Helfort's War Book 4: The Battle for Commitment Planet (35 page)

But …

For all its ingenuity, for all the damage it would do, for all the lives it would snuff out, the victory ENCOMM hoped to achieve at Perdan spoke volumes for the fundamental weaknesses of the NRA, weaknesses that condemned them never to be able to hold their battlefield gains outside the Branxtons. That was what troubled Michael to the point where a corrosive mix of self-doubt and guilt was beginning to eat away at him.

Even if the Hammers recaptured Perdan, even if its recapture cost the Hammers thousands of PGDF and marine lives, ENCOMM’s victory would be a hollow one; it would contribute nothing to ending the war.

A shape slithered out of the darkness. “Helfort,” it whispered.

Michael started to reply before realizing belatedly that he was not the only Helfort around.

“Yes, Corp?” Anna said.

“Pull back to Papa Golf in five minutes,” the shape said softly. “You’re the last to leave in this sector, so for Kraa’s sake, keep quiet. The Hammers have settled down for the night, and we want it to stay that way. Trip wires and claymores set?”

“Yes, Corp. All armed.”

“Good. Five minutes.”

“Roger that.” The figure slithered away. “Michael,” Anna said. “You ready?”

“Yes,” Michael said, trying not to think about the fact that less than 500 meters separated where he and Anna were holed up and the Hammer’s forward defenses—a shifting chain of slugs backed up by sensors linked to fixed defenses: mines, claymores, autofiring cannon, and microgrenade launchers all programmed to scour the ground clean of anything that moved. Behind them, dug in along the banks of a small stream, was a battalion of PGDF soldiers, and farther back was what ENCOMM intelligence reports said was a company of heavy artillery. It was a terrifying proposition to be so close to such overwhelming force, to be so alone, with only a handful of slugs for support if the Hammers tried anything.

The seconds ticked away, one eternity at a time. “Time,” Anna hissed at last. “You go first.”

Michael started to protest, then decided not to. Anna was ten times the foot soldier he would ever be. Taking firm hold of his rifle, he adjusted his chromaflage cape and backed out of the foxhole on his belly, eyes scanning the ground toward the
Hammer front line for the slightest movement. There was none, and Anna followed, a shapeless blur of black oozing its way backward.

It was a long, painful crawl; finally, Anna signaled Michael to stop. “That’s enough. We can walk out from here but stay low. Come on.”

With that, she was off, leaving Michael to wonder how she kept going. Jeez! She had been wounded only days before, and here she was, acting like nothing had happened. Anna might look like a china doll, but underneath she was pure unalloyed steel, and he should never forget it.

Papa Golf was the section rally point, a small rock outcrop thrusting up out of the forest 100 meters from the Manivi River, an exit route cut through the encircling Hammers and kept open only after a series of bloody engagements had persuaded the Hammers they had better things to do than worry about a few NRA troopers getting away from certain defeat. Anna and Michael were the last to arrive, her section corporal waving her on.

“Where the hell have you been, Helfort? Come on, for Kraa’s sake!”

“Yes, Corp.”

With that, the last of the NRA slipped south and away into the night. Behind them, Perdan was empty save for a few brave souls waiting for the Hammers to arrive.

   “What the hell do you want?” the Hammer general charged with retaking Perdan growled, glaring from sleep-gummed eyes at the man standing over his cot. “Kraa’s blood! What time is it?”

“It’s 00:15, sir,” the young officer said, nervously. Major General Horovitz, Hammer Planetary Ground Defense Force, was a man who held the unshakable view that military operations should not get in the way of a good night’s sleep.

“This better be good.”

“Chief of staff’s compliments, sir, and would you please come to the operations center?”

“If I must.”

* * *

“This seems too good to be true, General. I think we need to be careful.”

General Horovitz snorted in derision. Kraa! Why was his chief of staff so damn cautious? “It’s obvious, man. Those NRA scum know they can’t hold on to to Perdan, so they’ve done what they do every time. Run away like the gutless cowards they are. Get things moving. I want to tell the chief councillor that Perdan is back in our hands before daybreak.”

“Sir,” Horovitz’s chief of staff said.

An hour later, Hammer kinetics fell on Perdan’s outer defenses, a storm of high-velocity tungsten-carbide slugs that reduced earth and equipment to a rolling cloud of ionized gas and dust. Before it had even cleared, Hammer forward elements moved into the outer suburbs, the air ripped apart by ground-attack landers orbiting overhead. Screened by marine heavy armor, they moved along the main highway heading for the center of town. The city was deserted. Not a soul moved amid the debris of war, the only sounds the periodic flat crack as a main battle tank’s hypervelocity gun replied to some imagined threat and the occasional crackle of rifle fire from nervous patrols flanking the main advance, both underscored by the never-ending howl of patrolling marine landers.

   It was hours before General Horovitz allowed himself to be convinced that Perdan was his. Now he was. The NRA had gone, every last one of them. Satisfied, he called Chief Councillor Polk to give him the good news.

Call over and basking in Polk’s approval, Horovitz waved his chief of staff over. “Colonel Madani. You said General Baxter wanted to speak to me?”

“Yes, sir. He does,” Madani said.

“Fucking marines,” Horovitz said, his good humor evaporating fast. “What in Kraa’s name does he want?”

“I don’t know for sure, sir,” Madani said. “He refuses to talk to me. I suspect he wants his marines back.”

“Oh, he does, does he? Didn’t think he wanted to congratulate me. Well, he can have them back. Get onto it. I want orders cut withdrawing them back to the airport. They can damn well wait there until their landers arrive to take them home.”

“Is that wise, sir?”

“Wise?” Horovitz barked, rage reddening his face. “Why would it not be?”

“We’ve not swept the airport, sir. Kraa knows what the NRA has left lying around.”

Horovitz waved a dismissive hand. “The marines can look after themselves. They have combat engineers, don’t they?”

“Ah, no they don’t, General. Combat engineering support is our responsibility, planetary defense’s responsibility.”

Horovitz waved his hand again. “Well, that’s not my problem. Ours have better things to do than sanitizing an airport. Anyway, the NRA aren’t miracle workers. Even they can’t mine Kraa knows how many hectares of ceramcrete, and if they did, even the dumbest marine could see what they’d been up to. Provided the marines stay well clear of the buildings and don’t touch anything, I can’t see a problem. Kraa, what am I saying? They should know that.”

“Yes, sir.”

Horovitz waited patiently while his chief of staff went off to issue the orders to the marines. “Done?” he said when the man returned.

“Yes, sir. They’ll start pulling back inside the hour. They’re not happy about the lack of combat engineering support, but Brigadier Agnelli says he can cope.”

“Pleased to hear it,” Horovitz said venomously. “I’d be happy if we never worked with those arrogant pricks ever again. How are we doing interdicting the NRA withdrawal?”

“Well, sir. We are dropping blocking forces right across their egress routes back to the Branxtons as we speak, backed up by ground-attack fliers—”

“Do I detect a note of disapproval?” Horovitz said. “Yes, Colonel … yes, I think I do.”

“No, sir,” Madani protested. “I made my point at the time, sir. You made your decision, I accepted it then, I accept it now. There’s nothing more to say.”

Horovitz glared at his chief of staff. He refused to trust the man any farther than he could spit. The fact that Colonel Madani belonged to a clan with higher-placed connections than his was a constant irritation. He would have gotten rid of him
months ago otherwise. Horovitz’s nephew, a young and ambitious man, was ideal for the position, and it galled him that he had not been able to persuade the PGDF’s commanding general to sack Madani.

“Don’t think I don’t know what you’re thinking, Colonel,” Horovitz said finally. “I know you wanted the blocking forces dropped into position early. In my opinion, that was too risky. We needed to secure Perdan first. I thought I had made myself clear.”

“Yes, sir, you did.”

“Good. If I hear my decision being criticized, I’ll know whom to blame. So, you were saying?”

   Loneliness threatened to overwhelm Trooper Chou; he had never felt so cut off, so isolated, so exposed, his only connection to the small handful of NRA troopers left behind in Perdan a hastily buried fiber-optic cable. Tucked away under his chromaflage cape, he was hidden in rubble around a fire-damaged ware house positioned on a small ridge overlooking Perdan’s airport, a tangle of ceramsteel beams balanced overhead to form a precarious roof. The airport’s sprawling ceramcrete aprons were a shambolic mess of abandoned equipment scattered between the blast-blackened wrecks of planetary defense trucks and light armor. Long after the last of the NRA had pulled out, nothing had moved except for the rain dropped by a passing monsoonal rainstorm. Soon afterward, a gray light announced the arrival of a new day. Recon drones arrived overhead, then attack drones, and then the first chromaflaged shapes drifted into view, indistinct blurs that Chou struggled to identify. Backed up by armor, some moved past the shattered ruins of the airport’s terminal buildings before spreading out to secure a perimeter while the rest made their way out onto the aprons and taxiways. Hammer marines, Chou decided, judging by their obvious discipline and efficiency.

Some time later, things began to pick up. First, a second convoy of marine armor arrived, followed by a steady stream of marine units on foot until the airport apron was crowded. Heart in mouth, Chou watched one marine start to rearrange a pile of mortar-shell boxes into the makings of a crude shelter.
He did not get far before a passing corporal yelled at him, abuse pouring down much like the rain. Chou smiled. The corporal was dead right. Fiddling with battlefield debris that had not been declared safe by the combat engineers was bad for one’s health. Relieved, he watched the corporal harangue the miscreant to rejoin the rest of his unit.

Chou waited. Hour after hour, unit after unit, the marines kept coming until the ceramcrete aprons were thick with marines sprawled out in untidy lines as they waited for their rides home, a sea of combat-armored bodies interrupted by laagers of every vehicle in the marines’ air-mobile inventory. Chou licked his lips, his throat parched ash-dry. He had never seen this many Hammer marines in one place before; it was a frightening sight. “Kraa help us,” he whispered as an awful truth hit him. What he was staring at was a small part, a tiny fraction, of the Hammer war machine the NRA faced. The NRA could kill every last marine sitting on the airport aprons, and what difference would it make? There were thousands more, tens, hundreds of thousands more marines where these had come from. All of a sudden, victory seemed a long way away.

The distant rumble of incoming landers broke the silence, distant dots appearing, quickly taking the unmistakable shape of Hammer heavy transport landers. This was as good as it was going to get, he decided. Chou activated his whisper mike.

“Jackass, this is Joker Three Four,” he said.

“Joker Three Four, Jackass.”

“I have multiple heavy landers inbound. Estimate fifteen hundred marines plus support vehicles on the apron. Recommend we go when the landers touch down.”

“Jackass, roger that. Stand by.”

Chou said a quiet word of thanks to the Feds; they had provided the fiber-optic network connecting the observers to each other and to their improvised charges. He still was not sure about them, but the communications gear coming out of their microfabs was a hundred times better than anything the NRA had been able to steal from the Kraa-damned Hammers.

The faceless NRA trooper controlling the operation was gone only a minute. “Joker Three Four, Jackass.”

“Joker Three Four.”

“Joker Three Four, Jackass. Concur. Go when the first lander hits the ground. Stand by … Joker Niner One, Jackass. Activate. I say again, activate all charges. Report when ready to fire.”

Chou set to work, and one by one the truckbot fusion microplants came to life. The die was cast. Once fusion started, there was no stopping it. The safety interlocks had been just so much dead weight; they had been ripped off and discarded. All Chou needed to do was wait until they came to full power; then he either fired them or five minutes later they would lose containment anyway. It was a while, but finally he had all green lights.

“Jackass, Joker Three Four.”

“Joker Three Four, Jackass.”

“All charges online. Ready to fire.”

“Roger, Three Four. Joker Niner One, this is Jackass. All stations stand by to fire on Joker Three Four’s command. Joker Three Four, you copy? Try to get the landers.”

Chou gulped; this was not in the plan. He took a deep breath to steady himself. “Affirmative, Jackass, firing on my command. Joker Niner One, this is Three Four, stand by to fire.”

With agonizing slowness, the first of the marine landers banked hard, wings flexing under the load, before it settled down to make its final approach. Behind it, the second lander followed suit, the two landers running toward the threshold, rock-steady, as if on rails.

“Joker Niner One, this is Joker Three Four … firing in five, four, three, two, one, now!”

Truckbot microfusion plants scattered beside the runway and across the airport apron exploded in a single searing flash of pure energy, the blast scouring the ceramcrete clean, every living thing destroyed in an instant. The two marine landers never had a chance; picked up bodily, they were thrown over onto their sides. Before their pilots had time to react, first their wings and then their hulls plowed into the close-cropped grass flanking the main runway, the shock of impact blowing huge clouds of rain-sodden dirt high into the air before they tumbled
end over end, gouging massive scars into the ground before coming to a stop.