Graham Paul - The battle for Commitment planet

Chou did not live long enough to see what he had achieved. Before the first lander even drove into the ground, what was left of the ware house, weakened by fire, gave way in the face of the blast, its collapse toppling tons of ceramcrete onto his position.

As he died, towering columns of ionized gas climbed away into the sky all across Perdan before they were driven away by the latest rainstorm, shredded skeins of fast-cooling gas blown twisting away into the distance. Friday, November 23, 2401, UD Branxton Ranges, south of Perdan, Commitment

Separated from the rest of the 120th during a vicious firefight with the Hammers, Anna and Michael walked on alone. Even the Hammer recon drones that had forced them to slow down to a crawl had disappeared, and the battlesats had been blinded by thick gray cloud scudding overhead. Michael was happy to see the cloud; the intermittent rain it brought with it was a small price to pay.

Where the rest of the regiment had gotten to, they had no idea. All Michael knew was that they were not where they were supposed to be, rally point after rally point populated only by trees. Soon they abandoned any idea of finding them. Before he, too, vanished into the darkness, a straggler from the 48th had told them the rest of his regiment was somewhere ahead of them, and Michael still hoped they would catch up with them. It was not a good feeling, just the two of them alone in a vast forest infested with vengeful Hammers.

Fifty meters short of the next ridge, the characteristic buzz of a recon drone caught his attention. As he paused to see where the damn thing was, some deep-seated atavistic instinct shocked him out of the endless one-foot-after-another trudge away from Perdan, and in an instant he knew with absolute, unshakable certainty that he and Anna had to get off the track.

"Move!" he screamed as he leaped for Anna, provoked by instinct alone. Grabbing her backpack, he crash-tackled her off the path and into a twisting, rolling, crashing slide down through the undergrowth and into a narrow ravine. There Michael came to a crunching stop, the dead weight of Anna's body dropping on top of him, driving the air out of his lungs with a whooof.

"Michael!" Anna snapped. "What the fu-"

A fast-moving flight of four marine landers roared overhead, black shapes smeared across a predawn sky torn to shreds by the appalling noise of their engines as they accelerated away, a noise that was nothing compared to the blast from the pattern of fuel-air bombs that exploded an instant later. The shock wave was a malignant living force, the overpressure unstoppable, ripping and tearing at the ground, driving debris outward in a lethal storm of razor-sharp shards of wood. Michael was shaken to his core, unable to refill his lungs, every fiber of his body screaming in protest, his body pounded into the dirt, slammed up and then back when the shock wave ripped through the ground, rocks, dirt, and debris cascading down across them.

Ears ringing, confused and disoriented, Michael lay there for a long time, tortured lungs fighting for air. He could not hear much over the ringing in his ears; he could only feel the slow skittering of debris dropping onto his helmet. When his brain rebooted, he rolled Anna off his back and struggled to sit upright.

"Anna, you okay?" he mumbled past a tongue thick with dirt and dust; he tried to shake a sick fuzziness out of his head without success. He felt sick.

"Piss off," she mumbled. "Leave me alone. Don't want to move."

"Come on, Anna," Michael said, standing up. "We can't stay here. They must have spotted some of us, so they may be back. Come on"-urgently now, he shook her shoulder-"we need to keep moving."

"Bastard." She sat up, brushing dirt off her chromaflage cape. With an effort, she climbed to her feet, swaying unsteadily while she organized herself.

"You okay?"

Anna nodded. "Yeah. Bit woozy is all. FABs are no fun at all."

Michael had to agree. Like every Fed spacer, he had watched a live fuel-air bomb drop during his training-from a safe distance-and he had experienced the damn things firsthand when the Hammers were hunting him on Serhati. He hated them then, and he hated them now.

Settling his gear and grabbing his rifle, Michael scrambled out of the shallow ravine. The sight that greeted him shocked him to his core. He and Anna had been lucky; the Hammer landers had dropped their bombs just over the heavily wooded ridge they had been climbing on their way south to safety, leaving the ground leading to the ridge a shattered mess. The blast had sheared the tops of trees off, scattering branches and tree trunks across the ground in careless profusion.

"Not good," he said.

"No," Anna said. "I wonder how things look on the other side."

They soon found out, Michael offering a silent prayer of thanks that he and Anna had been protected from the worst of the blast by the ridge. The ground ran down to a small stream, then climbed to the next ridge. Before the Hammers had arrived, the valley would have been close to idyllic: well wooded, cool under trees undisturbed since the planetary engineers had seeded them into the ground, a stream running cold and clear across water-worn granite, rich with plants, birds, and wild animals.

The valley had been a small piece of paradise on a screwed-up world. Now it was hell.

For hundreds of meters upstream and downstream from where Michael and Anna stood, the valley was a nightmare of shattered trees, the ground a shambles of blast-tossed trunks blown into untidy heaps interlaced with branches stripped bare of leaves, the air thick with the acrid smell of charred wood and burned fuel, thin skeins of blue smoke drifting, twisting away into the sky.

Nothing moved, the silence oppressive. Michael scanned the valley for any sign of life. "Nothing," he said after a while. "You see anything?"

"No. Any poor bastard caught down there would have had no chance. You think they were after the 48th?" Anna asked.

"I hope not," Michael said with a heavy heart, "though the Hammers must have seen something to justify a four-lander strike. Come on, they'll have sent recon drones on their way back to count bodies… if they can find any left to count, that is," he added bitterly.

With a heavy heart Michael followed Anna. The Hammers' ability to rain death and destruction down on the NRA wherever and whenever they chose reinforced his growing fear that this war might be unwinnable. The prospect sickened him; for all its faults, humanspace deserved better than a victorious Hammer of Kraa: a vengeful, bloody-handed, and ruthless instrument of death.

Anna led the way back into the cool of the forest, forcing the pace now that the forest canopy minimized any chance they might be detected by battlesats or recon drones. Two more days should see them out of the granite country and back into the karst; another day after that and they would be home.

So Michael hoped. Saturday, November 24, 2401, UD Branxton Ranges, south of Perdan, Commitment

"I'm sure I saw something," Anna whispered. "Here, check it out."

She spit on the inside of her wrist and pressed her forearm to his. Michael's neuronics went online with Anna's; a second later he was looking through her optronics-enhanced eyes at a tumbled cluster of boulders overgrown with thick strands of creeper, a tangled green nightmare.

"Okay," he said, staring at the scarlet target icon Anna had laid over the image, "but what am I supposed to be seeing?"

"Keep looking."

Hard as he tried, all he saw was greenery. He shifted his optronics filters up and down the wavelengths, stopping in the infrared. Then he saw it, a patch of exposed rock toward the top of the outcrop that showed up a few degrees warmer than the rest. After a while he worked out what he was looking at: the infrared signature of a man's buttocks, a figure eight lying on its side.