Nothing to worry about except us, Lilja thought grimly.
She’d done some air-to-air work in the sims, but most of the practices had focused on air-to-ground attacks. Control had believed they would be helping to break up concentrations of the enemy’s seemingly endless ground forces, not going head to head with aerospace craft.
“You think we have any chance?” Anna asked as they crossed twelve thousand meters altitude.
“These are gunships, not fighters,” Lilja replied. “Besides, they’re used to fighting in space. They’re not aerodynamic and they won’t have the nuanced reactions we do. Don’t you listen to the briefings?”
“They didn’t choose me for my memory, boss. That’s what I have you for.”
“What did they choose you for, then?”
“My outstanding good looks…and my dogfighting scores.”
“Fair enough. I’m going to let you take lead on this one. Leveling out.” Lilja flattened her climb at twenty thousand meters and went to supercruise. The scramjets were happy up here in the thin air, and the two drones quickly passed Mach 5, three more two-ships following them.
Her HUD showed a mass of gunships ahead, more than she could easily count – twenty, thirty? Mixed feelings – worry at the possible defensive fire, eagerness to destroy the enemy – roiled in her gut. She imagined a World War Two German fighter pilot must have experienced similar emotions when he spotted a formation of Allied B-17s coming to bomb his homeland.
“Envelope in ten, Anna. Lock them up and launch. I’ll cover you and give them round two.” Lilja saw the icons of eight Scourge gunships change color and shape to show Anna’s radar had locked them, scanning electronically and sending hard pulses against those to help her Viper missiles guide.
As soon as the computer told them they were in range – about forty kilometers – Anna ripple-launched her Vipers by twos. Brief puffs of smoke marked them, and then tiny dots of light as their rockets accelerated and climbed. By the time they reached the enemy, the weapons would be diving on them from above.
Lilja locked up eight different targets. Not all of their missiles would strike, but sending two at once risked wasting the weapons. She watched as the icons merged on her HUD and cheered as several of them were marked as kills.
“Request permission to bail out and respawn,” she sent to Control.
The doctrine she’d been taught said she should launch her missiles, and then move her consciousness back to a waiting, fully armed bird. The one she’d abandoned would turn back for home under computer control to rearm, preserving the drones.
Short-range missiles were far cheaper than aircraft.
“Denied,” Control replied. “Those gunships are already pounding Moscow. You will attack with guns until you must respawn. We have moved the spare drone orbits in to 100 kilometers. Hakkaa palle!”
“Hakkaa palle!” Lilja replied automatically.
“Hack them down” indeed, she thought, though it’s irony indeed that we Finns are helping those Russian pigs.
Relations between the two countries had always been frosty, having never recovered from Stalin’s invasion of 1939-1940. Though outgunned and outmanned, the Finns had humbled the arrogant and well-equipped Red Army using ski troops, dog sleds carrying excellent German-supplied weapons, and the heartfelt desire to protect their homes.
They had drenched the snow with Russian blood.
“Anna, we’re pressing the attack with guns. Now’s your chance to show me what you can do.”
“With pleasure, boss. Try to keep up.”
Lilja saw her wingman’s engine flare to full power and her drone pitch up into a climb. “Anna, watch your ceiling,” she said. The Goshawks became unstable to fly and ran out of air to breathe above twenty-five thousand meters.
“No worries.” Anna leveled out, and then rolled inverted and pulled down in a split-S maneuver. “Hakkaa Palle!” she screamed as she dove, firing the Goshawk’s pulse cannon at the top of one of the Scourge gunships.
The target was huge compared to the tiny drones attacking them, and its armor resisted the sleet of ferrocrystal penetrators until Anna found a soft spot, perhaps a thruster port. The gunship wobbled and began to pitch, ceasing its plasma torpedo bombardment.
“Good shot!” Lilja followed Anna down, selecting another gunship and peppering it with rounds. She wasn’t so accurate, or perhaps lucky, as her wingman. Her shots had no visible effect before she dove past.
Once below, she found herself within a blinding deluge of plasma torpedoes superheating the air around her. She had just enough time to haul upward on the controls before her VR blanked out, to be replaced by the blue screen of death. “Dammit,” she mumbled, knowing she’d been shot down.
RESPAWN flashed in front of her eyes, bringing its usual jarring feeling of disorientation, and then she found her senses connected to another Goshawk. This one orbited 100 kilometers from the fight, fully armed and comfortably fuelled. She checked for Anna’s location and saw that she’d made it through the barrage, and was already in attack position again.
Crap. Guess I’ll be buying the drinks tonight, Lilja thought as Control assigned her a new wingman and she turned her Goshawk toward the enemy.
***
Brigadier Kragov roared into his radio, “Hold your formation, you dogs! Continue the advance, no matter what!”
Plasma torpedoes fell from above like old-fashioned bombs. The packets of hot energy were powerful, but thankfully lacking terminal guidance. They arrived like hammers of the Devil, but unless they struck one of his vehicles directly, they could be endured.
Great gouts of dirt fountained around him. The Troll in front of his tipped and fell into the hole gouged by a torpedo. “Go around!” Kragov told his driver. “Continue the advance!” The other tank would have to get out of its own mess if it could. The 4th Guards needed to move up to relieve pressure on Moscow.
Abruptly, the bombardment slackened. “4th Guards command, this is Air Base 46 Control, come in,” he heard in Finnish-accented Russian through his headset. Surprisingly, the CyberComm network had routed the high-level call directly to him, as programmed.
“This is Kragov. What is it, 46 Control?” Whatever the sneaky Finns wanted, he’d have to swallow his pride for the moment. Shepparton had deemed they would control the air cover, and he needed it badly.
“Air Wing 46 has attritted the enemy gunships more than fifty percent, and should finish them off within ten mikes. Unfortunately, we will not be able to provide close air support due to severe depletion of our resources.”
“I should have known you would fail to support us as you promised.”
“Brigadier,” the voice on the other end turned sarcastic, “you are free to lodge a complaint through channels. I will note your preferences, and in the future, Air Wing 46 will make sure to avoid clearing the skies above your division in favor of dying with you on the deck. Hakkaa Palle! Control out.”
“Bastard! I will –”
“Brigadier, they have left the net. Shall I try to get them back?” his CyberComm NCO asked.
Kragov seethed for a moment, and then mastered himself. “No. Give me a tactical view.” On the jouncing screen in front of him – Trolls were not known for their interior space, not even the command version – he saw his division advancing raggedly. He spent the next half hour correcting their formation.
As their arrangement again approached approved doctrine, both their rate of advance and their kill-to-casualty ratio improved dramatically. Whenever a battalion of Scourges appeared, they were quickly slaughtered by massed antipersonnel fire from Trolls and IFVs.
Ironically, their march was aided by the lack of forest. The denuded rolling hills and shallow rivers made for excellent tank country.
When a larger concentration of the enemy presented itself, he ordered a brief halt and called for immediate fire from his artillery and mortars. The Scourges knocked down guided missiles with surprising accuracy, but seemed to have
little defense against hundreds of incoming dumb shells other than to attack, attack, attack.
The rain of steel would break up the enemy concentrations, allowing his massed armor to slaughter them as they came. Now and again the bugs would reach his lines and he would lose some assets – the Scourgelings could easily snip smaller barrels from their turrets with their powerful jaws, or rip treads from their drive wheels – but with tenacity and discipline, his IFVs and their deployed infantry would surround the penetration and reduce it from three sides.
With each loss, his frontage diminished, but Kragov ruthlessly reorganized on the move and maintained proper formation. Only by rigid adherence to established doctrine could they win through.
Eventually, after almost a third of his vehicles lay dead or immobilized in a long trail behind him, the end of the battle for Moscow crept onto his tactical overview. Kragov grabbed his binoculars and opened his hatch to stand protruding to the waist from the turret. Only by personally viewing the field could a tank commander truly understand the battle around him.
Ten kilometers ahead, he could see dust and movement, a seething carpet of bugs, with their Centurion cyborgs and Soldiers standing taller among the mindless Scourgelings. Lasers and plasma weapons flashed, some individually and some in volleys, aiming at the Russian lines.
South of the enemy – beyond them – Kragov could see concrete-and-steel bunkers. Such materials could barely resist the high-tech weaponry wielded by the Scourge, but ferrocrystal was too valuable for mere fortifications. Earthen berms and tangles of wire further shielded the defending troops, but the brigadier could see many layers of trenches had already been overrun.
A burst of cluster munitions exploded like deadly popcorn among the bugs, and then another, showing some artillery still operated, but the fire was not nearly as dense as it should be. The gunships’ plasma torpedoes must have taken out much of it before they’d been neutralized by the Finns. Grudgingly, he admitted respect for the bourgeois weasels; they’d always been cunning runts, even if they didn’t have the backbone and fighting qualities of the true Russian worker and soldier.
Kragov took a deep breath and let it out, relieved that 4th Guards had arrived in time. The bugs were pressing the defenses hard, but the city had been made into a fortress, with every one of its ring-shaped roads turned into a killing field, every ugly concrete apartment block a bastion, every bridge and overpass a fortification. Millions of mines had been strewn everywhere without even bothering to hide them; the Scourgelings seemed blind to such nuances and ran straight through regardless, blowing legs off in the process.
Unfortunately, they seemed to be able to keep attacking with three legs, or even two, ignoring wounds that would have been deadly to a human.
Addressing his troops on the division network so his voice would reach everyone with a comlink or field radio, Kragov said, “This is the battle we seek, comrades. Moscow is in front of us and millions of the enemy bar our way. Our brothers and sisters in the trenches are fighting valiantly, but they cannot hold forever. On our left and on our right, other divisions also attack, but they are not 4th Guards. They are not Kantemir. They do not have our proud history, to which we now add another shining chapter. Advance!”
As one, his array of armor, Trolls in the lead, rolled forward on heavy treads. Defying his fear, Kragov stood up again in his hatch, glorying in the thunder of the battlefield. Even with his sound-cancelling helmet, he felt deafened by the sonic shockwave as his tank’s main gun fired, sending a round screaming out to smash a Centurion cyborg a thousand meters distant.
The enemy turned to face him, the teeming mass of Scourgelings rushing toward his division at frightening speed. His mortars and artillery began dropping salvoes among them immediately, for they knew their duty within the synchrony of the doctrine of battle. Each shell blew a dozen bugs to smithereens, throwing insectoid body parts in all directions.
As the enemy advanced through the curtain of fire, Troll and IFV heavy antipersonnel turrets opened up at six hundred meters, slaughtering the Scourgelings by the hundreds.
Unfortunately, thousands, tens of thousand came on.
At three hundred meters, the deployed infantry began to fire light machineguns and assault rifles, adding their weight of metal. Still, the creatures came on, strangely silent among the gore and death. Kragov found it surreal and strange that they did not scream or growl or even cough.
At one hundred meters, though, he could hear a sound like a million sticks being dumped from the back of a truck, or the chirping of crickets magnified and deepened by orders of magnitude. He’d never been this close to the things, never wanted to be, and he found himself unable to move, staring paralyzed at the ravening enemy.
Kragov didn’t feel afraid, exactly; death held no power over him, for he’d long ago decided to die on the battlefield – if not this one, then some other, future arena of war. Rather, he found himself fascinated with the enemy, and overwhelmed by the thought that he might be eaten.
By some visceral instinct, Kragov pulled his sidearm from its holster and emptied its magazine at the advancing enemy. His puny bullets had no visible effect, but he reloaded mechanically and continued to fire, a guttural growl escaping from his throat.
“Brigadier, you must button up!” Kragov’s CyberComm NCO tugged frantically at his waistband. “We cannot lose you!”
Abruptly, Kragov came to his senses. Stuffing his battle fury back inside his heart, he grabbed the handle of the hatch cover and slammed it down, dogging it just as his Troll rocked from another crash of its main gun.
“Transmit to the mortar teams. Drop antipersonnel rounds directly on our front lines, danger close! We cannot let them run amuck among us. After one minute, walk the barrage forward, to the south. At that time, the infantry will advance to close with the enemy.”
“Yes, Brigadier!” The CyberComm NCO typed rapidly into his battlenet keyboard; encrypted text was much more reliable than voice in the midst of combat.
A moment later, explosions erupted all around the tank, antipersonnel mortar shells zeroed in atop the 4th Guards leading edge. The armored vehicles would withstand the small blasts, but the Scourgelings would not.
On his screen, Kragov watched as his infantry units walked forward in assault lines not so different from those of the First World War, or even Napoleonic times, shooting as they moved. The mortar barrage shattered the enemy, leaving most of the individual Scourgelings wounded, meat for massed rifle fire.
With that strange abruptness each combat soldier knows, a peace descended over the battlefield as every enemy within a thousand meters of 4th Guards was finished off.
“Sort yourselves out, comrades!” Kragov roared over the division net. “You have five minutes to reset proper formation before we resume the advance. You have done well. The road to Moscow is open. For the glory of Mother Russia, let us finish this!”
***
Lieutenant Bokorin’s lips peeled back from his teeth as he screamed, “FIRE!” His militia – sorry, Fortress Infantry – platoon pulled their triggers as fast as their fingers could move. Their rifles did not have a full-automatic setting, the better to limit ammunition expenditure by panicked green troops.
But they could hardly miss as the wave of Scourgelings crawled in herky-jerky motion toward his lines like crack-addled army ants. Yellowish blood and pieces of exoskeleton sprayed into the air under the wet smack of bullets, keeping the enemy at bay for the moment.
The bugs kept coming in uncountable mobs, crawling over their dead and through the barriers of tangled steel while Soldiers advanced cautiously in a line, firing over the Scourgelings heads. Beside Bokorin, Anzhelika, the one he’d called a slut in the privacy of his own head, wailed suddenly, her face a mass of burns as a laser strike caused her skin and eyes to boil. She thrashed on the ground until someone stuck a preloaded ampule of narcotic into her, and then she stilled.
Behind him, in the city, he could see plasma torpedoes falling li
ke rain, throwing up gouts of flame and debris. Fire brigade sirens added their wails to the cacophony, and Bokorin wondered what would be left of his beloved city when they had killed all the aliens.
Turning back to the front, he lifted his pulse gun. Ignoring the oncoming wave of bugs and summoning all of the skill his tactical instructors had beaten into him – and that wasn’t an euphemism, for they’d used their batons freely on those who did not measure up – he drew a bead on one of the Soldiers and took a deep breath. Resting the weapon on the edge of the trench, he let the air out of his lungs to their natural pause, placed the crosshairs center mass of the four-armed creature, and stroked the trigger.
His weapon kicked him in the shoulder despite its shock-absorbing design, the tiny fusion explosion of a deuterium-tritium pellet driving a needle of ferrocrystal at speeds high enough to cause the air to glow with friction. The flash speared the Soldier through its middle, causing it to collapse and grow still.
Shifting his aim to another, he shot it dead before a flurry of laser heat blinded him, peeled off the skin around his inadequate protective goggles and lit his hair on fire beneath his helmet.
Nothing but pain existed, so much so that he barely felt the pinch as a syringe stabbed into his arm and the world went away.
When he awoke, he was still blind, but otherwise felt human. “Stay still, sir,” he heard the voice of Timofei Stanchyk, the platoon’s medic. “You are healing rapidly with the infusion of nutrient solution, but you must not move until you regain your eyesight.”
Bokorin wondered what it must have been like in the days before the coming of the Meme. The history classes he’d been force-fed had emphasized the sufferings and horror of an unsupervised humanity, until the Blends had graciously provided the Eden Plague to relieve their sickness and banish old age.
And then later, he’d been told that this was a lie; that the Eden Plague had been bequeathed to humanity by the new Emperor, Daniel Markis the First, who had gone into hiding when the Meme came, but now had emerged to save everyone again. That story seemed just as preposterous as the other.
Conquest and Empire (Stellar Conquest Series Book 5) Page 26
