“Not far now,” he whispered to Yazdi.
“Thank fuck for that,” she grumbled. “I’m dying down here.”
Michael grinned. “Hang on. Won’t be long.”
He turned the truck into a gap between two hangars, stopping before he came out onto the dispersal area proper. The landers were directly in front of him now; with a sense of relief, he saw that the lower access hatches on all of them were wide open, with the stairs down. Even if they had been buttoned up tight, he still could have gotten in, but it would have taken time; standing around in the open in the middle of a Hammer airbase struggling with a recalcitrant lander door was not how he liked to start his day.
A quick look around confirmed that they were alone.
“Okay, Corp. Out you come.”
Yazdi struggled out of the cramped footwell. “Thank Christ for that. I’ve got no legs left.”
“Ready?”
Yazdi nodded.
“Stick close, and if we’re challenged, keep moving. No running. We’re going for that lander there.” Michael pointed out the nearest lander, its massive shape towering over them, its hull a dirty gray-black. It looked well used.
“Got it. Let’s go.”
Praying that nobody got close enough to see that Yazdi was dressed in civilian clothes, Michael climbed out of the truck. He walked smartly across the dispersal area into the shadow of the ground attack lander he had picked, Yazdi following close behind. The instant they were in, he slapped the door controls to retract the stairs and shut the hatch behind them. Breathing heavily, he and Yazdi stood there waiting while the armored hatch thudded home, the interlocks going in with a reassuringly solid thunk-thunk, two green lights above the door coming on to show the hatch had a good seal.
“Fuck! What a way to make a living.” Yazdi laughed nervously. “I’m really glad that’s over.”
Michael could not agree more. The short walk across the tarmac to the lander had taken five lifetimes, his back rigid with tension as he waited for the challenge that never came.
“Me, too,” he replied. “Come on, we’ve got work to do. Check every compartment. I don’t want to be interrupted. I’ll see if we can fly this thing. Oh, and Corp.”
Yazdi turned. “Yes?”
“If there is anyone, stun-shoot them, then tie them up. Okay?”
Yazdi looked long and hard at him.
“Stun-shoot only. Got it?” Michael said firmly.
Michael took an agonizing, nerve-wracking hour before he was ready to make his move. Sitting in the command pilot’s chair, he worked methodically to match the assault lander’s controls and instrumentation with the intelligence summaries provided by his neuronics. While he did that, Yazdi, who was ransacking the lander for survival gear, kept an anxious eye on the airbase around them, but a Sunday was a Sunday, it seemed. Apart from an occasional vehicle, nobody even came close to the landers, let alone took any interest in them. As for the truck, it was ignored totally.
At last, he thought he had it. He had yet to touch a single control or switch on the old-fashioned panels ranged around
the command pilot’s seat, worried that the lander’s control system would lock him out. But by now he was pretty sure the lander would do as it was told.
He turned his attention to the weapons station; it was much simpler and largely matched the intelligence summaries provided by his neuronics. It was the work of only a few minutes to get on top of it. Calling Yazdi over, Michael sat her down and commed her what his neuronics thought were the correct operating procedures for the lander’s twin cannons. He told Yazdi to ignore the rest of the lander’s weapons systems. His orders were simple—answer the voice prompts and, once the system was live, put the laser target designator’s lozenge on the target and press the trigger. If all went well, the system should do the rest. There was one more thing, he added as an afterthought. Speak very, very deeply. Hammer women did not operate lander weapons systems.
Michael took a deep breath to steady himself; he could not put the evil moment off much longer. If they were going to get the lander operational, he would have to bite the bullet.
“Time to go.”
Yazdi smiled, a smile tight with tension. “Too true. Can’t sit here all day, anyway. Eventually someone’s going to wonder what that truck’s doing there.”
Michael nodded. Yazdi was right. They were on borrowed time. Happy that Yazdi was ready, he picked up a headset and plugged it into a spare socket. Without the benefit of neuronics, the Hammer relied heavily on voice-activated systems with touch screens as a backup, and so he was going to have to talk to the damn thing nicely and hope it cooperated.
Ten minutes later, he breathed a huge sigh of relief. Things definitely were going their way. Not much had changed since the last war, and when he had made a mistake, the lander’s control system had prompted him helpfully to do the right thing. Best of all, when it came to security, there was none. Not a damn thing. No identity checks, no password protection, nothing. If one knew what to do, the lander was wide open, and if one did not, the system would supply a prompt. The Hammers clearly assumed that their landers were secure enough behind walls of razor wire protected by dopey, halfasleep lance corporals.
Well, they were about to find out that was a bad mistake, Michael thought, a really bad mistake.
Michael took a deep breath. The assault lander was flightready. He scanned the command holovids one last time. Propulsion, flight control, navigation, weapons, threat warning, target management—all systems were ready to go.
He brought the lander’s two fusion plants online, the lander trembling slightly as cooling pumps kicked in. “Okay to go?” he called across to Yazdi.
“Much as I’ll ever be,” she replied with a nervous smile. Michael grinned. He knew she hated landers. She only tolerated them, she said; they were a necessary evil, useful only for getting marines down dirtside quickly so that they could get on with what they did best—killing people.
“Off we go, then.”
Tapping the brakes off, Michael nudged the lander’s main engine throttles forward gently. Slowly, reluctantly at first, the lander eased onto the taxiway. Once it was clear of the other landers, Michael turned the lander to face along the length of the flight line and stamped on the brakes.
“Right, Corporal Yazdi.” Michael’s command overrode the safety interlocks that prevented the cannons from operating when the lander was on the ground. “Let them know we mean business! Weapons free.”
“Roger that.”
“Let’s go.”
Michael mashed the throttle levers forward, the lander shuddering as raw power ripped the air behind it apart. He released the brakes, and the assault lander accelerated hard down the taxiway past the flight lines and their neatly parked aircraft. Yazdi opened up, the fuselage shaking as depleted-uranium rounds ripped away, the high-pitched buzz-whine of the rotary cannon filling the lander’s command cabin. Michael glanced at Yazdi as she methodically hosed the cannons up and down the flight line. Her teeth were bared in a rictus of sheer animal ferocity. For an airbase that had been empty only a few minutes before, there were suddenly a lot of people around; everywhere, desperate airmen scrambled to get clear of the blizzard of death falling on their heads.
It was carnage, and Michael loved it.
Michael’s headphones were screeching, the panicked voice of the duty controller trying to find out what the hell was going on. Michael ignored him, concentrating hard on keeping the lander’s enormous bulk on the narrow taxiway.
He smiled in grim satisfaction. They were rolling fast now; Yazdi was busy shredding a long line of air superiority fighters, their gleaming plasfiber wing and fuselage panels disintegrating under a vicious hail of cannon fire. One by one, they fragmented into shattered wrecks, their fusion mass driver plants losing containment to explode into vicious white balls of incandescent energy roaring up into the morning sky.
“Kind of them to keep their fusion plants online,” Michael
murmured. “Must have planned to go flying today.” They were coming up the serried ranks of ground attack aircraft. Confident that Yazdi knew what she was doing, Michael concentrated on getting the lander safely in the air.
With the end of the taxiway approaching fast, Michael ran the main engines up to emergency power. The lander’s warning systems screeched in protest as its main engines kicked him in the back, the lander climbing sluggishly across the inner perimeter fence. It took Michael a few anxious moments to get used to the sidestick controller, with the lander staggering and wallowing into a shallow climb, but he was relieved to find that it handled much the same as the ones he had trained on. It was heavier and slower to respond, but it did what it was told.
Then things got busy. Michael’s headphones screeched; somebody was awake out there. The radar warning receivers were telling him that Kraneveldt’s close-in air defense radars were coming online. Michael did not hesitate; a voice command launched radar-homing missiles, the radars exploding in plumes of dirty black smoke. A confused and bewildered Hammer air defense command and control was locked into a fatal paralysis of uncertainty and indecision.
Michael accelerated the lander hard but kept it low, bringing it around in a wide turn to run back across the airbase. A second salvo of antiradar missiles raced away to sterilize the base’s remaining air defense sites.
“Hit anything you like, Corp,” Michael urged. “Give them a good hosing. This is our last pass, then we’re gone.”
“Roger that, sir.”
Michael looked quickly across at her again. She was totally focused on the laser designator screen in front of her, teeth bared in ecstasy. A killer doing what she did best, Michael realized. He eased back on the main engines to give Yazdi more time. He lined the lander up for its last run across the base, boiling clouds of dirty gray-black smoke from destroyed aircraft climbing in front of him. Michael flew the lander low across the perimeter wire, the massive machine only meters off the ground. Yazdi opened up again. Twin streams of metal followed the laser designator across the base complex; he could see buildings disappearing in clouds of shredded plasteel, small explosions boiling up and out of the wreckage, men diving desperately for safety as the lander roared past, its fusion-fed main engines ripping the air apart over their heads.
“That’s it,” Michael called, reefing the lander around in a hard left turn, launching another salvo of antiradar missiles to streak away and deal with the latest missile sites to wake up. “See if you can get the base fusion plant on the way past. Should be five clicks, starboard bow. Hundred FedMarks says it’s not protected.” That’s what centuries of beating the crap out of your own people makes you, Michael thought—arrogant, careless, always taking things for granted. Well, the Hammers were about to find out what a mistake that was. A quick check confirmed that the plant’s air defense radars were not even online. He pushed the throttles forward. It was time to go.
The lander roared past the base power plant, and Yazdi did what she had to do. The plant’s ceramcrete outer skin and inner ceramsteel shell were no match for the hypervelocity depleted-uranium slugs laid down by the lander’s cannons. For a moment, nothing happened. Then, with a blast that threw the lander violently onto its side, the plant went up in a huge white flash. A towering column of superheated gray-white smoke shot through with writhing, swirling red flames climbed hundreds of meters high, urged on by the plant’s auxiliary systems as they, too, succumbed to Yazdi’s cannon fire. Finally, they were past and the cannon fell silent.
“Waaah!” Yazdi hissed breathlessly, engrossed in the holovid from the lander’s aft-facing holocam. What once had been a fully operational Hammer airbase fell away behind them, a shattered, smoking ruin. “That was awesome.”
“Good work. Now let’s see if we can get away with it.” Michael pulled the nose up sharply, the lander’s enormous power driving it through the sound barrier and well beyond, passing through the clouds and up into a brilliantly blue sky. Finally he leveled off and eased back on the power. If he did not, the lander would be in orbit and . . .
Michael cursed out loud as he shoved the lander’s nose down hard, the sudden negative g-force shoving him hard against his safety harness.
“Oh, Jesus. What the hell are you doing?” Yazdi protested. Michael ignored her and kept cursing. He had completely forgotten the Hammer’s battlesats. Climb too high and the lander would be easy meat without the planet’s atmosphere to take the edge off the enormous power of the battlesats’ ship-killing lasers. They had not been hit yet, which he could only attribute to confusion in the Hammer command hierarchy. Initiative was not a trait much encouraged in Hammer subordinate commanders, and Michael thanked God for that, driving the lander in a plunging dive to safety below the thick gray mat of cloud.
The lander punched through the cloud, and the ground reappeared, closing at a truly frightening rate. Michael chopped the power and pulled the nose up sharply to aerobrake the lander to a more reasonable speed, the violent maneuver bringing yet more protests from the long-suffering Yazdi. She was not the only one who was upset. The lander’s flight management system was beginning to get pissed, too, and the endless warnings—terrain, overspeed, wing loading, hull loading, engine overthrust, vectored thrust nozzles overtemp—were getting to be a real pain in the ass. Even as Michael reminded himself that there was no point going so fast that he’d hit an object bigger and stronger than the lander, he flinched. Something extremely large—it looked remarkably like a rocky, snowcapped mountain peak—had flashed past below the lander’s port wing. “Ouch, that was close,” he muttered. Maybe he should listen to some of the warnings the lander was throwing at him.
He pulled the lander up to a safe altitude, tucking it just below the layer of thick cloud that protected them from orbiting battlesats and their ship-killing lasers. Easing the throttles forward, he settled the lander down to run fast, straight, and level on a course direct for McNair. The good news was that the lander’s long-range search radar was working faultlessly. So far, apart from commercial traffic, there was not one military aircraft in the skies around them.
Barely a minute later, that changed in a hurry. First one, then five more contacts popped onto the holovid display, his headphones warbling to report multiple search radar intercepts. Damn, Michael thought, squinting at the command pilot’s primary holovid. Judging by their speed and rate of climb, they had to be air superiority fighters, probably Kingfishers from the O’Connor Marine Base south of New Berlin; an instant later, the lander’s threat management system confirmed the intercepts as Kingfisher search radars.
Tough as the lander was, it would be no match for a Kingfisher’s heavy long-range air-to-air missiles. What he needed now was speed. He needed to keep the buggers as far away as possible for as long as he could. Slamming the throttles hard onto the stops, he pulled the lander up into a shallow climb, the speed picking up rapidly as clouds swallowed the lander.
“Corp!”
“Sir?”
“Okay. They’re on to us. Air superiority fighters. Six of them. By my reckoning”—Michael did a quick bit of mental arithmetic—“they’ll be close enough to launch missiles in a matter of minutes. So hang on. This is going to be rough.”
“Roger that,” Yazdi replied without enthusiasm.
Anxiously, Michael watched the hostiles closing in from the west. They were joined minutes later by four more coming from the north, probably from one of the bases that ringed McNair: more Kingfishers probably.
Things were getting tricky. The lander was about to become a flying death trap; the only safe place for them was on the ground. They would be cold and hungry, true, but at least they would be safe. For the moment, that was all Michael cared about.
“Hang on. I’m putting down,” he shouted. He pitched the lander downward, the negative g-force setting off a barrage of alarms. He ignored them as the lander drove down hard in a desperate dive for the safety of the sheer-sided valleys that cut through the mountains below. T
hen, as Yazdi closed her eyes, unable to look at the awful sight of rock walls screaming past only meters from the lander’s left wingtip, Michael cut the power and pulled up the nose sharply. Holding the lander on its tail, he fired belly thrusters, and the lander, protesting loudly at the appalling way it was being treated, began to lose speed rapidly as it came into a hover.
They almost made it, but Michael had left it a minute too late.
The instant he got the lander stable above the only flat piece of ground he could find and lowered the undercarriage, the first Hammer missile, swooping down on them at hypersonic speed, smashed into the lander aft of the port main engine. The shock of the impact hammered the lander’s tail down, with the missile’s boosted high-explosive warhead and residual kinetic energy ripping most of the lander’s port quarter to shreds. Desperately, Michael struggled to regain control, the lander sagging and wallowing, a hairbreadth away from rolling over, the mountainside now dangerously close to their left wing and getting closer by the second. With the shock-damaged port main engine struggling to stay online—Michael had diverted what little power he could get out of it down to the lander’s belly thrusters—he somehow got enough control back to walk the lander away from the mountainside. He did not mess around; he did not have the time to. Chopping power, he let the lander drop like a stone for a second before ramming the throttles back up to full power, the efflux from the belly thrusters incinerating the ground below them. Great clouds of rock and steam billowed up around them in a massive roiling column.
Probably it was the cloud of ionized rock and water that saved them. In its terminal dive, the second missile lost lock only seconds away from impact, enough to drift fractionally off target to slice through the base of the lander’s port wing. The warhead exploded in a huge ball of flame on the ground below, the blast smashing the lander into an uncontrolled roll to starboard and into the ground. Michael winced as the armored hull absorbed the impact of the explosion.
The Battle of the Hammer Worlds Page 19
