The battle for Commitment planet hw-4 Page 15

  "Take a seat, sir," he said, waving Adrissa into the empty weapon systems operator's seat.

  "What the hell is-"

  "Sir, please. Let's get out of here, then I'll explain."

  "Better be good, Lieutenant, because none of this makes any sense."

  "It will, sir," Michael said. Even though I know full well it won't, he thought with a sense of foreboding at what lay ahead.

  "I hope so."

  Michael scanned the command and threat plots as he dropped into his seat. Nothing had changed: The marines blocking the only road into 5209 reported no enemy activity, and there was no air activity, which surprised Michael. The Gladiator operations plan assumed that the Hammers would launch their planetary defense force fliers even if the Fed landers managed to stay undetected, but for some reason they had not. Well, he decided, it did not matter why the Hammers were so passive. He hoped they stayed that way.

  "Command, Kallewi. Everyone's loaded. We're good to go."

  "Roger. Loadmaster, command. Close her up and get everyone strapped in. We'll be on our way shortly. Command out."

  Ferreira arrived, throwing herself into the tactical officer's seat, spraying rainwater everywhere. "Bloody rain's getting worse," she grumbled. "What a fucking shithole this place is. Sorry, sir," she added, throwing an embarrassed glance at Adrissa.

  "No problem," Adrissa said, her face a picture of utter confusion and uncertainty. Michael sympathized. An hour ago, the woman would have been asleep, dreaming away another long night with nothing but day after empty day to look forward to.

  "Command, sensors. I have a radio intercept, bearing 290. Sensor AI says it is a Hammer ground force datalink."

  "Roger. Janos, you copy that?"

  "Did, sir."

  "Your guys seeing anything?"

  "Nothing yet. Road's clear."

  "Roger. Suggest Widowmaker launches to deal with the Hammers. Get your guys to fall back. Once they've been recovered, we'll disengage and head for Point Lima."

  "Concur. Kallewi, out."

  "Alley Kat, Hell Bent, copy?"

  "Copy."

  Michael wasted no more time. "Launch," he said.

  "Roger, launch." Mother brought the lander's fusion plants online. Raw energy smashed into the ground, and slowly, sluggishly, Widowmaker started to climb, driven skyward by twin pillars of fire shooting down out of its belly thrusters. "Transitioning," Mother said; she pushed the nose down and fed power to the main engines.

  "Tac, you ready?" Michael asked.

  Ferreira shot him a grin of hungry anticipation. "Ready, sir."

  Accelerating fast, Mother steadied the lander to run 50 meters above J-5209's access road, its rain-slicked surface silvery gray in the low-light holovid, Kallewi's marines a cluster of blobs come and gone in a black blur. A quick glance confirmed that the radio intercept was right on the nose, its strength growing fast. "Stand by," he said to Ferreira, "any second… there!"

  "Got it," Ferreira said; she let go with Widowmaker's 30mm cannons, streams of shells tearing into the road before smashing through the Hammer column making its way toward the camp, the mix of trucks and light armor no match for Widowmaker's hypervelocity salvo. They were past, and Mother reefed the lander around hard to port. "One more pass and we're out of here," Michael said. Mother slammed the lander back to starboard so hard that Adrissa grunted out loud. Feeding power into the main engines, the AI tightened the turn, ramming the lander back level the moment the road reappeared. The Hammer column was visible ahead. The rain still sheeting down was painted a lurid red-gold by the flaming wreckage, a searing flare whiting out the holocams when a microfusion plant lost containment.

  A pair of white lines streaked out of the darkness toward Widowmaker. Michael had no time to work out what he was seeing before the lander's defensive lasers slashed the two Goombah short-range, man-portable surface-to-air missiles out of the air only meters before impact, fragments clattering into the armor like steel rain.

  "Someone's got his shit together," he muttered, reminding himself never, ever to take the Hammers for granted, not even their second-tier planetary ground defense forces. Widowmaker's unexpected appearance, a massive shape erupting out of the darkness spewing death, would have unsettled even the best.

  "Widowmaker, Alley Kat. Airborne. Coming onto track for Point Lima."

  "Roger. Mother, disengage," Michael said. "Take station on Alley Kat."

  "Command, sensors. We're getting too much attention from McNair air-defense radars. I think they know we're here."

  "Damn," Michael muttered. Not that he was surprised after the havoc they had unleashed. "Any sign of flier activity?"

  "None, sir, but it can't be long."

  "Agreed. Tac. Decoys ready for the breakaway?"

  "Ready."

  "Command, sensors. I have multiple airborne search radars. Stand by… Kingfisher air-superiority fighters bearing Green 170 inbound from Ojan PGDF base. They're within Alaric launch range. Stand by, more emitters, bearing…"

  Michael's gut twisted; the long-range air-to-air Alaric missiles carried by the Kingfishers were hard to shake off once they had locked on. Given enough of them, they would chop Widowmaker to pieces; even the much tougher and better-armed Alley Kat and Hell Bent might struggle to survive. He cut Carmellini off. "Update the threat plot. There are too many of them to report."

  Michael sat back, his heart pounding and his mouth dry. This was it, the big gamble, the one they had to win for any of them to survive; more than any operation he had been involved in, Gladiator's success depended on the weapon of the weak: deception. The Hammers could be allowed to see only what he wanted them to see: three decoys configured to look like landers fleeing for their lives, their active stealth systems programmed to return enough of the radio frequency energy thrown at them by the Hammer radars to convince the air-defense commanders that they were the real thing.

  "Command, tac. All landers ready for breakaway, decoys nominal."

  "Roger. All stations, command. Stand by breakaway. Hold on; this will be a bit rough."

  When the time came, it was. As one, the three landers turned and lifted their noses sharply. Throttling back the main engines, Mother shifted power to the belly thrusters. Michael held his breath as he watched what was an incredible balancing act. Kept airborne by the thrust from its main engines, slowed by its belly thrusters, air-braked by wings and flaps extended to their fullest, Widowmaker decelerated with savage force until it was moving at little more than walking speed.

  For a moment, the three landers hung in the air, noses pointed skyward, but only for as long as it took to retract their wings. Then they pitched back level to drop vertically into a narrow ravine barely wide enough to take them. The thrusters cut off, and the landers thumped into the rocky ground with a sickening crash that racked Widowmaker's frame, her brooding black shape enveloped in boiling clouds of steam rising into the rain-sodden air around her before being ripped away into the night by the storm.

  "Holy shit," Michael whispered when silence returned.

  "Holy shit is right," Ferreira said, her voice crackling with tension and excitement. "That is what I call a white-knuckle ride."

  Recovering his composure, Michael turned to Adrissa. "Captain, sir. There'll be a full briefing for the senior officers on the flight deck of Alley Kat. I'll see you there once I've confirmed the landing zone is secure."

  "Ah, yes," Adrissa said faintly, wide-eyed and white-faced. "Fine."

  Michael climbed out of his seat. "Right. Let's make sure Chief Bienefelt's doing what we pay her for. Jayla, for chrissakes, make sure everyone's neuronics are off. I want absolute radio silence. Laser tightbeams only."

  "Already on it, sir."

  Michael slid down the flight deck ladder, his boots thumping into the cargo bay deck. Making his way through Widowmaker's complement of rescued spacers-a more stunned and confused bunch of people he had never seen-he reached for Anna's hand.

  "I've a bit to do. You co
ming?"

  Anna nodded, and they walked out into the night.

  The instant the landers broke away, the decoys turned hard to starboard and went to emergency power, transmitting a tantalizing cocktail of radio frequency energy intended to attract the Hammers' attention. Dropping to within meters of the ground, a formless black blur below them, they fled west through the rain-soaked night, the wind buffeting and bumping them as they headed for the coast and the waiting ocean.

  Behind them, a large salvo of Alaric long-range hypersonic air-to-air missiles turned to follow. Closing fast now, the missiles ignored the decoys' increasingly frantic efforts to jam their sensors, though curiously, the jamming did manage to choke the Alarics' data uplinks, making sure that whatever their optical sensors saw in the final seconds before impact was lost in a torrent of noise.

  Well offshore, the decoys' time ran out; the Alarics closed in, and one after another, the decoys died. Blown out of the air, they fell in tumbling arcs down to a storm-savaged sea, smashing into its leaden surface in spectacular eruptions of spray urged into the night sky by incandescent balls of plasma as their fusion microplants lost containment.

  Soon a pair of Hammer search and rescue heavy lifters arrived. Spiraling out from the impact datum, they started the search, but there was nothing for them to see. The on-scene commander grunted his frustration; any debris there might have been was lost in a shambles of huge gray-black walls marching remorselessly out of the night, their crests collapsing, toppling forward in raging maelstroms of white water that smeared thick blankets of foam across the sea's surface. He made one last low-speed pass over the search area; if anything, conditions were getting worse, not better, with the lifter sagging and wallowing through the turbulent air and visibility at times close to nil in the driving rain and spray.

  The man knew a lost cause when he saw one. "SAR-65, this is 22. Anything?"

  "22, 65," the second lifter replied. "Nothing, and I don't think there will be."

  "22, roger. I'll call it in. SAR control, this is SAR-22," he radioed. "Search complete. No trace of enemy landers, no emergency beacons, no survivors. They must have gone in hard. 22 and 65 returning to base. Over."

  "SAR control, 22 and 65 returning to base. Understood. Out."

  "65, 22. You copy?"

  "65, copy," the command pilot of the second heavy lifter replied.

  "22, roger. Let's go."

  Michael and Anna sat with their backs against the rock wall, rushing water from the rain-swollen creek that cut across the floor of the ravine the only sound. The hours since landing had been busy, and Michael was exhausted, the extent of what he and the rest of the Redwoods had done, the appalling risks they had taken, weighing heavily on his mind. He hated to think how much three perfectly serviceable dreadnoughts were worth to an asset-strapped Fleet even if the dumb fucks had no idea how to use them effectively. Still, he consoled himself, here they were, safe. Apart from some air activity-all passing overhead and showing not the slightest interest in one unremarkable ravine out of the thousands incised into the Branxton Ranges-there had been no sign of the Hammers. The pickets Kallewi had thrown out in a protective ring around the lay-up point were troubled only by the driving rain.

  In truth, Michael had only one problem that worried him: the woman sitting alongside him. Throughout his account of what he had done and why, Anna sat without saying a word until-unnerved-Michael ground to a halt. Still she said nothing, forcing him to sit and wait for her response.

  "Well," Anna said, breaking the long silence at last, her face a gray blur in the predawn gloom, "what can I say? I still can't believe what's just happened any more than I can understand why. The whole business is nuts. I know why you did what you did. I just can't get my head around the fact that you managed to persuade so many sane people to go along with you."

  "Anna!" Michael said, trying not to let his frustration show. "It wasn't like that. They all had their own reasons; they all made up their own minds. Yes, the message from Hartspring was the trigger, the catalyst, but after that… well, the whole business assumed a life of its own; it became something much bigger. It stopped being just about me trying to save you."

  "You can say that again," Anna said with a shake of her head. "Honestly, Michael, never in my wildest dreams would I ever imagine something like this. Never! Shit… why is nothing ever straightforward with you? Here we are"-Anna waved a hand at the three landers tucked out of sight underneath gray micromesh chromaflage netting-"in the middle of nowhere, stuck on this dump of a Hammer planet with no way home, and what's the plan?" She shook her head again. "The plan," she said with a sharp, mocking laugh. "What plan? Oh, yes, that plan. The 'join the NRA and spend the rest of our lives fighting the Hammers until we all get killed' plan!" She shook her head despairingly. "What a prospect. At least we were warm and safe in 5209… well, apart from me, that is."

  "Anna, look, it's not that ba-"

  "Not that bad? Is that what you're telling me? It's not that bad? Well," Anna said fiercely, "it is that bad. The bloody NRA are what? Just second-rate guerrillas fighting a government that's a thousand times stronger than they are in a tiny, pointless war that'll never end. Doesn't matter what we do. Their war will never end, and we'll never get home… never. Even if there's ever a prisoner exchange, guess what? The Hammers would prefer to die than let us be part of that. I know how the fuckers think. They'll never stop hunting us, and when they get us, they'll kill us all. We're screwed," she said, scrambling to her feet, "thanks to you and your team of crazies. We're screwed. So bloody well don't expect gratitude from me… or anyone else you took out of 5209."

  "Anna," Michael protested, "you've got it wrong."

  "Have I?" she snapped. "Have I got it wrong? No, I don't think so. You're the one who's got it wrong. How could you do this? Where's your sense of duty? What happened to the oath you took when you were commissioned? Your sense of honor?"

  "There're more important things," he muttered, all too aware of how lame he must sound.

  Anna snorted, a snort dripping with contempt and derision. "Oh, really?"

  "Yes, there are."

  "Well, not for me there aren't. I don't believe it, Michael. I don't believe that you would do all this just to save me. And to drag the rest of your crew along with you? That's absolutely unforgivable."

  "They had their reasons, Anna, and those had nothing to do with you."

  "Maybe so, but you started this and they followed. You're responsible, and stop trying to pretend otherwise."

  "Hey," Michael protested, "that's not fair."

  "I don't care. No matter how much you love me, no matter what that psychopath Hartspring planned to do, it's just plain wrong to risk so many lives to save me. That's what's wrong, Michael. And Jesus! I almost forgot," she added, her voice dripping sarcasm. "You destroyed three fully operational dreadnoughts to do it. Unbelievable.

  "Don't say another word. Just piss off. Whatever your reasons, whatever your screwed-up mind tells you, whatever you think makes all this right, I don't want to hear it." With that, Anna walked away.

  Michael sat, crushed into immobility. Anna's reaction was a million light-years from the response he'd expected. Suddenly, doubt swamped him. What if Anna was right? What if the rest of the Feds saw things the same way? The last thing he needed was open conflict between the rescuers and the rescued.

  Goddamn her, he thought as a rush of anger swept away all the doubt; goddamn her to hell. Why could she not see what he and the rest of the Redwoods had risked to get her and the rest of the POWs out of J-5209? That Hartspring's threat was only the catalyst for what happened? That the Redwoods had their own reasons? Why could she not see all of that? Damn, damn, damn, he said to himself. Damn Hartspring, damn the Hammers, damn Anna Cheung, damn everything. If they did not like what he had done, tough. It was done, and they could all go fuck themselves if it did not sit well with their precious views of what constituted duty, honor, and the rest of that Fleet bullshit. They al
l might be happy to sit while Rome burned, but he was not.

  Still seething with anger, he spotted Chief Bienefelt making her way over to him.

  "Matti."

  "Lieutenant Cheung doesn't look too happy. And you don't, either."

  "I'm bloody well not," he snapped.

  "Hey! Don't take it out on me."

  "Sorry, Matti. Anna thinks what I've done is so wrong she's never going to speak to me again." He took a deep breath and sighed. "Don't tell me the rest of them think we're a bunch of crazies."

  "Well," Bienefelt said, "it's fair to say most do"-Michael's heart sank, the last of his anger fading away as he contemplated the prospect of having to face over four hundred angry Fed spacers hell-bent on hanging him from the nearest tree-"but that's not the whole story, not by a long shot."

  "It's not?"

  "No," Bienefelt said, shaking her head. "There are some exceptions, of course, there always are, but most of the spacers… no, no, make that almost all the spacers I've spoken to are happy to be out of 5209. Their guards didn't treat them that badly, but not well enough to make them want to stay. The way this damn war's been going, they thought they'd be there for years. They're not fools, but-"

  "There always has to be a 'but,' " Michael said, dejected.

  "Yes, there does, and it's this. Everything depends on how the NRA reacts. If it's positive, if the NRA can convince our people that its war is worth fighting, they'll be there."

  Bienefelt paused for a moment before continuing. "You need to remember one thing, sir. Most of the people we rescued come from Commodore Kumoro's task force. Do I need to remind you what the Hammers put them through at Salvation, how many of their shipmates died?"

  Michael shook his head; she did not. No matter how long he lived, he would never forget the Hammers' ruthless destruction of Kumoro's task group: eleven ships along with most of their crews blown to hell and beyond in the space of a few bloody minutes. Michael had never witnessed an operation so ill advised, an operation none of the ships involved was ever going to survive, the tragedy made unbearable for him by the knowledge that Anna might not have survived, either.