And it was very impressive. The last shells that were fired had the lowest trajectory with the most propellant. Their screaming through the air over the bunkers drowned out all other noise. The light show, though, was spectacular as the entire sky lit up with eighteen simultaneous beams firing. All of the shells survived noticeably longer than in the first tests as the laser light drifted from blue to green. But they all soon started popping, slowly at first, and then in a rush. Like popcorn, Kaethan thought.
One final explosion, though, occurred much later than the others did.
“That one could have impacted, Walter.”
“Well, seventeen out of eighteen isn’t bad, and I know I can improve on that by restricting the spin more. The ion bolts on your Templars wouldn’t have gotten half of them.”
Walter returned to his console and started reviewing some statistics. Kaethan looked over to the other bunker and found a corporal looking back, expectantly. He gave him a thumbs-up, and motioned that the testing was over for the day.
“I noticed the color shift this time.” Kaethan turned back to Walter. “The beams turned green.”
“As I told you, the wave-length will expand as the crystal heats up.”
“What color starts being dangerous?”
Walter looked up from his console and stared straight ahead for a moment.
“I’m not sure,” Walter admitted. “An alarm will trigger once the crystal hits two hundred fifty degrees Celsius. I’m not sure what color that would equate to.”
“Try to find out, okay?”
“Will do.” Walter turned back to his laptop. “Shouldn’t be difficult.”
A soft beep emanating from Kaethan’s belt captured his attention. Pulling out his handphone, he noted that a personal message had just been logged. Once the phone was activated and a password was typed in, that message was downloaded and displayed on a small scrolling message line.
“What was that sour face for?” Walter asked after a glance.
“My father’s on Delas. He’s coming to visit.”
“The colonel?” Walter laughed. “Is he on leave or something?”
“No. Some business that he won’t talk about.”
“When is he coming?”
“Tomorrow or the next day, he said. He doesn’t know.”
“Well, I’d love to meet him.”
Kaethan shrugged.
“We’ll see,” he only said. “I assume that you’ll be busy tonight.”
“Very,” Walter said. “Once I write up a report, my boss is treating these politicians to dinner and wants me to be there. I guess a funding vote is approaching again.”
“Good luck.”
“Oh, I think it’s a lock. None of them believed that a battlelaser would be useful on a modern battlefield, but they’ve been shown.”
“I think the price tag influenced them, also.”
“It needed that just to bring them to the table,” he said somewhat bitterly. “You heading out?”
“Yeah,” Kaethan said, retrieving his raincoat from a chair. “I’ll give you a call tomorrow. Turn off the lights when you’re done.”
“Will do. See ya.”
“See ya.”
Outside of the bunker, Kaethan had to dash through the rain a few steps before arriving under a concrete and steel overhang that protected their cars. Driving your own vehicle to the forward bunkers at the Fort Hilliard range required several release forms to be filled out. The overhang protected the vehicles against overhead shrapnel, but would not protect against near miss shrapnel, or direct hits. The only other choice was to walk, or be driven by someone else.
And Kaethan hated to be driven by someone else.
In fact, he hated having anything be done for him that he could do himself. He was told that this was the reason why he had become battalion commander so quickly, being only twenty-six years old, Earth standard. It was the nature of the military to promote their hardest workers into a position of delegating all their work to others. Of course, few soldiers in the Delassian Defense Force made the militia their full-time occupation, thus giving Kaethan an advantage. Most men on Delas were forced to devote four years of their lives in the DDF, but almost always quit thereafter. Many became weekend warriors, rejoining their battalions once a season for various training and wargames. Kaethan, however, joined full time. The pay sucked, he always told people, but the benefits were nice.
The work, though, especially lately, was tiring. For the last couple years, it had been Kaethan’s responsibility to incorporate recently purchased equipment into the battalion’s capabilities. And unfortunately, with local politicians organizing the acquisitions, the mix of technologies was poorly considered. Delas was so far away from their Sector Concordiat Base at Angelrath that they had planned on constructing a new base here. But with the Melconian war draining away resources, this never materialized. And now, with the fleet away to who-knows-where, Delas had been told to fend for itself. Except for the constantly rotating Army regiments that were based at Angelrath, the entire sector was basically left on its own. And at this time, only his father’s two Bolo Mark XXXs were keeping watch.
Perhaps it would have been better to allow the planetary government to maintain its own army, Kaethan had often considered. Their recently elected governor, Leonard Traine, was a very respected man, honorable and honest. But that would never be enough for the fiercely independent miners and frontier farmers that made up the population of this world. The planetary government could never be given the opportunity to force its will on others, so instead, the planetary defense forces consisted entirely of local militias. The weapons and equipment were purchased by the cities, sometimes in cooperation with each other, but not always. Except for one mass purchase of the Metallicast Industries Templar Mark XI, and another of several hundred SE-12244 mining company Sealed Environment Haulers, the individual cities went their own ways.
Walter’s battlelaser project, for the first time, was an entirely Delassian machine, with all parts and labor drawn from the planet’s rapidly expanding industry. Several cities were interested in it, and its success could be the start of a very lucrative business in this sector. Quite a bit of pressure was riding on Walter’s shoulders, though you’d never see it by talking to him. Personally, Kaethan thought the system would be of limited use if a Melconian dreadnought suddenly appeared in orbit and began carving up the planet into bite-sized morsels. He did, however, like that most of the electronics were standardized, easily acquired components, making his job dramatically easier. If for only that, Kaethan considered this a project worth continuing.
He’d never mention this opinion to his father, though. Of course, he had never known exactly what to talk to his father about. Kaethan hadn’t met his father until he was six, though he had no memory of the event. The colonel’s brief visit home when Kaethan was ten was made ever more awkward by numerous injuries that the Melconian front had inflicted upon him. At fourteen, after his mother had died from a sudden local illness, he had visited his father at a Concordiat base called Point Hermes. Kaethan could never find this on any star charts, but that is what everyone called it while he was there. Why he was told to go there, he had never found out. After several awkward weeks he was told to go home to Delas, where his sister would take care of him. The stay was excruciatingly boring, with little time spent with his father. The only enjoyment he had was talking for long hours with Chains, one of his father’s Bolos.
His father transferred to Angelrath only three years ago after most of his regiment was lost in a Melconian attack. Even so much closer, he only had visited twice since then. Most of the colonel’s time had been spent with Kaethan’s sister, Serina. This wasn’t his father’s fault, however. Kaethan had gone to extraordinary lengths to be sure that he was very busy during these visits. It wasn’t that he harbored any resentment towards his father for anything, it was just that they both were terribly uncomfortable around each other. Kaethan’s guilt for keeping his father at arm’s length was tempered by his firm belief that his father felt exactly the same way.
And so, as Kaethan navigated his way over the sand-swept ocean road, he began to mentally reorganize his next few days as inefficiently as he could. Rather than making more work for himself, it was always better to make do with what one had.
Of course, it would be best if something unexpected would happen that would keep him very busy for the next few days. This was unlikely, however, on a planet as remote as Delas.
* * *
Unit DBQ-0039DN has now safely made planetfall, and once again the last of the 39th Terran Lancers are reunited. Although we remain at low alert status, we are eager to begin our latest assignment, and have begun a complete strategic analysis of the Delassian defense network. This, perhaps, exceeds our Commander’s direction, but the latest events are certain signs of imminent danger to this planet. That Unit DBQ and myself are the only Bolos assigned to the protection of this entire sector is testament to the respect and trust that the 39th has so painfully earned in its nearly six-hundred-year history.