Willems nodded. “Goddamn it to hell. Michael, Janos, I’m real sorry. Just to be safe, we need to get out of this mobibot, and … Hold on, there’s an incoming com … okay. Goddamn it. We’re in the shit big-time. The Serhatis have just done a bed check. They know you’re missing, so I’m pretty sure the Hammers will, too. If they haven’t pinged the bot, they will when they backtrack through their holovid records. Let’s have a look … Yes, couple of klicks up the road there’s a cluster of houses and before them a park. Lots and lots of trees. Grab your stuff. When I give the word, I’ll slow the bot, and out we go. Hopefully, they won’t see us, and I’ll program the bot to wander all over town as a decoy once it’s dropped us off. Should buy us some time while we transfer to a backup mobibot. Sound okay?”
The fugitives nodded.
Michael tried to steady himself while the mobibot drove toward the park, the trees appearing as black cutouts against a night sky splashed with orange light from city street-lamps. When will it ever end? he asked himself in despair, even though he knew the answer: only when Chief Councillor Polk and the Hammer government came crashing to the ground.
Under cover of a line of scrawny trees, the mobibot slowed, but not by much. Michael knew this was going to hurt.
“Stand by. In three, go, go, go!”
With Kallewi and Willems close behind, Michael hurled himself out of the vehicle. He hit the sidewalk hard, his attempt to roll his way to a stop degenerating into a slithering, tumbling slide, the pain agonizing as the ceramcrete surface flayed clothes and skin off his right thigh and arm. “Jeez,” he mumbled through agony-clenched teeth as he skidded to a halt; shakily, he climbed to his feet, relieved not to have suffered anything more serious than the loss of a few square meters of skin, or so it felt.
Willems did not hang around. “Capes on, let’s go.”
Ignoring the blood congealing stickily on his arm and leg, Michael set off after Willems, jaw locked against the pain as he commed drugbots into his bloodstream. He had a sinking feeling that they all faced a long day.
Two hours later, the group found itself on the outskirts of Serhati City as dawn was flushing the night sky away, life beginning to return to the streets. Willems called a halt, waving to the group. “Okay. Pickup’s in ten, then it’s thirty klicks to Algal Springs.”
“Can’t wait. I’ve had enough of this,” Michael muttered.
“And me,” Kallewi added with feeling.
Willems’s head bobbed apologetically. “Sorry, guys. My fault. Never occur-”
“Don’t sweat it,” Kallewi said. “Stuff happens, but we’re okay. Let’s leave it at that.”
“Thanks,” Willems said. “Now, where’s our lift?”
They were getting close now. Ahead, the mountains rose slowly out of the haze, a fragmented, fissured nightmare of broken rock cliffs splashed red-gold by the early-morning sun. Soon the dun-colored buildings of Algal Springs took shape, the little settlement sitting in a bay of sand beset by slab-sided rock walls and boulder falls. Wordlessly, the group readied itself, pulling chromaflage capes on over lightweight body armor and checking weapons, surveillance gear, food and water, and helmets.
“All set?” Willems said.
Michael and Kallewi nodded.
“Good, we … oh, crap!”
The shadow of a light assault lander blackened the road ahead, the crackling blast of its main engines shaking the mobibot bodily as it climbed steeply away. “I think we are about to be sprung, team,” Willems said.
“Looks that way,” Michael said. “That’s a Hammer lander, and I don’t believe in coincidences.”
“Nor me.”
Kallewi pointed to an outlying clump of rocks off to the right of the road. “There!” he said urgently. “It’s our only chance. Stop!”
Willems slammed the brakes on, the mobibot skidding to a halt. “Out!” she shouted.
Grabbing his pack, Michael did as he was told. Eyes locked on the dwindling shape of the lander, he ran hard for the shelter of the rocks, his chromaflage cape blurring his image into a shapeless, rippling simulation of the desert around him. When the mobibot sped off toward Algal Springs, he saw that the lander was turning back. With a feeling of dread, he redoubled his efforts, goading his damaged leg to move faster, sliding into the safe embrace of the rocks, Kallewi and Willems piling in after him.
Without another word, Kallewi took control. “Okay, I think they’ll waste some time checking the mobibot out. When they find it’s empty, they’ll backtrack through their holovid records. Once they do, it’s only a matter of time before they spot where the mobibot dropped us off. So single file and go like hell for the hills. There”-he pointed to a tumble of broken rock cascading down onto the sand-“if we can get into that lot and keep climbing, the Hammers won’t be able to get behind us. If we can hold them off until dark, maybe we’ll get a chance to disengage and slip away. Let’s go.”
They almost made it before Kallewi’s shout drove them into cover behind a pair of house-sized boulders. Michael dug down into the sand with frantic desperation. The world erupted around him as the lander’s 30-mm hypervelocity cannons fired a blizzard of depleted-uranium slugs, the appalling racket forcing Michael to dig even deeper, rock splinters tearing the air apart around him. “Oh sweet Jeezus!” he screamed; sudden blind fear swamped him, his body shaking uncontrollably while he ripped at the dirt, a frantic, tearing rush to get somewhere, anywhere, safe.
No sooner had it started than the Hammer attack stopped, the only sound the fast-fading roar of the assault lander as it climbed away under full power.
Kallewi climbed back to his feet. “Let’s go, come on. They don’t have a clue where we are, otherwise we’d be dead, but we cannot hang around.”
Nerves jangling and badly shaken by the attack’s ferocity, Michael glanced around as Kallewi led off. Banked hard over, the lander was turning in for another run. He was relieved to see that Kallewi was right. As it steadied, Michael saw that the lander would make its next run in front of them, far enough ahead of the group to be a complete waste of ammunition.
“Morons,” Kallewi shouted, waving them to take cover. “They should have dropped their marines first to cut us off instead of hosing down the rocks, hoping to get lucky. Once it’s finished this run, we have to get well up into the rocks. We may not get another chance to get off the sand. That gully at my two o’clock. Get in there and keep going.”
Michael needed no encouragement; hands grabbing at the dirt, he ignored the earsplitting racket as the lander roared low across the ground ahead of them. Its cannons ripped the air apart. Cartridge cases-twin cascades of plasfiber flashing white in the morning sun-poured out of the turrets and into the lander’s slipstream. The instant it passed, Michael was on his feet and running through the dust cloud raised by the lander’s strafing run. By the time the lander climbed away, Michael had made it into the gully, its gravel bed leading up into the rocks, the air acrid with the smell of cannon-smashed stone, clouds of dust twisting slowly away in the still air. Gravel gave way to rocks, and Michael scrabbled and clawed his way across and around them in a frenzied rush to get away while behind them the lander dropped to the ground to disgorge its cargo of marines.
“Cover!” Kallewi yelled seconds before rifle fire slashed through the air over their heads. “On me.”
Michael crawled after Willems to Kallewi’s position, safely tucked behind a massive boulder; lungs heaving, he was happy to lie there for the moment. “Right, what they’re going to do is this. Judging by where they’ve landed, I’m pretty sure they only have a rough idea of where we are. The marines will form a skirmish line parallel to the rocks and move in, hoping to herd us into a position we cannot”-Michael flinched as more rifle fire smashed into the rock wall above them-“retreat from. They’ll use landers to move us out into the open if we look like we’re getting too dug in. That, of course, is if they can ever find us, which is something I won’t let happen.”
Kallewi paus
ed to catch his breath. “All we have going for us is mobility and our chromaflage capes,” he continued. “Hammer marines with combat optronics will find us hard to spot.”
“Surveillance drones?” Michael asked.
“Their optronics are no better. Leave them to me. I might be able to bag a few if they get close enough. The key is to move fast and smooth, and for chrissakes, don’t stop in the open even if they start shooting. Remember, they probably can’t see you. When in cover, take any targets of opportunity. Two shots maximum-any more and their hostile fire indicators will localize your position-then get away fast. If they get too close, we’ll stop and knock a few of the bastards down. That should encourage the rest to hang back. Okay, let’s go!”
Ducking and weaving, the group set off. Quickly, Michael settled into a routine-move, pause, move, pause, move-until he lost track of time, distance, and height, the group forced on by Kallewi’s relentless drive. Occasionally they had the chance to fire back: a welcome break, an opportunity to give protesting legs and lungs time to recover while they reminded the Hammers they were not out for a stroll in the hills.
The day wore on, and the tactical advantage shifted slowly in their favor. The higher they climbed, the more they overlooked the Hammers and the easier it became to pick off an unwary marine. Bloodlust replaced fear. Carefully, Michael adjusted his aim until his latest victim’s throat, exposed in a thin strip between helmet and body armor, sat in the center of the sighting ring in his neuronics, the rifle a seamless extension of his body. He breathed in, paused, and fired. He grunted with satisfaction when the Hammer marine fell backward. Working fast, he switched modes on his rifle and fired a microgrenade at a second who he assumed was tucked away safely behind a large boulder, the flat crack when the grenade went off rewarded by screams of pain.
“Incoming!”
Michael threw himself into a shallow cave below a boulder the size of a house. A Hammer lander howled past to unload a pattern of fuel-air blast bombs across the hillside, the latest attempt by the Hammers to blow them out of cover and, like all the rest, with too much hillside for the fleeing Feds to hide in, no more successful.
Not that Michael cared much anymore. Each attack had chipped away at his determination to keep going, and this, the latest in a long line, was closer than most. Afterward, he would swear the shock wave lifted the giant rock off the ground, its brutal power smashing into his body, the concussion so violent that he grayed out for a while. When he recovered, a frightening silence overlain by a ringing in his ears greeted him, the air in the cave filled with dust. His blast-battered brain refused to work properly. Suddenly, it was all too hard, and Michael gave up; he could not keep this up any longer. He lay there, stunned into immobility. He could not bring himself to move even though he should, he must. But he had had enough. If the damn Hammers wanted him, all they had to do was come get him. His head slumped down onto the ground.
Kallewi crawled into view. He grabbed Michael’s shoulder and started to drag him out from under the boulder. “Come on, let’s go. Move,” he hissed. “We need to move. Come on.”
Close to spent, Michael struggled to look up. Kallewi was a mess, his chromaflage cape torn, his helmet scarred by rock splinters. Michael noticed a thin trickle of blood running down Kallewi’s left arm to drip onto the ground. For some reason, the blood made him angry, made him want to keep killing Hammers. Where the sudden resolve to keep fighting came from, Michael had no idea, but it was enough to get him moving.
“Okay, okay,” he mumbled, crawling after Kallewi and out of the cave. “How’s Willems?”
“She’s fine. Let’s move. I know that felt real close, and it was, but the stupid bastards still dropped their damn bombs closer to their guys than to us. It won’t stop them, though. Hell knows, they’ve got plenty of marines to spare. Another lander’s just arrived with reinforcements. Come on, we need to keep moving.”
Head down, Michael forced himself to follow Kallewi uphill to where Willems waited, tucked away at the back of a cave, her visor up as she took a drink. She, too, showed the effects of rock splinters, a massive gash across her helmet marking the path of a near miss.
Willems did not seem too bothered; she raised her canteen in mock salute and grinned at Michael. “Wondered if you made it.”
“Me, too,” Michael said, ducking instinctively when a storm of rifle fire howled overhead, followed by the characteristic fizzing of the lander’s lasers and the shivering crack of cannon fire walking its way across the slope above them.
“Firing blind,” Kallewi said laconically, untroubled by the racket, “hoping to keep us pinned down until the marines can get to us. Well, good luck to them, ’cause luck is all they have going for them. Let’s go before they work out where we actually are.”
They set off again, slipping through the boulder field, climbing all the time. Michael concentrated on keeping his head down while Kallewi led the way through the nightmarish falls of tumbled rock that climbed steeply ahead of them. They stopped, but only long enough to dispatch a few more Hammers-Kallewi picked off a surveillance drone that strayed too close while he was at it-before moving off again. And so it went, on and on, until Michael could think of nothing else but keeping up with the relentless pace set by Kallewi, the only breaks forced on them by the Hammer landers returning to waste yet more ordnance on the rock slope. As each attack died away, Michael said another quiet prayer of thanks to the genius responsible for marine-grade chromaflage capes. He doubted whether the Hammers had ever known precisely where they were; they would be dead otherwise.
It took a while before he noticed, but it suddenly struck Michael that the Hammers were becoming increasingly reluctant to show themselves, their skirmish line disintegrating moments after it formed, victim to the appalling terrain. Soon the marines’ rate of fire dropped away noticeably, degenerating into random volleys interspersed with intermittent strafing runs from the landers that achieved very little apart from wasting prodigious amounts of ordnance in exchange for a lot of noise and broken rock.
By early afternoon, the Hammers gave up what must have been an increasingly frustrating and fruitless operation. Kallewi’s pace thwarted the Hammers’ repeated attempts to flank them. As they were forced to keep coming head-on, the Hammers’ efforts to drop blocking forces in place were frustrated by terrain no ground attack should ever have to cross, their numbers and overwhelming firepower neutralized by never knowing for sure where their prey was hiding.
Michael watched the Hammers give up finally and start to withdraw, pleased to see an impressive number of casualties ferried away in a fleet of Serhati ambulances. Michael’s opinion of the innate good sense of the locals had gone up. A large number of Serhati troops had arrived in armored half-tracks early in the battle; keeping well back, none made even the slightest effort to lend the Hammers a hand, content to watch the proceedings from a safe distance. When the Hammer landers took off and roared back up into orbit, the noise of their departure shaking the rocks, the Serhatis left, too, leaving a single half-track behind to keep an eye on things.
Even with the Hammers gone, Kallewi refused to ease up; on and on, up and up, they climbed until late into the afternoon. When Kallewi called it quits finally and waved them into a shallow cave screened by a tumbled maze of giant boulders, Michael almost cried with relief. He was a mess: hands and knees ripped and torn, his right shoulder aching after a day of firing, the skin of his shredded right arm and leg stiff with dried blood and tightening by the minute, his head muzzy with the aftereffects of fuel-air bombs dropped too close.
Sprawled across the dusty floor of the cave in silence, the group lay there for a long time. Exhausted, Michael let his mind churn through the day, a chaotic grab bag of events, places, people. And noise: the awful, bone-jarring whuuuump of Hammer fuel-air bombs, the whiplash of rifle fire tearing the air apart overhead, the fizzing crack of lasers, the screams of dying Hammers. Screw them, Michael said to himself. If the Hammers came knocking, he did
not have enough left in him to shoot back. But tired or not, his spirits soared. He had survived. He grinned at Willems and Kallewi. They grinned back.
That said it all.
Later, Michael took his turn on watch. It was a glorious night, the sky so dark and clear that he might have been in space, with only the soft crackling of slowly cooling rock and the occasional murmur of a passing surveillance drone to break the quiet. The drones had stayed when the Hammers pulled out, even though the task of tracking marinegrade chromaflage was beyond their optronics. They flew at random across the boulder fields, hoping to get lucky. Fat chance, Michael decided as his neuronics tracked one across the sky; with an effort he resisted the temptation to hack the thing out of the air. Cradling his rifle, Michael watched the drone disappear into the night. He felt better than he had in a long time, all fear and stress purged by the atavistic pleasure of shedding Hammer blood, comforted by the knowledge that he was safe and Anna was alive.
He stared down the slope across the starlit jumble of rock, his neuronics painting it a confused mess of grays and black. From time to time, he checked the feeds from the network of tiny holocams Kallewi had set up around the cave; they, too, showed nothing but yet more rock. Nothing moved. The Hammers were long gone, and there was no sign of their coming back, though Michael could not be convinced they had just given up and gone home. If he had learned anything that day, it was that the Hammers wanted him so badly that they would waste the lives of as many marines as it took to get their hands on him. Well, let them try, he vowed; he would kill himself first.
Michael made himself as comfortable as a bruised and battered body would allow. A satcom call from the embassy told them to stay out of sight, and for the moment at least, he stood his watch, quite happy to comply.
Wednesday, April 11, 2401, UD
The battle of Devastation reef hw-3 Page 32
