“Power up all six tanks.” Patel’s voice shook.
“Okay, then that’s what we want you to do, but remember, we do know how Aqabas work, so no mistakes, okay?”
Patel nodded his head hard. “Go on, then,” Michael prompted.
Patel’s fingers flashed across the tank commander’s master control panel. The Aqaba’s massive bulk trembled as the main fusion plant powered up. Michael left him to it. He wanted to check what was happening outside. Nothing to worry them, he was happy to see. He flicked the holocam down into the infrared. The heat signatures of two men appeared, stark patches of white in the cool of early morning.
“All six tanks are online and nominal,” Patel said. “I need to call that in.”
“Go on.”
“Okay. Wharf, this is Tank 1; we are ready to move.”
“Patel, you worm,” an angry voice barked. “Where the hell have you been? You think I’ve got all day?”
“Sorry, sarge. Tank 3 had a transient on her auxiliary power control module.”
Michael held his breath. Did an Aqaba even have such a thing? He glanced at Mallory, not at all happy when she shrugged her shoulders.
“Is it stable now?” the supervisor said a lifetime later.
“Affirmative.’
“Then what are you waiting for?” the man roared. “Get those fucking tanks off that fucking barge now! Take them to Golf-8.”
“Golf-8, roger that, sarge.”
“Do it,” Michael whispered. He watched as the young marine fed power to the drive train. He spun the tank on the spot, then eased its huge bulk down the ceramsteel ramp onto the wharf. His hand was soft on the sidestick controller. You’ve done this before, Michael thought. He admired the man’s effortless precision.
Patel soon had the Aqaba off the barge. It moved steadily up a muddy track. Michael watched the holovid screens with interest. The Hammers are not messing around, he thought. I’ve never seen so much ordnance in one place.
“This is where I park it,” Patel said. He spun the tank around and reversed into a wide gap between yet more Aqabas.
Michael wondered many of the damn things they had. “Now what?” he asked Patel.
“I bring the rest ashore and park them.”
“Okay. Do it.”
Patel did just that. “Wharf, this is Tank 1,” he said when he’d parked the last Aqaba. “All done, sarge.”
“Roger,” the supervisor said.
“What will he want you to do next?”
Patel shook his head. “I don’t know who you are,” he said, the tremble back in his voice, “but I’ve done what you want, so let me go and I won’t say anything to anybody.”
“I don’t think so,” Michael said. “Answer my question. What will the supervisor want you to do next?”
Patel just stared at him, mouth clamped shut, face set in an obstinate scowl. Michael sighed. “You’re not being smart. You help me, I’ll let you go. How about it?”
The Hammer marine shook his head. “No,” he whispered.
“Jonah, my man,” Michael sighed, his hand reaching out to take him by the throat. “Screw me around anymore and I will kill you.” His grip tightened, crushing Patel’s windpipe until he had to struggle to breathe. “Now, which is it to be?” Michael went on, letting go. “And make up your mind quickly. I’ve got better things to do.”
Patel’s face crumpled in defeat as he dragged air back into his lungs. “Okay, okay,” he croaked, his newfound courage gone. “I’ve got to run systems tests on all six tanks. We have to make sure the depot hasn’t sent us any duds. Once that’s done, I shut them down and go back to the wharf for the next load.”
“How long?”
“The testing’s automated, so a couple of minutes each.”
Michael swore. He’d promised Ho he would give him an hour; he still had a good thirty minutes left.
“Do the tests but call in a defect. Make it one that’ll take at least half an hour to fix. Understood?”
“Sergeant Miyashita won’t be happy.”
“A defect’s a defect. It’s not your fault.”
“Maybe not, but he’ll still kick my ass.”
“That can’t be helped.”
Patel sighed a sigh of resignation. “I don’t think I’ve got much choice,” he said.
“Not if you want to stay alive, no, you don’t.”
“Okay … Wharf, Tank One.”
“Where the fuck are you, Patel? I need you down here now!”
“Sorry, sarge. Tank Three’s still showing problems on its auxiliary power control module. I’ll have to replace it.”
“You useless dipstick,” Miyashita shouted. There was a moment’s silence, and Michael held his breath, praying that Patel wasn’t told to leave it for later. “Fix it,” the man said finally, “but fast, understood?”
“Yes, sarge.”
“Why do you put up with it?” Michael asked when the circuit went dead.
Patel shrugged. “It’s the way things are.”
“They don’t have to be. Come with us.”
Patel stared at Michael. “You’re NRA, right?”
“We are.”
“My corporal says the NRA is winning this war.”
Michael’s eyes opened in astonishment. “He said that?”
“He did. Haven’t seen him since. He did a runner. He was the tenth this week. So is it true … that we’re losing, I mean?”
“You want an honest answer to that?”
“Hah!” the man snorted. “That’d be a change.”
“I think we’ll win, but it’s still too early to be sure.”
“That’s what I think.”
“So come with us.”
“No,” Patel said, shaking his head. “I can’t do that. My two brothers are in the marines. DocSec would shoot them.”
Michael didn’t doubt it. DocSec was big on guilt by association. “We’ll have to tie you up and dump you, then,” he said.
Patel managed a lopsided grin. “Just don’t hit me too hard.”
Michael grinned back. “No more than we have to, Marine Jonah Patel. And you can tell them that we belted you the moment you got into this thing.”
“Oh, don’t worry. I will. Just let me wipe the holovid records before you do.”
Kleber and Delabi climbed back into the Aqaba. “The poor bastard’s sleeping like a baby,” Delabi said. “His head will hurt like hell when he wakes up.”
“Better that way than having it kicked in by DocSec,” Michael said. “Positions everyone. Last questions … no? Right, report when ready to roll.”
One by one, Michael’s team brought their tanks online and reported in. “Right, folks,” Michael said. “We need mayhem and lots of it. Wait until I give the word, then shoot at anything that crosses your path, but air-defense assets are a priority, so go for them if you can. Let’s go.”
Michael took a deep breath to quell an attack of nerves. He had a right to be nervous; they were surrounded by thousands of Hammers. He gripped the sidestick controller in his left hand and eased it forward. The Aqaba lurched ahead, forcing him to push the stick left. The tank swung around, narrowly missing a startled marine who appeared from nowhere. It was harder in real life than on the simulator, Michael realized. He sent the tank zigzagging through the packed ranks of Hammer heavy ordnance. His erratic steering produced a great deal of shouting and fist waving. He ignored it and brushed the Hammers aside. The rest of the tanks followed behind, a crazy conga line of heavy armor.
“Sorry about that,” Shinoda said. She’d overcontrolled and driven her tank over the back end of a mobile missile battery. The maneuver sent a passing officer into paroxysms of rage. Assault rifle in hand, he ran alongside the tank, shouting at it to stop. External hull-mounted microphones picked up his voice. The torrent of abuse racketed around the inside of the tank.
“Tank Three,” Michael said to Kleber. Even if the Hammers hadn’t woken up to the fact that five of their Aqabas w
ere being stolen, they soon would. “Shoot that mouthy asshole.”
“Three, roger.”
Michael watched as Kleber fired a short burst from one of his tank’s machine guns. The rounds picked the man up and tossed him away to one side.
“Nice shooting, Kleber,” Michael said. “All tanks, fire at will.”
There was only the briefest of pauses before the 95-millimeter autoloading gun on Michael’s tank crashed into life. It sent a hypervelocity round ripping effortlessly through a cluster of thin-skinned mobile air-defense batteries, then another and another before one got lucky and smashed into a missile warhead. The explosion that followed was close, violent. The Aqaba was punched bodily to one side. Not even bothering to select a target, Michael traversed the gun, firing as he went. Its rhythmic metallic crash was joined now by machine guns flaying the air around any Hammer stupid enough to stick his head up while grenade launchers dropped infrared absorbing smoke to protect their flanks. The column roared through the ordnance park and smashed through the perimeter wire. They turned hard right and accelerated in a headlong rush for the bridge across the Oxus River. Behind them, tumbling columns of smoke climbed away from the blazing wreckage of MARFOR 21’s heavy ordnance reserves.
Still the Hammers seemed paralyzed by events. Nobody tried to stop the tanks. They kept moving and smashed aside anything that got in their way. They let 95-millimeter guns loose at anything even remotely like a worthwhile target, right down to a small all-terrain vehicle full of what Michael hoped was Hammer brass. The furious barrage of fire scattered marines in all directions; only a handful had the presence of mind to fire back, an exercise in futility.
The marine in charge of the checkpoint at the massive bridge spanning the Oxus River was as brave as he was foolish. Flanked by a pair of Sampan antitank missile batteries that would have done the job for him if he had be bothered to take the time to think-until rounds from Kleber’s and Mallory’s tanks tore their guts out-he stood in the middle of the road, hand raised. His marines, smarter and much less brave, did not wait to see what would happen, hurling themselves out of the oncoming tanks’ path. At the last moment, the man woke up to the fact that no amount of arm waving would stop an Aqaba. In a convulsive, panic-stricken leap, he hurled himself to one side, only to be caught by the tank’s leading edge, his body tossed clean over the parapet and into the water far below, the tank’s microphones picking up his despairing scream as he fell to his death.
They were almost halfway across the bridge by the time the Hammers decided to take the problem seriously. Hostile fire alarms shrieked inside the Aqaba. The holovid screen looking down the bridge flared white as the tank’s fire-control system responded to a cluster of incoming Sampan missiles. The attack was over in seconds. Defensive lasers slashed the missiles out of the air; their warheads exploded to send missile debris ricocheting off the hull in a cacophony of metallic whanging that made Michael’s ears ring. The noise did not let up. The tank’s 95-millimeter gun tracked the missiles back to their launch point. It poured rounds into the missile battery. Again the screens whited out as a power plant lost containment, the blast smashing men and ordnance aside as the five tanks roared past and into the night.
Across the bridge, Michael swung the Aqaba left onto the road to Kumasi, the hull now reverberating as they took fire. Light cannon, Michael reckoned, and there’ll be worse to come and soon.
“Engage autofollow,” he shouted. He punched instructions into the master panel to tell the tank to take the road to Kumasi. Now the rest would follow wherever the lead tank went. “Kleber, get the hatch open; everyone stand by to bail out.”
The hatch opened with a crash. It was bedlam outside. The noise of tracks on the road and the pounding of incoming cannon fire were overwhelming. “Hold on,” Michael shouted. He slammed on the brakes. The tracks screamed in protest as the tank slid to walking pace. “Go, go, go!”
None of them hesitated, diving through the hatch after their packs and personal weapons. Delabi was the last to go. The instant she vanished, Michael mashed the throttle onto the stops, locked the controls, and followed, rolling and tumbling to a pain-filled halt that left him staring up into the sky, stunned and unable to move.
“Come on, sir,” Shinoda said, dragging him to his feet. “We need to get out of here.”
Groggy, Michael forced himself to follow Shinoda. They ran hard for the cover of the trees. In the distance, the rumble of ground-attack landers was clearly audible. The night sky to the northeast flickered red and white as the NRA and the Hammers traded artillery fire.
Tuesday, October 12, 2404, UD
Outside Cooperbridge, Commitment
“I think we’re hooked in,” Shinoda said, “so stand by … Okay, the link’s up. We’re into ENCOMM … and we have the latest OPSUM.”
Michael skimmed the high-level summaries, pleased to see that the battle for McNair was going well for the NRA, and no wonder. The Hammers’ planetary councillors were still refusing to release the marine divisions they needed to keep a lid on civil unrest; UNMILCOMM was not getting the reserves it needed to contain a rampaging NRA.
If I were Chief Councillor Polk, Michael said to himself, I think I’d be making plans to get as far away from Commitment as I could.
He turned his attention to the mass of data summarizing the disposition of NRA and Hammer units along what ENCOMM was now calling the Yallan Salient, both happy and concerned to see that the 120th had been pulled out of the line and into reserve. There’s only one reason for that, he thought. Anna’s battalion has been taking heavy punishment.
Michael burrowed down into the OPSUM. He located Team Victor; Hartspring was still in Cooperbridge. He closed the OPSUM. But one thing bothered him; it had been bothering him for a while.
The Hammer of Kraa’s survival, the fate of billions, the future of humanspace-they all hung in the balance. Compared with that, Team Victor was an irrelevance. So why did ENCOMM always know exactly where it was? Michael was no expert, but he knew how fast changing, how chaotic combat was, and good as the NRA’s intelligence system was, surely it wasn’t that good. He was missing something; he was sure of it.
Shinoda broke his train of thought. “I see Team Victor hasn’t moved,” she said. “I’ll get the team ready to move out.”
“Hold on for a second,” Michael said. “I’ve been thinking about things.”
“And?”
“It’s up to me now. I can’t ask you to go with me into Cooperbr-”
“Whoa!” Shinoda said. “Hold it there just one fucking second, sir. I don’t know about the rest of the team, but I haven’t come all this way to stop now. I want Hartspring almost as much as you do.”
“Look, sergeant. I appreciate the sentiment, but you’ll have to tell me how we’d get past the military police. We’re talking about going into a combat zone without valid orders. We belong to a unit that does not appear in the Hammer order of battle, and we have IDs we know are useless. They’ll nail us in a heartbeat.”
“And you do have valid orders to show the MPs?” Shinoda said. She looked exasperated. “And which unit do you belong to? Show us your ID; who are you, exactly?”
Michael put his hands up in defeat. “I know, I know, but one man on his own has a chance of getting through. Five don’t.”
“That is a complete crock, sir, and you know it. If we go as marines, then you’re right. We will get nailed. But a bunch of civilians has a chance. The marines are not DocSec. They won’t give a shit who we are. Even if they look at our IDs-which they won’t-they won’t check them out. They have better things to do.”
Michael knew all that. He’d just been hoping that Shinoda wouldn’t pick up on the flaws in his argument. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “Decision’s made. I’m going in on my own while you guys go to ground until the NRA gets here.”
“What? You want me to sit around on my ass waiting?” Shinoda shook her head dismissively. “Forgive my language, sir, but fuck that.”
<
br /> “This is my fight, Sergeant Shinoda, not yours. So butt out and let me fight it, okay?”
“My fight’s killing Hammers, sir, and I’m not too fussy about which ones, so this is what we’re going to do: We’ll go to Cooperbridge, find Hartspring, and when we do, you can kill him. Okay?”
Michael’s head dropped; he could see the determination on Shinoda’s face and knew when he was defeated. “Why can’t you just do as you are ordered?”
Shinoda grinned at him. “I’ll take that as a yes, shall I?”
“Suppose you’d better. Go talk to the guys, make sure they’re okay with it, then we’ll move out. We need-” His fingers plucked at his combat fatigues. “-to find something to replace these.”
Michael checked to make sure his assault rifle was safely tucked away under his coat. It was. He turned to look at Shinoda. He threw an admiring glance at the heavy skirt and embroidered blouse favored by older Hammer women. “I must say, you do look very fetching, Sergeant Shinoda,” he said. “All those rough, tough Hammer marines will not be able to keep their hands off you.”
“You may be a colonel now, sir,” Shinoda growled, “but that won’t stop me from belting you. Besides, you look like a pig farmer fallen on hard times.”
Michael laughed. Shinoda was right; he did. “We all set?”
“We are.”
“Let’s go, then.”
Michael followed Shinoda and the rest of the team down the road out of the village to the junction with the Cooperbridge-Kumasi highway, the ceramcrete road already hot in the midmorning sun. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Dressed in clothes dragged from the shattered ruins of a small village mall, they were a sorry-looking lot. But so were all the other civilians they had seen, and Michael knew they’d be all but invisible to the Hammer marines.
Because they were lost amid the flow of Hammer truckbots forcing their way down a road clogged with civilians, the walk into town was uneventful. The Hammer military police showed not the slightest interest in their small group. Since they were the only people heading into Cooperbridge while every other civilian was getting the hell out, Michael had thought they would. But they hadn’t. The marines were content to wave them through without even the most cursory check of their IDs.
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