The Blitzkrieg

by Yuri Hamaganov

  A few more steps; the enemy is very close, literally behind the nearest container. It’s now or never. Olga tears off a red strip from the bottom and starts counting.

  “One, two, three …”

  The cup vibrates in her palm, Olga smoothly throws it forward, toward the leg of a mercenary in a light combat suit, who jumps out from behind a container. The assault gun is roaring, but this noise can’t overcome the thin voice of the cup, joyfully singing, “Dinner is ready!” There is a flash, an explosive wave hits her ears, next to her head, and a ricocheted nut clinks, but the firing has stopped—there's no one else to shoot.

  Olga, squinting like a mole, peers at the corpse, thinking about the abandoned gun. She doesn’t have a second cup of soup, so the machine gun looks very tempting, especially when it's only ten meters away, but she doesn’t want to leave the reliable protection of the wagon—the mercenary probably wasn’t alone.

  The thirty-ton wagon above her shudders from the impact of a guided missile, an explosive wave buries Olga’s face in the sand, and a machine gun rattles. Shot from the opposite hill, a tracer flashes briefly, piercing the sides and the roof of the wagon. Olga buries more deeply into her trench, covering her head with her hands.

  “It's unforgivable to do this to a girl!”

  A powerful dull explosion silences the machine gun; Olga raises her head and manages to see two mercenaries running towards her just as both of them are swept away by a short burst of automatic cannon fire. The walkie-talkie comes alive.

  “Somewhere here I'm waiting for a girl who flew on a paraglider with me!”

  “Clark!”

  A car stops next to the wagon with a sharp hiss of its brakes.

  “The limousine has arrived!”

  Olga gets out from under the wagon and sees a triaxial buggy, with Clark sitting at the helm.

  “Get behind the wheel!”

  Clark promptly gets up from the driver's seat to take his place at the turret with automatic cannon, Olga slips across the hood and takes his place; her palms lie on the unusually big steering wheel, and under her feet are three large pedals. She is familiar with a manual gearbox only in theory; now comes the practice.

  “Go along the railway!”

  The girl hesitantly moves the car forward. Wide tires crush sand and scattered debris, she quickly gains speed, and the jeep begins to tangibly chatter.

  “Don’t accelerate above seventy-five, and slow down at the corners; otherwise, it will turn us over—this isn’t Earth!”

  Voronov is gradually mastering the wheel, quickly learning from Clark’s short lesson. Clark is right—low gravity and weak traction with loose ground makes it dangerous to accelerate the car too much. The risk of a coup is great; even their jeep with its low center of gravity can easily fly upwards into the breakage. But if she carefully follows the road and properly operates the brake and gas pedals, she can confidently move with a speed not available to Earth SUVs. The broken train stays far behind. The sun throws its last rays over the valley as Olga drives the jeep along a barely noticeable track parallel to the railway embankment. The valley gradually narrows, passing into a narrow gorge.

  “Skipper, what about coordinates? Where do we go?”

  “You see the three vertical windmills on the left? As you reach them, brake and turn off; there is a hill with a forty-degree slope. As you drive up, maintain a speed of ten, no more. Don’t turn on the headlights; we aren’t alone here!”

  In the shade, it gets colder. Olga starts to freeze; the action of the adaptive mixture is ending. In the jeep’s emergency set must be more syringes, but now isn’t the right time—the thin, high spokes of the windmills are very close, and she has to get out of the gorge. Olga slows down, turns away, and, switching to first gear, begins to slowly climb the hill, gazing intently ahead so she doesn’t hit one of the large stones.

  The burst of auto cannon breaks the silence like a lion's roar, and the jeep quivers from the recoil. Olga doesn’t see where Clark shoots, but she sees the return fire perfectly, as tracers whip the dust in front of the car. A single bullet is knocking loudly on the tubular frame. The jeep seems to stumble and begins to swing to the right—the rear right wheels have been punctured in several places. She manages to keep the car on the slope, braking to the speed of a pedestrian, waiting for the automatic protector to tighten the holes so the pumps can restore the pressure. The shootout continues for another thirty seconds and then abates as suddenly as it began; Clark has hit the enemy’s machine gun.

  “When we rise to the plateau, drive to the southeast, and be careful on the dunes—it’s very easy to turn over!”

  They travel the last ten meters, and the jeep gets on the edge of the sandy plateau. The girl turns left, where, according to the map, a dirt road is laid, and for about a minute she goes quite calmly. Suddenly, quick, cutting sounds attract her attention. Hurriedly looking around and finding nothing, she starts climbing a long, dingy dune when an unmanned Supernova helicopter, a black drop-shaped body with short wings under which rockets are fixed, rises in a cloud of orange dust.

  “Claaaark!”

  Olga bends over the steering wheel, waiting for the imminent missile salvo, but instead of firing, the attacking helicopter jerks to the side, its tail flying aside as if chopped off. The broken drone falls down, crashing into the dune, its rotor splitting into hundreds of small fragments. Olga has to turn abruptly to avoid a collision.

  “Nice shot, skipper!”

  “Yeah, but that wasn’t my shot. The powers of heaven helped.”

  Crossing the crest, Olga sees the angular silhouette of a small two-axle helicopter bearing the Republic's emblems on its black wings; it was the helicopter that had just saved them. The determinant confirms the status of a new ally; the robot skips the jeep under itself, and then flies off somewhere to the east. They travel alone for about four minutes before Antonina calls.

  “Olga, turn forty degrees starboard, speed seventy!”

  Without taking the time to question, Olga carries out the order, turning so sharply that the left wheels for a moment break away from the ground. Ahead appears the gray belt of a dirt road.

  “Faster!”

  Voronov presses the gas; the steering wheel is torn from her hands, and the jeep jumps like a ball in a mechanical billiard, rattling all the details. The dust covers her view, so she has to turn on the narrow yellow headlights. Ahead appears a bridge laid over a wide ravine.

  “Get off the road and stand directly under the bridge!”

  “Clark, hold on!”

  The last turn of the rudder sends the jeep flying into the ravine. The front wheels fly on a pile of gray pebbles, a sharp stone crashes into her face, and the rear wheels rise to the ground. Another ten seconds and she puts the car under the bridge.

  “Get to the column and stop!”

  The desert around the ravine soundlessly shakes with hundreds of simultaneous explosions. The steel deck above their heads rings like thousands of voices under a swarm of debris, the shock waves come one by one, and everything is covered with a long, low rumble.

  * * *

  “So, the last seam is ready. Voilà!”

  Clark removes the multifunctional surgical module of Olga's face and hands her a tiny signal mirror.

  “Just take it easy, man …”

  “Holy space!”

  Her high forehead is now divided by a deep scar from her left eyebrow to her hair; the newly stitched metal seam appears black on her pale skin. Olga seems to be looking at a tattered and carelessly sewn rag doll. The red light of a small lamp doesn’t add charm to the portrait.

  “In Alamo, you will be healed professionally, but this is the best that can be done right now. In our atmosphere, humans bleed much faster, so there is no time to lose.”

  “I see, thanks. Since you opened the first aid kit, can you see if there's any medical alcohol?”

  Clark takes a tiny flask from his belt.

  “I have something mu
ch better. Take off the mask and take one quick sip—only one, no more.”

  “Na zdorov’e!”

  A tiny portion of pure bourbon burns her throat, but it's nice—it dispels the cold and immediately clears up her head.

  “What did they throw at us—a tactical A-bomb?”

  “If it was a nuke, we would now be hovering in the upper atmosphere in the form of a couple of small clouds. It was just GRAD, fortunately loaded with conventional high-explosive fragmentation cassettes and not napalm. Antonina spotted the GRAD from a spy plane, and at the last moment found us this bridge. Thanks to that, we didn’t turn into a sieve. But the explosion was great, and when I saw that you were wounded in the head, I thought, ‘Mars took Olga.’ And this is just a fragment of rubble, nothing serious.”

  Putting aside the mirror, Olga tries to look around but without much success—the Martian nights are coal black, the tiny moons give little light, and only the edges of the mountains are slightly visible in the west.

  “Shall we wait here, under the bridge?”

  “Yes. The jeep is okay, but Antonina ordered us to stay where we are and wait for the landing helicopter. There will be no more firing; our little air friend is providing security. We have another minute and a half before the rescuers arrive, so if you want to thank me for that plastic surgery session—now is the time.”

  “This is better than any words.”

  Olga lowers the mask and gently kisses him on the lips.

  “Thank you for saving this girl, my hero.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: MEN AT ARMS

  “War is war, but dinner is as scheduled,” Olga says, opening the army's dry ration. Her gaze doesn’t leave the screens, marking the inexorable approach of enemy missiles, so the idea of a dinner in a hurry is very useful—especially if you can’t do anything else.

  Satellite-guided medium-range ballistic missiles attack the capital of the Republic for the third time in a day. After climbing a hundred and ten kilometers, they fall into a steep peak, and now it's up to Antonina to decide whether they’ll be intercepted or allowed to fall on the Alamo, like a meteor shower filled with explosives.

  Somewhere overhead, sirens howl, mobile lasers come to their fighting positions, and anti-aircraft batteries throw interceptors into the black sky. Separated from all this by a four-kilometer granite vault, Olga is at the command post in splendid isolation, waiting for the opportunity to help Antonina in case of any malfunction, like a coach watching an experienced athlete. While her help isn’t needed, she just watches the battle in the night sky, transferred to the command post through a branched network of radars and optical sights.

  In the black sky flashes rapid red sparkles—the warheads have passed the upper point of the trajectory and have rushed into the peak; the screens are covered by clouds. Laser guns and kinetic interceptors burn most of the missiles, but so thin is the line between the attack speed and the speed of defense, that many warheads break through, ending their flight with titanic explosions.

  In the epicenters, the temperature reaches five thousand degrees; the monstrous energy released in one thousandth of a second hits the Alamo, throwing hundreds of tons of debris. The hemispheres of shock waves batter the walls and tear down the roofs. Flows of air, compressed to the density of concrete, destroy the anti-aircraft batteries, turning heavy combat vehicles over like cardboard boxes. Multiple secondary fragments add destruction and fires.

  The stone armor reliably protects Antonina from the enemy attack, but a series of powerful explosions pretty much shatter the peripheral network. Having hundreds of hands and eyes cut off at once, Olga sees whole quarters leave the computer's control. Communication and control must be urgently restored, and repairmen are already making their way through the burning wreckage to set up new antennas and cables, and helicopters are scouting up in the heated sky to provide aerial observations. Voronov is also involved in the work, hastening to restore some of the underground communication lines, a temporary loss of control remains; the extent of the damage is clear.

  Alamo is burning. Some of the rockets carried cluster warheads with incendiary elements; the combustible compound will burn hotly even in the Martian atmosphere, burning stone and melting metal. The city is blazing with a lot of fires, but the biggest damage has been done to the southern, industrial outskirts: in some places, the flames rise for a hundred meters, tearing through the factory buildings and railway warehouses. Judging by personal sensors, at least seventy people have died, and even more have been seriously wounded—burned, affected by depressurization, and buried under the rubble of buildings. And the night is just beginning.

  From midnight on, the general attack continues. To ballistic missiles, winged brothers are added, and then air strikes and artillery shelling begin. The rockets start from the Supernova territories; from thence, one by one, waves of unmanned bombers roll up. There is no order to transfer combat operations to the enemy territory, which doesn’t leave Antonina with the possibility of retaliatory strikes. All she can do now is defensive battles. The purpose of the attacks is obvious—Ferdinand wants to destroy the Republic's air defense, knocking out Antonina's “teeth” and depriving her of the opportunity to give battle to the approaching interventionists.

  Missiles attack the most important civilian targets; Antonina is forced to meet them with reciprocal fire, unmasking her anti-aircraft guns, which immediately crash with the next wave of cruise missiles and bombers. Fighting to the end, missile batteries die one after another, forming more and more holes in the air defense shield. Self-propelled laser guns prove to be more tenacious; Antonina especially cares for these machines and changes position after each shot—in a modern battle, to remain in place is a sure death sentence.

  “Olga, give me a little help!”

  Trying to release some of the power, Antonina hands the experienced operators her secondary duties. Olga gets a batch of emergency robots under her control and directs them to start dismantling the rubble at the ruined railway station—she needs to get to the bomb shelter and bring the trapped people upstairs.

  Construction robots dismantle the rubble as they make their way to the bomb shelter, pulling out the wounded and packing the dead bodies into black bags. Catching a moment between the attacks, Olga urges an armored personnel carrier to the station, turns the car, and throws the aft hatch, carrying the wounded on the impromptu ambulance. Having finished the loading, she leads the car to the eastern outskirts, to the disguised mines in which the Alamo residents who aren’t engaged in military service are hiding.

  “Attention, attention! Hour X minus 310.”

  The short message reaches all the soldiers of the Republican army—those who are still alive and capable of continuing the battle. Olga has prepared herself for this news, but it still comes unexpectedly.

  “Today at eight in the morning, plus or minus ten minutes.”

  That's right—just over five hours from now, a full-scale invasion will begin; the interventionist ships are finishing a long flight and are ready to begin the landing operation.

  “Antonina, how's the Bolshevik?”

  “Normal—it’s doing its job.”

  Antonina didn’t consider it necessary to give further explanation, and Olga isn’t going to ask again. For more than two days, she has had no connection with her own ship, except for such short inquiries from the main computer. All she knows is that the cruiser is somewhere near the orbital station, observing almost complete radio silence.

  “Well, comrades, you know what to do. Don’t let me down.”

  The rocket attacks are noticeably weakening, but the activity of the enemy aircraft is increasing, so Antonina uses all available means of passive defense. Soldiers of the people's militia launch silver balloons into the sky, raising the barrier network—it’s an old-fashioned reception, primitive and cheap, but still effective against low-flying aircraft and cruise missiles. The generators of aerosol interference throw out clubs of thick gray smoke, dragging the st
reets with an impenetrable fog that hides residential quarters and industrial areas from optical and laser sights.

  “Olga, take command and keep the interval between the cars at one hundred and fifty meters. Move!”

  The new order doesn’t make itself wait: Antonina passes to her fifty “bites”—small camouflage tankettes with antennas. These caterpillar frogs rush along here and there, lighting the air with radio beams, imitating the anti-aircraft batteries and diverting retaliatory strikes, saving the real gunners with suicidal courage. Olga's link works on the north side of the city, next to a couple of kamikaze squads led by other operators.

  “Take cover!”

  Simultaneously, from all directions and all heights, several waves of bombers approach the city. But Antonina isn’t going to dutifully wait for their appearance in the sky over the Alamo.

  The squadron of robot fighters rises to meet the attacking, reinforced with flying radars and electronic warfare machines. Overcoming the resistance of the enemy jamming stations, Antonina finds in the thick electronic noise the primary targets—the flying command posts.

  The distance between the squadrons is rapidly shrinking; a concerted battle at a maximum range turns into an indiscriminate air melee, where laser hits and missile attacks are like knife fights and firing point-blank. Wildly roaring by, the planes make complicated maneuvers, casting fireworks of heat traps and dipole reflectors. A jamming hurricane drowns out the commands to individual planes and the whole squadron; despite heavy losses, the attackers are breaking through ever closer to the city, and after a few seconds, the first bombs fall to the outskirts.

  “Olga, spur your squadron!”

  Forcing the engines, the girl accelerates her “bites” to the ultimate speed, trying to win a little more time for the anti-aircraft gunners. The baits perish one after another, diverting enemy bombs and missiles; the battle is literally over her head.