by David Adams
He wasn’t sure how long he had before they struck. The bombers were some distance away but could close that distance quickly. They were low altitude, down in the weeds, trying to avoid anti-aircraft fire.
A missile streaked overhead, the howl of its engine loud enough to hurt his ears. The SAM battery, which had previously tried to kill him, was now protecting him. Another missile followed the first, climbing as it rose to meet the bombers.
Those missiles were short range. He only had moments. Pavlov threw himself down into the mud, wiggling into a ditch, and waited.
For a brief moment, everything was quiet. Still. Peaceful, almost. Maybe the aircraft weren’t bombers and were just flying nearby. Maybe they were going on another mission. Maybe they’d decided not to attack.
Two sonic booms shattered the silence as the bombers soared overhead, their bomb bays open and empty.
Two bombers. The SAM battery had killed one of their attackers.
Not enough.
The roar of atmospheric bombers was followed a few seconds of silence.
Maybe—
The air above him ignited in a thousand crackling explosions as the bombers’ air burst munitions broke apart and detonated, each spraying fragments in devastating spheres, shredding the jungle foliage and blasting mud up in all directions. Pavlov wiggled into his life-saving ditch as far as he could go. Shrapnel pinged off his armour, splattered into the mud nearby, and blasted everything around him to wet splinters.
Then, as quickly as it had began, it ended and the jungle was still once more.
He lay there for almost a minute. The heat from the blasts would confuse the thermal cameras of anyone watching. But he couldn’t stay here, as comforting a thought as that was. To just lie down and not have to think about any of this. Live the rest of his life in a safe ditch.
Tempting but silly. Pavlov poked his head up out of the mud. Gunk was smeared all over his visor. He wiped it off, his armour’s now-minimal sensors giving him information. No breaches, apart from the one on his arm, no damage apart from scratches, no wounds.
Good.
Pavlov retraced his steps back to the Separatist SAM battery. Miraculously, the battery was completely intact, minus two missiles. The bombing run had completely missed it.
The surrounding Separatists, the majority of whom lay blown to pieces, dead or dying, their limbs scattered to the four winds—not so much.
It was impossible to tell how many people had been killed. The bodies lay scattered, broken into tiny pieces, burned, churned into the mud. The Separatists did not have armour, as he did. They had thought their SAM site would protect them.
For all the fresh corpses he could see, it was the last mistake they ever made.
Pavlov wandered from broken, bloody corpse to bloody corpse, trying to identify them, or even salvage something useful out of all the carnage, and that was when he found the blonde woman.
Most of her.
A bomb blast had burned away much of her skin and hair, and peppered her body with fragments, each one having left a bloody flower on her flesh. She tried to breathe through burned lungs, her chest barely fluttering. An arm, leg, and a good chunk of her face were missing. Her remaining eye looked at him with sincere pain. Speaking was beyond her now.
There was absolutely no chance of any kind of casevac. Not that it would have helped anyway. The kind of injuries she had…they were not survivable.
So Pavlov took his pistol back, said a few words to God, and put the pistol under her chin. She thanked him with her eyes, so without further ado, he sent her to meet her maker. He holstered the pistol and moved on.
For some reason, this shook him more than it should have. There was something distinctly unsettling about seeing enemies turned into friends and then friends into corpses.
After a timeless wait, Ilyukhina emerged from the jungle, her armour scorched and dented.
“Is anyone else alive?” she asked, a tremor in her normally steel voice.
“I think it’s just us,” said Pavlov. “The SAM battery seems to be unharmed. I saw Dmitriev running for the hills before the strike, so it’s possible he’s still alive.”
“They say ‘fortune favours the bold’,” said Ilyukhina, looking around at the broken bodies that littered the jungle floor, “but courage certainly didn’t help these poor bastards.”
“Fortune’s favour doesn’t count for much versus high explosive air burst ordnance.” He took a breath, his visor filtering out the smell of the dead. “Even God has his limits. Judges 1:19. And the Lord was with Judah; and he drove out the inhabitants of the mountain; but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron.”
“Sorry, sir,” said Ilyukhina, scrunching up her face. “An all-powerful God, defeated by metal boxes?”
Pavlov shrugged and gestured around him. “Technology is pretty neat.”
Sorry, God. But you could have stopped this, you know. You could have just given me something to work with. I’m trying to do the right thing here.
“Holy shit. Pavlov?” Dmitriev’s voice heralded his emergence from the jungle, covered in mud and blood. “I didn’t think anyone else had survived.”
Behind him, a dozen survivors emerged, similarly bloody, but with a hardened resolve on their faces that Pavlov did not expect. Such a crushing defeat should have demoralised them, broken their will to fight…but instead, it had only hardened it. Strengthened it.
They took stock of the situation, squared their shoulders, salvaged whatever they could, and then they were ready.
CHAPTER 29
Jungle surrounding Hammerfall
TEN SURVIVORS, INCLUDING ILYUKHINA, CHUCHNOVA, Dmitriev, and himself. Whatever supplies they could salvage from the bodies. Some guns, some grenades, some handmade explosives. The blonde woman’s sword. Three missiles on the SAM battery.
That was all they had.
The SAM battery’s AI drove the rest of the way to its destination, a hill overlooking Hammerfall, without incident. It climbed the slope with barely a complaint, and the group was now small enough that they could all ride it. It was good to take a break from walking.
Dmitriev talked to keep their spirits up. Despite being a UE agent almost certain to be manipulating them all, Pavlov couldn’t help but respect that. A single low pass from a medium bomber had devastated their team and practically doomed them before they even started, but Dmitriev still talked as though they were going to win.
“Did you know,” said Dmitriev, “during the Great Patriotic War, the Soviets built the SU-100 tank destroyer? So named because it carried a 100mm anti-tank gun. Wicked thing! What was delightful about it was the nickname given to it by its crew: Pizdets Vsemu.” The Fucking End To Everything. “That 100mm D-10S cannon was a beast killer…designed to penetrate the gun mantlets of Panthers and Tigers, and even, under ideal conditions, the mighty Königstiger!” Dmitriev smiled like a jackal. “Lions, Tigers, and Bears, oh my. Ahh, if only we had one of those, eh?”
Pavlov twisted around on the SAM battery, squinting at him. “You want a cannon manufactured in 1943?”
“Made by strong Soviets, that thing was.” Dmitriev slapped the hull of the SAM battery. “So much better than this modern piece of shit, eh?”
Ilyukhina snorted. She and Pavlov exchanged a sidelong glance.
“We should sing,” said Dmitriev. “Let’s hear The Tankmen’s Song.”
Pavlov knew of it but didn’t know the words. “Let’s focus on our mission,” he suggested.
No such luck. Dmitriev coughed, cleared his throat, and then he and the other Separatists began to sing, their voices half drowned out by the churning of mud and the whine of the SAM battery’s engine.
“The tanks were rattling like a thunder
The soldiers went to their last fight
And here they carried young commander
With head all broken outright
An armour-piercer hit his vehicle,
So
say good-bye to his Guards crew.
Just four more corpses in the hillside
Will add to fair morning view.
And as the vehicle is burning,
Wait for the shells to detonate.
You want to live and see next morning,
But you’re too weak and it’s too late.
When they extract us from the wreckage,
They’ll put our bodies in a strip.
Then salvos by our turret gunners
Will set us down to our last trip.
Now mournful telegrams are flying
To every friend and relative
To read: “Your son will not be coming,
Nor will he ever get a leave.”
His old mum will sob in a corner,
His dad will wipe a silent tear.
His fiancée will never learn now
What kind of end got her love dear.
And there’s his photo in her old books
Collecting dust in their sad gloom,
His uniform with shoulder-straps on...
And he’s no longer her bridegroom.”
“Fucking hell, that’s depressing,” said Ilyukhina, her mouth hanging open. “That’s the song you sing before a heavy assault against overwhelming odds? A song about Soviet heroes dying for nothing?”
“Well firstly,” said Dmitriev, “they died in the defence of the motherland. That’s not nothing. Secondly, there’s no shame in dying for nothing. Most people die for nothing, and those who die for something find their sacrifice woefully unappreciated by those who still live.”
Pavlov had to concede that point. “Let’s just get this done,” he said, “so we can go back to hating each other.”
Ilyukhina and Dmitriev bickered all the way to the top of the hill, the SAM battery diligently steering itself around the worst of the mud. Pavlov was almost impressed; Ilyukhina apparently had a lot to say and had kept it in all this time.
Bitch, bitch, bitch. Is that what I sound like when I talk? The pair of them were at each other, and he wished they would just stop. He regretted talking politics to the blonde woman earlier, and to Dmitriev.
He regretted a lot of things.
The SAM battery ground to a halt, its electric engine whining as it cooled. On the opposite hill, poking out of the jungle, was the scorched, battered wart known as Hammerfall. Piece of shit building. He hated it now, hated even seeing it. For a brief second, he imagined the explosion that would soon destroy it. That beautiful mushroom cloud…
“Well,” said Pavlov, slightly louder than he needed to, to make sure the other two shut up. “We’re here! Time to stop talking and start working.”
Mercifully, Dmitriev and Ilyukhina stopped their arguing and actually did their jobs. The remaining Separatists fanned out and secured the area. Dmitriev pried open the side of the launcher and started adjusting its targeting radar to lock onto the facility. Ilyukhina began removing the safety bolts holding the missiles in place, throwing them into the mud when they were unscrewed.
Pavlov used the magnification on his visor to scan for threats. His armour’s tiny sensors couldn’t see much further than he could, and if the other spetsnaz were out there, they would know his suit’s limitations. They’d know his limitations.
But the crazy ones didn’t have a missile launcher capable of taking down aircraft from low orbit.
“Ready to do this shit,” said Dmitriev.
“Good up here,” said Ilyukhina.
According to the field manual—an actual, printed, paper manual, which was yellowed from exposure to the wet jungle air—the backblast on the missile was twenty metres long. Dmitriev tried to convince them that they could be as close as ten, but Chuchnova, Pavlov, and Ilyukhina weren’t having any part of that. They stood thirty metres away, crouched down in the mud.
“Everyone ready?” called Dmitriev.
Nobody said no, so Dmitriev tapped his wrist and signalled the launcher to fire.
One after the other, two of the three missiles flared to life and leapt off the railing, streaking toward Hammerfall. The backblast knocked the closer group off their feet, and when it reached Pavlov, he felt the pressure wave hit him like a titan’s fist to his chest, slamming into him with a force that made him gasp.
“Woo hoo!” yelled Dmitriev, sitting upright, his hair blown back and scorched. “See? Told you it was safe!”
The twin exhaust trails from both missiles formed a railway toward Hammerfall. They flew straight and fast, but as he watched, one peeled off to the side and plunged into the jungle, exploding with a muted bang that silenced the animals. It must have been damaged during the airstrike.
Its brother, however, flew true, ploughing into the door and bursting the smart-steel armour like a raw egg. The structure buckled and heaved, then subsided, its outer hull cracked, broken, and exposed.
Pavlov took out his flask and took a deep draught, the vodka burning his throat as it went down. Then he shouldered his rifle and took a deep breath.
“Go! Go! Go!” he shouted, and then the charge began.
CHAPTER 30
Pavlov’s Cell
“A FRONTAL ASSAULT.” YANOVNA’S FACE betrayed little emotion as she tapped away. “That was your plan?”
Pavlov was getting pretty sick of her questions. “It was a legitimate tactic,” he said. “We had the element of surprise and a way to breach the smart-steel.”
“Surely you could have used more finesse,” she said.
Maybe. Maybe not.
“Finesse isn’t everything,” said Chainsaw from the next cell. “Brute force is a suitable solution for a lot of things. If it doesn’t work, you’re not using enough of it.”
“I’m aware, Lieutenant,” said Yanovna. “I went to Officer’s school too. I know all the jokes.”
“But not flight school,” said Chainsaw. “I mean, flying is all about finesse, but also strength, too. Like the crosswinds we encountered when we landed…”
* * *
Cockpit
Dropship Anarchy
Druzhba City at night was even prettier from the upper atmosphere. A view probably not helped by how stuffy the air was getting.
The city’s thousands of lights shone bright and fierce, despite the almost-year of fighting that had engulfed the whole region, and the planet as a whole, but there were gaps—sections of the sea of lights that were dark. Places an artillery shell had landed, a fighter had crashed, or the power network had been disabled. Yet everyone else kept their lights on.
In some way, the light shone with the spirit of the people who were unwilling witnesses to the violence. They hadn’t chosen to be born on Syrene. Separatist or Loyalist, or neither, none of them had asked to have their homes destroyed.
“Landing pattern locked in,” said Anne, her voice emotionless as always. “Drop to angels ten and prepare for VTOL descent.”
“How are we doing for oxygen?” said Chainsaw, tugging at her flight suit’s collar. The ship was descending vertically, straight down. Riding an elevator to the surface of Syrene.
“Not too bad. Our stowaway’s stopped shouting. I had a talk with him earlier, and he seemed to listen to me.”
A persuasive robot. Chainsaw had tried but hadn’t gotten through to the kid. Weird that Anne could. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome. I guess I just have a human touch.”
Jokes. Always with the jokes. “Great,” she said. The lights below spread out, the city growing closer and closer. The ship lurched to one side, caught in a crosswind. She corrected, forcibly bringing the ship back into the landing path. “Anne, just so you know, if we crash during the landing, my ghost will haunt you something terrible. I mean it. There will be haunting.”
“AIs are not programmed to be afraid of ghosts,” said Anne. “Maybe you should let me fly…”
Hell to the absolute fucking no. She’d been saved too much by her computers lately; her pilot’s ego could take very little more. “I got this,” said Chainsaw
, guiding the descending ship through the night sky. “I got this.”
“If you say so,” said Anne.
She wrestled with the controls. The wind was beating the ship around something fierce. “How’s our guest?”
“Why don’t you talk to him yourself?”
Fair enough. Chainsaw reached out and opened the microphone to the passenger compartment.
Yeah, the kid was definitely screaming a lot. High pitched and aggravating.
“Hey, calm down,” Chainsaw said, turning down the volume with one hand.
“Are we going to die? We’re going to die! Oh my God, we’re going to die!”
“We aren’t going to die, kid, just relax. We’re just landing in Druzhba City.”
“Druzhba City?” Truby was practically shrieking now. “No! No! I won’t go back there—I won’t! I fucking won’t!”
Oh, God. She did not have time for this. “Look—”
“No! No! No!”
What a baby. “Okay, okay, look. We have to land—the ship’s damaged, we can’t avoid that—but I promise you. Listen! I promise you. You don’t have to get out, and nobody will come in, okay?”
Truby kept protesting, but Chainsaw cut the microphone and focused on landing. Fortunately, as they descended, the turbulence eased. Six columns of landing lights, like the fingers of some giant, guided Anarchy down toward the surface.
“You think it’ll explode this time?” asked Chainsaw as the lights closed in around her like a cage.
Anne said nothing. The ship gracefully slid onto the landing pad. Damage control teams raced to meet them.
“Guess we’ll be holed up here for a couple of days,” said Chainsaw, unclipping herself and popping open the canopy. Cool, fresh air rushed in and she took in a lungful. “Might as well get comfortable.”
