Warp Wraith, page 10
“My Lord?” came the response.
“First,” he said without preamble, “summon Roaul from the Dark Science Citadel. Second, establish me a link to Mabuse. Now.”
“Working on it, sire.”
Manipulating another control on the hologram brought up a huge map of the region around Aleister, up to the Magvar Mountains. Chains and clusters of crimson icons were on the move, speeding for the passes through the range. Other icons, beyond the mountains and far more isolated, winked urgently. Text boxes spooled out beside them, detailing distress calls from outposts under attack. As Vondrak watched, one, then another icon vanished—snuffed out by the Freedom Brigades.
Soon, there wouldn’t be any left, holding out north of the Magvars.
“We have Lady Mabuse,”
A halo drew itself around the cluster of icons closest to the Kraggar Pass. A hologram coalesced next to it, displayed the poorly-lit interior of a hovertank turret. Harsh blue-white glare underlit Mabuse’s sharp features, gleamed off the buttons of her high-collared black and red uniform.
“Krita, how much longer?”
“We’re just south of Reyes,” she replied. “My lead elements should reach the pass shortly.” Her eyes fluoresced for a furious moment. “I had to leave nearly half our armor behind, due to damage from those fighter strikes or crew casualties. And we were understrength to begin with!”
“Punch through that pass,” Vondrak pressed by her concerns. “We can’t wait on help from Bahamut.”
A frown creased her coldly lovely face and she looked right back at him through the holographic pickup. “But help is coming, yes, Lord?”
Ruthven had said so, but Vondrak’s lips pressed into a thin line. How hard would his Sire press? How urgently would that sensuous slob Sestus respond? And no one had yet established where the Anea main fleet even was. Sestus could be days crossing the breadth of the system on conventional thrusters.
His lower lip itched and Vondrak realized the point of an extended fang had pierced it, leaving blood to trickle to the point of his chin. In the hologram, Mabuse’s eyes widened in alarm. But he wiped it away as if it was nothing.
“Punch through, I said.”
THE MODIFIED BLUDGEON-class tank shivered to a halt, hull-down, just behind the wooded ridge, roughly three kilometers south of Kraggar Pass. Mabuse unbuttoned the cupola hatch to its turret and pushed herself up into a breeze that bit with the first hints of a Circe winter. She shivered; not with the chill, but with anticipation.
The Reyes-Aleister Road wormed upslope into the Pass above her. Calling it a road was being generous—long-degraded by Theocracy neglect, cracks webbed its pebbling surface and stubborn spine-weed twisted through. But it could support her hovers and heavy equipment.
These growled and whined as they shuddered to a halt on the road behind her, down the reverse slope of the ridge and shadowed by encroaching forest. The Bludgeons—four in her command platoon—settled with a crackle on their blastisteel skirts, off to the right side, anti-gravs spooling down. Vulg-series armored personnel carriers of her Scout Company nestled in on the opposite side, squat, rectangular hulls with co-axial heavy blasters in an open turret. Each of these carried a squad of Shock Troopers, ready to burst free from their rear ramp-hatches.
Mabuse turned to the front again and lifted holo-binocs to her eyes.
Computer enhanced imagery sprang into startling clarity before her. Reyes crouched up in the Pass, largely out of sight, save the shanties rambling at the edge of its crumbling outer wall. A black basalt spire peeked over the top, silent and foreboding. The whole of the village shared that pall of stillness.
Mabuse lowered the binocs and closed her eyes, breathed deeply to draw the Flux to her. She lacked her Sire’s talent for thaumaturgy, but possessed the baseline telepathic connection to other Immortals that most had. She reached out into the distance, searching for any hint of that hated fool, Kaizyn.
Nothing.
His absence was as much giveaway as the unnatural quiet of what would normally be an active roadside town.
“Drones,” she ordered.
Bulbous modules along the flanks and rear deck of her Bludgeon cracked open with a magnetic whine. Her tank was a modified command-type, sacrificing the heavy particle cannon of a standard model—and swapping it out with a plasma gun—to make room for boosted communications and sensor gear, including the drone pods. These released ebon metal globes into the air, thrumming on anti-gravity fields as cyclopean eyes sensors glinted and insectine spreads of legs extended.
“They will be visible from the village as they move up, my Lady,” the armored human comms specialist called up to her from within the turret.
“I’m counting on it,” she replied with a twist of smile, recognizing the mortal’s faint hint of disapproval. Good sensor droids were in shortly supply—wasting them no doubt offended his pride in equipment. But First Battalion was hers. She leaned down into the cupola, raising her voice. “Guns! Stand ready for a reaction!”
“Yes, Mistress.”
Mabuse rattled her fingernails along the rim of the hatch, eyeing the top of the gap again. Late afternoon sun had dipped low enough that shadows were beginning to creep up the slope, all while the mountain tops were bright and stark with direct radiance. That draining brilliance made her want to shrink back down in the turret, made her freshly-knit shoulder ache. Hunger growled from the base of her gut—it shouldn’t be anywhere near time for that, but she probably craved it in the same way she’d get dry-mouthed before a fight, when she was mortal.
She touched her earpiece to cue up her commlink. Helmet would be better now—as well as battle armor—but she wore the sable, crimson, and gold of her full uniform, instead. Mortals needed to see fearlessness in their gods. “Kryll,” she called into her collar mic, “how far back are you with the rest?”
“The rest of A Company is thirty minutes, Mistress” her senior battalion centurion replied. “Hold up at that last crossroads. D Company Mechanized should be with you in ten, though.”
“Not entirely satisfactory, Centurion,” she replied icily, though without threat. Kryll was Order of the Faithful, utterly indoctrinated, and nearly as fanatical as a Shock Trooper. Mortals needed fear to remain loyal, but it didn’t do to terrorize the ones who’d already accepted—even embraced—their place in things.
“No, My Lady.”
“We’re about to make contact outside Reyes,” she told him. “I need the rest of A Company, at least, to force the Pass. Get them up here!”
“With all speed, My Lady.”
Mabuse cut the connection without further acknowledgement. Punch through, Vondrak had demanded. That meant no time for caution and no time to wait. That meant now.
“Scout Company,” she said into the mic, “prepare to move up.”
The Vulgs’ anti-gravs squalled as their drivers revved them back up and their chassis shivered with what she anthropomorphized as anticipation. Helmeted heads of Shock Troopers emerged from the open turrets to man the guns.
“Drones,” she called, “deploy into the Pass!”
EDIE RACED THE LAST couple meters to the trench and leapt into it, jarring a Hardcase aside as she landed. No time for apologies, she shoved on ahead, followed by Hutch, whuffing from effort as her heavy communications packs bounced on her spine. The transverse trench—dug hastily in the last couple hours—ran from a caved-in basement to the main trench-line the guerillas had scraped out behind the rubble of the village wall.
Reaching a t-section, she veered left and ducked into the gloom of a dug-out excavated under a fallen-over lip of wall. Moff waited there, binocs pressed to his eyes as he stared out through a slit formed between the dirt and the block. A two-man heavy blaster crew shifted at their weapon to his left, one nodding in greeting—pale under smears of sweat-caked dirt, but smiling eagerly.
“What have we got?” Edie asked, pushing in at Moff’s side.
“It’s on,” the little man replied, handing her the binocs. “Contacts coming over that far rise.”
Heartbeat accelerating fast enough to ache in the veins, Edie accepted the binocs and pushed them to the bridge of her nose. Details filled her vision with sharpness almost too precise to process. But her attention went to crimson halos that materialized over the tree tops on the ridge to the south. At the center of these, gnat-sized specks grew. Schemata popped out beside each, fed from the binocs’ tiny onboard computer, showing robotic globes with tangles of sensor and weapon appendages extended.
Edie tapped her helmet mic with her free hand to cue up the tactical network. “Here they come. Everyone, stay frosty.” She handed the binocs back to Moff.
“Carrion-type,” he said, raising the viewer back to his eyes. “If we let ‘em get too close, they’ll detect everything.”
“They won’t,” Edie replied and turned in the tight confines. Hutch had crammed herself into the back of the dug-out and had a hologram projected from her wrist-piece, lighting the interior of the hole in blue. “Are those droids set?”
“Ready to go,” the off-worlder answered. In the hologram, a schematic of what looked like a quad-blaster turret mounted on a spidery spread of robotics legs flexed and blinked at several points. “Already got passive target lock.”
“Hold fire.”
Moff pressed in close at Edie’s flank, growling under his breath, “What are we waiting on?”
“Keep half out of action,” Edie told Hutch, ignoring the comment. “Task them with missile and anti-artillery response, only.” She turned to Moff, now. “This will be a probe. When they get serious, they’ll try direct-fire weapons at range. We’ll need something in reserve for that.”
“They’re closing,” one of the gun crew hissed.
Snapping the binocs from Moff, Edie scanned down the slope, then into the air above it. Half the Carrions were hovering just over head-high, along the ground—harder to pick up as they dropped in and out of undulations in the terrain. The other half came on brazenly, silhouetted against the late afternoon sky, sun light winking painfully yellow off their curving chassis.
“Heavy weapons teams,” Edie called into her mic, “no fire until we draw them in. Don’t expose yourselves for anything less than a hovertank.”
“What do we have on sensors?” Moff asked Hutch, impatience adding a rasp to the back of his voice.
“Patching through now,” she replied.
Edie lowered the viewer to glance over her shoulder at the woman. Holograms spun before her, a mix of maps and machine schemata. One of the maps swelled, crowding out the other displays. Edie recognized a topographic overlay of the countryside south of their positions, noted yellow pulses.
“Getting fusion bottle signatures,” Hutch said, “behind that rise. They’re idling. More coming up from the south. Consistent with hovertanks; Bludgeon-class. Mix of lighter vehicles, too. Something bigger behind those.”
A crash sent dust puffing into the dig-out from the trench and cyan glare shocked the eyes. Another, stuttering crash followed, and nervous fluttering like heat lightning followed.
Lunging back to the slit at the front of the dug-out Edie watched as the gun droids opened up. Daisy-chains of plasma bolts hosed into the sky, intersecting with the drones as they came on. Quad-blaster thunder hammered off the slopes of the pass. Dirty fans of fire and shrapnel spread across the stark blue-orange, blackened as they streaked smoking debris to the ground.
Half-a-dozen Theocracy drones burst in the skies before Reyes within half a second. Another half brought their response, ruby beams of high-power lasers carving back towards the sources of the plasma streams. One of these slashed a glower-ember gash across the right slope of the pass, cutting through tree trunks to send them toppling. A terrific whomp marked the end point where one, then another beam found one of the gun-droids. A fireball lifted skyward.
“Damned bad luck!” Edie spat over the din.
And that was the truth. The bulbous aerial droids had none of their opponent’s armor or firepower and torrents of plasma swatted most of the remaining robots from the air. Another glimmering of deadly red brilliance sliced from lower, from the drones that had hugged the nap of the terrain. But few of these had the fortune of their peers and the Hardcases’ gun droids pivoted with cyan and thunder, hosing bolts into them and the ground below, obscuring the slope in sparks and gouts of kicked-up dirt.
Robots torching robots, Edie reflected grimly. Let the machines bash it out. Seems a lot more humane way to conduct this damned business. But there was very little humane to the enemies who’d be following those robots shortly.
A laser bolt hissed over her position, its hellish touch tickling into the edge of the village and scorching air and masonry. The crew to Moff’s left tensed at their weapon, the gunner’s hand at the pistol grip and his scowling face pressed to its holographic site.
“Hold!” Edie snapped at him. “Incidental fire! They don’t see us!”
The gun-droids’ fire was already started to sputter out for lack of targets. A brief flare-up of bolts chased the surviving drones as they whirred back towards the ridge, hugging the swells of the terrain for cover. Some of the droid fire reached the distant ridge, crackling amongst trees.
A shaft of hellfire rocked forth from the rise, plasma glare brighter than the sun. Air and ground rippled away from the point of its impact, on the hillside to the left of the pass. The shock of a metric ton of rock vaporizing hid the explosion of the gun-droid. The magnitude of the firepower left little doubt it had come from a hover tank main gun.
Edie realized her helmet had bounced off—realized she had bounced off the impromptu roof of the dug-out, before striking the dirt floor. Blood trickled from her right temple to taste coppery at the corner of her lip. Wiping it aside, she scooped up her helmet again and thumped it back on, batting at the mic to key her commlink.
“Everyone, hold tight,” she hollered. “This is just the first act!”
MABUSE GRINNED AS THE fireball mushroomed as high as the worn summits of the Magvars. The grin expanded as her binocs picked out rocks sliding down into the pass to pile over the edges of the village, likely taking what remained of the gun-droid with it. Destruction excited in a way even the Hunger couldn’t.
A spatter of blaster bolts from the wooded mountainside on the opposite side of the gap stole the smile, sent her ducking low as sparks spalled off the armor of the turret. Damn, she thought, dropping down fully as cyan streak ricocheted off the underside of her raised hatch, sprinkling her in slag droplets. Damned long range on those things!
“Target!” the gunner called out. “Far side!”
“Take it, you fool!”
The heavy plasma gun was bucking with blast before she got the words out. The yellow-white torrent of its shot connected the Bludgeon to the gun-droid scuttling amongst woods and rock across over two kilometers. A blister of artificial sunrise rose for the heavens, turning every tree within fifty meters of it to torches—and leaving nothing of the droid.
Mabuse hoisted herself up to the cupola once more. The air stank of wood smoke and hot metal. Fires flickered amidst trees struck by stray plasma bolts. Someone was shouting back down the road. But the armored vehicles of her team huddled, untouched and engines shivering with pent-up energy.
“That cost us two-thirds of our drone cover,” the comm tech called up to her with more attitude than she thought appropriate for a mortal—even one as highly-trained as a First Shock Armor specialist.
“The rest of the First will be bringing more,” she retorted, knowing that if the Hunger started getting to her, she already knew where to find her first snack. “Guns,” she snapped. “Put a shot into the village!”
“My Lady!”
The turret whirred and pivoted slightly, the stubby-barreled gun adjusting with a whine. Blast followed an instant later, glare and concussion buffeting her backwards with the rim of the cupola biting her spine. Ignoring the pinch of it, she put the binocs to her brow once more and scanned.
Only the tops of a handful of buildings were visible over the top of the rise in the gap. These disintegrating at the touch of the plasma beam and fell in upon each other with a gout of powdered stucco and black smoke. The rumble of cave-in carried faintly to Mabuse’s ringing ears.
But no more blaster fire. Blazes crackled and hazed the upper reaches of the pass in dirty white where the droids had perished. Gray-black haze settled at Reyes’ edge. Nothing else moved. Nothing else responded.
Disciplined, Mabuse thought with unease tickling the pit of her stomach. Not just any run-of-the-mill bandits, up there. Freedom Brigade, perhaps.
“All right,” she decided. “First Platoon, Scouts, move up to the village. Number Two hover, move in support. The rest of you, stand by.”
Engines whined up to a thrum as the four Vulgs of First Scouts lifted off the roadside and glided forward. Mabuse watched them parade by, the Shock Troopers in their turrets impassive in their red armor, hunched behind their guns. The Number Two Bludgeon growled as it slipped out from behind her tank in line to follow.
Mabuse followed their path with her binocs, down into the dip below their ridge, then up the lower slope below the Pass. Still, nothing opened fire on them; not more gun-droids, not individual riflemen. They know that we know they’re up there, she thought. Why let us get any closer? Low on long-ranged weapons? Low on troops?
The Vulgs reached about mid-slope before the note of their engines changed. The APCs to the rear swung out from behind their leaders and veered into the pasturage, speeding up until they advanced, line-abreast. Number Two Bludgeon slowed slightly, lingering back behind the rightmost Vulg, on the road. Its turret pivoted leftwards, panning over the village’s edge.
Mabuse tapped her mic. “Anything on scanners?”
“Nothing,” came the response from the Bludgeon.
“That’s impossible.”
“Not even life readings, Mistress.” A dread-ladened pause. “That we’re being jammed is a certainty.”
