The Ascendant Stars - Michael Cobley [162]
‘Wish I could go with you. Best of Darien luck, eh?’
‘You too, my friend. Good hunting and see you on the other side.’
Theo raised his eyebrows. ‘And which side is that?’
‘The side where we’ve fought and won, and sit back drinking beer in front of a roaring fire, and tell huge lies about our bravery!’
‘Ah, yes,’ Theo said. ‘I’ll be there, all right. Just be sure to keep me a seat!’
The last he saw of the Tygran captain was a wave through the drenching rain before he headed over to the rope ladder, wiped the water from his face and started to climb.
KUROS
Gunships circled and swooped through the night sky, pounding Giant’s Shoulder with pulse rounds, missiles and bomblets. The promontory had become a field of fire yet the combat mechs were still holding out, replying with a variety of ranged weapons, while the defence battery gave back as good as it was getting. Some five hundred metres above the action, veiled by the pouring rain, another gunship maintained a holding pattern: from inside the main passenger compartment, Utavess Kuros stared down with exhilarated fascination and a sense of approaching triumph. How the game had shifted! Just hours ago he was nought but a mind trapped in his own head, imprisoned and humiliated by a pair of traitorous machine intelligences. Now he was leading the assault to regain possession of the ancient Forerunner artefact while in near space an immense Hegemony armada was poised to crush a pitiful, Imisil-led alliance of rebel scum who had thought to defy the greatest civilisation in half the galaxy!
Below, the Brolturan troops had established a beachhead on a rocky outcrop on the promontory’s northern edge while a heavy-weapons section had set up an elevated fire point on the ridge just to the west. Together they were creating a murderous crossfire that hammered and ripped up any mechs straying out of cover. The main facility’s primary tracking sensors had already been put out of commission by three aerial jump teams, two of them fighting off combat mechs while the third set charges around the armoured sensor cluster. All of the five-man teams had died, shot or clawed to pieces, but not before the sensors were wrecked. Which forced the battery systems to rely on secondary short-range detectors that were more easily fooled by Brolturan countermeasures.
As well as the naked eye, Kuros was observing the ongoing assault on a wide holoplane hanging down over the strategic overview table. An infrared subframe showed the hotspots of engaged units, with tags distinguishing between body heat and mech cooling manifolds. Another subframe was a more symbolic representation, revealing weapon types, rates of fire, hit accuracy percentages, and casualties. Yet another was an enhanced composite, showing the whole of the top of Giant’s Shoulder in pale blue-grey with the glare of the defence floods filtered out. The rain was like a succession of ghostly sheets trailing and swirling across.
An auxiliary holopanel provided updates and occasional vidreports from the other ambushes taking place. Becker’s strike against Tusk Mountain had successfully sabotaged the insurgents’ preparations so there would be no interference from that direction. Vashutkin’s operation to prevent bands of Spiralists from reaching the northern ridges had not been as successful – one of his three flyers had been shot down by a shoulder-launched missile, forcing him to land on the northern ridge and set up defensive positions.
The only thing missing was any confirmation of the presence of the mechs’ controlling intelligence, this entity known as the Legion Knight. But detailed scans had turned up no evidence to corroborate it – whoever was directing the combat mechs had to be holed up in the fortified building.
Once we’ve cut off the legs and the hands, then we’ll deal with the poisonous head.
Even before