Find Part One here; Part Two here.
Khom’s original assault plan had envisioned a three-phase atmospheric insertion of the striker company via two assault shuttles. Recon, two squads from one of the line platoons, and a mini-battery of mortars would make the first drop, seizing Hill 49, which held a commanding overview of the Oyos complex. One and one-half line platoons and the remainder of Klatta Lor’s support platoon would cycle in two hours later, as Recon probed the Gonks’ automated defenses. Within six hours the last platoon of line puppies would drop in, and thirty minutes later—timed to coincide with a firefall of orbital shrap—the company would overrun the garrison.
They never got to find out Elbers’ opinion of the plan, because Verk vetoed it on logistical grounds before anyone else ever saw it.
“I know forty large Cert sounds like a lot of money to you people,” he said. “But in my world that’s a kiss and a promise. With your budget, I can get your troops in orbit in four civilian zPL transports that will probably—I emphasize probably—hold atmosphere long enough to make the jump between systems. I can put up two, maybe three firefalls of shrap, and I can lease one very small assault shuttle with enough fuel for a single round-trip from orbit. You want two assault shuttles, fine. Just eliminate your artillery support. You want enough fuel for two shuttles to make three drops each? I can do that, so long as you plan on leaving two platoons at home to account for the fourth transport we can no longer afford.”
At that point he’d stirred his drink, winked at Arras, and then told Khom, “Time to stopp planning ops for the Grey Stalkers, and start thinking about making war on the cheap.”
She was beginning to understand why Khomarys hated him.
So they revised the plan: one assault shuttle in a dead drop five klicks out from Hill 49, overloaded with recon and a fire-support team. Use the fuel saved by grounding the shuttle rather than orbiting it again to buy a fourth unit of orbital fire. Lay that in as Recon rushed Hill 49 and the transports broke atmosphere for what would hopefully be a cold insertion of the remainder of the company.
“Creative,” Verk had muttered. “Suicidal, but creative.”
Elbers had not been so polite.
“Ka-fawking insanity,” he’d pronounced, and sent them back to the sim-tank in Khom’s apartment with the injunction, “Remember what an assault shuttle’s supposed to be useful for, Major Khomarys.”
Three iterations later, the assault shuttle landed hot and (optimistically) unannounced right on Hill 49, simultaneous with a firefall on the Oyos complex and a cold insert of the company no more than two klicks out.
“There’s a chance they’ll blow us all back to Geffney,” Khom said darkly. “Especially the assault shuttle. It’s only going to take one Gonk awake at its screens.”
At that point, Klatta Lor—whose presence had become tacitly accepted at joint planning sessions—hooted, “Major Khom, dead right or right dead, no matter. We fix, eh? Trouble groundstompers, you know ka-shit ‘bout artillery.”
Elbers had never directly spoken to the Xinq lieutenant. One of the most persistent arguments that he and Arras had never had involved using Xinq officers. Yet when no one else responded, his curiosity had overcome his distaste, and he asked, “Just what don’t we know about artillery? I was calling in shrap before you got your mind.”
Undaunted, Klatta Lor stretched out a tinker and tapped the holo table displaying the Oyos complex, changing the mode from topographic to schematic.
“Boss,” she hooted, “You call shrap down on moving targets in the bush. So you think firefall, think big loads high-ex droppin’ out clouds, all once at a time. How old these schematics?”
“Best we could get—maybe three, five months,” said Khom grudgingly.
Klatta Lor waved a grappler dismissively.
“Gonk time, then, they up date. Probably same-same their army uses. Anybody figure tubeheads seriously move fire control center?” When no one answered, the Xinq highlighted the control center in red and the nine fire-points with upper-atmospheric capability in green. “Question two? You stompers think Gonks keepin’ fire-points garrisoned all day all night, eh?”
Everyone around the table knew the answer to that one. Since the fire control center would have all nine fire-points slaved on automatic, slack units rarely manned them on a full-time basis.
“Major Verk, you buy standard-load shrap with that large, yah?”
The logistics officer nodded warily.
“Standard shrap be sixty high-ex bars, four target lighters, and—everybody always forget last part—four deadbolts.” Deadbolts were anti-armor rounds: no explosive charge, just solid neutronium delivered for a purely kinetic punch. Against soft targets, they tended only to leave a twenty-centimeter circular hole as they punched through the ground; from the deadbolt’s perspective anything short of ceramic or polarized armor amounted to wind resistance. They had little applicability in the kinds of wars that the XRAF normally fought, since insurgents could rarely afford cybernetic armor. Deadbolts nonetheless remained in standard shrap loads because the XRAF—like other combatants in the reaches—bought rather than manufactured their shrap.
“What happen, boss, I time-on-target four deadbolts into Gonk fire control?” Klatta Lor spread both tinkers and grapplers expressively, hooted the Xinq equivalent of laughter. “Building still there, most like, when we take over, but no Frec order fire out through that sys.”
Elbers and Khom made a great show of studying the map, while Arras and Verk tried—with modest success—to hide their smiles at two humans forced to take tactical lessons from tXinq neither man had wanted to commission in the first place.
* * *
“Sergeant Reyd, your squad looks good except for that problem with the sight on Nesley Vedka’s weapon.”
“Sub-Major!” responded the NCO with a sharp-toothed grin. “We’ll have it up before this tub hits air.”
“Carry on.”
Conducting Recon’s final equipment check, Arras flashed back to Verk’s characterization of the operation as “war on the cheap.” She’d first noticed that Sergeant Reyd wore floatie boots, designed for jumping and climbing, not walking. A glance at Recruit Hoella’s footgear and confirmed her suspicions: standard-issue field boots, not the “bush hoofers” that Recon outfits prized. Xinqs did not wear boots on their splayed, three-toed feet, but their harnesses told a similar tale. Two carried surplus striker rigs, another sported a non-regulation paramilitary variant, and only Gully Foy had actually togged out in a real Recon combat harness, albeit festooned with decidedly non-reg knives and grey-green fortune tassels.
Arras touched her command gauntlet abstractedly, which led to another disquieting thought. Company officers all carried fully functional, quantum-encrypted gloves with mastoid-implant back-ups. Unfortunately, equipment of similar quality hadn’t been in the budget for the NCOs, while line troops had been stuck with single-channel ear-patches manufactured to police rather than military standards.
Khom had insisted on standardized weapons. The troops all carried Stadthelder Gauss Rifles, but the surplus lot that Verk had picked up was composed of Mark IIs, not the Mark IVs carried by the regular service. According to the manufacturer’s literature the difference was purely cosmetic; seasoned strikers knew better. The Mark II’s plasteel grip heated up uncomfortably when fired on full pulse for more than ten seconds, unlike its successor’s ceramics. Worse, the Mark II power sockets had been so poorly located that changing power packs required bracing the rifle’s stock against the ground. Thinking of power packs reminded Arras that instead of the normal five-pack individual load, she was dropping onto Hill 49 with just three packs in each harness.
For heavy weapons support, XRAF striker companies normally deployed with six tripod-mounted Luitingh light rail guns and half that number of Accurans FADE (Flechette Area-Denial) systems. Khom had cut down to four rail guns and eliminated the FADEs, replacing them with a cheaper load-out of expendable shaped-charge fragmentation mines. None of these substitutions were critical, Khom and Elbers had both argued, because the company would still be hitting and holding Oyos with weapons superior to anything Nilly Nilly’s Gonks carried.
All of which sounded better in a planning meeting than it did on a foul-smelling assault shuttle dropping into the fetid Gonkaina atmosphere.
Take it all together, Arras realized—organizational improvisations, lack of training time, and second-rate weapons package—and what you had was the difference between elites like the Grey Stalkers and a private security force with a leavening of veterans.
Or mercenaries.
When the Colonel had suggested that the Reach’s new Xinq rulers would eventually discover the need for private military outfits to perform certain deniable missions, Arras had balked at the term “mercenary.” Her reticence had arisen from the XRAF’s unofficial motto: “We die for the Reach.” She hadn’t realized just how effective her indoctrination had been. Even the cynical Arras ak Winsen had told herself that she assassinated Xinq political leaders for patriotism rather than profit.
What motto would NRC put on its stationary, she wondered: “We die for survivor benefits?”
* * *
“I say again, Vendetta Four-aleph on objective. No opposition, no casualties. You are clear to execute.”
Arras crouched on the military crest of Hill 49, overlooking the Oyos lattice-field complex. There had been a Gonk observation post here once—the ration-wrapper trash made that clear—but Gully Foy estimated that no one had occupied the position in several weeks. If the Gonks that Nilly Nilly had left to hold the fields were that slack, then the main assault should roll right over them. On the other hands, Arras reflected, glancing over her shoulder at the assault transport still steaming in the dirt, there went nearly a million Cert in profits for an unnecessary hot drop.
Shrugging off that thought, she returned her attention to the complex, snapping down a Graf VII monocular lens in front of her right eye. The Oyos complex consisted of nine flat, round structures—the extraction nodes—and several administrative or storage buildings. The nodes were laid out four and five in parallel lines on either edge of a shuttle landing strip. A berm ran along the perimeter behind the nodes on the north side of the strip to channel away the run-off from the creek bordering the complex. The remainder of the installation, some six hectares, was fenced in and sprinkled with pre-fab fighting positions. Fields of fire (possibly interlocking but with Xinqs you never knew) had been cleared several hundred meters out, yet the persistent red-ocher Zekainian scrub-bushes had been allowed to grow back, in places nearly to man-height.
“The is Vendetta Prime-beta”—Elbers’s commo tech—“acknowledging. Vendetta Prime has go time for six mikes less thirty, how copy?”
“Good copy, Prime-beta. Suggest Vendetta Fire execute Option Three. Say again, Option Three.”
Examining the compound, even with infrared overlay Arras could detect no purposeful movement. Unbelievably, the sonic boom of an assault shuttle plummeting onto Hill 49, just three klicks out, had apparently gone unnoticed. She shook her head. The turgid Gonkainan atmosphere muffled sound—everyone knew that—but it beggared belief that no one at Oyos had been alerted. Still, that seemed to be the case, confirmed by Gully Foy and Reyd. Thus she had recommended that keeping the initial firefall of orbital shrap on standby and attempting a hasty penetration of the defenses.
Not only did it appear such might be the most efficient tactic, but Arras also admitted that economy played a role in her decision. Before insertion the assault shuttle had expelled three—and only three—loads of fire support into orbit. Providing they could overrun the defenders without utilizing any more than the four deadbolts to neutralize the fire control center, it would be worth a few casualties to keep those loads in reserve against Nilly Nilly’s inevitable counterattack. If for some reason the Gonks proved willing to leave the mercenaries in control of the complex until their relief arrived, each load of shrap recovered for future operations represented two million Cert of recouped expenses.
“Four-aleph, Prime-beta. Copy last. Stand by for Prime-aleph.”
The primary tactical quirk involved in capturing or defending lattice fields was that extraction nodes were both hideously expensive and frightfully vulnerable. The circular structures visible about ground represented merely the caps to the extraction penetrators that sucked up the asymmetrical saline crystals for processing into power cells. Heavy weapons—including errant bars of high-explosive shrap—could destroy them beyond repair, which was why neither the Frecs nor the Gonks were willing to toss around indiscriminate fire at Oyos. If Nilly Nilly shattered the extraction nodes he had no way to rebuild them, and would derive no value from occupying the complex. Yoo-hoo Tankey’s troops could not afford casual damage either, or outfits like Tegnarian Lattice wouldn’t be willing to reinvest. NRC’s contract specified both penalties and bonuses based on the damage or lack thereof done to the extraction nodes. Keep at least seven intact and NRC pulled in a ten-million Cert bonus. Lose more than four and it would cost Arras and Khom the same amount.
Elbers therefore knew that his Recon Commander’s recommendation could well be colored by her contractor’s eye on the profits, making it no surprise that he intended to speak with her before modifying the assault plan.
“This is Prime. Do you know what the ka-fawk you’re talking about? If I send this company in on your say-so and we get reamed, I’ll personally call down that shrap on your head.”
So much for comm procedures; Elbers had always made his own rules.
So did Arras ak Winsen.
“Prime, there is negative movement on the target. I don’t have a single IR signature on the berm, and our sweeps don’t pull up any electronics there either. I think you can bounce the berm and take the complex in a rush.”
Sergeant Reyd tapped her on the shoulder. Looking back, she noticed that the two heavy rail guns from the shuttle had been dismounted and repositioned in hastily excavated firing points. Gully Foy squatted behind one of them, grapplers and tinkers a blur as he attached a conversion sight-and-firing apparatus above the feeder links.
“Prime, we’ve got both RGs from the shuttle ready to provide direct fire support from here. If there really are Gonks on that berm, we’ll keep their heads down for you. It’s your call.”
“I know it’s my call, Four. That’s what I’m getting paid for. All right, we’ll do it your way. We’re down and will hit the berm in two mikes plus twenty. I want exactly one mike of covering fire on the berm when I give you the hack. When the linkages cool, you shift it into the middle of the complex and kill anything that moves.”
“Good copy, Prime. Waiting for your hack.”
Gesturing Reyd back toward the second rail gun, Arras could not keep from wondering exactly what function Elbers was performing that Khom could not have executed equally well, leaving NRC with another half million Cert in the bank, or else supported by some additional shrap.
Again pushing such thoughts away, she resumed her scan of the complex. In the pre-dawn blush of the orange K-5 star in the Gonkaina sky, she picked up the first signs of movement. Two figures scurried in the direction of the fire control building, and a half dozen Xinqs exited what appeared to be a barracks, carrying individual weapons. Although looking decidedly unsure about what to do with them.
Call it in? No, Arras had made her recommendation.
Instead, she touched the stud on her gauntlet for the NCO push and modified her firing instructions. “Reyd,” she barked. “Throw some rounds right into the center of the complex before you spray the berm. Gully Foy, you walk it down north to south.”
“Sub-Major!”
“Yaw, boss!”
The advantage of rail guns over shrap in this particular instance was that the unjacketed slugs they fired at 6,000 rounds per minute would splatter off extraction nodes without doing any damage, even as they turned anything organic into so much mush.
As her mon-oc superimposed ID symbols for First and Third Platoons over the IR blotches approaching the berm, the voice of Elbers’s comm tech crackled, “Vendetta Four, Hack minus five! Hack minus five! Fire at will on Hack!”
“Copy that, Prime.”
She counted off the seconds by opening and closing her fist, then shouted, “Fire! Fire! Fire!”
The rail guns cut loose with a shriek so penetrating that Arras couldn’t hear the impacts of Klatta Lor’s mini-mortar rounds against the berm. Even that noise, however, could not drown out the high-pitched whistle and subsequent sonic crash as four deadbolts dropped from orbit too quickly to be seen as other than a subliminal blur to slag the Gonk fire control center.
She dropped to one knee to brace herself, ignoring the assault in order to focus on the interior of the complex. Now dozens of Xinqs were pouring out of the buildings. Reyd’s initial fire toppled a few, which made the rest hesitate; that wouldn’t last once the officers realized no follow-up fire was being directed at them.
The biggest problem for Gonks right now would be figuring out the location of the main attack. From Hill 49 everything looked obvious, but inside the compound it would be next to impossible to determine the direction of incoming fire. Moreover, the Xinq time-sense would be working against them. Had the attack lasted seconds or minutes? She had not seen any Terrans on ground, and she doubted that there were any jacked Gonks at Oyos, so even the best Xinq commander should have been confused for a few critical minutes. The absence of an occupied outpost on Hill 49 suggested that Oyos was not commanded by one of Nilly Nilly’s best officers.
The rail guns fell silent. Arras would have liked to have swung back for suppressive fire on the Gonks beginning to organize inside the complex, but shuttle RGs depended on air flow from flight to cool the linkages. Lacking the heat-dissipating grid of infantry-support weapons, they could only be fired from stationary positions for roughly a minute before overheating. She’d have to give the Gonks below at least two minutes of respite before opening up again.
A yellow indicator on her gauntlet blinked, and the entire glove pulsed. Yellow meant one of her troops bypassing the sergeants for direct contact; the vibration signaled an emergency message.
“Four-aleph, go,” she said, unable to keep the note of “This better be good” out of her response.
The answering voice belonged to Private Hoella, left at the rear of the shuttle facing away from the action, in the least critical position along Recon’s hasty perimeter.
“Four-aleph, this is, oh shit, this is Four-two-I forgot my number. Shit. Major, we’ve got a big problem!”
“Calm down, Hoella, and report or get off my comm.”
Private Hoella reply disappeared in the roar of the first Gonk mortar rounds slamming into Hill 49.
* * *
Something—a rock or a flying clod of root-bound red dirt, not a shell fragment or Arras would not have survived the blow—struck her beneath the left shoulder blade and sent her careening into the bole of a buri-neshi tree. Her undergarment stiffened on impact, sparing Arras any penetration wounds, but the sheer kinetic force knocked her senseless for a minute and would leave her entire body—assuming she survived long enough—covered with bruises and contusions.
As her head cleared, Arras realized in the ringing silence that she had been shock-deafened. Instinctively, she slapped the general push on her gauntlet for a situation report from her NCOs. Her mastoid implant butted directly against the cochlear bones of her ear; even if the eardrum had been shattered she should still be able receive transmissions through it.
Nothing.
She examined the ceramic composite panel embedded in the wrist-plate of her armor-weave glove. Not a single tell-tale glowed. Even though command-quality gauntlets were supposed to deflect small arms fire and keep functioning, this one had picked the worst of all possible moments to fail. She slapped a contact on her neck to transfer signals directly into her implant, and was rewarded with weak but clear sounds of her Sergeants shouting orders.
“Daffa Kul! Your team covers ninety to one-eighty! He’s down, don’t stop for him, just get the rest of them in position!”
“Hoo-ella, get mon-oc up, slave to me! Zet, zet, Private! Gully Foy got no damn day wait see who shooting at him!”
Good news, Arras thought abstractedly, Reyd and Gully Foy are on their feet and know their jobs.
Bad news: Elbers may be right about me not knowing my mine, and I can’t even tell him that. Her implant had a range of no more than fifty to sixty meters. The two NCOs still had gauntlets, and could probably hear transmissions from the company, but almost certainly lacked the strength to send anything back.
Whose idea had it been to drop Recon on a hill with only one comm system capable of talking to anybody else?
Probably mine, Arras thought as she struggled to her feet, fighting to focus her vision and not to vomit.
“Reyd! Maybe two-three company Gonks head our way. Hoo-ella, turn head right, swing back slow. Slow! Ka-damn it! Klick out, little more, copy?”
“Copy! I got people on ninety to about two-seventy, nothing shows on the flanks. You got anybody free to get back in the shuttle for our ordnance?”
“Mazir and Ully Nood on it now!”
Wait one: the assault shuttle. The pilot could undoubtedly talk to the company, probably already was. She pivoted, got her bearings, and found the outline of the battered, green vehicle. Ignoring the possibility that additional incoming mortar rounds might take her out (they either would or would not, nothing she could do about it) and not wasting any time trying to communicate with Gully Foy and Reyd (they were already working a plan to defend the hilltop based on more tactical experience than she could pretend to), Arras started toward the shuttle.
The ground shook. Reflexively, she nearly threw herself down to avoid shrapnel before she realized that this was a different phenomenon. Clouds of dust and steam billowed out from the skirts of the assault shuttle; the pilot had clearly decided that lifting off was the better part of valor. For a second the image of the shuttle rising into the air and strafing the Gonks flashed through her mind, before Arras recalled that both rail guns were lying on the ground, ten meters away.
She started running.
Not only was that cowardly bastard about to desert her platoon and cut off her communications with the company, he was taking their only hope of holding the hill with him. Overriding Elbers’s objections, Khom had assigned a tripod-mounted Luitingh and six packets of frags to Recon, the only weapons heavier than pulse rifles that her two squads possessed. Hustling to get the rail guns down to support the assault on the complex, Arras had left them onboard when Hill 49 had turned out to be unoccupied.
The shuttle was an aging Vector-class Mark 7, only ten meters long, six wide, and capable of carrying forty troops crammed in crotch to butt. Designed decades ago as a stealth insertion vehicle, it merited assault status only in its ability to shrug off small arms fire and to land or take off without a strip. After a hard smack-down atop Hill 49, the ground-effect fans which lifted the vehicle the necessary three meters into the air for the main engines to fire would have become clogged with debris. Blowing them free required about three minutes, and the pilot had obviously been at the task for more than half that.
Arras figured that she had under ten seconds to reach the shuttle before the blow-out made it suicidal to approach any closer than five meters. She wasn’t going to make it.
Then she saw one Terran and one Xinq bounding in from the side, vaulting onto the vehicle’s skirts, and twisting the emergency releases of the port bay doors. Mazir and Ully Nood, Arras realized: told off to retrieve the ordnance. Mazir disappeared through the door as she approached the shuttle. She screamed for Ully Nood, who turned and hooted an acknowledgement she still could not hear. Six quick steps covered the ground, and she leaped toward the blower skirt. Two hands—one grappler and one tinker—caught her left arm. For an instant Arras swung awkwardly, threatening to fall back, then her right hand seized the guttering above the skirt and she pulled herself up.
Mazir had his Stadthelder screwed into the ear of the overweight pilot, whose brown jump carried the logo of Contract Transport of Striker’s Claim.
“I’ll take you with me!” the pilot screamed as Arras entered the cabin. “But we’ve got to lift now.” She pushed Mazir aside and backhanded him with the hard plate of her now-useless gauntlet.
“Help your partner with the ordnance,” Arras ordered while reaching across the console for the comm feed.
“Vendetta Prime, this is Four-aleph. Acknowledge.”
A few seconds passed. Mazir bay began tossing satchels toward the Xinq balancing in the hatch. The pilot whimpered and kept touching his bleeding lip. Arras sipped tasteless, warm water from the nipple connected to her reservoir.
“Four-aleph, this is Vendetta Tac. What’s your situation?”
Vendetta Tac was Khom. She felt a visceral surge of relief.
“Tac, we’re taking mortar fire from what appears to be a couple companies of Gonks approaching our position from the southwest. The rail guns are non-op for defensive purposes, and the shuttle pilot feels the need to get back into the sky, with or without them. Oh, and my ka-damn gauntlet’s fried, so I can only talk to you through his board. That’s been my morning. Yours?”
“Four, this is Tac. Complex secure except for some Gonks holed up in one of the admin structures. The garrison appears to have contained no more than seventy-five troops, not the regiment we’d expected, but the whole place is mined. We lost three casualties before they started checking for tripwires. No mining personnel on site at all; the whole set-up stinks of a trap. Prime’s on the perimeter; wait one, I’ve got him. Patching in.”
“Four, this is Prime. Later you can explain how Recon misses a short battalion up its ass. Right now I need to know if you can hold that hill.”
“Prime, I put the odds at fifty-fifty, providing you release me one load of shrap.”
“Negative on the shrap, Four. With your comm fouled up there’s no way to call it in accurately, and we haven’t got it to waste. Besides, I can guarantee that yours aren’t the only Gonks heading our way. The Ardooleys won’t arrive for another six hours, and we’re going to need every bar we’ve got.”
Before she could reply, Khom said, “Prime, we’ve got to do something. The Gonks get that hill and put up rail guns or a gauss rifle, we can’t hold the complex.”
“Tac, if the Gonks take the hill, then we’ll use the shrap to smash anything that moves. The hill itself we can hit from here, but we don’t have line of sight to Four’s attackers. She’s going to have to hold on by her ka-damn toenails. I told you it was a mistake to put an amateur in command of Recon.”
Arras said nothing. Elbers might not be tactful, but he was right on all counts. Platoons—especially Recon platoons—were expendable, even if a contractor turned up in the resulting pile of corpses. Worse, she’d thus far done nothing to justify a better opinion of her capabilities. She took a deep breath, felt her pulse racing, and aimed for the calm necessary to place a target in the crosshairs at 400 meters on a windy day.
“I copy, Prime. We’ll hold the hill until the Ardooleys arrive, but then you and I are going to have one long, private conversation.”
The circuit went dead. Turning to the pilot, she said, “You finish blowing out the chambers. Lift before I give the order, I’ll kill you myself.”
All right, she thought. I don’t know enough about tactics to get us out of this situation, so I’ll have to do it my way.
End of Part Three
War on the Cheap
An Original Science Fiction Story by
Steven H. Newton
(c)2008; all rights reserved.
Part Three of Four
Khom’s original assault plan had envisioned a three-phase atmospheric insertion of the striker company via two assault shuttles. Recon, two squads from one of the line platoons, and a mini-battery of mortars would make the first drop, seizing Hill 49, which held a commanding overview of the Oyos complex. One and one-half line platoons and the remainder of Klatta Lor’s support platoon would cycle in two hours later, as Recon probed the Gonks’ automated defenses. Within six hours the last platoon of line puppies would drop in, and thirty minutes later—timed to coincide with a firefall of orbital shrap—the company would overrun the garrison.
They never got to find out Elbers’ opinion of the plan, because Verk vetoed it on logistical grounds before anyone else ever saw it.
“I know forty large Cert sounds like a lot of money to you people,” he said. “But in my world that’s a kiss and a promise. With your budget, I can get your troops in orbit in four civilian zPL transports that will probably—I emphasize probably—hold atmosphere long enough to make the jump between systems. I can put up two, maybe three firefalls of shrap, and I can lease one very small assault shuttle with enough fuel for a single round-trip from orbit. You want two assault shuttles, fine. Just eliminate your artillery support. You want enough fuel for two shuttles to make three drops each? I can do that, so long as you plan on leaving two platoons at home to account for the fourth transport we can no longer afford.”
At that point he’d stirred his drink, winked at Arras, and then told Khom, “Time to stopp planning ops for the Grey Stalkers, and start thinking about making war on the cheap.”
She was beginning to understand why Khomarys hated him.
So they revised the plan: one assault shuttle in a dead drop five klicks out from Hill 49, overloaded with recon and a fire-support team. Use the fuel saved by grounding the shuttle rather than orbiting it again to buy a fourth unit of orbital fire. Lay that in as Recon rushed Hill 49 and the transports broke atmosphere for what would hopefully be a cold insertion of the remainder of the company.
“Creative,” Verk had muttered. “Suicidal, but creative.”
Elbers had not been so polite.
“Ka-fawking insanity,” he’d pronounced, and sent them back to the sim-tank in Khom’s apartment with the injunction, “Remember what an assault shuttle’s supposed to be useful for, Major Khomarys.”
Three iterations later, the assault shuttle landed hot and (optimistically) unannounced right on Hill 49, simultaneous with a firefall on the Oyos complex and a cold insert of the company no more than two klicks out.
“There’s a chance they’ll blow us all back to Geffney,” Khom said darkly. “Especially the assault shuttle. It’s only going to take one Gonk awake at its screens.”
At that point, Klatta Lor—whose presence had become tacitly accepted at joint planning sessions—hooted, “Major Khom, dead right or right dead, no matter. We fix, eh? Trouble groundstompers, you know ka-shit ‘bout artillery.”
Elbers had never directly spoken to the Xinq lieutenant. One of the most persistent arguments that he and Arras had never had involved using Xinq officers. Yet when no one else responded, his curiosity had overcome his distaste, and he asked, “Just what don’t we know about artillery? I was calling in shrap before you got your mind.”
Undaunted, Klatta Lor stretched out a tinker and tapped the holo table displaying the Oyos complex, changing the mode from topographic to schematic.
“Boss,” she hooted, “You call shrap down on moving targets in the bush. So you think firefall, think big loads high-ex droppin’ out clouds, all once at a time. How old these schematics?”
“Best we could get—maybe three, five months,” said Khom grudgingly.
Klatta Lor waved a grappler dismissively.
“Gonk time, then, they up date. Probably same-same their army uses. Anybody figure tubeheads seriously move fire control center?” When no one answered, the Xinq highlighted the control center in red and the nine fire-points with upper-atmospheric capability in green. “Question two? You stompers think Gonks keepin’ fire-points garrisoned all day all night, eh?”
Everyone around the table knew the answer to that one. Since the fire control center would have all nine fire-points slaved on automatic, slack units rarely manned them on a full-time basis.
“Major Verk, you buy standard-load shrap with that large, yah?”
The logistics officer nodded warily.
“Standard shrap be sixty high-ex bars, four target lighters, and—everybody always forget last part—four deadbolts.” Deadbolts were anti-armor rounds: no explosive charge, just solid neutronium delivered for a purely kinetic punch. Against soft targets, they tended only to leave a twenty-centimeter circular hole as they punched through the ground; from the deadbolt’s perspective anything short of ceramic or polarized armor amounted to wind resistance. They had little applicability in the kinds of wars that the XRAF normally fought, since insurgents could rarely afford cybernetic armor. Deadbolts nonetheless remained in standard shrap loads because the XRAF—like other combatants in the reaches—bought rather than manufactured their shrap.
“What happen, boss, I time-on-target four deadbolts into Gonk fire control?” Klatta Lor spread both tinkers and grapplers expressively, hooted the Xinq equivalent of laughter. “Building still there, most like, when we take over, but no Frec order fire out through that sys.”
Elbers and Khom made a great show of studying the map, while Arras and Verk tried—with modest success—to hide their smiles at two humans forced to take tactical lessons from tXinq neither man had wanted to commission in the first place.
* * *
“Sergeant Reyd, your squad looks good except for that problem with the sight on Nesley Vedka’s weapon.”
“Sub-Major!” responded the NCO with a sharp-toothed grin. “We’ll have it up before this tub hits air.”
“Carry on.”
Conducting Recon’s final equipment check, Arras flashed back to Verk’s characterization of the operation as “war on the cheap.” She’d first noticed that Sergeant Reyd wore floatie boots, designed for jumping and climbing, not walking. A glance at Recruit Hoella’s footgear and confirmed her suspicions: standard-issue field boots, not the “bush hoofers” that Recon outfits prized. Xinqs did not wear boots on their splayed, three-toed feet, but their harnesses told a similar tale. Two carried surplus striker rigs, another sported a non-regulation paramilitary variant, and only Gully Foy had actually togged out in a real Recon combat harness, albeit festooned with decidedly non-reg knives and grey-green fortune tassels.
Arras touched her command gauntlet abstractedly, which led to another disquieting thought. Company officers all carried fully functional, quantum-encrypted gloves with mastoid-implant back-ups. Unfortunately, equipment of similar quality hadn’t been in the budget for the NCOs, while line troops had been stuck with single-channel ear-patches manufactured to police rather than military standards.
Khom had insisted on standardized weapons. The troops all carried Stadthelder Gauss Rifles, but the surplus lot that Verk had picked up was composed of Mark IIs, not the Mark IVs carried by the regular service. According to the manufacturer’s literature the difference was purely cosmetic; seasoned strikers knew better. The Mark II’s plasteel grip heated up uncomfortably when fired on full pulse for more than ten seconds, unlike its successor’s ceramics. Worse, the Mark II power sockets had been so poorly located that changing power packs required bracing the rifle’s stock against the ground. Thinking of power packs reminded Arras that instead of the normal five-pack individual load, she was dropping onto Hill 49 with just three packs in each harness.
For heavy weapons support, XRAF striker companies normally deployed with six tripod-mounted Luitingh light rail guns and half that number of Accurans FADE (Flechette Area-Denial) systems. Khom had cut down to four rail guns and eliminated the FADEs, replacing them with a cheaper load-out of expendable shaped-charge fragmentation mines. None of these substitutions were critical, Khom and Elbers had both argued, because the company would still be hitting and holding Oyos with weapons superior to anything Nilly Nilly’s Gonks carried.
All of which sounded better in a planning meeting than it did on a foul-smelling assault shuttle dropping into the fetid Gonkaina atmosphere.
Take it all together, Arras realized—organizational improvisations, lack of training time, and second-rate weapons package—and what you had was the difference between elites like the Grey Stalkers and a private security force with a leavening of veterans.
Or mercenaries.
When the Colonel had suggested that the Reach’s new Xinq rulers would eventually discover the need for private military outfits to perform certain deniable missions, Arras had balked at the term “mercenary.” Her reticence had arisen from the XRAF’s unofficial motto: “We die for the Reach.” She hadn’t realized just how effective her indoctrination had been. Even the cynical Arras ak Winsen had told herself that she assassinated Xinq political leaders for patriotism rather than profit.
What motto would NRC put on its stationary, she wondered: “We die for survivor benefits?”
* * *
“I say again, Vendetta Four-aleph on objective. No opposition, no casualties. You are clear to execute.”
Arras crouched on the military crest of Hill 49, overlooking the Oyos lattice-field complex. There had been a Gonk observation post here once—the ration-wrapper trash made that clear—but Gully Foy estimated that no one had occupied the position in several weeks. If the Gonks that Nilly Nilly had left to hold the fields were that slack, then the main assault should roll right over them. On the other hands, Arras reflected, glancing over her shoulder at the assault transport still steaming in the dirt, there went nearly a million Cert in profits for an unnecessary hot drop.
Shrugging off that thought, she returned her attention to the complex, snapping down a Graf VII monocular lens in front of her right eye. The Oyos complex consisted of nine flat, round structures—the extraction nodes—and several administrative or storage buildings. The nodes were laid out four and five in parallel lines on either edge of a shuttle landing strip. A berm ran along the perimeter behind the nodes on the north side of the strip to channel away the run-off from the creek bordering the complex. The remainder of the installation, some six hectares, was fenced in and sprinkled with pre-fab fighting positions. Fields of fire (possibly interlocking but with Xinqs you never knew) had been cleared several hundred meters out, yet the persistent red-ocher Zekainian scrub-bushes had been allowed to grow back, in places nearly to man-height.
“The is Vendetta Prime-beta”—Elbers’s commo tech—“acknowledging. Vendetta Prime has go time for six mikes less thirty, how copy?”
“Good copy, Prime-beta. Suggest Vendetta Fire execute Option Three. Say again, Option Three.”
Examining the compound, even with infrared overlay Arras could detect no purposeful movement. Unbelievably, the sonic boom of an assault shuttle plummeting onto Hill 49, just three klicks out, had apparently gone unnoticed. She shook her head. The turgid Gonkainan atmosphere muffled sound—everyone knew that—but it beggared belief that no one at Oyos had been alerted. Still, that seemed to be the case, confirmed by Gully Foy and Reyd. Thus she had recommended that keeping the initial firefall of orbital shrap on standby and attempting a hasty penetration of the defenses.
Not only did it appear such might be the most efficient tactic, but Arras also admitted that economy played a role in her decision. Before insertion the assault shuttle had expelled three—and only three—loads of fire support into orbit. Providing they could overrun the defenders without utilizing any more than the four deadbolts to neutralize the fire control center, it would be worth a few casualties to keep those loads in reserve against Nilly Nilly’s inevitable counterattack. If for some reason the Gonks proved willing to leave the mercenaries in control of the complex until their relief arrived, each load of shrap recovered for future operations represented two million Cert of recouped expenses.
“Four-aleph, Prime-beta. Copy last. Stand by for Prime-aleph.”
The primary tactical quirk involved in capturing or defending lattice fields was that extraction nodes were both hideously expensive and frightfully vulnerable. The circular structures visible about ground represented merely the caps to the extraction penetrators that sucked up the asymmetrical saline crystals for processing into power cells. Heavy weapons—including errant bars of high-explosive shrap—could destroy them beyond repair, which was why neither the Frecs nor the Gonks were willing to toss around indiscriminate fire at Oyos. If Nilly Nilly shattered the extraction nodes he had no way to rebuild them, and would derive no value from occupying the complex. Yoo-hoo Tankey’s troops could not afford casual damage either, or outfits like Tegnarian Lattice wouldn’t be willing to reinvest. NRC’s contract specified both penalties and bonuses based on the damage or lack thereof done to the extraction nodes. Keep at least seven intact and NRC pulled in a ten-million Cert bonus. Lose more than four and it would cost Arras and Khom the same amount.
Elbers therefore knew that his Recon Commander’s recommendation could well be colored by her contractor’s eye on the profits, making it no surprise that he intended to speak with her before modifying the assault plan.
“This is Prime. Do you know what the ka-fawk you’re talking about? If I send this company in on your say-so and we get reamed, I’ll personally call down that shrap on your head.”
So much for comm procedures; Elbers had always made his own rules.
So did Arras ak Winsen.
“Prime, there is negative movement on the target. I don’t have a single IR signature on the berm, and our sweeps don’t pull up any electronics there either. I think you can bounce the berm and take the complex in a rush.”
Sergeant Reyd tapped her on the shoulder. Looking back, she noticed that the two heavy rail guns from the shuttle had been dismounted and repositioned in hastily excavated firing points. Gully Foy squatted behind one of them, grapplers and tinkers a blur as he attached a conversion sight-and-firing apparatus above the feeder links.
“Prime, we’ve got both RGs from the shuttle ready to provide direct fire support from here. If there really are Gonks on that berm, we’ll keep their heads down for you. It’s your call.”
“I know it’s my call, Four. That’s what I’m getting paid for. All right, we’ll do it your way. We’re down and will hit the berm in two mikes plus twenty. I want exactly one mike of covering fire on the berm when I give you the hack. When the linkages cool, you shift it into the middle of the complex and kill anything that moves.”
“Good copy, Prime. Waiting for your hack.”
Gesturing Reyd back toward the second rail gun, Arras could not keep from wondering exactly what function Elbers was performing that Khom could not have executed equally well, leaving NRC with another half million Cert in the bank, or else supported by some additional shrap.
Again pushing such thoughts away, she resumed her scan of the complex. In the pre-dawn blush of the orange K-5 star in the Gonkaina sky, she picked up the first signs of movement. Two figures scurried in the direction of the fire control building, and a half dozen Xinqs exited what appeared to be a barracks, carrying individual weapons. Although looking decidedly unsure about what to do with them.
Call it in? No, Arras had made her recommendation.
Instead, she touched the stud on her gauntlet for the NCO push and modified her firing instructions. “Reyd,” she barked. “Throw some rounds right into the center of the complex before you spray the berm. Gully Foy, you walk it down north to south.”
“Sub-Major!”
“Yaw, boss!”
The advantage of rail guns over shrap in this particular instance was that the unjacketed slugs they fired at 6,000 rounds per minute would splatter off extraction nodes without doing any damage, even as they turned anything organic into so much mush.
As her mon-oc superimposed ID symbols for First and Third Platoons over the IR blotches approaching the berm, the voice of Elbers’s comm tech crackled, “Vendetta Four, Hack minus five! Hack minus five! Fire at will on Hack!”
“Copy that, Prime.”
She counted off the seconds by opening and closing her fist, then shouted, “Fire! Fire! Fire!”
The rail guns cut loose with a shriek so penetrating that Arras couldn’t hear the impacts of Klatta Lor’s mini-mortar rounds against the berm. Even that noise, however, could not drown out the high-pitched whistle and subsequent sonic crash as four deadbolts dropped from orbit too quickly to be seen as other than a subliminal blur to slag the Gonk fire control center.
She dropped to one knee to brace herself, ignoring the assault in order to focus on the interior of the complex. Now dozens of Xinqs were pouring out of the buildings. Reyd’s initial fire toppled a few, which made the rest hesitate; that wouldn’t last once the officers realized no follow-up fire was being directed at them.
The biggest problem for Gonks right now would be figuring out the location of the main attack. From Hill 49 everything looked obvious, but inside the compound it would be next to impossible to determine the direction of incoming fire. Moreover, the Xinq time-sense would be working against them. Had the attack lasted seconds or minutes? She had not seen any Terrans on ground, and she doubted that there were any jacked Gonks at Oyos, so even the best Xinq commander should have been confused for a few critical minutes. The absence of an occupied outpost on Hill 49 suggested that Oyos was not commanded by one of Nilly Nilly’s best officers.
The rail guns fell silent. Arras would have liked to have swung back for suppressive fire on the Gonks beginning to organize inside the complex, but shuttle RGs depended on air flow from flight to cool the linkages. Lacking the heat-dissipating grid of infantry-support weapons, they could only be fired from stationary positions for roughly a minute before overheating. She’d have to give the Gonks below at least two minutes of respite before opening up again.
A yellow indicator on her gauntlet blinked, and the entire glove pulsed. Yellow meant one of her troops bypassing the sergeants for direct contact; the vibration signaled an emergency message.
“Four-aleph, go,” she said, unable to keep the note of “This better be good” out of her response.
The answering voice belonged to Private Hoella, left at the rear of the shuttle facing away from the action, in the least critical position along Recon’s hasty perimeter.
“Four-aleph, this is, oh shit, this is Four-two-I forgot my number. Shit. Major, we’ve got a big problem!”
“Calm down, Hoella, and report or get off my comm.”
Private Hoella reply disappeared in the roar of the first Gonk mortar rounds slamming into Hill 49.
* * *
Something—a rock or a flying clod of root-bound red dirt, not a shell fragment or Arras would not have survived the blow—struck her beneath the left shoulder blade and sent her careening into the bole of a buri-neshi tree. Her undergarment stiffened on impact, sparing Arras any penetration wounds, but the sheer kinetic force knocked her senseless for a minute and would leave her entire body—assuming she survived long enough—covered with bruises and contusions.
As her head cleared, Arras realized in the ringing silence that she had been shock-deafened. Instinctively, she slapped the general push on her gauntlet for a situation report from her NCOs. Her mastoid implant butted directly against the cochlear bones of her ear; even if the eardrum had been shattered she should still be able receive transmissions through it.
Nothing.
She examined the ceramic composite panel embedded in the wrist-plate of her armor-weave glove. Not a single tell-tale glowed. Even though command-quality gauntlets were supposed to deflect small arms fire and keep functioning, this one had picked the worst of all possible moments to fail. She slapped a contact on her neck to transfer signals directly into her implant, and was rewarded with weak but clear sounds of her Sergeants shouting orders.
“Daffa Kul! Your team covers ninety to one-eighty! He’s down, don’t stop for him, just get the rest of them in position!”
“Hoo-ella, get mon-oc up, slave to me! Zet, zet, Private! Gully Foy got no damn day wait see who shooting at him!”
Good news, Arras thought abstractedly, Reyd and Gully Foy are on their feet and know their jobs.
Bad news: Elbers may be right about me not knowing my mine, and I can’t even tell him that. Her implant had a range of no more than fifty to sixty meters. The two NCOs still had gauntlets, and could probably hear transmissions from the company, but almost certainly lacked the strength to send anything back.
Whose idea had it been to drop Recon on a hill with only one comm system capable of talking to anybody else?
Probably mine, Arras thought as she struggled to her feet, fighting to focus her vision and not to vomit.
“Reyd! Maybe two-three company Gonks head our way. Hoo-ella, turn head right, swing back slow. Slow! Ka-damn it! Klick out, little more, copy?”
“Copy! I got people on ninety to about two-seventy, nothing shows on the flanks. You got anybody free to get back in the shuttle for our ordnance?”
“Mazir and Ully Nood on it now!”
Wait one: the assault shuttle. The pilot could undoubtedly talk to the company, probably already was. She pivoted, got her bearings, and found the outline of the battered, green vehicle. Ignoring the possibility that additional incoming mortar rounds might take her out (they either would or would not, nothing she could do about it) and not wasting any time trying to communicate with Gully Foy and Reyd (they were already working a plan to defend the hilltop based on more tactical experience than she could pretend to), Arras started toward the shuttle.
The ground shook. Reflexively, she nearly threw herself down to avoid shrapnel before she realized that this was a different phenomenon. Clouds of dust and steam billowed out from the skirts of the assault shuttle; the pilot had clearly decided that lifting off was the better part of valor. For a second the image of the shuttle rising into the air and strafing the Gonks flashed through her mind, before Arras recalled that both rail guns were lying on the ground, ten meters away.
She started running.
Not only was that cowardly bastard about to desert her platoon and cut off her communications with the company, he was taking their only hope of holding the hill with him. Overriding Elbers’s objections, Khom had assigned a tripod-mounted Luitingh and six packets of frags to Recon, the only weapons heavier than pulse rifles that her two squads possessed. Hustling to get the rail guns down to support the assault on the complex, Arras had left them onboard when Hill 49 had turned out to be unoccupied.
The shuttle was an aging Vector-class Mark 7, only ten meters long, six wide, and capable of carrying forty troops crammed in crotch to butt. Designed decades ago as a stealth insertion vehicle, it merited assault status only in its ability to shrug off small arms fire and to land or take off without a strip. After a hard smack-down atop Hill 49, the ground-effect fans which lifted the vehicle the necessary three meters into the air for the main engines to fire would have become clogged with debris. Blowing them free required about three minutes, and the pilot had obviously been at the task for more than half that.
Arras figured that she had under ten seconds to reach the shuttle before the blow-out made it suicidal to approach any closer than five meters. She wasn’t going to make it.
Then she saw one Terran and one Xinq bounding in from the side, vaulting onto the vehicle’s skirts, and twisting the emergency releases of the port bay doors. Mazir and Ully Nood, Arras realized: told off to retrieve the ordnance. Mazir disappeared through the door as she approached the shuttle. She screamed for Ully Nood, who turned and hooted an acknowledgement she still could not hear. Six quick steps covered the ground, and she leaped toward the blower skirt. Two hands—one grappler and one tinker—caught her left arm. For an instant Arras swung awkwardly, threatening to fall back, then her right hand seized the guttering above the skirt and she pulled herself up.
Mazir had his Stadthelder screwed into the ear of the overweight pilot, whose brown jump carried the logo of Contract Transport of Striker’s Claim.
“I’ll take you with me!” the pilot screamed as Arras entered the cabin. “But we’ve got to lift now.” She pushed Mazir aside and backhanded him with the hard plate of her now-useless gauntlet.
“Help your partner with the ordnance,” Arras ordered while reaching across the console for the comm feed.
“Vendetta Prime, this is Four-aleph. Acknowledge.”
A few seconds passed. Mazir bay began tossing satchels toward the Xinq balancing in the hatch. The pilot whimpered and kept touching his bleeding lip. Arras sipped tasteless, warm water from the nipple connected to her reservoir.
“Four-aleph, this is Vendetta Tac. What’s your situation?”
Vendetta Tac was Khom. She felt a visceral surge of relief.
“Tac, we’re taking mortar fire from what appears to be a couple companies of Gonks approaching our position from the southwest. The rail guns are non-op for defensive purposes, and the shuttle pilot feels the need to get back into the sky, with or without them. Oh, and my ka-damn gauntlet’s fried, so I can only talk to you through his board. That’s been my morning. Yours?”
“Four, this is Tac. Complex secure except for some Gonks holed up in one of the admin structures. The garrison appears to have contained no more than seventy-five troops, not the regiment we’d expected, but the whole place is mined. We lost three casualties before they started checking for tripwires. No mining personnel on site at all; the whole set-up stinks of a trap. Prime’s on the perimeter; wait one, I’ve got him. Patching in.”
“Four, this is Prime. Later you can explain how Recon misses a short battalion up its ass. Right now I need to know if you can hold that hill.”
“Prime, I put the odds at fifty-fifty, providing you release me one load of shrap.”
“Negative on the shrap, Four. With your comm fouled up there’s no way to call it in accurately, and we haven’t got it to waste. Besides, I can guarantee that yours aren’t the only Gonks heading our way. The Ardooleys won’t arrive for another six hours, and we’re going to need every bar we’ve got.”
Before she could reply, Khom said, “Prime, we’ve got to do something. The Gonks get that hill and put up rail guns or a gauss rifle, we can’t hold the complex.”
“Tac, if the Gonks take the hill, then we’ll use the shrap to smash anything that moves. The hill itself we can hit from here, but we don’t have line of sight to Four’s attackers. She’s going to have to hold on by her ka-damn toenails. I told you it was a mistake to put an amateur in command of Recon.”
Arras said nothing. Elbers might not be tactful, but he was right on all counts. Platoons—especially Recon platoons—were expendable, even if a contractor turned up in the resulting pile of corpses. Worse, she’d thus far done nothing to justify a better opinion of her capabilities. She took a deep breath, felt her pulse racing, and aimed for the calm necessary to place a target in the crosshairs at 400 meters on a windy day.
“I copy, Prime. We’ll hold the hill until the Ardooleys arrive, but then you and I are going to have one long, private conversation.”
The circuit went dead. Turning to the pilot, she said, “You finish blowing out the chambers. Lift before I give the order, I’ll kill you myself.”
All right, she thought. I don’t know enough about tactics to get us out of this situation, so I’ll have to do it my way.
End of Part Three
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