would it make? There were thousands more, tens, hundreds of thousands more marines where these had come from. All of a sudden, victory seemed a long way away.
The distant rumble of incoming landers broke the silence, distant dots appearing, quickly taking the unmistakable shape of Hammer heavy transport landers. This was as good as it was going to get, he decided. Chou activated his whisper mike.
'Jackass, this is Joker Three Four,' he said.
'Joker Three Four, Jackass.'
'I have multiple heavy landers inbound. Estimate fifteen hundred marines plus support vehicles on the apron. Recommend we go when the landers touch down.'
'Jackass, roger that. Stand by.'
Chou said a quiet word of thanks to the Feds; they had provided the fiber-optic network connecting the observers to each other and to their improvised charges. He still was not sure about them, but the communications gear coming out of their microfabs was a hundred times better than anything the NRA had been able to steal from the Kraa-damned Hammers.
The faceless NRA trooper controlling the operation was gone only a minute. 'Joker Three Four, Jackass.'
'Joker Three Four.'
'Joker Three Four, Jackass. Concur. Go when the first lander hits the ground. Stand by… Joker Niner One, Jackass. Activate. I say again, activate all charges. Report when ready to fire.'
Chou set to work, and one by one the truckbot fusion microplants came to life. The die was cast. Once fusion started, there was no stopping it. The safety interlocks had been just so much dead weight; they had been ripped off and discarded. All Chou needed to do was wait until they came to full power; then he either fired them or five minutes later they would lose containment anyway. It was a while, but finally he had all green lights.
'Jackass, Joker Three Four.'
'Joker Three Four, Jackass.'
'All charges online. Ready to fire.'
'Roger, Three Four. Joker Niner One, this is Jackass. All stations stand by to fire on Joker Three Four's command. Joker Three Four, you copy? Try to get the landers.'
Chou gulped; this was not in the plan. He took a deep breath to steady himself. 'Affirmative, Jackass, firing on my command. Joker Niner One, this is Three Four, stand by to fire.'
With agonizing slowness, the first of the marine landers banked hard, wings flexing under the load, before it settled down to make its final approach. Behind it, the second lander followed suit, the two landers running toward the threshold, rock-steady, as if on rails.
'Joker Niner One, this is Joker Three Four… firing in five, four, three, two, one, now!'
Truckbot microfusion plants scattered beside the runway and across the airport apron exploded in a single searing flash of pure energy, the blast scouring the ceramcrete clean, every living thing destroyed in an instant. The two marine landers never had a chance; picked up bodily, they were thrown over onto their sides. Before their pilots had time to react, first their wings and then their hulls plowed into the close-cropped grass flanking the main runway, the shock of impact blowing huge clouds of rain-sodden dirt high into the air before they tumbled end over end, gouging massive scars into the ground before coming to a stop.
Chou did not live long enough to see what he had achieved. Before the first lander even drove into the ground, what was left of the ware house, weakened by fire, gave way in the face of the blast, its collapse toppling tons of ceramcrete onto his position.
As he died, towering columns of ionized gas climbed away into the sky all across Perdan before they were driven away by the latest rainstorm, shredded skeins of fast-cooling gas blown twisting away into the distance. Friday, November 23, 2401, UD Branxton Ranges, south of Perdan, Commitment
Separated from the rest of the 120th during a vicious firefight with the Hammers, Anna and Michael walked on alone. Even the Hammer recon drones that had forced them to slow down to a crawl had disappeared, and the battlesats had been blinded by thick gray cloud scudding overhead. Michael was happy to see the cloud; the intermittent rain it brought with it was a small price to pay.
Where the rest of the regiment had gotten to, they had no idea. All Michael knew was that they were not where they were supposed to be, rally point after rally point populated only by trees. Soon they abandoned any idea of finding them. Before he, too, vanished into the darkness, a straggler from the 48th had told them the rest of his regiment was somewhere ahead of them, and Michael still hoped they would catch up with them. It was not a good feeling, just the two of them alone in a vast forest infested with vengeful Hammers.
Fifty meters short of the next ridge, the characteristic buzz of a recon drone caught his attention. As he paused to see where the damn thing was, some deep-seated atavistic instinct shocked him out of the endless one-foot- after-another trudge away from Perdan, and in an instant he knew with absolute, unshakable certainty that he and Anna had to get off the track.
'Move!' he screamed as he leaped for Anna, provoked by instinct alone. Grabbing her backpack, he crash- tackled her off the path and into a twisting, rolling, crashing slide down through the undergrowth and into a narrow ravine. There Michael came to a crunching stop, the dead weight of Anna's body dropping on top of him, driving the air out of his lungs with a whooof.
'Michael!' Anna snapped. 'What the fu-'
A fast-moving flight of four marine landers roared overhead, black shapes smeared across a predawn sky torn to shreds by the appalling noise of their engines as they accelerated away, a noise that was nothing compared to the blast from the pattern of fuel-air bombs that exploded an instant later. The shock wave was a malignant living force, the overpressure unstoppable, ripping and tearing at the ground, driving debris outward in a lethal storm of razor-sharp shards of wood. Michael was shaken to his core, unable to refill his lungs, every fiber of his body screaming in protest, his body pounded into the dirt, slammed up and then back when the shock wave ripped through the ground, rocks, dirt, and debris cascading down across them.
Ears ringing, confused and disoriented, Michael lay there for a long time, tortured lungs fighting for air. He could not hear much over the ringing in his ears; he could only feel the slow skittering of debris dropping onto his helmet. When his brain rebooted, he rolled Anna off his back and struggled to sit upright.
'Anna, you okay?' he mumbled past a tongue thick with dirt and dust; he tried to shake a sick fuzziness out of his head without success. He felt sick.
'Piss off,' she mumbled. 'Leave me alone. Don't want to move.'
'Come on, Anna,' Michael said, standing up. 'We can't stay here. They must have spotted some of us, so they may be back. Come on'-urgently now, he shook her shoulder-'we need to keep moving.'
'Bastard.' She sat up, brushing dirt off her chromaflage cape. With an effort, she climbed to her feet, swaying unsteadily while she organized herself.
'You okay?'
Anna nodded. 'Yeah. Bit woozy is all. FABs are no fun at all.'
Michael had to agree. Like every Fed spacer, he had watched a live fuel-air bomb drop during his training-from a safe distance-and he had experienced the damn things firsthand when the Hammers were hunting him on Serhati. He hated them then, and he hated them now.
Settling his gear and grabbing his rifle, Michael scrambled out of the shallow ravine. The sight that greeted him shocked him to his core. He and Anna had been lucky; the Hammer landers had dropped their bombs just over the heavily wooded ridge they had been climbing on their way south to safety, leaving the ground leading to the ridge a shattered mess. The blast had sheared the tops of trees off, scattering branches and tree trunks across the ground in careless profusion.
'Not good,' he said.
'No,' Anna said. 'I wonder how things look on the other side.'
They soon found out, Michael offering a silent prayer of thanks that he and Anna had been protected from the worst of the blast by the ridge. The ground ran down to a small stream, then climbed to the next ridge. Before the Hammers had arrived, the valley would have been close to idyllic: well wooded, cool under trees undisturbed since the planetary engineers had seeded them into the ground, a stream running cold and clear across water-worn granite, rich with plants, birds, and wild animals.
The valley had been a small piece of paradise on a screwed-up world. Now it was hell.
For hundreds of meters upstream and downstream from where Michael and Anna stood, the valley was a
