We all nodded. I looked over at Mother and Tailgunner. They may as well have been carved out of mahogany. It was like looking at ghosts. After everything Mother had said I still couldn’t work out why. I’d spoken to Mudge about it. He’d said that sometimes you just had to draw a line against what the bad guys were allowed to get away with.
‘Is that my Void Eagle?’ Merle demanded. I looked down at the massive automatic holstered on my chest.
‘What, you want to argue about it now?’ I asked. We were just about to go operational.
‘I’ll be having that back,’ he snapped. Crucially Cat didn’t order me to give it back. In fact she was smiling.
‘There’s a reason the British army are called the Borrowers,’ Mudge told him. Rannu was laughing.
A new recruit had brought in a collection of antique weapons. Mudge had bartered with him for a pre-FHC assault shotgun for me. I’d added an external targeting system for the smartlink, which would be less than ideal, and I’d also had to make a few adjustments for the shotgun to fire caseless, but it would serve as a secondary weapon.
Watching the countdown I was shaking. When the klaxons and the red lights came on, for a moment I thought we were compromised but this was all part of the plan. I watched gunships laden with troops and exo-armour take to the air. The rest of Mother’s forces, along with whatever fighting elements of the resistance and Moa City gangs we’d managed to make contact with, had attacked targets in the city and its vicinity, hoping to draw elements of the Black Squadrons away from the Citadel.
I watched the gunships and flight-capable exo-armour head out of the big cavern. This helped but there was still a lot of men and hardware left. I knew we had to let them get to their targets. As soon as that happened our forces would pull back and hopefully melt into the background.
My breathing sounded impossibly loud in my ears but I didn’t dare risk a sedative now. I just wanted things to start — get it over with, break the tension. I was shaking quite badly now. Even under my camouflage I was sure I must have been visible as a quivering piece of rock, but nothing happened, though as a result of the alert the guards seemed more on the ball. The soldiers in the external defences were all New Zealand regulars.
I don’t think I noticed when the killing started. I knew that the others would be watching the synchronised countdown, getting ready to go. My heart was hammering at my ribcage. I didn’t hear the firing; I just saw an officer’s face cave in and he slumped to the ground. The man next to him had a moment to look surprised and then his face turned red just underneath his helmet. Rannu with a borrowed suppressed, long-barrel Steyr marksman’s rifle and Merle with his custom gauss rifle firing at subsonic speed. Every shot someone died. They were aiming and killing so quickly that none of the defenders had had time to raise the alarm yet.
The countdown reached zero. The explosion rolled across the cavern, echoing back and forth at the speed of sound. It was like standing in thunder. The ground shook as my audio dampeners managed the noise down to tolerable levels. This got their attention.
I knew that behind me a cliff face had just been turned to powder. One of the NCOs under Mother’s command was old enough to have worked mines in this area before the Citadel was built. He’d been able to guide us to mine shafts big enough for the mechs and close enough to the Citadel to blow a path through with a lot of stolen mining explosives.
They hadn’t even sounded the alarm when the Citadel started taking hits. My audio dampeners struggled with the hypersonic booms as 300mm rounds from the Apakura ’s mass driver cannon began impacting into the Citadel. The rapid hits penetrated deep into the hardened ice causing massive explosions of shards hard enough to cause shrapnel wounds. Water rained down on us from where the kinetic energy of the impacts had melted the dense ice. The ice burned where plasma rounds hit. The plasma had been fired by Kopuwai and Whakatau, the two Landsknecht-class bipedal mechs piloted by Soloso and Big Henry respectively. Every round from the plasma cannons sent up huge plumes of steam. All three mechs were targeting the Citadel’s point defence with their direct-fire weapons.
Rannu and Merle used the chaos to kill more and more as the defenders instinctively dived for cover in the face of the mech onslaught. My audio filters managed to pick up the rip of rotary railguns and the sound of rapidly staggered explosions. Apakura drew a wall of fire between her and the Citadel as she used the information provided by Pagan to detonate anti-armour mines with her rapid-firing belly railguns.
The Citadel’s point defences on our side were destroyed in moments. The Citadel had not even returned fire yet. The two Landsknechts and the Bismarck-class mech then fired half their missiles. Contrails filled the air in the huge cavern.
I opened my mouth and kept my head down. I’d been dangerously close to missile strikes before. Conventional and plasma warheads impacted. The ground jumped and tilted and I realised the impacts had blown me into the air and turned me on my side. None of the defenders had noticed; they’d had other things to worry about.
We were targeting the Citadel’s heavy-weapons systems and gunship landing areas. It looked like one whole side of the pyramid had thrown itself up into the air. Steam, water, shards and huge chunks of ice rained down on us. Several plasma warheads had detonated in the vehicle bay and it was burning with white fire. I could hear the secondary explosions of ammo cooking off. I was shaking like a leaf. I didn’t need a stim. I was wired. I needed something to take the edge off.
Each of us was a ghost, disrupting the steam and smoke as we stood up and ran towards the Citadel, killing as we went. The massive blast doors to the burning vehicle bay were starting to move, closing slowly. I sent a frag grenade from my launcher into the first trench. It exploded. I was oblivious to the screams. I glanced behind me. The Apakura, Kopuwai and Whakatau were emerging from the rolling cloud of dust, firing, seemingly unstoppable. Ahead of them Apakura ’s belly rotary railguns were hosing the ground down left and right, detonating the anti-armour mines closest to the Citadel. For a second I caught a glimpse of a small mech running towards us.
I reached the first trench. The defenders were still recovering from my initial frag. I sensed rather than heard Pagan, Mudge and Rannu run in behind me. I fired a flechette grenade. This was just slaughter. The soldiers in the trench were trying to work out what the fuck was happening to them when razor-sharp needles tore through cheap armour. The shaking had stopped. I fired at anything still moving with the SAW. Next to me Pagan and Mudge were subduing their own trenches.
‘Clear!’ I shouted. It was less fact and more a signal to move on. I turned to run into the vehicle bay. I heard the unmistakable hypersonic roar of a Bofors railgun and glanced over at the trench Cat was subduing. She’d painted the ice red. There were no bodies, only flying body parts.
There was movement behind me. I swung around to bring the SAW smoothly to my shoulder. Sprinting out of the mist came a Steel-Mantis-class scout mech. It was Strange in the Atua Kahukahu. She’d named it for the vengeful spirit of a dead child. She’d advanced ahead of the other three mechs. Shit! That meant that we could have made the attack with the stolen exo-armour and not have lain in our own piss for more than a day.
By the doors we tore the reactive camouflage gillie suits off. If we couldn’t see each other then we’d do more harm than good. The blast doors were still closing ponderously slowly. Inside the vehicle bay it was raining as plasma fires burned through ice. The walls and the ceiling were melting but I knew it was just superficial damage, even though most of the huge bay was burning. The missiles had veered to the left and the right at the last moment to give us a clear central path. Rannu was already sprinting across the bay towards another, much smaller blast door. We followed, moving rapidly, weapons at the ready. Any movement that wasn’t us got shot. We weren’t taking chances.