It was fortunate for the Tahn that Lady Atago had tried to prepare for any eventuality when she structured her battle plans. She hit Strongpoint Sh'aarl't with monitors.
Monitors should not have been part of the Tahn fleet for the Cavite operation, since there would be no conceivable use for the single-purpose behemoths.
Monitors were large, bulky warships. They were heavily armored and carried light secondary antimissile armament. Their only weapon was a single monstrous launch tube located along the ship's centerline, much as the Kali launch tubes on the Bulkeley-class tacships were located, but enormously larger. The missile—projectile—fired by the monitors was, in fact, somewhat larger than a tacship.
A monitor was a miniature spacecraft powered by AM2 engines. It was guided by a single operator into its target, and was intended for offplanet warfare, to be used against fortified moonlets or planetoids only.
Tahn intelligence had told Atago that no such space forts existed in the Fringe Worlds. Atago decided, however, to add two to her fleet, just in case. Now those two monitors were deployed against Sten's fort.
One monitor hovered, nose down, just outside Cavite's atmosphere, and fire belched from its nose. The missile flashed downward.
The reason that monitors weren't used against close-range targets became obvious. At full AM2 drive, it is almost impossible for the operator to acquire his target and home the missile in. Automatic homing was also, of course, too slow. The vast standoff distances of space warfare were vital for success, especially since the cost of each missile was just about that of a manned tacship.
Atago was not concerned with any of that—if Cavite's fall was delayed much longer, Atago's own fall would be guaranteed.
Still accelerating, the first missile missed the fort by only 500 meters—its operator was very skilled. The shock wave flattened what ruins were still standing near Strongpoint Sh'aarl't for almost a kilometer.
Sten was getting out of his command chair when the missile landed. He found himself sprawled flat against a wall two meters away, in blackness. A generator hummed, and secondary lighting went on. Sten was seeing double. Dust motes hung in the air.
He stumbled back to the board. "All stations. Report!"
And, amazingly, they did.
The impact, of course, had been even more severe up in the turrets. Tapia was bleeding from the nose and ears. But her cannon was still battle-worthy, as were Turrets A and D. The video to Kilgour's antipersonnel turret was out, but there was still an audio link to the center.
By the time Sten had his status, Foss had analyzed what had hit them.
"Very nice," Sten said. Ears still ringing, he and everyone else in the fort were talking very loudly. "What happens if they hit us direct?"
"No prog available," Foss said.
"Very nice indeed. Can you give us any warning?"
"Not when they launch. But they'll be bringing those two monitors on and off station to fire. It'll take 'em some time to reload. As soon as they get on-station, I'll hit the buzzer.
"Speaking of which," Foss said, looking at a screen, "that other clot's getting ready to try his luck."
Sten had time to order all turret crews down into the ready rooms before the second missile hit. This one missed by almost a full kilometer, and the shock was no worse than, Sten estimated, getting punched by Alex.
The gun crews recovered and clattered back up the ladders into the turrets. There were targets waiting for them. Atago had started the second stage, sending assault units forward just when she saw the fort's turrets turtle up. Behind the tracks moved waves of assault infantry.
But her plan became a bloody stalemate. The monitor's rounds did drive Sten's sailors from their guns. But they also destroyed anything around the fort that could have been used as cover for the tracks.
And the monitors took a very long time to reload and fire. There was not time enough for the tracks to close on the fort after the missile exploded before Strongpoint Sh'aarl't was blasting back.
They had reached a stalemate. It wasn't livable inside the fort, but it was survivable. And then two things occurred:
The seventh round from a monitor hit about 175 meters from the fort. The blast was enough to smash the lock on the second, unmanned and inoperable, antipersonnel quad projectile turret. The turret popped up—and stayed up.
And on Sten's central control board, no warning light went on.
The second thing was that Tahn Superior Private Heebner got lost.
CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN
Private heebner would never be used on a recruiting poster. He was short—barely within the Tahn minimum-height requirements—somewhat bowlegged, and had a bit of a potbelly. Not only that, his attitude wasn't very heroic, either.
Heebner had been conscripted from his father's orchards most reluctantly. But he knew better than to express that reluctance to the recruiting officer—the Tahn had Draconian penalties for and loose interpretations of draft resistance. He became even more reluctant when the classification clerk at the induction center informed Heebner that the military had no equivalent for "Fruit, Tree, Manual Gatherer of" and promptly made him a prospective infantryman.
Heebner endured the physical and mental batterings of training quietly in the rear rank. Since he expected nothing, he wasn't as disappointed as some other recruits who discovered that an active duty battalion was run just as brutally as basic training. All Heebner wanted was to do the minimum necessary to keep his squad sergeant from striking him, to stay alive, and to go home.
The private was slightly proud of himself for having survived this much of the war. He had an eye for good cover, excellent fear reactions, and an unwillingness to volunteer—mostly. Heebner had made a brilliant discovery during training. Volunteer duties were mostly in two categories— the extremely hazardous and the extremely dirty. Dirty frequently meant safe.
Heebner specialized in getting on those kind of details—digging holes for any purpose, bringing rations up through the muck, unloading gravsleds, and so forth, since he had learned that they generally weren't done under fire. And so he had survived.
His willingness to accept the drakh details even got him promoted one notch. Heebner now had to be wary—if he continued doing well, they might make him a noncommissioned officer. Which meant, to Heebner, a bigger target. He was contemplating whether he should commit some minor offense—enough to get him reduced in rank but not enough to earn a beating from his sergeant.
That morning the company his squad was part of had been ordered into the attack against the cursed Imperial fort. The Tahn infantry had nicknamed it AshHome: attacking the fort was a virtual certainty that one's cremated remains would be sent out on the next ship—assuming that one's remains were recovered. Many Tahn bodies lay unrescued in the mire around the fort, buried and then resurrected by exploding rounds.
Superior Private Heebner was lagging just behind the line of advancing troops when Tapia opened fire on the two assault tracks supporting his company. He dived for cover, heard shouts from his sergeant to keep moving, picked himself up—and a round from the monitor slammed in. Heebner went down again, stunned. He was still out when his squad advanced—straight into a burst from Alex's antipersonnel quad mounts.
Heebner staggered back to consciousness and his feet. Behind him the tracks billowed greasy smoke. There was no sign of his squad or company. Most of them were dead. Heebner's mind told him that there was no point continuing the attack if everyone else had given up. He should return to his own lines.