“Can ground defences make an intercept on that trajectory?” Vanessa demanded, staring at her display.
“Not without better targeting than they’re going to get with their satellite placement at the moment,” said Cai. “ETA twenty minutes, they’ll have a firing position on Droze.” Surely they wouldn’t actually nuke an entire city? That was over a million people down there. But there were secrets in Droze Chancelry HQ, Cai insisted. Secrets worth a million lives. She didn’t have the luxury of hoping.
“Cai,” she said, “if anyone can calculate an intercept, you can. Can you talk to those emplacements and feed them the data?”
“Yes,” said Cai, “but likely we can’t get a hit. He can make evasive with those engines of his and anti-ship works better further out in the gravity well. This is far too close.”
“But we’ll make him dodge and he’ll miss his strike run.”
“He’ll reacquire. We can force him to do another orbit, but on that second orbit he’ll be so low the missiles won’t acquire, and he’s not vulnerable to atmospheric missiles because his own defensive systems can neutralise anything slow . . . that will push the ETA out to eighty-four minutes, give or take.”
“That’ll have to do.”
Vanessa accessed station’s main com, redirected the antennae, and fed it some very secret coordinates. Station registered confusion at being told to transmit into empty space. She overrode it, and opened the channel.
“Hello Big Hat, this is Jailbait. I have a target for you. You must acquire and destroy in less than eighty-four, or Droze and everyone in it dies. Bear in mind I’m reading slightly better than an hour for this message to reach you, you’ll have to break every shipping lane rule in the book to get here.”
The firefight in front of Chancelry’s perimeter wall was as crazy as anything Sandy had seen, and she’d seen a lot. The neutral zone between inhabited Droze neighbourhoods and the Chancelry wall itself was four blocks wide, and now as she took cover at the first corner behind a pile of new rubble, most of it seemed engaged. Contrails streaked up and down the roads ahead, amidst rapid cannon rounds, small and large explosions and occasional crazy ricochetes. Every now and then a big explosion hit, probably missile artillery, though Sandy knew Chancelry had been positioning a lot more heavy weaponry in the last few days.
She’d taken the time to suit up. Kiet’s forces had brought additional armour and prepositioned some of it in a big van, parked underground nearby. The suit was League mil-spec, a little less advanced than her SWAT armour but good enough. It received and generated tacnet, as did every other suit, boosted further by their mini UAVs. They were in such close contact now that Chancelry couldn’t jam it without jamming their own tacnet. Sandy knew they had to get much closer.
“Sandy has command,” said Kiet, acknowledging her arrival at the fight. “What’s your plan?”
“Get in fast!” said Sandy. “Before the other corporations can bring reinforcements around, and before Rishi gets her ass kicked. Once we get in amongst their population, we’re safe. They can’t use big weapons among their own civvies.”
Kiet had a hundred and thirty-six operational GIs concentrated here. They followed standard GI ground ops in pairs, fours and twelves—sections, squads and platoons respectively. Four platoons made a company, so she had less than three companies, with no heavy support. Chancelry defensive forces were making interlocking fields of fire all across the roads ahead, making it impossible to advance quickly without significant casualties. With a force this small, she couldn’t afford casualties.
She sprinted, straight into the opposite building, a dive through a window then fast down a corridor. Tacnet showed her where her friendlies were, mostly pinned down two or three blocks in, trying to manoeuver against heavy positions—Chancelry had tanks and AMAPS blocking the streets, and a shitload of bots in the buildings to block any flanking moves. It was turning into a slugging match, but GIs were best at fast manoeuvering.
Even as she ran, she saw a big building take a hit from heavy artillery, and several IDs on tacnet went blank, followed by lots of shouting after squadmates lost under collapsing rubble.
“If they get us pinned down they’ll just pulverise us with heavy support!” Kiet was yelling, gunfire in the background. “We’ve gotta move!”
Sandy dashed into a new building, Gunter and Tim close behind, down a deserted corridor. Missiles were flying on tacnet, GIs launching mini-rockets at Chancelry defensive positions, tacnet coordinating those strikes but failing to make much impact.
“Someone get me a visual on those missile strikes,” said Sandy, skidding to a halt at the corridor’s exit onto a main street. Burning vehicles made cover in the street. Gunter covered and she ran. “Do they have defensive screens established?”
“Yes!” someone shouted. A visual appeared, a shaky view out a window, missiles streaking by towards what appeared to be a hovertank behind rubble up the road. Countermeasures shot the missiles down before they reached, a stream of rapid autofire. “I think it’s the AMAPS; they’re anti-missile equipped!” The visual ducked back as return fire blew out half the wall.
Fucking arms factory world, Sandy thought, shooting a bot that tried to hit her from a high rooftop, then skipping sideways through a new hole in a wall. Chancelry would throw everything at them. Something shot at her through a window as she dashed through ruined corridors, shrapnel ripping off the walls.
“Gotta separate those AMAPS from the tanks!” she said. “There’s no clever back way around; we’ve just gotta work our way through the buildings and take out those AMAPS—they can’t defend the tanks without them. Don’t waste missiles unless you’ve got a clear shot!”
The next cross street was chaos, the third block beginning and nothing safe anywhere. Wreckage burned in the street, bot tanks, AQ walkers, walls riddled with holes and collapsing in parts. A GI in a wall hole opposite waved up and down the street, warning her of multiple hostiles. Sandy threw a piece of concrete out, drew fire from both directions, an eruption of dust and flying fragments.
She indicated for Gunter to put fire to the left, as tacnet triangulated fire from the right . . . she made her own adjustments by eyesight, matched that trajectory against tacnet’s map of the skyline, and found the apartment window the bot must be located in. Locked a mini-missile from her back launcher and fired. Big explosion a few hundred meters down, ammunition cooking off. More fire ripped by, but lighter . . . Sandy kicked off the wall and flung herself explosively across the road, caught sight of more bots in doorways. Rolled, covered as fire sent concrete fragments pinging off her armour, then put an arm out long enough to bring two of them down with precision shots.
And left the road quickly, as the inevitable missile fire streaked in and blew a big hole two meters from where she’d been—GIs weren’t the only ones with tacnet coordinated missile fire. Gunter got across also, then Tim, and they pressed through increasingly ruined walls, past one wounded GI who gave them thumbs-up slumped against a wall, her buddy checking a small ammunition reserve, grabbing more grenades.
Up ahead, the volume of fire was staggering, the building constantly shaking and convulsing, dust raining down. Sandy skipped past one dead GI, several ruined bots, then a hands and knees scramble over rubble and a crouch behind what remained of the only wall left between here and the road heading into Chancelry. Down this street everything was flying—chain guns, autocannon, rapid grenades and rifle fire. This was why they had to go through the buildings for cover. The end of this street was so blocked up with weapons systems, anyone sticking a head up here would be dead before blinking.
She scrambled back the way she’d come. Even loitering in the open was deadly—seeker artillery would do wide circles above a target area on low power for several minutes, doing their own recon before finding a target to destroy, so even Chancelry’s lack of UAVs didn’t make her safe.
Here she found a hole in the ceiling, and sprang through it to the next floor, dashed alo
ng and found a stairwell to ascend another. This built-up environment was perfect GI terrain. These buildings had at least ten levels each, and Chancelry bots had to guard each one. Sandy didn’t think it possible. Tacnet showed her GIs on the seventh level of this building, more on the fourth, so she pressed down this corridor . . . and was immediately confronted with an AQ bot at the corridor’s end. She blew its arm off before the chain gun could fire, but the torso had missile mounts, and she flung herself through a side doorway before the missile reached her and blew all the walls to pieces.
Amidst dust and confusion, she crashed through an adjoining wall and dashed up the next corridor, shot a mini bot, a third made a smoke screen before she used it for a football, then ducked sprawling as another minigun just fired through the walls with no warning, pulverising everything around her.
She fired a grenade at it, ran again and took cover behind a heavier, reinforced wall. The ceiling blew in ahead of her, where she would have been if she’d kept running . . . something upstairs had been tracking those footsteps. There was now dust everywhere, and it was getting hard to breathe. Certainly she could see why there’d been such slow progress—Chancelry had deployed the full robot army into the buffer zone before their wall. And they hadn’t even reached the wall yet. God knew how they’d get past it.
Explosions behind alerted her to Gunter and Tim’s approach as they caught her up. This time she was grateful for the support—this wasn’t the same kind of mad dash she’d made through the underground caverns on Pyeongwha. These quarters were too tight and too well defended; here some teamwork would be welcome. Tacnet made a little three-person loop between them. Sandy fired a grenade into the wall of a cross corridor ahead, and they moved.
This time the bots didn’t stand a chance, as one GI drew a bot’s attention, while the other outflanked and killed it. They advanced in leapfrog through the building. A booby trap blew the floor out from under Gunter, but he bounced back up to this level immediately and kept fighting. Above them, on tacnet, Sandy saw one of her GIs put shots into an AMAPS guarding a hovertank on the corner, only to receive fire from three places at once and abruptly vanish from the grid.
“Demo charges,” she said to Gunter as they covered behind the last heavy bulkhead before the end of the building. They weren’t more than ten meters from the tank-guarded intersection here, and one city block from the Chancelry wall. She showed him on tacnet where she wanted them placed—she didn’t have more than a basic knowledge of demolition, but this under-built building didn’t require any genius.
She slapped her own to the wall, then another further on, set it for tacnet activation . . . and ducked flat as something outside opened fire on this part of the wall, heavy shells tearing through multiple walls like tissue paper. She ran without waiting for it to stop, nearly lost her head to one near miss, and saw Gunter simply wasn’t there anymore, just bits and pieces blasted across the corridor.
She grabbed Tim on the way through, hauling him back from the blast zone, took cover and activated. The blast rocked them, then an external feed from tacnet showed another GI’s perspective, half this building wall collapsing on the tank and AMAPS position on the corner. They vanished in a crash of debris and dust . . . the tank would be fine, but the AMAPS wouldn’t. Missile fire followed immediately, and the tank, without anti-missile protection, took multiple hits and detonated with a blast that made the demolitions seem small. Yells and victorious swearing over tacnet. Sandy had never heard GIs do that before in combat, either.
“That’s for you, Gunter,” said Sandy. And to Tim, “Come on, let’s get some.”
The crossroads were less well defended than the roads that lead straight to Chancelry. GIs now leaped across this part of the last crossroad, from building to building, and only received a little crossfire. That changed as Chancelry defences realised their line had been breached, and began pulling units off the line elsewhere. A tank appeared from Chancelry’s wall, AMAPS support sprinting alongside. Sandy sat in the rubble of her demolished building corner and picked off multiple AMAPS from several hundred meters, joined by fire from other buildings. The tank fired at someone else, who leaped as rapid cannon fire tore the building facade in half, but others further up the street were already firing missiles that accelerated to Mach two in just two seconds, tipped with mod-uranium heads that melted any armour yet devised on high velocity contact. This tank, too, exploded.
Chancelry pulled several tanks off their intersection positions further up the cross street, but again, GIs had time to fire here with less risk along the cross street, picked off the AMAPS with rifles, then blew the tanks with missiles. Another tank made a slow advance with AMAPS walking, shooting down incoming missiles while the tank’s rapid turrets backed by bots on high rooves further along, made sniping uncomfortable. GIs aimed missiles for the walls, trying to bring them down, but the missiles were anti-armour and couldn’t bring down the structural supports required to collapse an entire facade. But by this time GIs had made enough progress within adjoining buildings to blow a wall onto the advancing tank from within, and missiles did the rest.
With tanks lost and defensive positions crumbling, missile artillery began to rain down. GIs retreated into building interiors and pushed forward. The artillery lacked penetration, blowing off top floors where it hit buildings, or landing on roads to keep them clear. It killed mostly bots, something that no doubt registered on Chancelry tacnet, and artillery paused once more. Combat flyers tried to engage, but missile tech had made that tactic obsolete two centuries ago, and soon any that strayed from above the Chancelry wall’s built in anti-missile defences were almost instantly shot down. Worse yet for them, GIs were now close enough to target flyers with rifles, and even without Sandy’s degree of accuracy, that was often lethal.
Soon Sandy found herself with a third-story view directly over the Chancelry wall itself. There had been apartment buildings here once, but only the faint outline of foundations remained visible, having been razed years ago. In their place was a wall, three stories high, reinforced concrete within a steel frame, topped with electrified wire and heavy guardposts. It might have been impressive to a Droze non-corporate resident, or a scavenging street kid, but to three companies of advancing high-des combat GIs, not so much. But the wall itself was not the problem. It was the seventy meters of open, featureless ground before the wall that made things difficult.
“Big kill zone,” someone suggested, viewing what she was seeing on tacnet. There was just no getting across that with the guard towers operational, to say nothing of artillery raining down from above. They’d be lucky to make it ten meters, let alone seventy. The guard towers were largely immune to missiles—their own anti-missile systems were high-tech and functional, and the GIs didn’t have enough projectile weaponry to knock them off at this range.
Behind the wall were tall buildings. Those nearest the wall were squat and ugly, with few windows—a defensive precaution no doubt. But shortly behind them rose buildings of glass and bright lights, and beyond them, genuine towers. Like one of Tanusha’s many urban districts, but heavily defended, an island of propriety in a sea of poverty. So close.
“What’s the plan?” someone asked. They hadn’t come this far just to turn back.
“Corey,” said Sandy, “is that tank at grid 35-42 still working?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Let’s see if we can get it running, take out a few of those guard posts . . .”
She stopped, seeing something strange. A new round of missile artillery, five missiles climbing up together. Something in their spacing looked odd. Five simultaneous targets? Someone called warning on tacnet; several GIs retreating from viewpoints, assuming they’d been spotted . . . but Sandy stayed where she was. Obviously the missiles weren’t tracking for her location near the wall. In fact, they were following no pre-programmed trajectory that seemed logical . . .
They dropped, all five together. Straight onto the Chancelry wall, with no fore
warning. The wall disappeared in a series of rapid flashes, concrete debris and steel frames cartwheeling away.
“Rishi!” Sandy shouted in delight.
“She must have hacked and acquired fire control for one artillery unit,” someone observed.
“Let’s go!” said Kiet. “Before the smoke clears! Full sprint, then straight for HQ!”
Vanessa could hear laser cutters over surveillance microphones, as Antibe Station crews tried to get through lowered defensive doors and retake their bridge. It was going to take them longer than they had available.
Most of her attention remained on the ghostie’s orbit. Multiple ground missiles had been fired at it so far, none acquired. It had counter measures, and had once even dipped into an aerobraking manoeuver that generated a heat signature so intense an incoming missile had become utterly confused, hit the atmosphere too shallow and detonated short. Anti-ship missiles were a deep space or mid-orbit defence. Big ships weren’t supposed to skim the atmosphere, and most captains avoided planets like ocean ships avoided reefs. But having missed once, this League captain was determined not to miss a second time.
Now they had eight minutes. He couldn’t fire until he was right over Droze. Orbital artillery was supposed to be fired far further out, giving it time to equalise with planetary orbit so it wouldn’t burn up in reentry. If it did enter the atmosphere too soon and decelerated to manageable velocities, it would run out of fuel in slower atmospheric flight before it reached the target.
“Come on,” Vanessa muttered, seated in the station master’s chair, hooked into multiple displays and nav systems. The stationmaster lay in a pile with others further down the row, still unconscious, as were they all. Cai admitted it might be doing them damage by now, but she had other things to worry about.
“Should be coming in any moment now,” said Ari, also plugged into navcomp and calculating possible intercept trajectories—not strictly Ari’s speciality, but Vanessa had never seen him fail at these mathematical simulations yet. “That’s actually a pretty rare thing, to see the lightwave of arrival get here before the departure.”
Cassandra Kresnov 04: 23 Years on Fire Page 49
