He glanced at the Pyramid and tapped a button next to his center display to bring up a map of his position. He overlaid it with the projected impact area of the STI and saw that he was between the Pyramid and the outer edge of the impact zone.
He keyed his headset. "Keep moving it back you guys." Another group of carriers scurried around the flanks, trying to get around to the rear of his formation. They were brushing the edge of the impact zone and would drift out of it if they moved much further. "Tighten up the line. Draw them in behind me." All along the line, the Cats angled their track to close their ranks as they continued to march away from him. He centered his control levers and his Cat swayed as the stabilizers strained to keep it from falling over as he brought the behemoth to a halt.
"You need to keep moving there, Major," one of them said.
Walker smiled and slewed the reticle onto another tank that was moving in towards a Cat on the left flank of their line. The carriers halted and discharged more troops. He pulled the trigger. Now that he was standing still, the computer found its firing solution in less than a second and fired the guns at almost point blank range, sending the tank tumbling over the ground with a swirl of orange wrapping around it as it disintegrated.
"Don't worry about it," he said. "Just keep moving them towards the Pyramid."
He slewed his reticle again and dispatched another tank. The loading mechanism clunked into action as the banner on his display flashed LOADING. He quickly counted, realizing he couldn't dispatch the remaining eight tanks on his own.
More importantly, though, he wasn't in optimal position for the STI. As his guns loaded, he pulled back on the left control lever. The leg rose up and swung back while the sound of metal buckling rose up from the right leg straining to slide forward so the Cat could turn. The change in its direction wasn't enough. It was going to take many more steps than she probably had left. "Come on baby," he said, "just a few more."
The left leg clomped back again and he could hear the metal that had started to buckle in the right leg starting to tear, sounding like a bell cracking apart.
The display flashed READY when the Cat yanked sideways as another steel spear tore into his left gun, knocking it off its mount to leave it hanging by electric control cables and hydraulic fluid lines. The graphic for the left gun flashed red on his display.
He pulled the weapons control grip as far left as it would go and the reticle slewed to the edge of his HUD display, but the tanks were already moving too far to the side for his weapons to reach them.
He flipped the display to show the view through the camera mounted behind his cockpit. The Pyramid was still off to the side behind him, but he was slowly moving towards it.
"Close enough," he said, and yanked both control levers back, instructing his Cat to back up in a straight line. The left leg took a smaller step this time. White smoke curled up next to his canopy from the right leg grinding itself towards destruction as it slid back.
Dekker's voice crackled in his headset. "Two Bravo Delta, Enforcer - Major, we're just a few minutes away from the shot. You need to get out of there."
The left leg took another step back, shorter still as it compensated for the shrinking distance the right leg could still move.
"Are my boys out of the way?" he asked.
"They're out of the zone. Can you move any faster?"
The right foot scraped along the ground, black smoke curling up past his cockpit now.
"How many left?" He coughed as the smoke started to seep into his cockpit.
"Four. You've got four Cats left," Dekker said. Walker could hear the tone in Dekker's voice as he tried to make it sound like a good thing. He had always been that way. If he had run out of ammunition, Dekker was the kind of man who would say he could beat the enemy to death with an empty rifle.
Walker's throat squeezed in against itself as more smoke filled the cockpit. He coughed again and said, "That's good."
"You're moving the wrong way. You need to get away from the Pyramid."
"I know."
"Major, you're running out of time. Move yourself clear of the zone. That's an order."
The frame shuddered and the cockpit swayed as another round ripped through the Cat's right leg at the knee and sheered the last of it away. The stump of its leg slammed into the ground and impaled the dried clay below the sand and dirt of the desert floor. The frame rocked back and forth as gyros stabilized it enough to keep it from falling the rest of the way over.
The smoke filling his cockpit was so thick he could barely see the display in front of him. Walker smacked the canopy release plunger. Smoke spilled out of the cockipit as the canopy popped open and slid up on hydraulic struts. He coughed and reached behind him to unstrap the Old Scrolls from the bulkhead. He set the case in his lap and wrapped his hands around the edge.
As the smoke cleared, he saw two Terran Guard troop carriers standing just behind the tanks closing in on the Pyramid and the rest of his Cats. A hunched figure disembarked from one, took a few steps towards him with the help of a walking stick and looked straight into his eyes as his antennae fluttered over his head.
He must not come here.
"Negative, Colonel," Walker said. "Two Bravo Delta is unable to comply at this time."
"Sam! Get the hell out of there."
Walker eyed Shoahn'Fal as he stood behind heat waves rippling across the ground between them. He smiled, knowing that the old priest now stood in the STI impact zone with him. Another figure stepped out from the carrier to stand next to the Shoahn'. General Godfrey glared at him as she stood with her hands on her hips.
"Take the shot, Ben."
He unkeyed the microphone and looked up into the sky. The Shoahn' sun beat down on his face and he closed his eyes, imagining a time when he was a boy and would lift his face to the sun, close his eyes and pretend he was on a world they had called Earth.
He whispered to himself, "Semper fi."
Final Shot
Dekker looked away from the Paladin's crippled Cat and watched the other three continue their retreat as the Second Brigade converged on the Pyramid. He couldn't wait any longer.
He stood up and yelled at the Marines standing guard next to the carriers, "Get over here!"
As the rest scrambled to join Dekker, one of the Marines standing on top of the command carrier smacked his head and pulled his knife from its sheath. He placed the flat of the blade between the antenna post and the flange of the swivel that wouldn't latch. He nodded and the other two eased back from the post. It swayed back, but stopped and then held fast. Satisfied it would hold, they climbed down from the top of the carrier and ran to join the rest as they assembled in front of Dekker.
Jommy peeked out from behind the carrier. The hem of the utility battle dress trousers he had borrowed were folded up past his knee with the fold bloused around his ankle by an elastic band. A field utility blouse hung on him like a tent, the bottom hem hanging down by his knees with the sleeves cut just above his elbow. He and Shahn'Dra stepped out from behind the carrier and walked up to stand at the end of the line.
Dekker stood up and faced them. He caught Jommy's eyes. The boy's face, already aged by the years spent at his father's side tending their fields under the Shoahn' sun, had aged even more since Dekker had seen him in his shelter just days before. Dekker wanted to tell him to go back inside, but the boy's eyes told him that he would not have listened. He looked away and set his gaze on a point in the distance somewhere beyond the men standing in front of him.
"Honor that man," he said. "Present - " He waited for each Marine to unsling his rifle and line it up next to his right leg, holding the sites between his thumb and forefinger. "Hut." In one motion, they hoisted their rifles up and held them in front of their faces to point at the sky.
Dekker turned around and stared down at Walker's crippled Cat. He unlatched the STI grip from his belt and held it out with both hands.
Through his headset, Lt. Simmons reported, "Shot read
y sir. Five seconds." Dekker watched the second hand on his watch sweep the time away and then squeezed the trigger.
In the carrier behind him, Simmons pressed the transmit button to relay the release signal from the STI grip to the satellite they could only hope was in position to receive the signal.
Dekker tapped his headset and said, "Two Bravo Delta, Enforcer Six Actual. Shot. Out."
A hundred miles above, a lone satellite floated through the silence of the space just beyond the outer atmosphere of Shoahn'Tu. Constructed on the orbital factories of the Exodus fleet and hauled across the cosmos to be placed in orbit around Shoahn'Tu, it had sailed quietly for years, waiting for an instruction to fulfill its mission one last time.
The covers protecting its mirrors opened up like the petals of a flower.
Inside a service compartment, Tank valves opened to fill concentric combustion chambers with a mixture of gasses. The valves shut off as the onboard computer measured the mixtures and timed the ignition of arc coils to ignite them. More valves were opened to pass the explosion through a set of nozzles which were controlled by the computer to optimize the flow rate and control the temperature drop as the heated gasses flowed from each chamber and past a series of finely polished mirrors.
For the smallest instant of time, the gasses released their energy states to produce just a flicker of high powered light that shot down through the sky in a flurry of focused rays forming a precise shotgun pattern that blanketed the ground below.
In less than the blink of an eye, the shot was complete and the satellite vented the spent gasses through concentric venting portals to minimize their affect on its orbit. It closed the covers, not knowing that it had spent the last of its fuel to conduct the last STI shot the Shoahn' sky would ever see.
It would be years before its nuclear power system would finally die out and let the systems on board finally sleep, never knowing that they had been built a lifetime before to come to the world of the Shoahn' and forever change the course of - nothing.
Cover Fire
Dekker waited for something - anything - to happen. "Did it fire?" He saw a flash from the corner of his eye and yanked up his field glasses to scan the area around the Pyramid. The three Cats were still walking back as the Terran Guard carriers lined up in front of the Pyramid to establish what looked like a hasty defense. Dekker furrowed his brow as he swept his gaze past the tanks that continued to roll towards the Paladin, pummeling the frame of his Cat with steel slugs. They were close enough to their target that the frame jolted back and forth, like somebody being riddled with bullets but refusing to bleed and fall down. 500 meters away, he saw Godfrey and Shoahn'Fal standing next to her command carrier. Another pulled up next to it, but nobody disembarked. Still sweeping around to his right, he saw it - a column of dust a kilometer wide boiling into the sky. Just below it, the ground sizzled with an orange haze that dipped down into a shallow crater whose edges looked like they had been etched into the ground by a blow torch. If the shot had come a half hour earlier, it would have caught the bulk of the Second Brigade when they first started their attack. Instead, it had trampled a swatch of brush, dirt and rocks into oblivion.
Dekker deflated and let down his field glasses. "Simmons, get out here."
When he heard her footsteps shuffling up behind him, he reached out to hand his field glasses to her without looking. She took them from his hand and looked at the smoking ruins of the crater. Through clenched teeth, he asked, "What the hell happened?"
Simmons let the glasses drop to the ground. "Oh God."
He turned and glared at her. "What?"
"Declination," she said.
Dekker closed his eyes and let out every breath of air in his lungs through his nose as the realization slammed home. He pinched the brow of his nose and said, "The poles shifted two days ago."
"That's right. Preston used a magnetic bearing to align the inclination burn."
"And nobody thought to update the system in the com center."
"We wouldn't have had time anyway," she said. "It's not his fault."
"I know."
"We're not done yet, sir," Simmons said, pointing at Godfrey's carriers. Dekker opened his eyes to see Godfrey and Shoahn'Fal ducking into the command carrier and then head for the Paladin with the other one falling in on their flank.
Shahn'Dra stepped up next to them and said, "He yearns for the Scrolls."
The ladder on Walker's Cat extended itself and jammed into the ground. As he climbed out of the cockpit with the case in his hand and started down the ladder, Dekker snapped his fingers. "Alright, set up a firing line right here. Cover the Major's retreat."
The Marines looked at each other and then blinked at him. "Move!" he yelled. The Marines looked at each other again and then moved up to the crest of the ridge and lay down in a line with their R-51 rifles pointed at the Paladin's Cat.
Simmons climbed on top of her carrier. She unlatched the machine gun mounted in the cupola and called over one of her Marines. "Corporal, set up the Ma Deuce right in the center there as our base of fire." She grunted and pulled the weapon free. Cradling it in both arms, she lowered it to the corporal and then hopped off the carrier while he lugged the weapon to the crest of the ridge.
She unslung her rifle and lay prone next to Dekker.
"What do you make the range to be, Lieutenant?" one of them asked.
"She peered down the site of her barrel and twisted a windage knob to raise the rear site. "I'd say about 200 meters."
"This is where you recon boys get to show the rest of us how it's done," Dekker said. "Jommy, go to the track and get my plasma rifle."
Jommy waved a salute and said, "yessir", then scrambled back to the carrier.
"And bring me the belt with the square black boxes in it." Dekker picked up his field glasses and brushed off the dirt. He put the strap over his neck and let them hang as he watched Godfrey's carriers rumble towards Walker's wounded Cat.
Hearing the sound of something scraping along the ground behind him, Dekker turned around to see Jommy dragging the plasma rifle with both hands while the cartridge belt flopped around his neck like a dead animal.
Dekker took the weapon, extended its bipod and set it on the ground next to Simmons. He crouched down in front of Jommy and said, "Now, I want you to get inside the track and stay there until I tell you it's alright to come out. Understand?"
"Yes sir." Looking dejected, the boy turned around and traipsed back to the carrier. He opened the passenger door and clambered inside. After closing the door behind him, he turned his face to the window embedded in its thick steel frame and peered back at Dekker.
He didn't want Jommy to see what was going to happen, but he knew he couldn't make the boy look away. He nodded and smiled, then jutted his finger at the boy, reminding him to stay put. Jommy nodded: I'll be a good boy.
Dekker turned around and felt the smile drain from his face as he watched the carriers continue their approach towards Walker. "They're kind of moving slow, aren't they?"
"That's because they're waiting to make sure the rest are in position to keep him cut off," Simmons said. She pointed at the tanks streaking across the desert floor to join up with the carriers assembled in front of the Pyramid.
"Alright. Lieutenant, when I give the word, light up those two tracks with the Ma Deuce. The rest of you wait until they dismount and then pin those bastards to the ground."
He tapped his headset. "Two Bravo Delta. Major, can you hear me?" Walker was at the bottom of the ladder and didn't react as he turned to start running.
"I don't think he can hear us. Let's help him out." He flopped down next to his plasma rifle, unsnapped the flap to one of the cartridge pouches and smacked a cartridge into the action of his rifle. He shouldered the weapon and trained the sites on the carriers. "Alright, Lieutenant, light 'em up."
Simmons smacked the feed tray cover of her M2, making sure it was latched over the ammunition belt and thumbed the paddle trigger. The cla
nking burst of three rounds filled the air as smoke blasted from the barrel and its volley of bullets slammed against the lead carrier. Satisfied she had the range; she pummeled the carrier with a five-round burst, paused for a moment, and hit it again.
Sparks chipped off the side of the carrier as it started to swerve in reaction to the bullets raking along its side. The vehicle sped up and then slowed down, turning one direction and then the next. Simmons tracked the vehicle, adjusted her aim and fired again.
A patchwork of shredded metal formed along the side of the vehicle as the bullets ripped into it and compelled its occupants to do something besides sit inside in what was quickly becoming a moving coffin.
The vehicle slid to a stop and the rear hatch flopped open. Terran Guards scampered out and formed a circle around the vehicle with the barrels of their rail guns pointing out as they searched for their tormentors.
The rest of the Marines in Dekker's firing line opened up with the piercing blast of their R-51 long barrel rifles. Two Terran Guards floundered and then pitched over as his Marines found the range and homed in on their targets. The ground just in front of the crest of the ridge erupted with puffs of dirt and debris as the Terran Guard returned fire.
Crouching underneath his Cat, Walker yanked his head around to look at Dekker and then started to run up the slope towards their position. The second carrier turned hard, digging its wheels into the ground as it veered towards him and lunged forward to chase him down.
Simmons swung her weapon to track the second carrier and opened fire with a long burst. Sparks splattered the front of the vehicle as she walked the line of bullets into the windshield. The .50 caliber rounds from her M2 ripped ragged holes in the transparent plastic that could stop most bullets. Blood splashed against the plastic from the inside and the driver slammed back against his seat. The wheels yanked hard and the carrier skidded across the ground and flopped over on its side.
Troops emerged from the rear and knelt down in a loose formation, pointing their rifles at Dekker's line. One of them pointed at the Paladin and then yelled something. Dekker couldn't hear the voice, but he knew what it was saying.
The Terran Mandate Page 25
