Battlespace (29 page)

“Mike one-one, Memphis,” a voice shot back. “Negative on evac. Repeat, negative on evac.”

Shit. There were no medibugs with the MIEU, he knew, and he figured they didn't have any other aerospace-mobile vehicles in the battle zone yet that could ferry wounded. But at least they might send a couple of guys with a stretcher….

He looked around, assessing the situation.

And it was then that he realized that he and his two patients were not alone.

It looked like a huge, inverted pie plate three meters wide, jet black and massive, hovering just above the strange, alien surface of the Wheel less than thirty meters away.

And if that ugly snub-nosed projection was some kind of a weapon, it was aimed directly at them.

2
APRIL
2170

HM2 Phillip Lee
Alpha Company, First Platoon,
B Section
AO Cincinnati, Sirius Stargate
1311 hours, Shipboard time

Lee froze, staring at the hovering war machine. The only weapon he had was his underpowered LC-2132 laser carbine. He hadn't been following the radio chatter, but he knew the guys had been talking about taking out hostiles with Onager AT missiles and he very much doubted that his little Sunbeam would more than warm a patch on the menacing thing's ebon hull.

But it was all he had. He didn't see either Houston's or Tremkiss's 2120, and he sure as hell didn't have time to look for them.

Why hadn't it fired?

“Someone in Alpha-One!” he called. His voice was shaking. “Anyone! This is Doc Lee! I got a situation here!”

“Gotcha spotted on the map, Doc,” Gunny Dunne's voice replied instantly. “Whatcha got?”

“Two wounded and a fucking flying tank, thirty meters away! It's…it's just hovering there! It hasn't fired…”

“Get down and stay down, Doc!” Dunne shouted back. “Help's on the way!”

Suddenly the monster started floating forward.

Lee didn't actually think through what he did next. He simply acted. His first priority was protecting his two patients, and the only thing that occurred to him was trying to distract that thing, maybe lead it away until the rest of the company could rally.

Rising to his feet, he stood motionless for a second, then lunged to his left, out of the crater and away from Houston and Tremkiss. The machine pivoted, keeping its weapon aimed at the corpsman. Lee reached up behind his shoulder and unhooked his carbine from its carry clip. He didn't need to aim; he pointed and fired as he took another dive to his left.

Probably the only thing that saved Lee in that instant was the fact that he was so close to the enemy combat machine, close enough that even a small movement on his part translated as a large arc of motion for the machine to keep its weapon trained on him. He hit the ground and rolled clumsily just as the weapon fired. Static roared in his headset, and he felt a wave of heat brush past him, accompanied by a tingling pins-and-needles sensation gone as swiftly as it came.

From flat on his belly, Lee raised his carbine a second time, hoping that the thing's weapon might be a vulnerable point in its hide….

CPL John Garroway
Alpha Company, First Platoon,
B Section
AO Cincinnati, Sirius Stargate
1311 hours, Shipboard time

Garroway and the other two in his fire team were fighting for their lives.

They'd been making their way along the top of a long, narrow plateau, a kind of ridge or broad wall across the face of their sector of the Wheel, homing on Houston's and Tremkiss's suit beacons. They were still at least a hundred meters away, however, when two massive Wiggler vehicles seemed to detach themselves from the black mass of the broad valley below the plateau and started moving up-slope toward them.

“Targets!” Cavaco yelled. “Paint 'em, Sis!”

Garroway, Cavaco, and Geisler took aim, letting Sissy paint the nearest target with an aiming-point reticle. He steadied the red aim-point dot of his 2120 inside the triangle, held it…and then Sissy triggered his weapon.

There was a flash, and a spray of hot debris, but the enemy vehicle kept coming. The shot hadn't even slowed the monster.

All three men ducked behind the lip of the ridge top and shifted left. The enemy's answering particle beam bolt shrilled just over the ridge in a burst of hard static.

“Jesus!” Geisler cried over the company channel. “What's Doc doing?”

From this new vantage point, Garroway could see down the shoulder of the ridge to a long, narrow slash in the Wheel surface a hundred meters away. IFF beacons marked three Marines in green; two were flashing, indicating they were wounded. The company data net IDed the wounded men as Houston and Tremkiss, the third as Doc Lee.

A red icon marked a third enemy vehicle, seventy meters from Garroway's position, thirty from the corpsman and the two wounded Marines. It was moving toward the trio, turning to bring its weapon to bear. Garroway snapped his 2120 to his shoulder, taking aim.

CCN
INTERRUPT: LOW PRIORITY TARGET
flashed in red across the top of Garroway's HUD, and the weapon failed to lock.
Shit!

“Insufficient firepower available to successfully engage chosen target,” a woman's voice said over his headset. “Redirect fire as advised.” A flashing arrow appeared in his visual field, pointing right, telling him where to find the more urgent target.

He knew that two other enemy vehicles were much closer, and posed an immediate threat to the fire team. But sometimes you simply did
not
take orders from a fucking machine.

“Sissy! Override fire priority!” he screamed over the company channel. “
Repeat, override fire priority
!”

The flashing warnings winked off. Garroway fired into the rear armor of the distant war machine, but without visible effect.

“CCN!” Cavaco called. “Override protocol Foxtrot Alpha one-one! Link us in and repeat salvo!”

Obediently, a red triangle appeared on the rear of the target vehicle, as Garroway bumped the image magnification up to times-fifty. Garroway slipped his aim point into the reticle and, an instant later, Sissy triggered his weapon. He kept the 2120 on target, however, and let Sissy continue to fire it again and again, as fast as the weapon would cycle.

The Wheel defenders, most of them circular in shape like inverted dinner plates, appeared to be armored equally on all sides, unlike the tanks Marines had battled for the last couple of centuries in more conventional wars. Evidently, there weren't enough Marines with a direct line of sight to the same patch of the target's hull to ensure a burn-through and a kill, so Cavaco had directed Sissy to hold the lock and keep firing, trying to elevate the firepower of three Marines to that of eight.

Normally, that tactic was less efficient than having the CCN combine the fire of eight or more Marines in a single instant's volley. The target was moving, after all, and the explosion of vapor from the area where the laser pulses were striking would tend to scatter successive shots as effectively as an anti-laser aerosol fog.

But at the moment, three Marines were all that were avail
able. Garroway kept his 2120 on target for as long as he could, despite the target's movement, despite the blurring haze of vaporizing metal. Under his imaging system's magnification, it looked like they might be punching through….

HM2 Phillip Lee
Alpha Company, First Platoon,
B Section
AO Cincinnati, Sirius Stargate
1311 hours, Shipboard time

Lee fired his underpowered carbine into the bulk of the hovering monster time after time, with absolutely no effect. If he was hitting the muzzle—if, indeed, the muzzle was a weak point—he couldn't tell. The war machine was closer now, ten meters, getting closer….

Suddenly, miraculously, the thing halted its advance, hovered for a moment, then rotated in place, a full one-eighty that brought its rear armor into view. Lee could see a ragged gash there, close to the vehicle's rim, that glowed a dull red at optical wavelengths, and a bright yellow under infrared.

The thing was hurt. Was that why it had broken off its attack? He didn't know, but the damaged spot offered him a new target for his carbine. At almost point-blank range, he took aim and began slamming bolt after bolt of coherent light into the vehicle's wounded hide. As it continued to move away, he stood up and advanced, carbine at his shoulder, continuing to fire until his weapon's computer flashed a warning to his HUD:
PWR CELL DEPLETION
.

The weapon went dead in his hands. With a scream he flung the useless carbine at the retreating war machine, saw it strike and bounce harmlessly aside.

But the machine continued to move away. Lee and his patients were in the clear, at least for the moment.

“C'mon, you guys,” he said, returning to the crater where Tremkiss and Houston were still lying on the ground. He knew Houston couldn't hear him, but that didn't matter. “Let's vam the hell out of here!”

Mark VIII vac armor had an inset catch ring on the back, just below the helmet seal, used for holding it upright on a storage rack or during maintenance. It also had a reel of carbonweave line inside the backpack unit, like heavy-gauge fishing line for use as a tether in zero-G operations. Reaching into Tremkiss's back unit, he dragged a three-meter length from the reel, snicked it off with his scalpel, and secured one end to Tremkiss's catch ring, the other end to the ring on Houston's suit. Standing, he put the lanyard over his left shoulder, across his torso, and under his right arm, leaned forward, and started to move.

One man together with his armor massed over 140 kilograms. Surface gravity on this part of the Wheel ran around .9 G, so Lee was still trying to drag a dead weight of over 250 kilograms—a full quarter of a ton.

He managed one agonizing step…then another, but he couldn't get a good enough purchase on the Wheel's surface, even when he clicked on his boot magnets in an attempt to get better traction. He tried another step, struggling, pulling, and then he collapsed, panting hard, sweat fogging his visor, legs shrieking with the strain. He…couldn't…do…it….

Think, damn it!

Thermalslick. He was trying to think of what he was missing, and all he could think of was that botched training exercise at the Mare Imbrium a few lifetimes ago. His debriefing had emphasized, in loving detail, the proper use of a Navy-issue thermalslick.

Dropping his makeshift harness, he fished the wallet-sized packet out of his kit bag, ripped off the cover, and unfolded it, silver side up. The material could reflect heat and light, or drink it in. The black side possessed an upper coating of
buckyball carbon that rendered it very nearly frictionless, at least until that layer wore away.

He tried to roll Houston onto the blanket, but had to stop when he found that some of the nanoseal he'd used on the Marine's leg had bonded to the surface of the Wheel.

Shit, and shit again!

But it only took a moment to apply a smear of nanotech dissolving agent to free the bond—carefully to avoid opening the suit and the wound again—and then Houston was free. Together, he and Tremkiss manhandled Houston's armor onto the spread-out rectangle of foil, and then Tremkiss rolled onto it as well, lying partly across Houston's body. The blanket was really only big enough for one, but with Tremkiss clinging tightly to Houston's armor, they made a small-enough package to fit—barely.

Turning again, Lee picked up the fishing-line harness, leaned into it, and pulled. One step…then another…then another…

The two wounded Marines together still massed a quarter of a ton…but once Lee got them moving, they moved. Slowly, awkwardly…but they
moved
.

CPL John Garroway
Alpha Company, First Platoon,
B Section
AO Cincinnati, Sirius Stargate
1312 hours, Shipboard time

The injured Wheel defender had turned away from Doc and the wounded Marines, but now it was climbing up the slope toward Garroway and the rest of his fire team. To make matters worse, the pair of vehicles they'd ignored a moment ago—overriding the CCN's control so they could help Doc—were now breasting the ridge top a scant ten meters
away. They were coming up side by side, angled to keep their bellies parallel to the slope beneath them, giving Garroway a view of their smooth, black undersides.

Was the armor thinner there? “Sissy! Lock us on!”

Once again in control of the fire team's weapons, the CCN AI painted a red triangle on the belly of the monster to the right. Garroway took aim…cursing wildly beneath his breath as he waited for other Marine weapons to come online….

And then Sissy fired his weapon and eight others simultaneously. The armor
was
thinner on the keels of those hovering nightmares, and the burn-through erupted as a savage, silent blast of vapor and hot debris that knocked Garroway off his feet and sent him sprawling onto his back.

The targeted war machine slammed suddenly to the ground, canted at an angle, its weapon uselessly probing the sky. Its twin slid over the lip of the ridge beside it, its weapon dropping to take aim at the three blast-scattered Marines.

Rolling onto his stomach, Garroway aimed his laser rifle. “Sissy! Gimme a lock!”

“Insufficient firepower available to successfully engage chosen target,” Sissy's voice replied with a maddening lack of emotion. “Recommend immediate E and E to avoid hostile fire….”

“
Fuck you!
” Garroway yelled. Springing to his feet, he dropped his 2120 and charged forward, rushing the oncoming machine. He was already so close to the drifting behemoth it couldn't pivot fast enough to bring its weapon to bear. Garroway leaped, arms outspread, and landed on top of the machine's curved surface, legs dangling off the rim. The machine tilted alarmingly under Garroway's weight, seesawed a moment, then stabilized itself. It began rotating swiftly, as though trying to dislodge its unwanted rider. Garroway, clinging to a handhold among the innumerable fist-sized
raised blocks and angular depressions across the uneven surface, rolled his legs up and onto the top, then fumbled at his gear satchel for a block of CTX-5.

CTX-5 was a chemical explosive enhanced by dithermal exotics, as powerful a bang in a single book-sized package as it was possible to make. You armed it by pushing one of two pressure plates. The first caused the package to reform to the convex configuration; clip that side to a claymore pack—a package containing seventy lead-uranium ball bearings, and you had a charge triggered through your implant that fired the balls like a shotgun blast in a broad footprint. Press the other plate and the pack rearranged itself in the concave configuration, creating a shaped charge with a highly focused blast, like a concentrated, armor-piercing jet of white-hot plasma.