"Sir."
A moment later, Widowmaker's flight deck was deserted. His anxiety growing by the second, Michael kept his eyes on the threat plot; still nothing new and no sign of any Hammer Kingfishers. Their time on the ground was-
"Command, tac. Our friends are here."
"Authenticated okay?"
"They have. A Colonel Nussli, like we were briefed. I'm glad we started off-loading early."
"Me, too," Michael said, relief flooding through him. "Matti, get your team back onboard."
Off-loading was a quick business. Widowmaker's AI-controlled cargo handlers rammed the containers out onto the apron, and each was hustled away into the rain-drenched darkness by a small army of NRA troopers.
"Command, loadmaster. We're done. Closing up. We can go."
"Roger, sir. Flight deck crew's on their way back."
Michael wasted no time waiting for them to take their seats. With a quick check to make sure Widowmaker's main engines would not incinerate anyone, he commed Mother to take control; seconds later they were rolling back onto the runway and into the air, followed by Alley Kat and Hell Bent.
"Welcome back," he said to Ferreira when she dropped into her seat alongside him, spraying raindrops in all directions. "The forward controller's given us our first target, so let's do it. Weaps?"
"Ready," Bienefelt said. "Grapple Three Three has downloaded targeting."
"Roger. Sensors, where the hell are those Kingfishers?"
"Don't know, sir," Carmellini said. "Every other time they've been on us like a rash."
"Keep looking. Bastards are out there somewhere."
With one eye on the threat plot, Michael watched while Mother rolled the lander into the attack, the target obvious when Widowmaker burst into clear air: a cluster of plascrete government buildings in the center of Perdan that were home to those Hammer defenders too dumb to stop fighting. In quick succession, the three landers unloaded their ordnance across the area, fin-retarded iron bombs, old-fashioned but nonetheless ideal for the job and fused to explode after penetration. Clusterbots followed bombs, a lethal swarm of black shapes guided by sensors to take out any soft targets: people, vehicles, light armor, missile launchers.
Not that the Fed landers had things all their own way. The instant they appeared, the sky erupted into a maelstrom of defensive fire, cannon shells stitching wavering lines through the air before locking on to Widowmaker, its hull racketing with the pock pock pock of hits before defensive lasers were able to respond. Then came the missiles, a mix of shoulder-launched Goombahs and the heavier, vehicle-mounted Gondors, silver-white streaks appearing out of the darkness, lethal fingers of light reaching for the lander. Faster than Michael could think, Widowmaker's lasers hacked the missiles out of the attack… all but one. A single Gondor survived, smashing into Widowmaker, hitting on the port side well aft, the lander sagging and wallowing as systems alarms told Michael the bad news.
"Command, systems," Chief Fodor said. "Port cooling pump offline; not recoverable. Executing emergency shutdown of Fusion A."
"Command, roger," Michael said, ignoring a sudden stab of fear. Without Fusion A, the lander was down to one power plant, slow and vulnerable; he had to hope the missing Kingfishers stayed away.
Ferreira asked the obvious question. "Abort?"
For a moment, Michael hesitated. Aborting meant leaving the NRA attack unsupported. Staying risked the precious lander. Screw it, he decided; they were there to fight. "Negative, tac. Stay with it."
"Tac, roger."
Michael took a quick look at the holovid feed from Widowmaker's aft holocams as she climbed away, sluggish and unresponsive. Not a building was intact; some still had walls, but most were smoking ruins. Good one, he said to himself before looking at Widowmaker's next target: a cluster of armored vehicles trying to break through an NRA blocking force straddling the northern approaches to the town. Antiarmor clusterbots made short work of them, the Hammer armor vanishing underneath a rolling cloud of smoke and flame.
"Tac, tell our controller we have ordnance for one more run, so make it a good one."
"Stand by… on the plot… target confirmed and accepted."
Michael grunted when Mother reefed the lander around hard. Then the last target for the day was past and gone, a Hammer defensive position constructed around a cluster of wrecked storage silos disappearing behind boiling clouds of plascrete, torn apart by Widowmaker's cannons and lasers before iron bombs finished the job.
"Command, tac. Grapple Three Three says thanks. We can go home. Alley Kat and Hell Bent remaining on task."
"Command, roger," Michael said. "Go!" he snapped, and Mother pushed the lander's remaining fusion plant to emergency power, pulling the lander around until Widowmaker ran south toward safety, the icons littering the threat plot turning a comforting orange as Mother eased the lander down, the ground below a chaotic mat of gray-black streaks.
Michael was sure the threat plot was wrong. The Hammers had more than enough time to launch Kingfishers from Ojan and McNair, but ENCOMM was saying that both bases were quiet, with the marines from Amokran still committed to the diversionary attacks on Bretonville and Daleel. It made no sense. Why were the Hammers not responding to the attack on Perdan?
"Tac, where the hell are those Kingfishers?" he asked, even though he knew the question was pointless. If Ferreira knew, so would the threat plot, and it did not.
"Not seeing them," Ferreira replied, "and we have nothing from ENCOMM, either."
"I don't like this, not one bit," Michael muttered, forcing himself to sit back and let Mother get them home. "Maybe there's some-"
In an instant, the flight deck was filled with the cacophonous racket of threat alarms. "Alaric missiles inbound," Carmellini said, slapping the alarms off. "Missiles have gone active," he added. "They're in terminal guidance mode." The threat plot confirmed Michael's worst fears: too many missiles moving too fast from too many directions for Widowmaker's defenses to defeat. A pair of heavy landers like Alley Kat and Hell Bent might have a chance of surviving; a lone light lander like Widowmaker did not.
Now Michael and the rest of Widowmaker's crew could do nothing but watch. Dumping the last of her precious decoys into Widowmaker's wake, Mother rolled the lander over in a desperate bid to get even closer to the ground, ramming the fusion plant to full power in a futile attempt to outrun the incoming missiles, their terminal guidance system a lethal hybrid of optical, radar, and laser sensors even the best electronic countermeasures in humanspace would struggle to deceive.
Michael swore; maybe he should have held Widowmaker back until Alley Kat and Hell Bent came off task. Not that it mattered; it was too late. The Hammers had learned from their mistakes that making their presence known too early gave the landers the time they needed to accelerate away from the Alarics. Guided by track data from the battlesat radars overhead, they must have come in low, slow, and stealthy, probably from the sea, where there were no inquisitive NRA eyes to report their passing, before unloading their missiles. Heart hammering, Michael watched Mother do her best, the lander twisting and jinking in a final attempt to distract the missiles. But there were too many of them, and even though some were seduced by Widowmaker's decoys, even though some were distracted by jammers, the rest were not, enough getting past the defensive lasers to doom the lander.
Mother stopped trying to save Widowmaker, shifting her focus onto surviving the attack long enough to save the crew, wrenching the lander nose-up to force the missiles to impact the most heavily armored part of the hull, Widowmaker's belly, screams of pain from the lander's neural system ignored as the foamalloy wings, stressed well beyond the point of failure, disintegrated under the impossible pressure of onrushing air.
Michael swore the lander stopped when the Alarics smashed home, three of them hitting a microsecond apart, their enormous kinetic energy and explosive warheads hurling Widowmaker back, up, and over into a death roll to the ground. He lost consciousness for an instant before the automated ejection system hurled him and the rest of the crew out into the night. In front of them, Widowmaker tumbled to a fiery death on the rocks below, missile after missile smashing into her carcass, her passing marked by a spectacular white fireball when fusion plants lost containment. Barely aware of what was happening, Michael was knocked out again by the shattering crash of his escape capsule plowing into the ground.
How long he lay there, he had no idea. When he awoke, it was strangely peaceful, the only sound the rain drumming an insistent tattoo on the protective plasfiber cover of the capsule. Almost too tired to move, he commed the capsule to release him, which it did, dumping him unceremoniously down the slope.
"Oh shit," he whispered. He commed painkiller drugbots into his system to combat a growing chorus of protest from a badly abused body; as ever, his left leg was the most vocal of all. Forcing himself to his feet, he climbed out of his combat space suit, throwing it to the ground, where it lay, looking disconcertingly like a dead body. "Won't be needing that bastard thing again," he said to the night air.
Reenergized by the drugbots, he had his neuronics scan for the rest of Widowmaker's crew. To his intense relief, first one, then another and another beacon came online until the whole crew had been accounted for. Comming the rendezvous point to them, he set off.
By the time everyone turned up, Michael did not know whether to laugh or cry. A sorrier bunch he had never seen, his crew sporting an impressive collection of cuts and fast-blossoming bruises. With a silent "thank you" to the unknown engineers who had designed and built Widowmaker's crew escape system, Michael asked the question on his and everyone else's mind.
"Where to from here?"
Wincing as she lifted her arm, Ferreira pointed in the general direction of Perdan. "That way. Closest friendlies. Our bases in the Branxtons are too far away."
"Anyone disagree?" he asked. "No? Okay, Perdan it is. Anyone having trouble walking, for chrissakes let me know. Matti, take point. Single file and make sure your chromaflage capes are working and neuronics are off. I don't think the Hammers will come looking for us, but you never know. Let's go."
In silence, Widowmaker's crew set off after Chief Bienefelt. Limping along behind them, Michael knew how lucky they had been. They had been ambushed with the lander Widowmaker running slowly; if both fusion plants had been online, it would have been moving at full speed. Then no crew escape system could have saved them, ejection into the fast-moving airstream more than enough to tear capsule and occupants apart.
Bienefelt's hand went up. The small column stopped while she scanned the ground ahead. Perdan was visible beyond under a thick pall of smoke. "I think we're there. Hard to tell, but I think I saw NRA pickets up ahead, which means their outer sensor line can't be far away. According to the ops plan, the 48th has this sector. I'll go and make sure they don't start shooting at us."
"Watch out for the slugs, Matti," Michael said. Fitted with optical sensors feeding a simple fire-control system linked to a pulsed laser, the ground-attack drones the NRA called slugs were deployed to secure the outer approaches to a fixed position. The size and shape of a large tortoise, slugs were cheap and nasty. The average grunt hated them. Occasionally, slugs would ignore the IFF-identification friend or foe-patches worn by every trooper in combat; they might be cheap and nasty, but they were still lethally dangerous.
"I will," Bienefelt said, dropping to her stomach and crawling forward. "I don't trust the bloody things, either. I'll be back, so don't go anywhere."
"We won't." Too tired to care much anymore, his body racked by pain, Michael slumped to the ground.