Jackers (25 page)

Unlikely, that. The ambush platoon had been carefully planted here, beneath the covering screens of antisensor aerosols, and crouched now at near total power-down, with only life-support and AI-link network systems on-line. Four enemy striders had already stalked past in close formation and seen nothing. Too, the Imperial crawl-jackers would be concentrating on their target kilometers ahead, the outer ring of the Stone Mountain static defenses, rather than searching for rebels gone to ground.

Her trained eye spotted weakness against the strength, however. It had taken damage during the past hours of combat—a guntower on the starboard side reduced to scrap by a trio of Striker missiles; a gaping, jagged-edge cavern where a Starhawk had nearly scored a kill.

“Christ of the Cosmos!” Sublieutenant Martin called, the words jerked from his thoughts. “We can’t attack that thing! We gotta get out of here!”

“Steady, Chet!” Katya snapped back over the Ghost-rider’s link intercom.

“It’s no good! It’s no good!” She could sense him fumbling with the mental codes that would release his link.

Sharply, she took full control of the link network, blocking Martin’s shutdown, electronically pinning him in place. “Negative, Sublieutenant!” she said. “You can do it or you can come along for the ride, but you’re staying right where you are!”

“We… we…”

Thunder cracked and rolled outside the Ghostrider’s hull, as treads ground stone to sand.

“We can do it, damn it! We can take that monster! But we have to stay together, do you understand?” When silence answered her, Katya nudged the volume of her mental voice up a notch. “
Are you linked?
”

The old recruit training gimmick knifed through Martin’s panic. “Uh… linked, sir!”

“What was that?”

“LINKED, SIR!”

“Okay! Now you take the chin laser, right? I’m going to be busy!”

“Yes, sir.”

“Iceworld, Chet! We can
do
this.”

Now if you could just believe that yourself.…

“So! Are you linked, Sub?”

“Linked!”Hesitation. “I… I’m sorry, Colonel.…”

“Deleted and forgotten. Just pull yourself together. Let’s not let the Impies think they’re up against an undisciplined rabble!”

“I won’t let you down, sir.”

“I know you won’t.”

Courage, Katya knew, was nothing more than the willingness to press ahead despite the terror that turned knees weak, mouths dry, and stomachs to twisting emptiness. Her own fear was as sharp as Martin’s but was held under more rigid control.

Still, there had to come that moment, scant seconds away, now, when she would have to give the order and step out from under cover. Worse, still, she would give the order that would assure the deaths of members of this platoon, people she knew and had fought with.

She thought she understood Dev now, his vacillation when it came to wholeheartedly supporting the rebellion. Where was the value in bravery, in sacrifice, in attacks that were little short of suicide, when nothing useful could be accomplished? All the courage in the Shichiju would count for nothing if, minutes from now, her eight warstriders were blazing, hull-torn hulks, and the Imperial crawler was continuing its ponderous advance up the Gaither Valley.

Yet something
had
to be tried. Do nothing, and failure was certain. The Confederation would be crushed.

Pushing the darkness back in her mind, Katya braced to give the order.

Chapter 17

Section 1: TANK HUNTING.

THE ADVANTAGES ARE WITH THE HUNTER. The big game sometimes hunted… are tanks. Like any other kind of big game hunting, the advantages are with the hunter; he almost always is the winner; but there is enough danger to keep the hunter on his toes. With courage and determination [he] can use his weapons to hunt down and destroy 80,000 pounds of fighting steel.

—
Basic Field Manual

Engineer Soldier’s Handbook

FM21-105, Chapter 7, Section l

mid-twentieth century

A warstrider close-assault was the Confederation’s sole remaining chance to stop the crawler short of Stone Mountain, a last-ditch effort before it reached the fortress’s static defenses. Hours before, a powerful mine hidden in the monster’s path had been detected by the Impies and detonated harmlessly. Then a defensive line of Ranger and militia warstriders behind a fabricrete barricade had been swept aside, the wall smashed through.

A savage strider-to-strider battle at the wall had stopped most of the Imperial striders escorting the crawler, but the tracked combat machine’s armor had proven too thick for the rebel weapons. It had continued its relentless advance up the valley, alone now save for intermittent strikes by covering ascraft and a light support force of three Tachis and a Katana. Intelligence reports told of more Imperial warstriders massing a few kilometers to the southeast, pushing forward in the crawler’s wake. They would be the enemy’s final assault force, meant to overrun the Confederation compound once the crawler had breached its inner perimeter.

And then… hope! Unexpected and vanishingly slender the hope might be, yet remote-jacked surveillance drones had spotted damage to the crawler’s hull after the fight at the breach. Hits had scored after all, weaknesses been revealed. An ambush plan had been worked up, hastily planned, more hastily laid. The town of Anversen offered the last place along the crawler’s expected route where a strider close-assault team could be hidden with a chance of reaching the crawler’s side.

The ambush plan called for crippling the monster, if possible, by disabling its driver wheel with planted packs of high explosive, or by adding to the destruction amidships already wreaked by Starhawk and Strikers.

“Okay, team,” Katya broadcast over the tactical net. “Full power! Let’s do it!
Now!
”

She urged the Ghostrider forward, smashing through the sheltering face of a flame-scorched wall in an explosion of rubble and dust. The crawler, alerted, perhaps, by her radio emissions, bathed her emerging machine in radar and laser illumination, as point defense weapons pivoted swiftly to track and bring her down.

Katya triggered her Kv-70 weapons packs, hurling a salvo of M-490 rockets at nearly point-blank range. They struck dead on target in stuttering, flare-streaked bursts, their warheads alternating high explosives with charges of duralloy-devouring nano-D. Martin fired the hundred-megawatt chin laser in a ripple of quick-pulsed bursts, taking out a line of point defense lasers and hivel cannons on the monster’s flank, then triggered a smoke screen of antilaser aerosols. White fog blanketed Katya’s view, thinning as she sent the Ghostrider forward with ground-eating sweeps of its long legs.

To left and right, seven other warstriders in her ad hoc assault platoon emerged from cover as well, hammering away at the behemoth with everything from laser and CPG fire to high-speed deplur rounds from shrieking rotary cannons. Missiles scratched and flashed through the sky, slamming home in thunderous detonations. The night was filled with white flame and violence.

As Katya raced forward, her Ghostrider’s long legs scissoring through the smoke, she had a clear shot at the lead driver wheel and concentrated her fire on that. The damaged section of the crawler’s hull was a good fifty meters farther back along that curving, black cliff, and high enough up on the thing’s broad and thickly armored deck that she would not have a clear shot at it.

Tucked in close behind the Ghostrider’s chin turret was a McEverett Pack, a tubular, plastic satchel filled with one hundred kilos of C-30 plastic explosives and a fusion detonator with time and pressure triggers. An arm with gripper manipulators had been plugged into the Ghostrider’s number-three auxiliary link-interfaced hardpoint. As Katya moved, she mentally shifted link control for her left arm from the strider’s left-side weapons pack to the remote arm, passing the weapons pod to Chet’s control. With a shrill whine of servomotors, the arm unfolded, dangling heavily between the strider’s legs and dragging the heavy pack with it.

Together, she and Chet kept up their barrage against the crawler. Shots struck home, flashing and cracking with savage detonations, but to little outward effect. The wheel and its bearings were heavily shielded, the track itself composed of nanowoven diacarb fifteen centimeters thick. Even as her first shots slammed into armor, point defense lasers mounted in teardrop barbettes above the skirt swiveled to take the Ghostrider under fire.

Katya pushed harder as hundred-megawatt bursts of coherent light snapped into the Ghost’s starboard hull, melting armor in glittering puffs of vapor. Warning flags flashed in her mind: power loss… damage to the right weapons pack… damage to the right motivator array…

At least the McEverett Pack was still okay. Touch that with a laser and there’d be little left of the Ghostrider save scrap.

Closer!
She had to get closer! If the big main guns were able to depress far enough to track her, she and the other seven striders were already dead. “Closer everyone!” she yelled over the tactical link channel. “Get in closer!”

“I’m with you!” Captain Phillad Jobrey’s Scoutstrider stilted past her on the right, its CA-5000 high-velocity auto cannon slamming rounds, two a second, squarely into the target. Pawlovski’s Ghostrider, forty meters away, crumbled in a fusillade of close-up bursts, writhing as lightning played across its hull. Then the other strider’s explosives pack detonated, the blast filling the air with hurtling chunks of hot metal, the concussion jolting Katya and nearly making her stumble.

The crawler’s skirts and track were like a sheer cliff now, just ahead. Lightning grated against her eyes, painful even as her strider’s AI stepped down the illumination to safe levels, and a volcano’s thunder pealed. For a horrible instant she thought she’d been hit. Then she realized that she’d witnessed the muzzle discharge of the crawler’s main gun, a particle cannon as powerful as those mounted by a light cruiser. Its target, a Confederation gun emplacement on the face of Stone Mountain fifteen kilometers away vanished in a dazzling pulse of pure light and the forked, blue-white stab of grounding charge.

The last of her right-side M-490 rockets slammed into the crawler’s driver wheel from a range of fifteen meters, still without effect. Enough nano-D must be clinging to that armor by now to eat a hole through a dragonship’s hull, but clouds of anti-nano were already boiling down the vehicle’s curved side like dry ice fog, neutralizing the corrosive vapor before it had more than pitted the duralloy’s surface.

All she had now was her chin turret laser, and its hundred-megawatt bursts would no more than scratch the surface of the thing. Snapping an order to Martin to keep firing, she tried to move closer. If she could just get close enough to plant the McEverett charge in the port-side tread.…

Ozawa watched the rebel close-assault waver with an inward nod of satisfaction. Again, the rebels had been unable to properly coordinate their attack. So few striders offered little threat to the crawler and would be easy targets for the supporting imperial warstriders outside and for the crawler’s own guns.

There was a likely target, a LaG-42 Ghostrider sprinting into his watch area. He swung the targeting cursor for his big, two hundred-megawatt laser onto the target. Lock! He triggered the weapon.…

A laser bolt slashed into the Ghostrider’s upper hull as Katya lunged forward. Smoke erupted from a red-hot crater. Warning flags danced at the borders of her vision. Fire erupted from the Ghostrider’s left shoulder assembly; Chet engaged the fire control dispensers, bathing the strider’s upper works in an icy fog.

Damage? Some armor lost, but nothing serious… yet. Another such hit would boil through the strider’s internal circuits like a railgun bolt through tissue.

She was still lugging the McEverett Pack, but she wouldn’t be able to use it unless she could get all the way up to the crawler’s side. The volume of laser fire from the huge vehicle was frightful; twenty meters to go.…

By the flaring light of rapid-fire explosions, she saw truth. They were
never
going to wade through fire this heavy. Close-assaulting a crawler required a regiment of warstriders, not a single, ragged platoon.

Yet to retreat was unthinkable. Safety was in the hulking lee of the giant; to move back was to move into the target lock of heavy lasers and the buzz saw caress of hivel rotaries.

“Colonel!” Jobrey called. “We’ve got Imperial ascraft, coming in at three-zero-zero!”

From the other side of this slow-moving duralloy mountain. Craning a hull sensor, she searched the night sky.

There! They dropped out of heaven like black, stub-winged bats, illuminated from beneath by the crawler’s searchlights. Katya groaned as she saw them… three… no, four ascraft, a Typhoon and three Skywinds. Each could hold a number of warstriders, or a bellyfull of armored infantry. If this was the crawler’s infantry support, moved up to close with its attackers, then the battle was nearly over. The close-assault force was down to five machines. They couldn’t face the crawler and a company of Imperial striders as well.…

Tracers and laser beams snapped toward the newcomers, but Katya’s orders snapped louder. “Never mind them! Kill the crawler, damn it! We’ve got to kill the crawler!”

If they could… before the reinforcements landed.

*    *    *

Ozawa cursed as he saw the LaG-42 stagger, then continue moving. The enemy machine was so close that hitting the damned thing was almost impossible, a tight deflection shot against a swiftly moving target.

One last chance. The Ghostrider was moving more slowly now, clearly damaged, and Ozawa’s cursor slid onto the machine’s torso and flashed red, the signal for a target lock.

The rebels really were a pathetic lot. Even if they managed to get too close for the crawler’s point defense weapons, the aircraft hovering overhead would pick them off easily. He began forming the command to fire.…

The jolt was unexpected, an earthquake shuddering up through the siege crawler’s treads, unfelt by the men in link but noticeable as the landscape outside shuddered. An instant later, power failed with a burst of static, and Ozawa was kicked off-line…