Honor Bound

on them. The field on a ship that large is going to be too powerful for that. It’s certainly possible to make a gravimetic emitter powerful enough to destabilize a field on a cruiser that size, but I can’t rig it up from anything on this ship.”

“What about a field intersect?” Franks asked. “The ramships managed to take out the field on the Decatur, right?”

Infante hesitated for a long moment. “It would be close. I might be able to rig up a bypass that would keep our trunk line from exploding from the overload, but I guarantee the gravito-inertial load in a ship that large is going to cause one hell of a lot of structural damage.”

“Worse than that,” Gianeto said, “remember that those ramships were already equipped to survive multiple field intersects… what if this cruiser is rigged up the same way?”

“She’ll recover before we do,” Minishimi deduced. “And unlike the ramships, she’ll have enough firepower to blow us apart.”

“Could we launch a Shipbuster before the intersect?” Lee wondered. “Like we did with the ramships? Program it to hit right after we take out their field?”

“We could get away with that before,” Gianeto explained, “because the ramships are basically unarmed. If this is an operational cruiser, it’ll have the defenses to take out a Shipbuster.” He hissed out a frustrated breath. “We’ve never had to plan on fighting our own ships, or anything remotely like them.”

“We have the Sheridan,” Franks suggested. “If one of us did a field intersect, that would leave the enemy ship open to a strike from the other.”

“The only problem there is what I mentioned before, Lieutenant,” Infante replied. “If that ship is rigged to recover quickly from a field collision, the other cruiser may not have time to attack before the enemy’s drive field is back up. And with the damage I expect from such a collision, we’ll have basically sacrificed one of our ships for nothing.”

“Work on it, Commander Infante,” Minishimi directed. “Find me something. If you can’t, we’re going to have to put ourselves between her and Earth. She can’t launch on them without dropping her field, and she can’t do that if we’re sitting right there, waiting to take potshots at her.”

“But Captain,” Franks said, “they still control the defenses… including the ground based lasers. If we drop field to fight the ship, they can shoot us down.”

“Yes they can, Lieutenant,” she admitted, smiling sadly.

“Oh.” Realization came into his eyes. “Yes, ma’am.” Franks shrugged. He’d known what he was getting into when he’d come aboard the Brad. “Between our loved homes and the war’s desolation,” he murmured.

“What was that?” Minishimi asked, eyes narrowing as she tried to place the quote. “Is that from Homer?”

“Sort of, ma’am,” he told her. “Just something I remembered from history class.”

“If we win this fight, Lieutenant,” she told him, “you’ll be taught in those history classes.”

“And if we lose,” Gianeto cracked, “the history classes will be taught in Russian.”

Minishimi scowled at him, but it broke into a smile against her will.

“Lt. Reno,” she said, turning to the Communications Officer, “signal the Sheridan to come into comms range and drop field. We won’t be able to do this alone.”

Chapter Forty-Four

As he knelt over the dead biomech, Ariel Shamir thanked whatever gods of war that might be listening that Fourcade and Hellene D’Annique had found it convenient to outfit their clone army with standard military 8mm rifles already in the supply pipeline. Otherwise, they all might have run out of ammo by now. He slapped a fresh magazine into the well of his carbine and stuffed the rest of the salvaged mags into the empty pouches on his tactical vest. Beside him in the dry creek bed, Roza did the same from another of the dozens of biomech corpses piled there, some in charred and bloody pieces.

“Grab everything you can,” he called to the rest of the two platoons they were leading as they moved through the ditch, scavenging. “Look for grenades and heavy weapons!”

Ari glanced up and down the creek bed and beyond it, where the surviving Cee Gee cadets, their training cadre and a few of the Special Ops troops were foraging through the dead for ammunition. A glow of burning vehicles suffused the air above them, while the ditch itself was cloaked in shadows and darkness, growing a pale green in the infrared filters in his helmet visor.

“Ari,” he heard Colonel Stark’s voice in his earphones. “Hurry them up down there. Their vehicles are reforming and I think they’re getting ready to circle around and make another push for the bridge… or move off to find another crossing. We’re going to make sure it’s the former.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he replied. “A ‘V’ centered on the bridge?”

“More or less,” she agreed. “See if we can make a bit more use of natural cover this time, since we aren’t running for our lives at the moment.”

“Got it, Colonel.” He expected to chuckle at the comment, but found he couldn’t. Too many of the Colonial Guard officer candidates that he himself had helped to train were lying dead on the bloody, smoking ground up there. Instead, he walked over to Roza, squeezing her arm and touching helmets. “I love you,” he told her. Through her visor, he could see her eyes glancing his way with a bit of worry.

“I love you, too, kedves,” she said. “Is it bad?”

“The enemy is swinging around the wreckage and trying to come back in and take this bridge,” he replied. “They’ll have to dismount and push us out of here before they can clear it.”

“And there’ll be no more fire support,” she said with resignation in her voice.

Ari didn’t answer: there was no need. Instead, he keyed his helmet radio, tuned to the company net. “Wrap it up, ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “The day’s not over yet.”

Tom Crossman fought to control his breathing as he jogged the game trail that led over the gently rolling hills on the other side of the dry creek bed. He hadn’t slept more than an hour in days, his body’s resources were being tapped by the medical nanotech still repairing his wounds from within and he was buzzing on stimulants. His heart felt as if it were about to beat out of his chest and he seemed to be constantly on the verge of hyperventilating, but he pushed on, ignoring it all, ignoring the weight of the load he was carrying in his backpack and concentrating on trying to make sense of the input from the thermal and infrared lenses in his helmet in the pitch blackness.

The trail was closed in by young trees but as it cleared the next hill, it opened out onto an old secondary road that exited off the main highway. The road was crumbling and overgrown, but it was wide and clear enough for even the big cargo haulers, much less the APCs, which could have gone cross-country at need. That was why Tom and his squad were there.

“Where are their scouts, Colonel?” he radioed to Shannon Stark as he crouched in the trees beside the old road. He could hear Aaron Diehl slowly moving into place beside him and could see the rest of the squad’s avatars on his HUD as they took up positions on both sides of the road.

“They’re heading your way, Tom,” she warned him. “Two APCs. You’ve got maybe two minutes.”

“Roger that, ma’am.” He switched two Sgt. Diehl’s channel. “Sam, we have two enemy vehicles inbound, ETA two minutes. Take Manning and the last two missile launchers and stop them.”

“Got it, boss,” Diehl said, sprinting across the road and slapping Manning on the arm. The two of them grabbed a pair of anti-armor launchers from the backpack of one of the other Special Ops troops then headed down the road toward the intersection.

“Griffin!” Tom snapped at another of the newly-graduated operators. “Get over here and grab these charges from my backpack! We got ourselves a road to blow up!”

Tanya Manning gripped the twin handles of the missile launcher tightly, trying very hard to keep her hands from shaking. She could see the two armored vehicles approaching now, their thermal signature dim but still visible through the trees lining the road, and she touched the launcher’s targeting control, seeing a red reticle appear in