"Turning into a real force of nature, that woman of yours," said Mosha, as they jogged along.
Don rolled his eyes.
"You're a lucky man," said Mosha, and Don didn't disagree.
As the noise of the fighting grew, they stopped briefly to fix elongated cylinders to the muzzles of their carbines. The cylinders should allow them to fire through the Aeskri body shields.
Unfortunately the attack on base camp had limited the number of cylinders that could be made – if Don didn't count the strange hardwood attachments he'd seen Menan carving.
Then they concentrated on following the sounds of battle. A side corridor provided safety as several of the guard machines whirred past.
At the last moment one of them turned back, and Don could hear the low hum as it charged its energy weapons. He was about to rip it apart with alloy bullets when the machine stopped moving. Then all of them started turning in circles, and bumping against the walls.
"The IT team!" said Don, and the two men smashed open the flat tops of the machines and ripped out the circuitry underneath. One long corridor later they burst into one of the giant, open bays, confronting a pitched battle that would have been noted for its ferocity anywhere on this or other planets.
An Aeskri was taking apart some of Thapa's Gurkhas right in front of them, despite taking fire from half a dozen rifles. Don slid in beside it and pressed the opening of the cylinder against what passed for an ankle on the creature. Then he fired.
Just the one alloy bullet, but it would tell him whether the system worked. Hell, it would be more than a 'proof of concept', it would save these men's lives.
The Aeskri went over on its shattered ankle with a roar. Several of the Gurkhas closed in, wielding distinctive long-bladed kukri, but a long arm swept out and crushed one of them to the floor, driving the others back. Mosha scrambled up onto the Aeskri's back, while it tried to pull itself upright by its arms. He jabbed the cylinder against its skin, and pumped alloy bullets along its spine. It exhaled one long sigh, and collapsed forward.
Don looked around. The bays opened into each other, and he could see what was happening in all of them. The black citadel guards sat motionless wherever he looked. Don wasn't sure if they'd been destroyed in the fighting, or disabled by Jo and her team.
Another Aeskri lay dead at the far end of the bays, and he figured that was where Izem and Udad were. They had the other two cylinder attachments. Then he saw the many faces of the resistance as they surged around the Aeskri like waves around rocks, and it was a strange experience. It looked like all the ages of mankind had been magically brought together for this one battle.
In the tropical heat the Dayaks fought in little more than loincloths, still essentially hunter-gathers. They were circling a smaller Aeskri peppered with darts and bleeding from superficial wounds. The darts were too slow for the body shields to detect, and the hardwood spears were also getting through.
Don had seen the Dayaks use blowguns in the Kalimantan jungle, and they were silent and deadly fighters there. Here in the citadel, he wasn't so sure. The poison didn't seem to be working on the Aeskri, but then he saw it stagger sideways.
Alongside the Dayaks a number of Cambodian hunters were firing modern weapons, left over from previous wars fought in the area. The lead bullets were having little effect on the Aeskri body shields. The Gurkhas in front of him worked closely together as they fought, and to Don's mind represented one of the last of the world's imperial forces.
The Imazighen seemed straight out of the Middle Ages, if you didn't know about their expertise in electronics and specialised weapons. An upgraded moukalla discharged one of the much larger alloy bullets, and Don heard it hit its target like it was hitting a sack of fresh meat. He wondered if the bullet had made its way through the Aeskri's body shield.
Smaller numbers of elite forces moved through the other fighters, easily seen in their modern camouflage clothing. Graham raked one side of an Aeskri with a heavy duty 30 mil cannon he'd picked up somewhere. It drove the creature back a step, but then it came forward again.
Don could feel the despair of the Aeskri. There were so many of these infuriating small creatures now, attacking them in so many different ways. Added to that their own citadel seemed to be turning against them. Don counted five Aeskri still standing, and wondered if there were any more. Then something burst out of the corridor behind him.
He rolled to one side, and just avoided a huge hand that swept across the floor where he'd been standing. Then he looked up.
This fucker was huge! The bony spikes on its shoulders were half as long as Don himself, and it wore strips of a tough material that slapped loudly against its sides. Don could spot high-ranking insignia in any culture.
"Looks like we found the chief," he said, on the private band he shared with Mosha.
"You go left, I'll go right," said Mosha. "One of us has to get through."
Don scrambled to the side as the Aeskri turned toward him. He tried to get out of the way as it dropped a shoulder to gore him with its shoulder spike, but the size of the animal made it so damn fast.
If he had to lose this fight, he would make it as costly for the Aeskri as possible. He hunched over his rifle, guiding the cylindered end toward the incoming shoulder. He side-slipped the spike as it speared toward his chest and pulled the trigger. Then the massive shoulder hit him, and everything went black.
He went away for a long time, and it was very peaceful in that place. Then someone was slapping him, and they weren't being gentle about it.
"So help me I'll jab you with that stuff you gave Mosha!" said a voice he vaguely recognised. He opened his eyes, but everything was blurry. He tried to think, but words wouldn't form in his brain.
"Did we win?" he croaked, and felt arms tighten about him.
"Yes, you exasperating bastard, we won," said the voice, and Don lapsed back into unconsciousness.
65
Inside the Cambodian citadel
Phnum Sankoh wildlife sanctuary, Cambodia
When Don came round again, his eyes could focus properly.
"Oh, it's you," he said, recognising Jo sitting on the edge of the bed next to his.
"How many girlfriends have you got?" she said archly, and he smiled. The splint Mosha had fixed up for her was still on her leg, but it had been reinforced with more sticks and tape. She was resting the leg gingerly on the floor.
"No plaster, then?" he said, and she laughed.
"No plaster, no X-rays, and precious little bed rest," she said. "All that civilised stuff is gone, remember?"
He realised with a start that his brain was only semi-functional, and pulled himself upright in the bed. He was surprised the movement didn't hurt more. He must be on some good painkillers.
Don pushed the roughly-made pillows a little higher behind him. Then he rubbed his eyes, and realised he was inside the Cambodian citadel.
"Cal's moved the whole operation in here," said Jo, understanding why he was looking around. Don nodded. It made sense from a logistics viewpoint.
"Has the Peru citadel fallen?" he said sharply, as everything came back to him.
"No," she said quietly, "and we've got precious few assets left in the field over there. The coalition troops died bravely, but they died, and they didn't get their nuke inside the citadel."
Don swore. The Peru citadel had the backing of all the citadels around the planet to call on. The resistance could find itself thrown out of the Cambodian site in a matter of days, and all their work would be for nothing.
"There's some good news though," said Jo. "We have electronic control of all the automated citadels in our half of the world, and we've just got access to the electronics in two of the space ports.
"Cal wants you back in action as soon as you can function. Well, your ideas mainly – the rest of you isn't up to much."
"Is that so," said Don, with a smile on his face. He was getting seriously used to having this woman around.
"We'll move you across to the main control panel, where the IT team are plugged in," she said. "That is, when you feel up to it. Your injuries were mostly internal, and thank God we didn't have to operate."
So that was why he felt like shit. Then he sighed. Cal wanted him back in action, and the resistance had a problem – hell, that meant the goddamn planet had a problem. Whether he felt up to it or not wasn't going to matter.
"Right now will be okay," he said. "How do I get there?"
"Don't look at me," she said, reaching for crutches roughly fashioned out of branches, and they both laughed.
Five minutes later Don was in a large, resplendant area with magnificent coloured patterns on the walls and an imposing control panel at one end. It had to be the inner sanctum of the invaders.
Most of the panels had been taken off the control area. Wires came out of somewhere deep inside it, and they connected to a number of the IT team's devices. There were a dozen people already present in the room.
"Thought you were a goner," said Mosha, as Don was laid on a makeshift recliner, so he could sit up and have his feet on a cushion.
"When we hauled that gorilla off you," he continued, "I thought we'd have to peel you off its spikes!"
"You know me," said Don, enjoying the banter, "I'm faster than your average bear. Did you see the way I left that last one for you, so you could hog all the glory?"
"Yeah, well, I would have hated to lose you just so I could top that big, ugly bastard. It was a good thing the heart went out of the rest of them when it went down."
Don realised, with a sudden insight, that Mosha was ready for his own command. He was keeping as much of an eye on the team as Don was.
Don remembered a similar time years ago, when Cal had told him he was a major now, and 'would he lead a reconnaissance team into Kalimantan, there's a good chap'. Mosha would be running his own missions sometime soon, and that felt good.
"Over here, gentlemen," said Cal, and tapped something on the control panel. One of the three screens came up, and they gathered in front of it.
"These things work so much better with a single screen," said Cal. A slowly rotating view of the world showed each of the citadels, and all the resistance bases, in an assortment of colours.
"The resistance has got comms back!" said Cal enthusiastically, and reached across to pat Sufian on the shoulder. Sufian looked embarrassed.
"We've got direct lines to most places that still have radio capabilities," he continued, "and just a few more to bring on line."
"Can we talk to the resistance forces in Peru?" said Colonel Thapa, standing on Cal's other side.
"Better than that," said Cal. "We've got helmet cams from the front line, and we can do face-to-face with individuals behind the lines. I've been talking to Colonel Hinkley, who's the US commander in charge."
He tapped in something, and a wasteland came up on the screen. It stretched down a gentle slope to the citadel. Bodies, mangled machines and craters littered the ground. The helmet jittered about until they heard a voice in the soldier's headset, then the cam panned slowly across the slope.
"You were out for 18 hours," said Cal, looking over to Don, "and we've been mostly getting comms back up in that time, though the IT team have been working on other things as well.
"If we can't help the troops in Peru take their citadel, it might all be over. The Aeskri would be ready for us by the time our forces arrived there in a week or two, and I don't think we could win that one.
"Jo's team are trying to break into the Peruvian citadel electronically, but we don't have the bandwidth to do much."
Don remembered his own musings on this topic. If the resistance didn't take out the Peru site soon, the Aeskri would claim back the automated citadels and use them to throw the resistance out of the Cambodian site.
Then it struck him. They could use the Aeskri resources while they still had control of them.
"The space ports," he said. "Is there anything ready to launch right now?"
"I'll see," said Sufian, and his fingers danced over the keyboard.
The IT team had worked out the basic Aeskri coding commands. They could do most things with the citadel systems, as long as they kept the coding language simple. It was slow, but they got there.
"You want to distract the Aeskri by destroying the space platform at the Lagrange point?" said Jo, mystified.
"No," said Don. "I want to redirect the rocket so it will come down in Peru. Something that big wouldn't need to be weaponised, it would have as much kinetic energy on impact than the biggest nuke we could lay our hands on."
Jo looked around. She could see the others catching on to the idea. The problem was, could they make the Aeskri coding work?
"There's one rocket almost completed at the space port in the mid-west," said Sufian. "It might fly, but I can't be sure."
"The other problem is the rocket's directional system relies on Polar Coordinates," said Jo, but the others looked blank.
"Instead of three dimensions, it takes an angle and a distance from a starting point. Our maths system tried it 200 years ago and discarded it. I don't think we could direct one of their rockets manually. We'll need to find a program to work out the route to the Peru site in polar coordinates."
She hobbled over to stand beside Sufian. She wished Dassin were there, but the highly-strung Imazighen woman had thought she wouldn't cope with a war zone.
Four hours later, Sufian came to get Don and Cal from Cal's office, now a blocked off section of corridor leading away from the main control room. Don had been put in something more mobile, though the frame and wheels that held the seat in place could barely be called a wheelchair.
"We've done our best to program the rocket," said Jo, when they arrived in the control room. "All we can do now is give the initiating command and see what happens."
Cal took over the proceedings at that point.
"Our Peru forces know what we're going to try," he said, "and we've got some stationary feeds ready."
Two of the screens were up, side by side. One showed a wide shot of the citadel, while another had been set up much further away. "Just in case we lose the first camera when the rocket hits," said Cal.
There was an air of tension in the room as Cal did an old-fashioned countdown. At 'go!', Sufian typed in a section of code. Since the IT team didn't have a visual on the space port, it was a matter of waiting until the rocket made its presence felt.
"It's airborne!" said Jo, a few minutes later, as a backyard telescope at one of the resistance bases reported in. It was night in the mid-west, and the rocket trail had been easy to spot.
"Something's happening at the Peruvian site," said Cal, who was monitoring the two live feeds with Thapa and Izem.
Don took one look at the strange energy shield that had sprung into existence over the citadel, and yelled at Jo. "Open a line to the ground troops. Get them out of there!"
The energy shield looked like the Eiffel tower, though it was a shimmering blue and translucent. It came in from the ground and swept up to a blunt tip, high above. It was composed of eight sections, with prominent ridges between them. It would split anything coming from above – energy or material – and slide it out to the sides, away from the citadel.
"The kinetic energy in that rocket is going to level the countryside for kilometres around," yelled Don, even though it made his chest hurt like hell. "Get our people back behind the hills, underground, anywhere but not there!"
Then he started coughing.
The cameras showed a burst of activity around the citadel. Precious minutes went by, and the bulk of the troops seemed to have got away. Then the screen showed a boiling front of incandescent sparks. The next moment both cameras went off line.
66
Inside the Cambodian citadel
Phnum Sankoh wildlife sanctuary, Cambodia
The face at the other end of the link looked haggard. It was the face of a commander experiencing his worst nightmare, the troops
under his command dying, and dying again, with nothing to show for it.
"Colonel Hinkley," said Cal, as compassionately as he could. "You had something to report to us."
The colonel took a while to reply.
"There's some damage to one side of the citadel," he said, at last. "I guess the rocket must have hit off-centre, and that shield they put up couldn't deflect it all. I figure one more ground attack might put us inside the citadel, but the cost . . ."
The colonel's thoughts seemed to meander for a while.
"Colonel," said Don gently, "I know it's been hard. I understand."
The colonel's eyes focused on Don's face.
"You're the commander on the ground in Cambodia," he said, more firmly.
"One of them," said Don.
"Did you ever try demolition charges inside the citadel?" he asked.
"Yes, we did," said Don, "and the Aeskri machines always deactivated them. They have these small, agile things we call 'spiders', and they're a kind of handyman."
"That's what I suspected," said the colonel. "So setting a nuke on a timer, and getting the hell out of there, isn't going to work."
Don realised where Hinkley was going with this. No wonder the man was shaken.
"That's right, colonel," he said, having to work to keep his voice steady, "it would have to be taken in and detonated by hand."
The colonel looked squarely at the screen, and Don nodded sympathetically. Then the screen went blank.
"What the hell?" said Jo, checking the readings on the comms equipment at her end.
"It's all right," said Don. "He cut us off. He didn't want to hear our best wishes, or our commiserations, in case it undid him completely."
"He what? Why?" said Jo, and Don explained to her what was about to happen. She opened her mouth, and closed it again. Then she didn't say anything.
The resistance forces at the Peru site came back on line an hour and a half later. The control room inside the Cambodian citadel was packed by then. Some people had said they couldn't bear to watch, but most had wanted to know how their fate would be decided.
Struggle for a Small Blue Planet Page 29
