His infinite repeaters send up a flaring, dazzling cloud of ion bolts, as point-defense batteries loose invisible beams of UV lasers. Six of the missiles, and three aircraft, disintegrate within the first 0.16 second of his firing.
Through satellite recon views, I note a large flight of missiles launched from Enemy defense batteries near Inshallah, all of them targeting Andrew.
Four more missiles vaporize . . . and five more after that . . . but they have been fired at high velocity from a range of less than half a kilometer, and Andrew simply does not have point-defense weapons enough to track and destroy them all. He manages to burn down three more . . .
. . . and the remaining two strike his battlescreens, a pair of 25-kiloton fission nukes detonating almost simultaneously. Through the QDC link, I feel the sudden pulse as his battlescreens flutter, then fail, overloaded . . . feel the searing, deadly wash of superheated plasma scouring across his outer hull like the caress of a blowtorch across plastic . . . feel the black hurricane winds laden with vaporizing grit and rock exploding across his armor, as dense and as solid as the thunderous blast of a tsunami . . . feel the shift and slide of my tracks in ground now partly molten, as those winds attempt to push a mass of fourteen-thousand tons . . .
I am moving now, racing eastward through the valley, seeking a clear line of fire against the incoming wave of missiles still en route from Inshallah. The attacking aircraft have all been destroyed, by Andrew or in the fireball. But satellite sensors are tracking thirty-seven more targets inbound.
Andrew is still operational. Power at 27.4 percent . . . 12 infinite repeater batteries still full or partially operational . . . battlescreens down. His ablative layers are gone, carrying away the worst of the thermal radiation. His outer hull, the part facing the twin atomic suns when they lit off, is scorched black and in places sculpted smooth, with aerials and comm antennae melted away . . . and radiation sensors show that he is now hot enough to kill an unprotected human who comes within touching distance.
My seismic sensors register the trembling undertrack, followed by the shrill peal of thunder thirty seconds after the blast. “Andrew! Are you okay?”
“Still . . . operational.” I can sense the struggle simply to formulate those words. His processing power must momentarily focus entirely on the matter of survival. “Tracking new wave . . . incoming . . .”
“I see them. I’m repositioning for a clear shot.”
But the walls of the valley block me. I can see the launchers now, still thermal-bright after their launch seconds ago, but the missiles themselves are terrain-following ground huggers and have vanished into the rock-shrouded cleft of Smoke Valley.
Andrew’s analyses of the missiles flickers through my combat center. They are five-meter rods of depleted uranium, incoming at hypervelocity. In the base of each projectile is a fission device of at least 25 kilotons. The rods are designed to penetrate even Bolo armor . . . with the pocket nukes slamming through the half-molten openings.
With his battlescreens down, Andrew is vulnerable . . . and I can do nothing.
I sense more missiles being swung into launch position at the Inshallah site. . . .
* * *
“God! What’s happening?” Lang demanded.
“Those aircraft launched tacnuke penetrators at Andrew. His battlescreens are down, and it’s going to take time to bring them up again. He’s got more penetrators coming in from the east. Looks like they’re trying to saturate his defenses.”
“Can the other Bolo—?”
“Trapped in that high-walled valley. He’s trying to maneuver to assist, but—”
“What . . . what can we do?”
“Not a God-damned thing, Colonel. We sit back and watch. . . .”
“The other one,” Khalid put in, staring at the map display. “Hank. He moves so quickly! It’s almost as though he feels what the first one feels.”
“I think that’s exactly right.” Martin glanced at the colonel, expecting a rebuke, but there was none. “They’re brothers. . . .”
* * *
In a sense, I feel what Andrew feels . . . relayed sensory data from those few external hull sensors that survived the nuclear storm. I see the incoming missiles now, feel myself maneuvering to bring the largest possible number of infinite-repeater turrets to bear.
“Fire your main weapon!” I call. A 90cm super-Hellbore discharge of approximately 2.25 megatons/second firepower might not engulf that entire cloud of incoming penetrators, but the sudden vacuum ripped out of atmosphere would destroy any survivors in the shock wave, fry even hardened electronics with EM induction, and melt delicate sensors through thermal effect. The missile cloud is beginning to disperse, however, each penetrator maneuvering separately in order to descend upon Andrew from a different direction. He must fire his Hellbore within the next 0.5 second or lose the opportunity.
“Fire! Fire!”
His reactions are sluggish, and I wonder if his operational centers have taken battle damage . . . but then he looses a Hellbore bolt, lighting up the murk-shrouded, nuke-torn landscape of the valley with a needle-thin sliver of starfire dragged from the heart of a sun and hurled at the incoming missiles.
Twenty-four missiles vaporize, and five more smash into the ground or Andrew’s tough hide, broken, slowed, or half molten. Eight, reacting more swiftly than expected from available flight performance data, have swung clear of the fusion bolt and the thunderously collapsing tunnel of vacuum in its wake and arc around to approach Andrew from eight different angles.
His infinite repeaters kill five . . .
His point-defense lasers kill two . . .
The last surviving penetrator comes in high, plunging down into Andrew’s main deck, twelve meters behind his primary weapon turret. Robbed of much of its kinetic energy by its high-G maneuver to avoid the Hellbore bolt, it strikes with only a fraction of the energy a five-meter rod of depleted uranium was designed to carry . . .
. . . but it strikes a tender spot where a meter of duralloy, ceramplast, and flintsteel alloys has been scraped from Andrew’s hide and the remainder left soft, partly molten in places, above a mere two meters of inner titanium-duralloy amalgam and the blue shimmer of his inner defensive screens.
The breach, a white-hot needle driven like a spike into Andrew’s back, is a tiny one . . . but the 25-kiloton nuclear explosion that follows spears a fraction of its unleashed fury into the gap, igniting plasma fires within . . . .
“Andrew . . . !”
My scream momentarily jams all military radio frequencies, and the audio output echoes from the rock cliffs around me. Our QDC link is snapped . . . yet in my virtual, inner world, the world I shared with him, I see him ablaze from within, consumed from the inside and the out by the starcore blaze of nuclear hell that engulfs him.
“Andrew . . . !”
Ice dislodged from the cliff tops by sonic concussion tumbles into the valley on all sides, but I ignore it, continuing my eastern rush.
I feel the flame burning inside me, a blue-white, devouring heat.
I sense the touch of targeting radar and lidar locks. I swing my 90cm Hellbore around, target the launcher complex, some eighteen kilometers away, and fire. . . .
* * *
Lieutenant Martin looked up from his console, pinning Lang with a look of cold, hard hatred. “Bolo of the Line NDR 0831-57 has been destroyed,” he said.
“God help us all,” Lang replied.
“God forgive us,” Martin said, correcting him. “I don’t think we’re in control of Hank any longer. . . .”
* * *
There are Enemy troops moving up the Buruj Pass, humanoids in heavy armor, laboring against the steep slope as they climb toward my position. I wonder if, perhaps, they are employing Marlborough’s Blenheim tactics against me, pinning my attention on Andrew while moving a heavy armored force to break through at a different location—my position.
A better comparison might be Marlborough’s victory at Ramillies, two years after Blenheim, another classic battle frequently wargamed by Andrew and myself. There, Marlborough conducted probing attacks against Villeroi’s left and right, feinted right, then swung the majority of his forces from right to left, shielding their movement from French eyes by moving them behind a fold in the ground behind the Anglo-Allied front. His final assault against the French right and center rolled back Villeroi’s flank, then broke it.
The Kezdai Enemy has adopted a similar strategy, moving a sizable force up the Al Buruj Pass while I was distracted by events elsewhere. They are thermally shielded and well-camouflaged, invisible to the military recon satellites far overhead . . . or to my far flung net of sensor drones. As I race down the steepening slope, movement sensors and lidar pick up thirty Enemy crawlers and a large force of armored soldiers on foot or mounted in hovercraft troop carriers.