“Natalya,” Lavrenti shouted, steering the yurt toward three others which had reached the center of the herd, “On your right, in the grass--”
“I see them!” The tall grasses close by had been trampled and flattened by the horses and tires of the yurts, but less than a hundred feet away the tall steppe grasses waved in the wind like a yellow sea. And on the shores of that sea, Natalya saw figures emerging, leveling weapons at the riders as they circled and fired into the grass.
The cossacks were as brilliant horsemen as ever their ancestors had been, and their generations on Haven had made them warriors of the finest stripe. This kept their casualties low, but nothing could prevent death when facing Saurons, and very little could bring victory. Each second, Natalya would see another rider tumble from his horse.
She waited until gospodin Buyalev passed, then swept a long, low burst across the grasses behind him. The vegetation was scythed down for yards beyond, and a Sauron in dull grey battle dress went down with it.
“Hi!” she shrieked, Lavrenti cheering behind her. Natalya could feel her nipples tighten against the fabric of her undershirt, and felt an incongruous relief that she was wearing a heavy coat, preventing her brother from seeing her arousal. She dismissed the thought; she knew about boys, and from the constant rattle of the assault rifle from behind her, she was pretty sure that Lavrenti was just as excited in his own way as she was in hers. “N’asha, helicopter!”
The Sauron gauss weapons were virtually silent, but the helicopters mounted conventional Havener weapons; more primitive, but no less effective at these ranges. The gunship swept over their yurt from behind, rotary cannons roaring as they sliced the horsehair-felt and wooden framework into a collapsing wreck. The helicopter went by and banked to pass in front of them, turning to bring its cannons to bear on Natalya and Lavrenti. As it came about, Saurons emerged from the steppe grasses beneath it, advancing in the wake of its fire. Swinging the machine gun around, she kicked open the tent flap at her feet, and shouted: “Now!”
Beneath her and to the right, explosive bolts detonated, sending a quarter of the yurt’s side flying out and away to land smoking on the grasses. Two dozen men and women dressed in the butternut camouflage of Cummings’ Brigades boiled out of the opening, supported by another heavy machine gun within. The same thing was happening throughout the rolling mass of yurts; wherever a Sauron troop carrier was disgorging a squad, a company was leaping out of a yurt to ambush them.
Not even numbers such as these would even the odds, of course, and all the Haveners knew it. But Kettler had promised them Cummings’ support, and the survivors would pass the word that it had been given.
Supra-orbital fighters were one thing, but Natalya had dealt with helicopters before. It was no accident that she operated the heavy machine gun while her brother Lavrenti covered her with a mere assault rifle.
Natalya focused her vision on the gunship’s forward canopy--though armored, it was still the aircraft’s only weak spot--and keeping the sights over the gunner’s position there, she fired a steady burst into the transparent armor plating.
In the rear pilot seat of the gunship, Fighter Rank Amar almost smiled. More cattle troops meant more prey for the ground forces. As for himself, having had a great deal of experience with the futility of chemically-fired projectiles against the canopies of Sauron fighters, he ignored the pretty little cattle gunner’s fire and flew straight at her. Only as his gunner, Fourth Rank Hsien, was about to fire the helicopter’s forward weaponry, was Amar reminded that this time he was not flying a Sauron fighter.
The transparent panel in Hsien’s forward canopy abruptly crystallized, then blew inward in a flood of glass granules and tungsten-cored slugs, passing through Fighter Rank Hsien’s head and into the lower torso of Fighter Rank Amar seated above and behind him, ending only as it tore through the engine and fuel cells beyond.
The helicopter exploded, dropping directly on a Sauron who had been advancing beneath it in perfect, if imprudent, combat procedure.
The blast lifted Natalya and Lavrenti from the seat of the yurt and threw them to the earth two dozen feet beyond. Fuel and ammunition ignited the grasses all around the helicopter, and the wind began whipping the flames south and east into the tall grasses.
Natalya sat up, her ears ringing. She could smell hair burning, and turned to see Lavrenti senseless beside her on the ground, his coat and hat afire. Patting out the flames, she felt something hot pierce the flesh of her hand, and removed Lavrenti’s cap to expose a long piece of smoking metal embedded in his skull. Too angry for tears, Natalya groped about, finding her brother’s assault rifle, and taking a fresh clip from his belt, she began crawling toward the burning yurt. All around her, the volunteers from Cummings’ Brigade were falling, but continued to lay down withering fire as they advanced into the grasses, where the battle would ultimately close to hand-to-hand.
A sudden brilliant flash of light made Sargun start. “They have lost one of the rotary wing aircraft.”
“Were there troops aboard?” Stern asked.
“Unknown; one was caught beneath it when it fell.”
Stern decided to test the waters. “The human norms have more advanced weaponry than suspected, and far more troops. They could inflict serious casualties on our--on those forces.”
Sargun turned to him. “Indeed. But we are forbidden to intervene in any military actions. By order of the First Citizen himself.”
Stern nodded. “Were we to close to a better observation point, we might at least provide long range fire support. Without actually engaging the human norms.”
Now Sargun turned to look back at the figures spread about in the grasses behind him. One wore the bulky harness of a Mark VII manpack fusion gun. The weapon had been released from stores after Sargun’s insistence that it might prove necessary for cutting up samples of debris from the Fomoria should any be found; and had it proved necessary to do so, the Mark VII was certainly up to the job. No human norm could even lift the weapon, and even Sauron norms wore a powered hydraulic harness when taking it into battle--Cyborg Philomon wore the weapon casually slung over one shoulder.
The Mark VII generated a contained fusion reaction, then released the energy in a directed pulse; extremely destructive, but precisely contained. Intended to destroy with surgical precision, the Mark VII’s contained fusion effect did not even generate fatal doses of x-rays or gamma rays. Not fatal, at least, to Saurons.
Nothing was wasted, and everything went into the weapon’s blast sphere, with the resulting swath of destruction rivaled only by heavy artillery. Imperial Marines who had faced Mark VII-armed Saurons on the streets of contested worlds had nicknamed it the ‘blockbuster’.
Sargun secured the OpEn unit. “Your point is well-taken. We cannot make an informed decision from this distance.” He gestured to the remainder of the squad behind him: Forward; remain concealed; maintain fire discipline.
Stern was pleased. Sargun seemed like just the sort he and his men had been waiting for.
“Urrah!” A man on Sergei’s left had seen the explosion of the helicopter gunship and stood in his saddle to raise a fist in triumph. His head suddenly exploded and he fell back across his horse’s rump, arms splayed to the sides.
Yarmoloff poured fire into the burning grasses; the blaze had spread rapidly, and the smoke was making it hard to breathe, let alone see the enemy.
“Bastards!” Yarmoloff shouted, his horse wheeling. As it turned, a shadow flew from the brush, then another, then three more. The last three simply ran on without seeming to pay them any notice, but one dark blur slowed enough to become a large man who grabbed Yarmoloff s reins and dragged his horse to the ground, spilling the harness maker from his saddle. The Sauron raised one foot and crushed Yarmoloff’s skull with a single blow, then released the horse to stagger to its feet and run wild.
Meanwhile, one of the other Saurons had closed on Sergei, who wheeled his mount and held his sabre out before him and his other
hand behind his back, out of sight. The Sauron glanced at the sabre and stopped, raised his rifle in a leisurely gesture and aimed at Sergei’s head; the cossack looked directly into the Sauron’s eyes. Beneath him, Anya continued her graceful pivot, bringing Sergei’s other hand around and exposing the automatic he held in it. The weapon barked twice, and the Sauron fell dead with two bullets in his brain.
Kicking Anya into a gallop, Sergei charged the Sauron who had killed Yarmoloff, firing with the pistol and extending the sabre in the edge-up position for a killing run-through.
But this Sauron was the type to act, not react. He too charged, running toward Sergei and keeping himself behind Anya’s head and out of Sergei’s field of fire.
Cagey bastard, Sergei cursed. Let’s see how he likes getting trampled, then.
Anya was a cossack’s horse, and she had long since been trained out of any reluctance she might have held as regarded running a man down. She weighed over half a ton, and bore down on the Sauron like a judgment, preparing to put him under the hooves she had trampled a tamerlane with only a year before.
With an eerie grace, the Sauron sidestepped the charging animal, and dropping his weapon, reached out and grabbed Anya’s front right leg as she passed; jerking upward and outward, he threw horse and rider to the ground with a single pull. Screaming, Anya rolled to the side, flailing her legs before her.
The Sauron bent over to pick up his rifle and as he rose he turned toward Sergei. An impossibly large hole suddenly opened in his chest; Sergei could quite literally see daylight through the Sauron, who fell over dead with a look of utter astonishment.
Nikolai galloped up on his horse Pyotr, the massive revolver still smoking in his hand. He looked down briefly at the Sauron. “Huh. So perhaps they have only one heart after all, da Papa?”
Sergei scrambled over to Anya, who had struggled to her feet and looked at him almost in embarrassment.
“Is she lamed?” Nikolai shouted, keeping Pyotr wheeling, his eyes searching the surrounding smoke for the next Sauron.
“Nyet!” Sergei shouted in relief and jumped into the saddle. “Bad girl,” he grunted at Anya, “getting surprised like that.” He called to Nikolai: “Where is the headman?”
“Dead; we are falling back to the center. It looks like the end, Otetz; Papa, we’ve lost at least fifty men already.”
Sergei leaned down and swept up the Sauron’s weapon as he rode by. Rising and settling into the saddle, he bit back a curse. “Christus, fifty men? Are you sure?”
Nikolai nodded. The lad was utterly without fear, Sergei knew, but he looked shaken now. “And almost all of the Cummings Brigade, though their heavy weaponry has killed many Saurons. These Saurons, Papa; they are like nothing I have ever seen. And I have never seen so many at once.”
There was a roll of thunder as the explosion of another helicopter gunship reached them; Sergei and his son spurred their horses and headed for the center of the shrinking circle that had been their community.
Assault Leader Bohren was worried. Reports indicated that his forces had killed over fifty of the cattle males, at least twice that of the heavy weapons ambush troops wearing the butternut uniforms, and another thirty-seven females incidentally--every one of whom had been armed and extremely effective with her weapon--yet the cattle showed no sign of breaking. He had just lost one helicopter to a girl with a machine gun, and another had crashed when one of the cattle on horseback had thrown a lance into its tail rotors. A lance! At least there had been no casualties from that one.
“What are the casualty figures? “ Bohren addressed the Communications Rank seated beside him.
“Seven Soldiers have been killed, Assault Leader. Signals indicate that a further nine have activated their rescue telemetry and can no longer be counted as combat effectives.”
Bohren was aghast. Sixteen casualties? And seven of those dead? He had brought a force of one hundred Soldiers to make a simple raid on human norms, and so far his operation was suffering the highest exchange rate since the Sauron landing on Haven!
Operationally, things were not all that bad. If Bohren’s forces had been any other race but Saurons, his losses thus far could have been considered acceptable. But for the Soldiers, with their finite population of combat-capable troops, it was a disaster. It had been expected that these particular cattle would be fierce opponents, but these losses were unacceptable. “Recall Fighter Rank Stahler’s squadron,” Bohren ordered. “Instruct the units engaged in the field to pull back and mount suppressive fire to contain the cattle. We’ll allow the gunships and aircraft to finish them off.”
“Acknowledged, Assault Leader. New information from Sensor Ranks.”
“Speak.”
“Environmental Sensors show a massive storm front coming in from the north.” Bohren frowned. “Relevance?”
“Storm front is due to arrive this area in twenty-six minutes. Winds estimated at fifty knots, with heavy rain and strong electrical phenomena.”
Saurons were not an expressive people, but at that news, Bohren’s jaw dropped. “Meteorology Ranks said that storm front was continuing out to sea.”
The Communications Ranker nodded. “Yes, Assault Leader. But weather patterns on this world have not been fully codified by the Met Ranks, yet. The gas giant incurs unprecedented variables.”
“Very well. Proceed with revised orders and inform the helicopter gunships to press the attack for fifteen minutes, then to break off, land and secure for storm.”
Bohren raised a hand to his brow. He wondered if anything else could go wrong, today.
Sergei and Nikolai had rounded up several dozen other cossacks and ten survivors of Cummings’ volunteers, the latter armed with rotary grenade launchers. Together they had begun a sweeping skirmish action against the major Sauron assault force. The Saurons were pinning down the cossack forces on three sides with fire teams concealed in the tall grasses, while the helicopter gunships made their circular passes, raking the cossack yurts and horsemen with their wing-cannons.
Along the fourth side of the defender’s position, the line of Cummings’ volunteers held, but only because every remaining yurt was gathered there, and each bore at least three heavy machine guns--one even sported a rocket launcher. Women and children were spread about around and on the surface of every yurt, and every one of them capable of firing a weapon was doing so. Diettinger’s assessment of Sergei’s people as being a very strong community had been accurate; if anything (as Assault Leader Bohren was now learning), the Saurons had underestimated the Don cossacks seriously. Combined with the completely unexpected firepower provided them by Colonel Kettler’s intervention, the Sauron attack was beginning to bog down.
As Kettler himself had told Cummings: “They’ll still win any attack they make against those cossacks, General; nothing can prevent that. But I can guarantee that they won’t enjoy it very much.” Nor were they.
The grass fires were spreading, whipped up by the steadily freshening winds from the north. Behind those winds, a towering storm front on the horizon bore down on the battlefield, coming closer with each passing moment.
“Papa!” Nikolai shouted, pointing. “Helicopters coming up on the right!”
Sergei turned in his saddle, wheeling Anya about into a hard right turn, directly into the approaching gunships. The horsemen were only staying alive by constantly moving, keeping the Saurons from pinning any of them down, forcing the Soldiers to fire at moving targets and closing with the gunships to give them as little time in their sights as possible. And each Sauron whose position could be ascertained by his fire was met by a hail of heavy weapons fire from the Cummings units. Even so, the Haveners were doing very little damage to the attackers, and cossack after cossack fell from his saddle to the bloody grasses below. Smoke from the grass fires was now spreading all around them, blinding to the human norms and terrifying to their mounts, but impeding the Sauron’s fire accuracy not at all.
“We have to hold them off until the storm h
its,” Sergei yelled to the riders about them. “Then we can cover the withdrawal for the yurts and Cummings’ Brigade.”
One man, Putin, nodded and roared: “Da, but then what? No more helicopters, but their ground troops still have us surrounded.”
Sergei kneed Anya’s flank as he leaned to one side, signaling her to change course even as he fired a burst into the grasses to his left. He ducked and winced in the saddle as one of the Cummings’ Brigade SLaGs--a shoulder-launched, guided missile--shot less than a dozen feet over his head, lighting the faces of the men around him as it leaped across the sky toward a Sauron helicopter. Sergei’s reply was lost in astonishment as the helicopter ducked under the missile at the last second; the Sauron pilots were not--could not be--human.
“Shit,” Putin amended, “If they can fly like that, they can keep their helos up in a storm, too!”
“Shut up!” Sergei roared, as a runner from the Cummings Brigade dashed up to the horses, shouting up to him.
“When the storm hits those ‘copters’ll have to land; you push hard against the line of Saurons at the yurts . .. break out, we’ll fire off the rest of our SLaGs and destroy their helicopters .. . maybe then we’ll have the edge in mobility.”
Putin barked a laugh at the plan, and Sergei knew he was right; one look at Anya’s frothing lips told him that none of their horses could keep up this pace for very much longer. What they needed was something that had been in very short supply on Haven for a very long time. They needed a miracle. Even so, he nodded at the man on the ground who, he now saw, was leaving a red trail from a blood-filled boot.
“Da,” Kamov nodded at the volunteer, and without realizing it, he saluted before riding off.
War World IV: Invasion Page 10
