Graham Paul - The battle for Commitment planet

"Lieutenant Kallewi," Vaas said. "I don't suppose you ever imagined you'd get dirtside on Commitment after Comdur?"

"No, sir," Kallewi said, grimacing. "I wanted to but was beginning to think I never would."

"This," Vaas continued, "is my chief of staff, Brigadier General Cortez, and my intelligence chief, Colonel Pedersen."

Cortez, a heavily framed man, stocky, powerfully built, and Pedersen, a tall, slight woman with hair stubble cut down to her skull and piercing blue eyes, both nodded. Neither smiled; neither spoke.

"This might not look much"-Vaas waved a hand around the cave-"but it's secure. The Hammers don't know it even exists, and even if they find out, it's too deep for their ordnance to reach. Right," Vaas said. "We've studied the message you sent during your attack, and I must say it raises more questions than answers. I imagine your Lieutenant Cheung is someone very special, Michael."

"Yes, sir, I think she is," Michael said, his face reddening with embarrassment.

"I'd hope so, after what you've done." Vaas paused. He nodded, his lips ghosting into a brief smile, fingers still playing with the sunburst on the chain hung around his neck. "But I think I understand now," he said. "We didn't enjoy Colonel Hartspring's performance, not that we were surprised. He's a bad one, a view I know Colonel Pedersen will agree with. Her parents were rounded up in one of the Hammer's purges. Hartspring killed them both during interrogation. He likes to do that, so you were lucky, very lucky. He's not a man used to failure."

Michael had glanced at Pedersen while Vaas talked. The woman's face was impassive; not a muscle moved.

"I digress," Vaas said. "The question we want answered is this: Why in Kraa's name should we have anything to do with you? Why shouldn't we just cut you loose? We have enough to worry about what with the Hammers calling us Fed-loving traitors, something they like to do all the time. How is having you here going to help us? We've studied every guerrilla war in recorded history, and history shows that we risk our legitimacy by working with you. This is our war; this is a people's war. It has nothing to do with the Federated Worlds. It's not your business."

Michael shot a glance at Adrissa; she nodded.

"Look, General," Michael said. "I study history, too, and I-we-understand the point you make, but you said something last time we met, something I've never forgotten."

"Oh?"

"Yes. You said, 'All we want from people like the Feds is help. Give us the tools, and we'll finish those Hammer scum off.' "

"I said that?" Vaas said, eyes narrowing into a skeptical frown.

"Yes, General, you said that," Michael said firmly. "So that's what we're here to do: help. If you and your people want to pretend we don't exist, that's fine by us. We'll still help, but if you didn't mean what you said"-Vaas's eyebrows lifted-"if you're not interested in three assault landers, you're not interested in our microfabs, you're not interested in hundreds of well-trained military personnel, that's fine. We'll go and start our own guerrilla war somewhere else. It's your call, sir."

Michael sat back, his eyes locked on Vaas's. Vaas stared back, and there followed a long and uncomfortable silence. Michael sat unmoving, praying that he had not overplayed his hand.

The corners of Vaas's mouth turned up a fraction before his mouth opened wide into a broad smile. "Oh, you Feds," he said, shaking his head. "Some things never change. Self-doubt never was a problem with you people."

"Nor with yours," Michael said.

Vaas laughed. He turned to Adrissa. "You know what, Captain?"

"No, General. What?"

"We were all raised to regard all Feds-and everyone else in humanspace, come to that-as Kraa-less heretics, evil and corrupt. The Kraa-less bit is no problem; there's not one NRA trooper who doesn't think it's all fundamentalist bullshit, but we have to be careful. There can be no 'you' and 'us.' Your people must be part of the NRA, must commit to the Nationalist movement. You must share everything: what we stand to win, what we stand to lose. They must live with us… and die with us. Your people cannot be different. It won't work otherwise."

Adrissa considered that for a moment before she nodded. "I agree, but I'll not allow the NRA to coerce my people into anything, and I'll still be responsible for their overall welfare. How that works in practice is something we can sort out later."

Vaas glanced at his chief of staff. Cortez nodded. "Good," said Vaas. "I think we are agreed. However"-he raised a finger-"I report to the Resistance Council. I can, I will recommend acceptance of your offer, but only they can accept it. That said, I don't think there'll be any objections. We have a war to win, and we need all the help we can get. Now, we have some holovids you might like to see."

Adrissa nodded. "Sure," she said.

Two troopers wheeled in a holovid projector, and the room darkened. "I think you'll enjoy this," Vaas said. "I know we all did."

For a moment, Michael struggled to work out what he was looking at; then it clicked. The unmistakable layout of a Hammer base appeared through driving rain. Perhaps 5 kilometers away, the sprawling base was outlined by hundreds of floodlights that bounced a ghostly orange glare off hectares of ceramcrete up into the thick clouds scudding overhead. Quickly, he searched through his neuronics knowledge base. "Perkins," he said softly. "It's Perkins."

"Quite right, Michael," Vaas said. "That is-that was the Perkins planetary ground defense force base. We have a network of holocams monitoring the base, so we know when they're sending fliers to bother us."

Save for the rain picked up by the holocam's microphone, the silence was absolute while the holovid played. For a while, there was little to see, the only movement the flashing amber lights of trucks and service vehicles as they crawled around the base. Then the sky flared into life, a momentary white light that flickered across the clouds before vanishing.

"That's the debris field hitting the upper atmosphere," Michael said, entranced by the sight.

An instant later, all hell broke loose. As fliers started to move out of their open-sided hangars, air-defense sites protecting the base exploded into life, missile after missile after missile streaking skyward, lines of searingly bright light disappearing up into the night. Intense flashes turned the clouds milk white; the dull thumps of warheads exploding unseen overhead filled the air. A second later, the clouds turned red, gold, then white, and an instant after that-so fast that it was over before the image even registered-a pillar of fire reached down out of the storm clouds and smashed into the Hammer base with all the force of a tactical nuclear weapon, the holovid whiting out when the blast wave incinerated everything in its path.

"Jeez," Adrissa hissed. "What the hell was that?"

"That, sir, was Redwood on its final mission," Michael said. "I loved that ship, so I'm glad. She did well; she died bravely."

The show was not over. The holovid came back online to reveal a scene of utter devastation. Redwood had blasted an enormous crater into the ground close to the base's main taxiway, leaving its sprawling collection of hangars, workshops, armories, and administrative buildings blast-shattered shells that were burning fiercely, the clouds overhead painted a lurid red-gold, bleached white repeatedly when fusion plants lost containment and blew. Then, starting off to the left, a single explosion smeared white light across the clouds, followed by another and another until the entire area was carpeted. Bursting too fast to count, they left the base a raging inferno, columns of dirty black smoke twisted through with veins of red and yellow fire climbing away into the clouds.