Date Point: 14y1d AV
En route to Lavmuy, Planet Gao.
Lieutenant Anthony “Abbott” Costello
Smuggling a Weaver dropship onto Gao had been one of those prescient moves done in the spirit of ‘we-really-hope-we-don’t-need-this’ pessimism. Allied Extrasolar Command would have preferred to seed Gao’s orbit with some jump beacon microsats, but even between allies that was maybe going a little too far. A jump beacon could be anything, up to and including a WMD if it was used for a Rod-From-God strike.
Fortunately, they had some leverage: Whitecrest had been caught red-pawed, as it were, with a small cloud of surveillance dots in Regaari’s wake from his visit to Earth. The Clan didn’t even try to deny it; if anything, they seemed pleased at their swift discovery. They treated it almost like a game, and happily conceded a point to humanity in that round.
They’d allowed AEC to send over a single Weaver tricked out with a ‘Skymaster’ ground-to-orbit gun, a weapon that married warp technology and forcefields in a way that was now almost a decade old and still proving its worth. It had trivialized the process of getting comparatively small payloads into space, for a start.
The Lads had immediately fallen in love with their new ride. Officially the transport was TOURIST-11 but they had, unanimously and without any discussion, decided as a hive mind to call it ‘The Jitney.’
Akiyama in particular was geeking out over it. “It’s like a C-17 without the loud engines!”
Firth wouldn’t have been Firth if he hadn’t found something to complain about. “I liked the loud engines. Made it easier t’sleep…”
“Ollllld….”
Costello was perfectly placed to hear every conversation, from the affectionate abuse flying lazily around between the humans, to the more earnest, tenser commentary in Gaori between Regaari and Meereo.
“[Are they always like this? Even now?]”
“[It’s their way of remaining calm. They are aliens, Champion…]”
And behind all that, the steady trickle of information coming in that had filtered through Powell. The spaceport’s layout, and that of the Farthrow facilty. Reports on biodrone activity in the area. Casualty reports, weather updates…
Timing.
For now, TOURIST-11 was unchallenged in a sky that was absolutely full of high-value assets, just one of hundreds of radar contacts. No reason to be a target, nothing suspicious at all.
But the second they fired a jump beacon into orbit, that would change. HMS Caledonia would be in-system seconds later, escorted by the Racing Thunder.
Cally was their line of communication. Without her, they were cut off from the chain of command—no messages in, no messages out except on a tightly constraining schedule. Useless for the shifting demands of a warzone. From orbit, she could provide that vital contact, the power of her supercomputers to enhance the ground team’s awareness and performance, material support via jump array, CASEVAC to her infirmary, or even something as mundane as fire support.
But the moment she showed up, Big Hotel were going to know they were made.
So: Timing. He didn’t envy Powell the massive responsibility of making that call.
It filtered into Costello’s consciousness that he’d just been addressed, and he sharpened up. “…Sorry, Master Sergeant?”
It was difficult to read expressions behind the gold nanoparticle-infused EV-MASS visors, but he got a sense of understanding and sympathy off Vandenberg. Rebar was a rock, and Costello knew he was about the luckiest lieutenant alive to have a senior NCO of that quality to rely on. “Loadmaster says go in five, sir.”
Costello nodded, and put aside any thought of being annoyed at himself. There was no reproach in the older man’s voice, but it was the sort of thing Costello shouldn’t have needed help with. He’d correct himself later, though: For now, the mission loomed.
The Jitney bounced alarmingly, to the point where even the loadmaster and his experienced crew swayed and needed to catch their balance, and Champion Meereo made an alarmed chirruping noise.
“Choppy out there,” Rebar commented, coolly.
“We’re coming in over the city,” Costello told him. “It’s—” he steadied himself as another jolt shook them, “—burning down there. We probably just hit the thermal.”
“Christ.”
“Abbott!” Costello looked up. Powell was standing at the front of the bay, holding himself up by a strap and beckoning him over. Costello hit his strap release and navigated his way up the lurching Weaver like he was climbing a ladder in an earthquake.
“Final verdict, sir?” he asked. Intel on the ground situation around Farthrow had been too limited to make a call about whether the Jitney would land, whether they’d rappel down, or whether it was going to be a low-altitude HELLNO.
“We’re goin’ in by HELLNO,” Powell declared, raising his voice over the rattling sound of gear and men bouncing around in their restraints. “It’s a bloody busy sky out there. Get the VIP saddled up and the Lads ready.”
Costello nodded sharply and turned back to relay the orders.
“Everyone on your feet! Baseball! Anubis! Saddle up!”
Everyone was out of their seat in a flash, bracing themselves and checking their gear one last time while Meereo scrambled onto Baseball’s back and Warhorse strapped him on. The red lights were on and the ramp at the back yawned open, and Costello took his spot at the front of the line.
The view was something else. Just for a moment, he thought maybe he had a sense of what his great-grandfather had gone through in 1944—the devastation was that immediate, and that grinding. Lavmuy wasn’t just burning, it was bleeding, trickles of fire along all of its major arterial highways, spreading sullen bruises of smoke in the suburbs, and a gritty gray haze that obscured the highest buildings and hid the horizon.
Behind him, he heard Powell give the order to fire off the beacon, and the Weaver lurched again, differently this time. A powerful, percussive noise hit him through the hull and one of the crew sang out. “Beacon away!”
Costello knew the moment Caledonia arrived: It was the way that his information landscape unfolded, like climbing a hill to see previously invisible vistas roll out in front of him that gave it away. *Cally*’s twin supercomputers, ALBION and CAMBRIA, were looking over his shoulder again and not a moment too soon. The ship had sensors that could pick out individual bricks from orbit, and they were sweeping the LZ, looking for any detail out of place, categorizing and predicting, mapping and highlighting.
Costello’s satisfied grin barely fit inside his helmet. They were in business.
The loadmaster knew how to raise his voice above the noise. “Ready!…Go! Go! Go!” Costello’s feet were already moving halfway through the first ‘go’ and he’d launched into space by the end of the third one. He threw his arms and legs out, lay on the wind and orientated himself, steered into his fall.
This wasn’t a high-altitude jump. This was low, and fast, and aggressive. Buildings whipped by below him and he gave one skyscraper a wide berth, drifting to his right to clear it comfortably. The damn thing was taller than the Jeddah Tower on Earth, and twice as wide.
He put aside the stab of remorse he felt at not getting to see Gao properly before all this. Now wasn’t the time for worrying about that.
He popped his fields at two thousand feet, tensing his core muscles and gritting his teeth against the sharp deceleration they caused. They could fully deploy in half the fall distance of a conventional chute, but that came with stronger and fiercer g-forces. The Gaoians pushed themselves even harder and lower, thanks to the superior tech in their suits. They had low-grade warp fields built in, just enough to take the edge off their inertia and let them go that bit further than biology would let them.
It got them to the ground first—the end of their fall curved into a pouncing four-pawed run, keeping them low and fast as they fanned out, found cover, got their weapons ready. Their suits added their own sensors to the data being crunched by ALBION and CAMBRIA, gave the human operators a little more context, guided them to land exactly where they would be needed.
The humans landed harder, but in a fighting posture from the second they touched down. Costello’s boots hit the concrete around the Farthrow facility and his rifle was already there at his shoulder, raised, ready, reflex sight snapping back and forth.
A cluster of suspicious heat signatures lurking near the facility’s back entrance turned out to be a team of Clanless custodians hiding among the bins, trying to keep their heads down while the world ended around them. They barely had time to know that they’d been caught before they were restrained, rendered helpless, scanned and declared green. A pair of security guards at the front door sensibly dropped their pulse pistols and surrendered: Both were green as well.
That set the pattern for the whole operation, in fact. Meereo and his inner circle had done a good job of sidelining their implanted Brothers or “promoting” them to management at other, less consequential projects, and the Farthrow facility was readily and swiftly secured without a single shot being fired or a single drop of blood being spilled. Quick, clean, painless and efficient.
Powell promptly set to getting his command post set up. The Defenders had a jump array going in short order, the Protectors got their own equipment unpacked and ready to distribute, and Costello wasted no time in organizing patrols and watches. Meereo vanished into the facility’s guts with a few of the clean, green technicians and started to do arcane things involving quantum field whatevers and virtual mass whatchamacallits.
The first “goodie bags” of supplies from *Caledonia*’s waiting deployment bay came through the array just as Righteous, plainly looking to burn off all that nervous energy he’d accumulated, practically sprang out of the door on patrol. He was a good man and they didn’t come much better, but Abbott couldn’t think of anyone more intimidating.
Chief among the first shipments were the parts to set up the big jump array outdoors. The one that could handle vehicles up to and including more Weavers, with their stubby wings folded up and the tail collapsed. And of course, a Weaver was big enough to bring with it a platoon of men and all their gear, or a pair of JLTVs.
The easy part was out of the way, really. Now, it was a question of how much materiel they could bring to the beachhead at Farthrow before the enemy finally got their asses in gear and fought back.
Somehow, Costello knew that it wouldn’t be long.
Date Point: 14y1d AV
HMS Caledonia, Low orbit around planet Gao
Commander Ellen McDaniel
“Jump complete.”
“ALBION and CAMBRIA have linked with HEAT One, they’re beginning their jump.”
“Helm reports Gao orbit stable, beacons away.”
“OTRACK is active, high activity.”
A working CIC wasn’t loud. The reports were clear, audible and concise certainly, but the general air was calm competence. So far, things were proceeding as intended and even if they weren’t, panic could be a lethal mistake.
Things were going wrong all over the place, that much was obvious from the sensor data that was coming in. None of it involved Cally just yet, but the ship’s sensors tracked every object they could see and built up a grim picture of the space around them.
Several Gaoian ships were drifting and venting atmosphere. Others were limping into higher orbits trailing clouds of radioactive gas and flecks of disintegrating hull. One or two were just gutted hulks, tumbling end-over-end and slowly falling apart.
The comms channels told the story why. All of the major spacer Clans—the One-Fangs, the Firefangs, the Goldpaw merchant navy and the Ironclaw asteroid miners—were heavily implanted. As many as a quarter, a third…among the fighter jockeys and pilots of Clan Firefang, the number was pushing eighty percent.
And of course, whoever ruled orbit also ruled the ground.
There would be desperate wars raging on all those ships. The implants would mostly be concentrated in the leaders, the officers and the equivalent of senior NCOs. All the people with the keys to the sensitive gear, in other words. The people with the authority to do things like vent atmosphere, lock down the internal forcefields, or turn their captured guns on other ships that had successfully resisted being taken over.
All of it would have come from nowhere, as far as thousands of dead Gaoians knew. Far too many would have gasped their last on vacuum, never knowing the whence or the why of their betrayal.
Thousands dead, without a chance. In human history, only World War II had killed so many so quickly and so pointlessly.
It was a precarious position for Caledonia. When the biodrones finished consolidating their hold on those ships, they’d quickly notice a lone human destroyer loitering vulnerably in a geosynchronous orbit. And geosynchronous was a high orbit, too. Very visible. There wasn’t a lot of the sky that was below the horizon.
So, step one was to seed the sky with beacons and communications satellites. A job for which Cally was amply equipped. Even deep in her core, behind all the internal bulkheads and the thick structural components, the noise of hundreds of satellites being thrown to the solar wind sounded like rain on the roof.
The first ship through the new beacons was the Racing Thunder. Her entire crew had recently been briefed on DEEP RELIC and their reaction on learning their new mission had been…grim. They’d taken a hefty chunk of shore leave, reportedly been the talk of the commune in the Alien Quarter for a week afterwards, and had gone back to their duties looking knife-sharp and laser-focused.
In the weeks since then, their performance in fleet exercises had improved dramatically. That ship was a lance, now: the sharp tip of the naval spear, designed to do one thing extremely well: Claim the kinetic energy advantage, and keep it.
Now, *Racing Thunder*’s arrival was practically a war horn. She saw three of the hijacked One-Fang pickets accelerate in *Caledonia*’s direction, and turned to spear toward them at a hefty 8G acceleration.
The spear’s shaft was only moments behind her. Ten V-Class destroyers, each carrying six Bulldog drones, but more importantly carrying more supercomputers, more Watson-derived cognitive computing engines. HMS Myrmidon was almost the last in, and she fit neatly into the data-crunching web like a catalyst, taking everything the other ships were producing and running them through the Fleet Intelligence Center.
A simply numbing number of petaflops went to work on every ship in the sky, sorting them by class, capability, trajectory and, most importantly, by probability of compromise…and fed every byte to the Racing Thunder.
The three ships that had turned to challenge Caledonia were clawed apart in seconds, while their return fire scrabbled feebly off *Racing Thunder*’s shields. Not because the Gaoian ship was particularly sturdy, but because of the new card in humanity’s hand: the USS San Diego.
The San Diego class was designed to do what cruisers had always done: protect the rest of the fleet. She was a hard knot of anti-missile and anti-fighter firepower, but more importantly she was a flying shield emitter, ramped up to eleven. Her heart was a rack of fusion power plants, any one of which would have comfortably kept a couple of counties fed for power, and enough refrigeration to supercool her shield circuitry. That ship could put up a wall around its friends and hold off anything, across tens of thousands of kilometers.
The biodrones, in their damaged and imperfectly controlled fleet, didn’t stand a chance. What the V-types and Bulldogs didn’t blind, the Racing Thunder eviscerated and the San Diego thwarted.
The battle was practically over even before the Firebirds arrived. Total orbital superiority, delivered in a single overwhelming blow.
McDaniel smiled grimly to herself, and raised the bridge. Their part in the space battle was already done.
“Captain, geosynchronous orbit is no longer necessary. We’re clear to descend.”
However bad things were on the ground, they were there to help. Gao would live.
Date Point: 14y1d AV
Commune of Females, Wi Kao City, Gao
Ayma
The world was upside-down and falling apart. Everything was wrong—the fires, the explosions, the armed and armored vehicles leaving muddy gouges in the commune lawns, they were just symptoms.
Males were rounding up Females and stealing them away. Worse, Stonebacks were rounding up Females and stealing them away, and icily refusing to explain why. How had they missed this? The entirety of Maledom couldn’t possibly have conspired to something like that without Yulna learning of it…could they?
Most of the females were huddled with the cubs in the commune’s main concourse, doing their best to soothe their fears and not dwell on their own. The sound of worried keening drifted like mist behind every conversation and over every warily twitching ear.
Ayma was the only one daring to raise her voice. She’d been a prisoner before: Never again.
“This isn’t right!”
The young Brother called Fiin was a mystery himself. There was simply no way an earnest, honest, intelligent young male like him would go along with anything nefarious, even if Ayma couldn’t have smelled the desperate sincerity wafting off him.
But he was as unyielding as his Clan’s name suggested.
“I am sorry, Mother. I have my orders.”
“I don’t give a castrated Naxas for your orders!” Ayma snarled. “These are my sisters and I will not let you—”
“Mother, I promise you that we will explain as soon as—”
“Fiin!”
Ayma and Fiin both turned at the sharp bark from the main doors. She recognized this one—Tyal, the so-called ‘Champion-in-Stead’ standing in for Daar. Everything he shared with Daar in terms of size and ferocity he entirely lacked in terms of raw boisterous charisma, and Ayma was quite sure that the sun would freeze and the seas would boil before she let him get within sniffing distance of a mating contract with any sister she knew after this.
“What’s taking so long?” he asked.
“The first group just radioed up, Brother,” Fiin told him. “They’re coming.”
Tyal grunted, and turned his attention to Ayma. “Mother.”
“I will get an explanation for this, Tyal,” Ayma told him, pulling herself up to her full height. She wasn’t from anything resembling Stoneback’s preferred stock, however—her full height just about got her level with Tyal’s chest.
Tyal growled dangerously. “We remember our Contract, Mother, and we will fulfill it whether you cooperate or not.”
“Abducting my sisters, Stoneback? With no explanation?”
“These sisters need to be isolated to protect—” Fiin began.
He didn’t finished the sentence. His radio crackled alarmingly at the same time as the distinctive deep thumping of gauss rifle fire resonated through the floor under Ayma’s paws. “Containment failure! The prisoners are—!”
There was an ear-biting electronic howl and the radio fell silent again. The weapons fire did not.
Fiin and Tyal didn’t even need to speak or glance at each other—Ayma was barged aside almost as an afterthought as they leapt into action, alongside all their Brothers, who promptly moved to interpose themselves between cubs and females, and the doors that led down to the lower levels.
“SHIELD!” Fiin barked, and a semicircular wall of portable defensive shieldsticks sprang up around the doors in the instant before they burst open. Terrified keening erupted around the hall as the imprisoned sisters pounced into the room through the large doors at the back, armed with stolen rifles and fusion blades.
The first ones through staggered and fell as gauss fire hammered through their stolen shield harnesses and exploded through their flesh, crushing their bones and making them cough blood, but there were too many—fully a tenth of the commune had been imprisoned in the cellars, and now it seemed like all of them had gone berserk: they charged without seeming to care about their lives, and the handful of Brothers arrayed against them just couldn’t shoot enough of them before the enraged prisoners descended on them in a clawed frenzy.
Tyal narrowly danced around a fusion spear, grabbed it behind its searing tip and wrenched it through a full circle with such force that the spear’s haft bent around its former wielder’s head, knocking the lifeless female to the floor.
Mothers, Sisters and cubs stampeded for the main doors, and Ayma was knocked over when one sister barged into her. Black stars burst behind her eyes as the back of her head hit the stone tiles hard, but the keening sister didn’t even notice her; she just bolted on four-paws for the exit without stopping.
The Stonebacks barked orders at each other in some kind of cant that Ayma didn’t recognize, or maybe it was just being dazed and stunned from hitting her head. She used her claws to get traction on a stone pillar as she hauled herself to her feet.
“But…Sisters…!”
Dazed and disoriented, all she could see was that her Clan was being massacred by the very males who had sworn to protect them. She stumbled forward a few steps, trying to tell them to stop, trying to end the madness before it went any further. Tyal. If she just reached Tyal, she could stop this.
Tyal was holding the left flank almost by himself. Two of his brothers were down, their throats torn out by female claws, and a third was limping badly from a gauss shot that had nicked his leg. On the right, Fiin was holding his brothers together better, retreating in a disciplined pattern behind successive new shieldstick barricades.
Ayma’s legs wobbled and gave out under her for a second. She felt sick, turned around, fuzzy, but she forced herself back to her feet and stumbled forward. One of the prisoners was Guard-Sister Layra, almost as accomplished with her fusion-spear as Myun, and it was all Tyal could do to avoid evisceration as she lanced at him again and again, too quick to retaliate, too canny to overwhelm.
Layra was…a friend. She’d see reason.
“Layra—!”
Tyal twisted aside from another blow, and rather than chasing him Layra stepped past and—
It didn’t hurt. There was just a sudden and still moment where Ayma looked down and realized that one of her own sisters had stabbed her, right in the belly. She didn’t even really feel it, or notice the hiss and the whisp of steam and smoke.
Then Layra yanked the spear out of her guts and spun back to lance it at the enraged Tyal, who bowled toward her with an enraged roar. Ayma didn’t see what happened next. She just saw…gray. There were things happening at the edge of her vision, but the middle somehow seemed to be getting closer and further away at the same time.
And why wouldn’t her legs work any more? So hard to think, and getting harder. She felt something or…somebody…grab her. Felt herself being carried. …Or was she floating?
Maybe it would all make sense after a nap…She’d always liked to doze in the commune, when the flowers were in bloom. They were blooming now, in yellows and blues and whites. She could smell their scent, the same scent she’d loved as a cub.
Yes. She’d just…
…Sleep…
Date Point: 14y1d AV
Planet Akyawentuo, Unclaimed Space, Near 3Kpc Arm
Master Sergeant Derek Coombes
“…So that’s an Abrogator.”
Coombes glanced left. Daar was crouched low like a stalking cat, watching the machines pick their way toward the choke point below them, with his huge muscles tensed and ready and his big ears up and forward. Or more like a gun-dog maybe, quivering on the edge of a pounce.
Fuck that. More like a Gaoian ready to add a couple notches to his belt. He could have sworn the big bearcoon was giggling while deploying the explosives.
“Mhmm,” was the only comment he gave to Daar’s observation.
‘Fault-block mountain’ apparently meant huge geological forces had broken the rock along fault lines and shoved the blocks up and down like piano keys, and the unnamed pass was basically just a crack between two of them. It was as jagged as bad dentistry, deep enough to BASE jump into and its narrowest point was barely twenty yards across. And the wind tunnel effect down there was something else—even from up on the clifftop high above, the eddies and updrafts plucked at Daar’s whiskers and Coombes’ clothing.
The Abrogators were ignoring it. They looked kinda like a scorpion and an earwig got drunk and had a nightmare accident-baby, and they were obviously built to handle any terrain that wasn’t actually vertical. Low center of gravity, multiple agile legs, exquisite balance and coordination. Everything had a price, though, and that all-terrain agility obviously came at the cost of having to keep the weight down: those armor plates didn’t look like they’d stop any kind of serious anti-materiel firepower.
“I ask again, the fuck kinda war did they ever win with weak-ass tools like these?” Daar asked.
“They didn’t,” Coombes told him, and turned his binoculars back on the convoy. There were three Abrogators below, and they were covering the ground with alarming speed for their size. A tank could’ve hit those kinds of speeds on relatively clear ground, but an uneven, boulder-strewn, treacherous rocky obstacle course like that? Not a chance.
Daar eyed them warily. “Seems like a lotta engineering effort ‘fer somethin’ that wouldn’t survive much above small arms fire.”
Coombes shrugged. “First entry in the Big Hotel playbook is, ‘never pick on someone your own size.’ These things are for scouring the countryside and picking off the civilian survivors, not for warfare. They use biodrones and the victim’s own assets for the actual war…Kinda like a big game of stop hitting yourself, y’know?”
Daar quirked an ear at him. “…Don’t know that one, Boss.”
“You don’t? It’s where you grab a dude’s wrist and make him punch himself in the…” Coombes saw Daar’s expression and faltered. “…The face. Like this.” He mimed awkwardly for a few seconds.
Daar stared at him for a moment, then flicked his ears and turned his attention back to the Abrogators. “Humans are weird, Boss.”
Coombes cleared his throat and raised his binoculars again. “…Whaddya think? About…two minutes? Three?”
“‘Bout that,” Daar agreed. He plucked the detonator from his webbing and wired it up.
Neither of them spoke for a minute or so, until a flash of out-of-place movement caught Coombes’ eye. He focused the binoculars, tried to track it, and groaned.
“Fuck. Drones.”
“How many?” Daar asked.
“If the Misfit intel’s right, each Abrogator carries six, and these ones just launched their full complement…stay still.”
The drones never rose as high as the clifftop, but they zipped through the choke point too quickly and too far ahead of the Abrogators to catch them in the landslide. Coombes watched them go.
“Well…maybe if we’re lucky they’ll be disabled when we smush the ‘bots?” Daar suggested.
“Either that or they turn around and fuck us in the ass…” Coombes muttered to himself. “They’ll be in position in…twenty seconds, I reckon.”
“Yuh…Hey, Boss?”
“Yeah?”
“If they do turn around an’ fuck us…it’s been an honor.”
Coombes reached out and bumped a fist against his alien comrade’s paw. “Dude. You too…Blow it.”
Daar duck-nodded, wrapped his paw around the plunger, pulled it up firmly, then slammed it down hard.
For the second time in a handful of hours, Coombes felt an explosion drum on his rib cage. Daar had planted three charges, hanging his ass precariously out in the air on a rope to plant them in a looming swell of dark shale just beyond the choke point. When they went off, the whole mountain seemed to shiver like a horse with a fly on its back, and then an unbelievably large chunk of hillside just started to slide inexorably downwards. It didn’t even change for the first few seconds, just serenely sank off the hillside, until something jolted and it disintegrated into a meteoric fist of rubble and dust.
Coombes had never seen cool rock flow like water before. A wave of rubble and stone dust crashed down the mountainside, and if the Abrogators even noticed it coming they didn’t respond in time before it flattened them. The blast and the rolling, seething noise of stone in motion cracked and rattled off the surrounding terrain, and the howling wind down in the pass picked up the stone dust and began to carry it away west.
Daar was immensely pleased with himself, and had the creamy look of satisfaction that any man did after he’d just nailed the hottest girl at the dance.
Coombes snorted. “Was it good for you, Tiggs?”
“…Mhmm. Need a change’a shorts.”
Coombes chuckled, and aimed his binoculars out east, tracking the drones. “Daar, you’re not wearing shorts,” he pointed out.
“Shaddup, Boss. Drones?”
“…Dunno. They’re still flyin’, but not this way.”
“What’re they on autopilot, or…?”
“Fuck if I know.” Coombes handed him the binos. “I think they’re still going for the village.”
Daar scowled at them through the lenses, then handed them back. “…Think they can handle that many?” he asked.
“They’ll have to,” Coombes replied. He retreated from the cliff edge and stood up. “Come on. We better follow them.”
“Right behind you,” Daar promised. Coombes nodded and grabbed his radio. From this high up and on this side of the mountains they were back in contact again. He just wished he had better news.
“Net, Boss,” he said. “Splash three Abrogators, you got incoming drones. Count of one-eight.”
“Boss, Chimp. Say again?”
“I say again, count of one-eight.”
“Well…fuck. We’ll have to deal. Too scattered to engage, not enough firepower to win anyway.”
“Plan?”
“Scatter and hide. Only defense is mobility. Maybe…as you were, we have an idea.” There was a brief sound of probably Yan grunting for attention, then a painfully long silence that lasted long enough for Coombes and Daar to be a quarter of the way down the steepest part of the mountain before Hoeff got back to them.
“…Okay. Boss, here’s our proposed mission: We’re gonna peel off into multiple aggressive hunting parties while the women and children head east. One man with a radio and a rifle per party. You and Tigger would head for RV Delta, where Playboy will meet you. He’ll have the biggest group with him with extra radios and the biggest Given-Men. That should be enough for us to draw the drones in some favorable terrain.”
Coombes nodded along as he listened, appreciating the logic of it. As answers to a bad situation went it was almost elegant, and if the drones were too overwhelmed chasing the hunting parties then the actual heart and soul of the tribes were in with a chance. And it wasn’t like he had a better idea himself.
“Chimp, that sounds like a plan. Go ahead and enact it, Tigger and I will proceed to RV Delta.”
Beside him, Daar duck-nodded and got his ass in gear. Coombes had to give him credit, considering that humans were allegedly the galactic champion endurance athletes, Daar was doing a heck of a job keeping up the pace.
Then again he just got to blow up half a mountain. That’d put a spring in anyone’s step. Hopefully he wouldn’t pay too hard for it later—they were going to need him.
Assuming, of course, that the warning made any difference. Three Abrogators down was good going—but there were a lot more coming, a day behind them.
Coombes hauled himself up to a jogging pace again and began to plan. They had a lot of work to do if they were going to survive until the cavalry came.