One Good Soldier (23 page)

He scanned as best he could for any other surprises. The Seppies were known for using clever guerrilla tactics, booby traps, and kamikaze ships loaded with gluonium bombs, and they had used mass-driver guns at the Battle of the Oort very successfully. He hoped they didn't have any of those here. The problem with mass drivers, though, was that the damned things were usually kept underground and were hard as hell to find until after they had been fired. With all the American traffic in and out of the Ross 128 system, it would have been difficult for the Arcadians and/or the Separatists to build mass drivers in the system without anybody spotting them. Wallace doubted they had them here, but he wasn't taking anything for granted or making any undue assumptions. When in doubt, check it out.

"CO!" The air boss, Captain Michelle Wiggington, turned from her console. "Gods of War are out, sir! The Demon Dawgs and the Utopian Saviors are deploying."

"Good, Michelle."

"Drop tubes away, CO," the ground boss, Brigadier General James Brantley, added. "The Warlords and the Robots are out. The AAIs are right behind them."

"Good. We are stuck here without that facility." RADM Jefferson could do little more than wait at this point. The battle plan had been put into action. There was no gauge of the enemy's real strength until they started using it. Were there mass drivers? Did they have any ships? How many troops were on the QMT pad? "And I don't want to spend the next eighteen months in hyperspace."

"Sir! We're taking in some serious AA fire from the QMT facility," the XO said.

"I've got it, XO," the air boss replied. "I'm putting the Utopian Saviors on it."

"Ground Boss, any sign of enemy troops on the facility?" Jefferson asked.

"No, Admiral. Only automated defenses," Brantley replied. "But, sir, there are apparently a hell of a lot of the automated defenses. A lot more than were originally installed on that thing, according to our records."

"That's not what I expected to hear. They have been planning this for some time, it would appear. Who knows what modifications the damned Seppies have made to this facility? There could be traps, ambushes, and minefields. Better tell the ground forces to dig in and cover until we take out the automated systems from the air." The admiral was happy to see there were no defenses to speak of at the facility moon, but that also gave him a queasy feeling in his gut. The Arcadian ambassador had claimed to have a million man–strong Armored National Guard. Where were they?

"All right Saviors, listen up." Lieutenant Colonel Caroline "Deuce" Leeland bounced her USMC FM-12 strike mecha around to avoid the QMT facility AA fire. Her mecha in fighter mode screamed across the surface at just over fifty meters high. Her wingman, Captain Timothy "Goat" Crow, was off her right wing at five o'clock, and the rest of the Utopian Saviors were in pairs spread out behind her. "We've been given new orders from on high, and those are to take out the surface defenses and that AA fire. Skinny and HoundDog, Golfbag and Volleyball are on me. Jawbone, you and Popstar split off with Beanhead, PayDirt, Romeo, and Freak. My team will hit the AA and, Jaw, your team takes the ground defenses."

"Roger that, Deuce," Jawbone replied.

Deuce pushed her throttle forward a bit, tapped her right top pedal slightly, and crabbed her fighter to her right a few degrees to line up on the enemy AA cannons. From what she could tell, the cannons were dispersed on the towers of the facility at each of the points. There were eight points across each of the octagonal concentric rings. The outermost ring had half-kilometer–tall towers on each, and there was an even taller one dead center. The three-dimensional image in her mindview was fused together by QM, IR, lidar, radar, and optical sensors into an extremely detailed view of the targets. The cannons looked like large gray metal cubes with a gun turret sticking out of each of the five faces that were not attached to the ground or tower or other structure the thing rested on. Deuce picked the first one in her general flight direction and locked it up with a QM guided missile.

"Fox three!" she shouted. The missile twisted out across the surface of the Arcadian QMT toward the AA box on the tower nearest her. She guided her mecha low to stay out of the AA firing solutions so she could watch the impact of her missile. The missile never got close to the target before it turned upward and tumbled wildly out of control, landing somewhere beyond the engagement zone and never exploding. "What the hell!"

"Fox three!" Goat shouted. Her wingman followed up her attack the same way. The second QM guided missile spiraled out of control and went dead as well. "Shit, we're being countermeasured."

"Roger that, Goat. Shit." Deuce pulled away from her current run and out of the AA as best she could. "Saviors! Abandon present mission approach and pull back to angels ten. The facility is Gridiron. I repeat, the facility is Gridiron and fox three is ineffective."

"So why don't we just go to guns, Deuce?" Skinny called back over the net. Just because they were Gridiron—meaning electromagnetic countermeasures were taking out the missiles—didn't mean that guns would stop the AA boxes.

"Negative, negative, Skinny. We can't take the chance of damaging any part of the tower. If we can't hit the boxes, we don't hit them at all." Deuce thought about the problem for an instant and then had an idea and switched channels to the AEM command-net frequency. "Colonel Roberts, this is Lieutenant Colonel Leeland."

"Go ahead, Deuce."

"Colonel, the locals have us Gridiron and zapped, making our missiles useless against the AA boxes mounted on the towers. I'm DTMing you my sensor data of their locations now." Deuce thought to her AIC to link up with the AEM commander's AIC. "We need someone to burn them for us so we can go to laser-guided seekers."

"Hell, Deuce, we were getting bored down here anyway. I think my senior NCO is taking a nap. I'll see if I can wake her up and get it done for you."

"Roger that, Colonel. We'll see if we can't help keep the ground defenses preoccupied while you do it. Keep us posted on the status of the burn."

"Roger that. Robots are on the move, Deuce."

"All right, Saviors, watch for the AEMs making a move for the towers and let's see if we can't give them some cover," Deuce ordered her flight squad.

Ramy Roberts's Robots, also known as the 3rd Armored E-suit Marines Forward Recon Unit, had made it a policy, strategy, crazy-assed tactic, or whatever you'd like to call it, of riding down the drop tubes with the Army tank mecha. They had first done it at the Battle of the Oort with great success, and it had been adopted as standard operating procedure. Most of the other AEM squads thought it was a great idea. Most of the Army armored infantry squads thought that the marines were bat-fucking crazy.

"Warlord Five in the tube and ready for drop!" Army Captain Sam Cortez announced as he brought the tank to a stop inside the tube and locked it down. "Hang on out there, Jarhead, we go in five, four, three, two, one . . ."

"Shiiiitttt!" Tommy growled as the tube was launched. His suit was magnetically locked down to the tank so he wasn't going to fly off. But it was still one hell of a ride.

Nearly three dozen drop tubes were launched toward the QMT facility by the
Sienna Madira
's underbelly catapults. Traveling at over four thousand kilometers per hour, only ten of them actually held the tanks and their unusual attachments. The rest were decoys in case the fancy electronic and quantum membrane countermeasures failed to confuse all of the enemy fire.

As AA rounds peppered against the exterior armored hull of the drop tube, Suez thought it sounded a lot like the ringing of the bells of Notre Dame. He hoped like hell the tube's SIFs held up. They only needed to last for thirty seconds or so, since the flight of the drop tubes cut an unusually short ballistic trajectory. Tommy had been through this before, but it was still the most unsettling half-a-minute of any fight.

Since there was nothing he could do about it while magnetically locked to a tank inside the tube, he did his best not to think about the harrowing drop through flying shards of hot burning incendiary armor-piercing rounds outside. One way or another, it would be over soon enough. He went over in his mind exactly what he planned to do when he hit the surface. He was going to take cover and shoot any fucking thing in front of him without a blue force tracker beacon on it.

It was a good plan.

A few more seconds passed, and Suez had to grit his teeth against the jar of the tube retrofields firing and the demo blowing apart the tube, leaving him riding atop the tank-mode mecha in open space with the ground rushing up at them extremely fast and enemy AA rounds flashing about. The orange tracers from the enemy cannons seem to fill every part of the sky as far as he could see in front of him. So, like a good marine, he was headed toward where the shit was thickest.

"Thanks for the lift, Warlord Five!" Tommy gave the command to pop the superconductor magnet free, and he pounded his jumpboots against the hull of the tank, launching him wide and clear of the mecha. He rolled in a forward flip, and then he slammed into the ground with his left knee creating a crater and slinging up dust. He pulled his HVAR at ready and scanned it around, looking for targets of opportunity. There were no enemy soldiers, but there were automated ant hills with antipersonnel defenses splattering out railgun rounds as fast as they could. The fifty-millimeter railgun rounds tore through chunks of rock and dirt all around the LZ and all around him. He recalled the taking-cover part of his plan.

The Robots spread out to cover the landing zone for the tankheads, and then, to confuse the ant hills, they spread across the ridgeline a couple of klicks up in front of Army mecha. PFC Roger Willingham and PFC Hicks pounded down not far on either side of him, and Tommy could call them up in his DTM blue-force tracker if he needed to. The rest of the Robots were on the move as well, and it was clear that they had to move forward fast and randomly or those damned automated snipers were going to tear them apart.

"Kent, keep your fucking head down!" Tommy heard Top shouting at the female lance corporal. McCandless's voice sounded as if she could chew the lance corporal's head off.

"Goddamn, I'm hit!" Kent shouted over the Marine unit's tac-net. Tommy couldn't tell by the sound of her voice how bad it was.

"Top, Kent is down," he communicated.

"Got her, Gunny. She'll survive, but out of play. Keep moving," Tamara replied over the net.

"Roger that, Top. This fucking ground fire is thick as shit! I'm open for ideas." Tommy ducked behind an outcropping of rocks.

"How about we get the fuck out of it?" Corporal Sandy Cross said. "I mean, I could think of more fun places to be."

"You kidding—ain't this right where all the action is? You gotta love it, Sandy," Corporal Bates threw in his two cents' worth.

"Knock that shit off, Danny," Tommy ordered. He kept his position behind the rock pile for the moment. He couldn't tell if they were a man-made refuse pile of boulders or if they were part of the asteroid that had been dug out to make the QMT pad or if they were a natural phenomenon. He didn't really give a shit, either. They offered cover from those goddamned fifty-millimeter railguns, and that was all he was looking for at the moment.

The automated snipers were not very accurate, but they put down a shitload of antipersonnel rounds in a goddamned hurry. The Robots were gathering around the valley at the bottom of the ridgeline as best they could, and they could see the tankheads back behind them setting up a line. Several of them fired volleys into the ant hills atop the ridge and managed to take out a couple of the automated snipers, but there were hundreds of them per linear kilometer, which was way too many for ten tanks to take on.

Tommy, PFC Willingham, PFC Howser, and Sergeant Dallon Hubbard had bounced point to the rock pile he had found. There were more of the piles farther up the ridge that would make good cover and get them almost in range where their grenade launchers would be effective against some of the closer ant hills. He motioned to the two marines on him.

"Come on, we're moving up to that next pile. It's bigger and will give us a better vantage point," he told them. "On me in leapfrogs. And remember to adjust for the lower gravity. Go!" Tommy bounced first as far as his jumpboots would bounce him. He hit the ground on his belly, sliding uphill in prone position like a baseball player sliding into second base headfirst. He held still with his weapon pointed in the general direction of the ant hills. Several rounds from the automated railguns threw dust up around him, but he held still and the automated systems of the snipers didn't lock on him.

PFC Howser bounced twice. Her first jump was shorter than Tommy's, putting her about fifty meters behind him. Then she bounced as far as she could up the hill. She was still not even a third of the way to the next cover point. PFC Willingham followed the procedure, putting him somewhere near halfway to the rock pile. Then Sergeant Hubbard made it almost to the two-thirds distance before he slid to a stop and covered himself. Tommy crawled to his hands and feet and then bounced all the way up to the sergeant before he stopped. The two of them held still, planning to make it to cover last.