Ascendant

by Jack Campbell

  “Why?” she asked before stifling a yawn. “Didn’t we talk about that yesterday? The government completely evacuated that area. There’s no there there.”

  “Which is why the enemy left a relatively small force to hold it. We think we might be able to overrun them.”

  “I’ll see what I can find out,” Carmen said, trying to link to one of the surviving intelligence coordination nets.

  She finally linked up using a buried landline that the enemy apparently hadn’t discovered yet. The official picture offered was fragmentary, dismaying, and hopeful all at once. Lodz was no longer a single city but a collection of areas, some controlled by the invaders and some still in the hands of Kosatka’s defenders. The edges of the areas weren’t clean lines but blurs where one side’s control faded and eventually yielded at vague boundaries to the presence of the other side. Humans liked clearly defined boundaries, and given enough time would end up with them, where a single street would mark the border between one side and the other as it did in most places on Mars. But Carmen could see Loren Yeresh’s quantum mechanics background in these assessments. Given how little was known and how fluid the situation was, enemy positions and strengths and areas of control were defined as much by uncertainties as they were by precise information.

  “Here’s what we’ve got,” she told Dominic.

  He squinted at the image. “It’s too bad we don’t have more soldiers. The enemy hasn’t linked up the places they’ve captured. We could hit them while they’re still isolated from each other.”

  “That’s probably why we’re aiming to recapture the government complex,” Carmen said. “See? It’s between this industrial area that’s been captured and the spaceport. If we retake the government area, we’ll be between those two areas so they can’t link up.”

  A moment later the full implications of that hit her. “We’ll be between two strong enemy forces.”

  “Yeah,” Dominic agreed. “A number of other units are going in with us. But it will feel like being in a nutcracker, won’t it?” He hesitated. “Red, why don’t you—”

  “I’m staying with you.”

  “The attack is going to be hazardous, and afterward the enemy is going to be hitting us hard from at least two sides,” Dominic argued.

  “It sounds like you’ll need me there,” Carmen said.

  “Red, please . . .”

  “Domi, I spent my childhood fighting my battles alone. And I promised myself then that if I ever found someone I could count on, no matter what, that I would never let them fight alone.”

  He gazed back at her silently for a long moment before sighing and nodding. “All right. I can tell you’re not going to give in.”

  “Smart man.” Carmen smiled in what she hoped was a reassuring way. “Get back to leading your unit. I’ll see if I can find out anything else before we move away from here and I’m dependent on wireless again.”

  “All right,” Dominic said again. “I wish you’d never left Albuquerque. You’d be safe there.”

  “Safe? You obviously don’t know much about Albuquerque. This sort of thing is just a typical quiet Saturday night in Albuquerque.”

  They set off before sunrise, the men and women of Dominic’s unit moving in small groups from cover to cover, keeping careful watch on the silent buildings around them and the sky above where newly placed enemy satellites might already be watching these streets. Carmen took a look back at the park, wondering how much longer those trees would stand. If the fight went on for long inside the city, the enemy would realize those leaves offered too much concealment. A single overpressure munition would strip the trees of leaves and bark and smaller branches, leaving bare trunks where a small, cultivated forest had once stood.

  Somehow the thought of that bothered her more than the craters in the streets and the holes in some of the buildings.

  They’d been warned to avoid the subway tunnels and the other underground passages. Those were such obvious means to sneak through the city that the invaders had quickly laced them with sensors and automated sentries. “Why don’t they use those automated sentry robots aboveground?” one of those with Carmen and Dominic asked. “Why didn’t we ever use them against the rebels?”

  “I read up on them,” Dominic replied, his eye never halting in their search of their surroundings. “Even after all the work on artificial intelligence those things still end up targeting the wrong people and getting jammed. As panicky and confused as humans with weapons can get, they’re still a lot more reliable when it comes to choosing the right targets. But down in the subway and maintenance tunnels the only people they should encounter right now are defenders like you and me.”

  “There’s another reason they don’t get used,” Carmen said. “Hacking.”

  “They can get taken over by the other side?”

  “Any AI can get taken over. Rewritten. Modified. Earth and the other places in Sol Star System try new ones out sometimes on Mars to see how long it takes the Reds to hack them.” Carmen smiled, baring her teeth. “It usually doesn’t take long.”

  Dominic eyed her. “Do we have people working on that? Against these guys?”

  “Maybe,” Carmen said. “If I knew, I couldn’t talk about it.”

  “Sure.”

  A warning alert pulsed through their headsets and everyone froze, gazing about cautiously. “All units,” the report came through bursts of static caused by enemy jamming, “shuttles on their way to the surface.”

  Crouched against the nearest building, Carmen gazed upward, seeing the just-risen sun illuminating a wave of specks growing in size rapidly as they dropped toward the city. There weren’t nearly as many as yesterday. The enemy must have lost a lot of shuttles during the initial invasion.

  “They’re still coming down in waves,” Dominic said beside her. “Escorted by their own warbirds. That means they’re still worried about our warbirds. We must have a few left.”

  As the shuttles neared the surface they broke into smaller groups, heading for parts of the city already held by the invaders. The enemy warbirds escorting them stayed higher, circling protectively.

  “I wonder if we’re going to hit them?” Carmen asked Dominic.

  Her answer came in the form of a sudden high-pitched whine growing rapidly in volume. A warbird tore past just overhead, jinking between higher buildings at the lowest altitude it could manage at that speed, aiming for the enemy shuttles on their final landing approach.

  The roar of weaponry sounded, followed by one of the shuttles exploding. A second shuttle tried to reverse its drop and climb, but hits ripped holes in it. Out of control, the shuttle nosed over and dove into the ground, vanishing from Carmen’s sight. The blast from its impact could be seen, heard, and felt even from this far off.

  A barely audible cheer sounded from Dominic’s soldiers as the warbird dashed away to avoid enemy warbirds diving toward it. Carmen watched the warbirds for only a few seconds before the running fight was blocked from her view by intervening buildings.

  “Pilots,” Dominic remarked. “They’re all crazy.”

  “Whatever was in that one shuttle made a big explosion,” Carmen said. “Maybe power cell replacements for their battle armor?”

  “It was something important to them,” Dominic said. “And it’s gone. So that’s good. I hope that crazy pilot got away.”

  Carmen focused on her pad as an alert appeared. “I’ve got a feed from one of our drones! It’s . . . gone.”

  “Jamming?”

  “Looked more like a swat.” Drones had combat life spans so short that they made mayflies look long-lived by comparison. Once people had figured out that even little drones moving through the air made fairly easy targets for the right sensors to spot, sensors modeled on the ways that creatures like frogs detected and tracked the movement of small flying insects, drones became the pawns of battles, q
uickly sacrificed in the opening moves. Any that survived the initial engagement, or new ones constructed afterward, had to face an array of antidrone systems collectively known as flyswatters, as well as the same sort of jamming that every other system had to deal with.

  Which meant that Carmen was happy to get even one useful image from a friendly drone before it was swatted. “It’s the Central Coordination Building.” An unpoetic name for the large structure built to house the offices of a lot of people doing unpoetic but necessary government work. “There aren’t defenses visible on the outside. Something must have taken down that drone, though, so they must have sensors and some weapons hidden on the exterior.”

  Dominic studied the picture before nodding. “What we heard is right, then. They’re forted up inside the buildings.”

  “And those shuttles that were shot down were trying to land in the central courtyard on the other side of this building. See the smoke rising from behind it?”

  “Some of their reinforcements didn’t make it.” Dominic smiled. “Come on, everyone. Move it. We need to get into position to hit them before they get any more help sent their way.”

  But when they had finally made their way cautiously to buildings on the street facing the government complex, the order came to wait. Everyone sat or lay down among the abandoned, everyday trappings of the buildings they were hiding in. Work desks piled with once-urgent tasks, displays without power, shelves of clothing or other goods that had been too bulky or heavy to haul out of the city before the invaders landed. Carmen lay flat on a carpet in a comfortable office area, occasionally gazing up at a bare ceiling whose lights were as dead as the rest of the city. The rest of the time she worked at trying to pick up anything she could of friendly net traffic or enemy activity. “There’s something going on,” she told Dominic. “All kinds of activity nearby on just about every frequency.”

  “Any idea what—?” Dominic paused as the muffled sound of weapons suddenly came from outside. “How far off is that?”

  “Not far at all,” Carmen said, staring at her screen. “It’s underground.”

  “In the subway and maintenance tunnels?” Dominic hesitated, listening to something on his command circuit. “You called it, Red.” Switching circuits, he transmitted to his unit. “Most of the automated sentry bots the enemy placed in the underground approaches have been turned by our hackers. They’ve been ordered to assault the enemy forces they were guarding. We’re going to give the enemy five more minutes to send their troops down to fight their own bots, then we’re going in on the surface. We’re promised a chaff cloud cover for the assault. Everyone be ready to assault the Central Coord Building when I give the command.”

  Carmen sat up, readying herself and wishing she had a sidearm. Her rifle wasn’t well suited for the sort of close-in work that would soon be necessary.

  Concealed inside the buildings facing their objective, Carmen and the others didn’t hear the incoming chaff rounds. Enemy counterfire aimed at the rounds missed as the chaff detonated short of the enemy positions. Clouds of smoke filled with glittering metallic strands and glowing “fireflies” that created heat decoys filled the street as if a sudden, mystical fog had been summoned by magical means. The sunlight, striving to pass through chaff designed to scatter and confuse any radiation, could create only a dim glow in the street like a suddenly fallen night.

  “Go! Everyone go!” Dominic called into his command circuit as he bolted for the nearest door onto the street.

  He’d probably hoped to lose her in the fog, Carmen thought. Lose her so she’d lag behind looking for him and not be in as much danger. But she stayed right next to him as they ran. The chaff clouds blocked everything so their own command circuits and pads and all else went dead, leaving them isolated in the glowing cloud.

  An enemy shot tore through the cloud, passing uncomfortably close to Carmen, as the invaders fired blindly into the chaff in hopes of hitting someone or at least slowing down the attack. The curb on the other side of the street suddenly appeared underfoot, nearly tripping her, then the sidewalk and just beyond that the Central Coordination Building, constructed of sturdy materials using the latest architectural techniques. The latest techniques available here in the down and out, anyway. A strong building, meant to stand for a long time, but not designed to serve as a fort.

  Wide, low windows on the ground floor, their polymer glass already blown out in many cases by earlier fighting, gave easy access to the soldiers of Dominic’s unit and the other Kosatka defenders. The chaff filling the street had drifted in through the openings, blinding defenders of Kosatka and invaders alike. Carmen flinched as she came through one of the windows in the face of a storm of unaimed enemy fire, but her luck held and nothing hit her.

  Several steps into the large ground floor reception area, the chaff thinning around her, Carmen saw figures crouched behind a row of desks that had been turned into a barricade. She and Dominic dove for the floor to avoid the invaders’ fire as some of Dominic’s soldiers tossed grenades. Smart rounds would have been confused by the drifts of chaff, but simple, dumb grenades went where they were thrown, behind the desks to ravage the ranks of the invading troops.

  She came over the tops of the desks, seeing a wounded enemy soldier trying to bring his weapon around to shoot at her. By chance her rifle was nearly pointed at him already, so Carmen was able to aim and shoot before the soldier could. He fell back, the weapon dropping from his hands.

  There were other wounded behind the desks, along with several dead. Carmen covered them as the wounded who could raise their hands in surrender did so. She risked a few glances around, realizing that she’d lost Dominic. The sound of fighting was receding through the building as the fight went deeper inside, up to higher floors and down toward where the rattle of bot sentry weapons could still be occasionally heard.

  Carmen realized that she was shaking with reaction and sudden weariness after the assault. She sat down on an undamaged section on the top of one of the desks, keeping her rifle canted toward the wounded invaders who’d surrendered. “When the medics get here they’ll take a look at you,” she told them. “Try any funny, you dead,” Carmen added, deliberately reverting to Red street speech.

  None of them appeared to question her willingness to carry out her threat. That didn’t surprise her. She’d learned as a girl back in Shandakar that threats had to be delivered in ways that left no doubt about their sincerity.

  Running her gaze across the prisoners as the remnants of the chaff drifted past in thin wisps and the racket of battle continued elsewhere in the building, Carmen couldn’t tell where they were from in their mix of armor and equipment. Two had reacted to her Red talk with recognition, though.

  “Wherefrom?” she asked the nearest of those two.

  Might as well do her job of collecting intelligence while Dominic and his soldiers did theirs. Carmen wondered how many of those soldiers had already been lost trying to capture this building and how many more of Kosatka’s defenders would die holding off the inevitable counterattacks by the invaders.

  “Benway,” the invader she’d asked spat in reply.

  Carmen gave the woman her coldest smile. Benway. A simple way of saying the acronym BNW. Brave New World. The unofficial, ironic, all-purpose, angry motto of Mars, also employed as an obscenity. “Not this world,” she told her prisoner. “You won’t bring that here.”

  Brave words. But the scars of battle around her and the continuing sound of fighting told Carmen that the doom of Mars had already been brought to Kosatka. The question was whether it would stay here, or be stopped dead.

  * * *

  • • •

  “I’ve lost contact with forward post seven!”

  Mele Darcy checked the position of the two militia soldiers who had either just died or been captured. “Get everybody else back!” she ordered all three militia lieutenants. “Withdraw them to the main defe
nsive positions.”

  Lieutenant Freeman, with her, immediately began transmitting the orders to his forward posts. “But the rest are still holding,” one of the other lieutenants protested.

  “They’ll get cut off! Bring them back now and make it quick.” Mele watched movement popping up in a dozen places on disposable sensors seeded in corridors and tunnels. Whoever was in charge on the other side now had been smart enough to set up and launch a broad front attack. She wouldn’t be able to concentrate her forces against a single enemy thrust. But there was still a bright side to that.

  “They’re spread out,” Mele transmitted to her Marines and the militia. “They won’t be able to hit any point of ours with overwhelming strength. We can hold them, and the longer we hold them here, the more time Shark’ll have to get going.”

  “Here they come!” Corporal Gamba called.

  Mele spotted motion in the corridor leading toward the improvised defensive position where she waited with Lieutenant Freeman’s militia. She leveled her weapon, aiming carefully.

  Suddenly there were enemies everywhere to the front, enemy fire slamming into the mix of desks and chairs and cabinets that formed a bulwark for the defenders. Mele fired. A moment later the militia around her also opened up.

  CHAPTER 11

  Six hours. Three assaults.

  The militia soldier closest to Mele on her right fell backward, already limp from the shot that had killed him. Mele aimed and fired, taking down the attacker who had fired that shot. As she sought another target, Mele realized that the invaders had fallen back again to regroup for a fourth assault.

  “How do we look?” she asked Lieutenant Freeman.

  Freeman had so far beaten the odds that said lieutenants had short life spans in combat. But he’d seen a lot of his militia hurt or killed, and sometimes seemed in as much pain as if he’d suffered physical wounds. “We’re down by about a third,” he said, his voice ragged with weariness and grief.