by Jack Colrain
“Keeping Gresian paws off them, sir?” Stewart guessed.
“Exactly.”
Leaving the pair to set up the nano-disassemblers, Daniel went over to the Super-Bradley that had been extricated from his Mike Boat. There, Beswick and Torres were acclimatizing themselves with its controls since they’d take turns driving it. He had originally assigned one of the new replacement soldiers, Ross Franco, to spell Beswick at the controls, as the swarthy New Yorker had been a truck driver before being drafted. However, now that they had a combat-experienced pilot to find a place for, Daniel had decided that Torres was the better choice. And at least it would give her something useful to do; he didn’t want useless passengers on this mission since he already had Doug Wilson filling that role.
“Superman?” he called, and Bailey popped his head out of the APC’s turret. “Are the comms online yet?”
“Five by five, sir.”
“Excellent. Patch me through to the Sydney.” Daniel looked around at the hills as Bailey called up. The grass was a dusky pink, and, to the west and south, the sky was filled with a smeared wall of brownish smoke and dust. He shivered involuntarily, remembering the live footage of the aftermath of the attack on Sydney, Australia. He had come a long way since waking up in the drunk tank in Greenwich’s Bruce Place police headquarters, he reflected.
“You’re on, L-T,” Bailey said.
Daniel keyed his suit comms through the APC’s scrambler. “Firebird, Greyhound.”
“This is Firebird,” Colonel Barnett’s voice came back. “Is your team OK, Greyhound?”
“We still have a man with a mission,” Daniel said, glancing towards where Doug Wilson was examining grass and making notes. “And the willpower. What are the orders?”
“Things are tough out here, but the ships and the forces we’ve landed are doing their jobs. Your mission is still a priority, assuming you’re willing and able. You just said you’re willing, so what’s the sit-rep on able?”
“Equipment’s good,” Daniel reported, “but we’re way off-reservation, on the edge of a Gresian proving range which hasn’t been taken out as of yet. Four hundred klicks from objective LZ.”
There was a long pause. “Understood. You’re still go for Operation Stravinsky. You and your team are to proceed with all due haste toward your objective.”
“What kind of resistance does it look like we can count on in this proving range? We’ve been overflown by Gresian aircraft, and must assume our present location is known to the enemy.”
“I can’t tell you, Dan; we don’t have eyes on that location, but I’m routing air support in your direction ASAP.”
“Thanks, sir.”
“When there’s a suitable break in the fighting up here, I’ll have the New Delhi or the Islamabad use its main batteries to bombard the area thoroughly.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
“Good. I’ll get back with you and coordinate that strike before it happens.”
“Roger and out, Firebird.” Daniel broke the connection and jogged over to Hope, who was recovering some circuits and her sidearm from the crashed LCM cockpit.
“What did Barnett say?” she asked.
“Take a wild guess.”
“We’re on our own,” Hope said flatly, “until things are a little calmer in orbit. OK, let’s get our gear together.”
Daniel called over to the two combat engineers who were just activating the nano-disassemblers. “Sergeant Cole, Sergeant Stewart, suit up; you can act as outriders for the journey.” Stewart and Cole ran to their waiting Big Mike suits, which opened up to receive them. Even though Daniel had tried out Stewart’s Big Mike himself, he still felt a tingle of unease at the way it looked from the outside like a giant venus flytrap closing around a man.
Hope used quick hand gestures to point the rest of the platoon to the APCs. Daniel didn’t say anything, trusting her to do a neat and precise job of dividing up the passengers equally so that, even including the four pilots, both transports would have the same number of people with each skillset and load-out needed. He knew she was doing that instinctively because he couldn’t feel her thinking consciously about it, even though she was making sure neither transport got lumbered with all the extra passengers.
“Room for one more?” Daniel asked, putting one foot on the step to his Super-Bradley’s shotgun seat.
“And one here,” Hope replied, doing the same with the other APC, which she would now command in place of Palmer. Daniel had been reluctant to give Palmer such an order, but Palmer himself had insisted that, since she outranked him, she should be in charge. “Now we both have some people nobody was expecting.”
“Starting with yourself,” Daniel said with a grin. “I’m pretty sure we can manage.” He climbed into his APC’s shotgun seat next to Lieutenant Torres. The interior of the AFV smelled of metal and oil, but Daniel knew that wouldn’t last long. Pretty soon, it would stink of cordite—and sweat, as well—and he hoped everybody had taken a bathroom break before they’d climbed aboard. Daniel concentrated on bracing himself so as not to let his head bounce into any solid metal objects; it was a tricky enough proposition, considering how many boxes, turnwheels, and other obstacles filled the interior, but at least he was still wearing his helmet. “It would be nicer if the inside was as smooth as the outside,” Lizzie commented. He couldn’t disagree.
As Torres brought the engine to life, she looked around at the other soldiers in their seats in the rear of the APC. “First person to ask ‘are we there yet’ gets cuffed to a roof-rack, OK?” Everyone shook their heads. “I know, I need new material...”
Daniel popped the hatch above the commander’s shotgun seat and propped himself up through it with a sigh. “OK, Torres, all yours. Pipsqueak, take the turret; you’re gunner.”
“Well,” Lizzie said to Daniel, from where she appeared to sit cross-legged on the roof of the transport, “on the downside, it’s a little more weight and a little less room. But on the upside, it’s four more warm bodies with guns and a good eye.”
“That works fine for me,” Daniel said, a little disconcerted by the way the turret’s cannon was passing though her. Buapeuak, manning the gun, couldn’t see her, of course. Daniel leaned down into the body of the AFV. “Superman, pass me up a drone.” Bailey slipped out a folded-up piece of nanoplastic and gave it to Daniel, who unfolded it into a disk-shaped vehicle the size of a frisbee. Tuning his suit’s visual feed to the drone’s frequency, he tossed it into the air, where it hovered just ahead of the transport.
Controlling it by means of his thumb on his tablet screen, he sent it on ahead, rising to scan the countryside with a variety of visual frequencies—both visible and invisible to the naked eye. He leaned back against the padded edge of the hatch as Torres looped around the slowly-dissolving LCM and set off. The second Super-Bradley followed, with Hope sitting up in the hatch and Palmer driving.
“Anything specific I need to avoid, sir?” Torres asked.
Daniel shook his head. “It all looks pretty clear. For the moment, anyway. Let’s just head out and try to avoid going too deep into the Gresian proving ground.”
The ride was smooth enough for Daniel, but that had a downside in that it gave his brain time to gnaw at the question of how come the Gresians had been waiting for them when theyd’ entered orbit. As if reading his thoughts, he heard Marty Beswick vocalize exactly that. “Where the hell did those Gresian ships come from? Why would they suddenly just show up like that?”
“They must have known we were coming,” Torres said darkly. “It was a trap, you know?”
Wilson scoffed from his seat. “How would they know we were coming if they don’t even know that thing we’re coming for exists?”
“Yeah,” Daniel had to admit, “that’s true. And security on this op has been tighter than a gnat’s asshole.”
“Have we lost any ships to them since the plan was drawn up?” Beswick asked. “Something or someone that could have been examined or interro
gated?”
“Not that we know of.”
“They probably didn’t need to have been tipped off anyway,” Lizzie pointed out over Daniel’s suit comms, so that the others in the conversation could hear. “They don’t know what we know about why the Lyonesse colony was set up on that sacred planet sacred—sacred to them, anyway—so they’ll have to have deduced a reason of their own.”
“That just happened to lead them to figure out we’d attack here?” Beswick asked.
“Absolutely,” Lizzie said. “Out of the whole available surface area of that planet, you built your colony just a few miles from the ancient Shaldine constructions. They’ve no reason to assume that was coincidence, have they? So, the Gresians probably thought to themselves, ‘hmm, these upstart primitives have sent an expedition to attack this big ancient Shaldine complex that’s important to our religion. So, if they’re going to be doing that, where’s the biggest ancient Shaldine complex we have that they could attack? Maybe that museum or tourist attraction?’” Lizzie pointed to the rolling countryside around the APC, although only Daniel could see the gesture. “Hey, here we are!”
They fell silent for a few more minutes, the only sounds being the rumbling of the APC road wheels, the slight clatter of equipment rattling, and the regular thud of the Big Mikes’ armored footfalls jogging along as escort.
“Red grass,” Bailey said to himself, “that’s weird, man.”
“It probably needs to absorb a different light frequency out here,” Daniel said.
“The light isn’t that different,” Wilson commented. “I should say it’s more probable that the coloration is due to chemical nutrients in the soil on this planet. Though I am, of course, not a botanist.”
“Maybe we should have brought one.”
Wilson smiled thinly. “That might turn out to be not a bad idea if we end up needing to source food supplies from the local environment.”
Daniel grunted and looked out at the distant dust clouds. They were too far away to hear any sounds of battle or transport, but even now that the sun had most definitely risen, they could see flashes in the leaden sky. ‘Time to have another look ahead with the drone,’ Daniel sent to Hope.
He repeated the process from earlier, scanning the rugged, red moorland ahead for signs of Gresian activity. There were craters here and there, and destroyed vehicles, but they all seemed to be old and overgrown, and he figured they were former targets in areas used as firing ranges. There was a group of strange creatures in the middle-distance, looking a little like quadripedal moths whose wings were too stubby for them to fly. Daniel and his team eyed them warily as they drove past, but the creatures ignored them. To be on the safe side, he had the drivers and Big Mikes adjust course a little to keep clear, just in case those ranges were still being watched or there was undetonated ordinance hidden around them.
“Any sign of opposition?” Hope asked over the comms.
“Nothing so far.” He looked up at the obscured battle in the sky, and asked Lizzie if she could tag him in to the communications traffic from the Earth ships.
“Why are half of their reinforcements just sitting there?” he heard a pilot ask. “Several carriers and heavy battlecruisers are staying out of the fight.”
“I think I’ve seen this movie,” another pilot said. “They’re waiting for their emperor to fire up the Death Star, right?”
“The Gresians don’t have an—”
“CAG here. Cut the chatter,” Jameson’s voice cut in. “But to answer your question, it makes some strategic sense to hold back reserves, especially if they’re not being unduly pressed with the forces they have in the field. They may just be waiting to see if we’re trying to lure them out before bringing in an even bigger fleet. Or they might think we’re more maneuverable, and likely to flip round and come at them from that side of the system.”
“Maybe….” The pilot didn’t sound remotely convinced.
Sergeant Stewart was barely visible ahead, but was just enough in sight that Daniel noticed when the Big Mike suit stopped jogging and started looking around. Daniel wasn’t surprised when Stewart’s voice came over the radio, and in fact he’d been half a second from calling him. “Sir, it looks like we might have a problem up ahead.”
“Roger that. Opfor problem?”
“No, sir; terrain.”
“Acknowledged.” He zoomed his vision out towards the two armored suits, and then got a view beyond them as the APC crested a low ridge. “Halt the column,” he ordered as he saw the problem that Stewart had referenced. A dense forest spread out over a flat plain maybe a mile ahead of them, stretching almost to the horizon in every direction. On this planet, at this low elevation, Daniel figured that was a good fifteen miles—well over twenty klicks in every direction.
The spread of the forest wasn’t the problem, though; the Super-Bradleys were upscaled, but not so huge that they couldn’t get between trees a regular distance apart. This forest, however, wasn’t made of Earth-type trees. Instead, the growth was like a continuous nest of dead-looking white wood all entangled together and topped by red leaves They looked more like shrubs on tangled hedgerows than normal trees.
“We’re never going to be able to drive through that,” Daniel said over the radio.
“That’s what I thought,” Stewart replied.
“I wonder how far we’d have to go to get around it, and in what direction,” Daniel murmured to himself. As he decided to break out the drone to send it in search of the edge of the forest, his suit optics marked something aberrant… and then another something, and another. Whatever they were, the markers were wavering, which meant that the tagged objects were moving. He felt the tension return in his temples and his gut, and launched the drone towards where the markers showed movement. This time, he had the drone camera feed sent to his optics rather than the tablet.
The sensor-generated markers were quite widely scattered through the red and white forest, and the shrub-like leaf canopies rose to meet the drone. The leaves were too dense to make much out beyond the fact that there was movement at all, so he switched vision modes on its cameras—and things suddenly became abundantly clear.
Gresian heat signatures were threading their way through the tangled, petrified-looking woods. Suddenly, a flash momentarily blinded him, and he realized the drone was being fired upon by plasma rifles even though it was still a good thousand yards out. Daniel hurriedly recalled the drone, shutting down the feed to his vision.
The Big Mikes suddenly started looking around. “Sir,” Cole called in, “I can hear something coming in from the west.”
“I hear it, too,” Stewart agreed. “Aircraft inbound.”
Daniel started scanning the skies, listening out. “Lizzie, are there any friendly air assets in the area?”
“Not that I can tell.”
Now he could just barely hear it himself. A stuttering, pulse-jet whine. “Gresian air assets incoming!” he called across the platoon’s comms net. “The shit just hit the fan.
Thirteen
“Two Gresian fighters inbound!” Stewart yelled.
“You heard that?” Daniel called to Hope over the comms.
“I heard. We need to get under cover now. What about the forest? That would give us better cover from Gresian air assets.”
“No dice,” Daniel said. “The APCs won’t make it into the forest; it’s like a nest of hedgerow, all tangled branches instead of regular treetrunks. It’s also full of Gresian infantry. If we go in there, we’ll be sitting ducks waiting to being swarmed by their ground forces. They’d keep us pinned until their air units could flatten the forest with us in it.”
“Then we need to at least present smaller targets.”
Daniel thought for a moment. “OK, we’ll pull back behind the hill. At least that keeps us out of sight of the bushwhackers in the forest.” He dropped into his seat next to Torres. “Angle us towards their approach vector,” he told Torres, “facing uphill.” She did exactly as she was
told, and, behind him, Daniel could hear Beswick loading the turret cannon. The other APC, driven by Erik Palmer, was making the same maneuver. Daniel knew that if the Gresians sent armor in the form of tanks, then being nose-up on a slope would be asking for a shell or missile through the underside of the vehicle, but against an air attack, he hoped it might keep them alive until the human air assets could engage the Gresian fighters.
“Those troops will come out in a search pattern sooner or later,” Palmer said over comms.
“Yeah, I know. But it at least buys us some time, so we only have the planes to worry about. Their vehicles shouldn’t have any more luck getting through that than our transports would.”
“I wouldn’t count on that,” Hope said. “This is their planet, so they must be more familiar with its environment and have adapted vehicles to suit. But it’s a gamble we have to take. So, we only have to worry about being exposed to air strikes.”
“Not only; you can bet the planes will be alerting ground forces about our position.” Daniel ducked down beside Bailey at the radio and buttoned up the hatch above his head. After a moment, Bailey had a naval commander on line. “Greyhound, this is Sydney, go ahead.”
“CAG,” Daniel began, “I need immediate air support at these coordinates.” He gave the man their position, and then continued, “Traps One and Two are in an exposed position, and we have enemy fighters in-bound.”
“Roger that, Greyhound. We’ll reroute what assets we can as soon as we can.”
“The sooner the better.” Daniel broke off as Marty Beswick started shooting, the cannon’s blasts deafening inside the APC, and with shell casings rattling around somewhere above his head. Everyone aboard winced as the sound of the Gresian aircraft roared overhead, and they could all feel thuds of projectiles slamming into the ground outside. Through the armored viewport, Daniel could see gouts of earth punched into the air by the impact of the Gresians’ weapons, and Cole and Stewart’s armored colossi leaping out of the line of fire with surprising grace.
