'What the hell?' he said.
'The Hammers must have burned their way in,' Anna said, shaking her head in disbelief. 'They worked out where the rock was thinnest and just burned their way through.'
'Mining lasers?'
'Big ones, I reckon. Unbelievable. Come on.'
As Michael followed her, the answer to the question that had been troubling him ever since the attack started- how the Hammers had bypassed the NRA's outer defenses-was all too clear.
It was a stunning achievement, and the Hammers had done it by brute force. Parallel to the access tunnel destroyed by ENCOMM to keep the Hammer attack out of Karavakis-2, they had simply driven an entirely new tunnel, the limestone no match for pulsed hard-rock mining lasers, their enormous power vaporizing the stone into an incandescent mix of carbon dioxide and superheated calcium oxide blasting back down the tunnel and out into the valley beyond, a caustic plume of death that would have scoured the ground clean of all life for kilometers around, covering the area in a thin gray blanket of dust. Michael shook his head at the Hammers' ingenuity. It was brilliant, and it had taken ENCOMM completely by surprise, its failure to understand how fast the Hammers could burn their way through virgin limestone costing it dearly as it scrambled to stem the Hammer attacks.
But not everything had worked so well. To maximize the element of surprise, the Hammers had opted to blast their way through the last few meters of rock into Karavakis-2. That had left the mouth of their new tunnel carpeted with an ugly mass of sharp-edged boulders that were easily negotiated by soldiers on foot but a big problem for tracked vehicles and impossible for ground drones. Now Michael understood why the Hammers' light armor had been so slow to appear; good thing, too, he thought as he hurdled his way into the tunnel.
By the time Anna and Michael made it through, the battalion had brushed aside the Hammers defending Karavakis-1, the cavern that had formed the NRA's first line of defense, the Hammer marines simply overwhelmed by the unexpected speed and mindless ferocity of Mokhine's attack. The colonel was not holding back; leaving the rest of the battalion to reestablish defenses destroyed in the Hammer's initial attack, he had thrown a platoon into the Hammer tunnel that accessed Juliet-24, a massive portal that opened onto one of the karst's many slab-sided valleys. Heedless of stiffening resistance, the NRA troopers had driven down the tunnel, moving fast, firing blindly into the darkness, advancing behind a barrage of microgrenades. Any Hammer attack drones lucky enough to make it through were hacked out of the air by furious bursts of rifle fire.
Michael's heart sank; this battle showed all the signs of degenerating into a primitive hand-to-hand struggle. His heart sank even farther when Mokhine waved him and Anna over. What now? he wondered.
'Okay, you two,' he said. 'Our move toward Juliet-24 is a feint. I want to hold the Hammers, to keep them occupied while our combat engineers mine the Hammer tunnel. Meanwhile, we'll do something they won't be expecting.' Mokhine paused as a disheveled trooper ran up, the dust on her left cheek scarred by a savage gash that dripped blood in a slow, sticky stream. If the wound bothered the woman, she did not let it show. 'Ah, good,' he said. 'This is Lieutenant Tek. Maggie, these are the Helforts. They're going to take you and your platoon through the old tunnel.'
'Sir,' was all Tek said.
'The old tunnel?' Michael said with a puzzled frown. 'The one ENCOMM blew in?'
'The very same,' Mokhine said. 'I'm sure there'll be enough room above the rockfall for us to get through. It won't be fast, but we can do it. That means we can infiltrate an attack into Juliet-24 to take the Hammers from behind. If it all gets too hot, there is a cross-tunnel 75 meters back from the portal you can use to get away. All understood?'
Michael's heart sank, but he nodded.
'Go on, then,' Mokhine said.
While he and Anna scrambled up the rocks to the mouth of the old tunnel, Tek's platoon close behind, Michael commed Anna. 'This is getting hairy, Anna,' he said, 'so for chrissakes, be careful. There'll be ten million of those Hammer fuckers on the other end of this tunnel.'
'I know that,' Anna replied, 'so don't worry. No heroics from this little brown bear.'
'Yeah, right,' Michael said. 'Neuronics off?'
'Neuronics off.' Anna turned. 'Ready?' she said to Tek.
'We'll be right behind you,' Tek replied.
Together Anna and Michael plunged into the cramped space between the rockfall and the new blast-shattered roof of the tunnel. Mokhine had been right; there was enough room to crawl through… just. It was a miserable business, in places so tight that Michael had to squeeze his body between roof and rock, every meter a fight to overcome a growing certainty that the ceiling of the damaged tunnel would collapse onto him. He could not remember being so terrified ever. Even the undamaged sections of the tunnel were difficult, the floor littered with razor-edged boulders shock-blasted from the walls and roof. Were it not for the fact that Anna was alongside, shaming him to keep him moving, Michael could not have gone on into that terrible darkness.
On and on they went, Michael's neuronics counting off the meters with agonizing slowness, past the cross- tunnel, its mouth all but invisible behind a huge boulder-the temptation to turn away from the Hammers and into the sanctuary it offered was almost irresistible-until the absolute darkness ahead started to break up into tiny patches of gray light. About time, he said to himself, squeezing himself through the last few meters until he could move forward no more. No wonder the damn Hammers weren't paying this tunnel any attention, he thought. A mouse would have trouble getting through.
He tried to pull back but could not. He was jammed tight, and no matter how hard he pushed, he could not move. For one awful moment, he knew with heart-pounding certainty that he was never going to get out. Near panic, he wriggled and squirmed until the rock relented and allowed him to pull back.
'Holy shit,' he hissed, chest heaving as the panic subsided. 'I hate this place.'
'You okay?' Anna said, easing her way alongside him.
'Yeah,' he said, even though he was far from okay. 'Bastard tunnel closes in. We're maybe 3 meters short. We need cameras.'
'Let me talk to Tek.'
'Do it and tell her we need people to start clearing this rock away.'
'Okay.'
Michael lay facedown and tried not to think too much about the millions of tons of blast-fractured rock hanging only a few centimeters over his head. To his relief, Anna was back quickly, Tek close behind. 'Here you are,' she said, pushing a pair of holocam wands into his hand. 'Off you go.'
'Mind the damn cables,' Tek hissed. 'Those holocams are the only ones I've got.'
'Okay.' Michael wanted more than anything to ask Anna to place the holocams, but he did not; the last vestiges of pride and self-respect forced him back the way he had come. He stripped down to his T-shirt and took a deep breath to steady jangling nerves and trembling muscles; then he set off toward the gray patches that marked where the cave debouched into Juliet-24. This time, he was in and out in no time at all, the two wands jammed forward into clefts so that their wide-angle lenses could see all of the portal.
By the time he made it back, the cameras were online, Anna and Tek huddled over holovid screens that painted the tunnel a ghostly blue and the troopers beyond them an anonymous black as they struggled in complete silence to clear away the rockfall. Peering over Anna's shoulder, Michael did not like what he saw. The portal was a heart- stopping sight. He watched in shocked silence, the scale of the Hammers' commitment to taking the NRA's Branxton Base obvious. Jammed with marines, the place was a hive of activity as the Hammers prepared their counterattack, the sound of rifle fire punctuated by grenade explosions clearly audible.
Michael watched an Anvil armored vehicle move up to the mouth of the Hammer's tunnel, twin cannon mounted in blister turrets pouring sustained bursts of fire at the oncoming NRA attack. How were Mokhine's troopers ever going to withstand-
In a shocking blast that shivered the rocks Michael was lying on, the Hammer vehicle exploded.
'Yes!' Tek whispered, punching the air.
'Stabbers?' Anna asked.
'Yup. The frontal armor on an Anvil is no match for them. Just wish the colonel had a few more of them. Lot more Anvils where those came from.'
And there you have it, Michael thought, the NRA's problem summed up in a few short sentences.
The loss of the vehicle kicked the Hammers into frantic activity bordering on pandemonium; combat engineers
