The Final Battle (32 page)

The marine in charge of the checkpoint at the massive bridge spanning the Oxus River was as brave as he was foolish. Flanked by a pair of Sampan antitank missile batteries that would have done the job for him if he had be bothered to take the time to think—until rounds from Kleber’s and Mallory’s tanks tore their guts out—he stood in the middle of the road, hand raised. His marines, smarter and much less brave, did not wait to see what would happen, hurling themselves out of the oncoming tanks’ path. At the last moment, the man woke up to the fact that no amount of arm waving would stop an Aqaba. In a convulsive, panic-stricken leap, he hurled himself to one side, only to be caught by the tank’s leading edge, his body tossed clean over the parapet and into the water far below, the tank’s microphones picking up his despairing scream as he fell to his death.

They were almost halfway across the bridge by the time the Hammers decided to take the problem seriously. Hostile fire alarms shrieked inside the Aqaba. The holovid screen looking down the bridge flared white as the tank’s fire-control system responded to a cluster of incoming Sampan missiles. The attack was over in seconds. Defensive lasers slashed the missiles out of the air; their warheads exploded to send missile debris ricocheting off the hull in a cacophony of metallic whanging that made Michael’s ears ring. The noise did not let up. The tank’s 95-millimeter gun tracked the missiles back to their launch point. It poured rounds into the missile battery. Again the screens whited out as a power plant lost containment, the blast smashing men and ordnance aside as the five tanks roared past and into the night.

Across the bridge, Michael swung the Aqaba left onto the road to Kumasi, the hull now reverberating as they took fire.
Light cannon
, Michael reckoned,
and there’ll be worse to come and soon
.

“Engage autofollow,” he shouted. He punched instructions into the master panel to tell the tank to take the road to Kumasi. Now the rest would follow wherever the lead tank went. “Kleber, get the hatch open; everyone stand by to bail out.”

The hatch opened with a crash. It was bedlam outside. The noise of tracks on the road and the pounding of incoming cannon fire were overwhelming. “Hold on,” Michael shouted. He slammed on the brakes. The tracks screamed in protest as the tank slid to walking pace. “Go, go, go!”

None of them hesitated, diving through the hatch after their packs and personal weapons. Delabi was the last to go. The instant she vanished, Michael mashed the throttle onto the stops, locked the controls, and followed, rolling and tumbling to a pain-filled halt that left him staring up into the sky, stunned and unable to move.

“Come on, sir,” Shinoda said, dragging him to his feet. “We need to get out of here.”

Groggy, Michael forced himself to follow Shinoda. They ran hard for the cover of the trees. In the distance, the rumble of ground-attack landers was clearly audible. The night sky to the northeast flickered red and white as the
NRA
and the Hammers traded artillery fire.

Tuesday, October 12, 2404, UD
Outside Cooperbridge, Commitment

“I think we’re hooked in,” Shinoda said, “so stand by … Okay, the link’s up. We’re into
ENCOMM
… and we have the latest
OPSUM
.”

Michael skimmed the high-level summaries, pleased to see that the battle for McNair was going well for the
NRA
, and no wonder. The Hammers’ planetary councillors were still refusing to release the marine divisions they needed to keep a lid on civil unrest;
UNMILCOMM
was not getting the reserves it needed to contain a rampaging
NRA
.

If I were Chief Councillor Polk
, Michael said to himself,
I think
I’d be making plans to get as far away from Commitment as I could.

He turned his attention to the mass of data summarizing the disposition of
NRA
and Hammer units along what
ENCOMM
was now calling the Yallan Salient, both happy and concerned to see that the 120th had been pulled out of the line and into reserve.
There’s only one reason for that
, he thought.
Anna’s battalion has been taking heavy punishment
.

Michael burrowed down into the
OPSUM
. He located Team Victor; Hartspring was still in Cooperbridge. He closed the
OPSUM
. But one thing bothered him; it had been bothering him for a while.

The Hammer of Kraa’s survival, the fate of billions, the future of humanspace—they all hung in the balance. Compared with that, Team Victor was an irrelevance. So why did
ENCOMM
always know exactly where it was? Michael was no expert, but he knew how fast changing, how chaotic combat was, and good as the
NRA
’s intelligence system was, surely it wasn’t that good. He was missing something; he was sure of it.

Shinoda broke his train of thought. “I see Team Victor hasn’t moved,” she said. “I’ll get the team ready to move out.”

“Hold on for a second,” Michael said. “I’ve been thinking about things.”

“And?”

“It’s up to me now. I can’t ask you to go with me into Cooperbr—”

“Whoa!” Shinoda said. “Hold it there just one fucking second, sir. I don’t know about the rest of the team, but I haven’t come all this way to stop now. I want Hartspring almost as much as you do.”

“Look, sergeant. I appreciate the sentiment, but you’ll have to tell me how we’d get past the military police. We’re talking about going into a combat zone without valid orders. We belong to a unit that does not appear in the Hammer order of battle, and we have IDs we know are useless. They’ll nail us in a heartbeat.”

“And you
do
have valid orders to show the MPs?” Shinoda said. She looked exasperated. “And which unit
do
you belong to? Show us your ID; who
are
you, exactly?”

Michael put his hands up in defeat. “I know, I know, but one man on his own has a chance of getting through. Five don’t.”

“That is a complete crock, sir, and you know it. If we go as marines, then you’re right. We will get nailed. But a bunch of civilians has a chance. The marines are not DocSec. They won’t give a shit who we are. Even if they look at our IDs—which they won’t—they won’t check them out. They have better things to do.”

Michael knew all that. He’d just been hoping that Shinoda wouldn’t pick up on the flaws in his argument. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “Decision’s made. I’m going in on my own while you guys go to ground until the
NRA
gets here.”

“What? You want me to sit around on my ass waiting?” Shinoda shook her head dismissively. “Forgive my language, sir, but fuck that.”

“This is my fight, Sergeant Shinoda, not yours. So butt out and let me fight it, okay?”

“My fight’s killing Hammers, sir, and I’m not too fussy about which ones, so this is what we’re going to do: We’ll go to Cooperbridge, find Hartspring, and when we do, you can kill him. Okay?”

Michael’s head dropped; he could see the determination on Shinoda’s face and knew when he was defeated. “Why can’t you just do as you are ordered?”

Shinoda grinned at him. “I’ll take that as a yes, shall I?”

“Suppose you’d better. Go talk to the guys, make sure they’re okay with it, then we’ll move out. We need—” His fingers plucked at his combat fatigues. “—to find something to replace these.”

• • •

Michael checked to make sure his assault rifle was safely tucked away under his coat. It was. He turned to look at Shinoda. He threw an admiring glance at the heavy skirt and embroidered blouse favored by older Hammer women. “I must say, you do look very fetching, Sergeant Shinoda,” he said. “All those rough, tough Hammer marines will not be able to keep their hands off you.”

“You may be a colonel now, sir,” Shinoda growled, “but that won’t stop me from belting you. Besides, you look like a pig farmer fallen on hard times.”

Michael laughed. Shinoda was right; he did. “We all set?”

“We are.”

“Let’s go, then.”

Michael followed Shinoda and the rest of the team down the road out of the village to the junction with the Cooperbridge–Kumasi highway, the ceramcrete road already hot in the midmorning sun. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Dressed in clothes dragged from the shattered ruins of a small village mall, they were a sorry-looking lot. But so were all the other civilians they had seen, and Michael knew they’d be all but invisible to the Hammer marines.

Because they were lost amid the flow of Hammer truckbots forcing their way down a road clogged with civilians, the walk into town was uneventful. The Hammer military police showed not the slightest interest in their small group. Since they were the only people heading into Cooperbridge while every other civilian was getting the hell out, Michael had thought they would. But they hadn’t. The marines were content to wave them through without even the most cursory check of their IDs.

Michael called a halt just short of Cooperbridge’s plaza. Like all Hammer towns, it was a massive space dominated by the inevitable temple. It was still intact, but its facade was badly scarred by shrapnel. The buildings on either side lay in ruins, now just piles of smoking rubble.

Michael waved the team to close in. “Right,” he said, “you’ve all got your search areas. We meet at the corner of Herriot and Chang in eight hours. Keep an ear on channel 643; any problems, let everyone know. And remember, if you locate the target, call it in, get as many holocams set up as you can, then bug out. I do not want Hartspring getting spooked. Any last questions? … No? Okay, let’s move out, and remember, keep your heads down and try to stay clear of the surveillance cameras. There’s a lot of them, but they’re very easy to spot.”

The team split up, and Michael set off. He tried not to be daunted by the size of the task that lay ahead. Cooperbridge was a big place. Finding Colonel Hartspring’s unit would have been difficult at the best of times, let alone amid the chaos of the last major town before the front line. And it was chaos. Hammer units—some in good order and going up the line, others tattered, some badly mauled, coming back down—clogged the streets. Truckbots hauling supplies made the confusion worse. They forced their way through the mayhem, weaving around the debris from destroyed buildings and between armored, air-defense, and antitank units parked and waiting to move.

Something tells me
, Michael thought,
that the Hammers are not planning to give Cooperbridge up without one hell of a fight
.

Michael walked down the shattered remnants of what must once have been an attractive tree-lined boulevard. His eyes never stopped moving in the search for surveillance cameras. He was relieved to see that he was not the only one with a death wish. There weren’t many civilians around, but enough for him not to stand out. They were a sad-looking bunch, poorly dressed and dirty. They all had looks of shocked disbelief on their faces.

Michael rounded a corner and was confronted by the sight of a Goombah air-defense battery. Its tracked launch vehicle, power plant, and command trailer all but filled the road. He started to make his way toward the battery. The screeching of a siren brought him to a stop; he wondered what it meant. And then he realized. Frantic now, he turned and threw himself over a small wall in a desperate attempt to reach the safety of a small concrete enclosure. He crashed into the ground and slid to a stop. He clamped his hands over his ears even as the world around him was torn apart by the savage back blast from missiles screaming skyward. Rocket motor efflux hit the ground and exploded outward. Fingers of hot gas lashed his body, scorching his hands and neck.

The silence that followed was shocking in its intensity. Michael lay there for a minute, breathing air bitter with the acrid smell of burned propellant. He stumbled to his feet. He shook his head to clear the ringing from his ears and tried to ignore the pain from his burned hands, his body racked by coughs as it fought to expel the crud from his lungs.

It wasn’t until a hand fell on his shoulder that Michael realized somebody was talking to him. It was a while before he could make sense of what the hulking Hammer marine was saying.

“Can’t you read, you idiot?” the man was saying, pointing to a small dust-coated sign sitting a good 50 meters away.

“Sorry,” Michael mumbled, “didn’t see it.”

The marine shook his head. “Fucking civilians,” he said. “You are damn lucky you weren’t killed … Kraa! Look at your hands!”

Michael did, then wished he hadn’t.
No wonder my hands hurt
, he thought as he looked at the blistered red skin.

“Go down there,” the marine went on, pointing along the street, “about 300 meters. You’ll find an aid post. They’ll fix you up. What are you waiting for?” he said when Michael hesitated. “Go on. It’ll be okay. Tell them Sergeant Jalevi from the 654th Air Defense sent you.”

A marine aid post was the last place Michael wanted to go, but with the man so insistent, he didn’t have much choice.

“Thanks,” he muttered, setting off.

“And stay away from our batteries, you hear?” the man called out. “By the way, just what the hell are you doing around here?”

Michael just waved a hand and kept walking. With an effort, he resisted the urge to break into a run; a quick glance confirmed that the marine was still watching him, the man’s face set in a suspicious frown. Michael found the aid post; it was hard to miss the olive drab tent marked with massive red crosses. “Bastard Hammers,” Michael muttered under his breath when he saw a battalion command and control half-track parked so close that no
NRA
landers would attack it for fear of hitting the aid post.

Resisting the temptation to toss a microgrenade at the half-track, Michael went inside the tent. “What the fuck do you want?” one of the medics said, looking up. “We don’t treat civilians.”

“Sergeant Jalevi of the 654th Air Defense sent me,” Michael said. He waved hands now scarlet and spotted with suppurating blisters.

“Oh, did he?”