by Drew Avera
There was no line to get through the gate, not this early in the morning, which was a shame. He’d hoped for a busy, distracted guard, one who wouldn’t look too closely. Instead, the junior NCO at the security station looked bright-eyed and alert and already giving him the eye. Her arms were at her side, her hand nowhere near her hip holster and the service weapon there, but the enlisted soldier beside her had his carbine on a patrol sling, held at low ready.
Damn. Guess another bunch of bored guards like at the railroad bridge was too much to hope for.
“Mr. Stout,” she said, frowning in what seemed like confusion. “I wasn’t aware you’d returned. Didn’t you just leave?”
Damn, did I? That means Franklin might not be here.
“I forgot something,” Nate told her, thinking quickly. “Mr. Franklin called me back to check some data from the Hellfires.”
He was pulling it out of his ass, but he knew if Franklin was here, he had to be involved with the mech production somehow. Fortunately, the sergeant nodded, accepting the explanation. He thought he was home free until she squinted, staring pointedly at the Broken Arrow Mercenary Force patch on his flight suit.
“What the hell is that?” she wondered. “Weren’t you wearing a business suit when you left here?”
“It’s…,” he faltered.
“It’s our old unit patch,” Svetlana supplied. “We are both test pilots. We work for Mr. Franklin in his Hellfire improvement program.”
“And what’s your name, Miss…?” the NCO wanted to know.
“Patterson,” she said. “Svetlana Patterson.”
The flight suit was one of Patty’s old ones, adjusted with the Velcro straps that made it universal fit, and his name was still on the tape. Nate still winced at the sight, unable to quite forget Patty’s death at Svetlana’s hands. True, Patty had been a traitor, but still…
“I don’t remember that name on the authorized list,” the woman said, mouth twisted into an officiously stubborn set. “Let me call down to the main office and check…”
Damn. Now the shit’s going to hit the fan.
“Hey Sarge,” the guard said, head tilting back, ear cocked as if listening for something. “You hear that?”
“Damn it, Kirby,” the woman snapped, turning on him. “I’ve fucking told you not to call me ‘Sarge.’ A sarge is a fucking bottom-feeding fish. Are you calling me a fucking bottom-feeding fish?”
“Sergeant Hollister!” Corporal Kirby insisted, pointing upward with his left hand, his right still wrapped around the grip of his M37. “Does that sound like jets to you?”
She blinked, looking up, and so did Nate. The sound wasn’t quite the whine of a turbojet, not the sound of an airplane…it was something deeper, a growling rumble he knew all too well.
“Those are mech thrusters,” he said, eyes narrowing. “Lots of mech thrusters.”
For a second, he thought it was his people, BAMF and the other mercenaries, coming early, without his call, and he started to panic, wondering how he would explain it. Then he saw them. They came over the town, flying low, just over the rooftops, and they just kept coming, one after another, coming out of the morning sun, backlit, with a particular silhouette, angular, long-limbed…
“Oh, fuck me!” he blurted, exchanging a horrified glance with Svetlana. “Those are fucking Tagans!”
“No!” Sgt. Hollister insisted, in reflexive denial, her eyes flickering back and forth from the mechs to Nate. “Russians can’t be here! Not this far west!”
“The Russians are supposed to be here for a peace conference,” Svetlana pointed out. He was impressed she was able to say “the Russians” rather than “we.” He wasn’t sure if he could have been so in control of his words in the same situation. “This does not seem like a peace delegation. There must be a hundred mechs in that formation.”
“Maybe it’s some kind of honor guard?” Sgt. Hollister ventured, doubt in her voice. “Shit.” She grabbed at her shoulder mic and squeezed the key. “Captain Calderon, this is Sgt. Hollister at the front gate, do you read?”
She waited a moment, then keyed the mic again, more agitated.
“Captain Calderon? Is anyone there? We have incoming Russian mechs! Is anyone there?” She shook her head. “Damn it! Kirby, go find me someone who can get some mechs up here!”
Nate thought some mechs suddenly sounded like a damned good idea. He grabbed the radio off his belt and hissed into it urgently.
“Roach! We have a whole wing of Russian Tagans incoming! Get up here now! Get everyone moving!”
Hollister ran over to a canvas tarp set up beside the entrance and ripped the covering away, revealing a gimbal-mounted missile launcher. She jumped into the control seat and hit a series of switches and the turret’s motors hummed to life, sending it skewing around toward the east, the elevation adjusting up and down fitfully as she tried for a target lock.
“Oh, damn,” Svetlana said mildly, pointing upward. “Too late.”
Nate couldn’t see the rocket motors from the incoming missiles, not against the glare of the morning sun, but the smoke of their exhaust glowed in the light of it and their warheads glinted bright.
“Inside!” Nate yelled, grabbing Svetlana’s hand and sprinting through the entrance.
They hadn’t made it a hundred meters before the first explosions hit and the concussion of a dozen anti-armor missiles rolled through the entrance corridor in a wash of flame and everything went black in a cloud of roiling smoke.
Chapter Twenty-Four
“What in the living fuck is going on here?” Conrad Barron exclaimed on the general net. “Where the hell did all these Tagans come from?”
“Well,” Catalina Loughlin said, “when a daddy and a mommy Tagan love each other very much…”
“Shut up,” Roach said humorlessly. She’d expected when everything actually began that she’d be scared, nervous, but instead she simply felt a tremendous annoyance.
Because it was a damned good question. Where had all the damned Russians come from? Weren’t they supposed to be fighting Hellfires piloted by dupes?
Why can’t one fucking thing ever go according to plan?
“Westbridge,” she said curtly, “take LVS-427 and break north, circle around and cut them off from the town. Die Valkyrie, you come with us and push them away from the main entrance. We clear?”
“Roger that, Roach,” Bubba said, cheerfully agreeable. “We’re on your six. Lead us in.”
“I can’t believe I’m getting ordered around by a girl young enough to be my daughter,” Jenny commented. “But yeah, sure, lead on, honeychild.”
Roach shifted her annoyance to the side and poured her concentration into the incoming radar and lidar signals…which was fairly easy since there were so damned many of them.
“Jesus Christ, there’s a hundred of them!” Ramirez exclaimed, his voice shaking.
“There are,” she confirmed. “Get ahold of yourself, Mule, we got work to do.”
The feet of her Hellfire swung out to the right as she banked around a stand of lodgepole pines, one eye fixed to the heat readings and the other to the targeting reticle for her rocket pods, waiting for the enemy to come into range. The Tagans hadn’t seen them yet, didn’t expect them, were still pouring one missile after another into the entrance area. They were arrayed in standard multiple wedge formations, each squadron in a wedge and each individual wedge lined up in a wedge with the rest of the squadrons, and the closest of them would be in range just about…
“Fire!”
The rocket pods were a more versatile weapons system than the Mark-Ex, designed for general use rather than anti-armor, but their drawback was they were unguided and you had to be damn sure of your aim before you pulled the trigger. She was confident in her own ability to use the rockets effectively, and maybe trusted Ramirez because she’d been there for the drills Dix and Nate had put him and the others through in training, but the others were an unknown quantity. The plus side, of course,
was that the sky was so crowded, you almost couldn’t help but hit something.
Smoke trails corkscrewed away from the bulbous launch pods at the shoulders of the Hellfire mechs, a spider web of nebulous white silk, crossing the kilometer between the two clusters of machines in seconds. Roach felt a familiar surge of elation when the warheads began erupting like fireworks at a fourth of July celebration, a chain of orange fireballs wreathed in black smoke. Tagans began falling out of the sky, but she couldn’t be sure how many had been badly damaged and how many were simply trying to make themselves less obvious targets.
Either way, the Russians knew they were there and a hail of MJK-38F missiles coming their way was proof of it.
“Split!” she barked. “Get low!”
She took her own advice, hoping the others would follow her orders. A glance at the IFF transponder scan showed her they were, that Bubba’s mechs and her own were scattering their formation wide and heading down to the road surface, while the other two squadrons under Barron and Catalina still circled to the rear of the Russian formation. She wanted to ask if they’d opened fire yet, but she couldn’t spare the focus from trying to keep the MJK-38F’s from killing her.
Electronic Counter Measures squealed interference and chaff pods launched off the back of her Hellfire as she descended, weaving a cocoon of defense against the incoming heat-seeking missiles, shedding the lock of all but one. Her Hellfire touched down hard, the impact of her footpads cracking the concrete of the broad highway leading up to the Cheyenne Mountain entrance road, and she pivoted into the oncoming MJK-38F, letting her automated missile defense system do the rest.
The 6.5mm machinegun turrets in her Hellfire’s chest chattered, guided by the mech’s on-board radar, and the MJK-38F’s warhead blew two hundred meters away, tendrils of fire arcing down to the street below, leaving short-lived flames crackling across its surface. Roach let out a breath she hadn’t been conscious of holding, but didn’t have the time or the luxury of dwelling on the relief for too long. The Tagans were following their missiles in, coming straight at her and the two squadrons she was leading.
“Westbridge, LV-426,” she called, “are you guys waiting for an engraved fucking invitation?”
“Chill out, girl,” Catalina’s voice came over her helmet headphones. “We’re in position now, opening fire.”
She could tell when they did. She wasn’t sure how, couldn’t quite quantify whether it was the radar/lidar scans or the motion in the corner of her field of vision or just instinct, but she sensed the shift in the direction of the Russian forces. Like a school of fish moving together when they sensed an incoming predator, the speed and direction of the flying wing of Tagans began heading away from her and the squadrons with her.
“Use the distraction!” she called to her mechs, stomping down on the pedals for her thrusters. “Back up and at them!”
Another flight of rockets roared free of her mech’s launch pod and slammed into the side of a Tagan, the blasts stripping armor from its chest and laying bare the electrofiber muscles beneath. With a practiced ease, she toggled over to her Vulcan cannon and put a short burst of 20mm into the gap in the Tagan’s armor, the armor-piercers slicing right through the machine’s torso and reactor shielding and burying themselves in the isotope pile. A spike in the Hellfire’s external dosimeter told the story of the damage, but the Tagan tumbling out of the air confirmed it. The Russian mech smacked into the pavement shoulder first, trailing black smoke, and stayed there, motionless, but she was already moving on to the next target.
No shortage of them. Jesus, there are so damned many of them…
“Do you think Nate got inside before they hit?” Ramirez asked her.
She was surprised he had the presence of mind to ask, since her IFF feed showed him latched with a pair of Tagans. She was just as surprised she had the time to be worried, given how many Tagans were shooting at and around her.
“I hope so,” she replied brusquely.
But what she really hoped was that Nate could get to the Hellfires inside before Franklin’s pilots did…because there was no way they were going to be able to beat a hundred Tagans without some help.
Nate coughed fitfully and tried to rub grit out of his eyes as he pushed himself back up to his feet.
“Svet!” he yelled, his own voice muffled in his ears from the battering they’d taken from the explosions.
Shapes moved around him in the smoke, indistinct and ghostly, and he couldn’t tell which one was hers, couldn’t make out much of anything. When a hand grabbed his arm, he clawed at the handgun holstered across his chest before he felt Svetlana’s hair brush across his cheek.
“Stairs!” she shouted into his ear. “This way!”
He went with the direction of her pull, trusting she knew what she was doing.
I’ve been trusting her a lot lately. She’s an FSB agent and I trust her more than I do anyone except maybe Roach. How the hell did that happen?
She’d led them this far. He was willing to let her lead him a bit farther. She pulled him through a door and pushed it shut behind them and the smoke abated, revealing the broad, concrete steps leading downward into the complex.
“The mechs will be two floors down,” she said, her voice hoarse from the smoke they’d inhaled up in the entrance corridor. “Whatever the hell is going on outside, it should give us the distraction we need to get inside without being questioned.”
“Well, I knew there must be something good about a fucking Russian invasion,” he said acerbically. “For God’s sake, why would the Russians attack during a peace conference?”
He shut up and concentrated on breathing as they took the stairs three at a time.
“It has to be Antonov,” she said, pausing at the landing between floors. “He doesn’t trust Franklin and I’d be willing to bet he’s behind this.”
“This isn’t just an attack on Bob Franklin,” he argued, swinging out on the railing and wincing at the twinge in his knees when his feet hit the stairs two steps down. “This is a fucking decapitation strike. Why the hell would they take that chance?”
“The Chinese, at a guess.” She sounded almost as out of breath as he was, and he thought maybe she’d breathed in more of the smoke than he had. “They’re pushing US forces on the west coast, but they’re pushing Russia along the border, too. If Antonov gets rid of the US-backed mercenaries on the eastern seaboard, Russia will have a clear shot at the heartland and the food and fuel stores there.”
She didn’t elaborate and he didn’t ask her to, because they were at the door to the mech storage floor and staring at a big-assed security lock plate.
“How do we get through that?” he blurted. Their plan had been to bluff their way in the front entrance, down the elevator, and blowing down a security door hadn’t been part of the preparation.
“It’s smoky up there,” she told him, digging into her thigh pocket and pulling out an ID card still attached to an alligator clip. “The colonel I stole this from didn’t even notice.”
He wanted to kiss her, but instead, he drew his service pistol and stood ready while she touched the magnetic strip embedded in the ID card to the reader on the lock. The door clicked as the electromagnetic lock released and Svetlana pushed it open. Like Pandora’s Box, all the evil of the world seemed to stream out of the opening with a haze of acrid smoke and the unmistakable chatter of automatic weapons fire.
We’re too late.
Nate cursed and ducked inside anyway, his service pistol held at low ready. He missed his Glock 9mm. Sure, it was decades obsolete and he’d had to acquire the gun and the ammo on the black market, but it was the gun he’d remembered learning to shoot with, though those memories had come from his Prime. Something about the grip angle of the SIG .40 felt off to him, and he’d never trusted the caseless ammo. Self-destructive goo, designed to foul up your ignition chamber was what Dix had called it.
But the Glock was somewhere in the White House and they hadn’t stoppe
d to collect it before they’d evacuated back to Virginia, hadn’t even thought about it until later. The SIG was what he had and it would have to do. He pushed it out in front of him as they emerged from the narrow hallway to the staircase and out onto the main floor.
The place was a combined assembly plant and storage area, fully automated and capable of turning out a Hellfire mech in hours once all the parts were manufactured and brought in. Theoretically, it could have churned out dozens of Hellfires a week, but Nate knew the weakness was in acquiring the raw materials, particularly when shipping from both coasts was problematic, and he also knew most of the mechs they built were sent east to the mercenary units. Some went west, but the Chinese hadn’t had much luck with their attempts to adapt mech weaponry and had stuck with conventional tanks and aircraft, mostly, counting on quantity over quality, and the US military countered by shifting every available tank, APC and attack aircraft west of the Rockies.
Nate wasn’t sure he’d ever seen so many Hellfires in one place before as he did on the storage floor of the assembly plant. They reminded him of pictures he’d seen of the terra cotta armies in the tombs of the Chinese emperors, lined up in neat rows, identical down to the paint job. A few meters below those towering titans the illusion of order and perfection faded into the grey haze of what Nate recognized as the acrid leftovers of grenade explosions and the spiteful crack of small arms fire.
A light squad of security troops in Army utility fatigues were running past the entrance to the stairs towards the cover of the assembly machinery, pausing every few steps to lay down suppressive fire with their M37 carbines at targets behind them, in the rows of Hellfire mechs. Gunshots dogged the heels of the troopers and one of them went down with a bullet through his upper thigh, a spray of blood splashing across the concrete floor as he slumped to the ground. Two of his fellow soldiers grabbed him, each firing back one-handed as they pulled their comrade to safety.
