“Let me know if that changes.”
“Commander.” It was Clayhatchee again. “We’ve also got some ghosts about thirty klicks offshore. We can’t seem to get past their electronic countermeasures—they could be attack helicopters.”
Erik muttered a curse. Intelligence had reported increased use of attack helicopters and VTOLs by the Cappies. The cliffs would offer no defense against them, and the air-defense towers were designed primarily for aerospace fighters and larger spacecraft attacking from above. They’d be of little use against the nimble and low-flying helicopters. On the other hand, helicopters were vulnerable to ground fire, if anyone was lucky enough to get a hit.
Most of the defenders had shut down their engines to conserve fuel. The time for that was ending. Now there were exhaust plumes coming from many of the vehicles.
The light was red, and the sun was beginning to show itself. It would climb slowly, and not very far, casting long shadows over the battlefield. The fighting would all be over before it dropped from sight again.
Erik moved closer to the cliffs. He zoomed his viewscreen in on the big boats on the horizon. They were curious-looking things, boxy, slab-sided, with low, peaked roofs broken by huge hatches. They looked more like floating buildings. Each was big enough to hold half a dozen ’Mechs, but there was no way of knowing what, if anything, they contained. They were lingering just outside missile range, and appeared to have dropped anchor.
Then something else moving on the horizon caught his eye. He panned the camera, and saw dozens of bumps on the horizon. Hovervehicles, tanks, missile carriers, scout cars, APCs—almost anything that could hover. Following them were bigger vehicles—hoverferries that probably had been pressed into service to haul troops and armor that moved on tracks or wheels. The attack was finally here. But where were the ’Mechs? They should be landing ahead of the main force.
He looked back at the big boats.
“Commander.” It was Sortek. “It may not do us any good now but Mary Neskowin says she knows what those ships are.”
“They’re what we call ‘bulkers,’ Commander. They haul heavy bulk cargo: rock fill, demolition rubble. We use them to haul away material that we dredge out of the channels so we can dump it at sea.”
“Dump it? How?”
“There are chutes in the bottoms of the hulls.”
Erik suddenly felt his stomach knot. “How deep is the water out there?”
“The bottom is flat out to about twenty miles, and there it’s no more than fifty meters deep.”
Erik switched quickly to the command channel. “This is Commander Sandoval. All units, we’ve got massed ’Mechs in the water! They’re coming up the beach!”
Just then something like a giant metal frog broke the surface a hundred meters off shore, two metal boxes on its shoulders belching fire. It was the upper torso of a Catapult, missile launchers blazing.
It was quickly joined by another, and another, then a Mad Cat III, laying down a rain of fire on the shore defenses.
The fire was quickly answered from above. Missiles exploded around the ’Mechs, as Long Toms, Snipers, and Thumper artillery units found their range. Direct fire came from units on the beach, and hoverunits that raced out into the surf to attack the ’Mechs from behind.
For a moment, and only a moment, the advance seemed to stall.
Then, another pair of ’Mechs appeared, breaking the surface even farther offshore than the first wave. They were tall, red-and-black giants, stubby fins on their backs like a hornet’s wings.
Tian-zongs. Heavily armored, overwhelming in firepower. In many situations, they were limited by their poor speed.
Not here.
They opposed a force that had nowhere to run. They moved in until they were chest-deep in the water, then set up an overlapping sweep of the beach, firing their lasers almost continuously, hammering larger targets with their Gauss rifles.
Erik watched helplessly as their forces were shredded, the Catapults and Mad Cats using the Tian-zongs’ cover to advance toward the cliffs. His fists clenched inside the Hatchetman’s cockpit. He ached to be down there with them. But he knew that, soon enough, the battle was coming to them.
The artillery and missiles screaming down from the cliffs were finally getting results. One of the Catapults waded back into the water, armor in tatters, plasma leaking from its damaged reactor.
A SwordSworn SM1 Tank Destroyer slid up the beach from behind one of the Mad Cats, firing as it skittered sideways on its hoverskirts right in front of the ’Mech, at what must have been its minimum range. It was a gutsy move, Erik thought, and a risky one.
The big gun on the Tank Destroyer fired, and the Mad Cat was momentarily engulfed in flame—the right arm flying loose in the conflagration, the right missile pod left hanging by a few cables and scraps of metal. But the lasers on the remaining arm and torso fired, cutting into the lightly armored SM1. The Tank Destroyer’s hoverskirts collapsed, the vehicle’s right side bit into the sand, and it rolled, turning into a flaming pinwheel that smashed into a dune and exploded.
The Tian-zong units were moving now, separating, each headed for a different tunnel entrance.
Erik knew what was coming next. “East Tunnel, West Tunnel, expect a direct attack soon. Artillery and missile units, reposition to defend those tunnels.”
But he also knew this left the center of the beach more lightly defended, and that the Liao forces would be quick to exploit that. “Everybody on top-side defense, stay awake. The fight is coming to us soon enough.”
More ’Mechs were wading out of the water now; lighter, faster ’Mechs like Spiders and Koshis, as well as more mobile heavy hitters like Black Hawks and Ryoken II s. All of them, Erik noted, were models equipped with jump jets.
The Liao hoverunits were becoming bolder as well, spending more time on the beach in their sweeps, some of them moving past the docks and through the deserted streets of Port Archangel. Erik watched these latter units carefully, but it wasn’t yet time—
“Commander.” It was Sortek. “Those hoverferries are coming in closer.”
“Try to target them with missiles. They can’t be armored.”
“Yes, sir, they’re almost in range.”
Then it happened.
All along the beach, dozens of jump jets fired, and in an artificial sandstorm, a dozen ’Mechs began to rise up along the red cliffs of Ravensglade. “Armor, fall back from the cliff! ’Mechs incoming! ’Mechs incoming!”
And they came, rising over the lip of the cliff like fifty-ton hornets balanced on tails of fire, lasers blazing. A Black Hawk slammed down on a Thumper artillery unit, an accidental “death from above” attack that was no less deadly as the vehicle’s magazine detonated in a fountain of secondary explosions.
A Pack Hunter landed on the lip of the cliff, grabbed the smoking barrel of a Long Tom in its hands, and twisted the nearly red-hot metal into a slight curve. Unaware, the crew tried to fire at the incoming hoverferries, and the mighty cannon exploded, showering the surrounding vehicles with shrapnel.
Erik was momentarily awestruck as a Catapult seemed to rise out of the ground in front of him and loomed above. The much larger ’Mech landed no more than five meters in front of Erik, but the advantage was all his. Powerful though the Catapult was, it was all long-range punch. It had no short-range weapons, and no arms to defend itself.
Erik’s Hatchetman, on the other hand, was all about close-in fighting.