Crisis

by David Drake

  Not every aimed shot hit. The machines moved faster than they seemed to. The survivors had covered half the distance to the Headhunter positions.

  Bradley loped across the hilltop. His load of weapons and ammunition weighed him down as if he were trying to swim wrapped in log chain. Without radio, face-to-face contact was the only way to get plasma weapons from distant gun pits up to where they could support 1st Platoon.

  Bradley thought of dropping the bandoliers of shotgun ammo he was sure were useless, but his hand stopped halfway to the quick-release catch.

  This didn’t seem like a good time to throw away any hope, however slim.

  * * *

  “Grant!” Kowacs shouted into the APOT communicator as a shining, five-ton creature lumbered up the slope toward the dugout. It was the last of the attacking machines, but it was already too close for either of the crew-served plasma weapons to bear on it. “We need support fast! Bring the Haig down! We need heavy weapons!”

  Sienkiewicz fired three-shot bursts from her assault rifle. The bullets disintegrated as orange-white sparkles on the creature’s magrietic shielding, a finger’s breadth out from the metal surface.

  Sie’s plasma weapon lay on the floor of the dugout behind her. The muzzle still glowed a dull red. She’d fired her last two plasma rounds an instant apart when a pair of low-slung creatures lunged suddenly from dead ground to either side.

  Those targets now popped and bubbled, melting across the face of the rock from their internal energies; but there was one more, and Sienkiewicz was out of plasma charges.

  Kowacs dropped the communicator and aimed his rifle. The creature was fifty meters away. It was shaped roughly like an earthworm, but it seemed to slide forward without quite touching the rock.

  The dark patch just above the rounded nose might be a sensor window. Anyway, it was Sie’s aiming point, and maybe two rifles firing simultaneously–

  Kowacs squeezed the trigger, leaning into the recoil. He watched through the faint haze of powder gas as his bullets spattered vainly.

  The fat black cylinder of a RAG grenade sailed toward the target in a flat arc. Kowacs and Sienkiewicz ducked beneath the dugout’s rim. The hollow whoomp! of the armor-piercing charge rippled the ground and lifted the Marines a few millimeters.

  Kowacs looked out. Wind had already torn to rags the black smoke of the explosion. There was a thumb-sized hole through the machine’s skin. The cavity widened as the creature’s snout collapsed inward like a time-lapse image of a rotting vegetable.

  Bradley knelt beside the dugout, sliding another RAG grenade over his shotgun’s barrel to the launching plate. It was the last of his four rounds: the ammo cans dangled empty from his bandoliers.

  “Have you raised Grant?” the field first demanded. “Do we got some help coming?”

  “I’ll settle for an extraction,” Sienkiewicz muttered. She looked down at the grenade stick she’d plucked from her equipment belt to throw if necessary. The grenade was a bunker buster, devastating in enclosed spaces but probably useless against an armored opponent in the open air.

  “The trucks won’t crank,” Bradley said flatly. “The powerpacks are still at seventy percent, but current won’t flow through the control switches to the fans.”

  There was a moment of silence relieved only by the vibration of rock that spewed out of the pithead and hurtled across the sky. The stream cooled only to yellow-orange by the time it splashed on the tailings pile.

  A plasma weapon began to thump single shots at a fresh target.

  Fireballs flashed and Iifted from Hill 224. Every time the residue of the bolt’s impact drifted away, something fresh and metallic lifted from the same glassy crater. After the sixth bolt, the gun ceased firing.

  “I don’t know if I’m getting through,” Kowacs said. He picked up the communicator and stared at it for a moment. Then he turned and shouted over to the next dugout on the right, “All plasma weapons to the first Platoon sector! Pass it on.”

  “All plasma weapons to First Platoon sector!” Sienkiewicz echoed toward their left-hand neighbors. “Pass it on!”

  The dugouts were within voice range of one another. It was risky to strip the other sectors, but movement on Hill 224 proved there would be another attack here. The two plasma weapons that had not been engaged against the attack were the only ones in the unit that still had sufficient ammo to blunt a second thrust.

  Kowacs’s throat was swollen. He couldn’t smell the foul smoke drifting from the creatures smashed just in front of the dugout, but he felt the tissues of his nose and mouth cringe at further punishment.

  He put his thumb on the shallow depression beneath the communicator’s voiceplate and said hoarsely, “Grant, this is Kowacs. Please respond. We need destroyer-class support soonest. We’re being attacked by machines.”

  Part of Kowacs’s mind wondered whether the creatures had their own internal AI programs or if some Syndicate operator controlled them through telerobotics. What did the operation look like from that bastard’s point of view?

  “We could use ammo resupply and a little extra firepower.” His voice broke. He cleared it and continued, “For God’s sake, Grant, get Toby English and the Haig down here now!”

  Kowacs lifted his thumb from the depression. Nothing moved when he squeezed down. No sound–from Grant, of static, nothing–came from the voiceplate when he released the “key.”

  Maybe there wasn’t a key. Maybe there wasn’t even a communicator, just a plastic placebo that Grant had given Kowacs so the spook could be sure Headhunter Six would accept the mission that would mean the end of his whole company . . .

  “Bloody hell,” Top muttered as he stared toward what was taking shape on the furrowed side of Hill 224.

  A gun crew staggered over from 2nd Platoon with their plasma weapon on its tripod; ready to fire. They grounded beside the command dugout. The gunner slid behind his sights, while the assistant gunner helped the team’s number three adjust the hundred-round belt of ammunition she carried while her fellows handled the gun.

  Masses of shimmering metal oozed through the soil across the swale as if the hillside was sweating mercury. The blobs were larger than those that had appeared at the start of the first attack, and they merged again as soon as they reached the surface.

  Clattering rifle fire had no affect on the creatures. None of the command team bothered to shoot.

  Three plasma weapons, then a fourth, sent their dazzling radiance into the new threat. Blazing metal splashed a hundred meters skyward. The whole hillside glowed with an auroral lambency.

  The ball of metal continued to grow. It was already the size of a cathedral’s dome. Plasma bolts no longer touched the creature’s shimmering skin.

  It slid forward. The crater it left in the side of Hill 224 was the size a nuclear weapon would make.

  Only two plasma weapons were still firing. The one nearest the command team had run almost through its belt of ammunition. The weapon’s barrel glowed, and the rock a meter in front of its muzzle had been fused to glass.

  Sergeant Bradley aimed his RAG grenade and waited. Sie arranged all her grenade clusters on the forward lip of the dugout so that she could throw them in quick succession as soon as the target rolled into range.

  Kowacs emptied his assault rifle into the shining mass. It was halfway across the swale. Because of its size, the creature moved with deceptive speed.

  As Kowacs slid a fresh magazine into his weapon, his eye caught the message on the excavator screen:

  THIRTY-SEVEN KILOMETERS. TARGET RETRIEVED WITHOUT INCIDENT. A PIECE OF CAKE. BEGINNING ASCENT.

  Top fired his RAG grenade. The shaped-charge explosion was a momentary smear against the monster’s shielding, nothing more.

  Heat waves shimmered from Kowacs’s gun barrel. He fired the entire magazine in a single hammering burst and reloaded again. When the creature got within forty meters, he’d start throwing grenades.

  And I’II say to Toby English, “Boy, you
bastards cut it close! Ten seconds later and there wouldn’t have been anything left of us but grease spots!”

  Nick Kowacs laughed and aimed his rifle again at a towering monster framed by a sky that was empty of hope.

  “TOBY?” Cleary’s calm, sexy voice overrode Captain Tolliver English’s all-com as if the two of them were in bed together. But they weren’t. On his visor display, the purple privacy diode marking her transmission blinked: URGENT.

  He fucking knew that. In the middle of a space battle for the very life of the Fleet, English’s 92nd Marine Reaction Company was up to its collective ass in trouble. Special trouble because they’d become SERPA’s “Special Electro-Research” outfit, complete with x-class equipment and untested mission parameters.

  SERPA stood for Special Electromagnetic Research Projects Agency, and those SERPA parameters made the command-and-control (C&C) grid on his faceplate look like a bad dream. And Cleary, his female technical advisor, was as much responsible for that bad dream as anybody else.

  “Toby?” came her voice again. “Delta Two, do you copy?”

  In his electro-combatized personnel carrier, waiting to drop onto the skin of an enemy cruiser with his demicompany, English wasn’t interested in a damned thing Cleary had to say.

  His Associate AI took its cue from his spiking chemistries and wiped Cleary’s purple bead off his com grid. Redhorse company’s attenuated premission macho chatter filled his helmet. English toggled his visor back to real-time views of the men, equipment, weapons, and webbing in the back of the NOCM (Nocturnal Operations Clandestine Module) spacecraft.

  The dropmaster was floating over to his position by the door, pulling himself hand over hand like a spider, headed for a fly.

  The bay door was going to open onto a near vacuum full of stars and enemy hardware and hostile telerobots and nothing much in the way of gravity. English’s gut hated micro-gravity combat. His stomach was churning.

  He self-tested the ELVIS/EVA pack he was humping into this battle: power-pack, jet-assist, and life-support for space combat, all in one SERPA special-issue package. Without it, he’d have died ten times already, doing these tweaky missions. But just because you had survived didn’t mean you would survive. English’s 92nd was writing the book on this kind of combat as they went. And the survival-to-kill ratios, to boot. It wasn’t confidence building.

  Somehow the soft snoring of one of his veterans and the rhythmic gum-chewing of another steadied his nerves.

  English turned and signaled Trask questioningly.

  Trask, his Top, raised a fist and a thumb. They were in hush-time; you couldn’t tell how much the Syndicate was capable of overhearing, SERPA countermeasures or not.

  Sawyer, English’s line lieutenant, caught his attention.

  Sawyer tapped his wrist and then his own helmet.

  By then, English’s helmet was showing him a yellow bead: dual-com.

  “What, dammit, Sawyer? I got all these C&C parameters to soak up before we hit that hull.” He was lying. He knew by heart what his SERPA team was supposed to do on that Syndicate hull. He just didn’t have his heart in it. “You ready to jump, or what?”

  Jump and drop were almost the same, these days. You didn’t get to fight anywhere but the space envelope when you were special electro-research. English’s outfit had A-Potential experimental weaponry that made them all-Fleet choice for opening cans full of Syndicate robots, to see if there was anybody human inside, controlling the robots, or not.

  English’s dual-com diode pulsed: shielded, Sawyer said, “Query, Captain. Something wrong I should know about? TA Cleary just got off line with me. Said she couldn’t raise you. Your coms self-test all right?”

  “TA’s a girl,” English muttered, and then caught himself: “I’ll talk to her when I have goddamned time, not going into a mission. Tell her to stay off the fucking internal privacy push, if she bothers you again.”

  Sawyer got up with the mastiff’s grace that had made him English’s first officer and sailed toward Toby slowly, gliding over APOT rifles and extended armored legs.

  They put their helmets together. Sawyer said, off the com line: “Toby, you gotta relax. TA said–”

  “Fuck TA,” English snapped, but didn’t break contact. His suit whirred as it ratched up his climate control. Cleary was going to kill him yet, getting him all hot and bothered before he– “Look, Sawyer, I got a bad feeling about this one, that’s all.”

  Sawyer’s helmet clicked against his as if the lieutenant had shaken his head inside it. “Anything happens to you, can I have your accumulated hazard pay?”

  “Yeah, you bet. Take Manning on vacation to ASA-Zebra, on me.” English dumped his visor scans and depolarized it, to look Sawyer straight in the eye. ”We got about two minutes, I make it, before that door opens. You want to tell me something, Frank, you’d better tell me.”

  They’d known each other too long for English to miss all of Sawyer’s signals: there was something more than a com status check on his blue-jawed lieutenant’s mind.

  Sawyer’s faceplate cleared and he shifted to electronic privacy mode. At that moment English’s AI decided that the captain needed a final scan of the drop zone and imported it to his visor display.

  So English was looking at a synthesized schematic–a real-time view of the Syndicate ship onto which his Marines were about to jump with the equivalent of blowtorches and can-openers–when Sawyer said, “TA wanted you to know that Nick Kowacs’s One-Twenty-First was askin’ for us by name before the Haig Iost contact with them. The major wanted firepower and extraction, near as she could make out.”

  “Do I look like an air-taxi or a fairy godmother to you, Sawyer?” Despite himself, English’s eyes defocused from the C&C graphic in front of him. If he had a friend anywhere in the Fleet outside the 92nd, it was Nick Kowacs. His mouth grew dry and needles seemed to be trying to sprout in his throat.

  English pulled away from Sawyer and leaned his helmeted head back against the webbing draping the bulkhead, letting his eyes roam over his men. “Tell TA–” His words were a croak. He began again, “I’ll talk to her. Get ready to rock and roll.”

  The dropmaster was reaching for the depressurizer. The red ready light started strobing.

  And English’s AI got him “TA,” as soon as he thought about forming the sounds, while his hands were still automatically checking the seals on his gloves, his sensoring packages, and his hated A-Potential x-class weapons.

  When she popped into his life again as a blinking red C&C bead, indicating she was safe on the Haig in the destroyer’s war room, he’ d already coaxed a test glow from the tip of his rifle. He popped the charge back into its native spacetime and half ported his weapon, pointing with his other hand to the dropmaster in an age-old “Go when ready” signal.

  Sergeant Trask helped push the first of Toby’s reaction Marines out the bay door as Cleary said, “Delta Two?”

  English’s Associate AI was, now and forever, “Delta One.” The joke around the 92nd was that if any of the guys were killed inside their APOT suit-transducer/battle management systems, then the Associates would fight the rest of the battle using the powered exoskeletal suits to keep the corpses moving until the mission could be considered accomplished in terms that Als recognized.

  Whenever English heard Cleary’s voice he wanted to quit this damned war, go somewhere and raise babies. He didn’t touch her–not anymore. He couldn’t touch her and do his damned job. But at least she was as safe as any soldier could be, in the belly of the highest-tech destroyer in the Fleet, Jay Padova’s doubly retrofitted Haig.

  “Delta Two to Ninety-two TA. Yeah, Cleary, what the fuck do you want from me? I ain’t exactly goin’ out to pick up diapers and a six-pack, here.” She didn’t know how he felt about her; she only knew he didn’t want her in his outfit. He couldn’t tell her why.

  He could barely talk to her at all. When Sawyer and Manning had started sleeping together, English had bitched to all and sundry. So he
couldn’t sleep with Cleary. And he couldn’t sleep without her, knowing she was a few bulkheads away. So he wasn’t sleeping, and that didn’t help his combat readiness one bit.

  “Captain, Sawyer told you about Kowacs?”

  “Yeah, yeah, TA. Did you hear me? l’m about to go soldier, here. You want me to bilocate, you got the wrong Marine. Otherwise, you and Manning can do any damn thing you think’lI help the One-Twenty-First, and sign me off on your orders as you make ‘em up.” Better than that, nobody could do.

  But Cleary’s voice wanted better. Cleary always wanted better than you could do. He could see her so clearly–her dark hair, her pale intelligent eyes, her fine ass–that he couldn’t see the bay door for a minute.

  And when he could see it again, she was telling him that he ought to listen to what she had in mind and he was saying: “Just do it,” because her transmission was overriding his audio of some problem at the bay door.

  He got her out of his com and out of his head just in time to import the ongoing argument between Sawyer and the dropmaster.

  “–can’t take the risk,” the dropmaster was yelling.

  And Sawyer was growling, “My ass.”

  Then the NOCM shivered under English’s feet as he moved toward the argument. Simultaneously the NOCM started to pull away from the Syndicate vessel under her.

  English had men on that hull already–three of them!

  He just kept moving, now that he’d started, toward the bay door. He hardly saw his AI shift his coms as he said on open freqs, “Trask, flight deck. There’s a little mistake here somewhere. Sawyer–”

  Sawyer backed off, saying, “Navy says we can’t–”

  “Pilot’s orders, Captain,” said the dropmaster, an implacable growl in English’s ears. “We’ve got to abort the drop. Too dangerous.”

  “You bet,” said English, with a deep, regretful, understanding sigh, just before he bashed the dropmaster’s helmet back against the bulkhead with the butt of his A-Potential rifle.