The station interrupted my tirade with, "We have received no message telling of your arrival. Why are you broadcasting in clear instead of using the proper military security code? Why are you transmitting in real time instead of at combat speed?"
"I'm not at combat speed because I didn't expect to be in combat, you silly twit! Don't you have a gram of brains? Now shut down your guns and your computers! We're coming aboard!"
"You have not explained your use of uncoded messages."
Our forces were completely deployed now, with no further losses. My Gurkhas had been the first through the transporters, and we had only lost eleven men thus far. They were starting to move back toward the station. The New Syrians had taken some heavy losses when a hundred and six of our receivers were disabled. The survivors were moving farther out. In free space, you were never out of range of rail gun needles, but "distance makes the heart grow fonder and the target get smaller."
"Your incompetence seems to know no bounds! That was all explained in the message which you lost!"
"Explain it again, now."
"We are operating with new combat codes, since the old ones have been compromised. The new code was incorporated in with the message that you so conveniently lost. There was no other way to communicate with you except in clear, you bloody fool! Now, I say again, shut down. . . ."
"If you had expected us to get this hypothetical message, then you should have expected us to have the new combat codes, and would be using them yourself. I think that you are a liar. Stop where you are or I will open fire on you!"
They'd caught me.
By tight-beam laser, and using our own combat codes, I told my troops to each change direction slightly, but to continue in the general direction of the station. Also, they should be prepared to fire at the nearest gun which had exposed itself by firing earlier. I also sent a message to the New Syrian commander saying that any help would be greatly appreciated.
Abdul said that he was hesitant to use his rail guns on the station, for fear of causing unacceptable damage.
I replied that many of the enemy guns were located on the counterweights hanging at the end of the cables heading away from the sun. He should be able to shoot those up without seriously harming the station.
He said that he would see what he could do.
Still in clear, I broadcast to our enemy, "Good God, man! Would you honestly expect anyone to send a
mayday
call in anything else but clear English? Now let us in, and we can discuss this man to man!"
"You have not stopped your advance. I will open fire in two seconds."
I said, "We
can't
stop, you fool! You are making a stupid, horrible mistake!"
"I think not."
One point nine seconds after his threat, I gave the order, "Fire!"
Men around me started to die.
My colonels were kept busy identifying and assigning targets. My job was to sit back and try to perceive the Big Picture, preparing to change the general battle plan if that proved necessary and possible. Anything else would be micromanaging, and bad for all concerned. The trouble with sitting back is that you observe a lot of things that you wish you hadn't.
When an X-ray laser hits its target, there isn't much to see. Most of the energy is deposited deep inside, and the surface is only slightly warmed at first. When an Earthworm's rail gun took out one of our tanks, the results were pretty spectacular, with gobs of molten metal and burned flesh spraying out of fighting men and machines that were often cut in half. It looked like we were getting far worse than we were dishing out, but ever so slowly, one by one, the enemy guns ceased firing.
The Syrians were doing their share, taking out the guns mounted way out on the counterweights. We were still close to the station, and Abdul's men would have to pass those counterweights to get into position to defend against a counterattack.
In the course of shooting out the enemy guns, they often managed, by accident or design, to cut the cables entirely through. This sent the counterweights flying outward at a good clip while the cable came whipping inward. I saw at least two of the Syrians get taken out by those cables before they stopped aiming at them.
Being trained in the martial arts, some of our men made good use of those cables. I saw one of our tanks, with a rail gun burst coming right across his bow, reach out and grab a cable he was passing. He swung around like a nightclub dancer on a brass rail, and headed back the way he'd come! His humanoid drone wasn't ready for the G forces. It flew off into the rail gun needles, and was instantly shattered, but that's war.
Abdul's rail guns had one disadvantage when mounted on a tank in space. They developed over a G of thrust, more than his rockets could compensate for. Firing in the direction you were going, they could only be used intermittently, or you would soon start moving backward!
On the other hand, when you ran out of rocket fuel, you had another means of propulsion available.
My troops had neither that problem nor that advantage. The thrust of a laser is insignificant. What we did have was a god-awesome number of guns shooting at us, and we were the ones closest to them.
I was surprised to see that many of my Gurkhas had their tank swords in the hands of their manipulator arms, and were swinging them about, something that they hadn't done in practice sessions. Professor Cee said that it might help with maneuvering, but personally I think that they were just doing it for fun, as if they were taking part in an ancient cavalry charge.
Between themselves, they were shouting a bewildering number of battle cries, most of which I'd never heard before, but with the occasional "Gung Ho!", "Tally Ho!", "Hooah!", and rebel yell interspersed with the rest.
Quite a few of them had their humanoid drones riding on top of their tanks, swinging their swords as well. What the enemy thought of all this was unimaginable.
I let our boys have their fun. Anything to take their minds off of the horrible reality of the situation we found ourselves in. We had never expected the station to be this well defended.
I saw one sword-swinging tank take a hit that cut off its bow, right through where the man's feet had to be. As it was happening, he somehow managed to throw his sword ahead of him, directly at the gun that was taking his life. Moments later, that gun went silent.
His drones abandoned ship, their controls taken over by a teammate, and were taken aboard another tank.
In the first three seconds, I had five of my eight trucks destroyed. They were no great loss in themselves, but it did show that the enemy was trying hard to find and kill me, personally. Each of the trucks had had a tank guarding it, since I hadn't wanted to have a crowd around my CCC, calling attention to it. All of those men had survived, proving again that the enemy gunners were preferentially shooting up the trucks. It made me feel kind of paranoid.
I also lost eighty-seven of my Gurkhas, more than nine percent of my command. All of those men were dead. Nonfatal wounds don't happen in space when you are fighting against rail guns. Maybe we could save some of their metal ladies. Later.
We were less than a kilometer from the station when they opened up with their other, carefully camouflaged weapons.
For a while, it was rockets, usually one hundred and forty-four at a time, entire racks of them at once, and often many racks at the same time. They knew that as soon as we sighted a launch area, we would take it out, so they made sure that all we could hit was an empty rack.
At Quincy's suggestion, we adapted a doctrine where when the Earthers fired a mass of rockets, we all fired our antipersonnel weapons, our machineguns, lasers, and grenade launchers, into the path of the swarm, even if it wasn't aimed at the tank doing the firing. This was in addition to firing our big, X-ray lasers, of course. The doctrine proved to be effective, knocking out as many as eighty-five percent of the incoming missiles before they got close to their targets. The enemy quickly responded by sending out much larger swarms of rockets. Whoever was in charge over there was pretty damn quick. Much quicker than I had ever seen an Earthworm act before.
My Gurkhas and their mechanical ladies were kept busy with their lasers, blinding guided missiles, and frying their little brains out, but with so many coming at us at once, some rockets got through, and more of my men were lost. We soon found that it was safest to cluster up with a few dozen friends, and to have each man take care of his sector first, but to yell for help quickly if he needed it.
I got a message from Abdul saying that he planned to stop his men in and around the station's counterweights, once they cleared the local ones of enemy guns. Beyond them, where a larger number of enemy guns could target them, the firepower they faced was just too intense for his men to survive. All of our transport receivers that had continued rocketing beyond the weights had been quickly destroyed.
When my troops were a half a kilometer from the station proper, the Earthworms apparently ran out of rockets in our immediate area, so they started using their accelerators.
These were located inside the station, and were not originally intended for use as weapons. Further study of their plans showed that when a few kilograms of frozen hydrogen or oxygen is moving at nine-tenths of the speed of light, and then is
not
transmitted back to the beginning of the accelerator, or out to some fast robot ship many light years away, but is simply permitted to go on its way, it takes the end of the accelerator with it. It then takes out any walls, structural members, and KEF tanks that happen be in that general direction.
They were deliberately damaging their own station in their frenzy to kill us, cutting through quite a few of their stabilizing cables, and losing the counterweights they tethered.
This forced Abdul's men to attack a wider range of counterweights, to have enough space on them for all of his remaining forces.
From our standpoint, closer to the station, it was like being shot at by monstrous shotguns, like being hit by ancient stands of grape shot moving at hyper velocities.
There was nothing we could do to prevent it. Shooting at one after it had fired was as silly as shooting at a land mine after it had gone off. The only thing you could do to defend yourself against this barrage was to hope that you were someplace else when one of these things let loose. This, while the enemy was trying hard to insure that none of these very expensive weapons was being wasted.
We quickly learned to stay as far apart as possible, and to not bunch up. But by moving farther out, we came within range of more rockets, and more rail guns. There was no winning tactic, but to keep on advancing as fast as possible, and to keep on taking losses.
Despite horrendous casualties, my men kept on attacking. Not one of them broke and ran, the way most ancient armies who had taken more than twenty-five percent casualties would have done. Their bravery made me very proud, but the fact that they
had
to display such courage hurt me a lot.
Somehow, I should have done my job better.
Not that there was anyplace sane that they could have run to. The farther away they got from the station, the more guns the enemy had that could bear on them. And beyond that, there just wasn't anyplace else to go. We were all in the middle of the enemy's home solar system, and none of us had anything like the delta V that would be needed to do anything about it.
My Gurkhas were like the Polish division who took Monte Cassino in Italy during the Second World War, after so many other outfits had failed. If you are willing to accept the casualties, you
can
take your objective, no matter what.
Decelerating as we got to the station, we were passed by the debris of battle, the dead men and tanks we'd lost on the way in. Mostly, we could dodge it, but the station couldn't. The blasted half of a Mark XIX tank knocks a major hole in a lightly built space station, when it is moving fast enough. Most of the station seemed to be airless, but sometimes a puff of air came out. Sometimes a few human bodies came out with it. My Gurkhas weren't the only ones being killed.
I saw one major chunk of shattered weaponry hit what must have been a large cluster of Earthworm rockets, which had not been fired for some reason. They gang detonated right where they were, blowing a hole so big that incredibly bright sunlight streamed in from the other side. If we had been seeing through our own eyes, and not our sensors, we all would have been blinded.
The first tank to get to the station tried to go in through an air lock. As soon as he closed the outer door, the lock exploded. The door blew out, followed by what was left of my soldier and his tank. A shaped charge had blown a meter-wide hole through the man's coffin. The inner air lock door must have been blown as well, because the tank was followed by a long blast of air, a lot of debris, and twenty-six human bodies.
I couldn't figure out why our enemy had used so large an explosive there. They should have known that the inner door couldn't take that much force. And why hadn't those people been evacuated from the battle zone?
After that, we started sending drones into an air lock first. Every one of them detonated a booby trap. After losing eleven drones, and killing a hundred and eight enemy personnel that we knew about, we stopped doing that. Our job was to capture the station as intact as possible. It wasn't to fight a war of attrition on enemy civilians.
Some of my men were able to enter the station through the holes we'd made in it, but most just touched down, whipped out their tank swords, and chopped their way in. After the losses we'd taken, nobody was in any mood to be delicate.
Looking through the sensors of the tank doing it, I saw one of my Gurkhas chop into a room filled with forty-two armed humans in space suits. One of them made the fatal mistake of shooting at a Mark XIX tank with an angry observer. With machine guns, lasers, and his huge tank sword, the Gurkha slaughtered all of the Earthers in under two seconds.