Outside Kraneveldt Planetary Defense Force Base, Commitment
With a screech of ancient brakes, Yazdi stopped the truck safely under the cover of a thick stand of trees, its nose rammed firmly into a clump of bushes.
“This’ll do,” Yazdi declared after a good look around. “I’ll cut some branches to screen us from the track.”
“Okay. I’ll take a look at the base.” Michael climbed stiffly out of the truck. It had been a long and tense drive up from Barkersville, but surprisingly, they had not been stopped once. A small convoy of DocSec trucks that had ignored them completely while racing south had been the only evidence of a response to their attack on the Barkersville police station.
According to Michael’s neuronics, they were on the far side of a small rise overlooking Kraneveldt Planetary Defense Force Base. He stood for a moment to enjoy a rare sense of peace, the last rays of a slowly setting sun warm on his back, the western sky a lurid mass of gold and scarlet slashes shot haphazardly across a blue sky deepening slowly to black. He had left the stolen police handheld in the truck; it was quiet now except for an occasional laconic report. However hard the Hammers were looking for what they were calling the Barkersville terrorist gang, they were not looking anywhere near Kraneveldt. Until they kicked the Hammers again, Michael reckoned, he and Yazdi were safe.
Crawling up to the crest of the rise, he turned his attention to the Hammer base. The place was enormous, an ugly mass of ceramcrete that sprawled out across the shallow valley in front of them, orange floodlights coming on all across the huge Hammer base to mark the end of another interminably long Commitment day. Nothing moved; the base was quiet to the point of being dead. Weekends were weekends, Michael thought, even for those godless Hammer sons of bitches.
He settled down to have a long hard look at what he thought might be their next target.
The flight lines lay beyond the clutter of hangars and plascrete buildings of all sizes that infested the airbase. There, two long rows of aircraft were tucked away from the weather under open-sided plasteel-roofed hangars that stretched down one side of the runway. Most were ground attack aircraft, together with a squadron of air superiority fighters. Michael dismissed them as of no interest. He was confident he could fly a lander; Hammer planetary defense aircraft were an entirely different matter. Toward the far right-hand end of the runway was a small collection of dark gray lumps parked out in the open, seven of them in all. Aha, Michael thought.
Hoping to find an easy way in, he studied the base’s defenses at length. In the end, he gave up. The Hammer knew how to build fences, that was for sure. He rolled onto his back and handed the glasses back to Yazdi.
“You have a look. I can’t see any obvious way in.”
Taking the binoculars, Yazdi looked long and hard before shaking her head. “Nor me. We’d need an assault lander to get through.”
Michael nodded. “So, if we’re going to get in. .”
“It’s through the front gate.”
“Thought you might say that. Let me have another look.”
In the fading light, Michael studied the landers with interest. The binoculars Yazdi had stolen were not much good, but they were enough for him to see that at least two were ground attack landers. Judging by the slight flare in their after hulls, they were Hammer Space Dynamics LGA-44’s; Fed intelligence had codenamed them Lanyards. Introduced into front-line service just in time for the Third Hammer War, the Lanyards had been the backbone of Hammer ground attack forces ever since; even now they were regarded with respect by the FedWorld military. The Lanyard might be crudely engineered by Fed standards, but it was simple, tough, reliable, and heavily armored.
Michael grunted in satisfaction. The Lanyards, with their massive blunt noses and brooding bulk, might be obsolescent, but they were all business. They were brutally capable machines, and Michael was happy to see them. He handed the binoculars to Yazdi. “Give me a moment, Corp. I want to look at something.” Closing his eyes, he started to look through everything the TECHINT knowledge base in his neuronics could tell him about the Lanyard ground attack lander.
He had an idea.