Authors: Gavin Smith
When he had all the information he required he sent it as a packet on a UV tight beam link to a transponder we’d set up at a prearranged location. That receiver was hard-wired via a cable run through a small hole drilled in solid rock to the
whanau
’s position. Using tight beam communication meant that the Black Squadrons would have to have something interposed between the receiver and us. Also they had no reason to be scanning UV frequencies.
I checked the time displays on my IVD. One showed the actual time. The other was a countdown. I looked up at the large entrance to the vehicle bay. All that was between the entrance and us were three lines of trenches and then the terraced trenches above the door.
‘I want two fireteams,’ Cat told us. We were in one of the smaller caves. Soloso and Big Henry were just inside the entrance discouraging people from paying attention to us. ‘Fireteam Alpha is me, Merle and Morag. Fireteam Bravo is Jakob running it, Mudge, Rannu and Pagan.’
I would have liked to turn over command to Rannu but I’d done that once and I couldn’t afford to be seen as a weak link again, as I suspected that Cat would actually drop me from the mission. I didn’t want to work with Pagan. I couldn’t trust him. Actually that wasn’t true. I knew he’d do his job, but I didn’t want to trust him
.
‘Looks like we’ve got all the fuck-ups,’ Mudge said
.
‘Shut up, Mudge,’ I told him
.
‘Right, Rannu and I are going to start the killing before zero point. We’re going after officers, NCOs, heavy-weapon crews, but we’re going to be doing it quietly,’ Merle said. He seemed happier with Cat in command
.
‘Then we move on my go and we are fucking quick or dead. Everyone understand?’ Cat told us
.
We all nodded. I looked over at Mother and Tailgunner. They may as well have been carved out of mahogany. It was like looking at ghosts. After everything Mother had said I still couldn’t work out why. I’d spoken to Mudge about it. He’d said that sometimes you just had to draw a line against what the bad guys were allowed to get away with
.
‘Is that my Void Eagle?’ Merle demanded. I looked down at the massive automatic holstered on my chest
.
‘What, you want to argue about it now?’ I asked. We were just about to go operational
.
‘I’ll be having that back,’ he snapped. Crucially Cat didn’t order me to give it back. In fact she was smiling
.
‘There’s a reason the British army are called the Borrowers,’ Mudge told him. Rannu was laughing
.
A new recruit had brought in a collection of antique weapons. Mudge had bartered with him for a pre-FHC assault shotgun for me. I’d added an external targeting system for the smartlink, which would be less than ideal, and I’d also had to make a few adjustments for the shotgun to fire caseless, but it would serve as a secondary weapon
.
Watching the countdown I was shaking. When the klaxons and the red lights came on, for a moment I thought we were compromised but this was all part of the plan. I watched gunships laden with troops and exo-armour take to the air. The rest of Mother’s forces, along with whatever fighting elements of the resistance and Moa City gangs we’d managed to make contact with, had attacked targets in the city and its vicinity, hoping to draw elements of the Black Squadrons away from the Citadel.
I watched the gunships and flight-capable exo-armour head out of the big cavern. This helped but there was still a lot of men and hardware left. I knew we had to let them get to their targets. As soon as that happened our forces would pull back and hopefully melt into the background.
My breathing sounded impossibly loud in my ears but I didn’t dare risk a sedative now. I just wanted things to start – get it over with, break the tension. I was shaking quite badly now. Even under my camouflage I was sure I must have been visible as a quivering piece of rock, but nothing happened, though as a result of the alert the guards seemed more on the ball. The soldiers in the external defences were all New Zealand regulars.
I don’t think I noticed when the killing started. I knew that the others would be watching the synchronised countdown, getting ready to go. My heart was hammering at my ribcage. I didn’t hear the firing; I just saw an officer’s face cave in and he slumped to the ground. The man next to him had a moment to look surprised and then his face turned red just underneath his helmet. Rannu with a borrowed suppressed, long-barrel Steyr marksman’s rifle and Merle with his custom gauss rifle firing at subsonic speed. Every shot someone died. They were aiming and killing so quickly that none of the defenders had had time to raise the alarm yet.
The countdown reached zero. The explosion rolled across the cavern, echoing back and forth at the speed of sound. It was like standing in thunder. The ground shook as my audio dampeners managed the noise down to tolerable levels. This got their attention.
I knew that behind me a cliff face had just been turned to powder. One of the NCOs under Mother’s command was old enough to have worked mines in this area before the Citadel was built. He’d been able to guide us to mine shafts big enough for the mechs and close enough to the Citadel to blow a path through with a lot of stolen mining explosives.
They hadn’t even sounded the alarm when the Citadel started taking hits. My audio dampeners struggled with the hypersonic booms as 300mm rounds from the
Apakura
’s mass driver cannon began impacting into the Citadel. The rapid hits penetrated deep into the hardened ice causing massive explosions of shards hard enough to cause shrapnel wounds. Water rained down on us from where the kinetic energy of the impacts had melted the dense ice. The ice burned where plasma rounds hit. The plasma had been fired by
Kopuwai
and
Whakatau
, the two Landsknecht-class bipedal mechs piloted by Soloso and Big Henry respectively. Every round from the plasma cannons sent up huge plumes of steam. All three mechs were targeting the Citadel’s point defence with their direct-fire weapons.
Rannu and Merle used the chaos to kill more and more as the defenders instinctively dived for cover in the face of the mech onslaught. My audio filters managed to pick up the rip of rotary railguns and the sound of rapidly staggered explosions.
Apakura
drew a wall of fire between her and the Citadel as she used the information provided by Pagan to detonate anti-armour mines with her rapid-firing belly railguns.
The Citadel’s point defences on our side were destroyed in moments. The Citadel had not even returned fire yet. The two Landsknechts and the Bismarck-class mech then fired half their missiles. Contrails filled the air in the huge cavern.
I opened my mouth and kept my head down. I’d been dangerously close to missile strikes before. Conventional and plasma warheads impacted. The ground jumped and tilted and I realised the impacts had blown me into the air and turned me on my side. None of the defenders had noticed; they’d had other things to worry about.
We were targeting the Citadel’s heavy-weapons systems and gunship landing areas. It looked like one whole side of the pyramid had thrown itself up into the air. Steam, water, shards and huge chunks of ice rained down on us. Several plasma warheads had detonated in the vehicle bay and it was burning with white fire. I could hear the secondary explosions of ammo cooking off. I was shaking like a leaf. I didn’t need a stim. I was wired. I needed something to take the edge off.
Each of us was a ghost, disrupting the steam and smoke as we stood up and ran towards the Citadel, killing as we went. The massive blast doors to the burning vehicle bay were starting to move, closing slowly. I sent a frag grenade from my launcher into the first trench. It exploded. I was oblivious to the screams. I glanced behind me. The
Apakura, Kopuwai
and
Whakatau
were emerging from the rolling cloud of dust, firing, seemingly unstoppable. Ahead of them
Apakura
’s belly rotary railguns were hosing the ground down left and right, detonating the anti-armour mines closest to the Citadel. For a second I caught a glimpse of a small mech running towards us.
I reached the first trench. The defenders were still recovering from my initial frag. I sensed rather than heard Pagan, Mudge and Rannu run in behind me. I fired a flechette grenade. This was just slaughter. The soldiers in the trench were trying to work out what the fuck was happening to them when razor-sharp needles tore through cheap armour. The shaking had stopped. I fired at anything still moving with the SAW. Next to me Pagan and Mudge were subduing their own trenches.
‘Clear!’ I shouted. It was less fact and more a signal to move on. I turned to run into the vehicle bay. I heard the unmistakable hypersonic roar of a Bofors railgun and glanced over at the trench Cat was subduing. She’d painted the ice red. There were no bodies, only flying body parts.
There was movement behind me. I swung around to bring the SAW smoothly to my shoulder. Sprinting out of the mist came a Steel-Mantis-class scout mech. It was Strange in the
Atua Kahukahu
. She’d named it for the vengeful spirit of a dead child. She’d advanced ahead of the other three mechs. Shit! That meant that we could have made the attack with the stolen exo-armour and not have lain in our own piss for more than a day.
By the doors we tore the reactive camouflage gillie suits off. If we couldn’t see each other then we’d do more harm than good. The blast doors were still closing ponderously slowly. Inside the vehicle bay it was raining as plasma fires burned through ice. The walls and the ceiling were melting but I knew it was just superficial damage, even though most of the huge bay was burning. The missiles had veered to the left and the right at the last moment to give us a clear central path. Rannu was already sprinting across the bay towards another, much smaller blast door. We followed, moving rapidly, weapons at the ready. Any movement that wasn’t us got shot. We weren’t taking chances.
The scout mech’s twin rotary railguns destroyed any significant resistance. Strange swivelled the mech with economical grace, located points of enemy fire and tore them apart with short, disciplined bursts. She targeted the more heavily protected points. The short-range missile battery on her right shoulder fired its payload in one go. The missiles shot off in different directions and protected firing points and heavy-weapons emplacements exploded.
A burning light mech strode out of the plasma fire on our left. As one, Mudge, Pagan, Rannu and I triggered vertically launched Laa-Laas from one of the twin tubes attached to our packs. Four missiles hit the mech, exploding all over its already weakened body. The long-legged war machine toppled backwards and plasma flames consumed it.
Ahead of me Mudge was firing on the run, aiming his converted AK-47 at the catwalks that surrounded the vehicle bay. As Rannu reached the closed blast door he pulled the smart frame off his chest webbing. At a command sent through his palm link, the frame expanded. He attached the frame to the door and then turned, weapon at the ready. The rest of us reached the door and did the same.
This was the tricky part – the waiting while the microbes ate at the armour plate of the blast door, making us a man-sized hole to get through. When I looked behind me everything was fire. The main blast door entrance to the bay was about to shut. Through the crack I could just make out the
Apakura
. They had begun to counter-attack. It looked like every inch of the
Apakura
was either exploding or burning. It was wreathed in fire. Yet its belly guns were still firing; the huge impacts of its mass driver could still be felt. Chunks of ice fell from the ceiling with every hit. I watched it fire the rest of its missiles. Then the doors closed. Moments later we felt the missiles’ impacts. I glanced up at the scout mech next to me firing burst after burst. I’m not sure what response I expected from the composite and metal shell of the mech.
‘We’re through,’ Rannu shouted. As soon as the hole appeared we’d started taking fire from the corridor on the other side. Cat poked her railgun round the corner and fired but quickly had to take cover.
‘Strange!’ Cat shouted. The mech turned and knelt, putting one of its rotary railgun arms through the hole. I heard the rip as one hypersonic bang mixed with the next and I saw Strange move the arm about. When she’d withdrawn Rannu poked his head around the corner.
‘Clear!’ he shouted.
Strange was trapped in the vehicle bay.
Atua Kahukahu
was way too large to get through the hole and the external doors were shut.
‘Exit the mech! Come with us!’ Morag shouted. I could hear the desperation in her voice. The mech shook its head-shaped sensor array. I knew that the girl had had a short and tragic life. Now with the rest of her family almost certainly dead, it looked like it was going to come to a short and violent end. ‘Please!’ Morag begged. Strange’s sprint had been incredible. She’d made this part of the operation so much easier. She may have been a murderous disturbed mess, but she did not lack courage. Or maybe she wanted to die. Whatever the reason, she wasn’t leaving the mech.
‘We don’t have time for this. Move!’ Cat screamed at Morag.
We were through into the corridor. Advancing at a fast walk in two lines, Alpha team and then Bravo. Anyone who showed their face got shot. We passed the remains of the defenders that Strange had subdued. They were a sticky carpet and wallpaper. Humans reduced to their constituent parts at hypersonic speed. Pagan and Morag used their laser carbines to burn out any security lenses we saw.