Crisis

by David Drake

The convoy was rolling at over one hundred kph. The lowboys accelerated slowly, but they could maintain a higher speed than Kowacs had expected. The Marine trucks had their side armor lowered so that the outward-facing troops could shoot or deploy instantly, but the wind buffeting was getting severe.

  “We’re not aboard a ship because we’d be as useless as tits on a boar in a space battle,” Kowacs continued. “Anyway, the naval boys don’t have near the lift capacity to get even Fleet personnel clear in the time available. Our engineering personnel are going to dig up the Syndicate mines instead.”

  Dig up the mines–or detonate them out of sequence, making the result a number of explosions rather than a single, crust-splitting surge. Asequential detonation was a perfectly satisfactory solution–for everyone except those directly on top of the bang.

  “We’re just along to protect the hardware,” Kowacs concluded. “It’s a milk run, but keep your eyes open.”

  A yellow light winked on Kowacs’s raised visor, a glow at the frontier of his vision. One of his platoon leaders had a question, and the major’s AI thought he ought to listen to it.

  “Go ahead, Gamma Six,” Kowacs said.

  “Nick ... ?” said Horstmann of 3rd Platoon, aboard the last vehicle in the convoy. “What are we s’posed to be protecting against?”

  “Right, fair question,” Kowacs agreed.

  He’d asked the same thing when the orders came over the squawk box in the Headhunters’ temporary barracks. The voice on the other end of the line said, “Any fucking thing! Get your asses moving!” and rang off.

  Which was pretty standard for headquarters staff scrambling line Marines, but not the way Nick Kowacs liked to run his own outfit.

  “I presume–”

  “I guess,” spoken with an air of calm authority that implied the CO knew what was going on, there was no need to panic.

  “–that headquarters is concerned about Weasels who haven’t gotten the word that they’ve surrendered. And maybe there’s some locals who think we’re planting mines instead of deactivating them. You know how rumors start.”

  Bradley laughed. Kowacs laughed also.

  Another light winked: Sergeant Bynum, who was running Weapons Platoon until another lieutenant transferred in to replace Woking. Woking had died of anaphylactic shock on a Syndicate base that Fleet HQ swore the Headhunters had never seen.

  “Go ahead, Delta Six.”

  “Capt–Major?” The veterans had trouble remembering the CO’s promotion. Kowacs had trouble with it himself. “How did they locate these planet-wreckers, anyhow?”

  Well, somebody was bound to ask that. Would’ve been nice if they hadn’t, though. ...

  “They used A-Potential equipment,” Kowacs answered flatly. The wind rush made his eyes water. “Toby English’s Ninety-second is in orbit aboard the Haig. The destroyer’s got the new hardware, and they’ve done subsurface mapping.”

  “APOT shit,” said Bynum. “Like the stuff that left us swinging in the breeze on the last mission? The mission the brass said didn’t happen–only we took fourteen casualties.”

  The only thing Nick Kowacs really understood about A-Potential equipment was that he never wanted to use it again. No grunt had any business tapping powers to which all points in time and space were equivalent. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea if some other friendly used the technology, but ...

  The artificial intelligence in Bradley’s helmet should not have been able to emulate Kowacs’s unit and enter this discussion without the CO’s stated approval. . . but it could. The field first broke in to state with brutal simplicity, “If savin’ your ass is the only thing you’re worried about, Bynum, you sure shouldn’t’ve volunteered for the Headhunters.”

  Kowacs took his hand away from the special communicator. The plastic case felt cold.

  Bynum muttered something apologetic.

  “Alpha Six to Six,” said the 1st Platoon leader laconically from the leading truck. “Hill One-Six-Fiver is in sight. Over.”

  “Right,” said Kowacs. “Okay, Headhunters, we’ve arrived.”

  If anything, this landscape of pebble-strewn hills and wind-carved vegetation was more bleakly innocent than any of the countryside the convoy had passed through on its way here.

  “Dig in, keep your eyes on your sensors, and be thankful we’ve got a cushy job for a change.”

  And while you’re at it, pray that Fleet Vice Admiral Hannah Teitelbaum, whom Kowacs suspected to be a traitor in the pay of the Syndicate, hadn’t gotten the Headhunters sent here for reasons of her own.

  * * *

  Corporal Sienkiewicz surveyed the landscape, flipping her helmet visor from straight visuals, through infrared to ultraviolet, then back. Nothing she saw repaid her care–or explained her nervousness.

  In addition to her massive pack and slung assault rifle, Sie cradled a three-shot plasma weapon lightly in her arms. She had no target as yet for its bolts of ravening hell, but somewhere out there ...

  “Gamma Six to Six,” said the com helmet. “We’re dug in. Over.”

  The rock in 3rd Platoon’s sector was a little more friable than that of the others, so they’d finished ahead of 1st and 2nd. Probably wasn’t enough difference to make it worthwhile sending Horstmann’s powered digging equipment over to help Lanier and Michie’s men, though.

  The excavation site, Hill 165, was one of a series of low pimples on a barren landscape. The crane was swinging the excavator into final position, nose down. Occasionally Sienkiewicz heard a bellowed curse as a variation in wind velocity rotated the machine out of alignment–again.

  The Headhunters dug in by three Marine fire teams, just below the hillcrest so that they wouldn’t be silhouetted against the sky. Each platoon, stiffened by two of Weapons Platoon’s belt-fed plasma weapons, was responsible for a120-degree wedge–

  Of wasteland. There was absolutely no chance in the world that this empty terrain could support more than the Weasel equivalent of a goatherd. Sie had imagined a Khalian city from which furry waves might surge toward the humans, but not here.

  And not from a tunnel complex, either. If the Haig’s A-Potential equipment had located planet-wreckers lying just above the asthenosphere, it would have spotted any large abnormality lying close enough to the surface to threaten the Headhunters.

  So what the hell was wrong?

  The self-contained excavator touched the ground. Its crew switched on their cutters with a scream that became a howl, then dropped into bowel-loosening subsonics.

  The huge device disappeared into rock with the jerky suddenness of a land vehicle sinking into a pond. Just before the stern vanished from sight, a thirty-centimeter gout of magma spurted from it and spun ninety degrees in the magnetic deflector positioned above the pithead. The molten rock crossed a swale to splash and cool against a gravel slope three kilometers away.

  Ten-second pulses of glowing waste continued to cross the 2nd Platoon sector every minute or so. Lanier’s troops had left a corridor as the engineering officers directed, but they’d still be glad for their dugouts’ overhead cover.

  Nick and Top walked over from where they had been talking to the engineers. Bradley was carrying a communications screen of unfamiliar design in one hand. He looked okay again.

  Sienkiewicz had to watch the field first pretty carefully nowadays, anytime there might be Weasels around.

  “Anything out there, Sie?” the major asked, casual but obviously ready to react if his big bodyguard could put a name to her forebodings.

  Sienkiewicz shrugged. “Not that I can find, anyway,” she admitted. Her palms sweated against the twin grips of the plasma weapon.

  The crane lowered the first section of casing to follow the excavator. Rock didn’t simply go away because you heated it gaseous and slung it out the back of your equipment at high velocity. Pulses rising along the casing’s magnetic field focused the waste in the center of the bore until it could be deflected to a tailings pile on the surface.

  Kow
acs must have been feeling the same thing Sienkiewicz did–whatever that was–because he touched the unfamiliar black object clipped to his equipment belt.

  Sienkiewicz noted the gesture. “You know,” she said, “it sorta looked like the guy who called you over to the car in the yard there ... like he was Grant.”

  “Fucking spook,” Bradley muttered. His fingers began to check his weapons and ammunition, as though he were telling the beads of a rosary.

  “Yeah, that was Grant,” Kowacs agreed. He started to say more, then closed his mouth.

  The three members of the command team spoke over a com channel to which only they had access. The wind that scoured these hills also abraded words spoken by unaided voices.

  Bradley touched the black monomer case of the object Kowacs had gotten in Grant’s limousine. It was ten centimeters to a side and very thin. The outside was featureless except for a cross-hatched voiceplate and a small oval indentation just below it.

  “I thought,” the field first said, articulating the same assumption Sienkiewicz herself had made, “that all this A-Potential stuff was supposed to be turned in after the last mission?”

  Kowacs’s face worked. “It’s a communicator,” he said. ”Grant says it is, anyhow. He thought ... maybe we ought to have a way to get ahold of him if, if something happened out here.”

  He stared grimly at the stark hills around them. “Doesn’t look like there’s much to worry about, does there?”

  Sie’s right hand began to cramp. She spread it in the open air. The wind chilled and dried her callused palm.

  “What’s Grant expecting, then?” Bradley said, as though he were asking for a weather report. Wispy clouds at high altitude offered no promise of moisture to the sparse vegetation.

  Kowacs shrugged. “We didn’t have time to talk,” the stocky, powerful officer said. His eyes were on the horizon. “Except, the other twelve excavators got sent out with Shore Police detachments for security. This is the only one that’s being guarded by a reaction company.”

  “Anybody know who gave the orders?” Sienkiewicz heard herself ask.

  “With a flap like this on, who the hell could tell?” Kowacs muttered. “Grant said he’d check, but it’ll take a couple days ... if there’s anything left after the Syndicate fleet hits.”

  Then, as his fingers delicately brushed the APOT communicator, Kowacs added, “There’s no reason to suppose somebody’s trying to get rid of the Headhunters because of what we saw on that last mission.”

  “No reason at all,” Sienkiewicz said, repeating the lie as she continued to scan the bleak horizon.

  * * *

  Bradley stared at the pattern, on the flat-plate screen. He adjusted the focus, but the image didn’t go away.

  “Major!” he said sharply. “We got company coming!”

  Bradley had borrowed the screen from the engineers so the Headhunter command team could eavesdrop on the excavator. A peg into rock fed seismic vibrations to the screen’s microprocessor control for sorting.

  Though the unit was small, it could discriminate between words vibrating from the sending unit on the excavator’s hull and the roar of the cutters and impellers. Thus far, the only words that had appeared on the screen in block letters were laconic reports:

  PASSING TWO KILOMETERS, IN THE GREEN.

  PASSING FIVE KILOMETERS. REPLACING HEADS FIVE-THREE AND FIVE-FOUR WITH BACKUP UNITS.

  PASSING EIGHT KILOMETERS . . .

  When there were no words to decode from vibrations traveling at sound’s swifter speed through rock, the screen mapped the surrounding hills. It had found a pattern there, also.

  The command team’s dugout was as tight and crude as those of the remaining fire teams: two meters on the long axis, a meter and a half in depth, and front-to-back width. The walls were stabilized by a bonding agent, while a back-filled sheet of beryllium monocrystal on thirty-centimeter risers provided top cover.

  Kowacs bumped shoulders with the field first as he leaned toward the screen. Sie scraped the roof when she tried to get a view from the opposite end of the dugout.

  “What is it?” Kowacs said. Then, “That’s just Hill Two-Two-Four in front of us, isn’t it? Vibration from the excavator makes the rock mass stand out.”

  “No, sir,” Bradley said. “There was a pattern, and it’s changed.”

  His lips were dry. He’d never used a screen like this before and he might be screwing up, the way a newbie shoots at every noise in the night. But ... years of surviving had taught Bradley to trust his gut, to flatten now or to blast that patch of vegetation that was no different from the klicks of jungle all around it.

  Something here was wrong.

  PASSING TWELVE KILOMETERS, the screen said, blanking its map of the terrain. HEADS RUNNING EIGHTY PERCENT, STILL IN THE GREEN.

  The quivering map display returned to the screen. It shifted, but the clouds changed overhead and the planet surely trembled to its own rhythms besides those imposed on it by human hardware ...

  “The digger’s getting deeper, so the vibrations don’t look the same up here,” Sienkiewicz muttered. She looked out the firing slit toward Hill 224 and manually adjusted her visor to high magnification.

  “Headhunter Six to all elements,” Kowacs ordered in a flat, decisive voice. “Full alert. Break. Alpha elements, watch Hill Two-Two-Four. Break. Delta Six, prepare to redeploy half your weapons to Alpha sector on command.”

  Metal glinted on the side of the hill a kilometer away. Bradley centered it in the sighting ring of his visor and shouted, “Support, target!” so that his AI would carat the object for every Headhunter within line of sight of it.

  “Break,” continued the major, his voice as bored but forceful as that of a roll-call sergeant. “Knifeswitch One-Three”–Regional Fire Control–“this is Headhunter, S–” The transmission dissolved into a momentary roar of jamming. Bradley’s artificial intelligence cut the noise off to save his hearing and sanity.

  The glint on Hill 224 vaporized in the sun-bright streak of a plasma weapon. A ball of gaseous metal rose, then cooled into a miniature mushroom cloud.

  “–arget for you,” Kowacs continued beside Bradley.

  So long as he was transmitting out, the major couldn’t know that his message was being turned to garbage by a very sophisticated jammer. Instead of a brute-force attempt to cover all frequencies, the enemy used an algorithm that mimicked that of the Headhunters’ own spread-frequency transmitters. The low-level white noise destroyed communication more effectively than a high-amplitude hum that would itself have called regional headquarters’ attention to what was going on.

  “You’re being jammed!” the field first said, slipping a RAG grenade over the barrel of his shotgun.

  Airflow through the center of the grenade kept the cylinder on a flat trajectory, even though it was launched at low velocity. The warhead was hollow, but its twelve-em diameter made it effective against considerable thicknesses of armor.

  PASSING ElGHTEEN KILOMETERS, said the borrowed screen.

  Sound–through rock or in air–was unaffected by the jamming. Bradley heard the fire teams to either side shouting because their normal com had been cut off.

  The side of Hill 224 erupted in glittering hostility. Bradley adjusted his visor to top magnification as Kowacs’s rifle and Sie’s plasma weapon joined the crackling thunder from all of the 1st Platoon positions.

  The enemies were machines. Individually they were small, the size of a man’s head–small enough to have been overlooked as crystalline anomalies in the rock when the Haig scanned for planet-wreckers.

  There were thousands of them. They began to merge into larger constructs as they broke through the surface and crawled toward the Headhunters on Hill 165.

  Bradley clapped Sie on the shoulder. Light shimmered across the track of ionized air from the muzzle of her weapon to the patch of molten rock across the swale. ”Save your ammo!” Bradley shouted.

  He pushed himself through the tight o
pening between the ground and the dugout’s top cover, then reached back inside for his shotgun. RAG grenades had a maximum range of five hundred meters, and the aerofoil charges in the shotgun itself were probably useless against this enemy even at point-blank.

  Bradley ran in a crouch toward the crew-served plasma weapon in the second dugout to the right. He expected bullets–bolts–something, but the enemy machines merely continued to roll down the slope like a metal-ceramic sludge.

  Even at a thousand meters, bullets from Marine assault rifles seemed to have some effect on the individual machines. An object in a marksman’s killing zone flashed for a moment within a curtain of rock dust cast up by deflected bullets. After the third or fourth sparkling hit, the machine slumped in on itself and stopped moving.

  When two or more machines joined, the larger unit shrugged off bullets like a dog pacing stolidly through the rain. Only a direct hit from a plasma bolt could affect them–and Weapons Platoon had only a hundred rounds for each of its belt-fed plasma weapons.

  Bradley knelt at the back of the gun pit. “Raush!” he ordered. “Blair!”

  The crew triggered another short burst. Air hammered to fill the tracks burned through it, and ozone stripped the protecting mucus from Bradley’s throat.

  He reached through the opening and prodded the gunner between the shoulder blades with the shotgun’s muzzle. “Raush, damn you!” he croaked.

  The gunner and assistant gunner turned in surprise. Their eyes widened to see the gun and Bradley’s face transfigured into a death’s head by fear.

  “Single shots!” the field first ordered. “And wait for three of the bloody things to join before you shoot! Don’t waste ammo!”

  Bradley rose to run to the other 1st Platoon gun pit, but Kowacs was already there, bellowing orders.

  Nick understood. You could always count on the captain.

  Raush resumed fire, splashing one and then a second of the aggregated creatures into fireballs with individual bolts.