Helfort's War Book 4: The Battle for Commitment Planet (9 page)

Except, except …

The brutal truth was that diverting the three dreadnoughts would make no difference to anything. For reasons that made no sense, in the face of everything the dreadnoughts had achieved against appalling odds, Fleet had decided they would play no significant part in the war. That was why they had been sent to Nyleth, their war reduced to pointless attacks on soft Hammer targets in an unimportant sector of space. Like children given a tool they did not understand and could not use, Fleet first mocked it as useless and then discarded it.

Michael gave a snort of disgust. Who were the fools? Not he and the crew of
Redwood
. Yes, nobody would think what he was about to do made any sense. He would be branded a traitor and a fool. He would be a pariah for as long as he lived. He would never be forgiven. But as long as there was a chance that helping Anna also would help the poor bastards fighting the Hammers on the ground—and they were the only ones capable of toppling the Hammers—then it was the right thing to do.

Because one thing was for sure. Nothing Fleet was doing right now was going to win this war.

The heavily wooded foothills of the Branxton Ranges sprawled away from the coast, shrouded in mist. Thin tendrils of moisture twisted their way through the predawn gloom, gray wraiths pushed by a gentle westerly breeze down the valleys toward the coastal highway linking Daleel to the north
and Besud to the south. Ghostlike, chromaflaged shapes had come out of the mountains. Now they slipped through the trees, easing into position around the kill zone, a sweeping bend in the highway cut into the shallow hillside and flanked by sharp outcropping headlands that dropped sheer into the sea below.

Major Chiaou, the assault commander, pronounced himself satisfied, pleased that his troopers had followed the plan as briefed though still concerned at what his force was being asked to do. He settled down to wait.

A long hour dragged past, and Chiaou began to worry in earnest. He had much to worry about: that the convoy taking the best part of a marine battalion and its equipment to the Besud marine base might be a figment of some intel spook’s overheated imagination, that the arrival of daylight might expose his painfully small force, that the endless succession of Hammer recon drones scanning the highway for anything unusual might detect a momentary lapse of chromaflage discipline by one of his troopers, and, worst of all, that marine landers might already be on their way to turn the hillside into a shock-ravaged and flame-blasted wasteland scoured clean of all life by the Hammers’ favorite weapon, the simple but cruelly effective fuel-air bomb, engineered to give an explosive yield greater than battlefield tacnukes without the political cost that bedeviled all nuclear weapons.

Thirty minutes, Chiaou decided, another thirty minutes, and then he would order the withdrawal. He could not risk his troopers any longer than that.

With less than ten of those thirty minutes left, the waiting ended. Word arrived that the targets were on their way, and Chiaou passed the order to stand to. It seemed a lifetime before the convoy swung into view around the headland to the north, preceded by a pair of recon drones zigzagging through the air overhead, searching for anything unusual with mindless diligence. Chiaou breathed in sharply, air hissing in through clenched teeth to fill his lungs. This was no ordinary convoy. No, this was a Hammer marine convoy, a succession of soft-skinned cargobots protected by light tanks front and rear, with a command half-track and more tanks in the convoy’s center.

Chiaou did not like what he saw. Marines made him nervous;
marine armor, even light armor, terrified him. It had been long-standing NRA policy to leave the marines well alone, and for good reason. So why me? he asked himself. Why was his company the one selected for the dubious honor of being the first to take out a marine convoy?

The convoy was in no hurry. The long line of vehicles ground its way nose to tail around the headland and into view until they were arrayed in a long, shallow arc in front of Chiaou, and still the lead tank had not reached the southern headland.

“Now!” he hissed. “No—”

With a flat, slapping crack, claymores fired to initiate the ambush, and the leading cargobots disintegrated as walls of shrapnel scythed through their soft skins. The tanks slammed to a halt, turrets turning to face the attack, hypervelocity auto-cannon and lasers firing blindly at an unseen enemy. Too little, too late; the tanks died, overwhelmed by antiarmor missiles fired from positions well back from the road and upslope, the missiles climbing steeply before dropping in a plunging attack under full power directly into the tanks’ vulnerable upper armor. Then it was the recon drones’ turn, man-portable air-defense missiles streaking skyward on flame-topped needles of white smoke to hack them out of the air.

“Suck that, you Hammer bastards,” Chiaou muttered as he watched the drones plummet to earth. “What did you think we’d do with all those missiles we stole last month, you dumb shitheads?”

He watched the armored vehicles spin out of control, death pyres of dirty black smoke shot through with scarlet tongues of flame climbing hungrily into the sky, pillars of death quickly overwhelmed as one after another, fusion power plants lost containment, blasting blinding white balls of pure energy across the convoy. The shock wave smashed into Chiaou’s helmet with such force that he grayed out for second. There was silence, then the morning filled with an appalling racket as every weapon Bravo Company possessed opened up on the surviving cargobots and their hapless marines, the thin-skinned vehicles no match for the short-range missiles carried by every trooper in Chiaou’s force. Trapped front and rear by burning armor, flanked
by a wall of death on one side and a sheer drop into the sea on the other, the marines had nowhere to run. Those who survived the brutal assault long enough to reach what little cover there was were quickly overwhelmed. Soon the air was filled with the bone-crunching crack of cargobot fusion power plants losing containment, savage white flares of pure energy bleaching the muted greens and browns of the landscape to pale gray.

Chiaou gave the order to withdraw. Time was not on his side, and he knew from bitter experience that the ambush was the easiest part of the operation. What came next was what worried him: surviving the Hammer’s response. Warned by the recon drones in the instant before they died, Hammer commanders would have heavy ground-attack landers loaded with fuel-air bombs on their way from the marine bases at Besud and Amokran; assuming the intel brief was right, B Company had enough time to reach the dubious safety of caves to the southwest of the ambush site before the Hammers turned up. If he and his troopers were not tucked away safely by the time the landers started to carpet bomb the area, they would not live to see another day.

Leaving behind a scene of utter carnage, the bones of the convoy and its missile-shattered escort strewn across the highway in an arc of smoldering, blast-ripped metal, Chiaou’s company pulled back into the woods. Running hard now, they did not stop even when the distant grumble of heavy engines announced the landers’ arrival. Legs burning and lungs afire, Chiaou pounded along, the withdrawal disintegrating into a loose melee as B Company fled for its life, the already headlong pace picking up when the
whump whump
of the first pattern of bombs shook the forest, shock waves showering the ground with leaves and twigs.

The lay-up point was a chaotic fall of rocks at the head of a thickly wooded dry valley, one of thousands incised into the foothills of the Branxton Ranges. Behind the boulder fall lay a small complex of caves, smaller than Chiaou would have wanted but the best for many kilometers around and proof against all but a direct hit, which was an unlikely event; for all their overwhelming numbers, not even the Hammers could carpet bomb
every square centimeter of the Branxtons, though they seemed intent on trying.

   It took a lifetime before the endless pounding of the Hammer air attack died away. B Company had survived, the nearest bombs falling too far away to cause any casualties. Shaking a head thick with the aftereffects of repeated shock, his mouth dry with limestone dust blasted off the cave walls, Chiaou ordered recon teams out to make sure the Hammers were not waiting for them. Impatiently, he waited for word back. When it came, it was bad news. The Hammers had dropped blocking forces to the west; the air was thick with recon drones, their black shapes wheeling endlessly overhead. The protective forest had been reduced to matchwood, more marines were sweeping toward them from the coast, and the first of the Hammers’ attack drones had been spotted, their lasers and fuel-air bomblets already at work, pounding anything remotely resembling an NRA formation.

After a quick briefing, Chiaou ordered his troopers out of hiding. He swore under his breath when he emerged into the morning light; even though the Hammers seemed to have no idea where he and his troopers had holed up, the situation did not look good. B Company had one chance: Whatever the cost, it would have to break through the Hammer containment lines and run for the safety of the forest beyond. If they stayed and fought out in the open, the Hammers would grind them to dust.

So be it, Chiaou thought, resigned to whatever fate had in store for him and B Company.

With an efficiency born of quiet desperation, the troopers formed up and moved off. Chiaou’s plan laid no claim to subtlety. Outgunned and outnumbered, all he had left was surprise, speed, and ferocity. “Faster, faster,” he screamed over his shoulder, waving his troopers into a sprint that slammed B Company into the containment line blocking their retreat to the west. For all the battlefield intelligence pouring down from the recon drones overhead, the marines were slow to react to the onslaught, letting B Company get far too close. When they did react, their response was a terrible thing, a blizzard of
rifle and machine gun fire pouring into the NRA’s ranks. Heedless, the survivors closed on the marines, the terrible losses ignored as they clawed their way into the marines’ hastily prepared positions.

Shock, sheer momentum, and a suicidal disregard for personal safety did what lack of numbers could not; in only minutes, B Company had punched a hole through the Hammers’ lines. Chiaou’s orders had been clear: Anyone who made it through was to keep going, and so they did, those who could.

Those too badly wounded to follow whispered their farewells and prepared to die the only way they knew how. Only minutes after B Company had smashed into the Hammers’ containment line, a microgrenade finished off the last NRA trooper still fighting, but not before she took a good many Hammers with her. When the trooper died, less than thirty of B Company had survived. Chiaou had not; with manic bravery, he and a handful of troopers had fought their way into the marines’ command post, and there they, too, had died, along with most of the battalion’s senior staff.

   As silence fell, the Hammer battalion’s new commander walked the ground, shaken by the ferocity of the morning’s events and embittered by the loss of so many of his men. He had refused to believe his intelligence officer when told the battalion had faced a single reinforced NRA company. He shook his head as he studied the latest casualty report. Only a reinforced company? How could that be? He had never seen anything like it, and this was not the NRA’s only operation that day. It had launched attacks on targets all across Maranzika: a factory manufacturing inertial navigation units, another producing air-to-air guided missiles, a third assembling heavy lander fusion power plants. They had assaulted DocSec security posts and support facilities, planetary ground defense supply depots, and a marine recruit induction center. It was unbelievable, every operation stamped with what were fast becoming the NRA’s trademarks: audacity, speed, ferocity, and a willful disregard for self.

The battalion commander kicked the ground with the toe of his boot. Today was his first in combat against the NRA, a day
he had not enjoyed. Something told him it would not be his last.

“Sir,” one of his sergeants said.

“Yes?”

“Major Schmidt’s compliments, sir. He has the prisoners ready for you.”

“How many?”

“Five, sir.”

“Five?” the battalion commander said, looking up sharply, his eyes narrowed in astonishment. “You sure? Five? That’s all?”

“Yes, sir. I’m sure. Five.”

“Kraa! So few. Okay, lead on.”

The man followed his sergeant to a small rock-backed hollow in the valley wall. There lay the five NRA prisoners. They were a pitiful sight: every one badly wounded, combat overalls blood-drenched, wounds dressed with hastily applied field dressings. But it was their eyes that took his attention; wounded or not, hate blazed from all of them.

Schmidt came over to meet him. “Hard to believe, sir, but that’s the lot. The rest are either dead or got away.”

“They going to tell us anything useful?”

“Doubt it, sir. They won’t say a word, any of them. Get too close, and all they do is spit at you.”

“Kraa-damned sonsofbitches,” the battalion commander said, voice harsh. “Screw them. We have better things to do. Shoot the bastards.”

Schmidt’s eyes flared wide in surprise. “Sir?”

“You heard me, Major. Shoot them. Then we pull out; planetary defense after-action teams are on their way to clean up.”

“Sir!” Schmidt’s voice rose in protest. “I don’t believe that is a legal—”

“I’m not interested in what you believe, Major Schmidt. Either we shoot them or DocSec does. What difference does it make? So do it. That’s an order.”

“What DocSec does is their business and doesn’t alter the fact that we are not permitted to shoot prisoners out of hand. I’m sorry, sir, but that’s a fact.”

The battalion commander stepped back a pace and unbuttoned
the flap over the pistol at his waist. “You’re sorry? You’re sorry?” he said, voice rising as shock and stress let anger take control. “This is a battlefield, not a courtroom. It is for me, not you, to decide what is legal and what is not,” he shouted, all self-control gone, spittle gathering white in the corners of his mouth. “Obey my order, Major. Obey it now, or I’ll shoot you and then I’ll shoot them myself. Make up your Kraa-damned mind, Major!”