Branxton Base, Commitment
“I’m letting you do this only because we need all the help we can get making Juggernaut a success. You do know that, Colonel Helfort?”
“I understand, General,” Michael said with a smile.
Vaas shook his head in mock despair and patted Michael on the back. “Just don’t mess it up, that’s all. And stay on Tactical Alfa. J-Day might change, and it’s critical that you don’t go early.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You must be Shinoda,” Vaas said when the sergeant appeared. “Good to meet you,” he added. “Now, your job is to keep this man safe and well, and if there’s a choice between getting out alive and completing the mission, then getting out alive takes precedence. Is that clearly understood?”
“Understood, sir,” Shinoda replied.
“Good luck, Colonel,” Vaas said as he turned to leave.
“What was all that about?” she asked as they watched Vaas walk away.
Michael sighed. “He didn’t want me to do this, so I had to lean on him a bit. It turns out I have a talent for emotional blackmail.”
Shinoda shook her head. “Obviously,” she said. “Come on; we should go, col-ah, husband.”
“Fall in behind me, woman,” Michael said.
“Why are Hammer men such pigs?” Shinoda grumbled sotto voce as they set off.
Shinoda looked around with ill-concealed disapproval as they emerged from the maglev station onto what the maps said was Gwalia’s Grand Plaza. “What a total shithole,” she said.
Michael had to agree. Grand Plaza, my ass, he thought. Dominated by an ornate temple to the Hammer of Kraa, it was a tired and dirty town square much like thousands of others across the Hammer Worlds, he supposed. And there were an awful lot of DocSec personnel around. He swallowed hard. The sooner they were out of the place, the better.
Michael spotted a battered mobibot off to one side of the plaza, its green paint barely visible under what looked like a century’s worth of mud, dust, and dents. “There,” he said.
“Nothing but the best when you work for you know who,” Shinoda whispered.
“I don’t care as long as the damn thing works.”
And it did, surprisingly well for something that looked like it belonged on the scrap heap, humming softly as it sped out of Gwalia down the main highway northeast to Martinsen.
Ten minutes later, Michael slowed the mobibot. “Bit of history coming up,” he said, “on the right in a couple of klicks.”
“What history?”
“Gwalia planetary ground defense base … what’s left of it. I crashed the Red River into the place,” Michael said, his voice matter-of-fact, “More than half a million tons of perfectly good dreadnought moving very, very fast. Needless to say, it was completely trashed. Here we are-holy fuck!”
Michael had seen holovids of the Gwalia base both before and after the Red River had come calling, but the sheer scale of the destruction his attack had inflicted still took his breath away. Even now, many months later and with reconstruction work well under way, the place was a wasteland of flame-scarred ceramcrete studded everywhere with the shattered remains of buildings and wrecked aircraft bulldozed into sad heaps.
“You did this?” Shinoda whispered as the devastated remnants of Gwalia rolled past.
“Yup. Taught the Hammers a lesson they won’t forget in a hurry, that’s for sure.”
“I’m not surprised the bastards want to get their hands on you.”
Then the base was gone. Nothing was said for a long time.
Eventually a sign appeared. Gwalia County Park, it read. Michael found the turnoff. Another twenty minutes saw them in the park, a sprawling well-forested reserve dissected by creeks feeding into the Jerzic River, which flowed westward to the sea north of McNair. To the east, lay the enormous bulk of the Velmar Mountains. Like the Branxtons, they were a single expanse of limestone lifted into a high plateau that dominated the horizon.
And somewhere in all that vastness were Anna and her battalion. Michael forced himself not to think about her.
The briefing they had been given by Gidisu’s people had said the park was busy only at weekends, and so it proved to be. For a good hour they cruised its network of narrow lanes, methodically working their way over to the eastern boundary in the process. They did not see another soul.
“I think that’s enough, and that’ll do nicely,” Shinoda said finally. She pointed to a small picnic area that was set back from the road. “Park up over there.”
Michael eased the mobibot off the road. He stopped out of sight of any passersby and under the canopy of a massive fig tree. He climbed out and stretched to ease the stiffness from his back. He looked around. “Doesn’t look like anyone’s been here for a while,” he said.
“It’s as good as we’ll get.” She looked around to get her bearings. “Okay,” she went on, pointing to the east. “The Jerzic River’s half a klick that way with the missile base another five after that- Down!” she hissed as, without any warning, she hurled herself at Michael and knocked him to the ground. “Make it look real,” she whispered.
“What the-”
Whatever Michael was about to say was lost as Shinoda’s lips clamped down onto his. He was too surprised by the sheer speed and ferocity of Shinoda’s attack to put up anything more than token resistance, resistance that vanished altogether when his senses were overwhelmed by the warmth and scent of her body, his tongue flicking out to meet hers.
Shinoda lifted her head only a fraction but enough to break the kiss. “I know we have history, and I know I said to make it real,” she whispered, her breath warm and sweet on his face, “but don’t get carried away, spacer boy.”
“Like to tell me what you’re doing?” Michael whispered back.
“Drone, you idi-sir.”
Shinoda didn’t have to say it. Michael did feel like an idiot. He could hear the steady, thrumming resonance of engines. A minute later a drone shot overhead and disappeared into the distance.
Pinned to the ground, Michael waited for Shinoda to let him go, something she appeared reluctant to do. Finally she rolled off him and onto her back. She lay there, staring up into the dense mass of greenery that hung over their heads. “Pity about that,” she said.
“Pity about what?”
“Lieutenant Colonel Anna Cheung Helfort, that’s what.”
“Ah,” was Michael’s only response. He did not trust himself to say any more. He was on very thin ice, and he knew it.
“Come on,’ Shinoda said. She scrambled to her feet. “We should move out.”
“We should. Think that thing saw us?”
“No. The new Hammer recon drones are a problem, but that version’s not,” Shinoda replied with a dismissive wave. “That was a KSD-31: no down-facing radar, limited ESM capability, and fitted with infrared and optical sensors only. And one of these-” She pointed at the massive fig tree. “-is as good as cover gets … well, short of a couple of meters of ceramcrete, that is. Right, sir,” Shinoda went on, all businesslike, as if the events of a few moments earlier had never happened. “Get geared up and we’ll move out. And triple-check your chromaflage. There’ll be surveillance drones around, and we can’t rely on them all being second-rate KSD-31s.”
“Yes, sergeant.”
Binoculars to their eyes, Michael and Shinoda lay under their chromaflage capes back from the crest of a ridge that ran parallel to the western boundary of Gwalia Missile Defense Base. The late afternoon sun burned hot on their backs.
The base was huge, laid out in a broad rectangle. It was studded with hexagonal ceramcrete structures that supported armored cupolas. Below each one was a quadruple Goshawk antiballistic missile launcher. The perimeter was secured by three razor-wire fences. They ran in parallel and were studded with posts cluttered with arrays of motion sensors and holocams. A road ran outside the wire, connecting a series of small blockhouses and laser batteries. Beyond the road, the ground had been scraped back to dirt for a good 500 meters. Michael didn’t need binoculars to know what the signs set in the ground every 50 meters said. The skull and crossbones symbol that headed each one was enough to tell him that the entire area was thick with mines.
In the center of the base was the command center. It was a brutal building, squat and ugly, built of ceramcrete with massive recessed blastproof doors and topped with an enormous dome that protected the phased array radar installation, its seamless skin blindingly white in the morning sun.
Michael shifted his binoculars onto the only thing that mattered to him and Shinoda: the road connecting the command center to the base’s main gate, a substantial installation in its own right, protected from attack by a chicane and flanked by dragon’s teeth; the approach was covered by blockhouses.
From the gate ran the one and only road that linked Gwalia Missile Defense Base to the town of Gwalia. It was down that road that Colonel Farrah would drive when Juggernaut happened.
“Seen enough?” Michael murmured. They had been watching for hours now, and he was beginning to get nervous.
“I have,” Shinoda said. “Let’s get out of here before we get spotted. I’d like to drive the road before it gets dark, and we should make sure the good colonel is still shacked up with his wife in town.”
By the time sunset arrived-always a protracted business on Commitment thanks to its forty-nine-hour day-Shinoda had picked a spot along the road linking the missile base to Gwalia. It was a tight curve forced on the engineers by a massive limestone reef that reared up out of flat ground.
Shinoda scuffed the toe of one boot through the dust. “Thanks to all this damn rock, there’s not as much vegetation as I’d like,” she said, “but this’ll do.” She looked up and down the road. “I’ll put you there-” She pointed to where a small outcrop poked its way clear of a thin fringe of bushes. “-while I go just here, alongside this boulder. Our man will come from that way.” She pointed down the road toward Gwalia. “He’ll slow right down for the bend, and that’s when we’ll hit him. We’ll put three of the remote holocams down the road. That way we can make absolutely sure we get a positive identification. Be a shame to shoot up the wrong car. And we’ll put the fourth camera back toward the base to make sure we don’t get blindsided by someone coming from that direction. All make sense?”
“Yup.”
“Our primary egress will be 50 meters back from and parallel to the road, back where we’ll stash the bot. If that’s compromised, we’ll follow the reef away from the road up to high ground, drop down to the Jerzic River, turn north, and try to reach the NRA positions in the Velmars on foot.”
“Long walk.”
“But doable. So what I want you to do is this: First, put the base-side holocam in position. Let me see; yes, you’ll need to run fiber back to here. We can’t risk a radio datalink, and we can’t get direct line of sight, so a laser link is out.”
“Roger that.”
“And point the bloody thing the right way, toward the base. Got that?”
“Sergeant,” Michael protested, “I’m not a complete idiot.”
“Maybe not, but you’d be surprised how many times it happens. Now, when you’ve done that, I’d like you to check our secondary escape route. Try to find a way through that will allow us to move fast; look for good ambush sites and ways to get up onto the reef if we have to. Got all that?”
“Yeah. How far do I go?”
“Let me see … Five klicks should be enough. But I want you back here no later than four hours from now and watch your chromaflage discipline. There’ll be drones for sure. Any questions?”
“Just one. While I’m doing that, where will you be? And I’m not being a smart-ass, sergeant, in case you were wondering. I just want to know where to find you.”
“Fair enough. I’ll set up the cameras, run the fiber back here, and bring up our supplies in case we have to abandon the bot. And when we’ve done all that, we’ll find somewhere to hole up.”