“Oh, no, Bottom-san,” said Mutsumi Ota as he brought the Oshkosh to a stop against the steep south bank and parked it there. “Just regular lasers. Would not hurt a fly.”
“Final coordinates in?” asked Sato.
Nick, who’d taken twelve weeks of instruction in conversational Japanese with Dara during his push for detective first grade nine years ago, didn’t understand a word of what he’d just heard.
“Gee-bear
“Thirty-eight seconds,” said Shinta Ishii, obviously using English for Nick’s benefit.
Above them, the turret whirred and Daigorou Okada’s mini-gun opened up again and hot, spent cartridges started raining down on the steel floor. Nick could see through four of the monitors that the line of infantry was almost to the south riverbank, the tanks less than a hundred meters behind. The tanks were also accompanied by infantry. The figures in the front were visibly firing on the single mini-drone video feed and now Nick could hear the bullets pinging against the Oshkosh’s outer skin. Slugs hitting the turret above had a slightly more resonant sound.
“Shouldn’t we at least go out and… I don’t know…,” said Nick. “Fight?”
Sato put his strong left hand on Nick’s wrist and said nothing. The pinging on the outer hull became a solid roar. Nick thought of a time when he was a kid and he and his father had run to a farmer’s tin-roofed shed during a violent downpour. This was louder.
The mini-gun above them fell silent. “Out of ammunition, Sato-san,” announced Daigorou Okada.
“Ten seconds,” Shinta Ishii said softly from in front of Nick. The man sat back deeper in his crash chair and tugged at the already tight five-point harnesses holding him in. Okada dropped down from his perch and Nick heard and saw a metal panel sealing off the top gun bubble. Okada pulled down a jump seat and harnessed himself into it.
Suddenly Sato moved up behind Nick as if to hug him, despite the shattered arm hanging limp at his side, and the big man shoved his huge and armored body tight, pressing Nick against the crash-couch ahead of him.
Later, Nick swore that he’d caught a glimpse of them via the single drone monitor and the last working Oshkosh external cam. Six slim shapes—about the size and configuration of telephone poles—hurtling down from orbit at eight times the speed of sound.
The mini-drone turning on a widening gyre a thousand feet above them that was painting the three tanks with its laser beams was vaporized in the first seconds of the blast, but the more distant drones opened their channels and sent images—recorded for later study—of the three mushroom clouds rising and converging into one great mushroom cloud that folded and unfolded and then refolded itself toward the stratosphere.
The tanks were vaporized in an instant. The hundreds of infantrymen and -women, anyone standing within a radius of two kilometers of the three targeted and simultaneously struck tanks, were caught up in the shockwave and blast front of disturbed air and thrown a hundred meters or more through the dust-filled sky. None appeared to have survived.
The riverbank collapsed in on and completely buried the Oshkosh.
“On one hundred percent internal air,” came a computer voice that Nick hadn’t heard before.
The vibrations and tremors were very strong. If it hadn’t been for Sato pressing him against the crash-couch, it was quite possible that he would have rattled around the inside of the truck like a BB in a shaken steel can.
“Holy shit,” whispered Nick when the up-and-down oscillations had stopped and Mutsumi Ota had fired up the Oshkosh’s big twin turbines and driven them out of the landslide.
Ota guided them up the rough ramp onto the scorched area atop the bank and stopped, engines idling. Daigorou Okada had opened the top turret and clambered back up, carrying heavy magazines for the mini-gun, but there was no firing.
Nick stared at the monitors as more of the mini-drones moved back within range. The scorched area was an almost perfect circle extending across the riverbed and another mile or so to the north and up the river valley cliffs almost two miles to the south.
The doors opened and the driver, Mutsumi Ota, and Shinta Ishii had attached their PEAPs and climbed out, heading back down the bank toward the still-burning first Oshkosh.
“Please to lower visor and activate PEAP,” Sato said softly. “The air is very full of particles. We must retrieve Joe’s body from our vehicle. His real name was Genshirou Ito and though there will not be much left after the fire, we must find what we can. We shall send others back for a more complete job before sending Ito-san’s ashes back to Nippon for a hero’s burial. We honor our dead.”
Nick nodded and closed his visor with a shaking hand. His hands were too unsteady to activate the PEAP comm, so Sato helped. Then the security chief pushed a button and the big rear door swung out and clanged down. Nick followed Sato down the ramp onto earth so fried that it snapped and crackled under their boots. Not even a blade of grass had survived the flames.
“Nukes?” managed Nick.
“Ahh, no,” said Sato over their personal comm. “A purely hyperkinetic weapon. From orbit, you see. Many hundreds waiting for the call. Six used here. No warheads. No radioactivity, of course. Merely speed turned into energy. Much energy.”
“I didn’t know such things existed,” whispered Nick. They were walking toward the first Oshkosh now. Ota and Ishii were using large foam fire extinguishers from the surviving Oshkosh to fight the flames. Behind Sato and Nick, the bubble turret whirred as Daigorou Okada covered them.
“No,” agreed Sato, using his good arm to pull another fire extinguisher from an outside locker and handing it one-handed to Nick before he took another for himself.
“That arm’s in terrible shape,” said Nick. “You’ll need to get airlifted to a surgeon. Soon.”
Sato smiled and shook his head. “Okada-san is a very good medic, as was Genshirou Ito. There are adequate painkillers and medical materials aboard this Oshkosh for Okada-san to set the worst of the break and to allow me to travel the last three or four hours to Santa Fe in relative comfort.”
Before they went down the bank into the riverbed, Nick looked south and then all around again at the miles of devastation. Ten thousand small fires still burned. It seemed as if the ground were on fire.
“What do you call this weapon?” he asked.
Sato smiled. “The man who came up with the idea for such an enhanced, self-guided kinetic kill weapon— especially designed to penetrate deep bunkers—called them OWL.”
“Owl?” repeated Nick.
“Orbital Warhead Lancet. Very simple. Very useful for such small-unit fighting when regular air support is not available. It is used occasionally in China, not often. It is very expensive.”
“And these six OWLs came from Mr. Nakamura’s private stock.”
Nick remembered hearing the odd word. “ ‘Gee’ as in gravity, high-boost, acceleration, that sort of thing?”
“Yes,” nodded Sato, as if enjoying some private joke. “But also ‘Gee’ as in the first letter of the first name of the American skiffy writer who came up with the idea for this particular technology. We like to honor creators when we can.”
“Skiffy writer,” repeated Nick. S-c-i-hyphen-f-i.
Sato quit smiling. “It was important, Bottom-san, that we get you to your interview tomorrow with Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev. I promised Mr. Nakamura that you would be there.”
As they began walking down the crumbled riverbank toward the burning Oshkosh, Nick was wondering how they were going to get the pieces of Joe’s charred and crumbling body out of that mess. Or if they’d find his head.
