Graham Paul - The battle for Commitment planet

He was not human anymore; he was a machine, a killing machine, an automaton armed with a stolen Hammer assault rifle doing what killing machines were supposed to do: crush the life out of the enemy. The flat metallic racket of heavy machine guns and the crash-bang of microgrenades were all ignored, and Michael followed the rest of the battalion when they broke cover and charged toward the Hammers, their bulky, body-armored shapes black in the firefly lights the Hammers had rigged to mark the way up to the front line.

Hit broadside on, the Hammers wilted in the face of an unstoppable wave of hate-fed anger. Confident the NRA had been forced back, they had not taken the trouble to secure their flanks. Now they paid for that mistake, the NRA attack forcing the marine column to break apart into small groups fighting in a frenzied, scrambling race to escape the blizzard of death the NRA poured out of the darkness. The Hammer battalion disintegrated, its ranks shredded by rifle and machine gun fire, every attempt to regroup or take cover smashed apart by salvos of microgrenades that tossed bodies across the ground.

The Hammers had nowhere to run, and one by one the marines died amid the jumble of broken rocks and boulders that ran back to cavern walls invisible in the darkness. Taken by surprise, they were overwhelmed by the shocking brutality of the NRA attack. Finally, only a handful were left. Trapped, they fought hard until overwhelmed by sheer weight of numbers, and then they, too, died.

Mokhine wasted no time celebrating victory.

Splitting his force in three, he positioned a heavy weapons platoon to secure the narrow exit from the cavern that led deeper into the NRA base, their positions protected by rows of claymores. A second platoon moved through the Hammer casualties; methodically they started to strip weapons and ammunition off the marines, anyone still alive unceremoniously rolled over and-to Michael's surprise; he had expected any Hammer survivors to be shot out of hand-plasticuffed, those still able to talk dragged to one side for interrogation. The rest of the battalion set off toward the tunnel that led to the outside world and the Hammer support areas.

Michael found Anna amid the throng. "Officially, we're done," he said. "What now? Go with Mokhine or stay?"

"We go," Anna said, her face glistening in the faint light. "It'll take us hours to find the 120th, and I'm sure Mokhine will find something for us to do. You okay with that?"

"Sure am," Michael said, adrenaline-charged excitement and blood lust still running hot and strong.

"Let's go, then."

Together they ran after Mokhine's troopers. The NRA colonel's plan was simple: Keep going, don't stop, shoot anything that moves, use heavy weapons to deal with any Hammer light armor, and move on. Not much of a plan, Michael reckoned, but good enough since the Hammers would still not know what the hell was going on, their fiber-optic comms lines having been cut moments before the attack started.

Ahead of them, Mokhine's troopers were disappearing into a tunnel that did not appear on Michael's maps. "What the hell?" he said.

"The Hammers must have burned their way in," Anna said, shaking her head in disbelief. "They worked out where the rock was thinnest and just burned their way through."

"Mining lasers?"

"Big ones, I reckon. Unbelievable. Come on."

As Michael followed her, the answer to the question that had been troubling him ever since the attack started-how the Hammers had bypassed the NRA's outer defenses-was all too clear.

It was a stunning achievement, and the Hammers had done it by brute force. Parallel to the access tunnel destroyed by ENCOMM to keep the Hammer attack out of Karavakis-2, they had simply driven an entirely new tunnel, the limestone no match for pulsed hard-rock mining lasers, their enormous power vaporizing the stone into an incandescent mix of carbon dioxide and superheated calcium oxide blasting back down the tunnel and out into the valley beyond, a caustic plume of death that would have scoured the ground clean of all life for kilometers around, covering the area in a thin gray blanket of dust. Michael shook his head at the Hammers' ingenuity. It was brilliant, and it had taken ENCOMM completely by surprise, its failure to understand how fast the Hammers could burn their way through virgin limestone costing it dearly as it scrambled to stem the Hammer attacks.

But not everything had worked so well. To maximize the element of surprise, the Hammers had opted to blast their way through the last few meters of rock into Karavakis-2. That had left the mouth of their new tunnel carpeted with an ugly mass of sharp-edged boulders that were easily negotiated by soldiers on foot but a big problem for tracked vehicles and impossible for ground drones. Now Michael understood why the Hammers' light armor had been so slow to appear; good thing, too, he thought as he hurdled his way into the tunnel.

By the time Anna and Michael made it through, the battalion had brushed aside the Hammers defending Karavakis-1, the cavern that had formed the NRA's first line of defense, the Hammer marines simply overwhelmed by the unexpected speed and mindless ferocity of Mokhine's attack. The colonel was not holding back; leaving the rest of the battalion to reestablish defenses destroyed in the Hammer's initial attack, he had thrown a platoon into the Hammer tunnel that accessed Juliet-24, a massive portal that opened onto one of the karst's many slab-sided valleys. Heedless of stiffening resistance, the NRA troopers had driven down the tunnel, moving fast, firing blindly into the darkness, advancing behind a barrage of microgrenades. Any Hammer attack drones lucky enough to make it through were hacked out of the air by furious bursts of rifle fire.

Michael's heart sank; this battle showed all the signs of degenerating into a primitive hand-to-hand struggle. His heart sank even farther when Mokhine waved him and Anna over. What now? he wondered.

"Okay, you two," he said. "Our move toward Juliet-24 is a feint. I want to hold the Hammers, to keep them occupied while our combat engineers mine the Hammer tunnel. Meanwhile, we'll do something they won't be expecting." Mokhine paused as a disheveled trooper ran up, the dust on her left cheek scarred by a savage gash that dripped blood in a slow, sticky stream. If the wound bothered the woman, she did not let it show. "Ah, good," he said. "This is Lieutenant Tek. Maggie, these are the Helforts. They're going to take you and your platoon through the old tunnel."

"Sir," was all Tek said.

"The old tunnel?" Michael said with a puzzled frown. "The one ENCOMM blew in?"

"The very same," Mokhine said. "I'm sure there'll be enough room above the rockfall for us to get through. It won't be fast, but we can do it. That means we can infiltrate an attack into Juliet-24 to take the Hammers from behind. If it all gets too hot, there is a cross-tunnel 75 meters back from the portal you can use to get away. All understood?"

Michael's heart sank, but he nodded.

"Go on, then," Mokhine said.

While he and Anna scrambled up the rocks to the mouth of the old tunnel, Tek's platoon close behind, Michael commed Anna. "This is getting hairy, Anna," he said, "so for chrissakes, be careful. There'll be ten million of those Hammer fuckers on the other end of this tunnel."

"I know that," Anna replied, "so don't worry. No heroics from this little brown bear."

"Yeah, right," Michael said. "Neuronics off?"

"Neuronics off." Anna turned. "Ready?" she said to Tek.

"We'll be right behind you," Tek replied.

Together Anna and Michael plunged into the cramped space between the rockfall and the new blast-shattered roof of the tunnel. Mokhine had been right; there was enough room to crawl through… just. It was a miserable business, in places so tight that Michael had to squeeze his body between roof and rock, every meter a fight to overcome a growing certainty that the ceiling of the damaged tunnel would collapse onto him. He could not remember being so terrified ever. Even the undamaged sections of the tunnel were difficult, the floor littered with razor-edged boulders shock-blasted from the walls and roof. Were it not for the fact that Anna was alongside, shaming him to keep him moving, Michael could not have gone on into that terrible darkness.