My last two missiles, however, have been saved for one last contact whose passage through the ocean net has been like a ghost. It approaches much slower than the others, and likely has radiation shielding protecting its exhaust. It threads its way between the Delassian detectors as if it were provided a map, though I calculate that likelihood as being infinitesimal. Instead, I must attribute its opportune zigzag approach to nothing more than luck. Even now, as it finally approaches the southern Delassian coast, far off detectors can only approximate its position as north of Telville and south of Candelith.
Once this transport reaches land, we risk it deploying its forces. But firing my missiles at such an elusive target may waste the last of our extreme range ordnance. My stage-one heuristic dilemma switches have tripped, but it is unnecessary that I invoke my stage two circuitry.
I call my Commander . . .
* * *
The Kezdai assault dropship never detected the approaching missile. Its particle beam defenses remained utterly still, useless without direction from the ship’s impressive sensor arrays, which were off. Its crew saw only the blackness of the south Deladin shoreline, looming larger and larger on their forward view screen. The light from their fusion drive, up until now reflecting off nothing but the waves only meters below, now was beginning to cast a bluish glow over the white sand beach that they were approaching. Is-kaldai Riffen’s elite forces had been flying manually over the ocean, and planned on remaining on manual navigation for their flight over land. There were just too many active sensors sweeping the skies between them and Adakradai Khoriss’ landing area to risk plotting anything beforehand.
Their plans, however, had to be rewritten.
Coming down on the dropship from above, the Icehawk missile locked in on their forward left thruster and ignited its powerful magnetic dynamo. At the split moment of impact, the warhead was fed a stream of antimatter particles that annihilated instantly. Molten shards of crystalline carbon exploded high into the air in a sparkling cloud as an impossibly narrow beam of focused plasma drilled deep into the Triamond lattice hull. Drive shielding was sliced clean through, causing an explosion that blasted the thruster clean off its housing.
The sudden explosion could be seen thirty kilometers up and down the coast, but even that wasn’t enough for anyone to notice it. The peninsula that the dropship had to crash upon was over twenty kilometers from the nearest human dwellings, with no roads leading to it. No one was around to see that the dropship remained intact after smashing a two-hundred-meter long swathe through the dense rainforest, or that soldiers and equipment descended unhurt from the burning hulk.
No one, including the Kezdai, noticed the large black fin that cut through the waves just offshore.
* * *
As the first light of dawn glowed deep blue in the eastern sky, Captain Kaethan Ishida and the Alabaster Coast Heavy Armor was still point battalion in Telville Corps’ drive inland. While his ten Templars of Alpha team were running up the eastern lane of the highway, his Bravo team was paralleling him on the western lane. Charlie team followed behind. Somewhere around the fifth hour, it had become obvious to the captain that their “leap” ahead of the Chandoine Guard had become a permanent condition. There would be no deployment to allow the Tigris Guard to jump ahead of them. Someone upstairs wanted contact to be made as soon as possible, and his unit was just lucky enough to be out front when that decision was made.
Kaethan was driving Templar One as Sergeant Pritchard slept. Andrea kept watch from her turret position. When Zen awoke in an hour, they all would have had four hours sleep during the night as they traded duties. The nights on Delas were fifteen hours and about thirty minutes, with little variation from the planet’s almost perfectly vertical axis. At nearly fifty kilometers per hour, Kaethan’s column had traveled six hundred kilometers inland in the last twelve hours. The tall mountains of south Deladin were looming high into the clouds far to the south. The rain forest that they drove through was giving way to the limestone foothills that dominated the approaches to the granite peaks.
Contact was expected soon, but the three recon companies ahead of them had still not reported anything. Everyone was on radio silence except for them, and they were to break it only in an emergency. Even the running lights on the Templars were off, forcing Kaethan to use his thermal and low-light scopes to keep in line.
So when their radio did crackle with traffic, Kaethan was all ears.
“This is Recon Bravo Two. Contact at my position.”
A red circle popped up on Kaethan’s navigation map that was scrolling on the display before him as he drove. It was about eight kilometers ahead of him, directly on the highway. He did not recognize the voice, but whoever it was, he was exceedingly calm. Obviously Bravo Two had driven into an ambush site, but the aliens were hoping for something tastier to feed on than just a recon unit.
Kaethan didn’t wait for confirmation, however. By hitting a virtual button on his left panel, he put his entire battalion on alert. And with a yell, he woke up Zen. As acknowledgements were sent back to him from his Templar commanders, lighting up his left-hand display with bright icons for each tank, he continued to listen to command channels.
“Are you sure, Bravo?” said a quiet female voice over the radio. “You’re two kilometers behind us.”
The female voice was that of Recon Alpha commander, Captain Beth Nichols.
“Forget your thermals. Use your low-light.” Bravo Two replied. “They must have cooled armor . . .”
Standard procedure in this situation was for the Recon unit to keep advancing, but much slower. It was now the column’s job to catch up quickly and extract it. A glance at his left-hand display showed the alert acknowledgements coming back quickly.
As a flurry of artillery plots lit up along the treeline ahead of him on his navigation map, Kaethan turned his transmitter to his battalion channel.
“Wake up boys and girls!” he called. “Our recon companies have just walked into a passive ambush seven klicks ahead. It’s our job to go in and hold the jaws open while recon gets the hell out. Teams acknowledge!”
“Aye,” called Lieutenant Peter Birch of his Bravo team.
“Aye,” called Lieutenant Ellen Holowitz of his Charlie team.
“Nobody is to fire until the action starts! Once it begins, Alpha and Bravo are to stop and plant where they are! Charlie will come up and deploy across our front. Got that?”
“Aye.” They replied.
Kaethan suddenly closed his eyes and groaned as he remembered that Walter and his father tagging along in the prototype Sentinel.
“Bicks, are you there?”
“Yes, Captain!”
“You take Walter’s toy into the depression in the middle of our box and stay there!”
“Yes, sir!”
The highway was taking a gradual turn as he talked, and a long, flat straightaway was ahead of them. Dense groves of trees lined both sides, with a sharp rise at the far end, and many rocky knolls and outcroppings to hide any enemy armor. It was the perfect place for an ambush, with nowhere for them to hide once the firing started.
Of course, the Templar Mark XI was never meant to hide.
* * *
Ad-akradai Khoriss watched as the rising light of the alien sun turned the eastern sky lavender and pink. It had been raining, off and on, since he had landed upon this world, and this was the first time the skies were mostly clear. In his exhilaration, he had succumbed to his terrible urge to remove his helmet and breathe in the unfiltered air of this world. It was dangerous, yes, but there was danger everywhere here. Such a swamp-ridden world as this was the breeding ground of countless bacteria and germs, and the Kezdai immune system was weak from evolving on a desert world that was so devoid of them.
The hot, moist air, though, was less than refreshing.
The aliens on this world traveled without protection, he had noticed. They called themselves “Humans.” A wounded male farm worker had been captured and interrogated as best they could before he died. Very little else was learned from him, but then little was expected. He was only a farmer, what must be their lowest caste, as it was with the Kezdai.
To the west, explosions and antiartillery discharges could be heard as his forces engaged the Humans along the narrow stretch of highway that cut through the rainforest and impassable rocky terrain of the area. All of his armor remained dug in along the highway perimeter, unable to travel over ground because their tires would sink to their floor into the muddy ground. Maneuver was impossible in this country, and if he were on the offensive, he’d be going mad in frustration right now. But he wasn’t. His forces were on the defense, and the Humans could reach him with only a fraction of their forces at a time.