I can still hear the roar of the explosion, and the light, even twenty meters down, is still searingly brilliant, a hot, shimmering white glow above me. The particulate and gamma radiation flux is gone, however, as is the direct thermal radiation. My hull temperature drops rapidly in the cold, thick embrace of the sea. My immediate concern now is not vaporization or the stress of impact, but simply landing upright when I hit the bottom. If my tumble takes me to the seabed upside down, I may not be able to right myself.
Righting myself would have been simple with working contragravity projectors, but their failure forces me to investigate other means of attitude control. I am currently sinking toward the bottom on my left side some 110 degrees out of the upright position, nose down at a 56-degree angle. The bottom, I sense, using sonar, since laser ranging is largely useless in this medium, is fifteen meters below the front of my left track, and I am sinking at a rate humans would refer to as rocklike . . . at twenty-five meters per second.
There is no time for experimentation. If I can reduce my yaw to the left by something in excess of 20 degrees, I should be able to land ventral-side down on both tracks.
My secondary weaponry consists of fourteen 20cm ball-turret-mounted Hellbore infinite repeaters arrayed in two lateral banks of seven apiece. I pivot my seven starboard secondaries to maximum elevation, pointing above my hull in relation to my body, but, in this upside-down configuration, they aim at the fast-approaching bottom.
I fire all seven weapons simultaneously. The shock of seven one-gram pellets of fusing hydrogen plasma accelerated by magnetic induction to a fair percentage of the speed of light jolts me like the near brush of a nuclear warhead. The water around me turns to steam, and my upper deck heats dangerously.
But the momentum of those seven relativistic rounds jolts me hard, like the firing of heavy missiles. The recoil as I drop is enough to push my starboard side over to the right by a good thirty degrees. I'm going to hit hard . . . but I'm going to hit more or less upright.
My left-front track slams into the bottom at an estimated twenty meters per second . . . and sinks into mud. My surviving external sensors note that almost my entire length plunges nose-first into the blanketing ooze before I finally come to rest.
Above me, the dazzling light of the nuclear fireball fades, plunging the depths once again into their normal lightless murk. I have survived the near-miss of three half-kiloton nuclear warheads. But the situation I find myself in now seems scarcely better.
I seem to be entombed in mud.
The problem, Streicher thought, was this feeling of helplessness, this being trapped in a tiny command craft high above the planet's atmosphere utterly unable to do a thing to influence the battle . . . or help in the location and rescue of a downed warrior AI. The Confederation tended to be ludicrously top-heavy in its military hierarchies, and Bolo regiments pushed that imbalance to the limit. A single Bolo had a unit commander, a battalion commander, and a regimental commander, and none of them could do much of anything short of make suggestions, at least so long as they were so far to the rear.
Ancient combat, millennia ago, had required commanders who led from the front, who inspired their men, who made a difference simply through their presence. Modern combat, though, was peculiarly lethal to flesh and blood. The life expectancy of a human on a modern NB2C battlefield—with Nuclear, Bolo, Biological, and Chemical weapons—was measured not in minutes, but in seconds. Only units as heavily armored as Bolos had a chance of survival.
And when things started to go wrong—and they invariably did in combat—there wasn't a damned thing all of those brass-heavy commanders could do but watch and maybe do a little heavy-duty cursing.
Or praying.
God I need a euph. He had a store of them here on the command craft, tucked away in his personal locker below decks. A foil packet with twenty-four tabs . . . though he'd already gone through five of those. Nineteen doses left. Nineteen gloriously blue, blue chewtabs that could take away the stress, take away the anguish that lingered still, every time he thought of lost Aristotle.
He shook himself, dragging his thoughts back from the tantalizing blue of euphoria. He had to think, had to concentrate, to focus.
Two Bolos down out of his original regimental strength of six. He shifted his command sim to an overview of the entire regimental op area again, noting positions and times to landing. Invictus was only seconds from touching down on the Kretier Peninsula, just south of the planetary defense bastion at Dolendi. Ferox was one minute out of its LZ at Kanth. Third Batt was still over the Storm Sea, minutes from landing.
"Go, you goddamned brutes," he muttered, not realizing he'd spoken aloud. . . .
I require 2.035 seconds to completely catalog my assets. All systems, save for the onboard contragravity generators, are fully functional. Twelve psychotronic circuit boards, despite being fully hardened and shielded, have burned out in various other systems, but all have multiple redundant backups and do not at all limit my options. In particular, my power plants are at full combat operational output, and my drive train is operational at 100% capacity.
The problem is that by using my tracks alone I cannot escape this nose-down attitude, with more than three-quarters of my length buried in mud. There's nothing to grip, nothing to work against, and my total mass—while amounting to only 23,680 metric tons in Caern's .74G gravitational field—is far too great to lift from the mud, no matter how furiously I spin my tracks. I sense that my weight is slowly dragging my rear portion down deeper into the mud. My nose appears to be pressed against solid bedrock beneath the mud, but the raised portion of my structure is sinking through the viscous stuff at a rate of approximately three meters per minute.
At this rate, I will again have all four sets of tracks resting on more or less solid ground in another five minutes. However, the viscosity of the mud is such that my movement will be seriously hindered.
I have downloaded reports of lower-mark Bolos that literally tunneled through hundreds of meters of ferrocrete, duralloy, and concrete to escape subsurface tombs prepared for them. I will be able to move, but it may take hours, even days, to win my way through mud. I would actually make better process if I were entombed in ferrocrete; at least then my tracks would have something against which to push, a means for applying the not inconsiderable power stored in my accumulators.
I do not have hours, or days, in which to get free of this trap. My presence on the battlefield is required now, in accordance with the battle plan currently being employed. While my commanders must have assumed me destroyed in the explosion that brought me down and by now be changing their plans to reflect my loss, it is my clear duty and responsibility to reach the battlefield as quickly as I can and bring my armaments to bear on the Enemy.
If I can reduce the effects of my mass, I might still be able to swim my way out of this predicament. If I can at least partially repair my contragravity generators, there is a chance, albeit a slim one.
The diagnostic has shown me where key power feeds picked up the magnetic pulse of the nuclear detonations via induction and melted, despite shielding, battlescreens, and other safeguards. In addition, the vaporizing power leads have damaged five of the twelve projector assemblies on my ventral surface. The power feeds can be replaced, and I deploy ten damage control robots—"techspiders," as humans call them—to replace the cables and bus bars. The damaged projectors can only be replaced, and that is an operation requiring refit within a major maintenance depot. If seven CG projector assemblies are not sufficient—something which I believe is borderline under these less than ideal conditions—I will not be able to repair the units at all.
I have no option but to try. I deploy the spiders to the damaged sections of my hull.
I wonder, though, how the battle is proceeding on shore without me.
"I'm going to stretch my legs. Beep me if there's a change."
Colonel Streicher broke contact, sat forward, removed his headset, and rubbed the spots from his eyes. The landings were going as well as could be expected, and there was little now for him to do. The tough work now was up to the unit commanders . . . and their mobile warrior mountains below. He needed a break. He needed . . .
No.
The others of the 4th Regimental Command Staff remained in the circled couch, faces blank, the rapid green flicker of light across their eyes and brows blocking the real world from their consciousness as each played voyeur within the less substantial electronic world of data feeds and AI simulation.
The lighting within the command craft was low and indirect, and the view screens encircling the room were on, allowing shipboard personnel to gaze out into space. He went first to the hatchway leading down to their personal lockers. Space was at a decided premium aboard ECD command craft, so there wasn't much in the way of amenities—narrow bunks, no private rooms for senior officers, a single small locker for a change of uniform . . . and any other personal effects.
He palmed open his locker, its recognition pad accepting his touch. Inside, tucked into a breast pocket of his number two uniform, was the packet of euph.
He broke one free and held it in his palm a moment. Such a pretty blue color, so deep, so pure. He popped the tab into his mouth and chewed it slowly, savoring the warmth that spread from tongue and jaw up through his face and back through his head.
It felt so good. . . .
He knew he was going to need the charge to get through this next part.
No . . . it wasn't that he needed it, not really. It was just that the blue chew-tablet helped him be more himself, more focused, more observant. Clear-headed.
And no thoughts of . . . what he didn't want to remember. That was what was important. . . .
He used the lavatory, then returned to the main deck where he accepted a cup of kaff from an aide. Padding silently across the thick, white carpeting, he leaned against a sill and stared for a long time down at the world of Caern.
Below and ahead—the saucer was tipped with one rim pointed directly at Caern's heart—glowed a panorama of spectacular beauty, swirled cloud whites and wrinkled browns and ochers, verdant greens and deep sea-blues. The command craft had decelerated and matched the planet's slow rotation, which meant they were no longer in orbit. Poised six hundred kilometers above Caern's dawn terminator, they were held aloft now solely by the thrust of the spacecraft's contragravity generators. It was the only way they could maintain line-of-sight communications with the regimental ground elements, without enduring a long comm blackout as they circled around to the far side of the planet.
To Streicher's left, the slash-ringed disk of Dis hung heavy against the sky, its night side faintly glowing in deep red and orange-brown swirls and bands of color and internal heat, while beyond the arc-brilliant flare of Sallos painted a slender crescent across the Disian limb. Other moons were scattered across the gas giant's ecliptic, tiny crescents bowed away from the glare of the distant, closely paired white suns.
Without the electronic visual acuity of the virtual reality feeds, the other ships of the Confederation invasion fleet were lost in distance, motes in a vast gulf of emptiness. The planet's surface itself gave few clues to the savagery of the assault from space. He could just make out some smudges here and there, catching the dawn's first light, that might be vast plumes of ash and smoke rising from ruined cities, and across the terminator into the night there was a scattered handful of ruddy pinpoints which might be active volcanoes . . . or the funeral pyres of Caern's centers of population.
He felt a sharp pang at that. While major defense installations located within population centers had been targeted, the kinetic energy released by each projectile directed planetward from orbit had been calculated to destroy as little of civilian structures as possible. No one had expected that the enemy would use nukes against incoming landing pods, however, and large sections of the human cities on Caern had been set ablaze or knocked flat by nuclear air bursts ranging from a few kilotons into the megaton range.
It demonstrated how desperately the enemy intended to defend himself on Caern. The enslaved human population, though, was caught in the middle and was suffering accordingly.
It always happened like that, with war. . . .
Caern's surface was pocked and scarred by ancient craters and the eroded shadows of craters, ghosted crescent-shaped mountain chains and ring lakes. A chain of circular seas stretched from equator nearly to the north pole, and one, the Storm Sea, was the focus of a hellstorm loosed upon the world. They were hovering directly above that thousand-kilometer circle of water now, and Streicher thought of the Bolos fighting their way into the burning enemy cities around its northeastern rim.
"In order to save the village we had to destroy it." The words were from an ancient war, a blood-letting so far in the past no records of it remained, but the aphorism had survived within some military traditions. How many of the human slaves held on Caern had been killed in the preliminary orbital bombardment, or by the nukes deployed by their Aetryx masters to stop the first wave of the assault? And how many more would die before the Aetryx bases and planetary defense bastions and fortresses and depots were neutralized or under Confederation control? The Aetryx's free use of nukes against incoming drop pods suggested a fanaticism bordering on the suicidal.
"Are you on Aristotle again?" a soft voice said at his back.
He jumped, startled. Carla Ramirez had emerged from the VR simulation as well and stood behind him now, a cup of steaming kaff in her hand.
"I suppose maybe I am," he admitted. "It puts a different perspective on it, seeing it from this angle."
"For war," she said, "there is no good angle."
"We're doing the right thing," he insisted, as much to convince himself as his Executive Officer. He felt the power, the rightness of what they were doing. "Hundreds of millions of humans down there . . . in slavery. . . ."
"How many millions will we kill to free the rest?"
"I don't need to hear this now, Carla."
"Sorry. It's . . . been on my mind for a while."
"And mine . . ."
He still remembered the bloody fighting on Aristotle. He'd been a young junior staff officer in the planetary militia, serving aboard the battlecruiser Alexander. Aristotle had been anything but a warlike world. One of the wealthiest and most prosperous of the Confederation's Thousand Worlds, it rarely involved itself in galactic politics. The majority of its citizens were Eudaimonians, with a fanatic regard for the greatest pleasure for the greatest number that was as much religion as philosophy.
Twenty years ago, the Confederation had found itself in a brief, savage little bastard of a war, the Kerellian Incursion. A Kerellian raiding fleet had entered the Aristotelian system and hit the world, hard.
To say that the attack had been unexpected was almost criminal understatement. Aristotle lay well off the major space lanes and trade routes, a hundred parsecs from the Danforth Cluster, where most of the fighting was taking place. They used meteor bombers to shatter the cities, spaceports, and military facilities first, then followed the first strikes up with nuclear warheads. Then the landing boats had swooped down from smoke-clotted skies, disgorging Kerellian raiders and human mercenaries intent only on killing, plundering, and rape.
The Alexander had been on patrol with the Confederation 453rd Fleet when the attack came. Streicher didn't see his homeworld, didn't see what it had become, until nearly two months after the raid. His parents, his wife, his daughter, all had died in the raid; at least, he hoped they'd died. None of their bodies had been found, and it was possible the Kerellians had carried them off.
Carla Ramirez had been on Aristotle when the raiders came, a child of eight. She'd hidden in a blast shelter as the high-velocity projectiles shrieked from the sky, shattering cities . . . then taken refuge in the ruins of a library in the forests outside of New Athens, eluding the patrols and slaver gangs and hunterbots and drunken marauders.
She'd lost her family in the holocaust as well.
Aristotle had had a global population of nearly half a billion. One hundred million—twenty percent—had died in the flaming city-pyres. Another two hundred million—possibly more, though the numbers would never be known with precision—had died in the months following of starvation, disease, radiation sickness, and exposure during the brutal onset of the southern hemisphere's winter. The pall of dust hanging in the sky, swept around the world by the jet streams, promised a winter that would last for decades and might well signal the onset of an ice age.
Tens of thousands of Aristotelians had escaped to other worlds . . . the lucky ones. The rich ones. Several million more had taken the only other route off of a shattered and poisoned homeworld, joining the Confederation military, while their surviving friends and families began the generations-long task of rebuilding.
The Bombardment of Aristotle had proved to be the challenge to the philosophy of Eudaimonics. How did one find joy in life and productivity when his homeland had been reduced to ice-locked rubble, dying forests, and starving bands of survivors?
Twenty years later, there were a number of Aristotelians in the Confederation Navy who remembered that day. They tended to find one another, to form small and tightly knit cliques, to serve together where possible. They were an elite, of sorts, for they'd experienced first-hand war at its most violent, senseless, and horrific. Relatively few other Confederation military personnel had ever seen war. The Kerellian Incursion had been the only real fighting faced by Confederation forces in the past fifty years, and few veterans of that conflict still served. The Aristotelians had stayed in, however, most of them; the military was now the only home they knew. Other Confederation military personnel tended to look at them a bit strangely, to keep their distance, as though fearful of contracting their fanaticism . . . or their ill fortune. It didn't matter. They thought of themselves as an elite who knew the true meaning of war and its true horror. They retained their Eudaimonic philosophy, but it was a philosophy tempered now by horror, blood, and nightmare.
The greatest pleasure for the greatest number now lay in the death of enemies and in a battle plan well developed, well deployed, well fought.
Their password, the phrase spoken sotto voce that allowed them to recognize one another, had been used before in the remote past, and with similar feeling. Never again.
"How can we do this?" Carla asked, her voice soft.
He knew that what she meant was how could survivors of Aristotle employ the same tactics that had destroyed their world. "We didn't start this war," he said. "No more than we started it with the Kerellians. We didn't nuke their cities. It wasn't our fault. It wasn't our fault! . . ."
With a small, nightmare snap of horror, he realized that his thoughts had wandered into forbidden territory. Damn it, this isn't supposed to happen! He'd just taken a euph. He should be feeling the blue singing in his blood right now. He should feel powerful right now with the drug's first upward surge, strong, right, on top of things . . . not wallowing in a black and blasted past.
He'd been dreading this moment, knowing it was coming. Perhaps it would have been better had he offered his resignation, left the service, as several friends back on Primus had suggested.
No. He would beat this thing. His fist clenched at his side.
I'm going to beat it! . . .
Together, he and Carla watched the cities burn at the edge of the Caernan night. He put an arm around her waist, drawing her close. They'd been lovers, off and on, for nearly a year, now, ever since she'd transferred to the 4th.
And after a long time, he heard her whisper, "Never again."
It has been 14 minutes, 27.503 seconds since I deployed the techspiders to begin repairs to my contra-gravity assemblies, an eternity in combat or to an advanced AI battle intelligence capable of awareness at microsecond levels. Throughout that time, I have been monitoring the repairs directly through the electronic eyes and senses of the spiders as they clamber through access ducts and repair conduits to reach and replace the damaged circuitry.
The contra-gravity projectors are General Psychotronics Model 78s, each with a listed lift rating, at full power, of 4000 tons. Six of the twelve damaged systems have been brought to optimal capability by replacing power feeds, bus bars, and melted circuit modules. The remaining six, I have now determined, cannot be repaired in situ, and I require the services of a Bolo maintenance/repair facility to have them replaced.
Six CG projectors with a total lift capacity of 24,000 tons. I have a mass of 32,000 tons, with another thousand tons, approximately, of on-board cargo, remotes, and expendables. Even in Caern's .74 G, I weigh nearly 24,500 tons. I am not going to be able to fly—or even float—my way out of this trap.
Still, there may be other aspects of basic physics I can bring to bear on the problem. I have braided diamonofilament tow cable on board, of course, with a robotic deployment system, but with only 500 meters of cable overall, I would be unable to reach the shore and the nearest suitable anchor point necessary to drag myself free.
I consider the design of my tracks.
I have a total of twelve sets of tracks, twin-mounted in six suspension assemblies, three along each side. Each set is four meters wide, and set with half-meter flanges to increase ground traction and to grip slippery slopes. They are not enough to provide adequate traction in twenty meters of mud, but they may assist my escape in another way.
I set my drive trains in motion, the tracks turning. At the same time, I engage all operational CG projectors. Immediately, the water above my canted upper deck turns opaque as vast, swirling clouds of silt rise, obscuring all of my external vision pickups. I increase power. On land, on an open plain, my driver wheel rate would translate to a velocity of sixty kilometers per hour. Here, underwater and in the mud, I feel my mass shifting forward a bit, feel my nose coming up, but the only direct measure of the tremendous energy going into my spinning tracks is a sharp rise in suspension temperature. I will need to monitor that carefully to avoid further damaging my drive systems.
I increase turn rate by ten percent. My contra-gravity projectors have succeeded in reducing my apparent mass to approximately 500 tons. I am very nearly there.
If my unsupported weight in Caern's gravity is only a bit more than 24,000 tons, however, my inertial mass is still well over 32,000 tons. Contra-gravity can support most of my weight, but I retain my full mass. Getting that mass moving is going to be a major problem.
I increase my driver speed again, this time by five percent. The temperature is rising quickly throughout my suspension and drive elements. The water surrounding them is an effective coolant, but the silt is so thick the drive efficiency is being seriously impeded.
I change tactics, putting my drive train in reverse. After a moment, I shift forward again, repeating the maneuver a number of times, attempting to rock myself free of the mud's grip. The attempt fails.
There is one possible trick left which I can try, but it is a dangerous one. I run several sets of calculations first, seeking some reassurance that I will not be seriously damaged or even disabled by this maneuver, but find none. With no other viable option that I can see, however, I elect to implement it.
Swinging my forward turret until it is aligned dead ahead, I elevate my forward primary weapon to 45 degrees and fire.
The effect is immediate, and remarkable. Hellbores use magnetic induction to accelerate gram-slivers of cryo-hydrogen to relativistic speeds, along vacuum paths tunneled by a high-energy laser pulse. The acceleration is sufficient to induce fusion within the cryo-H, and the kinetic energy released is in the 2-megaton-per-second range.
The range of the tunneling laser is sharply limited within water, however, and much of the energy is absorbed by the surrounding medium before the pulse reaches the surface. The cryo-H sliver reaches fusion temperatures and pressures just beyond the muzzle of my primary weapon, then begins to heat—violently—the water above and ahead of me.
The result is a titanic blast which creates a region of hard vacuum surrounded by a fast-expanding bubble of superheated steam and water plasma. The shock wave envelops me, as violently devastating as the nuclear fireball I flew through earlier.
A number of other effects occur in rapid sequence. As the vacuum ahead and above me collapses, it draws an enormous volume of water and silt into itself. At the far end of the collapsing bubble, the fierce energies of the disintegrating fusion-plasma sphere break through to the open air, creating a fireball that swiftly boils into the sky. Tremendous energy—heat, mostly—rises with the fast-forming mushroom cloud. The updraft of the cloud adds to the powerful current of steam and super-heated water sweeping across my hull from back to front.
In addition, the shock wave strikes the sea floor beneath my tracks, rebounding violently. The net effect is powerful enough to drag me forward and up, setting me in rapid motion.
My upper deck and primary turrets break the surface and are engulfed at once in the firestorm. For a brief instant, my outer hull temperature registers 970 degrees, a temperature which would break down even duralloy if sustained for more than a few minutes.
I increase the rate of turn on my tracks, literally swimming now as my hull skims through water well above the worst of the silt. My less than perfect streamlining cannot sustain this drift for long, of course, but I can generate lift enough to carry me clear of the worst of the sediment which, in any case, has been scoured from the sea floor and hurled aloft with the Hellbore shot's fireball. It may have taken a great deal of energy to get my inertial mass moving; once moving, I am very hard to stop.
Inevitably, though, friction takes its toll and I begin to sink once more.
Across the ravaged landscape of Caern's habitable belt, the Bolos were coming down. While the 4th Regiment was landing in the district Intelligence called Kanthuras, 3rd Regiment was hitting Vortan, northeast of the Kretier Peninsula. Both 1st Battalion/3rd Bolos grounded safely outside of the enemy command control center and naval base at Othelid. Both 2nd Batt machines landed safely as well, one at Gron, the other at Yedethelfen. One of 3rd Battalion's Bolos had been hit by a ground-to-space nuclear interceptor however, while still forty kilometers up, a near-direct hit in the five-megaton range.
The other 3rd Battalion Bolo managed to jettison itself from its damaged drop pod and make an emergency landing on its contra-grav units in the Ethyreat Sea. Since 3rd Batt's planned target had been a planetary garrison at Vled, the surviving Bolo was going to have its figurative hands full.
In skies lit by light-suffused palls of smoke and the pyres of cities, by auroral glow and the strobe and thunder of high-altitude nuclear detonations, the ponderous, delta-forms of the ALPs drifted down over forests and rugged, broken stretches of black basalt and erosion-scoured badlands, free, for the most part, from enemy attack for the final seconds of their approaches since they were low enough now that the horizon itself offered some shelter.
Slowed by wide-open airbrakes and contra-gravity thrusters, the deltas drifted in one by one, searching for relatively open ground. Landing skids deployed, and the aerial monsters, several with steaming, half-molten scars in wing and nose surfaces, slammed into the ground, rumbling forward for dozens of meters before finally grinding to a creaking, shuddering halt.
Side panels blew off, inner armor unfolded like opening petals of a flower, exposing the blocky, slab-sided black-and-gray combat units locked within. Restraints parted with the high-pitched bangs of release charges and the whistle of highly stressed cables whiplashing through air. Bolo engines engaged, and the titanic machines lumbered off their opened pods, their tracks biting into the soil of the flame-wracked world.
Caern was a rugged planet with a surface pocked by near-circular seas and lakes, the evidence of past meteoric bombardments in the world-moon's stormy youth. Much of the land between the scattered cities was forest, mountain, or badlands, with few habitations outside of the heavily built-up, farm-encircled population centers. The mines and the major industrial centers appeared to be deep underground, where the planet's geothermal energy was easily tapped. A few roads and magtubes connected the cities, but most transport on Caern was by air or sea. The wilderness stretches had provided the invasion's planners with one of their two biggest challenges—the other being the rumored underground factories, depots, and power plants. Only the size, speed, and supreme mobility of the Bolos would make the conquest possible at all.
And it was conquest, after all, that the Confederation wanted to achieve on Caern, and not obliteration. The ostensible purpose of the invasion was the rescue of the human population from slavery, though most critics of the war back on the major worlds of the Confederation pointed out that Caern's rich mineral resources and the high density of its heavy-metal-rich crust were more attractive to the Confederation economic planners than the freedom of a few hundred million humans.
In either case, the planet had to be secured and the Aetryx presence neutralized. The Aetryx were still something of an unknown quantity, especially since it was assumed that most of their numbers and military strength were hidden underground, safe from orbital bombardment. The first step in the conquest of Caern, however, would be to seize the cities and other surface facilities. That would give the Confederation forces freedom of movement on the surface and the luxury of bottling up their opponents underground to be dealt with later.
Each Bolo LZ, then, had been chosen with considerable thought, a choice seeking an ideal balance between open, uninhabited wilderness and a primary objective that, usually, was in or near a city. That ideal was not always possible.
Invictus of the 1st Battalion/4th Regiment, for instance, overshot its LZ and came down almost on top of the southern wall of the planetary defense bastion at Dolendi. Though the bastion had been savaged by half a dozen big-gauge Hellbore blasts from space, knocking out the main radar and lidar facilities and smashing the big particle beam turrets, there was plenty of small-caliber fire coming from the wreckage, as troops poured out of underground bunkers to take up defensive positions in the rubble. Invictus was taking heavy ground fire even before the landing pod touched down. By the time the craft had skidded and gouged its way to a halt, it was the center of an all-out barrage of everything from small arms fire to 100cm plasma guns mounted on light, teleoperated armored vehicles. As the craft doors opened, freeing the Bolo on the load pallet inside, the fire intensified, raking the armored sides and exposed tracks of the combat machine within.
And everywhere else on the inhabited portions of Caern, the defenses were coming fully to life.
Disaster at Caern:
A Study of the Unexpected in Warfare
Galactic Press Productions, Primus, cy 426