d checked. If he doesn’t make it down ...

  “Captain,” Lieutenant Tomas said. “The dumpsters are dropping now.”

  “Begin transmitting,” Kerri ordered. The enemy would try to lock the signals out of their datanet, but it wouldn’t be easy. Their system had been shot to hell in the last ten minutes. “And order the boarding parties to try to insert more signals into the network,”

  “Aye, Captain.”

  ***

  “This is worse than making a HALO drop through a storm,” someone muttered.

  Haydn was tempted to agree. Parachuting through a storm was dangerous as hell. The rain alone could be painful, if not lethal; the wind could pick a parachutist up and toss him too high to survive or tangle the chute or slam him into the ground or ... there were just too many possibilities, each one worse than the last. And yet ... the dumpster was shaking violently as it plunged through the atmosphere. He felt completely helpless. It felt as if he were riding a rock as it fell to its doom.

  It isn’t that bad, he told himself. He thought he could hear the metal creak behind him. He’d ridden emergency escape pods, but they’d been far smaller and safer. Something crashed in the distance ... he prayed, silently, that it wasn’t one of the vehicles. It could start crushing marines or smashing through cables or even destabilising the whole dumpster and sending it wildly off course. We could be on a starship falling towards the nearest star.

  “There was an old book about an alien race that invaded a planet,” Mayberry said. “They shot themselves out of giant cannons and practically rammed their target. They survived.”

  Haydn scowled. He couldn’t tell if Mayberry was trying to distract the men or distract himself. The whole concept sounded absurd, except ... they were doing it. The Onge had already done it. Maybe the landing part was practical ... maybe. Shooting a dumpster out of a cannon, without crushing the crew to bloody paste? He mulled it over as the dumpster shook, again and again. It might be possible, if one had the right sort of technology. But if one did, why not build a proper starship? The whole concept sounded like something drawn up by a scientific illiterate.

  He probably didn’t know what was possible, Haydn thought. He’d read a handful of scientific romances from the pre-space days. The corps had preserved them for reasons that had never really been explained. Half had just been laughable. The other half had remained universally true, even centuries after the people and places they referenced had been forgotten. Perhaps they didn’t have starships in those days.

  “There’s no such thing as aliens, Sarge,” Rifleman Scully said. “They just don’t exist.”

  “Hey, someone found some pretty odd ruins on a world beyond the rim,” Rifleman Muldoon put in. “Strange ziggurats, weird houses build for weirder creatures. They weren’t human.”

  “Faked,” Scully said. “You look in any market along the rim and you’ll see a handful of fake alien relics. You might even see a pair of skulls belonging to a single person ... one for when he was an adult and one for when he was a child.”

  Muldoon laughed. “People actually believe that crap?”

  “My recruiting sergeant told me that women go mad for men in military uniforms,” Scully said. “And you know what? He was lying through his ass.”

  “You have to look good in the uniform.” Muldoon snickered. “It isn’t my fault you look like a beached whale with a BO problem ...”

  The dumpster lurched again. “I probably shouldn’t have tried to pick up girls on Atlanta,” Scully said, mournfully. “Oh, what a fool I was. They see the military as a pool for losers.”

  “They’ll have probably changed their minds by now,” Muldoon said. There was a hint of cold satisfaction in his voice. “Atlanta is right on the edge of disputed space.”

  Haydn couldn’t disagree. The university world had been peaceful and pacifistic to a fault. The greatest threat the academics had faced had been polite arguments over grants from the imperial authorities. They’d even banned the military from recruiting there, on the grounds it would sully their peaceful paradise with violence. He doubted it was anything like as peaceful now. The academics would probably make things worse by appealing to an authority that no longer existed, an authority the neighbouring warlords knew very well no longer existed. And they couldn’t hope to defend themselves ...

  The buzzer rang. The marines fell silent and braced themselves, an instant before the retrorockets fired. Haydn had made hundreds of drops into hostile territory, but this ... he thought, just for a second, as though someone had kicked him in the butt. The techs had assured him the dumpster’s lower plating could survive anything short of a bomb-pumped laser, but he hadn’t felt particularly reassured. The impact didn’t have to blow them to atoms to throw them off-kilter and send them crashing to the planet below.

  The gravity field seemed to invert itself, just for a second. There was a final thunderous impact, then total silence. Haydn shook his head, wondering if he’d gone deaf. Marines always laughed and joked, making light of the death that awaited them ... now, he couldn’t hear a thing. Fear gripped him, just long enough to send ice through his heart. Was he the sole survivor? It didn’t seem possible. And yet ...

  “Any landing you can walk away from is a good landing,” Mayberry said. “Sir?”

  Haydn disengaged himself from his webbing and scrambled to his feet. His legs felt wobbly, as if he’d fallen back to the days when, as a young recruit, he’d made his first parachute drop. He hadn’t been anything like scared enough, he recalled. Now ... he wondered, as he checked his weapons and led the command platoon towards the opened hatches, if the corps would be making more dumpster drops. When it worked, it worked.

  And one tiny mishap would be enough to wipe out a regiment, he thought. We wouldn’t have tried it here if we weren’t desperate.

  His HUD flashed up warnings as he peered out of the hatch. The dumpster had crashed down in the middle of a forest ... no, it was too well-tended to be a forest. A large garden ... he recalled some of the video games he’d played as a child, the ones that had invited him to pretend he had limitless resources, and shuddered. The garden in front of him was easily large enough to take an entire regiment of marines. He could see a mansion in the distance, nearly a mile from the landing zone. It looked like a building out of a historical flick.

  The remainder of the platoon hurried past him, scrambling up the side of the crater and spreading out. It didn’t look as though they were under attack, as if the enemy was hurling shells or missiles towards them in a desperate bid to smash the dumpster before it started unloading its contents, but that could change at any moment. He keyed his throatmike as he jumped down and walked up the side of the crater himself, ordering the logistics staff to get the air defence units out as quickly as possible. The planners had sworn blind the first wave would get down on the ground before the enemy had a chance to react, and he supposed they’d been right, but it was just a matter of time before that changed. The enemy would be scrambling to react to the invasion. It wasn’t as if they’d landed on the very edge of settled territory. They were far too close to the megacity for the enemy’s piece of mind.

  He reached the top of the crater and looked back, just in time to see the first ADV emerge from the dumpster and drive up beside him. Its sensors were already sweeping the air, looking for targets. The logistics crew were laying down struts, making it easier for the follow-up vehicl
es to get out of the crater. Haydn ground his teeth in annoyance. The crater ... they should have expected the crater. None of the reports had suggested the impact would create one, but - in hindsight - it was bloody obvious. They hadn’t been planning to land in the middle of a spaceport!

  I suppose we’re lucky we didn’t set the forest on fire, he thought, grimly. He could see plumes of smoke rising from the distant mountains. There was a PDC there, if he recalled correctly. The plan had called for it to be taken out with maximum force. He guessed the plan had worked. An active PDC would have blown the dumpsters to atoms well before they reached the surface. It could have been worse.

  He joined the rest of the platoon as the marine continued to file out of the dumpster and form up. The remainder of their equipment was being unloaded slowly, but they didn’t need it. Not yet. He smiled as a pair of tiny drones were launched into the air, even though they were easy targets for modern antiaircraft systems. If nothing else, their deaths would tell the marines something useful. They’d know where the enemy wanted to defend and was willing to risk revealing their position to do so ...

  Mayberry saluted. “Captain,” he said. “The company is ready to advance.”

  “Good,” Haydn said. “Follow me.”

  He pointed towards the distant mansion, then started to walk. Time wasn’t on their side. The enemy had used dumpsters themselves. It stood to reason they had a plan for dealing with the sudden arrival of a large body of troops. Hopefully, they’d hesitate to use WMD on lands owned and occupied by corporate royalty. A single nuke would shatter the timetable beyond repair.

  In the distance, he heard the sound of guns.

  Chapter Seventeen

  And yet, is this true. Each successive party in the process brings his skills and experience to the task of creating wealth. The lumberjack’s sole job is to cut down a tree, a relatively simple task. The carpenter’s role requires a certain degree of training and experience as well as tools. The builder’s role requires still more training and experience.