The Terran Mandate (23 page)

Uplink

Dekker stepped into the communications
building, closed the hatch and leaned against it as Sergeant Preston dialed out
the screws on one of the com panels. Preston grabbed the curved handles on each
side of the panel and yanked it free from the console. He turned the panel over
and laid it on a narrow bench, exposing its attached cables and a honeycomb of
circuit boards as Lt. Simmons watched over his shoulder.

"Lieutenant," Dekker said,
waving Simmons over.

As she approached him, he could see her
expression soften. He put his hand to his forehead, stripping away the sheen of
sweat that had forced its way onto his clammy face.

"What is it, Colonel?" she
asked.

"I have a care package in one of
your carriers that I think should be displaced."

"The girl?"

"And Jommy."

"What about the rest of the
civilians Ortiz brought with him?"

"They joined the line. Ammunition
runners, that sort of thing."

"Untrained civilians?" Simmons
asked. "Are we sure we need to go there?"

"Surviving Dirt Hill is good enough
training today, Lieutenant. I'm not sure it's going to matter much."

He ran his hand over his forehead again,
stripping more sweat from his forehead.

"Are you alright, Colonel?"

"Yeah. It's just - you know. I'm
worried about Jommy I guess. I knew his father." He feigned a smile,
trying to disarm her scrutiny.

"I'll take care of it," she
said, stepping around him to tug open the hatch.

Dekker pushed himself away from the
bulkhead and shuffled to Preston's bench.

Preston tapped his headset.
"Private Martin, I need a stack of oscillators and a burner. Hustle it
up."

"What is your report, Sergeant
Preston?"

Preston ran his fingers through the the
cables snaking from the back of the panel into the recesses of the console.
"Sir, I'm going to try and modify the main transmitter and set its tuner for
three different bands - one of which should work for uplink."

"Why three?"

"I don't know if it's using Ka, Ku
or S-band.

"Are you sure about those
frequencies?  Wouldn't a tuner be better?"

"I can burn hard coded frequencies
much faster than I can wind a tuner. We're talking about inserting a few chips
here, not redesigning the board."

"What's your marksman score?"
Dekker asked.

Preston turned to look at Dekker.
"Sir?"

"I'm just wondering how well a tron
as smart as you can fire a weapon."

Preston grinned. "I'm an expert
marksman, sir. Qualified for sniper school, too."

"Fair enough," Dekker said.
"What about power?"

"We have plenty, as long as we
don't start powering up the rest of the complex"

"How long will you need?"

"Hour or so."

"And how long to make it
mobile?"

Preston's fingers stopped moving through
the cables.

"Sir?"

"How long to rig this thing to work
on a track?"

"Sir, I'm not even sure I can make
it work in place. I have power and an antenna array to work with here. On a
track - I don't even know if we have the power."

"See what you can work out,
Sergeant," Dekker said. "I don't think we'll be able to stay here
very long."

Sergeant Preston fumbled with the cables
a moment longer. "Yes sir."

Last Stand

As Captain Douglas watched the Terran
line race through a wall of smoke and dust, the cracks and thumps of his latest
mortar barrage finally reached him, lending a new reality to what they were,
what they meant and what he needed them to do. Several seconds later, a new line
of plumes from the second volley rose up from the desert floor. Half the rounds
landed right in with the vehicles, knocking some of them on their side. The
other half landed just in front, crushing the front ends of several carriers,
forcing them to stop. One round made a direct hit and one of the carriers
disappeared in an orange flash and black smoke boiled into the air.

How many people had just ceased to exist
in that moment?  How many Marines would stay alive because of it? 
Slow
down. We're just getting started
. The truth he couldn't yet face - because,
if he did, he would be compelled to do nothing more useful than to walk out
onto the field and throw up his arms, yelling 'I'm here, right here, put it
down my throat' - was that the only thing he had done was purchase of a few
scant seconds. Time was the thing. Slow them down. Tie them up. Delay their
attack. Keep them away, keep them away, until there was enough time to let the
inevitable finally break through. But that was a while away still. It had to
be. There was the end and there was the end of all things. All of it boiled
away in the black smoke that took with it the answer to the only question that
mattered: how long?

His headset crackled with the voice of
the next listening post. "Whiskey Six, Whiskey Six, Tripoli watch, the
enemy line is 500 meters inbound Tripoli."

"Spear point two and four,
engage," he said.

Marines loaded missiles half as tall as
a man into the mounted launchers fifty meters to his front. Gunners perched on
plastic seats mounted underneath the tubes peered through high powered
binocular sights and jockeyed the aiming grips as they sifted through the array
of targets bearing down on them. A flash of yellow flame shot out from the rear
of one of the tubes and splashed against a steel blast guard ten meters behind
it. The missile leapt from its tube with a ripping hiss and streaked across the
ground  streaming a trail of white smoke.

As Douglas watched the missile string
out he heard the rippling thumps of his most recent mortar barrage, turning the
wall of dissipating dust and smoke into a reality that told him they still had
a say in all of it; they still had a voice and it reached out with a roar and
he knew that somebody out there was afraid of it.

The other three missile launchers loosed
their charges, stringing out behind the first, tugging at their unwinding
chains of white smoke. It took several seconds for them to reach out to their
targets, as if they were unwinding from a wench and had to latch onto their
targets before they could smack them down.
Stay away, stay away
. And if
they couldn't hold on, time would slip away, more seconds forever lost, any one
of which would be the difference between the end and the end of all things.

He prepared his mortars for the next
barrage. "Fire Mission mortars to follow. HE quick. Volley five rounds.
Deflection two eight zero zero. Charge three. Elevation nine five eight. At my
command." He wanted to time the next volley himself to the precise moment
the tension in his gut would tell him was the right one. It was tension that
came from too many years of experience that would never be enough. He was
supposed to know, somehow, but it was still the same as the first time he had
sighted rounds on the training range - all he could do was guess. That those
guesses had improved over the years now seemed nothing more then coincidence
and he was afraid that this would be the one time that his luck would finally
miss.

As the section leader yelled out his
commands behind him, Douglas followed the missiles through his binoculars as
they flew towards the vehicles of the Terran line, ready to latch on with steel
teeth and pitch them over and yank their innards out with more fire and smoke.
The first missile missed as its target vehicle swerved hard at the last moment.
Two of the other three landed home and sent one vehicle flipping over on its
back while the other exploded in a shower of steel and aluminum.

Behind him, mortar squad leaders
shouted, "Hang it!", and Marines held the rounds just inside the tubes,
ready to drop them when Douglas felt his gut tell him the moment of the Great
Guess had arrived.

"Ready," the section sergeant
said through his headset.

Douglas waited for a few more seconds
and when the world grew quiet and his body chimed the moment with a sweeping
charge of adrenalin, he said, "Fire." The tubes cracked and rang out
like bells brushed with a hammer as the next volley launched through the sky
above him. The crews reached for more rounds - fangs to dig into the enemy and convince
him to stop - and launched the remaining four rounds in less than ten seconds.
Almost at the same time, the squad leaders shouted, "Rounds
complete!"

Through his headset, the section
sergeant confirmed they had finished firing their volley. "Shot,
Over."

"Shot, out."

Stay away. Stay away. Stay
out there where I can bite you and your claws can't find me. Stay away.

The listening post chimed in.
"Whiskey Six, Whiskey Six, tripwire Tripoli."

"Spear points two and four, fire at
will."

As the missile crews prepared to load
another round of missiles, the sound of an incoming round rushed through the
sky above Douglas. A screech wailed over his headset and then it went dead. He
tapped it, but didn't hear anything, not even static. He ripped off his helmet,
flung the headset aside and jumped into the trench in front of him.

He looked over his shoulder and yelled
to the mortar section leader, "Sergeant Phillips, haul your ass up
here."

He groped around in the trench until he
found the headphones connected to the sound-powered communications line the S-6
had strung to each of the company command posts. He put them on and grasped the
horn of the mouthpiece. "Company Commanders, phone check."

A voice that sounded like it came from
the inside of a tin can answered. "Alpha Six up."

Sergeant Phillips thumped the ground
behind the trench as he ran up. "Here, sir."

Douglas hopped out of the trench.
"I think we got hit by an EMP canister there."

"Yes sir."

"I need you to take over as FDC. I
can't run the battalion and the mortars at the same time with just
sound-powered phones."

"Aye aye, sir. Anything else?"

"Focus on the center until they
dismount, then work whatever's closest."

"Yes sir." Phillips ran back
to the mortars to prepare for the next volley.

Captain Douglas grabbed the horn of his
mouthpiece. "Bravo, where the hell are you?"

"Bravo Six here."

"Charlie Six is up."

"All company commanders, since we
can't serve calls for fire, be advised that Weapons will continue to work the
center front. You guys take care of your respective facings and flanks using
your own mortars and AV."

Captain Douglas raised his field
glasses, scanning the horizon in search of the next listening post. The
vehicles of the Terran Guard looked like they were close to crossing phase line
Exodus at the three kilometer mark. He imagined the isolated Marines staring at
the approaching Terran Vehicles and frantically keying their microphones,
wondering why he wasn't answering them.

The launchers in front of him let off
another salvo of missiles that sizzled the air with a stream of white smoke
trails. As Douglas tracked them through his binoculars, he heard a loud clang
and felt the air push into him as one of the missile launchers blew apart,
sending the tube spinning through the air and tearing its crew apart.

"Whiskey Six, all stations, be
advised, enemy tangos now in range of our position."

Something tugged at his gut as the enemy
line continued towards them. They had not slowed down - not that he expected
them to. He had only destroyed a handful and already they were taking his
positions under fire. But something still wasn't right about the picture he was
watching through his binoculars. Another curtain of smoke and dust leapt up in
front of the vehicles, the smaller plumes from the company mortars adding to
the barrage from his heavy mortars. He took a quick count of the vehicles as
they emerged from behind the curtain and realized that he didn't see any tanks.
The tripod sitting on the ground in front of him and the blank air where the
launcher had been mounted just seconds before told him that those tanks were in
range and firing on his position. But they weren't there.

He lowered his field glasses. Another
missile launcher exploded in front of him. A moment later, his command track
crumpled and flipped over as a steel bolt from a Terran Guard tank slammed into
it.

Marines popped up from the trenches on
the line to either side of him and propped long-range anti vehicle missile
launchers on their shoulders. Loaders slid missiles into the tubes and ducked
to the side as the missilemen scanned the horizon to choose their targets.
First one, then two missiles streaked out from their tubes, snaking across the
ground as their seekers homed in on their targets. Moments later, the rest
joined in, creating a swath of wriggling smoke trails that stretched out from
the entire width of the battalion's frontage and swept towards the vehicles
still charging towards them. The enemy had taken away half his heavy mounts,
but he could still reach out to the charging line, sink teeth into their
scurrying formation and shake the life out of them. The shoulder missiles
didn't have the range of a mounted missile launcher, but any one of them could
take a troop carrier and turn it into a pile of curled metal belching smoke and
fire. Eight missiles surged away from him, hunting for targets, ready to stop
them in their tracks while they were still far enough away to do no harm. As
they closed in, he waited for the line to burst wide open with a wall of smoke
and fire. Just before they reached their targets, all eight missile detonated,
just far enough away from the vehicles that their blast did little more than
put on an impressive show of pyrotechnics. There was a bark, but there was no
bite.

"All stations, Whiskey six. Set
missiles with crush fuzes. They're jamming our proximity fuzes." As he
waited for his crews to reset their ordnance, something clunked over in his
mind like the hand of a giant clock. There were different grades of time and
the enemy had just found its way through a sector of it packed with those last
seconds between the time they were too far away and the time they were just
close enough. There had been a band of seconds during which he could reach out
to them one last time and push them away before they could bite back. They were
the most precious seconds of all and now they were gone. For a moment, he had
been able to swat at them with impunity, and now that moment was locked away
behind him forever. Time had been free.  Now it would be purchased with the
only currency he had left: the lives of his Marines.

Another barrage rang out from behind him
as he waited for the missile launchers to re-arm. The two remaining fixed
launchers in front of him launched another pair of heavy missiles. He counted
the seconds as they flew out towards the vehicles, just in case he might have
enough for one free round from the shoulder launchers. Two carriers erupted in
a ball of fire as he reached the seven second mark. That put the Terran line
within two kilometers of his own. Free time was over.

With their tubes now loaded with
missiles fuzed for impact, the missilemen stood back up and loosed a full salvo
at the Terran vehicles still charging towards them. Just as they streaked
forward, a swarm of figures blurred by the heat waves poured from the Terran
vehicles. Their troops were dismounting and every vehicle was empty by the time
his missiles reached their targets. Six vechicles, now empty, disappeared in a
burst of flame and smoke.

He watched the Terran troops deploy as
his heavy machine guns opened fire, clawing at the Terran line. He only had
four of the heavy smokers on the main battalion line and they were the only
machine guns firing. The twelve medium machine guns from the company weapons
platoons and the fifty or so light machine guns from the rifle squads remained
silent.

Captatin Douglas scanned each limit
stake they had set up to mark the maximum effective range of the lighter
weapons and the Terran Guard had stopped just beyond them before dismounting.
While he pondered the notion of letting them open fire anyway, the last two
mounted missile launchers in front of him were blown apart by another salvo of
steel spears from enemy tanks. Through his binoculars, he could see the troops
of the Terran Guard lying prone, but they were not moving forward. A few were
kneeling as they erected small mortar tubes.

"All stations, Whiskey Six. Does
anybody have eyes on those tanks?"

The clang of metal striking metal rang
out to his left. He swung around as the mounted missile launcher on his left
flank blew apart.