Lone Wolf (39 page)

Escorts, huh? I strain my eyes to spot them.

It takes me a second, they’re smaller than I expected. When I recognize them, I feel my cheeks stretch in a drek-eating grin. Four of the little shapes are buzzing out across the river toward us, presumably to take up station flanking us. They’re Suzuki Watersports, or at least watercraft very much like them. Up-engined brethren of the Bombardier WaveRunner on which I used to tear up the lake as a kid. Yeah, it makes sense—they’re probably the perfect highspeed high-maneuverability river craft. Slap on a little armor and equip them with a firmpoint or hardpoint, and they could even be decent weapons platforms.

“NVC 1, we’re bringing in supplies, transfer authorization Zulu-Kilo-Tango One-Five.” That’s the Able Riverine’s “talker,” using the authorization code Lynne Telestrian was able to dredge up from frag knows where. It’s not nearly enough to get us through unscathed—we all know that—but it should buy us a few more seconds. “Thought you boys might be getting a mite hungry in a couple of days,” the talker goes on.

Apparently the guy on the other end of the link has left his sense of humor in his other suit. “Requesting recognition code, One-Five,” he says calmly.

I tap another key, sending a preprogrammed message to the helmsmen of the two Riverines. I’m almost knocked off my feet as the Able boat kicks in full power. Alongside us. the knife-edge bow of the Baker boat rides up higher out of the water as it too increases speed.

“Recognition code ... lessee . . .,” our talker mumbles, “I know I had it around here a minute ago." Lame attempt to gain the Riverines the extra second that would let them get an extra ninety meters or so closer to the target.

It doesn’t work. My HUD lights up with warning symbols, much too much information for a greenie like me to integrate. But strip away all the pulse modulation and amplitude data, and what’s left is the news that some fire-control radars have just kicked in. None of them is painting either of the boats yet, but that won’t last. I tap another key, launching another preprogrammed macro, and a raucous warning tone bleats from the speakers of both boats. General quarters, man battle stations, and all that drek. The gunner leaps to the minigun mount and powers up, strapping himself into his harness while the multiple barrels spin up to speed.

A teeth-splitting wheep-wheep-wheep in my ear, and I know we’ve been painted. Instantly, a brilliant yellow-orange lance of light reaches out toward our boat from somewhere along the riverbank. I know what it is, and I was expecting it, but even so I just barely keep control of my sphincters. Probing out across the river toward us, making the water boil and spray where it touches, it looks for all the world like a “death-ray” from out of some bad sci-fi trideo.

No death-ray, this, but something as deadly. It’s the stream of fire from a Requiter minigun, a terrifying display of high rate-of-fire. We know they’re there—two of them mounted in hardened auto-turrets flanking the facilities’s docks—and we’ve taken them into account in our planning. (Correction:
Argent’s
taken them into account in
his
planning.) From what I read of the specs, a Requiter is even more lethal than the Riverine’s Vanquisher, with a rate of fire listed at something like two thousand rounds a minute. Of those, only one in six is usually a tracer, but that’s enough to make the stream of fire look like a slightly flexible bar of glowing optical-plastic. Terrifying.

Even more terrifying if that stream—and the other one that’s now reaching for the second Riverine—touches its target. The only good thing is that even with radar fire control, scoring with a minigun like that is a touchy business. We’ve only got a few seconds—if we’re lucky—but we’re poised to use that grace period.

“Do it!” I snap into my throat mike.

“My” troops don’t even need to hear the words. Even as I was issuing the order, the first of the two infantry mortars on the bow deck of the Able boat coughs, echoed by both tubes on the Baker boat. The whine of the Riverine’s engine is too loud for me to hear the projectiles in flight, but I certainly do hear them detonate. Perfectly timed airbursts, about twenty meters above the river, maybe fifty meters offshore, between us and the guns. Way too far out to damage armored auto-turrets, of course, even if the warheads had been straight high-explosive, which they weren’t. Instead, when they went boom, they sent up a big floating cloud of drek that glittered and twinkled in the watery afternoon light.

Some of it’s metal, or, more precisely, metallicized mylar, chaff cut into strips whose exact dimensions are tailored to best frag up any typical fire-control radar. Mixed in with the mylar is the same kind of active chaff that Raven the decker-pilot had used to spoof the SAM off our hoop in the Merlin. And if that wasn’t enough, there’s a special concoction of “smoke” containing living microscopic blue-green algae cells in a water suspension. The cloud of dispersing water droplets makes it fragging difficult to see clearly, and the fact that there are living organisms in those droplets extends the effect to magical sight too. (All Argent’s idea, I happily admit. He remembered shells like this from his Desert Wars days, and asked Lynne if she could get any. An idle request, we’d both thought at the time—this stuff is hardly the kind of drek you find off-the-rack. But Lynne-slitch hadn’t blinked an ice-green eye when she agreed, and the shells were waiting for us when we arrived at the Columbia River staging area. Fascinating, and fragging scary. Maybe we should have asked for a couple of heavy panzers, or maybe a Main Battle Tank or two . ..) And while I’m going through all this in my mind, the mortar tubes are delivering more of these ever-so-wiz loads, the wired-up mercs laying the weapons while adjusting for the boats’ motion between shots.

And it’s working. Again my HUD display changes, telling me—I think and hope—that the targeting radars have lost lock. Radar or not, the streams of light are wavering aimlessly now, drifting further away from us as both Riverines maneuver.

The four Watersports that were on their way out for escort duty are between us and the chaff cloud. The drivers know that serious drek is going down, and they’re honking their machines round in the tightest turns they can manage. Even from this distance, I can see the curtains of water the hulls are kicking up as they carve. The Baker boat’s Vanquisher opens up—a sound like an amplified fart—and the stream of fire turns one of the Watersports into a fireball. Then the three survivors are through the chaff, which protects them as effectively as it does us.

Time for Act Two. “Bring up the Wandjinas,” I order, simultaneously switching my HUD mode to window in a view from the Condor stealth drones drifting overhead. In the grainy image, I see the three Wandjina combat drones— looking like miniature fighter planes with two-meter wingspans—pop up from where they’ve been loitering, and bore in toward the NVC facility at full military power. The clouds of active chaff and other drek are between the Remotely Piloted Vehicles and the target, so I know the riggers who are “flying” the drones from afar aren’t getting squat from the Wandjinas’ on-board sensors. But it doesn’t matter for the moment; they can fly them just fine using the overhead view from the Condors.

The combat drones burst through the chaff cloud. I know they’ve suddenly appeared on the target’s fire-control radars, because both miniguns suddenly train out to engage the new bogies—sensible, since they’re the only thing the gunners can “see” clearly. But high-speed, high-maneuverabilty drones are much tougher to hit than Riverines. (Which is just the way we like it, you can bet your hoop.) One of the Wandjinas gets grazed and disintegrates, but the other two race in toward their targets, the auto-turrets. They fire their weapons, and pull up. I zoom in the overhead image, and see both weapon loads strike home.

Query: How do you destroy an auto-turret well-armored enough to shrug off a round from a panzer’s main gun? You take out the intelligence controlling the turret, that’s how—at least that’s the way Argent approached the problem. Our recon and Lynne’s intelligence both confirmed that the auto-turrets themselves were too small to fit anything but the Requiter miniguns, which means the gunners have to be elsewhere. And who would those gunners be? Riggers, priyatel, slags like Raven, jacked into the fire-control radar and the servos that manage the guns themselves. Sitting in revetments too well-hardened to be cracked by anything less than a tac-nuke, but with nice fiber-optic cables running directly into their skulls.

And that’s how you take out the auto-turrets. The weapons the Wandjinas were bringing to bear aren’t bombs or rockets or missiles or napalm. They’re larger versions of taser darts, pure and simple, big beefy capacitors capable of delivering the biggest fragging jolt you’ve never wanted to experience. Just like the “zappers” the more militant sprawl gangs use to take out Star drones, the theory is if you pump a high enough voltage spike into the hardware end of a rigger circuit, you can set up brain-frying neural feedback in the wetware end—in other words, the rigger. The light show's impressive as the zapper darts hit home and discharge, creating myriad bright blue arcs from turret to ground. One minigun shuts down instantly, the other slews around to spray a stream of fire directly into the sky. Then it too shuts down.

The Condor overhead-view shows me the two surviving Wandjinas cutting back, pulling more gees than any meat pilot could ever take, and lining up for coordinated strafing runs over the main compound with their machine guns. That should take the edge off the concentration of anyone inside, particularly when those slags figure out that the coordinated fire missions are going to have them under a drone’s guns every ten seconds or so.

And so comes Act Three. “Bring in the Yellowjackets,” I order.

Again, I doubt my troops actually waited for their fearless commander to give the order. When I shift HUD modes once more, the radar display shows eight bogies inbound from the east, flying nap-of-the-earth following the shoreline. Here comes the cavalry.

And just in time, too, as it turns out. Our own chaff frags up our radar view of the NVC facility, and the smoke-mist drek puts normal vision out of the running too. But that’s at ground level. When something gets high enough up, we’ve got line-of-sight over the intervening crap. So that’s how I spot the half-dozen Yellowjackets taking off from inside the compound, then climbing to altitude. The light-attack choppers on both sides kick in full power and dart forward to mix it up like .. . well, like yellowjackets. (I’m just fragging glad I’m not up there, priyatel. All fourteen or so choppers have the same Telestrian green and gold livery because they’re all Telestrian-owned birds, and their transponders will all be squawking more or less the same thing. That reduces the value of all that oh-so-wiz Identification Friend-or-Foe tech they’re no doubt packing to precisely zero. You interrogate any bird up there with your IFF rig and it’s going to come back as “friendly,” no matter who’s flying it. Nasty and chaotic, and leave it to the flyboys.)

The Baker boat disappears into the chaff cloud— dissipating now—and then a dozen seconds later we’re through as well. There’s sporadic small-arms fire from the shoreline, and I even hear a couple of rounds slam into our Riverine’s armored hull. But this limited resistance doesn’t last long as the Vanquishers on the two boats sweep the shore clear of opposition.

I inspect the docks while the gunners finish off the last pockets of resistance. There’s a Samuvani-Criscraft Otter moored to one of the quays, a small five-meter design with a single medium machine gun on a pintle mount. Next to it sits an Aztech Nightrunner. Tied to the second quay are a couple of Watersports. That reminds me: where’s our “escort” gone? If they’re smart, to California, but we can’t depend on that. And
that
reminds me ...

I turn, and kick in my helmet’s electronic binoculars. Less than two klicks away from us is Tir Taimgire territory, can’t forget that. The helmet’s built-in optics bring the opposite shore closer. There are planes over there, planes and rotorcraft. For a moment fear wrenches my gut. I think we can take the NVC facility. We sure as frag can’t take the NVC assets plus Tir air support.

But then I make a little better sense of what I’m seeing. There’s lots of air power up there, but all of it’s staying very carefully on the Tir side of the river. Nothing’s ranging out over the Columbia toward us. Not that it’s overly reassuring, of course. A couple of klicks is pointblank range for any full-on military “smart” missile.

It is demonstrative, though. The Tir military might be showing its teeth, but so far it’s more a warning that if we don’t keep our scrap on our side of the line, they’ll be kicking some hoop. I flip them an ironic salute. Scan that one, priyatel. Corp-equipped mercs scare the drek out of me quite enough without getting full-on military into the game.

When I turn back to the main event, the Baker boat’s already backing away from the dock, its contingent of troops ashore and heading for the reinforced gate I can see ahead of us. I look up. Yep, like I’d expected, it’s absolute fragging chaos up there. There’s less than a dozen Yellowjackets still in the sky, and they’re mixed up real tight. Nobody’s using rockets or missiles, everybody’s in the aerial equivalent of a knife-fight, almost getting close enough to recognize individual pilots before cutting loose with their chain-guns. Doesn’t look like anything important’s going to get settled up there, but I seriously doubt anybody’s going to have a free moment to pound at the ground assault. Which is just the way we planned it.

Way over on the other side of the facility, I see a big beefy fireball roiling up into the sky. That tells me our ground assets are hitting the landward side of the compound with everything they’ve got. (Not much, to be honest, but hopefully enough to distract even more attention from the Able and Baker assault teams.)