I employ the final seconds before pod release completing a final diagnostic on all combat, power, navigation, and sensory systems, and report to Central Combat Command that all systems are working within the expected parameters. Through external shipboard monitors, I can see the objective planet now, a ruddy crescent touched with white and ocher, now less than five hundred kilometers distant. Heritas has established an approach vector which will bring me down on the night side, but close to the dawn terminator. Ringed Dis, swollen, pole-flattened, storm-banded, rises above the curved horizon of its largest moon.
"Fourth Regiment, First Battalion!" sounds over our communications relay from C3. "Sound off!"
"Invictus, ready," First Battalion's Unit One replies.
"Horrendus, ready," adds Unit Two.
Then it is Second Battalion's turn.
"Second Battalion. Sound off!"
"Victor, ready," I reply.
"Ferox, ready!"
"Third Battalion. Sound off!"
"Terribilis, ready!"
"Fortis, ready!"
Elsewhere in the sky, the stars, formerly banished by the brilliant sun, emerge. . . .
Colonel Streicher ushered Major Ramirez through the hatch before him, then followed, stooping to ease his tall frame past the hatch combing and into the sunken, circular compartment beyond. Soft and indirect lighting glowed from the walls; in the center of the room, a comfortable sofa couch surrounded the sunken conversation pit.
No instrumentation was in evidence. It didn't look much like a spaceship at all.
VR techs began helping the two officers with helmets and commlink mikes. Major Dylan King, the Regimental Tactical Officer, was already on the couch, his eyes lost in the flickering patterns of laser light that tied him into the Combat Command Network. With him were the three battalion commanders and members of their staffs.
Streicher took a seat and allowed a tech to complete the physical links with C2N. As his feeds went hot, he sensed presences about him—Ramirez and King, the vehicle's pilot, members of Moberly's command staff aboard the flagship Denever, the quick awarenesses and nervous thoughts of the regiment's six unit commanders and the three battalion commanders, and all the others. The process was called Extended Command Distribution, or ECD, and it was a tried and tested strategy for military operations, especially mil ops as large and as complex as this one.
Also present within the ghostly kinesthetically sensed host were six large and brooding thought-forms, the virtual presence constructs of the six Bolos of the 4th Regiment.
As the link switched on, Streicher could see the view being transmitted by an external camera on Heritas's outer hull, with the curved blue and black-painted duralloy above, the dark orb of Caern below and ahead. Heritas was now in the world's shadow; both Sallos A and B, the local suns, and Dis, the world-moon's primary, were below that slowly flattening horizon. The side of Caern that forever faced away from giant Dis was a cold and lonely place with few settlements and no targets of any military significance. It lay in night, now, the surface illuminated only by starlight and the ghostly glow of the planet's highly charged auroras, visible as pale green, red, and yellow patches circling the poles.
Streicher could see the pinpoint orange and red gleams of several large, active volcanoes stretched in chains across the night side, where lava seas illuminated smeared plumes of ash, and a glacier the size of an ocean shone in pale starlight, like a ghostly cloud obscuring much of Caern's anti-Dis hemisphere. The data feed on Caern had indicated that the side facing away from Dis was cold, never getting much above minus ten degrees, even during the long, fifty-two-hour period of daylight. At this distance from brilliant Sallos A and B—almost five astronomical units—the temperature of any free planet would remain far below zero. Dis, however, through thermal radiation and the heating effects of tides alternately stretching and compressing the world, kept Caern's sub-Dis side unpleasantly hot for humans.
The major settlements and military strongholds all lay along the shores of the chain of seas that stretched from pole to pole to pole again, girdling the world between the realms of fire and ice. That would simplify somewhat the basic strategy for assaulting Caern. It wasn't as though the Confederation fleet had to conquer an entire world of some 220 million square kilometers. Only about ten percent of that area lay within Caern's habitable band, and of that less than half—say, ten million square kilometers all told—was land.
Still, that much sheer open ground comprised a vast area. The Caern strike force of necessity would focus on key targets—cities, military stores depots, communications centers, spaceport facilities. Secret allies among the Confederation trade delegation to Caern had provided most of the necessary information.
The bombardment would help.
"Give me tactical," Streicher said, and the view of the planet became cluttered with targeting and tracking reticules, icons, and symbols. Ahead, orbiting toward the horizon, an echelon formation of destroyers—their ID blocks picked them out as Cateran, Delphis, and Tritheladee—were commencing a bombardment run. Their Hellbore blasts were optically invisible at this range, of course, but the data feeds showed fire cones and firing angles, primary and secondary targets, and the flash and shockwave spread of each shot. Grendylfen was getting a real working-over, Streicher thought. Those destroyers mounted 200cm main weapons with an output of five megatons per second apiece, the same as the Mark XXXIIIs in his regiment. Whatever they knocked down would not get up again soon.
He tried not to think about the devastation taking place at that moment across the world's surface. He'd seen that sort of thing firsthand, on Aristotle. . . .
Damn. I should have gone ahead and taken a euph before coming here, he thought. This was going to be rougher than he'd expected.
"Command craft, stand by for release," a voice whispered in his ear.
"Here we go," King said. "I hope the scouts knew what they were doing when they reported the area clear!"
"Why's that?" Major Beswin, the First Battalion CO, asked.
"Because I feel exposed in a lifeboat, damn it!"
Streicher chuckled. "Don't worry, Dylan. If the bad guys start shooting back, the transport is a much bigger and easier target! You'll be damned glad you've already taken to the boats!"
In fact, the command craft was considerably larger and more comfortable than any lifeboat. But Streicher knew what Major King was feeling. Heritas was so big; it was hard to imagine being safer in a squat, domed saucer barely fifty meters across.
"Command craft release in five," the voice continued, " . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . release!"
Inertial fields kept Streicher and the others from feeling anything, but the clang of hull grapples releasing provided the illusion of a sharp jolt. The vast curve of the Heritas's hull fell away, and as the saucer-shaped command craft rotated and stabilized, the larger vessel seemed to swing off to the side, receding quickly.
Other saucers, as tiny, comparatively, as minnows swarming out from the sides of a thousand-kilo bladeshark, spilled into space, along with a glittering cloud of myriad decoy satellites.
With nuclear interceptors and anti-ship hunter-killers, even a vessel as large as the Heritas was vulnerable. No matter if she had battlescreens up at full, one nuke close alongside could render her helpless, and a single salvo was guaranteed to reduce her to a cloud of hot, metallic vapor. ECD had been evolved to assure the survival of as many members of the command staff as possible, even in the face of an all-out nuclear assault.
But Streicher had to admit that he did feel a little more helpless now, adrift in the black void above Caern's starlit hemisphere.
Heritas was maneuvering now, dropping rapidly toward the planet and slowing sharply as well. From the vantage point of the command craft, and with the visual enhancements possible through the fleet-wide netlink, they could follow the transport's descent as she stooped toward Caern's night-shrouded surface.
Other transports maneuvered elsewhere along the night edge of Caern's daybreak terminator—the Vangled, with the 3rd Regiment, further north, and the Kalahad with the 1st, to the south. Streicher found himself holding his breath, and he forced himself to release it, to draw a new one. If the enemy had any hidden reserves, weapons or forces concealed from the trading consortium spies, this, logically, would be the time for them to strike, when the drop pods were vulnerable to ground fire, when the Bolos they carried were still unable to deploy their fearsome armaments.
The watchers switched to a view relayed from a camera satellite paralleling Heritas's course, as the horizon ahead flattened to a gentle, silver-and-gold-edged curve bowed back from a rising sun of pinpoint, eye-searing brilliance. She had her main bay doors open now and was decelerating hard to match the planet's rotational velocity, to reduce her ground-speed to effectively zero. A moment later, the first of the Bolo ALPs dropped from her swollen belly.
Each was considerably larger than a command craft, but tiny compared to the transport nonetheless. They dropped two by two, maneuvering clear of Heritas and of each other, pivoting in space, aligning themselves with their drives aimed against the sky, their blunt noses toward the ground. Their drive flares were invisible, but the data tags on Streicher's virtual readout showed that the pods were accelerating, dropping from space and beginning their long plunge toward Caern.
Two by two, we are released from our docking grapples. Brief bursts from contragrav projectors nudge us free of Heritas and into the void.
First Battalion—Invictus and Horrendus—are first to clear the ship's bay. I follow, along with Ferox, and the Third Battalion drops after us. Our pods handle the separation and drop-vector insertion maneuvers. Though not possessed of true AI, the processing power of their computer brains are more than ample to handle these tasks. My inertial sensors record our passage through Heritas's idling drive fields and pick up the jolt as my pod's drive switches on and the acceleration swiftly builds.
A quick scan by long-wave radar verifies my position and vector. Heritas has successfully released us at a point that very nearly matches the slow rotational vector of Caern—a ground velocity of approximately 69.7 meters per second. The value is extremely low for a planet—some three to five times faster is more common—but I note that this is due to Caern's low rotational velocity—one rotation about its 26288.8 kilometer circumference in 4 days, 8 hours, 46 minutes, 6.86 seconds.
With a lateral descent vector component matching the planet's rotation, however, I effectively have been released directly above my drop point at an altitude of 127.3 kilometers. My pod's drives are accelerating me to a velocity of 1500 kph, straight toward the surface. At this speed, impact will occur in 5 minutes, 4.8 seconds.
I have other things to worry about, however, for the next several minutes. The Enemy, while severely handled by the Fleet's orbital bombardment, is beginning to respond with heavy anti-space and -aircraft fire.
The sky around me blazes with light, heat, and hard radiation. . . .
"Kind of hard, all this waiting," Captain Meyers, of the regimental logistical staff, observed.
Lieutenant Kelly Tyler had to agree, though she never would have done so aloud. For now, from orbit, all she and the rest of the 4th Regiment's command staff could do was sit about the circular well and watch the landing approach, painted directly on their retinas by flickering pulses of light. Cameras mounted on the pod hulls gave unsettling views of the Bolos' descent, nose-down toward a darkened, cracked and broken plain. Myriad flares like brilliant stars—plasma projectiles, white-hot kinetic rounds, and the exhausts of anti-air missiles—floated up from the shadows below to meet them.
It was hard to keep in mind that they were over six hundred kilometers above Caern's surface and not in that fire-ringed plunge into night, so persuasive were the virtual scenes unfolding in their thoughts. At one point, Kelly felt a biting pain in her palms. It took a moment to realize that the pain was caused by her own fingernails digging into the heels of her hands.
She focused on the commlink she shared with Victor. She could sense his thoughts as though he were there in the Sky Strike command craft with her, or she with him in his battle command compartment. "How are you, Vic?" she asked.
"All systems functioning nominally, my Commander," was Vic's typically flat reply. Was there a hint of rebuke there, a subtle suggestion that she should shut up and let him do his job?
Now I'm getting way too sensitive, she thought. Vic understands.
Dear Vic . . .
Kelly knew she had a lot of trouble relating to other humans, especially to men, and she knew that others thought of her as quiet, shy, even withdrawn. She'd imagined that they'd accepted her on the command staff because she was undeniably good with Bolos, especially with Victor, with whom she'd been teamed now for over a standard year.
The only entities, the only people she'd ever really been comfortable with were Bolos. Like Victor. He didn't come into her room at night the way her father had, hadn't beaten her or "played games" with her, never got drunk on joybrew. Victor didn't scream at her the way Wayne had, or hit her and humiliate her like Fred. He was cool, self-sufficient and self-possessed, always rational, always presenting a thrilling, deep masculinity that had nothing to do with sex. He accepted her and extended to her respect, in that calm "Yes, my Commander" he always used.
For Kelly, he represented perfect power—complete, perfectly controlled, and balanced.
She pretended sometimes that she was in love with Victor, though she knew that it was nothing more than a private game, a fantasy, perhaps.
Usually.
At ninety kilometers, they were well into the thin, upper reaches of Caern's ionosphere. Hull temperature rising . . . atmospheric pressure increasing. A dazzling flare of star-bright radiance expanded at the edge of her vision, swelling, brightening . . . and then flashing past as the landing pod dropped. Data readouts recorded the EMP surge, the intense heat and searing radiation, and Kelly imagined she could almost feel the shudder as the pod rode out the shock wave.
So, the Trixies weren't afraid to use nukes. That was not a real surprise; the records from the Kurbal showed the Trixie interceptors using nukes against BTF-74, after all. Still, some in the command staff had suggested that the Trixies wouldn't resort to nuclear weapons on or near their own world.
She remembered that Streicher had not been persuaded by the arguments and had pushed the planning team to adopt tactics that acknowledged the possibility of NBC warfare on the planet, with maximum dispersal of assault force assets. He'd been prescient on that one. Had he been prescient enough?
The ground below appeared to spark and twinkle. The assault force was redirecting its bombardment now to suppress enemy batteries and strong points within the LZs, and the Hellbore strikes were punching out craters filled with molten rock, each shot liberating a megaton per second or better of sheer, raw heat. The fleet's two battlers, Ajecerras and Validente, had turned their kilometer-long railguns toward the planet below and were hurling relativistic projectiles down the gravity well, targeting enemy defense bastions and command-control centers.
It seemed impossible that anything could face such a rain of devastation and survive. . . .
LKN 8737938 could feel the thud and reverberation of the bombardment as he rumbled slowly through the tunnel. The underground tubes, a labyrinthine maze his people called the Caern Deeps, crisscrossed their way through the planet's crust, connecting the human cities with the deeply buried Aetryx communal centers and nests. He'd been in the tunnels countless times since his emergence from the vats two and a half Disyears before, but his memories of them were of vast tubes beneath the ground, with high-arching ceilings all but lost in the darkness overhead. To his new senses, and from this new vantage point within the duralloy hull of a Mark XXXII Bolo, the tunnels were brightly lit—at least at infrared wavelengths—and almost claustrophobically low and narrow. The gods had assured him that the tunnels were deep enough and strongly enough reinforced that no weapon could touch them. Even so, he felt a quickening of fear. Had he still possessed a heart, it would have been beating rapidly now.
The detonations above increased in intensity and frequency, a shuddering, rolling thunder as the enemy warships passed over, slamming the surface of Caern with high-energy plasma bolts, each liberating the heat and shock of a fair-sized nuclear warhead.
He wondered if his family had survived. The city of Paimos had almost certainly been among the first on the enemy's list of targets.
Your family lives. <assurance> Most of the civilian population was evacuated into the sub-city tunnels as the enemy approached.
"Thank you. Can I see them? Talk to them, maybe?"
Not now. <regret> You must focus on your mission and upon our cause.
It was just as well. What would either of his mates think if they saw him in this form now? Jaennai, especially, with her neurotic dislike for the plasticity of the Gods' Way, the mutability of their appearance.
His parents too, might be distressed, though there were few emotional bonds remaining with them. Removed from his mother while still the size of a pea, nurtured within the spawning vats, and born and raised in the warmth and joy of Paimos Crèche 4937, he'd not even met them until he was half a Disyear old and now knew that he had very little in common with them.
But they'd visited him in the hospital before his surgery. He knew they were concerned. And he didn't want to cause them worry.
A branching appeared in the tunnel ahead, the left leading up, the right down. Go right, the god's voice said. You will wait out the bombardment at Trolvas.
"What is Trolvas? A city? I don't know the name."
It is one of our . . . special places within the Caern Deep. A city of the gods.
Elken felt a shiver of anticipation and just a little fear. He'd heard of such places, of course. Caernan myth was filled with stories of the fabulous caverns of the great Deep, of the treasure troves laid up by the gods, of the places of joy and judgement.
But he'd never expected to actually see one before his physical death.
The tunnel floor dropped away, leading him deeper into the planetary crust. How deep was he, now? He realized that both the ambient temperature and the air pressure here were controlled, so he would find no clues there. He could only guess that he was kilometers beneath the surface already, if only because the multi-megaton blasts were muted now to a distant, ominous thunder.
How far down did the labyrinth reach? The gods alone knew. Myth from the Dark Age before the coming of the gods whispered that humans had begun these tunnels as they'd probed Caern's crust, searching for precious metals and rare elements. But Man's scratchings at the rock were insignificant compared to the power of the gods.
The thunder overhead redoubled, booming and rumbling through the tunnel maze. What, Elken wondered, was it like on the surface now? Was there even anything left of the cities, the towers, the farms, the droma ponds, the habspreads, the soaring, golden temples of the world he'd known?
LKN 8737938 pressed onward, and down. He might not yet have come to terms with his own change of appearance, but one thing he knew.
The Enemy would pay for the desecration of the Holy Places of the gods, and pay dearly. . . .
Hellfire explodes around me, nuclear detonations ranging from half-kiloton tactical anti-air bursts to five-megaton thermonuclear blasts designed to scramble the electronics of incoming spacecraft. Both my internal electronics and those of my drop pod are hardened and well-shielded, however, with fiber-optic data feeds and EMP-grounded processor mounts, and while the pod's outer hull heats alarmingly, I pass through the blaze unscathed.
The friction of my passage through thickening atmosphere is heating the hull as well. I monitor the rate of temperature increase, as well as sensors reporting hull stress and flexure. All systems are still well within normal parameters.
I fall through a cloud of anti-radar, anti-lidar chaff blasted from ejectors on the pod's outer hull. From the ground, the sky must be a nearly opaque shield of chaff clouds, for my own view of the target area is now increasingly obscure. A trio of nuclear explosions detonate some ten kilometers below me, and I surmise that the Enemy may be trying to clear the chaff cloud with shock waves and thermal radiation.
Then I am through the chaff layer, technically in free fall, but feeling deceleration now due to atmospheric re-entry friction. The pod's outer layers are ablative, shedding excess heat as they break away, the half-molten fragments in turn providing additional radar and laser shielding. The fireball of my descent ionizes the air around me, which both increases my radar cross-section to sensors on the planet and interrupts my HF and VHF communications bands with the transport and the command craft overhead. No matter. I continue falling, and in another 158.4 seconds, I have slowed enough that the ionization trail begins to dissipate and full operational communications is restored.
I sense the brush and tickle of the Enemy's search and targeting radars and laser-ranging detectors. I am in the center of a vast and very rapidly played game, of sorts. Each time the Enemy attempts to paint the incoming pods by radar, sensors in orbit pinpoint the source of the transmitter, and shipboard Hellbore batteries pound the target until the signal goes dead. The Enemy, for his part, uses a large number of radar emitters at widely scattered, remote stations, switching among the different transmitters quickly so as to avoid providing the ship sensors with a signal of great enough duration to allow a target lock.
Nonetheless, with each passing second, fewer and fewer of the Enemy's radar and laser emitters remain active, and those that do are having a harder and harder time penetrating both the electronic jamming from ECM satellites and spacecraft and the clouds of metallic debris filling Caern's predawn sky.
The Enemy is not helpless, however. Below me, another nuke detonates, and a light layer of clouds at the ten-thousand-meter level suddenly glows with a pulse of intense reflected light. The shock wave brushes my pod, sending me into a momentary tumble, but its idiot brain recovers and restores itself to the proper vector.
But one of my regimental data feeds has just gone dead. Bolo serial 837989, Horrendus of First Battalion, whom our handlers fondly referred to as "Horry," is no longer transmitting on any frequency. I must surmise that that last nuke detonated close enough to his drop pod to score a kill.
Resistance, I note, is far more active, more fanatic than anticipated by either the Bolos of the regiment or our human counterparts. I am concerned about what this may mean when I finally am able to grapple with the Enemy.
"Damn!" Major Beswin shouted, breaking the silence within the command craft's observation center. "Horry's gone!"
Streicher had felt the snap of the communications link with the First Batt Bolo and known immediately what it meant. There was a chance, of course, that the pod's communications suite had been destroyed but the craft itself was still intact . . . but Streicher had seen the flash of that last nuke and knew from his telemetry that the missile had detonated less than a hundred meters from the pod bearing Horrendus.
It was hard imagining something as large, as powerful, as heavily armored as a Mark XXXIII Bolo being destroyed by anything . . . but a near-direct hit by a nuke at an altitude of twenty-five kilometers would certainly do it.
"Steady," Streicher said gently. "We knew there was a chance things would be rough going in. You've still got Invie to get down."
"Y-yes, sir."
"Lieutenant Bucklin?" Jaime Bucklin had been Horry's unit commander, and he knew the two were close.
"Sir." His voice broke.
"Hang on. I'll need you as regimental reserve. Don't go to pieces on me, now."
"No . . . sir. I'm okay."
Like hell you are, son. Unit commanders and Batt COs alike tended to form pretty close bonds with their titanic metal charges. The shock of losing one was always tough.
The loss hurt Streicher as well. He'd liked Horry, the short time he'd been able to work with the machine. But he still had five other Bolos in the regiment, all of them dropping through hellfire.
The orbit of the constellation of command craft was sweeping them across the Bolo LZs, bringing them closer to Caern's dawn terminator. Within the scene painted by flickering, low-energy laser light across Streicher's retinas, sunlight burst above the curved horizon of Caern, as silver and gold arcs rimming the planet's edge raced away from the dazzling point of sunrise, slowly thickening into the slenderest of crescents.
Below, the land was still in night, but lit enough by the coming dawn that Streicher and the others could see the crinkle of mountains, some ice-capped, some wreathed in ash-cloud and the sullen glow of lava. The seas were dark and still, the shorelines intricate fractals of dune and black rock, of pale shallows and twisting rivers knotted within the molted hues of spreading, alluvial fans.
Most of the cities were burning, with dense clusters of yellow and orange pinpoints of flickering light shotgunned into the larger tangles of artificially geometric shapes that were the Caernan population centers. Smoke palls hung downwind of each target area, lit by ruddy glows from within and beneath. Here and there, fires burned in the cratered ruin of other targets apart from the cities, the aerospace bases and communications centers and command complexes and other defense installations that comprised the Aetryx military infrastructure.
They'd tried their best to spare Caern's population centers, though most cities had at least one major Trixie base or command complex. The bombardment had savaged all of the major targets and most of the lesser ones, though the low-orbiting destroyers were still seeking out the smaller bases nestled in among mountain crags and desert canyons. Fast-pulsing sparkles of blue-white light to the north marked the bombardment of a radar-lidar tracking station in the mountains above Yotun.
Enemy resistance was unexpectedly fierce, and he could tell from the data feed that they had a lot more in the way of ground defenses than had been expected. New radar, laser, and planetary defense positions were revealing themselves every moment, none of them were on the original list of pre-invasion bombardment targets and objectives.
Well, it wouldn't be the first time in military history that intelligence had failed to provide accurate and timely data.
He just hoped that the intelligence shortfall wasn't going to be the deciding factor in this contest, because if it was, those Bolos down there might well find themselves in a trap from which there was no possible escape.