behind them, Widowmaker streaked out of the canyon into clear air; an instant later, the threat plot burst into an ugly mess of red radar intercepts from the air-defense stations around McNair. Putting the nose down and engines at full power, Mother drove the lander down hard toward the floor of the floodplain, its bulk tearing apart the early-morning fog of a calm Commitment morning before it leveled out meters above the dirt.
'Command, tac.' Michael was impressed; Ferreira's voice was no less calm than Mother's. Considering her often repeated dislike of landers, that was something.
'Command.'
'Alley Kat and Hell Bent are airborne and nominal. We have tactical update and target confirmation from ENCOMM.'
'Command, roger. Weaps?'
'Target set,' Chief Bienefelt said.
'Command, Sensors. Lock up, battlesat fire-control radar. No threat; spaceborne lasers in effective.'
'Command, roger. This overcast will hold?'
'Yes, sir. Forecast says it won't burn off until midmorning.'
By which time we'll either be a smoking wreck or home safe, Michael said to himself. He made himself settle down, suppressing the inevitable urge to take manual control. Despite its human crew, Widowmaker was largely in Mother's hands, and she was in the hands of a cluster of AIs that controlled every system from flight control down to air-conditioning. Given how fast Widowmaker was moving, that was for the best. The ground under the lander was a green and brown blur, objects disappearing before the brain had even begun to register their existence, the occasional settlement vanishing below them in a gray streak.
'Stand by IP… now!'
Widowmaker slammed over onto its side and into a hard turn to starboard, foamalloy wings flexing upward as g forces built, the starboard wingtip centimeters from the ground before Mother flipped the lander back level to run right at the target: DocSec's Millfield base, a large cluster of ceramcrete buildings arranged around a parade ground crowded with a mass of black jumpsuited troopers, neat lines of trucks, armored personnel carriers, and lightly armored urban warfare vehicles. Michael's heart tried to beat its way out of his chest as the range closed, the certain fact that Widowmaker was about to rain death down on one of the bigger DocSec bases in the Oxus valley flooding his system with adrenaline.
'Stand by… bays open… clusterbots gone… cleaning up, coming right to new track. Target 2 in one minute.'
Through the rear holocams, Michael watched Widowmaker's lethal load of fin-retarded clusterbots-supplied by the NRA and, like most NRA's ordnance, stolen by Nationalist agents or captured from the Hammer convoys; Michael wondered if they would even work-open out. Sprouting fins, they aerobraked savagely before spewing hordes of tiny black shapes onto the hapless DocSec base, an unstoppable swarm of smart bomblets programmed to sterilize the entire base, to scour it clean of men, trucks, and armor. An instant later, the base disappeared behind a mat of dirty gray-black smoke shot through with yellow and red flame, exploding fusion plants ramming misty white shock waves away through the damp morning air. That's the way to do it, Michael thought.
'Command, sensors. New intercept. Multiple air search radars at Red 20… stand by… confirmed Locusts inbound from Amokran.'
'Command, roger.' No surprises there, Michael decided. He watched the threat plot update. If things-
'Command, sensors'-Carmellini's voice was thick with stress-'new intercept. Multiple airborne search radars at Red 40. Confirmed Kingfishers. Stand by range.'
Already alerted by the threat plot, Michael was on it. 'Abort, abort,' he barked, gritting his teeth when Mother threw Widowmaker into one of its trademark screaming turns that had the foamalloy wings screeching in protest, mashing the main engines to emergency power to send the lander fleeing for safety: Kingfishers and their long- range hypersonic Alaric air-to-air missiles were a lethal threat to a light lander. Their only hope was to get away; engines capable of driving a fully loaded lander into orbit now accelerated the lander through Mach 5 and beyond, air superheated by compression overwhelming the heat sinks, the lander's leading edges turning cherry-red.
Where had the Kingfishers come from? ENCOMM's intelligence people had said nothing about them. There was only one place, Michael decided; they had to have come from McNair spaceport north of the city, the only facility within a thousand kilometers that has runways long enough to launch fully loaded Kingfishers.
'Command, tac. ENCOMM has cleared us inbound direct to Bravo-26.'
'Roger.' Michael ran through the math in his head to make sure the command plot had it right. It had: just. It would be close, very close. The lander would be tucked away below Bravo-26's limestone slab by the time the Alarics had reached them. With a quick prayer that Alley Kat and Hell Bent were okay-he resisted the temptation to check; Widowmaker came first-he watched intently as Mother cut the power, one eye on the command plot to make sure the Alarics were where they were supposed to be. Flaring the lander and extending the wings, Mother allowed the lander's speed to wash off before she restored power to drive it through the slab-sided canyon leading to Bravo-26.
'Command, tac. ENCOMM reports kinetics inbound.'
Michael stiffened; this might be bad. 'They have vectors yet?'
'Working on it… yes, shit… sorry, sir. Time of flight 42 seconds. Impact datum is 3 klicks north of Bravo-26, where the canyon splits.'
Michael stifled a curse. The karst that covered so much of the Branxtons was riddled with caves, arching holes in the limestone valley walls, thousands of which were big enough to accommodate a light lander. Even so, the Hammers had managed to narrow the target area down to a point just short of Bravo-26, almost certainly attracted by a large cave that could well have been a lander refuge were it not a dead end. Too great a risk of entrapment, the ENCOMM planners had said, so strictly for emergency use only. Michael had no intention of straying anywhere near it.
The instant Widowmaker reached the junction, Mother turned hard left to make the final run into Bravo-26; it was a closely run thing. Ten seconds later the Hammer's kinetics smashed to ground, the impact shock visible as a rippling wave racing across the ground, the impact zone disappearing behind a boiling wall of vaporized rock. 'Holy shit,' Michael muttered. Decelerating savagely now, the lander flared nose up and then leveled out before easing into the safety of the cave. 'Thankchrist for that,' Michael muttered as Mother dropped the lander to the ground, its speed down to a sedate walking pace that took Widowmaker deep underground.
Five thousand meters in, Mother braked Widowmaker to a stop and shut down. Releasing his straps, Michael climbed stiffly out of his seat, his combat space suit stiff and awkward. He hated the damn thing, but procedures were procedures, though the chances of a combat space suit keeping him alive if Widowmaker bought it were slim. 'Okay, folks,' he said to the rest of the lander's flight deck crew, 'I'll go and plug into the network. We need to see how the rest of the op went. Jayla, can you check on the tug? I think we're moving to Bravo-16.'
'Yes, sir. We are. It's a long way, so I'll let you know when the tug's hooked up. Be a long walk otherwise.'
'Thanks,' Michael said, struggling out of his space suit before dropping down the ladder to the cargo bay to exit the lander, the familiar smell of burned rock greeting him, the heat radiating off Widowmaker's armored skin forcing him to duck his head on the way past. He found the commander of the local security detachment waiting for him.
'Sir,' the man said with the casual wave of his right hand that passed for a salute in the NRA, 'Sergeant Burelli, Bravo-26 security detachment.'
Returning the salute, Michael did what he did with every new NRA trooper he met: He shook hands. Given that every last one of them had been taught from birth to think that the Feds were something unspeakably evil, it was the only way Michael knew to show them that Feds were ordinary human beings, too.
'Sergeant. Glad to be here. They tried to nail us with kinetics on the way in.'
'We know,' Burelli said. 'We felt them.'
'Any sign of follow-up?'
Burelli shook his head, the look on his sun-weathered face-by Fed standards, he looked like an old man even though Michael had seen enough Hammers to know that he was probably not even fifty-making it quite clear he wanted the Hammers to try. 'No, sir,' he said. 'ENCOMM reports no air activity in this sector and no kinetics inbound. Portal defenses are online, so we're not expecting any problems.'
'Any ground activity?'
