High on Humpback Hill, Digby had stayed alone with his thoughts for much longer than usual. His driver would be wondering what in Kraa he’d been up to. Screw it, he thought, that’s enough for tonight. As he levered himself up off his rock, his comms unit chirped, announcing a priority call. Odd, he thought. The camp was quiet, so why the priority call? Everything looked okay.
And then it hit him and hit him hard.
The Feds were coming, and they were coming now. Nobody needed to tell him. He just knew.
As he took the call, Digby turned and started to half walk, half run down the hill.
Even as the alarm came through on his earpiece, Corporal Erdem sat bolt upright in his seat, boredom gone and heart pounding as he brought the half-track’s gyro-stabilized low-light holocam to bear.
It took seconds for him to identify the black shapes coming in from the west on final approach as military assault landers. They definitely weren’t commercial. The holocam was zooming in to pick up every detail of the lead vehicle, its wings flexing alarmingly as it bounced and shook and drove its way down through the rough air rolling off the hills. They’d been caught, he thought as he locked the holocam to autotrack the incoming lander, and now there would be hell to pay.
Erdem didn’t hesitate as years of military training kicked in. The only time to hit a lander was before it landed, and even if he had only a single 30-mm hypersonic light cannon, he was going to have a go. Shouting to Korda to get set up, he gunned the half-track sharply forward, swinging it south toward the runway to get clear of the long ridge that ran down from Humpback Hill.
As Erdem hammered the half-track down the slope toward the runway, Korda’s microvid told him the system had a firing solution on the lead lander. It was closing rapidly, wheels coming down as it approached the threshold, nose pitching up as belly-mounted mass drivers fired to slow the massive ship for landing. Without waiting, Korda opened up, the laser-guided fire control system putting him precisely on target, the high-explosive cannon shells smashing into the lander’s belly armor, splashes of red-gold stitching their way across the hull. For a moment, Korda would have sworn that the lander flinched before it settled again. Erdem actually cheered as Korda hammered away, the cannon shells spalling thin shards of ceramsteel armor off the lander, the pieces whipped away by the airflow howling turbulently past the lander’s less-than-aerodynamic hull.
But Erdem and Korda had forgotten that landers were built to survive much worse than 30-mm cannon and not simply by absorbing whatever was thrown at them.
Within seconds, an escorting ground attack lander had tracked the shells back to their point of origin and had passed the data to its fire control system. Microseconds after that, it had a valid firing solution, and then, happy that there was no more pressing threat that needed looking after first, it directed the full fury of its forward laser batteries onto the hapless half-track and its crew, pausing only to switch targets to hack the last few shells out of the sky as they raced in toward the lander Korda was trying so hard to bring down.
Moments later, all that was left of the half-track was a charred wreck. Even the wreckage didn’t last long as the half-track’s microfusion bottle gave up the unequal struggle to hold on to plasma hotter than any sun before exploding in a shattering, searing blast that picked Digby up and threw him brutally onto his back as he ran in.
Seconds later the first lander thumped down on the runway. The liberation of Eternity Base and its unwilling guests was just a matter of time.
For more than an hour, almost a thousand Mumtazers had huddled miserable and afraid in the darkness of a damp Eternity night as all hell had broken loose to the east and south, the darkness lit by the flashes of grenade explosions and the ripping sound of small arms fire.
Kerri Helfort, with Sam never farther than a foot away the entire time, had walked through the group, settling people down, calming the nervous, reassuring everyone that all was under control even if the flow of information from the marines who’d slipped them out of the camp right under the noses of the Hammer had dried up completely.
To Kerri’s relief, the wait finally came to an end.
A group of shifting, shapeless blurs emerged cautiously from the broken ground between her and the huge slab sides of the bioplant supplies and driver mass buildings. Close as they were, they were barely discernible even under the floodlights that swamped the base in orange light. It took them no time at all to get to her position, but as they got close enough for her to make them out, Kerri was pleased to see that just as they were quick, they were also watchful; their heads and carbines swung ceaselessly from side to side, and from time to time they turned to walk backward.
As the marines approached, Kerri rose slowly to her feet. She saw the marines spread out to take covering positions around the Mumtazers, chromaflage reducing them in seconds to just another part of the rock-strewn ground that surrounded Eternity Base. One of the leading marines, flipping his battle helmet’s visor up to reveal a disarmingly young face, made his way over to where Kerri and Sam were standing.
“Commodore Helfort? I’m Major Krasov, sir. Colonel Musaghi’s compliments. It’s time to go home.”
Kerri just nodded.
Holding Sam tightly by the hand, she waved the watching Mumtazers to their feet. “You heard the man. Let’s get out of here!”
Without a look back, they set off down the long road home.
The last two FedWorld heavy assault landers sat patiently on the apron, anticollision lights on full power throwing splashes of orange light across the ground.
The air was thick with tension as Colonel Musaghi and his battalion staff watched the infuriatingly slow process of herding the last of the Hammers in sullen flexicuffed silence up the ramp of Clarion Call, a well-used assault lander with plenty of scars to show for it.
Musaghi snorted disapprovingly. Where did the Fleet get its lander names from? The second lander rejoiced in the sobriquet of Nervous Nellie, for Christ’s sake. No such nonsense allowed in the marines, thank God.
“Not a happy bunch, Colonel.” Musaghi’s operations officer, a tall lanky Suleimani, waved a dismissive hand at the dejected line of men.
Musaghi nodded. He’d have much preferred to leave every single one of the Hammer scum dirtside, but orders were orders. “Not quite what the bastards expected, I’m sure. How many to go?”
“That’s the lot, Colonel. Apart from the dead ones.”
“I’m sure as hell not taking them,” Musaghi said, lifting his breather mask for a second to spit on the ground for effect. “Sterilization teams?”
“On schedule, sir. All the major facilities have been seeded, and those teams are back; just the minor support systems to go and we’re done.”
Musaghi grunted.
Not for one second had he allowed himself to forget that they were deep inside Hammer space, and the minute they pinchjumped out-system wouldn’t be soon enough. In the interests of completing the operation sooner rather than later, he had wanted simply to blow up the entire base, but he had been emphatically overruled. Some lunatic, probably some useless seat polisher in interstellar relations, clearly thought that Eternity Base would be reactivated some day, and to that end teams had fanned out to seed every system in the place with software that would turn millions of FedMarks worth of AIs into so much solid-state junk. Never in a thousand years would the Hammer be able to reactivate the enormously complex systems that could turn a dirtball of a world like Eternity into a place fit for humans in a matter of years.
Musaghi grunted again, this time much more emphatically. He didn’t give a toss for Eternity, and it would be one hell of a long time before the Hammers would allow anyone back to pick up where Brigadier General Digby and his unholy crew of jailbirds had been forced to leave off. If ever.