Helfort's War Book 4: The Battle for Commitment Planet (36 page)

Chou did not live long enough to see what he had achieved. Before the first lander even drove into the ground, what was left of the ware house, weakened by fire, gave way in the face of the blast, its collapse toppling tons of ceramcrete onto his position.

As he died, towering columns of ionized gas climbed away into the sky all across Perdan before they were driven away by the latest rainstorm, shredded skeins of fast-cooling gas blown twisting away into the distance.

Separated from the rest of the 120th during a vicious firefight with the Hammers, Anna and Michael walked on alone. Even the Hammer recon drones that had forced them to slow down to a crawl had disappeared, and the battlesats had been blinded by thick gray cloud scudding overhead. Michael was happy to see the cloud; the intermittent rain it brought with it was a small price to pay.

Where the rest of the regiment had gotten to, they had no idea. All Michael knew was that they were not where they were supposed to be, rally point after rally point populated only by trees. Soon they abandoned any idea of finding them. Before he, too, vanished into the darkness, a straggler from the 48th had told them the rest of his regiment was somewhere ahead of them, and Michael still hoped they would catch up with them. It was not a good feeling, just the two of them alone in a vast forest infested with vengeful Hammers.

Fifty meters short of the next ridge, the characteristic buzz of a recon drone caught his attention. As he paused to see where
the damn thing was, some deep-seated atavistic instinct shocked him out of the endless one-foot-after-another trudge away from Perdan, and in an instant he knew with absolute, unshakable certainty that he and Anna had to get off the track.

“Move!” he screamed as he leaped for Anna, provoked by instinct alone. Grabbing her backpack, he crash-tackled her off the path and into a twisting, rolling, crashing slide down through the undergrowth and into a narrow ravine. There Michael came to a crunching stop, the dead weight of Anna’s body dropping on top of him, driving the air out of his lungs with a
whooof
.

“Michael!” Anna snapped. “What the fu—”

A fast-moving flight of four marine landers roared overhead, black shapes smeared across a predawn sky torn to shreds by the appalling noise of their engines as they accelerated away, a noise that was nothing compared to the blast from the pattern of fuel-air bombs that exploded an instant later. The shock wave was a malignant living force, the overpressure unstoppable, ripping and tearing at the ground, driving debris outward in a lethal storm of razor-sharp shards of wood. Michael was shaken to his core, unable to refill his lungs, every fiber of his body screaming in protest, his body pounded into the dirt, slammed up and then back when the shock wave ripped through the ground, rocks, dirt, and debris cascading down across them.

Ears ringing, confused and disoriented, Michael lay there for a long time, tortured lungs fighting for air. He could not hear much over the ringing in his ears; he could only feel the slow skittering of debris dropping onto his helmet. When his brain rebooted, he rolled Anna off his back and struggled to sit upright.

“Anna, you okay?” he mumbled past a tongue thick with dirt and dust; he tried to shake a sick fuzziness out of his head without success. He felt sick.

“Piss off,” she mumbled. “Leave me alone. Don’t want to move.”

“Come on, Anna,” Michael said, standing up. “We can’t stay here. They must have spotted some of us, so they may be back.
Come on”—urgently now, he shook her shoulder—“we need to keep moving.”

“Bastard.” She sat up, brushing dirt off her chromaflage cape. With an effort, she climbed to her feet, swaying unsteadily while she organized herself.

“You okay?”

Anna nodded. “Yeah. Bit woozy is all. FABs are no fun at all.”

Michael had to agree. Like every Fed spacer, he had watched a live fuel-air bomb drop during his training—from a safe distance—and he had experienced the damn things firsthand when the Hammers were hunting him on Serhati. He hated them then, and he hated them now.

Settling his gear and grabbing his rifle, Michael scrambled out of the shallow ravine. The sight that greeted him shocked him to his core. He and Anna had been lucky; the Hammer landers had dropped their bombs just over the heavily wooded ridge they had been climbing on their way south to safety, leaving the ground leading to the ridge a shattered mess. The blast had sheared the tops of trees off, scattering branches and tree trunks across the ground in careless profusion.

“Not good,” he said.

“No,” Anna said. “I wonder how things look on the other side.”

They soon found out, Michael offering a silent prayer of thanks that he and Anna had been protected from the worst of the blast by the ridge. The ground ran down to a small stream, then climbed to the next ridge. Before the Hammers had arrived, the valley would have been close to idyllic: well wooded, cool under trees undisturbed since the planetary engineers had seeded them into the ground, a stream running cold and clear across water-worn granite, rich with plants, birds, and wild animals.

The valley had been a small piece of paradise on a screwed-up world. Now it was hell.

For hundreds of meters upstream and downstream from where Michael and Anna stood, the valley was a nightmare of shattered trees, the ground a shambles of blast-tossed trunks blown into untidy heaps interlaced with branches stripped bare
of leaves, the air thick with the acrid smell of charred wood and burned fuel, thin skeins of blue smoke drifting, twisting away into the sky.

Nothing moved, the silence oppressive. Michael scanned the valley for any sign of life. “Nothing,” he said after a while. “You see anything?”

“No. Any poor bastard caught down there would have had no chance. You think they were after the 48th?” Anna asked.

“I hope not,” Michael said with a heavy heart, “though the Hammers must have seen something to justify a four-lander strike. Come on, they’ll have sent recon drones on their way back to count bodies … if they can find any left to count, that is,” he added bitterly.

With a heavy heart Michael followed Anna. The Hammers’ ability to rain death and destruction down on the NRA wherever and whenever they chose reinforced his growing fear that this war might be unwinnable. The prospect sickened him; for all its faults, humanspace deserved better than a victorious Hammer of Kraa: a vengeful, bloody-handed, and ruthless instrument of death.

Anna led the way back into the cool of the forest, forcing the pace now that the forest canopy minimized any chance they might be detected by battlesats or recon drones. Two more days should see them out of the granite country and back into the karst; another day after that and they would be home.

So Michael hoped.

“I’m sure I saw something,” Anna whispered. “Here, check it out.”

She spit on the inside of her wrist and pressed her forearm to his. Michael’s neuronics went online with Anna’s; a second
later he was looking through her optronics-enhanced eyes at a tumbled cluster of boulders overgrown with thick strands of creeper, a tangled green nightmare.

“Okay,” he said, staring at the scarlet target icon Anna had laid over the image, “but what am I supposed to be seeing?”

“Keep looking.”

Hard as he tried, all he saw was greenery. He shifted his optronics filters up and down the wavelengths, stopping in the infrared. Then he saw it, a patch of exposed rock toward the top of the outcrop that showed up a few degrees warmer than the rest. After a while he worked out what he was looking at: the infrared signature of a man’s buttocks, a figure eight lying on its side.

“Nice work, Anna,” he said. “Someone was sitting in that damn rock not long ago.”

“He was. We don’t know if they are expecting us or not. We may have triggered a sensor,” she said, head swiveling around slowly to check their surroundings. “Though I don’t think so as I’m not picking up any radio transmissions from any sensor lines. We were very careful coming in.”

“I’m glad we knew about it. We owe those sensor recon teams a beer.”

“We do,” Anna said. “Anyway, we need to get the hell out of here. Back the way we came before heading west … fast. If the NRA intel is correct, five klicks will take us around the end of this sensor line. If they did detect us coming south, we should be clear by the time they work out that we’re not going to walk into their ambush. Let’s go.”

Nerves jangling, Michael slid backward with infinite care, his every movement slow and deliberate, paced to ensure that he never overtaxed his chromaflage, that nothing except the sounds and sights of the forest reached the line of holocams and acoustic sensors the Hammers had strung across their path.

Once out of sight of the boulders and well clear of the sensor line, he and Anna turned. Moving fast now, they made their way to the end of the line of Hammer sensors before turning south again.

Finally clear, Anna stopped and waved Michael forward. “Okay?” she whispered.

“Yup.”

“I think we’re clear. Your neuronics picking up any radio transmissions?”

“No, still nothing.”

“Good. That means the Hammers haven’t air-dropped any remote sensors. Let’s go.”

With that, she was on her feet, moving quietly through the trees, the need for speed tempered by the need to stay quiet. The NRA knew the locations of the Hammers’ fixed sensor lines; where they might have dropped thousands of short-lived microsensors to try to pick up the retreating NRA was another matter. Scattered at random in the thousands in the aftermath of any big NRA operation, the microsensors were card-sized boxes packed with a wide-angle holocam and microphone, an optical and acoustic signal processor, a power supply good for a week’s operation, and a simple radio transmitter, all attached to a cable and cross-frame aerial designed to snag in the trees. Simple, cheap, and crude—just like the Hammers, Michael always thought—the microsensors would hang in the trees waiting to shout for help if something out of the ordinary walked past.

All Michael could hope was that they never ran into one; the Branxton Ranges was a big place, and even the Hammers could not cover every square meter of it with microsensors.

For hour after hour they did not stop, crossing a series of valleys and ridges until Anna declared herself satisfied they were clear and called a halt. Michael was beginning not to care much; his left leg was mounting its usual protest. Dropping to the ground, he fumbled around in a pocket until he found his supply of painkillers—his drugbots had run out long since—swallowing a couple with a welcome drink from his canteen.

“What a life,” he muttered. “Wha—”

Michael’s neuronics screamed a sudden warning, and without thinking, he was on his feet, dragging Anna with him. “You get that?” he said as they started to run.

“Yup. Bastards have pinged us,” Anna said while they plunged through the undergrowth away from the radio transmissions detected by their neuronics. “Those sensors were real
close. All we can do is go like hell and hope they’re slow to turn up. They’ll be getting a lot of these intercepts.”

“Optimist,” Michael said, beginning to breathe hard.

“Come on, faster,” was Anna’s response.

Michael ran as he had never run before, launching himself into a pounding, driving relentless plunge through the tangled undergrowth and down into the valley bottom, slipping and sliding across water-slicked rocks, forcing a path back up to the ridge, cursing when roots snagged boots, when branches slashed savage welts into exposed skin, when tanglevine snagged rifle or helmet or backpack, heart hammering, chest heaving, legs dissolving into molten rivers of white-hot agony. All pain was ignored in a desperate race to get over the ridge and into the valley beyond, then the next, and the next, pushed on by willpower alone, on, on, on, until his willpower ran out and his body crashed to the ground in a sobbing heap, lungs fighting to drag air in to feed muscles screaming for oxygen, legs locked, unable to take him another meter.

“Stop,” he whispered, straining to make himself heard. “Stop.” It was all his tortured lungs would allow.

Anna did stop; she turned back and slid to the ground alongside him, breathing hard. “Take five,” she said. “Then we need to get into clear ground. We’ll go one more klick that way, but low and slow this time. Okay?”

Michael nodded; he could not speak. Facedown in the dirt of the forest floor, he waited. Slowly the pain from legs and lungs abated. “I’m ready,” he said at last. “Let’s go.”

“Okay,” Anna said.

Staying on her stomach, she was off, easing her way smoothly over the ground. With an effort, Michael made himself follow, even though all he wanted was to find a cool, dark, safe place to rest up. But giving up was not an option. He hated the thought that he might be the one who called it quits first. He would stop when Anna said stop, so he kept going, though for how long, he did not know.

An age later, Michael was close to collapse, exhausted, in pain, hungry, thirsty. Toward the end, the only thing that sustained him was Anna’s relentless ability to keep moving, her
body sliding ahead of him in complete silence over rock, through water and undergrowth, the pace set to allow her chromaflage to blend her shape into the background, invisible to any Hammer holocam. No matter how bad he felt, he always had just enough left to follow her, his eyes locked with manic determination on the tiny ID patch on the back of her helmet.

Crossing a small ridge, they slithered down to a thin trickle of a stream where a sizable clearing opened up by a fallen tree long covered by a sprawling mass of vine dominated the gully. Michael followed Anna under the tangled mess, overwhelmed with relief when she signaled a stop. Please let that be it for today, he prayed.

“I’m not picking up any radio transmissions,” Anna whispered, “but I want a thorough check. If there are sensors around us, we need to know. If the area’s clear, we’ll lie up here while we work out what to do next. You take west through south to east. I’ll do north. Okay?”