The connection was answered immediately. “Nhlappo here. Go ahead, Major.”
“Lieutenant, your status please...”
— Chapter 12 —
Tirunesh Nhlappo didn’t need to be a trained combat pilot or flight engineer to tell that the airplane she was inspecting would never fly again. It was the same with every plane, shuttle, and gunship she’d inspected in Detroit’s flight hangar.
Shattered avionics parts glistened amidst the debris littering the cockpit floor. The manual controls were mixed in with the avionics, the main fascia panel reduced to a bare sheet with a jagged hole blown through.
She growled at the back of her throat. To help fill the gaping holes in Beowulf’s crew roster, some of her Marines had trained in Navy roles during the run back to Tranquility. A surprisingly large proportion had shown good aptitude as pilots. Actually, not so surprising. Flying a highly maneuverable fighter spacecraft called on some of the same reactions and human-AI interactions as dodging through the void in a battlesuit. To rustle up a scratch air force would have been the kind of break they needed if they were to prevail against the Hardits. No such luck. The Hardits had taken any aircraft they wanted – drone gunships by the look of it – and disabled the rest by tossing grenades into every cockpit.
Crude and unimaginative, yet thorough. It was the Hardit way.
Hardits were also masters of being annoying. The aircraft were still armed, fueled, and possibly structurally flightworthy. Theoretically most of them could fly again, but only the skangat Hardits had the parts, equipment, and know-how to repair them. To the humans, the aircraft with their ruined controls and splintered avionics were just so much hi-tech military junk.
Damned Hardits.
“It’s no good,” Nhlappo called out as she scrambled onto the wing of the fighter plane. “Let’s not waste more time on this. None will fly again.”
“Well, maybe one,” said Deacon, the Aux who’d worked here before the rebellion.
“You told me they were all wrecked,” snapped Nhlappo. She made her visor transparent and fixed the idiot man with a steely gaze. What his history was, she didn’t know, but he hadn’t made the grade to graduate as a Marine. That made Joel Deacon a liability in her eyes until proved otherwise.
“I did,” he replied. “And they are wrecked.”
Deacon met Nhlappo’s stare and reflected it right back at her. He showed backbone, at least.
“They aren’t all wrecked in the same way,” Deacon explained. “The Hardits poured most of their venom into the fighter planes and gunships. But there are a few DS90A shuttles that aren’t so badly damaged, and a T16B transport plane that’s barely scratched. I’ve even managed to power up the T16.”
“Will any of them fly?”
“Not yet. If I salvaged parts from other craft and jury-rigged repairs, then maybe I could fix one aircraft. Maybe. I’d give it a 50 percent chance of success with the T16B, half that for a DS90A. Should I be working on this? If so, which craft?”
Nhlappo considered. Resurrecting an atmospheric aircraft could be a powerful symbol of hope, and the survivors definitely needed to believe the Legion was here to do business. But they needed to succeed in the basics first. “No. Your priority is to clear a safe passage into the hangar’s main flight deck so we could get a Stork or two from Beowulf down here. That’s our resupply route. And if the situation turns to drent, that will be our only way off planet.”
Amadou, the senior resistance fighter left in Detroit, placed a hand on Deacon, and interposed himself between his subordinate and Nhlappo. He tried to look the Marine officer in the eye, but couldn’t see through Nhlappo’s helmet visor.
“Don’t forget, Joel,” he said, “that this self-appointed human officer is your ally, for the moment. She is not your commander. I say you keep working on your transport plane and anything else you can get operational.”
It hadn’t taken Nhlappo long to work out the dynamics of this ragtag survivor group, and identify Amadou as a problem. If Deacon was a liability who showed signs of promise, Amadou was an out-and-out disgrace. He had been one of the experienced Marines trusted by Colonel Little Scar, his Jotun CO, to leave the base before the final battle, his task to form the cadre of a guerrilla group operating behind enemy lines.
Amadou should be in charge. Instead, he had allowed his weak male will to be subjugated by Jennifer Boon. Pretty and petite Boon might be, but Amadou should have seen through that to the girl’s dark heart and corrosive attitude.
Four years earlier, Nhlappo had kicked Boon out of the Marine cadets for disobeying orders. Boon’s resentment toward Nhlappo was easily understood, but for Amadou to borrow his lover’s anger as if his own was simply pathetic.
Boon’s repeated insubordination had been more than enough ammunition to be rid of her, but Nhlappo had already been looking for an excuse. Boon was a demon who delighted in using her clever tongue and lithe body to sow discord amongst her fellow cadets. She didn’t play her comrades off against each other for any other reason than the sheer spiteful hell of it.
Young male cadets had proved willing prey. It was another example of why single-sex combat units would make so much more sense...
A stab of dismay interrupted her thought. Inwardly she slapped herself for thinking so callously. Men had proved their uses to her in other roles than combat personnel. One man in particular…
Nhlappo removed her helmet, hoping Amadou would see it as a conciliatory gesture. Deprived of her visor’s enhancements the hangar was instantly plunged into a thick gloom, through which the wrecked aircraft loomed, vague yet menacing,
“I propose a compromise,” she said. “Work on your transport plane for now, Deacon. I’ll send over a team to assist once they’ve completed their inventory assessment in the main part of the base. Lance Corporal Sandure will be among them. He’s a wetware and hard-systems wizard. If anyone can wire together your flight systems, it will be him. Before they assist you, though, first you must work together to clear space for two Stork-class shuttles to land.”
She raised an eyebrow at Amadou, trying to be questioning rather than challenging.
He nodded, scowling.
Nhlappo tried to soften the muscles around her mouth and eyes. It wasn’t quite a smile, but it was the most comradely expression she could summon for the pathetic little veck.
“Thank you,” she said.
To give Amadou time to cool his temper, Nhlappo turned and looked out through the sparkling curtain of water that shielded the flight deck’s external opening.
Detroit’s hangar was three klicks away from the main part of the base, emerging through a broad waterfall in the neighboring valley. She allowed the roar of the water to fill her ears, drowning out her responsibilities for a few moments. With her helmet off, the air had a fresh, tingling quality. Sunlight sparkled through the lens of the cascading water, and glinted in the radar reflective strips that were released upstream, collected downstream and then pumped back above the waterfall. It wasn’t a perfect privacy shield, but it made looking or listening through the waterfall difficult, and she assumed that Detroit’s nano-scale defenses against spybots were still intact.
She closed her eyes and breathed deeply of Nature’s beauty. It wasn’t that she wanted to escape her situation, more that she wanted to register the essence of this place. To remind herself of its worth. Detroit and the area around could be a good place to live for future generations. Soon her force would have to fight to claim this land for humankind. Some would die. Questioning why you fought was not something that had troubled her under the Jotuns. Now it was important to remind herself what they were fighting for.
What she was fighting for.
A fantasy teased her of settling down here in peace. Farming the fertile land near Detroit with her son. Grandchildren playing with the neighbors’ kids. Games of chase and throwing balls, and messing around by the river. She wasn’t sure what free children did, but in her fantasies her grandchildren kn
ew how to exist without an instructor to schedule and structure every moment of their existence.
She growled at this dream. Her son knew her only as a machinelike drill instructor, not even knowing she was his mother. She’d come close to telling him on the flight back to Tranquility, but… close was still a failure.
She sighed. If they ever did win freedom for the humans of Tranquility, it would never be her freedom. There would be another campaign around a distant star. And another. Ceaseless conflict until one day death would claim her.
The dream of freedom was worth fighting for. But it would never be hers to claim.
Brandt cleared his throat, an appalling artifice given that he deliberately amplified the sound through his helmet speakers. When she didn’t turn around, Brandt asked: “Ma’am, should I join the inventory hunt?”
“Not yet, Lieutenant. Leave that in Sergeant Majanita’s capable hands.”
Out of the blue, Deacon blurted out his own question. “Hey! How did you people get down to the surface anyways? Did you use shuttles to get here? Can’t we use them? We could strike the enemy anywhere on the planet and then get out quick.”
Although wincing at the inappropriate way he spoke, people with the brain and gall to ask the right questions were a valuable asset they were short of. So she indulged him. Somewhat. “Lieutenant, please explain to Mr. Deacon.”
“Yes, ma’am. We arrived in Tranquility system on transport ship Beowulf, which remains safe in the outer system. We used a Lysander shuttle to reach Tranquility orbit. Chief Petty Officer Turbine was our pilot. She’s still on board, and the Lysander should still be in orbit. We descended in dark lighters.”
“Dark what?” asked Deacon.
“He means stealthed dropships,” said Amadou.
“Correct, Mr. McKenzie. To descend rapidly through the atmosphere with stealth shielding consumes an immense amount of power. Most of the dark lighter is comprised of its heat sink. Once we’ve landed and completed egress, the dropship goes into cool-down mode. Cables snake down into the ground, dumping thermal energy. It has a lot to get rid of.”
“We don’t think the Hardits have much of a mil-grade orbital sensor network,” said Amadou. “Otherwise they’d be all over our ass already.”
“Let’s hope you’re right,” said Brandt. “Even if they haven’t detected our expeditionary force, we suspect they know your resistance group is here, but they haven’t felt it worth harassing you. We came down in fields two hours’ march from here. Once a cool-down lockdown starts, the dropship is committed to thermal dumping. Anything within three meters of the hull won’t survive long with all the exotic radiation being pumped out, us included. We have no choice but to abandon the lighters for the duration. Takes about 3-4 days. If we re-enter too soon, or the dropship is damaged, we’re dead.”
“It explodes?”
“Something like that.”
“Tell Deacon what happens if we damage the dropship,” said a more knowledgeable survivor.
Brandt looked to Nhlappo for permission. She gave it via private comms.
“A Dark Lighter unable to cool down properly will explode with the power of a tactical fusion bomb. Exploding dropships deliberately is a risky proposition as the result is more than a mere conventional explosion. There is a release of exotic radiation of extremely variable yield. The radiation level may be so limited that it is barely detectable. On the other hand, it could be enough to instantly sterilize half a continent, and ignite the atmosphere in an uncontrollable chain reaction that will burn the planet to a cinder. When the Hardits come — and they will come — the dropships could give us options.”
“But a last resort only, Brandt. I want other lines of defense in place first, a ring of fire established in the mountainsides around Detroit. GX-cannon. Missile batteries. SAM pods.”
“Yes, ma’am. We need aerial defense too. It’s no good having shuttles come down from Beowulf if they get shot out the sky by Hardit aircraft or surface-to-air missiles.”
“Very true, Lieutenant. Let’s see what Sergeant Majanita has for us.”
She looked pointedly at Amadou, who shouted out to one of his confederates to raise Sergeant Majanita on the comm.
Main power was out through Detroit, but several portable generators had been successfully rigged up and one kept the internal public address system running. Assuming the Hardits were listening in, the survivors had devised a crude pulse-coded communication protocol that could be decoded into Morse Code. Hopefully the pulses sounded like random white noise to any hypothetical Hardit monitor. The downside was that the system required you to tap and hold gadget boxes connected to the standard base access consoles by wires.
By the time the group had reached the comm station in the hangar, Majanita was ready on the far side.
Nhlappo held the comm box in her gauntlet. She instructed her suit AI to translate the pulses of Morse and speak the words through her internal and external helmet speakers.
Majanita’s team was combing the base for equipment. She reported that every armory and munition store they encountered had been destroyed. The dead combatants, though, had simply been abandoned. Attacker and defender; human, Jotun, or Hardit: they had been left where they fell. So too had their weapons. Typical Hardits: lazy and unimaginative.
“We need some means of defending against Hardit air assets,” Nhlappo said, her suit reversing the process by translating her speech into Morse Code, “and I don’t expect you will find the fallen were firing surface-to-air missiles along the passageways. There won’t be discarded SAM ordnance waiting for us to pick up. Confirm, Sergeant, have all SAM pods you’ve discovered been destroyed?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Then don’t waste more time. Strip the fallen of their weapons. We might not be done yet with stores, though. There were many levels of secrecy at Detroit. I may know of hidden munition stores the Hardits did not find. If I’m right, then that’s where we will find some serious ordnance. I’m on my way back now to look. Nhlappo out.”
“We have plenty of missiles here, ma’am,” said Brandt.
It took Nhlappo a few moments to work out what Brandt meant, but she never doubted he had a good point. Brandt was level headed, unlike McEwan with his flights of fancy. That’s why she had fought so hard for him to become one of the new junior officers. Given the opportunity to learn, he could grow into a great battlefield commander one day.
Then understanding dawned. “You mean the missiles these aircraft are armed with?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“These air-to-air missiles launched by fire control systems that no longer function?”
“I believe we should try to find a way to use these missiles, ma’am, and their other ordnance. I know it will break operating protocols, but...” He shrugged. “We’re the Human Legion now.”
“And we must use our new freedoms to innovate if we are to prevail. I believe you are right, Brandt. Proceed. If you need Sandure to make these missiles fly, you have priority over resurrecting this shuttle. Sorry, Deacon.”
Deacon shrugged, in an echo of Brandt. Nhlappo didn’t honor Amadou with a glance to assess his reaction.
“Until we know otherwise,” Nhlappo continued, “I want you all to assume the enemy has not yet detected our presence. For you, Lieutenant, that means shifting materiel into the mountains using nothing noisier than boots and backs. I don’t want any unhardened power signatures, or any EM leakage at all, despite all this talk I hear of Hardits not employing electronics. I give it 36 hours at the most before we receive unwelcome visitors. If the major ever makes it back alive from his... quest to find this resistance leader, he’ll be sure to bring hostiles on his tail. That is Major McEwan’s way.”
Her suit AI alerted Nhlappo to an incoming call on the FTL channel. “Speak of the devil,” she muttered before accepting the comm link. “Nhlappo here. Go ahead, Major…”
“Lieutenant, your status please...”
— Chapter 13 �
�
“So far we’ve recovered nothing intact other than small arms,” Nhlappo reported. “Brandt is setting up topside defenses and had the smarts to strip ordnance from the wrecked aircraft in the hangar.”
“And the Resistance?” asked Arun.
Arun heard a sniff of disdain over the FTL link. “Some show potential,” Nhlappo admitted grudgingly. “If we arm and train them, could they win the war? Yes. But their morale is far too fragile. All their hopes are hitched to one person, this Spartika, just like… never mind. I hope you’re going to tell me this Spartika is a twenty-foot high, thunderbolt-hurling goddess, because any less will be a disappointment.”
An awkward pause passed between them.
“Major, what is she like? Tell me you are bringing her back…”
“Hardits took her away.”
“So, we’re in the drent.”
“I’ll get her back, Nhlappo.”
“Of course you will, sir.”
It was just as well Arun’s face was hidden behind his visor. His fury felt so hot, he wondered whether it would melt through his helmet. “Do I need to relieve you of command, Lieutenant Nhlappo?”
All Arun could hear was Nhlappo’s breathing. Had he pushed her too far? Was this where the dream ended?
“No, sir.”
Nhlappo’s reply was curt, but Arun decided to brush the incident aside as if it had never happened. “Good, because here’s my plan and I want my senior officer to review it. We think Spartika has been taken by wheeled transport to Labor Camp 3, which is 420 klicks from here. I’m sending coordinates now. If we power ahead at 20 klicks per hour with a single rest stop, we can get there by dawn tomorrow. Heavy Weapons Section should be able to send the monkeys scurrying down their holes while we grab Spartika.”
“Makes sense,” said Nhlappo. “Getting there won’t be a problem. Boon hasn’t got a suit, but you can take turns carrying her. It’s any humans you manage to liberate from the camp who will be the problem. They’ll slow you down. You’ll need to pick a route back that has shelter and fresh water. If you’re talking hundreds of refugees, there isn’t much my Marines can do to assist. The best we can do here is prepare our defenses. You have a habit of attracting trouble, Major. And the trouble will land here, sooner or later.”
Renegade Legion (The Human Legion Book 3) Page 5
