Angolin, p.32
Angolin, page 32
Then he picked up his sword from the bunk he had bivouacked on for the last two nights. The chatter quieted. Eyes stared at the long, double-edged blade shining in the overhead light as he inspected it.
He looked slowly around the room, met every gaze. Everyone but Theus looked away immediately and went back to their business. Ergyres were requested to leave the revered but cumbersome weapons behind in favor of more practical particle weapons and assault knives.
“Taroc balls to that!” Dharmen muttered under his breath.
Captain Falconer and his companies had relied on theirs nearly a millennium ago, and so would he. And he knew he wouldn’t be the only one. Anyone wants me up close, this’ll be as good as any pulse rifle, he thought. He thrust the blade into its scabbard. Grinding metal cut the room’s silence. Then, choosing to wear it as the ancients had, he flung his weapon over his back and secured the straps.
The PA call to arms swept the barracks. Camos sprayed out of doorways with platoon leaders bellowing behind them. Dharmen glanced over to Dori. She nodded crisply. He returned it as his staff ordered their recruits out into the black morning.
From the walkway above Port’s widest tarmac, Dharmen watched the assembly. Ranks upon ranks stood before a line of Long-Gunners bigger than anything any Guardsman had gone to battle in, with their broadside deployment hatches opened to receive their armed but anxious living cargo. On the support buildings behind them, the Angolin Guard Jack fluttered in brilliant red and blue from newly erected flagpoles, each lit from below and giving a much-needed confidence boost.
Area klaxons sounded prompts. To the keenest of sight, bodies forsook military precision and trembled at the formation call. The air was charged with precombat emotion: exhilaration, excitement, tension, fright. Every bit of it filled Dharmen’s senses. He took it in stride, concentrated on just those elements that would get him to the battlefield ready to fight.
He headed for the down ramp. Dori was waiting below. Smiling tightly, she stopped him long enough to hand him a folded cloth. He unwrapped it and put on the copper-colored armband that denoted him as a UC. It wasn’t his first stab at leadership, but it was his first battlefield command, and he realized that the trepidation he had prepared for never really materialized. How had he come to such a composed mental place? He walked his unit’s ranks, nodded to his staff, then to Theus before stopping front and center. Dori took up position in front of the next unit.
Standing at attention, Dharmen felt every man and woman’s fear behind him. His gen-comm earplant activated. Recon reports were updated and verified. The enemy was closing. ETA: point-eight-five hours. He shrugged off the jitters loitering in his mind, hoped his people followed suit. And maybe, just maybe, he thought, we could all use a quick uplift . . . “Krone, give us will, Krone, give us strength,” he prayed out loud, and was heartened to hear others behind him join in. “Krone, put your might behind each and every one of us. Hail the fighting Fifth!”
The whole unit repeated the prayer once more before the final signal came. Dharmen, Dori, and the rest of the UC line yelled a unified order to forward march. He advanced, and a massive rumble of boot falls advanced with him up into the gargantuan open holds, three thousand to a ship.
Lord Naul went to the front of the fortress-bomber’s main deck. Empty handed. He refused to read the prebattle speech the Lescainate had prepared for him.
“My finest achievement needs no forced prose!” he had spat at Daio earlier. “Angolin will be taken by nightfall. Who off the field has words for that?” He mounted the steps to his command throne, aides flanking, chained chattel quivering.
His assembled officers raised fists and shouted. Naul lifted a hand. The noise below him died.
“Fighters of Carmogen,” he bellowed, “at last, we come to the task put before us by God himself: to rid this planet of the alien scourge that has infected it for too long. Here, I look upon the best warriors of the most powerful empire the world has ever known. Out there”—he pointed a long gray finger at the aircraft’s forward viewport—“out there sits a mongrel horde from who knows where, trespassers against holy supreme design! This is our world. It is every gray-skinned man’s duty to secure his birthright and put the foreign filth beneath his heels where it belongs! We are Carmogen, we are the master race on this planet, and no one lesser will outdo us!”
Naul paused to allow the hate thundering beneath the deck’s dim lighting. “The Angoliners call theirs the Hidden Realm. That will change soon enough. We will render them weak as grazing ganaal after a day’s flight, and once we cleanse the lands of the alien trash, we will turn our sights to Lena’s pale pestilence. Our final victory and dominion over the West will be as the Great One dictates! Tentim is ours!”
“Death to the aliens,” the men shouted. “Death to the trespassers! Death to the inferior! Death to Angolin!”
Naul’s thin gray lips twisted into a dark smile. As he absorbed it all, euphoria gripped him and his insides soared as high as the vessel he commanded. He took his throne, arms across its gilded gold armrests and feet planted firmly on the metal floor plating. He reached over and grabbed one of his slave’s chains, pulling her close. Looking out to the nearest high-caste officer, Naul ordered him forward. The man took the woman’s tether and pulled her into the crowd, a prebattle gift of his very own.
Naul relished in the scene beneath him: a sea of gray-skin elite officers singing his praises and chanting destruction to the soon-to-be-conquered, and all amid the main deck’s filtered air, with inferior nongray conscripts segregated in glassed-off anterooms. Their oxygen-masked overseers whipped them into joining the melee of praise as they gasped and choked on the Abyssal gases penetrating the rest of the aircraft’s poor air-handling system.
The officers carried their noise to their stations. Naul swiveled his throne to the viewport. He expected to see the same cloud-and-sky expanse that had stared back at him for the last two days out of Gragna Airbase. He was as mistaken as the vessel’s instrument readings.
Over darkened gas clouds, the first light of the Great One’s lanterns unveiled a jagged line of dark green and gray capped in white above the misty horizon. The sight of Angolin’s northernmost mountains moved his stunned lips. “And there, Lord in Heaven, sit another people who will find themselves in the maw of the Carmogen Ninth Army. There lies my greatest prize!”
Admiral Gennet left the low stone he had used as a seat for much of the morning. Tired of haggling with HC over tactical strategies already covered ad nauseum, he had left Admiral Sajeva to her forte: dealing with thick-headed legates with less ability to listen to their field commanders than to plan. He ignored the giant upright, walked the low hill’s crown, and stared downward. The command post provided an excellent overlook to the entire engagement area.
He had reviewed battlespace interest points exhaustively for days. Now he put the endless maps and data blocks aside and pulled out a careworn pair of antique binoculars given to him by his great grandfather. He wanted to see the dawn-uncovered plain with his own eyes: rear combat support sectors, touchdown sites, revetment shield positionings—every sustainment point. Beneath it all, the Osterrand sat ominously peaceful, a lonely stretch of land that was about to see its second run in history as a major battlefield.
He raised the eyepieces to the eastern horizon. Far over the Abyss, a line of small fires was erupting. He was cautiously pleased. Phase two of the plan was working, though he wondered just how many enemy aircraft would be struck down . . . and how many casualties might be prevented had phase one—nano-AI neutralization of Carmogen forces en route—been undertaken by the Kraal sooner to bring more than minor sabo. Damned irresponsible, he thought. This war should be fought with machines, not boots on the ground! He lowered the binoculars, returned to the upright.
Sajeva’s face had calmed from its frustrated tightness. Her voice modulated now to a more conciliatory tone toward the images of the legates seated around their conference table. “Sirs, according to our data, enemy approach vectors will put them on the plain below us as the latest intel indicated.”
“We haven’t yet confirmed the exact number of downed enemy aircraft,” Gennet added after examining data refreshed and split-screened on the meters-wide upright, “but so far, three hundred TimeSpaced LR-2 Gunships have been remotely crashed into the most heavily armed Carmogen vessels, and nearly as many mines have made direct hits. Synth drone squads sent in behind the enemy are commencing a second sweep.”
“Excellent news, Admiral,” said a flickering legate. “By that estimate, at least fifty thousand hostiles have been taken out of commission. May the Netherlords beneath the gases receive them well.”
Gennet grunted closemouthed his concern for his own people that would soon die also. “Sir, regardless of initial successes, tens of thousands more have broken through our barricade. Forgive me and my colleague if we feel little inkling to celebrate just yet.”
“And particularly since the Orbital Weapons Platforms are still nonoperational,” added Sajeva. “If Bemin control doesn’t get them up soon, there’s no telling how this will turn out.”
“We are well aware of that situation, Admiral,” said one of the seated men on the upright. “Those who escaped will put down and begin amassing on the Osterrand fields below your position within the quarter hour.”
Tate was right about that! His hunch beat Armetrian’s confession on telling the enemy where to land. Gennet would have smiled had the coming situation not stolen it from his lips.
“But at the least, you have some help there with the enemy’s stolen arms capabilities,” said another legate, gesturing toward CP’s two physicists at their monitoring station farther up the hill. Yos and Brona looked over at the mention, nodded to the hovering row of top silver, and returned to their work.
“The particle detection system has already proven effective. We cannot thank them enough!” Gennet lauded in their direction. “Our mining hit marks without fail, but once the drones exited TS and rerouted power to their targeting systems, the enemy had only seconds of particle fire before their rigged cannons were disabled.” And some of their pilots pulled into a permanent alternate universe holiday, if I understand Brona correctly. Tsk-tsk! “Conventional fighters were sitting prey,” he continued, “but a lot of it—too much for our equipment to get to.”
“Well, you’ll be pleased to know that we’ve finally received word from our Northern ally,” interjected a woman from the legatine side of the conference. “Lena has promised to commit a task force. They’ll arrive late, but we’re thankful for their support.”
“If all goes well, I’ll personally thank Lord Balaneth myself, ma’am,” said Gennet, hiding his surprise at the news. Even while recovering from his injuries, the ambassador had insisted from his hospital bed on soliciting military aid. The attack on him had apparently fired him up. But Lena was potentially as much a target as Angolin, and no one had expected the extra help.
“Ma’am, is there any update on your end on the Realm’s Cloak status?” Sajeva asked. “I’m worried about the report of power fluctuations over the last hour, and oddly, we have no status readings at all up here.”
“The Cloak is fully operative as far as we can tell, Angolinian grids as well as the Bemini systems,” was another legate’s rather stiff response.
Gennet winced. The distance between the hilltop post and HC couldn’t mask the lack of knowledge, genuine or otherwise, from the other side of the upright. From the corner of his eye, he saw Brona look up. “Those fluctuations indicate a potentially massive problem,” he said intentionally loud enough for her to overhear. “The Carmogen still have no idea of Angolin proper’s exact location. That’ll give Second and Sixth more time to secure generator installations, but if even a single section of our defenses is lowered . . . well, any victory up here would be useless if we find ourselves chasing Carmogen forces to our population centers, Greathall being the nearest.”
“That’s not your primary concern,” said one of the legates. “You two concentrate on your objective. We will work with PDP to monitor the Cloak situation. Kronespeed to you both. High Command out!”
The alarmed looks Gennet and Sajeva gave the vanishing upright were burned into their faces as they mounted the hill toward Yos and Brona.
“Do you two suspect what we suspect?” Gennet asked, his breath forming clouds in the cold morning dampness.
“If there’s bollixing back at PDP, I’ll deal with it,” Brona said.
“How, exactly?” Yos asked.
“However I need to, that’s all I can say. That’s all I know.” She grabbed his hand, squeezed it, and beckoned him back to their monitoring.
The admirals left them to their work. “Please tell me she isn’t our only hope in this,” Sajeva hissed out of the physicists’ and the rest of the post’s earshot. “This Ian Folc that she warned us about has been missing for days now. If he’s involved in even the slightest sabo effort—”
“Yes, Caevon, I hear you,” said Gennet. “I’m handling that situation as best as I can.”
“If even part of the grid or, Krone forbid, the shield layer beneath is compromised . . .” Sajeva frowned. “The Centrum, the Condorcet communities, Mid Realm, the Westermeer, and Nieuw Holland—every corner of our interior will be at risk! The Carmis may be primitive, but they’re far from stupid. They’ll find any weak spot Dawn Fire creates and spread from it like—”
The world rumbled, faint at first, then louder. It came not from over the Abyss but from the south. The entire post looked upward. The sky flashed. A long line of Robo-Interceptor Assault Vessels and waves of Long-Gunners emerged from TimeSpace and headed for the plain below. The RIAV cannons faced the eastern sky with the troop-filled gunners ready to deliver their ranks directly behind. The joint Guard-Bemini force had arrived.
Gennet sniffed. He saw Yos and Brona stare in wonder at the armada. Their friends—his officers—were on one of those ships. He sucked in his gut, summoned as much courage as he could, and channeled his experience from the final Negaran battle.
“Admiral,” he said, “let’s engage the enemy before they get that chance.”
18
THE OSTERRAND
Sir, your CSD symptoms will undoubtedly return. Severalfold.
I’ll deal with it.
And your combat anxieties at this moment—
I’m ignoring them. You should too.
—are made worse by your worries over your father and fiancé. I advise you to put them out of your mind for now and focus.
I am focused, Rem-E. Let me keep to it!
Of course, sir. Krone be with you.
Dharmen left his jump seat, reached for a rail beneath the Long-Gunner’s low ceiling. He looked out the broadside viewport. Time to see the stage! A long RIAV line formed the Guard front on the grassland below. The enemy massed opposite, about five klicks away by his estimate, until the FOB reported it to be just three. He breathed hard and fast, heartbeat exploding in his chest, and Rem-E nagging.
The Carmogen force looked archaic as ever from the air, with its rotary-bladed copters and wheeled ground assault vehicles. But it was enormous. Lines of armored tanks mounted with pulse cannons (which Dharmen hoped would soon be disabled) rolled slowly in front of the greatest sea of foot soldiers he had ever seen. Column upon column of conscripts were positioned in front of single lines of gray-skin elite officers: standard Carmogen battle formation and easily fifty times what they had brought to Negara. Dharmen clamped his mouth shut to stop gawking at the spectacle ready to swallow him and his unit.
A flash swept through the Long-Gunner and the ground came instantly close. The ship had just exited TimeSpace. Far behind the RIAVs, he saw a line of High-Neck Gunners disengage stealthtech also, their power now focused on weapons. With artillery batteries flanking their bases and arrayed on their massive, high heads, they held position, ready to support the ground force about to be dropped in the broad, empty space between. The yellow land raced upward. Dharmen felt the tension within and around him as the ship descended.
“All units ready!” The battalion commander’s voice rattled into his gen-comm earplant.
“Touchdown in T-minus seventy seconds,” came the copilot’s prompt.
Rockets fired from the Carmogen line over the shielded RIAVs and directly at the Long-Gunners. Dharmen’s ship was pelted. The shields held, but hands on rails didn’t—camos were thrown to the floor.
“T-minus thirty-five seconds!”
Dharmen braced. His whole body tightened as he tried to keep balance, stifle his fear, and keep his unit from seeing it. They would be on the ground soon, intact or in a blazing fireball. Keep it together, Tate, he thought. Rumblings in his hands traveled up his arms. Rem-E countered with treatment. Whatever you do, just keep it together!
“T-minus twenty seconds . . . eighteen . . . sixteen . . .”
The Long-Gunners descended in tight formation. Once in position between defensive lines, the forward revetment shield cascaded upward in front of and high above the RIAV line in a broad, raking arc, leaving rotating grid sections open for their cannons. In nanoseconds, the RIAVs dropped their own energy-sapping defenses and began bombarding the enemy air offense.
