Helfort's War Book 4: The Battle for Commitment Planet (47 page)

Lungs heaving and heart still thumping, Michael stood for a moment, shocked to find that he was still alive.

   Second Platoon had dug itself into defensive positions around the vehicle park’s eastern edge. After Sadotra’s trenchant criticism of his first attempt, Michael was now the proud owner of a regulation fighting position, well concealed under chromaflage micromesh netting—another product of Chief Chua’s burgeoning industrial empire—and invisible to passing Hammer recon drones.

Anna’s grip on her platoon was viselike; with ruthless efficiency, she had sent the platoon’s handful of prisoners back to Juliet-24, transferred her wounded to the casualty collection point, walked the ground forward of the platoon, made sure the remote holocams covered all possible enemy lines of approach, checked fighting positions, briefed her section commanders on the next phase of the operation, and a whole lot more, none of which would ever have occurred to him, in a bravura performance that made Michael realize that the love
of his life was wasted in Fleet. The woman was a born foot soldier. He might think he knew Anna better than anyone else alive, but still she had the capacity to surprise. Happy that she was doing a job he never could, he leaned against the front wall of the trench, eyes scanning the ground for any sign of enemy activity. Not that there was any; as far as Michael could tell, the vicious battle being fought by 12 Brigade in the distance had sucked in every Hammer capable of moving, the air over the battle flicker-flashing in a never-ending display of pyrotechnics, the noise of combat rolling across the broken ground like thunder. He wondered how Mokhine’s attack on the Hammer’s headquarters was going; being only a humble grunt, he did not have the right privileges to access that level of the tactical plot.

To his surprise, Anna slid under the chromaflage net and into the trench. “Good to see a proper fighting position, Lieutenant,” she said.

“Gee thanks, Sarge,” Michael said, refusing to rise to the bait and keeping his eyes out front.

“We’ll make a soldier of you yet, and I was right. You can shoot even if you had no idea what was going on, none at all.”

“Yeah, well?” Michael said with a shrug. “I’m a spacer, remember? Not some dirt-munching grunt.”

“Spacer or not, here’s the plan.”

“We get to go home?” Michael asked hopefully.

“Focus, Lieutenant, focus.”

“Sorry.”

“As you can see, the assault on the Hammers covering the valley to the east and west of Juliet-24 by 12 and 5 Brigades has gone well. They took them by surprise, they retain tactical advantage, and they are giving the Hammers a great deal of grief. ENCOMM has ordered them to keep going until the Hammers break.”

“Jeez,” Michael hissed. “What if they can’t?”

“They have to,” Anna said flatly. “They have to.”

“Okay. And our mission?”

“To hold this position until 12 Brigade withdraws. Hrelitz says that elements of 12 Brigade have penetrated the Hammer positions so far that they’ll be forced to pull back through our
positions. That means we’ll be staying here until they’ve withdrawn. Once they’re clear, we’ll screen them all the way to Juliet-24. If we can’t make it back there, our fallback egress route is through the vehicle park to the emergency accesses. They’re marked Juliet-24 Alfa on your tactical plot.”

Michael frowned. “It all sounds tricky.”

“It’s called a rearward passage of lines, and yes, it’s tricky. How tricky depends on how much pressure the Hammers put us under. Anyway, can’t worry about that. Now, what else? Oh, yes. The rest of the battalion didn’t just destroy the Hammer’s command post; Colonel Mokhine went and captured his very own major general of Hammer marines. The prick’s on his way to ENCOMM already.”

“Good one.”

“Don’t think the Hammer general would agree. Anyway, once they’ve handed over their prisoners, A and B Companies will move up to reinforce our position.”

“And Fifth Brigade?”

“Is going well, according to Hrelitz. Same deal. The plan is to keep fighting, break the Hammers, then withdraw, but that’s someone else’s problem. Anyway, got to go. There’ll be a detailed briefing in an hour. Keep your eyes open. I’m off to talk to the rest of the section.”

“Just one more.”

Anna sighed. “One more and that’s it.”

“Why are we being left alone? We’re in the middle of thousands of Hammers, we’ve shot the shit out of their heavy equipment park, Colonel Mokhine’s captured their command post, and nobody’s come calling. Makes no sense.”

“Hrelitz was wondering the same thing. Several reasons, we think. First, those fuel-air charges cut the guts out of the Hammers’ reserves. She thinks their casualties have run into the thousands. Second, the attacks by 5 and 12 Brigades seem to have sucked in every Hammer available unit not committed to local security duties. Third, like you said, their c-cubed has had its head lopped off. Those Hammers out there”—she waved a hand at an eastern horizon alive with the light and fury of combat—“have their own battles to fight, and none of
them has the big picture. We’re being ignored, and long may it continue. Now let me get on.”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

Anna started to climb out of the trench, then stopped and turned. “You did well, Michael, but not well enough. You took too many risks. Don’t get so tied up. Try to keep one eye on the target and one eye on the big picture. If you don’t, someone’s going to pop up and blow your damn head off before you even see them coming. Okay?”

Michael nodded. “Yes, Sergeant,” he said, reassured by Anna’s obvious competence even though still worried sick. Attacking the Hammers was one thing; disengaging when the time came to pull back was quite another.

   “Things are quieting down over there,” Sadotra muttered scanning the horizon.

“They are,” Michael said. “Any word from ENCOMM?”

“No, not yet, but I don’t think it can be—”

Both flinched as a savage explosion bleached the eastern sky white, so searingly bright that Michael’s eyes watered. A few seconds later, the shock wave arrived, accompanied by a crackling rumble.

“Main battle tank fusion plant, I reckon,” Sadotra said. “And since the NRA doesn’t own any Aqaba main battle tanks, that means it’s one of the Hammers’.”

Michael nodded. “One less coming our way when 12 Brigade pulls out,” he said as the sky lit up again and again. “No, make that three less.”

The thought of taking on Hammer heavy armor bothered Michael. The 2/83rd might be a tough, battle-hardened battalion, but stopping Aqaba main battle tanks with command-detonated mines, Stabber antiarmor missiles, claymores, machine guns, and assault rifles was one hell of a big ask, not to say downright impossible. Stopping them required Sampan medium antiarmor missiles; ever the optimist, Mokhine had asked ENCOMM for some. He was told none were available of course. The Aqaba was a brute: fast, maneuverable, well armored, armed with an autoloaded 95-millimeter hypervelocity
gun, missile pods, and defensive lasers. Capable of remote operation, taking real-time battlefield intelligence from recon drones, and supported by ground-attack landers and attack drones, it was a formidable threat. The Feds had long abandoned the main battle tank—too big, too clumsy, too expensive, too vulnerable to mines and missiles—in favor of a mix of light armor and combatbots, but the Hammer military still loved the things. Anna reckoned it was because the hulking black shapes matched the Hammers’ national character: all brute force and no finesse.

Michael’s neuronics burst into life. “Stand to, contact sector 4, stand by … friendlies, say again, friendlies.”

At last, Michael thought. The wait had been killing him; he grinned when the image popped into his neuronics. The chromaflaged shapes were too scruffy to be Hammer marines, their capes so well used that some were more holes and tears than fabric. Shifting his optronics down into the infrared, Michael checked their IFF patches.

“Positively identified as NRA, Corp,” he said to Sadotra.

“Roger. Hammers won’t be far behind.”

With a final check to make sure he was ready, Michael eased his rifle into the tiny gap between the chromaflage net overhead and the sandbagged parapet. He knew every square centimeter of the ground in front of his position. He should; he had spent a long time looking at it. C Company’s three platoons were dug in along the eastern perimeter of the Hammer vehicle park, their left flank secured by a towering wall of rock. Positioned to enfilade a Hammer advance down the track through the middle of the valley as it passed the vehicle park, C Company’s mission was simple: to ensure a Hammer attack could not flank B Company, which was dug in on the right and straddling the track as it dropped down from a small ridge. A Company had been held back in reserve.

The result was a killing zone constricted by the rock wall on the far side of the valley to Michael’s right and the vehicle park on the left, the ground in between seeded with command-fired mines to stop the armor in its tracks and claymores to break up any dismounted attacks. That much Michael did understand, even if the chances of a single understrength battalion
with no air support and precious few attack drones stopping a serious Hammer armored assault had to be slim, even slimmer if the Hammers supported the attack with landers.

The new arrivals had been cleared through the battalion’s forward positions and were moving past Michael’s position. To his inexperienced eyes, they looked to be in good order, the company-strength unit moving down the road in column, heads and weapons scanning left and right in a ceaseless search for Hammers.

“Now that,” Sadotra said, squinting at her microvid screen, “is First Battalion, 115th NRA. I recognize that ugly sonofabitch on point.”

Michael smiled. The smile did not stay in place long. As the 115th closed, their faces became clear. Even in his neuronics-boosted night vision, the exhaustion was unmistakable, faces stretched tight with fatigue and stress, every second trooper wounded, some limping badly, a handful carried on makeshift stretchers. Michael knew he should not be surprised; these troopers had been fighting, much of it hand to hand, for hours now against an enemy force that outnumbered and outgunned them. That they had been able to disengage and withdraw in such good order was nothing short of a miracle; clearly, the Hammers’ command and control had fallen in a heap, shocked into confusion by the sudden violence of 12 Brigade’s attack.

Michael put them out of his mind, his attention focused on the narrow wedge of ground in front of his position. He and the rest of the battalion would know what they were up against once Mokhine’s staff had debriefed the new arrivals and updated the tactical plot. It did not take them long; Michael breathed out as he scanned the plot, a long hiss of dismay. The 115th had been badly mauled, its losses heavy. It was followed by a grab bag of detachments drawn from almost every unit attached to 12 Brigade, shattered remnants of once-proud units spun off by the chaotic, unpredictable violence of combat.

Now the duty of rear guard fell to the only regiment capable of operating as a unit, the 201st. They and the 115th had punched right through the Hammers, their attack so sudden, so brutal, so violent that they had been able to crush what little organized resistance the marines had been able to offer.
Unable to use landers or artillery, the Hammers had wilted in the face of the NRA’s ferocious assault until the 115th and 201st emerged into clear air, the shattered, disorganized, and demoralized remnants of a Hammer brigade left bleeding in their wake.

As the 201st disengaged and started its run for safety, the Hammers were slow to recover at first, but they were recovering. Slowly they emerged from a nightmare of death and violence, a nightmare that had stupefied them into uncertainty, into immobility, into a mob of indecisive fools.

Now the Hammers were no longer a rabble; the tide had begun to turn, and the battle was slipping out of the NRA’s grasp.

Transfixed, Michael patched his neuronics into the feed from one of the 2/83rd’s recon drones as it tracked the 201st’s fighting withdrawal, according to Anna the most difficult maneuver any unit could perform. At first, only a handful of Hammer ground units pressed them and the 201st maintained its cohesion, forward elements in contact stalling the enemy advance until the next line of resistance had been established before disengaging to fall back. Time after time, the 201st repeated the maneuver, the gap between them and the waiting 2/83rd closing with agonizing slowness.

At last Hammer armor joined the fight, and the 201st could hold them back no longer, their defense disintegrating into small groups standing to fight when they could, running when they could not. The 201st fell back in a desperate scramble for safety, pursued by Aqaba main battle tanks supported by ground troops, light armor, and attack drones, the whole ghastly performance coordinated by an unseen Hammer commander taking his battlefield data from a swarm of recon drones. The 201st had only one thing to be thankful for: There was no sign of Hammer ground-attack landers … yet. No, Michael realized, make that two things. The Hammers were moving slowly, almost reluctantly, as if their commanders were still struggling to recover from the shock of the NRA attack.

But, slow or not, the Hammers were hurting the 201st.

Their tanks had opened out into a shallow crescent formation across the valley floor to start the bloody business of
chopping the 201st to pieces, the bark of guns and the crack of lasers rising to a crescendo, only one NRA antiarmor missile squad brave—or suicidal—enough to hang back to take out a pair of Aqabas that had strayed from the main body of the attack. When they passed the squad, the Sampan missile leaped out of cover, blown out of its launch tube by a low-power first-stage motor before the second-stage rocket motor kicked in, a plume of red-gold fire driving the missile up and then down onto its target, the range so close that the leading tank’s defensive lasers, distracted by a hail of rifle and machine gun fire, did not have time to deal with the sudden threat. The missile smashed into the tank’s lightly armored upper skin, and the stricken machine lurched to a halt, its two-man crew bailing out seconds before the tank exploded in a spectacular ball of flame.