Netlink (20 page)

Which is what Clifford had done. He’d seen action on New America during the Rebellion, twenty-five years ago, and had been in plenty of scrapes since. Three years ago he’d been offered a chance to attend the Academy and become an officer.

Most long-time career sergeants held the virtually traditional opinion that NCOs were the real leadership of any good army, that the best officers were those who actually bothered to listen to what their senior sergeants told them. Clifford shared the opinion—but he’d also seen stupidity enough in the ConMil command that he’d decided that maybe he could make a difference if he wielded the authority of an officer instead of that of a grizzled, foul-mouthed noncom. Assigned now as CO of Alfa Platoon, Company D, 12th Regiment, First Confederation Marines, he had as much combat experience as anyone in the unit. He was also, still, a grizzled, foul-mouthed noncom in spirit, a fact that his own troops took considerable pride in.

“Okay, you goking leggers!” he bellowed over the platoon circuit. “Move! Move! Move! You want to toast marshmallows in the transport’s jets? Or earn your goking yen transfer?”

The marines dispersed rapidly and with practiced efficiency, forming a broad, protective perimeter around the transport’s LZ. With armored resistance within the compound largely crushed, Clifford and his marines had the assignment of clearing key buildings and actually snatching what they’d come here to snatch. He didn’t know what the target was, though he could guess that it was some kind of high-tech horror the Impies were cooking up in their Kasei labs. Dr. Carol Browning and a small team of linksystem experts were along to handle the actual search and grab; Clifford’s part of the job was to get them inside the building so that they could do their work and to keep them safe while they completed the mission.

With his Mitsubishi Mark XVII plasma rifle at the ready, he trotted clear of the grounded transport, feeling like he was slogging through wet sand. Movement was difficult, almost like trying to walk underwater or in high gravity. This entire area had been saturated with QEC nano, and the magnetic field resisted his movement through it. His armor, his weapons, his other gear had very little ferrous material in them—iron or steel was all too easy for an enemy to detect with magnetic scanners—but the little there was in various items of circuitry fought him step by torturous step.

Gunfire crackled and barked; an explosion to the north sent fire boiling into the sky. Not all resistance had ended yet, by any means. The Imperial striders had been neutralized—destroyed or driven off—but there were plenty of holdouts dug in among the blast- and fire-shattered buildings.

Clifford dropped behind a low stone wall and studied the target through his helmet display. His Companion was interfaced directly with the helmet’s electronics, processing both scanner information and data being relayed from Sandman, the ops field HQ at the grounded Artemis ascraft. The main building of the lab complex was a dome-topped, two-story structure ringed with transplas or glass windows—he couldn’t tell which—and circled by a kind of park with flower garden plots, meter-tall walls, and benches. As he studied the building through enhanced optics, his Companion painted blobs of color moving behind the upper-story windows marking infrared sources that might be technicians or lab personnel but could also easily be waiting Imperial troops.

A stray round sighed overhead. Gunfire chattered, a light machine gun somewhere to the north.

There was only one way to find out who the silently glowing heat sources were, and no point in waiting. “Okay, people!” he called over the tactical net. “Let’s take ’em down!”

He rolled over the wall and started forward. To either side, other armored figures rose and advanced. Almost at once, a hail of gunfire opened up on the advancing marines. A pulse laser stuttered silently, a dazzling, fast-strobing flicker of intense light that chopped through Corporal DeLattio’s breastplate and gorget in a splatter of molten duralloy and vaporizing blood. DeLattio shrieked—once and very briefly—and went down. Private Redding lost his left arm as the light exploded through pauldron and rerebrace.

The sudden, devastating fire coming from the building stopped the marines before their rush had gained momentum enough to carry them forward. Most of the troops dropped back behind the wall or into sheltered nooks in the garden-park that lay in front of the building’s main entrance.

“Move! Move! Move!” Clifford screamed as automatic fire howled overhead and the laser continued its relentless, deadly pulsing. “You want to just stand there and take it? Get inside there and give ’em some back!”

But the advancing line wavered, then broke, and he had to vault back behind the wall or be the only marine left standing in the park. At his back, the transports, their troops disembarked now, lifted from the LZ, pivoting, rising slowly, their weapons mounts unfolding on stubby wings, seeking the enemy. Hivel rounds slashed toward them from the lab building’s second story; one transport took a hit and staggered, its belly slashed open, but then its pilot applied more thrust and the craft straightened out, still rising.

Hivel cannon fire, missiles, and laser pulses snapped and hissed as the transports laid down a devastating covering fire. Infantry—leggers in military parlance—stood very little chance of survival for more than scant minutes on the open battlefield. Their transports were designed to provide them with an extra few moments in the form of overwhelming fire support.

But the damaged transport was in trouble. It had taken too many hits, and white steam was spilling from a ruptured fuel tank, hydrogen slush boiling into atmosphere. An incendiary round slammed into the hull, and in a literal flash, the hydrogen tank exploded, erupting in a savage detonation that broke the transport’s spine. Gunfire continued to reach toward the craft as it spun wildly across the compound’s airspace; it struck a line of sand dunes just above the beach, exploding for a final time in a billowing mushroom cloud of orange and jet black.

Clifford winced and ducked below a laser-scored wall as the sky turned a dazzling, day-bright orange.
Damn!
That was the
San Jacinto!
Just moments ago, he and his boys and girls had been aboard her. Gok… he’d been talking to the major piloting her.…

There would be time to think about that later, if they didn’t get swept off the front porch by the gunfire coming from inside.

If they could get some support from the other transport…

But the
Vera Cruz
loosed only a brief burst of laser fire, scoring the lab’s domed roof, then broke off and circled south, out over the bay. The fire coming from that building was just too hot for a relatively vulnerable aircraft to stand and face.

They needed heavy fire support if they were to get inside that fortress.

Levering himself up to peer across the top of the wall, he studied the building’s facade. Most of the fire appeared to be coming from the second floor; he could see the twinkle and flash of small arms up there, the repeated flicker of the laser. Those windows were glass after all. They had to be, to be so easily broken. Made sense. One thing Kasei had a lot of was sand, and buildings here tended to be raised with glass facades instead of plastics.

He opened a tactical channel in his helmet com unit. “Striker, Striker, Striker, this is Red Rover! Do you copy?”

“Rover, Striker Two-one. Go ahead!”

“Striker Two-one, we could use some big-foot help over here.” He rattled off coordinates, ducking once again as a grenade fired from the building detonated a few tens of meters away.

He sensed motion and turned. A warstrider floated a meter above the ground a few meters away, a huge, black, fire-blasted shape that was all curves and smooth surfaces except for the evil-looking snouts of weapons and wave guide antennae protruding here and there from recesses in the armor. Fear stirred in the back of Clifford’s mind.
Please, God, let it be Striker Two-one!

“Red Rover?” a voice said over his radio link. “It’s me, Striker. Where do you want me to put it?”

Sagging with relief, Clifford jerked a gloved thumb over his shoulder. “That building. They’ve got a small, do-it-yourself fortress up there, second floor, just above the main entrance. They’re dug in with grenade launchers, small arms, a hivel, and at least one 2cm pulse laser. Think you can take that out for us without bringing down the whole damned structure?”

“Well, that’s the trick, I guess,” the warstrider answered. “Taking ’em down is easy. But as for not knocking down the building—”

“That’s our objective in there, striderjack. I’d rather not go after it with a shovel, thank you.”

“I understand. Okay, keep your head down.”

The warstrider drifted past, clearing the top of the wall and moving into the open in front of the building. The gunfire from inside doubled and redoubled; bullets sang and whined off the armor; a grenade exploded close beside the upright machine, rocking it to the right.

A hatch popped open in the strider’s side, and a snub-nosed cylinder nosed forth. There was a shrill whine and a stabbing jet of flame, the sound so piercing that Clifford raised his gloves to cover his ears—uselessly, since he was wearing an enclosed helmet.

The hivel cannon hosed the entire second story of the main building, starting at one end and sweeping to the other. Glass exploded, showering out into the night in a glittering cascade. Bodies fell as well, most mangled almost beyond recognition. The interior of the second floor was intermittently lit from within by exploding rounds, but when the hivel gun fell silent, the gaping holes that had once been windows remained black and silent.

There was no answering fire from the structure.

“Pest control done while you wait,” the warstrider’s pilot said. “Anything else?”

“Thanks, striderjack. If you want to hang around, you’re more than welcome, believe me!”

“I think I’ll wander. There’s a firefight on at the landing field. But give a yell if you need anything else, right?”

“You got it! Thanks!” He shifted frequencies. “Okay, you leggers. Let’s move it! Move it!”

For the second time, he rolled over the wall and started forward, his troops following. It was the stuff of a classic nightmare, trying to run across ground permeated by a QEC mag field, each step mired in slow-motion, and all the while enduring that prickly feeling at the back of his neck that someone up there was taking aim and about to fire.

And then suddenly he’d broken through, staggering into the open, almost as though emerging from hip-deep surf or wet sand. He’d fought clear of the caged electron field and was moving over normal ground once more.

Gunfire continued to bark elsewhere in the compound, but the main lab building was silent now… as silent as death. He reached the entrance and backed up against the wall, plasma rifle ready. Bradley and Chung slammed into the wall opposite, exchanged nods with him, and braced themselves. Chung tossed a grenade through the blast-shattered door, and when the fragments of ceiling stopped falling, they rolled around the corner and plunged inside, one-two-three.

There was nothing inside the entrance foyer but shattered glass and dead Imperial soldiers.…

Watching from Aresynch, Kara followed the raid as it unfolded before her eyes. Resolution through the sky-el’s optics was good; at infrared wavelengths, she could see individual troopers as they scattered from the armored carrier and raced into the nearest of the lab buildings. Incoming fire continued to probe and flash. The battle proceeded in an eerie silence; Kara kept expecting to hear the crash and howl and thunder of detonating rounds, the shriek of hivels, the yells of men and women, and the clatter of small-arms fire, but the entire scenario unfolded before her eyes in complete silence.

She wished she were down there with them. With
Ran…

Kara had already tried several times to access the computer system at the MilTech labs through the Net, but, as expected, there was no direct access. Even the most sophisticated AI system couldn’t talk to other computers if they weren’t linked in, though she could sense where those node access points were when the communications lines were open.

Had she been able to access the lab computers directly, she might well have been able to carry out this mission—or the major part of it—herself, without the need for warstriders or marines. In fact, the lack of access was a confirmation that sensitive data on the I2C might well be stored at Noctis Labyrinthus. Severing the lab’s on-line connections with Aresynch would be one of the most basic of security precautions they could take.

A warning tone caught her attention. Shifting to another window, she checked the strategic map, which showed everything in the battle area from the foot of Pavonis Mons to Oudemans.

There… that was what had triggered the alert. A flight of aircraft—and from their ID tags on the tracking screen, they were damned big transports of some kind—was lifting off from a base in Syria Planum, south of the Marineris Sea. Touching the icon with her thoughts, she requested a magnification of the image and more data.

And she got it. The aircraft were four Kaba transports, enormous, lumbering beasts that could easily be hauling a full regiment of heavy warstriders between them. They were already clear of their base control area and were winging across the Labyrinthine Bay, headed north. Aresynch Military Command listed the flight as assigned to the 5th Imperial
Hi
Division, stationed at Syria Planum.

That made sense, now that the alarm was out. They would be on the way with a regiment of crack Imperial striders at least; they wouldn’t know for sure what they were up against, but there would be enough of them to deal with anything short of a full-scale invasion. They would walk right over the Confederation forces on the ground, no problem and no questions asked.

What to do?

Kara stared at the four tiny symbols streaking north across the waters of the Labyrinth of Night and knew that she had very few options.

“Strikers! All Strikers! This is Sandman! Priority flash, urgent!”