Starship Liberator Page 13

  Straker brought it up on his HUD. “Fifty-seven of us are still kicking. We’re stretched out in a ragged band along Phase Line Charlie, approximately the boundary of the downtown. We want them to get everyone inside the most built-up area before we spring our trap.”

  “Yeah, but who’s trapping who?” Loco muttered.

  “Getting tired of that defeatism!” Chen snapped.

  “Hey, when facing certain death, I make jokes.”

  Straker broke in. “Can it, you two, and focus. The enemy will be here within the hour.”

  Speeding through everything was another advantage of mechsuiters over traditional ground-pounders. Their suits could maintain ninety KPH over the roughest terrain, with sprints up to a hundred-fifty. Unlike other heavy vehicles, they didn’t have to worry about curbs, barriers and the anti-tank obstacles the militia had deployed for defense.

  Thus, the mechsuiters had so far stayed comfortably ahead of the probing enemy armor. After losing several squads to ambush, the Hok infantry kept well back, waiting for their slower vehicles to provide cover and firepower.

  Straker considered tearing his way up inside a building to achieve a position of plunging fire, but he would have to break through ten or twelve floors to do it. Once sited, he would have to either retreat to the interior and down, or leap out and into the midst of the enemy.

  Maybe that wasn’t such a bad idea. He’d never considered it before, but it might be the surprise that would turn the tables.

  “Everyone have full jet tanks?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Ninety-five percent.”

  “Okay,” Straker said. “This is what we’re doing.”

  He explained his plan, and the others were incredulous.

  “You’re nucking futs, boss,” Loco said, but he spoke in an admiring rather than a protesting tone. “I love it.”

  “It’s the best chance we’ve got to get inside their lines.”

  “Should you suggest it up the chain?” Chen asked.

  Straker grunted. “I’ll shoot the XO a message.” He didn’t feel like talking right now, and the acting commander probably had a lot on his plate anyway. Still, when he got promoted, Straker vowed he’d drill his troopers in unconventional situations like the one they’d found themselves in today.

  Careful not to break holes in a skyscraper’s crystalline exterior, Straker, Chen, and Loco tunneled their way upward and made nests for themselves in snipers’ positions, with views down the major avenues the enemy armor would have to use.

  “Make sure you set your feet on the main load-bearing struts,” Straker reminded them. “And activate full jet assist and stabilization before you jump.”

  “Yes, mother,” Loco replied.

  “If I was your mother I’d give you a spanking,” Chen said.

  “There you go, man! Gotta get some good humor in you. I must be rubbing off.”

  “Don’t go rubbing anything in my direction.”

  Loco laughed, and then Chen did too.

  On his battlenet, which was now only updating intermittently, Straker saw the red spots of the enemy flow around and beneath them. Passive opticals let him watch platoons of armored vehicles probing through the streets while battlesuited Hok infantry tried to cover the heights, leaping from rooftop to rooftop on jump jets not so different from his own.

  Straker froze as a Hok squad flew past. One trooper seemed to look straight at him through the two layers of window crystal, but he moved on.

  “We’ll wait as long as we can,” Straker breathed, as if speaking quietly would matter within their stealth-encrypted comlink. “Maybe we can bag us a mobile command post. That might disrupt their advance.”

  “Well, we gotta try something big, that’s for sure,” replied Loco.

  “Sounds good to me,” said Chen.

  “I figured you guys didn’t wanna live forever, anyway,” Straker said.

  “Uh oh,” said Loco. “When the boss cracks a joke, I know we’re in deep kimchee.”

  Light tanks gave way to hovers in standard Hok deployment, and then missile tracks. Straker’s HUD showed additional lines of combat units approaching after the usual doctrinal separation. A mobile command post might be lurking within the dead space, or it might be staying well back.

  “If we don’t see an MCP or get the go-ahead, we’ll initiate as the last of these missile tracks get here and hit them from the rear.” Straker’s battlenet updated, and the order to initiate the mass ambush came through. “Three, two,—”

  “MCP in sight,” interrupted Chen. “Two o’clock to you.”

  “Right. Two o’clock, Chen, you take point and we’ll flank you.”

  “It has LADAs with it, sir…”

  “Dammit!” Straker said.

  Laser Air-Defense Array vehicles provided interlocking beam fire using close-in robotic turrets. Without penetration aids, there was no way the mechsuiters could jump from this height and drop on the enemy like they’d planned. The LADAs would treat them as airborne targets and, at point-blank range, could blind and severely damage them long before they reached the ground.

  “Missiles?” said Loco.

  “I hate to use them as decoys.”

  “Use me as a decoy, then,” Chen said.

  “What?”

  “Look, if I break cover first, they’ll all snap-shot me. We’ll use their own reaction times against them. We set our remaining missiles to launch a fraction of a second afterward, in direct-fire mode instead of pop-up, one per LADA. You guys take out any of them that survive, then nail the MCP.”

  Straker replied, “Chen, that might work, but at best your suit will be ruined. You’ll probably be cooked by three dozen lasers.”

  “I’ll set my ejection parameters to punch me out if things get too hot.”

  “There has to be another way!” Straker said.

  “There’s no time to think about it, sir. We’ve got about thirty seconds before we lose our best chance.”

  Straker came to a hard decision. “We’ll all hit them at once. That will split their fire.”

  “If we do that, we’ll lose our missiles as they launch. No, you have to use me as a decoy.”

  An idea blossomed full-blown in Straker’s mind. “No, we don’t. We have to use your suit as decoy. Dismount now, Chen, but maintain tele-operation. Hurry! Suicide your suit directly at the MCP.”

  “Leave my suit?” The horror at the unthinkable in Chen’s voice came through clearly.

  “Better than being the main course at a laser barbecue. Do it now! That’s a direct order!”

  “Roger wilco, sir. Dismounting now.” Chen initiated the sequence that let him exit his Foehammer, leaving him standing in the carpeted fiftieth-floor corner office of some corporate bigwig, wearing nothing but his survival rig. “Ready.”

  “Almost too late…” Straker said. “Two, one, go.”

  Chen’s suit leaped straight out, bursting through skyscraper windows never designed to hold back fifty tons of duralloy. A tenth of a second later, Straker and Loco followed, their target-locked missiles firing.

  As expected, Chen’s rockets never made it out of the zone of death. Thirty-six lasers, focused by ultra-quick mirrors, speared his suit and everything attached to it. Blazing with heat, the Foehammer’s external fittings melted and some ignited. The missiles’ warheads detonated as they left the rails.

  The suit itself, though mortally wounded, flew true. It headed directly toward the mobile command post and its flock of escorts. Gatlings, shotguns, and every other defensive weapon targeted the suit in an attempt to bring down the threat identified by the enemy computers.

  Those artificial brains outsmarted themselves, as Straker had hoped. Before they could register the fact they’d grossly over-allocated their firepower to the initial target, and before the Hok controllers could override their systems, the squad’s last six antitank missiles streaked past the laser phalanx.

  Five struck home, turning a maniple of ligh
tly armored LADAs into burning wrecks. The final LADA exploded with the impact of Straker’s force-cannon bolt. “Kill the MCP, Loco!” he roared, hosing the big crawler with gatling fire as he waited for his main weapon to recharge.

  Chen’s wrecked Foehammer crashed next to the MCP. He would have been dead had he not dismounted. Straker had no time to congratulate himself, though, as he flipped end for end and triggered his landing jets to keep from joining Chen’s suit in a smoking hole.

  As he hit the ground running, he saw one metal end of the MCP crumple under the impact of Loco’s primary bolt. The crawler was big, though, over fifty meters long, and compartmented for survivability. It had been hurt, but it would take several more shots before they could count it as destroyed.

  Incredibly, a few humanoids dragged themselves out of the damaged section. One ran, burning from head to toe, and threw itself into the mud in hopes of putting out the flames.

  Straker fired one precise gatling round into the figure and blew it apart, then another, then another, waiting for his force-cannon to recharge. He felt no remorse about gunning them down. They deserved no mercy, for they gave none to the Hundred Worlds.

  Belatedly, obscurant charges triggered off the MCP, adding to the smoke and dust of the battlefield. Straker took this stroke of luck as a sign of fate. It would hide the entire scene from the enemy fleet overhead for several minutes.

  Finally, his capacitor telltale turned green and, in the relative calm of this storm’s eye, he aimed carefully at the crawler’s engine compartment and narrowed the aperture of his force-cannon for maximum armor piercing. The plasma bolt speared into the enemy power plant. As he’d intended, its hydrogen-deuterium fuel supply ignited.

  Even then, the MCP remained, but its effectiveness had been eliminated. With no power to move and several compartments breached, it couldn’t command a Youth Brigade troop, much less an armored division.

  Straker yearned for a satchel charge or limpet mine, but those had been used up long ago. Perhaps…

  “Chen, you read?”

  “Here, boss. I can’t see you for all that crap, but I detect hovers and infantry circling back, and missile tracks reorienting on your position. You got about one minute before they land on you like a ton of bricks.”

  “Understood. Do you still have a good battlenet datalink with your suit?”

  “I do, but it’s nothing but a processor and a power plant anymore.”

  “That’s enough.” Straker told him what to do, then shifted to Loco. “Help me with Chen’s suit.”

  “It’s a total loss, boss. We gotta get out of here.”

  “Shut up and help me, dammit.”

  “Right-o.” Loco grabbed one side of the mangled Foehammer and Straker the other. “And do what?”

  “Shove it under the MCP, between the two side tracks.”

  “Whatever you say.” Loco dragged the thing and, with Straker’s help, forced it halfway beneath the command track. “That’s it.”

  “Chen, do it,” Straker said.

  “Doing it now.”

  Straker waved a massive arm at Loco. “Follow me to the river!”

  They ran.

  Behind them, Chen’s suit gave its all for the war effort as its fusion plant overloaded, cracking the MCP in half and sending wreckage flying in arcs a kilometer long. The explosion further obscured their section of the battlefield.

  Straker led Loco perpendicular to two enemy lines—those turning back and the next wave advancing—which gave them temporary respite from the ground units.

  The fleet overhead, however, was a different matter. Spikes fell like thunderbolts as the mechsuiters dodged left and right at full speed. Particle beams blasted gouts of steam from the river next to them.

  “There!” Straker pointed at a sports stadium. “It’s our only chance.”

  They’d almost reached the massive complex when Straker felt pain flare in his right foot, and he stumbled. He turned the incipient fall into a roll and managed to scramble under the concrete overhang of the super-sized building.

  The bombardment ceased.

  Straker looked down to see his suit’s right leg end in a stump. A spike had taken it off at the ankle. “Shit,” he said.

  “Yeah, for sure,” Loco agreed.

  “I can still fight. I just can’t move fast,” Straker said. “We’ll have to make our stand here.”

  “Two Foehammers? We won’t hold them off for long. Not static, like this.”

  Straker took a position of cover behind a reinforced wall, where he could see back the way they’d come. In the near distance, hovers spread out to the flanks while a line of infantry advanced deliberately, sacrificial lambs. Behind them, missile tracks sited themselves. They’d fire their suit-killers as soon as they located and targeted the two mechsuiters. That would be the beginning of the end.

  “Got a better idea?” he asked.

  Loco sucked in a long breath. “Nope. What’s the tactical situation?”

  Straker almost didn’t want to look. He couldn’t imagine good news, despite their destruction of the MCP. When he pulled up the display, the results were better than he’d feared, worse than he’d hoped.

  He transmitted the details to Loco, and to Chen listening back at the financial center. “Thirty-one suits left,” he said. “The two lead Hok divisions are shattered, but their third is at full strength and moving in, and they have reserves after that. We’re still inflicting heavy casualties, but it’s only a matter of time… time we don’t have. If not for the strikes from overhead, we’d have a chance, but every time we move…” He stuck out the stump of his suit’s leg in illustration.

  “Um, guys?” said Chen. “I think I’m done for. I’m hiding as deep in as I can, but my sensors show Hok battlesuiters searching the building. They must know I’m here. I’m gonna go EMCON. Maybe I’ll get lucky.”

  Straker cleared his throat. “Good luck, Chen.”

  “See you on the other side, brother,” said Loco. “Survive with honor. Oh, and keep some lubrication handy. I hear they go for the pretty ones like you.”

  Chen didn’t respond.

  Straker reduced his comlink power to minimum. “Just us now, Loco. You can give up on jerking Chen around.”

  “But boss, it’s so much fun.” He sighed. “How long until our fleet arrives?”

  Straker cleared his throat. “You can read a chrono as well as I can. Nine hours. No way we’re holding out for nine hours.”

  “Ah… Derek?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Remember when they spiked our houses back on Oceanus?”

  “How can I forget?”

  “Yeah, sorry... I meant, remember how we hid in the food warehouse?”

  “Yep.”

  “We could try that here. Set our suits for auto-fight, send them running as far away as possible while we try to evade. Find a basement. Maybe get into the river to hide our IR sigs.”

  Derek considered his friend’s suggestion, rejected it. “No. You can if you want to. That’s not me. I always knew I’d die on a battlefield, killing Hok. It’s fate. I’ll be happy to join the Celestial Legion.”

  “You really believe in that stuff?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Better than thinking it all ends here.”

  “Guess so.” Loco shifted over to park his suit next to Straker’s and sat, back to the same wall, two giants relaxing. He pointed in the direction of the cautiously advancing enemy. “What do you think? Five minutes?”

  “I give us ten, maybe fifteen. They know they’ve won. They’ll do it deliberately, by the book. At this point they’ll want to minimize casualties and infrastructure damage.”

  “Infrastructure, infrastructure. It’s a bunch of stuff. Is that what we’re dying for, Derek? Some bureaucrat’s balance sheet? Some war-billionaire’s mansion?”

  Straker shook his head, his suit mimicking the motion. “No. We’re doing it for the people, to keep them safe. We’re defending ourselves. Just look at t
his. They invaded us, invaded the Hundred Worlds, when they could have lived with us in peace. They enslave our civilians and make them work until they die of exhaustion. They take our planets, turn them into production centers and use them against us. We have to fight.”

  “I know. I know. But I’d barely even heard of Corinth until this op. Hard to care when I don’t know these people.”

  “They’re human beings. They’re citizens, doing their jobs like we are. That’s what matters.” Straker slapped his friend’s armored shoulder with a ton of mechanical gauntlet. “They’ll remember us.”

  “They’ll remember you, maybe. You’re the best to ever pilot a Foehammer. Most kills, best record.” Loco chuckled. “Assault Captain Derek Straker, Champion of the Hundred Worlds. They’ll make holovids about you. You’ll have a Heroic Action Figure. If I’m lucky they’ll make one of your faithful sidekick Loco.”

  “Ever wonder why they only make showvids about dead heroes?” Straker asked.

  “I don’t wonder. I know why. It’s because dead heroes can’t refute the bullshit they show.”

  Straker sighed. “I’m beginning to think you’re right.”

  “You always did buy too much of the party line, Derek.”

  “You don’t believe in defending the Hundred Worlds?”

  “I believe in you, Derek. I believe in us, in two brothers-in-arms. That’s what I believe in.” Loco raised his chin to peer at the enemy forming up out of easy range. “But it ain’t gonna matter. We’re goners.”

  “You can still try to escape. Rejoin what’s left of the regiment, or hide until Fleet comes back. I’ll cover you.”

  Loco turned to slap Straker’s faceplate. “That’s why I love you and hate you, man. This straight-arrow routine. We’re gonna die because you can’t stand to live with defeat. But I couldn’t stand to live if I left you here.”

  “Thanks, Loco… and sorry.”

  “That’s enough bromance for me,” Loco said, rolling to a crouch. “Time to go out in a blaze of glory.”

  “One more thing, though.”