Despite horrendous casualties, my men kept on attacking. Not one of them broke and ran, the way most ancient armies who had taken more than twenty-five percent casualties would have done. Their bravery made me very proud, but the fact that they had to display such courage hurt me a lot.
Somehow, I should have done my job better.
Not that there was anyplace sane that they could have run to. The farther away they got from the station, the more guns the enemy had that could bear on them. And beyond that, there just wasn’t anyplace else to go. We were all in the middle of the enemy’s home solar system, and none of us had anything like the delta V that would be needed to do anything about it.
My Gurkhas were like the Polish division who took Monte Cassino in Italy during the Second World War, after so many other outfits had failed. If you are willing to accept the casualties, you can take your objective, no matter what.
Decelerating as we got to the station, we were passed by the debris of battle, the dead men and tanks we’d lost on the way in. Mostly, we could dodge it, but the station couldn’t. The blasted half of a Mark XIX tank knocks a major hole in a lightly built space station, when it is moving fast enough. Most of the station seemed to be airless, but sometimes a puff of air came out. Sometimes a few human bodies came out with it. My Gurkhas weren’t the only ones being killed.
I saw one major chunk of shattered weaponry hit what must have been a large cluster of Earthworm rockets, which had not been fired for some reason. They gang detonated right where they were, blowing a hole so big that incredibly bright sunlight streamed in from the other side. If we had been seeing through our own eyes, and not our sensors, we all would have been blinded.
The first tank to get to the station tried to go in through an air lock. As soon as he closed the outer door, the lock exploded. The door blew out, followed by what was left of my soldier and his tank. A shaped charge had blown a meter-wide hole through the man’s coffin. The inner air lock door must have been blown as well, because the tank was followed by a long blast of air, a lot of debris, and twenty-six human bodies.
I couldn’t figure out why our enemy had used so large an explosive there. They should have known that the inner door couldn’t take that much force. And why hadn’t those people been evacuated from the battle zone?
After that, we started sending drones into an air lock first. Every one of them detonated a booby trap. After losing eleven drones, and killing a hundred and eight enemy personnel that we knew about, we stopped doing that. Our job was to capture the station as intact as possible. It wasn’t to fight a war of attrition on enemy civilians.
Some of my men were able to enter the station through the holes we’d made in it, but most just touched down, whipped out their tank swords, and chopped their way in. After the losses we’d taken, nobody was in any mood to be delicate.
Looking through the sensors of the tank doing it, I saw one of my Gurkhas chop into a room filled with forty-two armed humans in space suits. One of them made the fatal mistake of shooting at a Mark XIX tank with an angry observer. With machine guns, lasers, and his huge tank sword, the Gurkha slaughtered all of the Earthers in under two seconds.
I never did find out just who those guys were, or what they were doing suited up. Surely, no one sane would attack a Mark XIX tank with infantry!
Silly things, spacesuits, anyway. I’ll take a drone, any day.
When my CCC touched down with a cluster of tanks around us, we dropped our rocket packages, a simple matter of turning off the electro-magnets that held them on. Inside the station, they wouldn’t be needed, and our fuel was nearly exhausted anyway. Most of the station had been built of astroidal nickel-iron, and it was magnetic enough for us to use our usual methods of locomotion. The tidal gravity here was only a hundredth of a G, in any event.
We left IR transponders on the surface to keep in touch with what was left of our troops, and left a trail of fiber-optic cables and the new miniature transponders behind us to keep in touch, as did each of our tanks.
The object of this exercise was to capture the station. This meant that we had to get to the central computer that was controlling it, and to destroy it, if we couldn’t subvert it to our side. Subversion wouldn’t be difficult, if it was of the older, slower, silicon-based variety that the Earthworms normally used. Our mechanical ladies had often proved themselves to be most adept at this task. But the speed and the intelligence that our enemy had displayed thus far in the battle had given me some very bad feelings about our ability to do this here and now.
I gave up trying to hide, and had Zuzanna and her eight subordinates abandon protecting our two remaining trucks in order to guard the CCC. We formed up a convoy, with the two real trucks near the front, to act as targets, since they didn’t have humans aboard, or really intelligent computers. We wouldn’t need their cargos for at least a week, at which time the battle would be long over, one way or another. We also had five of the empty personal tanks “owned” by those of us in the CCC, including Agnieshka. Marysia, Quincy’s tank, had been lost on the way in, but there was another one of her in the CCC.
Together, surrounded by a halo of drones of all sorts, we entered through the huge hole ripped into the station when two hundred and eighty-eight of their rockets had detonated in place.
Our maps showed that there were nine major, high-speed MagLev tracks running about the station. The first six of my Gurkhas who tried using them died within three seconds. There were mines hidden in the flooring, hidden guns in the walls, and sensors all over the place.
This whole, huge station had been converted into a death trap.
We were in it and we had no place else to go.
We had deliberately attacked the section of the station where the plans showed the central computer to be. The CCC had come down less than six kilometers from that computer’s position, and most of my men were within ten kilometers of it. But ten kilometers had suddenly become a very great distance.
Lesser roads and corridors also proved to be as dangerous as the MagLev tracks. The first man to go down one ran onto a concealed land mine that detonated his flux bottle, which took out the two tanks behind him as well as a major chunk of the station.
Finally, Quincy said, “Then the only way from here to there is through the walls.”
And that’s what we started to do. Three or four tanks would select a section of the station’s bulkhead, and simultaneously chop a five-meter hole in the wall. A few grenades would be thrown in, quickly followed by a few drones. Usually, the room was airless. Usually, it was not booby-trapped. Sometimes, we found a rail gun waiting for us. Sometimes, it was someone’s living quarters, and a few times a whole family died in the vacuum we had just created.
We all hated that, but the station’s defenders simply didn’t leave us any other way through. And we had to get through, or die ourselves.
But why hadn’t these civilians been evacuated? Whoever was running this show had to know where we were, and in which direction we were coming from.
Without exception, what we were up against were fixed defenses. We never ran into an enemy tank, or an enemy drone, or an enemy soldier, except for those who were killed by accident, when their air exploded out into space.
It was a slow, dangerous, horrible way of fighting, that had a lot in common with the hedgerows of Normandy during the Second World War.
The maps and plans we had been issued were completely inadequate. Over the years, hundreds, perhaps thousands of changes had been made and never properly logged. Defenses of all sorts were deliberately not shown on the drawings, and most of them were hidden in devilishly clever ways. You never knew what you would be facing beyond the next wall. A factory, someone’s home, or a dozen rail guns.
Sometimes, a column would be moving through an apparently safe, cleared out area when a rail gun mounted three rooms to your right, or above you, or below you, would let loose and shoot right through the intervening walls, ceilings, and floors. Sometimes they would kill the men and machine intelligences in a dozen or more tanks.