Stark’s Crusade Read online

  “I don’t want to do that, Vic. The guy on the scene should have the discretion to decide. That’s what we always said should happen, right?”

  “It’s hard to argue with that. We all got micromanaged too many times by people sitting a hundred klicks from the front. It’s awfully tempting to try to run everything from here.” She waved one hand around the headquarters command center, filled with displays and communications terminals from which officers had once tried to do just that. “This gear makes it real easy to think you’re right there on the scene.”

  “Yeah. Only you’re not, so you don’t really know what’s going down like the people who are there. We don’t want to give dumb orders which kill people and lose battles. Which is what the officers we replaced used to do. But Lamont’s too cocky. He’s having too much fun playing with that enemy controller.”

  “I agree. He’s too caught up in the deception game. Someone watching the bigger picture has to reign him in, Ethan.”

  “Okay. I get it. That someone would be me, right? I guess that’s the right job for someone back here. Lamont, this is Stark.”

  “Hey, boss. We’re doing great.”

  “Lamont, stop trying to string this guy. Open fire as soon as you’re ready.”

  “You mean like now?”

  “I mean like real soon. It’s still your call. But don’t let him get off the first shot, or I’ll rip your head off when you get back here.”

  “Uh, roger that. Stand by for fireworks.”

  After several more verbal exchanges with Lamont, the increasingly frustrated and angry controller had apparently reached the end of his rope. “Stop all movement or I will activate our security forces!”

  “Hold on. Did you say you needed our LAAOC?”

  “Yes, you idiot!”

  “Well, I got your LAAOC right here, pal.” On Stark’s display, he watched threat symbology detach itself from the tank as its main cannon swung and fired in one motion. An instant of shocked silence reigned, then the shell impacted on the main surface communications relay, hurling fragments of rock and metal in all directions. Lamont’s other tanks opened fire, raking the landing field defenses even as those defenders frantically tried to bring to bear weapons designed to engage overhead targets, not forces deployed on the field itself.

  The neat infantry formations dissolved, armored soldiers scattering into combat dispersal and engaging targets with deliberate skill. Stark switched displays to the camera mounted in an individual soldier’s helmet, watching through the eyes of a squad leader as she led her troops into a defensive fortification. Symbology on the battle armor Heads-Up Displays painted lightning quick detections of armored foes, HUD targeting systems highlighting kill-points as the squad swept forward, pausing only to fire their rifles as they picked off each target. Wish I was doing that, instead of sitting here. Wish the other noncoms had chosen someone else to lead them so I could still be a squad leader. But I got another job to do now.

  The squad Stark was observing overran the fortification, the remnants of the enemy weapon’s crew hastily surrendering. On the squad leader’s HUD, points for attaching demolition charges were now illuminated on the heavy surface defenses. The squad broke into fire teams, some guarding the prisoners while others placed the demolitions to ensure the weapons’ destruction. All happening perfect without me calling the shots. This is the way it ought to be. I know from lots of experience that the best thing leaders can usually do is keep their mouths shut and let their people do their jobs. As long as they ain’t screwing up, anyway. But man, it’s frustrating.

  Something was missing, something that nagged at Stark, so that he automatically glanced toward one corner of the squad leader’s HUD, looking for something that wasn’t there. The timeline. It had become so routine, a readout linked to the operational plan that informed every individual soldier the second they began to fall behind the rigid schedules devised by planners who likely had never seen the battlefield. A happy green when the soldier was on timeline, most soldiers were used to seeing it in increasingly accusing shades of yellow, orange, and red. Being off timeline was a major distraction for a combat soldier, so Stark and his improvised staff had decided to see what would happen without one. So far, the world hadn’t come to an end.

  “I read all primary defenses eliminated,” Lamont reported. “Whadayya think, Milheim?”

  Sergeant Milheim, commanding the ground soldiers from Fourth Battalion on the landing field, took a moment to respond. “Yeah. We’re not taking any fire, anyway.”

  “Well, then, let’s start blowing things up!”

  “Concur. Fourth Battalion, plant your charges on the targets specified in your Tacs. Keep an eye out for hostile visitors while you’re at it.” The soldiers of Fourth Battalion scattered even more, heading for locations where their Tactical Computer Systems indicated communications, weapons, and supply equipment should be.

  Stark pulled his view back again, scanning the display for indications of an enemy response. Every soldier’s suit, every tank, every shuttle contained sensors, and the inputs from those sources were all fed to places like this to be fused together into a single picture. Blue symbols marking Stark’s troops swarmed over the field like ants at a picnic. Several small clusters of red enemy symbology sat motionless, tagged with extra symbols, indicating their status as prisoners. At a few sites along the edge of the field, green symbols indicated probable civilian employees of the landing field fleeing for their lives. Stark shook his head. “I don’t see nothing.”

  Reynolds studied the display. “And that bothers you.” It was a statement rather than a question.

  “Damn right. There oughta be something else in place defending that field. Lamont! Milheim!”

  “Yo.”

  “Roger.”

  “Listen up. There’s something else out there. Keep your guard up.”

  “I don’t see anything,” Milheim offered.

  “Neither do I. So where would a quick reaction defensive force be that we wouldn’t see it?”

  “Cargo warehouses,” Lamont announced. “Nice, warm, and hidden until they’re needed. You think?”

  Vic Reynolds nodded and keyed her own response. “I think so. You’re right. They’d be under cover and protected from immediate detection and attack.”

  “Sure they would. I’ll swing a couple of my hogs that way. Milheim, I’d appreciate some of your boys and girls coming along.”

  “Roger,” Milheim acknowledged. “I’m sending the two nearest platoons to link up with your armor.”

  Stark leaned back, nodding in approval as he watched the commands fly across the tactical display and units on the landing field begin the move in response. He hesitated, then glanced at Reynolds. “So did I just do something stupid? Get all nervous and jerk around the troops on the field for nothing?”

  “No. Ethan, you may or may not be right about a reaction force being hidden there, but it makes sense. And thinking about that is exactly what you should be doing from back here. You know what it’s like in combat. Too much going on too fast. I think the troops out there appreciate your thinking about things they don’t have time to focus on.”

  “Maybe—” Stark began, whatever else he might have said choked off as alarms pulsed on the display.

  Two armored cars shot onto the landing field, erupting from a depression near the known warehouse locations, spitting light-caliber shells as they came. Behind the armored cars, a couple of platoons of infantry came dashing out, firing rapidly. Instead of surprising a widely dispersed force, though, they ran head-on into the scratch force Lamont and Milheim had just assembled.

  The light rounds from one of the armored cars glanced uselessly off the carapace of one of Lamont’s tanks, which swung its turret and spat a single round at the attacking vehicle. The heavy shell decapitated the armored car, striking just beneath its weapon mount and blowing the entire top of the vehicle into a long, high parabola extended by the low lunar gravity.

  Th
e first armored car’s gun mount was still tumbling in languid flight against the bright stars above when the nearest squad of Milheim’s infantry targeted its companion. At close range, the infantry weapons punched through the light armor of the enemy vehicle, riddling it with penetrations. The armored car staggered under the barrage, then ceased firing, its gun mount locked in place, before grounding and sliding to a prolonged halt, atmosphere venting from a dozen holes. A single surviving crew member spilled out, arms upraised in surrender.

  The surprised enemy ground troops targeted Lamont’s tanks. Not a great choice, Stark thought, but the only chance they’ve got is to take out that armor fast. Not that they’ll be able to do that with Milheim’s infantry hitting them. A single enemy antiarmor round detonated just short of its target as the tank’s point defenses scored a just-in-time hit. Then the enemy antiarmor teams started dropping as Milheim’s soldiers hit them with a blizzard of fire. Belatedly, the enemy infantry tried to shift targets to hit the other ground fighters, but then the tanks began flaying them with their own secondary armament. A brief scattering of fire from the enemy forces tapered off into nothing, then the enemy began broadcasting surrender messages as individual soldiers stood, dropping their weapons and raising their hands.

  “Commander Stark, we got a problem,” Milheim reported.

  “What’s that?”

  “I got a coupla platoons of enemy soldiers surrendering here.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “Do we want ‘em?”

  “Hell, no.” The cargo shuttles had been fully loaded and wouldn’t need any extra bodies weighing them down on the way back.

  “I didn’t think so. What do I do with ‘em?”

  Stark glanced at Vic, who triggered her own circuit. “Milheim, this is Reynolds. Tell the enemy to leave their weapons and run. Anybody who’s slow in doing either gets shot.”

  “Roger. Oh, man.”

  “Now what?”

  “Got word from one of my squads. There’s some American techs here. Private contractors, I think. Do we bring ‘em back?”

  “Link me to that squad.” Stark switched controls swiftly, bringing up vid of the view from another soldier’s battle armor. Visible before him were two figures in surface suits, armored only enough to protect them from the lunar environment. Some sort of corporate logo made bright splashes on the left breasts of their suits, looking weirdly out of place against the black, white, and gray of the lunar surface. “They look like civs,” he remarked to Reynolds. “What do you think? They might know some stuff we could use.”

  “They might. But, Ethan, there’s a chance we’ll lose a shuttle on the way back. We don’t want these guys to be on that shuttle, because if they are, we get blamed for causing the deaths of other Americans. American civs, no less. So far, our hands are clean. Let’s keep it that way.”

  “Yeah. Good call, Vic. Milheim? Let ‘em go. And tell ‘em to run like hell. I don’t want them around when we blow away everything on that field.”

  “You’re the boss.”

  “Hey!” another soldier called over the command circuit. “This is Corporal Yuin. I’m at that big pile of junk to lunar southeast of the landing field. Everybody stop throwing bullets this way!”

  Stark tagged Yuin’s symbol. “What’s the problem, Corporal?”

  “The problem is this junk ain’t beans and blankets! Sir. It’s ordnance. Live ammo. Tons of it. And it ain’t covered by anything but some sort of metallic tarp.”

  “It’s on the surface? Almost unprotected? Geez. Thanks, Corporal.” Stark pulled back, glaring around the command center. “Have I got a combat engineer in here anywhere?”

  Sergeant Tran, responsible for running the command center since the death of his predecessor, Sergeant Tanaka, pivoted and pointed to where one watchstander was raising her hand. Solid and squarish in her build, she almost resembled a bulldozer herself. “Right here, sir.”

  “We got a big pile of munitions on the surface. You heard that?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Is that as stupid as I think it is? Won’t the stuff blow if one of those micrometeorites hits the pile?”

  “Not likely, sir. The explosives they use these days are really stable. They’ll only blow if the detonator goes off. So maybe if the little rock hit a detonator dead on, maybe then something would blow. That reinforced tarp they’re using would stop the small stuff, or at least slow it enough to reduce the chance of an explosion. I wouldn’t do it, but you could get away with storing stuff on the surface for a while like that if you didn’t have enough covered storage on hand.”

  Vic leaned forward. “How do we blow it if the explosives are stable?”

  “Oh, that’s easy. Just plant the explosive charges. They’ll make the right kind of bang to set off the detonators and then everything else.” The combat engineer paused. “I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near that spot when the charges go off. That’s gonna be a helluva blast.”

  “I bet,” Stark acknowledged. “Thanks, Corporal. Milheim, tell your people to plant their charges anywhere on that pile and get the hell out of there. Lamont!”

  “Yo.” The tanker sounded like he was having the time of his life.

  “We got munitions lying around in the area I’m highlighting. Got it? Anything big might set them off, so make sure your people don’t throw any heavy stuff in there. We don’t need anybody blowing the place halfway back to Earth before we leave.”

  “That stuff’s all ammo? Roger. I got an interdict for that area on all my tanks’ fire control systems now. If anybody tries to override it, I’ll fire them out of my main cannon.”

  Stark looked over at Reynolds. “They left tons of ammo just lying on the surface? Are they nuts?”

  “More likely they filled the local magazines with other munitions and haven’t found a place for this stuff, yet, like the corporal said.”

  “So what if a big rock fell on it?”

  “I assume they were planning on hitting any big rocks with the landing field defenses. That would deflect them, anyway.”

  “Yeah, right. Probably onto the heads of some poor foot soldiers. Where the hell have our former bosses been keeping all this ordnance? We always ran into shortages before.” Before, when they’d been obeying their officers’ orders through the apparently endless lunar war. Before they’d mutinied and cut themselves off from a system that never seemed to have enough money for bullets or spare parts, but could always afford to send them somewhere where they needed every bullet and part they could get and then some.

  Vic shrugged. “Some of it’s probably from the strategic reserve stockpiles. It’s been long enough since we mutinied for the powers that be to have ramped up ammunition production, though.”

  “I guess. But they always claimed they couldn’t afford lots of ammo. So how’re those powers that be paying for the stuff?”

  “Ethan? What’s the rule about questions?”

  Stark smiled despite his tension. “ ‘Never ask a question you don’t wanna know the answer to,’ ” he quoted. “You’d think I was a new recruit.” He focused back on the battle scene. “Okay. See anything else to worry about?”

  She shook her head. “You’ve been doing a good job of spotting problems so far.”

  “Uh-huh. But you’re still a better tactical thinker than me.” Stark nodded at the display and the scattered symbology on it. “What do you think?”

  “I think that if we get hit right now we’d be toast. Our forces are too spread out.”

  “They gotta be spread out to reach all the targets we want to destroy.”

  “I know, but—Ethan.” Vic pointed a single finger toward her display, the digit jumping across several threat readings. “We’re starting to take more fire from the warehouse area. Aimed fire.”

  “Aimed.” Somebody who wasn’t panicking, somebody who was keeping under cover. “Some more of that reaction force?”

  “No. Reinforcements.”

  “How c
an you be sure of that? If we bug out early we might not destroy every target we want to nail.”

  Reynolds eyed him narrowly, her finger stabbing at the display once more. “The way that reaction force came out, you could tell they were risking everything on a quick hit. And nobody provided covering fire for them when we hit back. These are new. And there could be a company, or a battalion, right behind these guys. Those ridges over that way screen the approach from our sensors so we can’t view this area to be sure.”

  “We knew that. But—”

  “But nothing, Ethan. If you were going to hit our forces on that field, how would plan your approach?”

  Stark stared at the display, his face growing grim. “Yeah. Behind the screening terrain. Lamont’s tanks and that company of infantry are still there. Could they handle anything that comes for a few minutes?”

  “Hell, Ethan, you know as well as I do that it’d depend on what comes! If a bunch of armor and mech infantry comes over that ridge behind an artillery barrage…”

  “Okay. You’re right.” Stark blinked, then took another look at his display, deliberately pulling back the scale so he could see beyond the landing field. I’m getting too caught up in this. Lots of fun, breaking stuff and watching the enemy run. “Thanks, Vic. Milheim, Lamont, it’s getting hot out there.”

  “Roger,” Milheim agreed. “I don’t like what’s going down by those warehouses. We’ve achieved most of our objectives. I suggest we get the hell out of Dodge.”

  “There’s still time to hit the remaining objectives,” Lamont argued. “We can handle things for a few more minutes.”

  Stark hesitated, weighing what he saw, what he felt, with what his commanders on the scene were saying. My guts tell me what the right answer is. Maybe I’m just over-cautious, but… “No. The remaining objectives aren’t worth the risk. Get your people back to the shuttles. It’s time to leave.”

  “My tanks can finish the job then bring up the rear…” Lamont began.

  “Negative. Begin withdrawal now. Expedite.” Stark started to call out more detailed instructions, then caught himself. I told ‘em what to do. Now, just watch. Tell ‘em if there’s a problem.