The darkness over Alamo is burned by laser lashings, ruby tracers of automatic cannons, and explosions of bombs, and the night sky is cut by manmade comets—doomed airplanes fall, trailing dazzling fire tails. Finishing their fall, they pierce into the ground, marking the place of death with mushroom-like fiery clouds, and almost simultaneously, the anti-aircraft systems that have overtaken them from the sky perish, covered with a hail of bombs.
“Code Nine! I repeat, Code Nine in—”
Communication is interrupted; the first confirmations come from a scout helicopter flying over what used to be the Ministry of Defense, which is housed in a disguised building among the houses on the outskirts. Now there are only two walls and a small part of the roof; everything else has disappeared. No flame, no smoke, not a single fragment, nothing at all in the place of the multi-story building and everything that was inside—there is only a silver lake resembling a giant drop of mercury.
The mercury droplet moves—the mirrored surface flows silently over the concrete, embracing the remains of the Ministry's walls; a couple of seconds later, the walls crumble into the liquid mirror and instantly disappear. Only a couple of circles pass through the serene surface, then everything ceases; the area of the lake has grown.
“The nanomachines.”
One of the bomber squadrons carried unusual and very expensive ammunition filled with a transparent liquid of silvery color. This isn’t an incendiary compound or poison gas; it has nothing at all in common with any previously known substance: each drop is a cluster of several trillions of atomic constructors. Such weapons have already been used, and Antonina has repelled several such attacks, destroying hordes of invisible assassins with electromagnetic traps, for the Achilles' heel of nanomachines is an imbalance to hard radiation. But this time, a new prototype is working against them, with increased protection against radiation, applied in an unprecedented amount.
The bombs freed the liquid, which immediately merged into a huge drop and proceeded to action. There is no barrier that can stop its spreading—the most durable concrete and ceramite are instantly disassembled by nanomachines to the molecular state, barely standing in the way. Once they reach any metal, atomic constructors use it to produce copies—the drop increases its volume and hence its strength. Having dealt with the Ministry, the drop moves toward the nearest buildings, overturning lampposts and absorbing broken cars. Anti-aircraft guns shoot the drop, but the shells can’t cause any damage to that rippling mirror surface; it's like shooting a stormy river hoping to stop the flood.
“Olga, get all the fire trucks here!”
Having entered into battle with a new enemy, Antonina first disconnects the cable lines to prevent the drop from spreading through them. Olga, meanwhile, is pulling to the contaminated area all nearby fire trucks, which had to be removed from everywhere else. Antonina briefly explains how she plans to cope with the drop destroyer; now they must hurry before it eats half the city.
The drop reaches the nearest houses, seeping through the walls, like water through a sponge. Antonina tries to get people out, but she isn’t very successful—all the metal parts of the buildings are rapidly becoming part of a drop that has accelerated many times and turns fortified houses into deadly traps. Almost immediately, the security systems fail, a few seconds before the electricity cutoff, Olga sees civilians trying to escape the silvery stream, which is instantly destroying victims at contact. There are also those who try to resist, shooting the drop or throwing grenades into it, but no one survives.
“This bastard can also leak to us.”
In less than two minutes, the drop destroys the city quarter, but then its speed slows down—everything around it has been destroyed. All possible metal has already been used to build up the mass, and everything that can burn has already been processed for fuel. Now the drop has to cross a vast empty space in search of a new enemy, and this will require considerable energy, which the drop has in very limited supply. At this moment, the fire trucks are on their way.
“All searchlights—go to the south!”
Olga turns on the searchlights on the patrol helicopters, directing dazzlingly bright rays toward the mercury drop.
“Take her away!”
The girl moves the helicopters, leading the light spot to one side. Another second and the drop flowed after it, trying to catch the light of the searchlights.
“We got her!”
Nanomachines need energy as much as any other mechanism, and now the energy supply is coming to an end—and everything that can be used for fuel has already been absorbed in the occupied territory. And now the drop remains in an empty place, at the risk of dying from energy starvation on bare sand, which it can’t recycle. To continue its destructive work, it urgently needs an external source of heat and light, and such a source appears briefly and then goes to the side—and the drop begins to pursue it.
“Set fire to the napalm!”
The napalm barrels go down, the night darkness burns with the huge orange fire, and, feeling the heat, the drop accelerates; Olga sees that its dimensions are decreasing with every second—the periphery has already begun to die from lack of energy.
“The trench is ready; stop the helicopters!”
Running in three rows, automatic bulldozers have finished digging a wide trench half a meter deep. Separating the drop from the napalm fire, Olga sends to the trench all the light at her disposal.
“Caught a fish!”
Swallowing the bulldozers, the drop begins to pour into the trench, trying to occupy as large a space as possible under the beams of the searchlights, filling the trench almost to the brim.
“Kill the lights!”
The light goes out, and the fire trucks behind the trench send white streams of the fire-fighting reagent to the mercury drop, with temperatures just over one hundred degrees Kelvin. Olga sees the drop rush from side to side, stretching its tentacles in different directions in an attempt to get out from under the icy streams, but Antonina cuts off all attempts, gradually bringing the trucks closer together. The movement of the droplet slows down for another ten seconds before it freezes; the circles continue to circulate for a while, but then they stop.
“Is it dead?”
“Yes, death by frostbite, a very Martian way. Go back to work.”
The battle continues. Antonina doesn’t let go of control, despite the conflict with the killer's drop. Constantly risking their lives, airfield ground crews work without respite, removing new flying robots from the underground hangars to replace the destroyed ones. Individual groups of daredevils are moving along burning streets on four-wheeled motorcycles, reloading anti-aircraft guns under enemy fire, and on the Alamo, in the meantime, the new waves of bombers are coming.
“Hour X minus fifty-six minutes!”
Darkness recedes, revealing a view of the battlefield. Encountering strong resistance in air battles, Ferdinand's troops retreat; taking advantage of the brief respite, Antonina tidies up her fairly dilapidated forces, preparing to meet guests from outer space. Olga, meanwhile, returns to the repair business, specifying the scale of destruction in the city and the suburbs and issuing priority tasks to surviving emergency teams—the list of destroyed and seriously damaged objects increases with every second.
The Ministry of Defense has ceased to exist, but the People's Palace, near which Antonina held a particularly staunch defense, still stands. Covered in old mines, automatic war plants continue to work. The southern railway station was completely destroyed, and the eastern one received much damage, but most of the airfields were able to be saved. The Civil Communication Center and two of the four sectoral army headquarters survived. One-third of the antenna transmitters are now disabled, and the cable network was severely damaged—the main restoration work is going on there. The heaviest battles unfolded over the cosmodrome—at the cost of the complete destruction of the control center and half of the take-off sites, Antonina managed to defend most of the docks and the observatory.
Losses in aviation total thirty percent, and the air defense was destroyed by half. The death of four hundred and eighty people of both army and civilian personnel is confirmed; the number of wounded is almost three times greater.
“Who would have thought that the absence of atmosphere and water has its advantages,” says Olga, examining the city with the reconnaissance helicopters. Now these factors, which poisoned the lives of the citizens for so many decades, work in their favor. In an atmosphere unfit for respiration, each building in the Alamo, residential or public, is an isolated complex, with an autonomous system for supplying air, water, and electricity. Separated from the dead world behind the walls by a powerful system of locks and filters, each house is immune to chemical or virological weapons and can withstand tough doses of radiation. So the use of weapons of mass destruction here won’t have a hundredth part of the effect that it has in wars on Earth, and Ferdinand is compelled to fight with conventional methods, in which the Republic isn’t going to give up. Victory is indeed possible.
Completing the report on losses, Voronov notices the fact that some civilian objects didn’t suffer any damage at all, despite the strongest air strikes. Water wells, going to the Patel Glacier, greenhouses, farms, numerous food stores—all this was basically unaffected, except for small damages by fragments. The invaders don’t want to destroy their future property.
“Hour X minus nineteen minutes.”
The First Chief goes on air.
“Citizens—attention! There are less than twenty minutes left until the beginning of the enemy invasion. The ships of the occupants are finishing their maneuvers.”
The desperate face of Johnson is replaced by the globe of Mars: on the dull red surface, bright blue lines mark the borders of the Republic. The approaching Supernova squadron has just split into two links, constantly gaining speed. It isn’t necessary to be an experienced strategist to understand the purpose of this maneuver—bypassing the planet, the interventionists simultaneously attack from two directions in order to make Antonina's defense as difficult as possible.
“The invaders have four prison transports for ten thousand paratroopers each, plus fire support ships. This means that they can throw on us up to forty thousand criminals, some of whom will fall on our hospitable land already dead, and the rest we’ll meet with all our cordiality. To arms!”
Calling on fellow citizens to fight, the First Chief doesn’t say a word about his own space fleet, as if it doesn’t exist. Olga is lost in conjectures about what the Bolshevik is going to do, and is simply burning with the desire to be among her friends and not sit in this dungeon. However, the dungeon also has its advantages.
“Clark? How are things going there?”
“We are preparing to meet guests—setting the tables and making shish kebabs. How are you?”
“Not complaining. I wanted to ask—can you send a couple of smart guys here, just in case?”
“Sorry, we have no free men. At the worst, I'll come to you, but for now, don’t draw attention to yourself. So, it seems, it begins. Good luck!”
Again, the sirens howl, witnessing the approach of the climax—there is a little more than a minute remaining before the landing. Alamo freezes—the cannons are silent, most of the fires are extinguished, and there is no movement in the streets.
“Forty seconds!”
The invaders’ ships appear in the sky above the city—they can be seen through ordinary binoculars. The transport is declining, intending to dive for a short moment to the hundred-kilometer mark, drop the paratroopers, and immediately go back up, leaving the zone of Antonina’s missiles as soon as possible. Some of the fire support ships are repeating the maneuver, preparing to drop a multi-ton bomb load onto the city; some remain in high orbit, covering the transports from the Republic’s fleet, if they come into battle.
“Twenty-five seconds.”
Waves of interference periodically dazzle the radars, so Olga misses the brief moment when new marks appear on the screens. A second ago, only the Supernova ships were in the sky, but now their precise formation is being broken by several different ships, like the squadron of Russian hussars that struck the infantry column of Napoleon.
“Give them fire, comrades!”
The closest of the fights lasts only ten seconds, after which the Republic fleet hastily retreat, having lost more than half of their ships on the battlefield. But this desperate attack is enough to open the road to the Bolshevik, and Olga's comrades don’t miss their opportunity. Their guns drop one of the transports from orbit and seriously damage the other.
“Twelve seconds!”
One sun habitually rises in the east, and one more, smaller, quickly rolls up in the north—it falls the burning transport. The man-made sun ends its run behind the mountain ridge seventy kilometers from the Alamo; sitting in the underground shelter, Olga feels with her whole body the shuddering of the granite armor, and only then, a thunderous crash hits the city, drowning out the countdown.
“Five seconds!”
Against the orange-black wall of the nuclear explosion, long red stripes lash out—the fire support ships have dropped their bomb load. Towards the bombs, spears of rays rise, and the sky blossoms with explosions; the first wave of artificial meteorites has been destroyed, but many subsequent ones manage to break through. Bombs crash into the ground or pierce the roofs of city buildings, knocking them down like a deck of cards. Orbital bombardment costs Antonina several more air defense batteries, plus significant damage to the electronics—electromagnetic bombs cause many short circuits throughout the city.
“Here they go!”
In the sky above the Alamo, thousands of small stars flash—two surviving transports drop landing capsules. The third transport, heavily damaged by the Bolshevik’s shells, didn’t reach the drop zone and discharged over the territories of Supernova—another ten thousand criminals won’t be able to enter the battle. “Fortunate Son” replaces the countdown; soldiers and officers go to battle with banners and the national anthem of the Republic. They are preparing to meet the twenty thousand-strong army of invaders, inspired by the bold attack of their space fleet, which at one stroke halved the number of enemies.
Paratroopers fall from the orbit in single capsules: it takes them a little more than a minute to reach the ground. Each capsule is protected from enemy radars, throwing out charges of dipole reflectors, and in addition, dazzling illuminating bombs overlap the optical sights, so Antonina has to fight with this swarm at the limit of her reduced opportunities. Shots of laser guns are burned at a rate of twenty capsules per second, but there are too many of them, and now they have overcome the ten-kilometer mark.
“Crews of anti-aircraft guns—choose your targets and fire on readiness!”
Martians raise anti-aircraft guns to the zenith. They wait for the last seconds before the landing capsules enter the reach zone and then open fire. Deprived of electronics, these firearm veterans are not afraid of electromagnetic bombs and jamming and will shoot until the shells run out or the crews fall dead. The attackers are met by a deadly hail, going upward, contrary to the laws of physics. The capsules are scattered into shreds, but there are still too many of them.
“Contact!”
The first capsules that reached the ground were immediately swept away by fire but were followed by others, and now fierce skirmishes begin in the city streets. Twenty seconds later, the landing is over; one-third of the attackers were killed in the air, but the survivors now engage in battle.
Over Olga’s head flares up the most brutal kind of war—an urban battle at the minimum distance. There is no clear front line and rear: splitting into many fights, the battle goes on all over Alamo, wherever the surviving capsules have landed. The battle is on the streets and the roofs of large buildings; some units of the Republican army are fighting in complete encirclement, blocked by paratroopers on all sides.
Lasers flare up briefly. Flamethrowers jet out long streams of liquid fire, low-frequency gen
erators crush walls and human bodies with directed infrasonic waves, and anti-aircraft guns strike at point-blank range. If the enemy manages to break through into the houses, paving their way with explosives or infrasound, then along with the most modern weapons, time-proven tools such as hand grenades, trench knives, knuckles, and sapper blades are coming into play.
“Attention—wasps!”
Without leaving the command center, Olga conducts her battle. Her opponents are a familiar kind of military vehicles—a huge number of deadly robots, wasps, accompanying the paratroopers. Having escaped to freedom from their cases, the wasps rise into the air, attacking any person or robot that doesn’t bear the determinant “ally” or “enemy.” The wasps destroyed most of the anti-aircraft crews, and now they help the paratroopers seize buildings. It isn’t possible to destroy each wasp individually; it’s necessary to fight them with other methods. Voronov raises dozens of small aircraft, blinding aspen swarms with radio interference and spreading heat traps everywhere. This saves a lot of lives, but in order to completely eliminate the aspen threat, something more effective is needed.
“We got one!”
“Quickly, take him down!”
Olga sees how the Martians lower the killed paratrooper in the bomb shelter, whose spacesuit appears to be the least damaged.
“Put him on the operating table and get out!”
They start running the scanning program, and after a couple of seconds of searching, here it is, the intact determinant, hidden deep inside the oxygen cylinder. Next to the determinant is a bubble with a blue drop inside—a mine surprise for anyone who tries to extract a secret device. A few minutes earlier, the blasting of such a bubble killed two Republicans who were trying to take the determinant off another corpse.
"Let's start the operation."
Cutting a tiny hole in the knapsack with a surgical manipulator, the girl is closely matched with the determinant, but she can’t remove the insidious blue bubble, so she needs to do something else.
Using an armored ceramic flask for especially dangerous biological samples, Olga cools the bubble with a droplet of liquid nitrogen. Now it will explode not immediately but after a tiny period of time, about three-tenths of a second, which in principle should suffice.
The Blitzkrieg Page 24
