Michael grinned. "Bad break, though let me tell you, walking out of here is no fun, so let's hope the NRA keeps the Hammers occupied. Chief Bienefelt?"
"Ready, sir," Widowmaker's latest crew member replied from the weapons systems station. "Let's hope we meet a few Hammers. I'm in the mood to dispatch a few to meet that damn Kraa of theirs."
"Amen," Chief Fodor muttered, his body, awkward in the bulky combat space suit, hunched forward over his holovid screen, eyes locked on the screen, watching to make sure Widowmaker behaved itself.
"Ferrite Four, this is Fractal Six," Adrissa said. "Stand by."
"Here we go, folks," Michael said.
"Ferrite Four, this is Fractal Six. Immediate execute Bravo-1, stand by… execute!"
Michael fed power to Widowmaker's belly thrusters; slowly, reluctantly the lander lifted off and he started to ease it out of the ravine, its holocams tracking Alley Kat and Hell Bent as they followed suit, their huge bulk emerging like alien machines from enormous clouds of steam boiled off the ravine floor by the white-hot plasma from landers' engines.
"That'll get someone's attention," Ferreira muttered when Widowmaker cleared the ravine and started to accelerate hard away to the east.
Michael nodded. "Sure will," he said. The weather was far from perfect. Unlike the week before, there was no convenient layer of cloud to protect the landers from wandering battlesats, only a thin layer of high altocumulus, enough to take the edge off the Hammers' lasers but not enough to shut them out.
Proof of which arrived seconds later. "We've been locked up," Carmellini shouted over the screeching of alarms, the threat plot erupting as space-based radars illuminated the lander.
Michael did not need to think; he reacted. He rammed the engines to full power and slammed the lander hard over to one side and an instant later back again just before the air outside was torn apart by a burst from the battlesat's pulsed ultraviolet laser. "Close," someone said.
"Have faith, folks," Michael said. "The armor on these-"
A sharp crack ran through the lander. "For chrissakes, shut those damn alarms off," he shouted, and threw the lander left and right, zigzagging in a frantic race for safety, running hard for the protection of a thicker patch of clouds a few kilometers ahead. "Damage?" he snapped, handing the lander over to Mother; he was a good pilot, but the AI would do a better job of keeping the lander under what little cloud there was.
"Minor. Atmospheric attenuation's doing a good job for us," Chief Fodor said. He flinched when another flat chattering crack resonated through the lander, a long one this time, while the battlesat kept the laser on target.
"Roger," Michael said. "Sensors. Any air activity?"
"Yes, but not directed at us. I have multiple ground-attack landers from"-Carmellini stopped when yet another stream of laser pulses hit Widowmaker-"from Amokran marine base inbound on track for Chalidze."
"Roger," Michael said, allowing himself to relax a touch; the NRA's diversionary attack was having the desired effect. "Nothing from Besud or O'Connor?"
"Nothing yet, sir."
"Anna. Sitrep."
"NRA confirms the assault on Chalidze is under way. Initial reports confirm little organized resistance. Hammer air from Amokran will be on task over Chalidze in thirty minutes. NRA confirms multiple Locusts."
"Roger." He hoped the NRA withdrew before the Hammers arrived. The Locust ground-attack lander was big, fast, and tough. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the NRA's shoulder-launched Goombah missiles would bounce off the Hammer landers-they might as well throw pebbles at them-and the one Klaxon ground-attack lander they'd managed to get airborne would not be much help, either. Their best chance was to get the hell away. He scanned the plots and eased back on the throttles; screaming along at full power was all very well, but they would soon have to start decelerating. Thus far, their frantic run to safety was going to plan. Behind Widowmaker, Alley Kat and Hell Bent ducked and weaved to avoid the incoming battlesat lasers but with less success, their greater mass making them easier targets. Not that the lasers bothered the heavy landers. Their armor made Widowmaker's look like tissue paper.
"Command, tac. Four minutes to run. The NRA has confirmed we are cleared in."
"Roger, tac. What-"
Alarms screamed. "Oh, shit," Michael hissed as the AI slammed Widowmaker over onto its back in a desperate dive to earth. Missiles! Where the fu-
Widowmaker's flight deck filled with the racket of cannons and lasers, her automated defenses letting go with everything in a frantic effort to destroy the pair of missiles streaking toward them. Michael had enough time to register that fact before, with a sickening, shuddering crunch, the lander was thrown bodily upward.
No sooner had it started than it was over. Feverishly Michael checked Widowmaker's status boards. To his shock, the lander was untouched, its systems nominal, the good news confirmed by a thumbs-up from Chief Fodor.
"What the hell happened there?" he asked, unable to keep the shock out of his voice.
"Hold on, sir," Ferreira said, a tremor in her voice. "Yes. Looks like we ran into a trap. Bastard Hammers knew we were coming. Ground-launched missiles; sensor AI says Gordians. I have absolutely no idea how we kept them out."
"Luck," Michael said, grim-faced. "Pure, blind luck… and a weapons AI paying attention. Alley Kat and Hell Bent?"
"Stand by," Ferreira hissed in shock. "Alley Kat's damaged. Airburst off its stern damaged the port main engine. Hold on… yes, power's down, but it'll make it. Hell Bent's undamaged. Looks like the Hammers didn't have much time to set up, and they were too far off our track to get a good shot at us. Those Gordians are hopeless at high crossing rates, and we were moving very low and fast. Otherwise…"
Anna shook her head. "Doesn't make sense," she said. "Why wait? Why didn't they take us on the ground?"
"Don't know," Michael said, shaking his head. "Okay, folks, we'll worry about that later. Let's get dirtside. Tac, we good to land?"
"Affirmative. NRA approach control has cleared Alley Kat in first, followed by Hell Bent, then us."
"Roger that. All stations, get your neuronics back online. The Hammers know where we are."
Shaken by the Hammer ambush, Michael had the common sense to let Mother bring the lander in; AI or not, she was ten times the pilot he was. He watched the forward holocams track Alley Kat and Hell Bent while they reduced speed, their noses rising for landing. Ahead, the gaping mouth of a cave loomed; Michael knew it was big enough to take the landers, but it would be a squeeze. More unsettling was the ground around the cave entrance. It looked like it had been worked over by a giant earth-bot, the ground scarred by countless craters and littered with the shattered remnants of trees, soil, and small debris scoured away by lander blasts. The cliff into which the cave entrance was cut was just as battered, whole slabs of limestone blasted off to leave pale scars hundreds of square meters in size.
"Command, sensors. NRA reports kinetic weapons inbound, time of flight forty-five seconds. They suggest we expedite."
Michael swore. The Hammer's command of space exposed every square centimeter of the planet to the threat of having tungsten-carbide slugs the mass of a small crowbar dropped on one's head. The best defense was to move fast, to be somewhere else when the slug arrived. Silently he urged Alley Kat and Hell Bent on. They were now hovering, the ground underneath the landers erupting into a thick, roiling cloud of ionized driver mass, dust, and dirt that swallowed them altogether before they entered the cave mouth. Widowmaker wasted no time; it moved through the cloud and into the cave, sudden darkness the only indication that they were inside.
The landers taxied on into the darkness, twisting and turning to follow the laser-smoothed floor of an ancient cave. Michael tried not to flinch when the tunnel walls shook from the kinetic slug strike; large lumps of limestone broken free by the impact shock wave crashed onto the lander's armor, a stark reminder of just how vulnerable the tunnels were to kinetic weapons and tacnuke bunker busters.
On and on they went until they were deep underground. Michael allowed himself to relax only when Mother brought the lander to a halt and started to shut down its systems, the hundreds of meters of limestone overhead more than enough to keep out the most determined Hammer attack.
"Not before time," he said with considerable feeling, throwing off his safety straps and removing his helmet. "Anna, can you liaise with the NRA. Check that their local security detail has the tunnel secured behind us and see what they want to do about off-loading the cargo." Anna nodded; she still looked shocked. "And Jayla, can you finish the shutdown? I want to see how the hell the Hammers knew we were coming."
"Sir."
The air outside the lander was thick with dust laced heavily with the unmistakable smell of ionized driver mass from the landers' engines. Michael jumped down and made his way past Hell Bent to Alley Kat; her enormous bulk loomed black and menacing over him. As he approached, red lights started to flash and the cargo ramp hissed down, thumping into the ground with a dull thud. Captain Adrissa walked down, followed by Rasmussen and Solanki. Anger blazed in their eyes.
"You thinking what I'm thinking, sir?" Michael said.
"We are. Some traitorous sonofabitch tipped the Hammers off, and we think we might know who it was. Follow me."
"Oh," was all Michael said. Adrissa pushed past him and made her way back to Hell Bent. Scrambling to catch up, Michael followed. When they made it there, it was obvious that something bad was happening. Two of Kallewi's marines had a man-Leading Spacer Sasaki, Michael's neuronics told him-grasped firmly, a small crowd of curious spacers standing in a loose circle around them.
"Lieutenant Acharya!" Adrissa barked.
"Yes, sir?" Hell Bent's command pilot replied, his face a tangled confusion of surprise and shock.
"Last time I looked, you were Hell Bent's ranking officer," Adrissa snarled. "So take charge of this rabble. You understand me, spacer?"
"Yes, sir," Acharya stammered, clearly startled by the ferocity of Adrissa's verbal attack. "Yes, sir. Understood."
"I hope so. You two," Adrissa said to the two marines. "Come with me and bring that man with you."
Without another word, Adrissa turned and started to walk back to Alley Kat. She managed only a few meters before Vaas and his chief of staff appeared out of the gloom.
"You and your ships okay, Captain?" Vaas said.
"We are, thank you, General," Adrissa replied, grim-faced, "but I think we have a problem. Is there somewhere we can interrogate one of our people?"
"There's a small cave 50 meters past your first lander," Cortez said. "It has lighting and a table and chairs."
"That'll do. Take Leading Spacer Sasaki there," Adrissa said to the two marines. "I'll be along presently."
She turned back to Vaas and Cortez. "I'm sorry, sirs, but it seems we may have a traitor among us."
Vaas nodded. "We suspected that much. The Hammers were tipped off. They never operate in that area. There's no point, 'cause we don't, either. Seems you were lucky, though, very lucky. I think they received word too late to lay a proper trap. Otherwise…"
"Quite so," Adrissa said. "Anyway, we'll get to the bottom of this."
"I think you will, but I want one of my security people to sit in. Maria Dalaki. She'll be able to verify any Hammer-related information you uncover. She'll be with you in ten minutes."
"That's fine, General. Let me get things started here."
"When you're ready, just follow the signs to the NRA's command center," Vaas said. "We call it ENCOMM for short; easier to say than NRA Command. I'll be there. Nine hundred meters up the tunnel, you'll find a sled station off to your left. It's marked. Take a sled heading west and get off at the end of the line. It's obvious; you can't get lost, and for Kraa's sake, if you open a blast door, make sure to close it."
"Blast door?" Adrissa said with a puzzled frown.
"The Hammers like to push missiles carrying thermobaric warheads into our tunnels," Vaas said. "We get most of them, but some slip through, hence the blast doors. We've learned the hard way that fuel-air explosions and tunnels are a bad combination."
"Ah, right. I'll make sure everyone knows that. If it's okay, I'll send Helfort on ahead."
"Fine. I'll have someone meet him," Vaas said. "Okay, unless there's anything else, I'll see you back at ENCOMM."
Adrissa watched Vaas and Cortez walk away before turning to Rasmussen. "I need two officers with interrogation training to get the truth out of Sasaki and a third to witness the proceedings. If there's enough evidence that Sasaki betrayed us, I'm court-martialing the bast-I'm court-martialing him."
"Yes, sir. I'll get onto it."
Adrissa waved Michael over. "You get to the command center, ENCOMM or whatever it is they call it," she said. "We need someone they trust to stay close; at the moment that's probably only you. Your neuronics online?"
"They are, sir."
"Okay, if you need me, just comm me. I'm going to try to get a neuronics network set up."
"Sir."
Michael set off. He had not gone far when Anna commed him.
"Hi, Anna. What's happening?"
"I've been pinged to be part of the interrogation team." Her avatar grimaced; clearly, she had no stomach for the task.
"Didn't I tell you never, ever to volunteer for anything, Anna?" Michael shook his head. "Never!"
"Volunteer? Me? Hell, no, but Adrissa's nothing if not efficient. We downloaded our service records when we arrived in 5209. Knew I should never have agreed to go on that damn interrogation course. Anyway, that's where I'll be."
"When you're done, I'll be in the NRA command center-sorry, ENCOMM-or back onboard Widowmaker."
"Okay."
After wrestling with two heavy and uncooperative blast doors, Michael found the station down a narrow tunnel. A westbound sled waited. He tried not to let the state of the machine-a double car capable of carrying ten people-concern him as he climbed in and pushed the button. With a screech, the battered antique started off, accelerating at an impressive rate, racketing down the laser-cut tunnel. According to Michael's neuronics, the sled traveled 25 kilometers before it slowed, emerging into a small lobby before decelerating to a halt in front of an NRA trooper who, like all of them, was dressed in faded combat overalls and carried a well-worn assault rifle in immaculate condition.
"Lieutenant Helfort?" the man said.
"That's me." Michael replied, climbing out of the sled.
"This way."
Michael followed the man out into a concourse so large that the cave roof was lost in the darkness; it was busy with NRA troopers in well-worn combat overalls. The command center was right ahead of him, guarded by four heavily armed troopers behind a crude security desk.
Even though they must have been briefed to expect him, the mouths of all four troopers were half-open in amazement as he approached. He was probably the first real, live spawn-of-the-devil Fed they had ever seen, Michael realized.
"Lieutenant Helfort, here to see General Vaas," his escort said.
"Ah, yes," one of the troopers said, recovering himself with an effort. "If you'd please carry this with you at all times"-the trooper handed Michael a small card on a neck lanyard-"that'll identify you. Please go in. Ask for Major Hok."
"Thank you…?"
"Corporal Vasili Banic, sir. 556th Regiment, NRA."
"Thank you, Corporal Banic."
"Sir."
ENCOMM took Michael by surprise. He expected the operations room from which all NRA operations were planned and controlled to be something out of ancient history: state boards covered in handwritten information, maps, telephones, paper, all the things he remembered from his one and only visit to the Museum of Twentieth-Century Warfare. How wrong could he be? He stared at the tidy arrays of holovids, wall-mounted in front of neat ranks of workstations, the room filled with the susurrus of quiet conversation underscored by the hiss of air-conditioning. Apart from the telephone handsets scattered e
verywhere-neuronics were proscribed by Hammer of Kraa doctrine, and head-mounted microvid comm sets were obviously scarce-it might have been an old, battered, and well-worn Fed command post.
A woman spotted him and waved him over. Save for a pair of embroidered rank badges, she was indistinguishable from all the other NRA troopers he had seen: the same buzz cut, the same worn combat overalls, the same lean and hungry look on a face stretched tight by privation and hard work.
"Major Hok, sir?" he said.
"That's me," she said, shaking Michael's outstretched hand. "I'm on General Vaas's personal staff. Welcome."
"This is impressive, sir."
Hok's eyes narrowed; Michael cursed under his breath when he realized how patronizing he must have sounded. "Sorry," he said. "I didn't mean, you know…"
Hok's face cracked into a broad smile before she surprised him by laughing out loud. "Relax," she said. "We're not that precious, you know." She led him by the arm to a group of empty workstations set into a large recess complete with its own suite of wall-mounted holovids.
"This'll be your space. Take a seat, we'll get your authorizations organized, and then I'll show you how the system works."
"Okay, but one question."
"Shoot."
"The Chalidze operation. How'd it go?"
"Okay, let's do that first. Hold on… right, here we are."
Michael watched while Hok brought one of the holovids online and a three-dimensional representation of the Chalidze ordnance depot popped into view.
"Things went to plan," Hok said. "Supported up by an air-defense company and combat engineers, we infiltrated the 22nd's Fourth Battalion into position over a forty-eight-hour period before the attack. They hid up here"-she stabbed a marker at a cluster of heavily wooded ravines a kilometer south of the depot-"and moved up to the start line two hours before the operation kicked off. One klick to the east, and close to the main access road into the depot, were the transport elements… that's code for NRA troopers, by the way." She threw a grin at Michael. "We may not have many trucks," she continued, "but by Kraa, we've got plenty of troopers, and it's amazing how much they can carry."
The battle for Commitment planet hw-4 Page 19
