“Sir,” was all Tek said.
“The old tunnel?” Michael said with a puzzled frown. “The one ENCOMM blew in?”
“The very same,” Mokhine said. “I’m sure there’ll be enough room above the rockfall for us to get through. It won’t be fast, but we can do it. That means we can infiltrate an attack into Juliet-24 to take the Hammers from behind. If it all gets too hot, there is a cross-tunnel 75 meters back from the portal you can use to get away. All understood?”
Michael’s heart sank, but he nodded.
“Go on, then,” Mokhine said.
While he and Anna scrambled up the rocks to the mouth of the old tunnel, Tek’s platoon close behind, Michael commed Anna. “This is getting hairy, Anna,” he said, “so for chrissakes, be careful. There’ll be ten million of those Hammer fuckers on the other end of this tunnel.”
“I know that,” Anna replied, “so don’t worry. No heroics from this little brown bear.”
“Yeah, right,” Michael said. “Neuronics off?”
“Neuronics off.” Anna turned. “Ready?” she said to Tek.
“We’ll be right behind you,” Tek replied.
Together Anna and Michael plunged into the cramped space between the rockfall and the new blast-shattered roof of the tunnel. Mokhine had been right; there was enough room to crawl through … just. It was a miserable business, in places so tight that Michael had to squeeze his body between roof and rock, every meter a fight to overcome a growing certainty that the ceiling of the damaged tunnel would collapse onto him. He could not remember being so terrified ever. Even the undamaged sections of the tunnel were difficult, the floor littered with razor-edged boulders shock-blasted from the walls and roof. Were it not for the fact that Anna was alongside, shaming him to keep him moving, Michael could not have gone on into that terrible darkness.
On and on they went, Michael’s neuronics counting off the meters with agonizing slowness, past the cross-tunnel, its mouth all but invisible behind a huge boulder—the temptation to turn away from the Hammers and into the sanctuary it offered was almost irresistible—until the absolute darkness ahead started to break up into tiny patches of gray light. About time, he said to himself, squeezing himself through the last few meters until he could move forward no more. No wonder the damn Hammers weren’t paying this tunnel any attention, he thought. A mouse would have trouble getting through.
He tried to pull back but could not. He was jammed tight, and no matter how hard he pushed, he could not move. For one awful moment, he knew with heart-pounding certainty that he was never going to get out. Near panic, he wriggled and squirmed until the rock relented and allowed him to pull back.
“Holy shit,” he hissed, chest heaving as the panic subsided. “I hate this place.”
“You okay?” Anna said, easing her way alongside him.
“Yeah,” he said, even though he was far from okay. “Bastard tunnel closes in. We’re maybe 3 meters short. We need cameras.”
“Let me talk to Tek.”
“Do it and tell her we need people to start clearing this rock away.”
“Okay.”
Michael lay facedown and tried not to think too much about the millions of tons of blast-fractured rock hanging only a few centimeters over his head. To his relief, Anna was back quickly, Tek close behind. “Here you are,” she said, pushing a pair of holocam wands into his hand. “Off you go.”
“Mind the damn cables,” Tek hissed. “Those holocams are the only ones I’ve got.”
“Okay.” Michael wanted more than anything to ask Anna to place the holocams, but he did not; the last vestiges of pride and self-respect forced him back the way he had come. He stripped down to his T-shirt and took a deep breath to steady jangling nerves and trembling muscles; then he set off toward the gray patches that marked where the cave debouched into Juliet-24. This time, he was in and out in no time at all, the two wands jammed forward into clefts so that their wide-angle lenses could see all of the portal.
By the time he made it back, the cameras were online, Anna and Tek huddled over holovid screens that painted the tunnel a ghostly blue and the troopers beyond them an anonymous black as they struggled in complete silence to clear away the rockfall. Peering over Anna’s shoulder, Michael did not like what he saw. The portal was a heart-stopping sight. He watched in shocked silence, the scale of the Hammers’ commitment to taking the NRA’s Branxton Base obvious. Jammed with marines, the place was a hive of activity as the Hammers prepared their counterattack, the sound of rifle fire punctuated by grenade explosions clearly audible.
Michael watched an Anvil armored vehicle move up to the mouth of the Hammer’s tunnel, twin cannon mounted in blister turrets pouring sustained bursts of fire at the oncoming NRA attack. How were Mokhine’s troopers ever going to withstand—
In a shocking blast that shivered the rocks Michael was lying on, the Hammer vehicle exploded.
“Yes!” Tek whispered, punching the air.
“Stabbers?” Anna asked.
“Yup. The frontal armor on an Anvil is no match for them. Just wish the colonel had a few more of them. Lot more Anvils where those came from.”
And there you have it, Michael thought, the NRA’s problem summed up in a few short sentences.
The loss of the vehicle kicked the Hammers into frantic activity bordering on pandemonium; combat engineers worked frantically in the face of renewed NRA fire to move the blazing wrecks out of the way, and the medics dragged away the casualties from around the cave mouth. The NRA fire never slackened, and soon Hammer marines were in place returning the compliment as fresh armor—a light tank this time, an Akkad, judging from its low-profile main turret—moved into place, its gun adding to the appalling racket that had the walls of Juliet-24 shaking.
“Dickheads,” Tek said dismissively. “That Akkad is wasting its time.”
“Only if Mokhine’s pulled his people back,” Michael muttered.
“He will have.”
“Stalemate,” Anna whispered. “An Akkad’s too damn fat to fit down that tunnel of theirs. I think they’re just there to make sure we don’t break through. The Hammers aren’t going anywhere for a while.”
Anna was dead right. The Hammers had been thrown back on the defensive, their attack had stalled, and the frustration showed in the body language of marine NCOs and officers. This was not the way they expected things to turn out, that much was obvious.
Across the valley floor outside the portal, more heavy ordnance waited: Anvil cannon-armed urban attack vehicles with a scattering of Akkad light tanks and drone launchers. Beyond them, Michael could see yet more marines and more armor, a lot more. How the NRA was ever going to defeat them he could not even begin to imagine. He flicked a glance at Anna; she stared unmoving at the holovids. Michael wondered what she was thinking.
“Shit,” Tek murmured. “That’s a lot of Hammers. Just what we want. Okay, I’ve seen enough.” She slid back and turned to her comms man, a lance corporal responsible for laying the single stand of plasfiber-armored optical fiber that connected her platoon to the outside world. “Comms,” she whispered.
Without a word, the trooper passed Tek the connector. Try as he might, Michael could not hear what she was muttering into her whisper mike. Whatever the reply, Tek seemed happy with it. She passed the connector back and waved Michael and Anna in close.
“Much as I’d like to kick those assholes back where they came from, we don’t have what it takes. So here’s the plan. You”—she tapped Michael on the arm—“stay here with Lance Corporal Chengkiz. Your job is to keep an eye on our Hammer friends, and for Kraa’s sake, make sure they don’t hear you.”
“Roger that.”
Tek turned to Anna. “Sergeant, you’re going to lead the rest of us back the way we came, but only as far as that access tunnel. Brigade is sending up combat engineers with fuel-air guns”—barbecues, Michael reminded himself; that was what the NRA called them—“and it’ll be up to us to clear as much of this dam
n rock as we can so we can get the guns up easily.”
“And this rockfall while you’re at it,” Michael said. “Otherwise the charges won’t work so well.”
“You’re right,” Tek said. “I’ll ask the colonel to send up a second platoon. Anyway, once the barbecues are in position, ENCOMM will fire them. All being well, they should clean out the portal.”
“What about the marines outside, in the valley?” Anna asked.
“Thank Kraa for caves and sinkholes. We’re infiltrating barbecues into position below the cliff top overlooking the valley. They’ll drop a pattern onto the portal approaches. Should make our lives a bit easier.”
“Shit. Those Hammers aren’t going to know what hit them.”
“No, they’re not. Anyway, once the barbecues have thinned the Hammers out a bit, ENCOMM will send in 5 and 12 Brigades to take out what’s left. It seems this is one of their main lines of attack. They look committed, so ENCOMM wants to persuade them they are wasting their time. We’ll wait in the access tunnel and then go once the charges are fired.”
Michael could not help himself. “There are thousands of Hammers out there. How’s ENCOMM going to get the 5th and 12th out there?”
Tek shook her head. “You Feds,” she said softly. “Questions, questions, always questions. Let’s just say we have tunnels accessing the valley that the Hammers don’t know about, sally ports we call them. Nice old-fashioned touch, I’ve always thought. There’ll be NRA troopers appearing out of the rock in the thousands, coming from nowhere far as the Hammers are concerned. Not that there’ll be many left to see them coming.”
“Let me guess,” Michael said. “More barbecues?”
“Oh, yeah. Every last one we can lay our hands on.”
“What about the Hammer’s tunnel?”
Tek grinned, teeth flaring white in the backlight from the holovids. “What about the—”
A bone-jarring crunch cut her short, then another. Michael flinched as broken rock rained down from the tunnel roof. “Ah,” he said when it stopped. “Is that my answer?”
“Sure is. No Hammers will be using that tunnel for a while, and it’ll be a while before they bring their hard-rock laser cutters back into play. We’ve blown the tunnel leading back to the front line as well. It’ll be a bloody business mopping up the Hammers, and there are plenty of them, but it’s just a matter of time. They’ve got nowhere to run, and they don’t seem to enjoy our tunnels. Wonder why. Right, Sergeant. Move out.”
“Watch yourself, Michael,” Anna said. Without another word, she turned and left.
Tek patted Michael’s arm. “Good luck,” she said before following Anna’s dusty shape into the darkness.
Michael leaned across to Chengkiz. “Lieutenant Michael Helfort, Corp,” he said.
“Good to meet you, sir. Heard a lot about you.”
“All lies, Corp, all lies. Now, we don’t need two pairs of eyes, so how about I take the first half hour, then you take over?”
“Sounds good to me.”
Time dragged; Michael had drifted off into a doze when a soft scraping brought him back to life. “Visitors,” he whispered to Chengkiz, setting his rifle to his shoulder. Unlikely to be Hammers, that much he knew, but it did not pay to take chances.
The familiar shape of a Fed combat helmet emerged out of the gloom; it was all the identification he needed. “Anna,” he hissed. “How’s it going?”
“Fine,” she murmured back as she slid into position alongside him. “The barbecues are on their way. It’s going to be a bitch to get them through, but somehow I don’t think that’s going to bother Colonel Mokhine. Never met anyone like him. No such thing as a problem. All he sees are situations and solutions. Amazing.”
“So what happens now?”
“Mokhine wants you to pull back to the cross-tunnel once the engineers turn up. You’ll find C Company there. Report to them for orders.”
“Okay. Shit, hope this works. There have to be ten thousand Hammers waiting out there.”
“At least. The last briefing said the Hammers were going to throw at least one hundred thousand marines into the attack.” She shook her head. “Hell, maybe there’s even twenty thousand out there. Who knows … who cares? See you later.”
Leaving the combat engineers to finish up, Michael made his way back down the tunnel past squads of troopers carrying boulders to tamp explosives in place, a pattern of small charges to clear the tunnel mouth of the remaining debris; a millisecond later the barbecues would fire. When Michael had first seen a fuel-air gun—the NRA called the crude assembly of plasteel pipes barbecues because they were perfect for flash-grilling Hammers—it took an effort not to laugh. They looked exactly like what they were: crude and homebuilt, the work of some crackpot inventor.
Crude or not, they worked. Spurred on by a desperate shortage of ordnance, NRA ingenuity made sure of that; Michael had seen the holovid. The damage just one could do was enormous, and Juliet-24 was going to be on the receiving end of six. Each barbecue lobbed a pattern of bomblets into the air, the bomblets’ aluminum-boosted fuel command-fired by a flash laser to create an enormous fireball. What the fireball did not kill, massive overpressure and the subsequent vacuum would; that was why they were so devastating in tunnels and caves and why Branxton Base had so many blast doors in its connecting tunnels.
Michael could only hope that they worked, that they took out all the marines in the portal. ENCOMM’s planned counterattack would throw two brigades at the Hammers. At best that meant eight thousand troopers, and that was being optimistic given the casualties the NRA must have suffered so far. It would have to be the best ground assault ever planned to have any chance of hurting the Hammers, never mind persuading them to pack up and bugger off home.
Getting Tek’s troopers back to the cross-tunnel was not the nightmare Michael had braced himself for, and in a gratifyingly short space of time he was making his way down tumbled rocks. A small team of engineers was putting a blast door in place across the entrance; C Company was waiting in a cave down the cross-tunnel, they said.
The company was a sobering sight, the walls of the cave lined with troopers, most slumped asleep, those still awake staring grim-faced at nothing. Nobody talked. Michael felt for them; the coming battle was one the NRA had to win. Problem was, its chances of defeating all those Hammer marines with only two brigades could not be good; all military logic said so. He found Anna talking to C Company’s commander.
“Lieutenant Helfort, sir,” he said.
“Welcome to C Company, Lieutenant. I’m Captain Hrelitz.”
If Hrelitz shared Michael’s doubts, she was not letting it show. “Not long now,” she continued, a woman undaunted by the day’s terrible events. “ENCOMM says we’ll have the charges placed inside the hour, and then I think we’ll be showing the Hammers why taking us on on our home turf was a bad idea.”
“Can’t wait, sir,” Michael said.
Hrelitz laughed and slapped him on the back. “You worry too much, Lieutenant.”
Michael shook his head. “Not sure I do. There’s a shitload of Hammers out there.”
“What are we looking at, sir?” Anna asked. “When the 120th was briefed, ENCOMM said we’d be facing a hundred thousand of them.”
“Intel says that’s about right. That’s the bad news.”
“There’s good news?” Anna said, face tightened into a skeptical frown.
“Oh, yes. ENCOMM says our Gordians hacked at least twenty of those damn landers of theirs out of the attack. That the bastards did not expect.”
“Shit,” Michael hissed. “Twenty landers? That’s a lot of dead Hammer marines.”
“Yup, it sure is,” Hrelitz said with a savage grin. “Thousands. When will they ever learn not to take us for granted? The other good news is that the Hammers launched three major and five diversionary attacks. We’ve stopped every one of them, but ENCOMM has just confirmed that the Hammers put something like twenty-five thousand of them into the att
ack on this sector.”
Michael and Anna exchanged glances.
“Sounds like a lot, eh?” Hrelitz said.
“Twenty-five thousand is a lot,” Anna said firmly, “especially as we can only muster, what? Eight thousand?”
“No, no,” Hrelitz said, shaking her head. “We’ll have more than that. ENCOMM’s scraped the barrel big-time. The 176th, 44th, and 13th are being transferred from Echo and Kilo sectors.”
“Hey, outnumbered less than three to one,” Michael said. “What a relief. Why was I worried?”
“My sort of odds,” Hrelitz said with a huge grin.
When Anna and Michael responded with halfhearted smiles, the grin faded to a look of grim determination. “Look, guys,” Hrelitz said. “I know what you’re thinking, but there’s more to this than you realize. We’re not facing twenty-five thousand marines, not directly, anyway. About twenty percent are rear echelon. Kraa! Maybe even thirty percent. Lander crews, logistics, intelligence, technicians, c-cubed staff, the combat engineers they used to break through our defenses … Shit, the list is endless. One more thing. Most of these Hammer marines haven’t seen serious action in twenty years. They’ve left those poor bastards in the PGDF to do almost all the fighting, and yes, the average marine is tough and well trained, but let me tell you, they are nothing like as tough as an NRA trooper.”
“Fair point, sir,” Anna said, “but … yes, that still leaves what? More than seventeen thousand of the sonsofbitches waiting for us, not to mention all their armor, artillery, drones, and landers.”
“Well, then, we’ll just have to see, won’t we?” Hrelitz said. “I’m not much of a betting woman, Sergeant, but my money’s on the NRA. We need this. The Hammers don’t. Remember that. Now, enough talk. Anna, I want you to take over Second Platoon. You’ll find them down the back somewhere. Ask for Corporal Gur. He knows you’re coming.”
“Sir.”
“You might as well go along, Lieutenant,” Hrelitz said, turning to Michael. “I know you can handle an assault rifle, and the Second has taken a bit of a beating.”
Helfort’s War Book 4: The Battle for Commitment Planet Page 35
