Ashes of Freedom

by K. J. Coble

  A section of Cole’s view seemed to blur and fragment. When the disturbance coalesced into a hologram plastered across the upper left-hand corner of his visor, he realized the AI in his accursed, complicated Coalition helm was trying to tell him something.

  The holographic map was a multicolored mess of blips. One icon, red and outlined in flashing, double threat-haloes was moving up from the rear of the logjam of the ambushed convoy. A quadrant divided off from the already cluttered display, the AI’s war book identifying the newcomer’s fusion reactor signature and projecting a crude schematic of the war machine.

  “—hovertank!” The scream of a guerrilla squad leader distorted in Cole’s helm speakers. “Fuckers had a hovertank on the back of a trailer! Movin’ up fast!”

  A hatch on the side of the downed APC popped open. Holograms fell away from Cole’s view as a red threat rating painting itself across the Korvan emerging from the wreckage.

  The Korvan was narrow-shouldered, startlingly pale in the sunlight, and female. She was halfway out of the hatch when she swayed and her gaze came to rest on Cole. Her helmet was gone and her already harsh features were made nightmarish by the flap of cheek ripped back and dangling so that a half-grin of teeth was visible. Her eyes narrowed through pain as her hand darted for something inside the hatch.

  Cole’s first shot was reflexive, gouging a line through dirt and into the vehicle’s crumpled lower hull. The Korvan had her plasma pistol clear of the hatch and coming up before Cole’s targeting icon slid across the center of her mass. His finger twitched on the trigger pad. Blaster bolts lit her breastplate in flashes of sparks and droplets of slagged armor. She slumped in the hatch. Molten tears in the plate glowed for an instant before fading.

  “—damn you, get out of there! Get out of its way!”

  The cries in Cole’s helmet radio were drowned out an instant later by a roar like a monstrous insect swarm, sleeting through rock, tree, and bone. Ground and air shuddered liquid-like around him. Cole cringed into the dirt as churned soil, chewed wood, and the blood mist of shredded bodies blotted out the sun.

  “WEAPONS!” CROZIER SHOUTED into his helm mike, his throat an agony of membranes ravaged by heat and fumes.

  The Korvan hovertank was a dome of non-light, a giant blot of darkness as if the Korvans had somehow inserted a slice of night into the midst of day. The tank’s half-globe of deflector screen was a space-time distortion of sorts, absorbing the punishment of blasterfire, the kinetic energy of bullets and rockets, and bleeding them into random alternate dimensions. What this energy did in those dimensions was the guesswork of physicists. But there was always collateral damage in war.

  The deflector could be set to variable levels of displacement. At the high settings it absorbed even daylight, creating the mushroom of black now sliding up the road to confront the ambush. The hovertank moved at a sluggish pace, the shield as blinding as it was protective. Navigation was limited to what its sensors could make of the ground it passed over.

  The ambush had nearly become a rout. The guerrillas had pressed forward from either side to overrun what remained of the Korvan escort. But momentum reversed with the appearance of the hovertank. The din of fighting from the rear of the convoy intensified as screens of Korvans pushed up behind the tank in a counterattack. The tactical network dissolved in the jabber of near panic.

  “Weapons!” Crozier repeated to the surviving heavy weapons teams. “All fire on that hovertank!”

  Curling trails of missiles and streaks of blasterfire vanished in faint red smears across the obsidian surface of the deflector.

  Crozier glanced to his right at the clump of bush and netting concealing the 10-kilo missile launcher. The tripod-mounted monstrosity could be dismantled in a hurry but it took two to carry—three, if you counted the unlucky sap tasked with hauling the rockets, themselves. The pair manning it was a husband-and-wife team, if Crozier recalled.

  “Kill that thing!” Crozier screamed.

  He turned back to the road in time to see the black dome shimmer and fade into an uncertain halo through which the tank was visible, though blurred, like seeing through water. He made out a wedge of armored hull and the squat dome of turret, though a main gun was noticeably absent from the empty housing. That was why it was shut down and being towed on a trailer—it was due for overhaul, probably at the Outpost’s facilities.

  Lousy fucking luck...

  Crozier had his mouth open with a warning that the shield was coming down for a reason. But that reason was demonstrated before he found his ravaged voice as the tank’s apparently functional secondary armaments opened up.

  Twin Gauss cannon, mounted low in the hull, made no report as they fired by means of excited electrical fields. But the wicked bluish sparks in their muzzles were easily discernible and the roar of hundreds of thumbnail-sized hyper-velocity slugs curtaining through the air was like a monstrous buzzsaw.

  Holdouts splashed away from the onslaught, their push to victory dissolving. A pair of guerrillas on the grassy slope across from Crozier rose from hiding and bolted. They got almost to the crest of the hill and safety when the stream of metal whirled them into scarlet cloud that would be difficult to discern as two separate persons when it settled.

  Stupid bastards! Don’t they know the only way to win here is to stand and fight?

  Then the storm of slugs was all around Crozier and he pressed to the ground, covering his face as fragments of rock and metal and splinters of wood prickled across the back of his helmet and body armor. Eyes pinched shut hard enough to bring sullen sparks flicking across the insides of his eyelids.

  The storm passed by in an instant to ravage another corner of the battleground. Crozier looked up and around.

  The Gauss guns had shaved a corridor through the forest, undergrowth churned into smoking green ruin thick with a reek like mown grass left to cook under the sun. Smaller trees were jagged, damp white shards, larger ones looked as though mauled by a thousand bites. Ruby speckles of blood seemed to be everywhere.

  Cameron looked at Crozier, his mouth opened on the verge of a shout. Most of his squad was intact, though one of them picked, unbelieving, at the cleanly severed lower body of a comrade.

  Behind them, the 10-kilo position was a shredded ruin.

  “Cameron!” Crozier hollered to be heard, even though his helm would transmit his voice quite clearly at the short range. “Get down there! Get close! I’m going to drop the hovertank’s deflectors! When that shield comes down, take it out! Use the anti-matter mines!” They had brought the heavy magnetic explosives along to leave behind for the inevitable Korvan relief force.

  Cameron nodded, the rotten smile flickering for an instant. The youth turned and shouted something to his team that Crozier’s helm did not pick up. Eight guerrillas rose from the forest floor and swept downhill past Crozier.

  Committing my reserves...

  Crozier rolled over and crawled through the haze of fresh fires. The power saw scream of the Gauss guns split the air again and he dropped flat. The drone of the little projectiles faded in a moment and he was up again, now scampering for the rocket position.

  He leapt the mown-down trunk of a tree to reach the missile launcher and landed in something slick that squished beneath shins and knees. His hands retracted from a glistening blue-veined mass uncoiled from the remains of one of the missile team. Swallowing and pinching his eyes shut, Crozier crawled over to the rocket launcher, leaned backwards but still on its bipod. He put himself under it and strained upwards with the weapon, lifting it to his shoulder with a grunt.

  Only then did he open his eyes.

  The hovertank halted near the front of the convoy, its shields a faint cherry-black as a stream of plasma fire ravaged it. Sandy’s repeat blastcannon, Crozier realized. She would only be able to hold the Korvan in position for a few moments.

  Crozier’s hand closed over the handle of the launcher, the pistol-grip slick with gore. A firing dot settled on the tank as his helm
et AI and the weapon’s targeting package mated. He stroked the trigger pad.

  The launcher’s backblast was a wedge of flame that kicked fifty meters of forest into roaring chaos. The 10-kilo missile slammed downrange with a howl like pins of agony in Crozier’s eardrums, even with his helm’s dampening. The rocket hit the shields with the force of worlds colliding. Deflector black was shocked away in mushrooming red-orange.

  There were two 10-kilos to a clip and Crozier didn’t hesitate to fire the second. The follow-up detonation was nearly lost in the still-blossoming fireball of the first strike. But Crozier clearly made out the piercing string of flashes across the hovertank’s now exposed hull that signaled the overload of the vehicle’s deflector screen generator coils.

  “Now, Cameron!” Crozier’s voice was a forlorn croak. “Take it now!”

  CHAPTER TEN

  “So, this is how things stand...” HaustLieutenant Mingas’ voice carried over the Awareness with a touch of nervousness still, but she was becoming accustomed to the new authority.

  Zarven sat at the head of the command post conference table. The officers of Outpost 9 and his own company commanders gathered around. The physical presence wasn’t necessary, especially with his own officers, whose minds and quirks he knew well. But the tangible contact seemed to have a steadying effect on the Outpost’s young but already harshly-used command team.

  A three-dimensional image of Outpost 9’s area of operations rotated over the surface of the table—again, unnecessary, but it was Mingas’ briefing. Bright red splotches appeared across the holographic terrain, stamped with dates and times. Skirmishes, ambushes, banditry. Judging by the dates, the attacks were growing more frequent and were getting closer to the large settlements and to the Outpost, itself.

  “We have Infantry Company D at Outpost 9, reinforced with two light armor platoons—one battle-car, one hovertank—from the 2nd Mechanized, as well as the Scout and Ground Support Wings on loan from Air Strike Command.” As Mingas spoke, tables of organization and equipment popped up. “All units are, at best, rated understrength.”

  Mingas gave an uncomfortable pause. “My predecessor had grown to dislike aggressive patrolling and would only do so when pressured from Battalion. The ground is extremely poor, especially to the southeast where the forests are mature and thick and the hills steep and run through with narrow, sandstone gorges. Our maps of the area are substandard—the worms found time to wipe their Survey Service’s databases before we overran Mondanberg—and we lack the equipment and personnel to do a thorough survey.

  “With these things in mind, we have found ourselves quite hand-tied.”

  “Thank you, HaustLieutenant,” Zarven said. He felt the urge to stand and acted upon it, folding his arms behind his back as he did so and beginning to pace around the table. His eyes wandered across the hologram, hesitating over the splashes of color. His AI ran through statistics and flashes of Awareness-memory at each icon. He looked through the details, tried to see the trail. The old smile teased at the corners of his mouth and he sensed his Commando officers taking notice of it, the old hunter’s smile they knew well.

  “You will note, Hausts, the pattern here,” Zarven said. Heightened attention at that, but the younger ones were missing the point. “And that is that there is no pattern. So many incidents, but no uniformity. These attacks here, to the northwest on the Collaborator farms, are obviously looting by scavengers with poor organization who broke at the first sign of Korvan intervention. These killings closer to Teshima might be part of some Resistance terror campaign, as a number of the victims are notable Collaborators—police, politicians, Militia officers. But evidence suggests some of these could be part of some inter-worm feud.”

  “To the south we see more obvious guerrilla activity, these raids on Collaborator Militia checkpoints, this attack only a few months ago—” Zarven designated the ambush he’d investigated “—that claimed one of our own patrols. But no method, no reason. A superior of mine characterized these as flea-bites, which is precisely what they are.”

  “The point I am striking at is that we have an opportunity to hit the worm Resistance while it is still weak, in its embryonic stages, before it begins to gain a true grass roots support. What Movement they’ve got is early stage, campaigns of fear and intimidation, assassinations aimed at weakening Collaborator infrastructure, raids on local police units and occasional small-scale engagements with our regular forces. But we’re looking at half a dozen, maybe a dozen separate entities, each acting with its own agenda, probably unaware of the others’ existence.”

  “This is what previous leadership in this region failed to understand. We are not fighting an army, not yet. If you smash all the little pieces, they can’t build the machine.”

  Zarven let the smile show to all in the chamber. “We’re going to start smashing pieces.”

  “What is your plan?” Mingas asked, a flicker of eagerness in her harmonic.

  Zarven looked at the holographic map. “You were speaking of the difficult ground to the southeast earli—”

  The Awareness exploded in a wave of shock, terror and pain. Zarven pressed hands to the table in order to avoid swaying with the disorientation. His mind burned with flashes of imagery, arching streams of tracer, pulses of blaster fire and plasma, vehicles vomiting flames, panic, panic, panic as Hausts tried to steady Fanrohausts and direct slow-to-react Minrohausts.

  “The convoy!” Mingas’ voice carried a kicked-in-the-gut amazement.

  “Of course,” Zarven replied.

  There were dozens of worms in the ambush and lots of firepower, well directed. The Convoy commander had been blown to hell by a mine and her immediate subordinate was killed seconds later. Organization unraveled and Zarven’s words of only a few moments before suddenly felt stale, taunting him with their arrogance. Damn them!

  “Just south of the lower Estrek fords,” Mingas said, the hologram across the table flashing to indicate the position. “Thirty kilometers.”

  “The worms have never hit this close—” one of the junior officers started to say.

  “Mobilize your fast reaction teams, Mingas!” Zarven said, whirling about and heading for the door. His commanders were on their feet nearly as quickly.

  “Fast reaction teams—yes, HaustColonel...I mean...”

  Zarven halted near the exit. We still haven’t had time for a full shakedown of this place...good grief, what kind of a mess did that fool Merrak leave? Zarven overrode the command harmonic with his voice, casting it across the entire outpost. “All air elements, hot scramble! Coordinates downloading. Outpost ground elements, full alert, man all stations as if under direct attack!”

  He turned his attention to Mingas. “Prep the light armor. This ambush could be meant to lure a reaction force into a larger ambush.”

  “HaustCaptain Ozer,” Zarven said to his senior company commander as they swept out through the conference room exit, leaving Mingas and her subordinates in a flurry of activity. “Load your company into the dropships, two platoons with you, and a third platoon inserted north at the Estrek fords, spread out as a blocking force across the worms’ most likely avenues of retreat.”

  To the other company commanders, “The rest of you remain here to bolster our brethren’s defenses. Expect a worm raid on this instillation, once they’ve drawn us out. And I want one of you to take charge of the Outpost artillery section.”

  Zarven stepped from the command post bunker into the late afternoon. The Outpost swirled with activity and the air rang with boots on pavement, anti-grav motors firing up, weapons sections readying. Zarven smiled as the charged Awareness tickled in his nerves.

  Over the storm of preparation, though, snarled the rage of the ambush across the Awareness. The worms were pressing the convoy hard. Most of the Hausts were dead and a Senior Fanrohaust directed the surviving infantry. The Haust commanding the hovertank—redlined and due for overhaul at Outpost 9’s facilities—had backed his vehicle off its trailer and
was pushing it forward to aid his fellows. Brave, but the ground was horrible for armor.

  “What will you be doing in all of this, Haust?” Ozer asked Zarven as they strode across the landing field pavement.

  Zarven halted, his eyes coming to rest on the assault skimmers, the Brakas and Vendos, being readied for flight. He changed direction for them, throwing to Ozer, “I’ll be leading the way.”

  ZARVEN GRINNED AS THE Vendo raced north, shuddering as trees lashed by a scant dozen meters beneath its hull. A seemingly flimsy vehicle, the assault skimmer was spindly and insect-like, bulbous where anti-grav nacelles and under-wing weapons pods bulged.

  He occupied the weapons control station, mounted in front of and slightly below the pilot’s seat with a plasteel canopy pressing in around him. A thread-fine datajack chord he plugged into the socket at the base of his skull, felt the faint pop as his AI mated with the assault skimmer’s weapons software. Targeting holograms lit across his vision, multiple crosshairs for the twin linked Gauss cannon in the chin turret, the 20mm unguided anti-personnel rocket pod nestled under the starboard wing, and the heat-seeking anti-armor missiles under the port.

  He could just as easily have accessed the systems via the Awareness, but the communal intellect was not beyond interruption and regulation insisted on hard-link.

  Regulation also insisted on a helmet, but Zarven had been in a hurry. A faint corner of him regretted deposing the skimmer’s rightful weapons operator. A more immediate part of him tightened with the uncertainty of the fight only seconds away. But he was Zarven and could hardly conceive of not leading from the front.

  “Fifty seconds!” The pilot’s harmonic trembled with dueling currents of excitement and anxiety. “The convoy hasn’t been overrun yet!”

  “They’ll hold,” Zarven replied. Across the Awareness, he saw the hovertank wading into the firefight. But the infantry screen that had rallied at its appearance and pressed forward was hopelessly outnumbered and coming apart under heavy worm fire.