A Deep Sleep (Valhalla Book 1) (4 page)

Danford figured he didn’t have time to dive back inside his bunker, so he crouched low behind his outcropping, hoping that the rest of his marines were doing the same. He glanced at the tactical overlay, moving his head slightly from side to side to see the weapons arcing in towards his position. Company level units were too small to have their own AA, their best defense being an extended line formation. The Regiment had the AA, but it required actual landers and the LZ was too hot and too small to risk the AA or the precious few landers available on the transports.

Danford cursed himself for not adapting a more spread formation, but this was their world, he hadn’t expected the PRC High Command to authorize nuclear weapons on any scale so close to a prime port like Haikou. Obviously he had been wrong, the twelve small rockets tracing towards him proof of that. He flipped to his company comm.

“Heads down, visors off.” Danford ducked his head between his arms and braced himself. The blasts and rumbles in the ground came a half second later. He saw the temperature of his suit rise rapidly, blowing past one-thousand degrees centigrade in an instant before dropping off almost as rapidly. His suit could handle up to eighteen-hundred degree centigrade almost indefinitely and even as high as twenty-one-hundred for short periods of time, but it was still a dangerous place to be. He felt the injection from his suit as it gave him drugs to counteract the likely radiation leakage. The shielding in his armor and the terrain itself was only able to stop so much. He made sure the comm was off and then asked his AI. “Assessment?”

“The warheads appear to be the standard PRC free-flight rockets with warheads set to their minimum yield of five kilotons. Targeting priorities suggest that they are not certain of troop concentrations, the rockets targeted almost the entire LZ.” The AI paused in its report, waiting to be prompted to continue. Danford didn’t prompt, he was already looking at the information on his display.

“They completely missed most of the strongpoints. Looks like they just wanted us to keep our heads down. That and the jamming must be working, they would have gotten better effects if they had the intel.” Danford flipped to company wide comm. “I want everyone keeping their eyes open. Any indications of the enemy weakening their line, trying to disengage, I want to know about it. Even just a feeling, pass it on up.” He closed to comm. “Connect me to Lieutenants Diggs and Hanford.”

As he spoke, Danford felt and heard the arrival of conventional enemy artillery. Whoever was in command on the other side had apparently decided that giving up the location of some of their big guns was worth it after that strike.

“Done.”

“Alright, that looked like a covering move to me. Thoughts?” Danford wanted to brainstorm on this one.

“I concur sir, looks like they saw the rest of the battalion land and are probably trying to maneuver forces to engage them before we have a solid LZ to bring down the heavies. We might be a decent sized force, but if they leave 4
th
and 5
th
Companies out there we can bring down the entire Regiment. Then they’ll really be in a bind.” Lieutenant Hanford spoke first.

“Not only that sir, but they probably went nuclear just now to try and stamp out as much of our ability to fight as they could. We might be heavily outnumbered, but they have to tie down a large force just to keep us here. If they stripped away too much force to engage LZ X-ray, we could stage a break-out.” Lieutenant Diggs added. Vice Admiral Thompson was sure to take out anything that showed itself with a kinetic strike almost immediately.

Danford didn’t know it but those PRC guns were firing their last rounds, even now the fleet in orbit was opening fire. They were just waiting for such an opportunity, with several of the destroyers in orbits so low they were actually heating up their hulls and continually firing their braking thrusters to prevent themselves from entering the atmosphere proper and being torn apart.

“My company is down to one-hundred and four effectives, including myself.” Danford threw the number out there, prompting the others to do the same.

“I’ve still got most of my strength, one-hundred and fifty effectives.” Diggs spoke up first.

“Eighty-six.” Hanford said nothing else and the comm was quiet for a moment. Eighty-six, out of one-hundred ninety-two, meant that Hanford’s company had suffered fifty-five percent casualties. Many of them were probably just critically wounded as opposed to dead. Their suit keeping them alive with the built-in trauma control, but it was still devastating for any unit. Not to mention they had already lost their commanding officer, as well as several other officers and noncoms today.

“I say we hit them, and hard.” Danford said after what seemed like a disgustingly short period of time to skip right past the loss and pain the young lieutenant must be feeling right now. But that was war and they had no time for mourning now. “They’ll be expecting us to attack in support of the push from the rest of the battalion. I say we give them the attack they’re expecting, but make it a spoiling attack. Then we’ll hit them with everything we can spare, right towards Haikou. If we’re lucky they’ll be caught off guard and we can push right through their lines. If we can get into the port, we can anchor our lines on the coast and they’ll have to attack their own town to get to us. Plus, if we time it right we can use our own nuclear barrage to make it that much easier. Then we can bring down the shuttles, right onto Haikou’s landing pads.”

“That could be tight sir, if they still have enough SAWs waiting for us we’ll get cut to pieces.” Diggs responded.

“I concur with Diggs sir, but I agree with you, it’s worth the risk. They’ll never expect it and if we target the nukes carefully we can probably do a number of their prepared positions. My major reservation sir, is the rest of the battalion. They’re counting on us engaging the enemy from our side. If we don’t, they’ll get cut to pieces trying to close with the enemy.”

“I think we can minimize that risk, but it is still going to be chancy.” Danford had mulled these points over himself and he was worried about what would happen if 4
th
Company and 5
th
Company got chewed to pieces. Especially if his assault failed to break through to Haikou. They needed that spaceport and it also happened to be the best way to get the heavy shuttles down with their bigger guns and reinforcements. Not to mention the enemy wasn’t likely to nuke their own city.

“Sir?” It was Diggs again. “What about splitting our barrage, half toward Haikou and the other half onto the enemy between us and the rest of the battalion? If we lead with the strike against the force in between us, they’ll likely not suspect a spoiling attack. Give it a few minutes then launch the second barrage against the enemy forces in front of the port.” He outlined his plan for the strike over the next minute or so. Danford was sold before he finished speaking.

“Damn good idea, let’s do it. We’ll have to be careful in our targeting, because we’ll have to shoot out our stocks to do this.” Company level units didn’t bring many nukes with them, expecting that by the time they were needed in any significant quantities, there’d be at least a full battalion, if not a regiment on the ground. Between the three companies stuck in the pocket of LZ Hotel, they had just twenty-four warheads, all of a variable yield between four and fifteen kilotons. “Set it up Diggs, but stick with the ordnance deployment you just laid out, I don’t want more than half dropping between us and the port. We’re already stretching it to make that attack only a spoiling attack.”

“Yessir.”

“Get me Lieutenant Colonel Cain” Danford said to his AI.

“Connected.”

“Colonel Cain, sir, the other company commanders and I have an idea and not much time.”

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

From the center of the LZ, fourteen free-flight rockets leapt from their launch tubes, their engines cold until they were well clear of the mortar tubes. Their rockets ignited and they sped away towards the enemy positions along the ridgelines between the two elements of the battalion. The PRC Marines, expecting such an attack, were in a dispersed formation. They all took cover and waited for the blanket of atomic fury to subside.

The rockets might have found their flight path unusual, had their tiny processors had the capacity for true thought. Instead, they merely executed their pre-programmed commands and converged on a small period of frontage. One warhead was intercepted by a lucky shot from the enemy AA, but the remaining thirteen rockets detonated fifteen meters off the ridgeline in a grid, blanketing a mere one kilometer of the enemy frontage, the entire depth of their line. Instead of covering the entire twelve kilometers line between, the center kilometer was subjected to a concentrated fireball. The armored troops taking cover there were subjected to an inferno in excess of thirty-five hundred degrees centigrade, easily melting their suits and boiling the soldiers inside them. In the places directly below the detonation the landscape was forever changed, ancient rock formations melted and blasted away by man’s fury.

Lieutenant Diggs couldn’t help but be slightly awed by the raw destructive power at his disposal. The heat was dissipating quickly and it was almost time to move. His company, at least his two most intact platoons, were about to launch a spoiling attack right into the new flanks of the enemy they’d just created with their barrage. Hopefully they’d make this spoiling attack morph into the rest of the regiment breaking through to them. Diggs didn’t think that retreating back to his current position would be particularly easy once the enemy got reorganized.

“Alright 3
rd
Company, on me!” Diggs slipped above the trench line, careful to not leap too high in his armor.  Jumping, running, even just moving in armor was a skill all marines had to acquire before they even left boot camp. Even for a veteran it still took some concentration to do it right. If you leapt with all the power in your suit, well, a sniper was going to end you real quick. He knew he shouldn’t be among the first over the top, but he couldn’t send his men in their without going right in with them. They needed him and he needed to do it for himself as well. Lead from the front was the way of the Marines.

The first platoon of 3
rd
company came out of the trenches with him, thirty-two marines charging the enemy. They covered the half kilometer to the enemy lines without receiving any return fire. 2
nd
company, and the heavy weapons of 3
rd
company, were firing away at the edges of the blast zone, trying to encourage any enemy that may have survived to keep their heads down. The timing had been perfect and the enemy was still recovering from the blasts that impacted their line just three minutes earlier. Diggs’ AI provided a thermal overlay of the hotspots, the ones that his suit wouldn’t handle well, but otherwise left him in normal visible light spectrum. As the 1
st
platoon reached the region where the enemy had been dug in to entrap them, Diggs called for a halt.

“Cover. 2
nd
Platoon, advance. Heavy weapons, advance and take up positions, even split on each flank.” Diggs could here enemy fire now, with his own marines returning fire. 2
nd
platoon was going to have a tougher time crossing.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

“Alright Lieutenant, let ’em have it.” Danford spoke calmly into his comm. Diggs and his men had become bogged down and what was supposed to be a spoiling attack had stalled. Trying to pull back across the open ground between the two former positions would be a shooting gallery, so Diggs was hunkering down and ordering his men to dig in. Danford had detached a third of the mortar teams he was going to use for his assault to give them some extra support. 2
nd
Company had taken some hard losses in their heavy weapons teams and they were on the second or third crews for most of the SAWs, cutting into their effectiveness somewhat. Danford figured that with what was left of Hanford’s command and some of Danford’s mortar teams, they could keep Diggs’ company from being overrun, at least as long as ammunition held out. The fleet had made a drop earlier, but enemy AA had taken out almost half of it and so further drops were on hold. They seemed to have an unlimited supply of mobile launchers and hand-held units, especially considering the fleet hadn’t missed many of the mobile AA units once they gave away their positions.

Danford shifted slightly as Lieutenant Hanford, who he had given all control of all three companies’ nuclear weapons stocks, had the remaining nuclear ordnance launched towards the enemy dug in between the marines and Haikou. Seemingly surprised by the assault in the exact opposite direction from the first strike, the AA hardly responded, failing to even attempt to engage the rockets. This time, instead of a single strike, the ten warheads split into two groups of four and two individual flights. The groups of four detonated on top of the tallest sections of the ridgeline, the locations best suited to creating large fields of fire in good cover for automatic weapons. One of the individual warheads detonated between the two groups, the blast channeled by the peaks and wreaking destruction in the slight valley below. The final warhead did not airburst, instead burrowing into the sandy soil in front of the enemy line and blasting tons of material into the air, creating a blinding screen of radioactive plasma and dirt.