Anna stirred. She rolled over and lifted her head. “Morning,” she said, peering at him from sleep-clouded eyes. “I think. Where’s my frigging coffee, flyboy?”
“What did your last house bot die of?” Michael grumbled. Climbing to his feet, he went back into the cave to get the stove going.
Twenty minutes and two cups of coffee later, Anna was sitting up, her back against the wall of the cave. Michael’s spirits soared at the sight of her. All the tension had gone from her face, her skin restored to the honey-gold he loved, her eyes glittering with life, two pools of spark-shot jade.
“Mmm, that’s better,” she said. “So what’s for breakfast?”
Michael rolled his eyes. Anna was not a morning person, and he knew from bitter experience that she had to be humored until coffee and food had time to work their magic.
“Coming up,” he said, face set in a resigned frown, getting back to his feet.
“I should hope—hey, what the hell is that?” Anna said leaning forward, eyes narrowed as she scanned the trees that framed the mouth of the cave.
The rumble was so faint that Michael was not sure what he was hearing. Then he was, a sudden stab of fear forcing his heart to skip a beat. Without thinking, he reached back and grabbed his assault rifle. Anna followed suit. She slithered across to him, head tilted to one side.
Anna’s face went ashen. “Those are landers, Michael. Landers, and a lot of them!”
Acting on instinct alone, Michael reacted, every neuron in his brain screaming at him to get away. “Back, back!” he shouted, grabbing Anna’s hand and dragging her bodily after him. Frantic now, they fled deep into the cave, on and on, scrambling across rockfalls and through squeezes heedless of grazed hands and knees. Michael’s eyes watered with pain when a moment’s inattention allowed his head to smack into an unseen protrusion.
“Screw this fuc—”
The whole cave seemed to lift under their feet, a photoflash of intense light searing an image of white rock and black shadows into Michael’s retina; an instant later, a thunderous crack ripped the air around them apart a second ahead of a shock wave that turned the air into a wall of steel, hurling them both off their feet and onto the floor of the cave, shock-blasted splinters of rock spalling off the cave walls and into their bodies. There was another, and another, until Michael had to fight to hang on to consciousness, his only link to reality Anna’s hand clutching his in a death grip as dust and splinters filled the air.
The explosions stopped. Anna and Michael lay unmoving facedown in the dirt for a long time, a steady shower of shattered rock raining down. “Shit,” Anna said at last, her voice muffled.
“I think the Hammers have come calling,” Michael said, rolling over and shaking his head in a vain attempt to dampen the savage ringing in his ears.
“You think it’s their big push?”
“Has to be,” Michael said. “So much for the NRA’s much-vaunted contacts inside DocSec and the PGDF. Seems the Hammers managed to keep a lid on things this time. You okay?”
“Think so. Bit bruised, bit woozy, but otherwise fine. Glad we got as far in as we did. I think the sonsofbitches just dropped every last kinetic and fuel-air bomb they could muster. I’m surprised they didn’t nuke us.”
“Maybe they did,” Michael muttered. “It sure as hell felt like it. Bastards. Come on. Let’s get back, but for chrissakes take it slowly until we know what’s going on. Too early in the day for me to be swapping small talk with the Hammers, and I’m in no mood for a firefight.”
Collecting his rifle, Michael followed Anna as she started off down the cave, on and on until the low-light processor in his neuronics was struggling to generate an image in the darkness. Cautiously, they made their way in until Anna’s hand went up. “According to my map, the feeder tunnel taking us back to sector control is just up ahead,” she said.
“My map says the same thing, but where the hell are the lights?”
“Off, so the main power supply has failed. Our network’s down; my neuronics won’t connect. This does not look good. The Hammers must have broken in, and if they—”
Again the floor of the cave lifted as a single crunching thud shook them. “Holy shit,” Michael hissed, fighting to stay on his feet. “Does that mean what I think it means?”
“Yup,” Anna replied. “The Hammers are in, and ENCOMM’s blowing the tunnels. Unless they’ve changed the plan, we need to fall back to area headquarters.”
“Plan?” Michael said with a baffled frown. “What plan?”
“Operation Counterweight. The 120th was briefed on it last week. We haven’t seen the final operation order yet, but I guess that doesn’t matter now.”
Michael swore under his breath. FLTDETCOMM had been left out of the loop again; sometimes the NRA took operational security too far. He swore some more. “What’s the plan?”
“Follow me. If we’re separated, follow this route here”—a ghostly red line overlaid the map in his neuronics—“to sector HQ; they’ll tell you what to do. Let’s go.”
By the time they made it back to headquarters, Michael no longer noticed the thumping crunch as another tunnel was blown in. The explosions were too frequent and the implications too depressing to worry about.
“Jeez,” Anna said as they emerged from the latest tunnel through the labyrinth to find themselves outside sector headquarters, a cluster of small laser-cut rooms packed with bodies and alive with the buzz of conversation and the snap of orders. A series of small tables had been set up outside under a crude sign that said ORDERS. Michael and Anna joined the line of NRA troopers, a motley crew, every face painted with the same mix of fear and determination.
“Next!” a harassed corporal barked.
“Sergeant Helfort, 120th, and Lieutenant Helfort, FLTDETCOMM.”
“Don’t care where you’re from. Get your asses down to Six Brigade; it’s pulled back to Karavakis-4. Go! They need all the help they can get.”
“Where’s the 120th?”
“Don’t know, don’t care. Go! Next!”
As they turned and started to run, Anna shot a worried look at Michael. “That doesn’t sound too good,” she said.
“Why?”
“The Karavakis-4 cave complex is part of our inner defensive line,” Anna said. “If Six Brigade’s there, that means the Hammers have broken through this sector’s main defensive positions and we’ve fallen back.”
“Shit.”
The pair ran on in silence for a while, two more anonymous figures in a stream of anonymous troopers running hard around them.
“How?” Michael said, beginning to breathe hard as he tried to keep up with Anna. “How did they get in? I thought ENCOMM had all the access tunnels mined.”
“They did, every last one, big or small, so I don’t know. Only thing I can think of is that they blew their way in. Bring in high-powered laser rock borers and plenty of explosive, and even limestone won’t stand in your way for long. Once they broke into the inner caves, then …”
“No more mines.”
“Yup.”
They ran on. Rounding a corner, they could run no more, their path blocked by the bloodstained clutter of a battalion aid station, fresh casualties arriving even as they threaded their way through the mess of stretchers. Anna stopped one of the walking wounded. “Where’s the brigade command post?” she asked a trooper sporting a bloody bandage across half his face.
“Keep going. One hundred meters on your left.”
“Thanks.”
“Good luck,” the trooper said with a cheerful grin, waving an arm wrapped in bloodstained dressings. “Kick some Hammer ass for me.”
“We will,” Anna promised.
The brigade command post occupied a cramped room cut out of the cave wall. “Wait here,” she said. “I’ll get our orders.”
“Yes, sir,” Michael said to Anna’s back. She was not gone long.
“Hope you’re feeling lucky, flyboy,” she said, waving him to follow.
<
br /> Michael’s heart sank. “That doesn’t sound too good.”
“They were real happy to see us.”
“Why?”
“Because we’re Feds, the Feds have low-light processors in their neuronics, and the NRA’s desperately short of imaging equipment. Brigade wants us to guide an attack into position behind the Hammer front line. Come on, pick up the pace. Lieutenant Colonel Mokhine and the Second Battalion, 83rd NRA, await.”
“Terrific.”
Michael had shut down his neuronics transmitter in case the Hammers had scanners; it made the isolation total, his assault rifle his only comforter. Before Mokhine called a halt, Michael had spent hours working his way through the near darkness of a cave so tortuous and narrow that progress was measured in centimeters at times. Now that darkness pressed down on him with an oppressive, almost physical force that squeezed the air out of his lungs until he had to fight to breathe, knowing with absolute certainty that each lungful might be his last. He hated it; every second was a struggle to keep claustrophobia-fueled panic under control, to ignore the terrible fact that billions of tons of rock lay between him and fresh air, to reject the conviction that he was about to die in this awful place. This was nothing like being in space: so empty, so clean, so sterile, ship sensors reaching out hundreds of thousands of kilometers, pulling data back by the terabyte until there were no secrets left, the risk of death quantified to five decimal places.
Unlike this grim place, a narrow passage water-dissolved through limestone. All he knew was what he could hear, smell, or feel. His awareness reached no farther than those senses did. It was a bad sensation; a rockfall might be seconds away, a Hammer ambush might lie in wait ten meters farther on, and nobody would know until rocks fell or assault rifles ripped air and bodies to shreds.
Worst of all, he had no way of talking to Anna. An hour earlier, Mokhine had divided his command into two; Anna had led her group into a narrow cleft in the rock, heading for the other side of Karavakis-2, a massive cavern connecting the Hammer front line to the outside world, a cavern now only meters ahead of him.
The minutes dragged by until Michael began to think Mokhine would never give the word. Then an unseen hand tapped his heel. Michael turned, the colonel’s face an ethereal speckled gray in the gloom.
“Brigade’s given the word,” Mokhine hissed. “There’s a Hammer battalion moving up the line, so let’s go.”
“Sir.”
Michael steeled himself; much as he hated the darkness of the cave, it was a safer place than the cavern up ahead. Part of a much larger complex of caves, Karavakis-2 looked to be an awful place, a nightmarish jumble of rocks through which Hammer reinforcements moved up in a steady stream while casualties flowed back for evacuation. Flicking on a tiny helmet-mounted infrared beacon for Mokhine’s troopers to follow and powering up his rifle’s optronics, he took a deep breath and started to slide forward.
A sustained burst of heavy machine gun fire triggered the ambush, and Michael exploded into action.
His neuronics found the first target, dropping a red target indicator icon onto a startled Hammer marine. The man turned toward him, moving in slow motion, his mouth widening into an O of surprise. A double tap took the man in the neck; he dropped, mouth still open in bewilderment and confusion. Michael wanted to tell the man it was nothing personal, but the indicator was shifting target. Burying all emotion, Michael followed the red lozenge and dropped the next marine, then the next, and the next, never looking at their faces, his focus locked on to the target indicator.
He was not human anymore; he was a machine, a killing machine, an automaton armed with a stolen Hammer assault rifle doing what killing machines were supposed to do: crush the life out of the enemy. The flat metallic racket of heavy machine guns and the crash-bang of microgrenades were all ignored, and Michael followed the rest of the battalion when they broke cover and charged toward the Hammers, their bulky, body-armored shapes black in the firefly lights the Hammers had rigged to mark the way up to the front line.
Hit broadside on, the Hammers wilted in the face of an unstoppable wave of hate-fed anger. Confident the NRA had been forced back, they had not taken the trouble to secure their flanks. Now they paid for that mistake, the NRA attack forcing the marine column to break apart into small groups fighting in a frenzied, scrambling race to escape the blizzard of death the NRA poured out of the darkness. The Hammer battalion disintegrated, its ranks shredded by rifle and machine gun fire, every attempt to regroup or take cover smashed apart by salvos of microgrenades that tossed bodies across the ground.
The Hammers had nowhere to run, and one by one the marines died amid the jumble of broken rocks and boulders that ran back to cavern walls invisible in the darkness. Taken by surprise, they were overwhelmed by the shocking brutality of the NRA attack. Finally, only a handful were left. Trapped, they fought hard until overwhelmed by sheer weight of numbers, and then they, too, died.
Mokhine wasted no time celebrating victory.
Splitting his force in three, he positioned a heavy weapons platoon to secure the narrow exit from the cavern that led deeper into the NRA base, their positions protected by rows of claymores. A second platoon moved through the Hammer casualties; methodically they started to strip weapons and ammunition off the marines, anyone still alive unceremoniously rolled over and—to Michael’s surprise; he had expected any Hammer survivors to be shot out of hand—plasticuffed, those still able to talk dragged to one side for interrogation. The rest of the battalion set off toward the tunnel that led to the outside world and the Hammer support areas.
Michael found Anna amid the throng. “Officially, we’re done,” he said. “What now? Go with Mokhine or stay?”
“We go,” Anna said, her face glistening in the faint light. “It’ll take us hours to find the 120th, and I’m sure Mokhine will find something for us to do. You okay with that?”
“Sure am,” Michael said, adrenaline-charged excitement and blood lust still running hot and strong.
“Let’s go, then.”
Together they ran after Mokhine’s troopers. The NRA colonel’s plan was simple: Keep going, don’t stop, shoot anything that moves, use heavy weapons to deal with any Hammer light armor, and move on. Not much of a plan, Michael reckoned, but good enough since the Hammers would still not know what the hell was going on, their fiber-optic comms lines having been cut moments before the attack started.
Ahead of them, Mokhine’s troopers were disappearing into a tunnel that did not appear on Michael’s maps. “What the hell?” he said.
“The Hammers must have burned their way in,” Anna said, shaking her head in disbelief. “They worked out where the rock was thinnest and just burned their way through.”
“Mining lasers?”
“Big ones, I reckon. Unbelievable. Come on.”
As Michael followed her, the answer to the question that had been troubling him ever since the attack started—how the Hammers had bypassed the NRA’s outer defenses—was all too clear.
It was a stunning achievement, and the Hammers had done it by brute force. Parallel to the access tunnel destroyed by ENCOMM to keep the Hammer attack out of Karavakis-2, they had simply driven an entirely new tunnel, the limestone no match for pulsed hard-rock mining lasers, their enormous power vaporizing the stone into an incandescent mix of carbon dioxide and superheated calcium oxide blasting back down the tunnel and out into the valley beyond, a caustic plume of death that would have scoured the ground clean of all life for kilometers around, covering the area in a thin gray blanket of dust. Michael shook his head at the Hammers’ ingenuity. It was brilliant, and it had taken ENCOMM completely by surprise, its failure to understand how fast the Hammers could burn their way through virgin limestone costing it dearly as it scrambled to stem the Hammer attacks.
But not everything had worked so well. To maximize the element of surprise, the Hammers had opted to blast their way through the last few meters of rock into Karavakis-2. That had left th
e mouth of their new tunnel carpeted with an ugly mass of sharp-edged boulders that were easily negotiated by soldiers on foot but a big problem for tracked vehicles and impossible for ground drones. Now Michael understood why the Hammers’ light armor had been so slow to appear; good thing, too, he thought as he hurdled his way into the tunnel.
By the time Anna and Michael made it through, the battalion had brushed aside the Hammers defending Karavakis-1, the cavern that had formed the NRA’s first line of defense, the Hammer marines simply overwhelmed by the unexpected speed and mindless ferocity of Mokhine’s attack. The colonel was not holding back; leaving the rest of the battalion to reestablish defenses destroyed in the Hammer’s initial attack, he had thrown a platoon into the Hammer tunnel that accessed Juliet-24, a massive portal that opened onto one of the karst’s many slab-sided valleys. Heedless of stiffening resistance, the NRA troopers had driven down the tunnel, moving fast, firing blindly into the darkness, advancing behind a barrage of microgrenades. Any Hammer attack drones lucky enough to make it through were hacked out of the air by furious bursts of rifle fire.
Michael’s heart sank; this battle showed all the signs of degenerating into a primitive hand-to-hand struggle. His heart sank even farther when Mokhine waved him and Anna over. What now? he wondered.
“Okay, you two,” he said. “Our move toward Juliet-24 is a feint. I want to hold the Hammers, to keep them occupied while our combat engineers mine the Hammer tunnel. Meanwhile, we’ll do something they won’t be expecting.” Mokhine paused as a disheveled trooper ran up, the dust on her left cheek scarred by a savage gash that dripped blood in a slow, sticky stream. If the wound bothered the woman, she did not let it show. “Ah, good,” he said. “This is Lieutenant Tek. Maggie, these are the Helforts. They’re going to take you and your platoon through the old tunnel.”
Helfort’s War Book 4: The Battle for Commitment Planet Page 34
