The steam filling that valley could provide Andrew with a tactical advantage, masking his heat signature and helping to render him invisible even at close range.
My destination is the Al Buruj Pass to the north, a narrow defile through the mountains named “The Mansions of the Stars” in the local tongue.
I sense now the near approach of the Enemy ahead and increase my pace.
* * *
“I really think we should be listening to them, sir,” Martin said, stubborn. “They have more experience on the front line than any of the rest of us have on the chow line.” He hesitated, trying to gauge just how far he could go. “Colonel, a good officer knows to listen to his sergeants. What they have to say comes from experience, not simulations!”
Lang almost smiled. “Lieutenant, the day I take advice from a giant track-crawling piece of construction equipment with a psycho-whatsit brain and a programmed-to-order attitude is the day I retire from the service! Get it through your head, son. Those toys of yours are machines. Not men. They don’t think, not the way we do, and you’ll just get yourself in trouble pretending they do!” He turned and glanced at the QDC console, then indicated the fast-flickering screens with a nod of his head. “Besides, it looks like they play simulations. Not paying attention to the real world much, are they?”
“Some of that is ordinary conversation, Colonel. They’re discussing something. It looks like there’s also a game running, but they have it isolated in a pretty small shared virtual world. They don’t need that much thought to traverse terrain or watch for incoming. My guess is that they’re modeling some possible Kezdai strategy and tactics, so they can decide how best to deploy.”
“They’ll decide, huh?” Lang shook his head. “I’m not getting through to you, Lieutenant. Bolos are machines, not people! Stop goddamn pretending they’re alive!”
“Yes, sir.”
Martin returned to his console. On a map display overhead, two points of green light crawled toward the mountains.
* * *
I am now in full Combat Reflex Mode as battle is joined at 0587 hours, local time. Three Kezdai aircraft, possibly drones but carrying numerous missile weapons, flew across the mountains on an attack vector for the Combat Command Center. I downed one and Andrew two, brushing them from the night’s sky with twin bursts of ion bolts from our infinite repeaters.
My Vertical Launch System is on-line, and I use it to deploy a combat zone recon drone package. Ninety-six small, autonomous probes will relay visual and e-signal data via Izra’il’s military-comm satellite network or, should that fail, by way of relay drones landed atop the Frozen Hell’s higher and more inaccessible peaks.
As the recon drones come down on the eastern side of the mountains, our battle centers are flooded with incoming data. Weapon and ship designs, radio frequencies and code types, all match samples from the last Kezdai incursion at Delas, verifying the Enemy’s identity. They appear more numerous than the first field reports suggested.
We observe at least forty-two heavily armored ground crawlers, each with an estimated mass of five hundred tons, each with a turret-mounted energy weapon and obvious missile launch tubes. They appear to be moving in two groups of twenty-one toward the two passes. We could take them out now . . . but our orders from our command center specifically prohibit this.
On my long-range sensors, I pick up an orbiting Kezdai battlecruiser rising above the western horizon.
For the next 0.015 second, I wrestle with conflicting hierarchies of programming and the orders to avoid firing at targets in orbit. I decide that an attack from the battlecruiser will warrant a reply, but until then I will merely observe. Colonial spacecraft remain in orbit, I note. Possibly the command center hopes to avoid a naval engagement.
As I continue to move toward Al Buruj Pass, the ground begins rising. A roadway passes beneath my tracks and is pulverized, but I do avoid brushing against the pylons of the monorail line connecting the east and west plains across the mountains. Several cars have passed already, each filled with civilians. I notice a large number of civilians in ground vehicles—snowcats and hovercraft, mostly—all headed west.
The presence of civilians within the narrow confines of the Al Buruj Pass will seriously complicate my defense of this position. I try to increase my speed but am forced to halt several times as the refugee crowds grow thicker. Many, I now note, are on foot.
Andrew informs me that similar conditions prevail in the Ad Dukhan Valley.
At a much lower awareness level, we continue our round of simulations. We have modeled the surrounding terrain, estimating Enemy capabilities and weaponry as best we can by comparing them with known opponents and materiel. At a conservative guess, we assign the Kezdai armored crawlers with armor values and firepower equivalent to Deng Type A/2 Yavacs, which possess a similar mass. Our initial gaming suggests that the Enemy must employ 8.75 A/2-equivalent crawlers in simultaneous direct-fire combat to jeopardize a single Mark XXIV. Our strategy, clearly, while necessarily defensive in nature, must be directed toward preventing the Enemy from achieving that level of numerical superiority.
I reach the top of Al Buruj Pass, a crest that affords an excellent view of the tundra plains beyond . . . and the blazing torches of Consortium villages.
* * *
The first refugees were arriving at the spaceport, two kilometers south of the command center. Monorail cars were sliding in one after another, spilling hundreds of shocked, terrified, and confused civilians onto the port concourse, while ground-effect vehicles and snow crawlers continued to arrive from both passes in apparently unending streams.
“Order the 5th Brigade to the spaceport,” Lang said, speaking into a comm headset. “Off-planet transport is to be reserved for Concordiat military!”
Khalid’s dark face flushed darker. “You cannot be serious!”
“I’m dead serious, Governor. We’ll see to it that you and your top people get out okay. But there are seventy thousand colonists on this rock, and we don’t have space transport enough for a quarter that. What we don’t need now is a riot at the spaceport.”
“So . . . what is it you intend to do?”
“Delay the Kezdai for as long as we can, first off. It won’t be easy because they outnumber us by a considerable margin.”
“But your two Bolos . . .”
“Can only do so much. I’m a realist, Governor. Those machines won’t more than slow the incoming tide. But in the meantime, we’ll be trying to open negotiations with the Kezdai. It’s possible that we can arrange a truce and evacuate peacefully . . . and without further bloodshed.”
“Indeed?” Khalid looked down at Lang with undisguised contempt. “And has it occurred to you, Colonel, that this rock as you keep calling it, this iceball, is our home? We may be only a Concordiat mining venture, but the people here have made this world their home. I suggest you help us defend it.”
“If we do that, Governor, you won’t have a home left.” He shrugged. “Defend the place yourselves, if you want. My people were not posted here to die in some hopeless gesture!”
“Colonel!” Martin called, hoping to prevent an ugly scene. He could feel Khalid’s fury radiating from behind his eyes and clenched fists, barely contained.
“What is it, Lieutenant?”
“Both Bolos have reached their assigned defensive positions, sir. Andrew reports poor visibility. Hank, however, has a clear view of the towns of Inshallah, Glacierhelm, and Gadalene. He has the enemy in sight.”
“Then have them open fire on them, damn it! Give ’em Hellbores! Do I have to think about everything around here?”
* * *
I receive the order to commence firing, and for the first time in my career history, I hesitate at that command. I have the Enemy in my sights, and yet I am aware with laser-exact precision what the firing of my 90cm Hellbore in close proximity to unarmored civilians would do.
The mountain pass is perhaps eighty meters wide at this point and walled in by sheer, basaltic slopes capped with snow and ice. Hellbores fire a “bolt” of fusing hydrogen at velocities approaching ten percent c. Within a thick atmosphere such as Izra’il’s, the bolt’s 30-million-degree core temperature dissipates as a shock wave that would kill or maim any unarmored individual within a radius of approximately two kilometers and would bring down the surrounding ice in a cataclysmic avalanche.
Civilian casualties would be horrendous.
I withhold my main battery fire, then, in order to allow the refugees to continue passing me on their way to the west. Instead, I launch four VLS missiles with CMSG warheads, vectoring them toward concentrations of Enemy armor and radiating communications assets east of the mountains.
Each cluster-munitions warhead disintegrates above the target area, scattering a cloud of self-guiding force packages across broad, suddenly lethal footprints. As expected, the Enemy’s armored units appear unaffected, but troops caught in the open, along with the buildings and light vehicles being utilized as C3 units, are shredded by bursts of high-velocity pellets fired like shotgun blasts from falling CM warheads.