The Final Battle (22 page)

“Pity about what?”

“Lieutenant Colonel Anna Cheung Helfort, that’s what.”

“Ah,” was Michael’s only response. He did not trust himself to say any more. He was on very thin ice, and he knew it.

“Come on,’ Shinoda said. She scrambled to her feet. “We should move out.”

“We should. Think that thing saw us?”

“No. The new Hammer recon drones are a problem, but that version’s not,” Shinoda replied with a dismissive wave. “That was a KSD-31: no down-facing radar, limited ESM capability, and fitted with infrared and optical sensors only. And one of these—” She pointed at the massive fig tree. “—is as good as cover gets … well, short of a couple of meters of ceramcrete, that is. Right, sir,” Shinoda went on, all businesslike, as if the events of a few moments earlier had never happened. “Get geared up and we’ll move out. And triple-check your chromaflage. There’ll be surveillance drones around, and we can’t rely on them all being second-rate KSD-31s.”

“Yes, sergeant.”

• • •

Binoculars to their eyes, Michael and Shinoda lay under their chromaflage capes back from the crest of a ridge that ran parallel to the western boundary of Gwalia Missile Defense Base. The late afternoon sun burned hot on their backs.

The base was huge, laid out in a broad rectangle. It was studded with hexagonal ceramcrete structures that supported armored cupolas. Below each one was a quadruple Goshawk antiballistic missile launcher. The perimeter was secured by three razor-wire fences. They ran in parallel and were studded with posts cluttered with arrays of motion sensors and holocams. A road ran outside the wire, connecting a series of small blockhouses and laser batteries. Beyond the road, the ground had been scraped back to dirt for a good 500 meters. Michael didn’t need binoculars to know what the signs set in the ground every 50 meters said. The skull and crossbones symbol that headed each one was enough to tell him that the entire area was thick with mines.

In the center of the base was the command center. It was a brutal building, squat and ugly, built of ceramcrete with massive recessed blastproof doors and topped with an enormous dome that protected the phased array radar installation, its seamless skin blindingly white in the morning sun.

Michael shifted his binoculars onto the only thing that mattered to him and Shinoda: the road connecting the command center to the base’s main gate, a substantial installation in its own right, protected from attack by a chicane and flanked by dragon’s teeth; the approach was covered by blockhouses.

From the gate ran the one and only road that linked Gwalia Missile Defense Base to the town of Gwalia. It was down that road that Colonel Farrah would drive when Juggernaut happened.

“Seen enough?” Michael murmured. They had been watching for hours now, and he was beginning to get nervous.

“I have,” Shinoda said. “Let’s get out of here before we get spotted. I’d like to drive the road before it gets dark, and we should make sure the good colonel is still shacked up with his wife in town.”

• • •

By the time sunset arrived—always a protracted business on Commitment thanks to its forty-nine-hour day—Shinoda had picked a spot along the road linking the missile base to Gwalia. It was a tight curve forced on the engineers by a massive limestone reef that reared up out of flat ground.

Shinoda scuffed the toe of one boot through the dust. “Thanks to all this damn rock, there’s not as much vegetation as I’d like,” she said, “but this’ll do.” She looked up and down the road. “I’ll put you there—” She pointed to where a small outcrop poked its way clear of a thin fringe of bushes. “—while I go just here, alongside this boulder. Our man will come from that way.” She pointed down the road toward Gwalia. “He’ll slow right down for the bend, and that’s when we’ll hit him. We’ll put three of the remote holocams down the road. That way we can make absolutely sure we get a positive identification. Be a shame to shoot up the wrong car. And we’ll put the fourth camera back toward the base to make sure we don’t get blindsided by someone coming from that direction. All make sense?”

“Yup.”

“Our primary egress will be 50 meters back from and parallel to the road, back where we’ll stash the bot. If that’s compromised, we’ll follow the reef away from the road up to high ground, drop down to the Jerzic River, turn north, and try to reach the
NRA
positions in the Velmars on foot.”

“Long walk.”

“But doable. So what I want you to do is this: First, put the base-side holocam in position. Let me see; yes, you’ll need to run fiber back to here. We can’t risk a radio datalink, and we can’t get direct line of sight, so a laser link is out.”

“Roger that.”

“And point the bloody thing the right way, toward the base. Got that?”

“Sergeant,” Michael protested, “I’m not a complete idiot.”

“Maybe not, but you’d be surprised how many times it happens. Now, when you’ve done that, I’d like you to check our secondary escape route. Try to find a way through that will allow us to move fast; look for good ambush sites and ways to get up onto the reef if we have to. Got all that?”

“Yeah. How far do I go?”

“Let me see … Five klicks should be enough. But I want you back here no later than four hours from now and watch your chromaflage discipline. There’ll be drones for sure. Any questions?”

“Just one. While I’m doing that, where will you be? And I’m not being a smart-ass, sergeant, in case you were wondering. I just want to know where to find you.”

“Fair enough. I’ll set up the cameras, run the fiber back here, and bring up our supplies in case we have to abandon the bot. And when we’ve done all that, we’ll find somewhere to hole up.”

Wednesday, July 7, 2404, UD
Gwalia Road, Commitment

Shinoda commed Michael. “Just received the final go code from
ENCOMM
,” she said. “J-Hour is confirmed for 04:00 Universal. So let me see; yes, that’s just on dusk local time.”

Finally
, Michael thought.
Finally, the beginning of what I really hope will be the end
. He cycled through each of the holocams in turn. “About time,” he replied.

“Any sign of life?”

“There’s still nothing moving.” The road was empty in both directions and had been since the last changeover of the base’s watch keepers.
Shit!
Michael thought with a twinge of panic.
We’ve missed something important, very important
. “I think we might have a snag, sergeant,” he said.

“A snag?”

“As soon as the shit hits the fan, the missile base will to go from
OPSTAT-4
to
OPSTAT-5
, and our man will come tearing down the road, right?”

“Which is why we’re both here, sir,” Shinoda said. She sounded irritated.

“But we haven’t seen the base go to
OPSTAT-5
, have we?”

“Not while we’ve been here, no. Why does that matter?”

“
OPSTAT-5
is the same as our general quarters,” Michael said, “and that means all the Hammers not on watch have to get back to base to do whatever they do when they’re at general quarters. So when Juggernaut kicks off—”

“I get it, I get it!’ Shinoda said, cutting him off. “We’ll not only see Colonel Farrah, we’ll have every man and his fucking dog coming down the road at us. How could I have missed that?”

“Doesn’t matter. Question is what we do now.”

Shinoda went quiet for a moment. “I know what General Vaas said,” she said softly, “but I think we should do what we came to do.”

“But the road will be thick with truckloads of PGDF troopers,” he said. “I know what Vaas would say.”

“So do I, but we’re here to take out Farrah, and we can do that no matter how many trucks there are. What happens after that …” Shinoda’s voice slid into an uneasy silence.

“It’s suicide,” Michael said.

“Shit happens. But General Vaas isn’t here, so it’s your call. If you tell me to abort, we’ll abort.”

We should abort,
Michael thought.
We’ll never get away alive.

He took a deep breath. “No,” he said even though he knew he had almost certainly signed their death warrants. “We’ll stay. We can’t walk away from this, not now.”

“I agree,” Shinoda said. “Now, let me see … Yeah, we need to change things to give us a decent chance of getting away. I’m coming to you.”

A fleeting ripple shimmered its way toward him. Shinoda eased herself down beside him. “Right,” she said. “I’ll watch the holovids. When Farrah appears, I’ll take him from here. You get back to the base of the reef. See that boulder?”

“The one sticking out of the reef with the trees in front?”

“Yup. Dig in there. You’ll flank any PGDF brave enough to try and rush me. These are not frontline troops, so they’ll almost certainly fall back to the other side of the road when we hit them. The moment I’ve dealt with Farrah, we need to pull back along the reef. If we can do that before the Hammers get their shit together, we might just make it.”

“Not back to the bot?”

“No. The ground’s way too open, and more than likely there’ll be more truckbots coming up the road. And remember, when I move, you go too. No heroics; just run like hell. Clear?”

“Yes, sergeant.”

“Well, what are you waiting for? Go!”

• • •

Michael was dug in beneath the overhang of a massive boulder. He stared out down the road, a thin ribbon of silver-gray in the evening light that lanced down between towering thunderheads, harbingers of yet another storm.

“Stand by.” Shinoda’s voice came as a shock, so intense was his concentration. “One truck. Let it go.”

“Let it go, roger.”

The vehicle tore past, tires squealing and scrubbing as it hit the corner so fast that Michael thought it might roll over. Somehow it stayed upright. It left the corner and accelerated hard toward the base, giving Michael a clear view of the PGDF troopers packed into the back. They were all in combat gear and carried assault rifles.
No, not all,
he thought.
One of them has a KAF-08 machine gun upright between his legs
.

His heart sank. What he’d seen wasn’t a bunch of seat polishers, people who spent their time tweaking missiles or buried in bunkers staring at tactical displays, punching buttons. No, they were security troops. They might not be marines, but they would know what they were doing.

“Vehicles inbound … stand by … okay,” Shinoda said. “I have a red mobibot … Yes, image scan confirms that’s our man. Oh, shit. He’s got two trucks right behind him. Okay, here’s the plan. Open fire when I do. Put a long burst into the target, then shift your fire to the lead truck. Don’t let it get too close to us.”

“One burst on the target, then shift to the lead truck, roger.”

Michael wiped the sweat from his hands, then tightened his grip on the battered assault rifle and peered down the road through the stabilized optical sight.

“Yes,” Michael hissed when Colonel Farrah’s red mobibot appeared. The man was clearly visible through the plasglass windshield. He was talking animatedly to the three other occupants of the bot. “Bad day to ask for a lift from the boss, boys,” he whispered.

The moment the mobibot slowed into the curve, Shinoda opened fire. Michael followed suit an instant later. The windshield disintegrated into a maelstrom of shattered plasglass, but the mobibot kept coming despite the hail of hypersonic rounds tearing it apart. Then its snout bobbed as the emergency brakes bit. It slid to a stop in a screech of tortured tires, a smoking, shredded shambles, the bodies of the men inside thrown forward in bloody ruins.

Michael shifted fire. He settled his optical sight on the cab of the oncoming truckbot. Its sole occupant stared open-mouthed at the carnage ahead. Michael squeezed the trigger and put two rounds into the man’s face, dropped his aim to put a long burst into the engine compartment, and emptied the last of his magazine into the camouflaged cover over the truck bed. The truckbot wobbled and swayed before it too shuddered to a halt, but not before its nose had rammed into the bullet-ridden wreck of Colonel Farrah’s mobibot and shunted it another 20 meters down the road.

Michael changed magazines and returned to the attack. A blizzard of fire flayed the truck and anyone stupid enough to try to get to his side of the road. But the Hammers were getting their act together. A significant amount of fire was already coming his way, and now the heavy chatter of machine gun fire joined the assault rifles. Rounds smashed at the rocks around him. Razor-sharp fragments of rock spalled off the rocks around him, stinging and burning when they hit his arms and face. The noise and confusion grew. Microgrenades arced across the road and exploded with ear-splitting cracks that filled the air with dust and the acrid smell of high explosive.

The mobibot’s microfusion plant blew, followed an instant later by the truck’s; the two blue-white balls of light and fire hurled debris in all directions. The concussion was so violent that it picked Michael up and threw him bodily backward; he was left stunned and deafened.

For a moment there was a silence. The respite did not last. The Hammers resumed their attack with full fury.

With an effort, Michael forced his brain back to work. He swore under his breath as he watched the second truck screech to a halt. Troopers spilled out of the back. Michael sent a hail of fire into them, chasing the men off the road into cover. But it was hopeless; there were simply too many of them, and they knew what they were doing. Under cover of heavy suppressing fire, Michael could see one group working its way left past the wreckage of the mobibot; a second was moving to his right.
They’re flanking us,
he said to himself.
Come on, Sergeant Shinoda; it’s time to move.

Shinoda had been listening; she stopped firing. Michael put a single sustained burst into the Hammers, then squirmed and rolled away He scrambled to his feet and ran around the base of the reef to where Shinoda waited. He shot past her. “Go!” he shouted over the noise as he led the way along the path he had scouted earlier. The volume of fire thrown at them dropped off as they moved away from the road.