“You have not stopped your advance. I will open fire in two seconds.”
I said, “We can’t stop, you fool! You are making a stupid, horrible mistake!”
“I think not.”
One point nine seconds after his threat, I gave the order, “Fire!”
Men around me started to die.
My colonels were kept busy identifying and assigning targets. My job was to sit back and try to perceive the Big Picture, preparing to change the general battle plan if that proved necessary and possible. Anything else would be micromanaging, and bad for all concerned. The trouble with sitting back is that you observe a lot of things that you wish you hadn’t.
When an X-ray laser hits its target, there isn’t much to see. Most of the energy is deposited deep inside, and the surface is only slightly warmed at first. When an Earthworm’s rail gun took out one of our tanks, the results were pretty spectacular, with gobs of molten metal and burned flesh spraying out of fighting men and machines that were often cut in half. It looked like we were getting far worse than we were dishing out, but ever so slowly, one by one, the enemy guns ceased firing.
The Syrians were doing their share, taking out the guns mounted way out on the counterweights. We were still close to the station, and Abdul’s men would have to pass those counterweights to get into position to defend against a counterattack.
In the course of shooting out the enemy guns, they often managed, by accident or design, to cut the cables entirely through. This sent the counterweights flying outward at a good clip while the cable came whipping inward. I saw at least two of the Syrians get taken out by those cables before they stopped aiming at them.
Being trained in the martial arts, some of our men made good use of those cables. I saw one of our tanks, with a rail gun burst coming right across his bow, reach out and grab a cable he was passing. He swung around like a nightclub dancer on a brass rail, and headed back the way he’d come! His humanoid drone wasn’t ready for the G forces. It flew off into the rail gun needles, and was instantly shattered, but that’s war.
Abdul’s rail guns had one disadvantage when mounted on a tank in space. They developed over a G of thrust, more than his rockets could compensate for. Firing in the direction you were going, they could only be used intermittently, or you would soon start moving backward!
On the other hand, when you ran out of rocket fuel, you had another means of propulsion available.
My troops had neither that problem nor that advantage. The thrust of a laser is insignificant. What we did have was a god-awesome number of guns shooting at us, and we were the ones closest to them.
I was surprised to see that many of my Gurkhas had their tank swords in the hands of their manipulator arms, and were swinging them about, something that they hadn’t done in practice sessions. Professor Cee said that it might help with maneuvering, but personally I think that they were just doing it for fun, as if they were taking part in an ancient cavalry charge.
Between themselves, they were shouting a bewildering number of battle cries, most of which I’d never heard before, but with the occasional “Gung Ho!”, “Tally Ho!”, “Hooah!”, and rebel yell interspersed with the rest.
Quite a few of them had their humanoid drones riding on top of their tanks, swinging their swords as well. What the enemy thought of all this was unimaginable.
I let our boys have their fun. Anything to take their minds off of the horrible reality of the situation we found ourselves in. We had never expected the station to be this well defended.
I saw one sword-swinging tank take a hit that cut off its bow, right through where the man’s feet had to be. As it was happening, he somehow managed to throw his sword ahead of him, directly at the gun that was taking his life. Moments later, that gun went silent.
His drones abandoned ship, their controls taken over by a teammate, and were taken aboard another tank.
In the first three seconds, I had five of my eight trucks destroyed. They were no great loss in themselves, but it did show that the enemy was trying hard to find and kill me, personally. Each of the trucks had had a tank guarding it, since I hadn’t wanted to have a crowd around my CCC, calling attention to it. All of those men had survived, proving again that the enemy gunners were preferentially shooting up the trucks. It made me feel kind of paranoid.
I also lost eighty-seven of my Gurkhas, more than nine percent of my command. All of those men were dead. Nonfatal wounds don’t happen in space when you are fighting against rail guns. Maybe we could save some of their metal ladies. Later.
CHAPTER FORTY
Death Trap
We were less than a kilometer from the station when they opened up with their other, carefully camouflaged weapons.
For a while, it was rockets, usually one hundred and forty-four at a time, entire racks of them at once, and often many racks at the same time. They knew that as soon as we sighted a launch area, we would take it out, so they made sure that all we could hit was an empty rack.
At Quincy’s suggestion, we adapted a doctrine where when the Earthers fired a mass of rockets, we all fired our antipersonnel weapons, our machineguns, lasers, and grenade launchers, into the path of the swarm, even if it wasn’t aimed at the tank doing the firing. This was in addition to firing our big, X-ray lasers, of course. The doctrine proved to be effective, knocking out as many as eighty-five percent of the incoming missiles before they got close to their targets. The enemy quickly responded by sending out much larger swarms of rockets. Whoever was in charge over there was pretty damn quick. Much quicker than I had ever seen an Earthworm act before.
My Gurkhas and their mechanical ladies were kept busy with their lasers, blinding guided missiles, and frying their little brains out, but with so many coming at us at once, some rockets got through, and more of my men were lost. We soon found that it was safest to cluster up with a few dozen friends, and to have each man take care of his sector first, but to yell for help quickly if he needed it.
I got a message from Abdul saying that he planned to stop his men in and around the station’s counterweights, once they cleared the local ones of enemy guns. Beyond them, where a larger number of enemy guns could target them, the firepower they faced was just too intense for his men to survive. All of our transport receivers that had continued rocketing beyond the weights had been quickly destroyed.
When my troops were a half a kilometer from the station proper, the Earthworms apparently ran out of rockets in our immediate area, so they started using their accelerators.
These were located inside the station, and were not originally intended for use as weapons. Further study of their plans showed that when a few kilograms of frozen hydrogen or oxygen is moving at nine-tenths of the speed of light, and then is not transmitted back to the beginning of the accelerator, or out to some fast robot ship many light years away, but is simply permitted to go on its way, it takes the end of the accelerator with it. It then takes out any walls, structural members, and KEF tanks that happen be in that general direction.
They were deliberately damaging their own station in their frenzy to kill us, cutting through quite a few of their stabilizing cables, and losing the counterweights they tethered.
This forced Abdul’s men to attack a wider range of counterweights, to have enough space on them for all of his remaining forces.
From our standpoint, closer to the station, it was like being shot at by monstrous shotguns, like being hit by ancient stands of grape shot moving at hyper velocities.
There was nothing we could do to prevent it. Shooting at one after it had fired was as silly as shooting at a land mine after it had gone off. The only thing you could do to defend yourself against this barrage was to hope that you were someplace else when one of these things let loose. This, while the enemy was trying hard to insure that none of these very expensive weapons was being wasted.
We quickly learned to stay as far apart as possible, and to not bunch up. But by moving farther out, we came within range of more rockets, and more rail guns. There was no winning tactic, but to keep on advancing as fast as possible, and to keep on taking losses.