Once they were all inside, she could see that the table faced a bank of viewscreens, most of which were showing flight footage from various transport cams. In the center, the two largest screens were taken up by the now-familiar face of Colonel Debrett, and what appeared to be a map tracking the progress of the fleet. At the top corner of the tracking map was a countdown, which Lhyn confirmed was the estimated time until the ground pounder hit the next town. It was currently at one hundred and four ticks.
Lancer Tal spoke with the three new Alseans while gesturing in turn at Ekatya, Baldassar, and Lhyn. Ekatya missed a language chip more than ever as she listened to their names being pronounced and realized that it was the only thing she was going to understand in this entire meeting.
Next came the introductions of the Alseans, with Lhyn translating after each one. The lean, dark-skinned woman was Colonel Northcliff, confirmed as commander of this base. The stockier woman with pale skin and short hair was Colonel Razine, head of the Alsean Investigative Force. And the man, with shoulder-length graying hair and shrewd eyes, was Prime Warrior Shantu, a member of the High Council and the most powerful warrior on Alsea after Lancer Tal. Ekatya thought she might have figured out the respect issue upon learning that. As Lhyn had told her earlier, every caste head was not just on the High Council but also the highest authority in the caste—except for the warriors and scholars, whose ultimate leader was the Lancer if one of their caste held the title. Ekatya would have bet a month’s pay that Shantu had been a candidate for Lancer when Tal was elected.
They settled at the table, with Lancer Tal at the center. Colonel Micah pushed Ekatya in next to her and then sat on the Lancer’s other side. Lhyn slid in next to Ekatya, and Baldassar took the next chair, making it easier for Lhyn to handle the translation duties. The other three warriors ranged themselves beside Colonel Micah.
Ekatya glanced over the Alseans, who surely represented the powerful elite of this culture. Lancer Tal was the smallest figure among them, dwarfed by the bulk of Colonel Micah and outweighed even by the slender Colonel Northcliff. But she radiated confidence and authority, and the high-collared crimson jacket of what looked like a formal uniform set her apart from the other military officials. Her blonde hair shone against the red, and when she turned her head, her light blue eyes seemed to look right through Ekatya until she faced forward again and spoke with Colonel Debrett.
Lhyn whispered an explanation. “She’s asking him if he’s brought the others up to speed. He says yes, including the ground pounder’s shield tech. Now they’re talking about our fighter; Shantu wants to know if it could be slung under a super cargo transport and shipped over.”
“Not enough time,” Ekatya said in a low voice. “And even if we had time, something that unwieldy would never get close enough to the ground pounder for Candini to get off a shot. They’d both be blown out of the sky.”
“That’s what Lancer Tal is saying.”
The Lancer turned to Ekatya and spoke, then waited for the translation.
“She says we need to start all over, which means full details on the ground pounder. Weaponry, power source, how it moves, everything. Stars and Shippers, I wish you had those language chips already. This is not my field.”
“I know. Don’t worry; just do the best you can.” Ekatya caught Baldassar’s eye. “Feel free to jump in if I miss anything.”
“But jump slowly,” Lhyn said. “And please don’t use your biggest and most technical words.”
Ekatya faced Lancer Tal and the others. “Starting with weaponry, you’ve seen three of the four types it carries. The rapidgun fires projectiles about this size, and the magazine holds fifty thousand of them.” She held her fingers eight centimeters apart and waited for Lhyn. All of the Alseans looked startled, though she wasn’t certain if they were reacting to the cartridge size or the quantity. Colonel Debrett said something that had the others nodding.
“He says that must be what was used on the houses along the river before the ground pounder got to the village.”
“We didn’t see that footage. But the bullets are designed for maximum disruption, both to living beings and property. They have vertical cuts at the top so that when they hit, the metal peels back.” Again she demonstrated while Lhyn spoke. “That means the force of impact is much greater, and it tears big holes through anything it hits.”
Lancer Tal spoke and held up her hands, making a circle with fingers and thumbs. Needing no translation, Ekatya nodded. “Yes, about that big.”
“Damnation! They shoot people with those?” Lhyn had forgotten her role and was staring at Ekatya with wide eyes. “That would blow bodies apart!”
“That’s exactly the point,” Baldassar said from behind her. “They’re not interested in survivors, Dr. Rivers. They’re interested in eliminating resistance.”
Lhyn looked sick. “This is why I’m in anthropology. Sorry, keep going.”
Ekatya moved on to the missiles, explaining that they used an artificial intelligence to stay on target.
“Not thermal scanners?” Lhyn asked after Colonel Micah said something.
“No, those can be too easily confused. The AI just needs to be shown its target and after that, there’s no escaping it. The only way to get rid of one of those missiles is to shoot it out of the sky.”
This seemed to confirm something for the Alseans, who nodded their heads and spoke amongst each other.
“They’re saying that explains why a decoy didn’t work.”
“No, it wouldn’t. But that was a smart idea under difficult circumstances. I was impressed with the cargo pilot’s instincts. Please tell them that.”
They all looked pleased, and Ekatya mused that warriors were the same the galaxy over. Compliment someone they were commanding, and they took it personally. She was the same way.
When she told them that the ground pounder carried fifty missiles, an almost palpable pall settled over the room. Judging by their expressions, they had just realized what she already knew. The ground pounder could take out half the fleet of aircraft currently converging on it, as easily as pressing a button. She waited for that to settle before moving on to the laser cannon.
“Its greatest tactical advantage is its nearly infinite power supply. So long as the ground pounder is mobile, the laser cannon will work, even after all of the bullets, missiles, and mortars have been fired. And unlike the other weapons, which are all designed for maximum destruction, the laser cannon is a precision instrument. It has a narrow beam, meaning it will slice through a target rather than blow it up.”
After Lhyn had translated, Colonel Debrett wanted to know why, if that was the case, the laser had exploded trees along the river when it was firing at the rescue pilot.
“Because the beam superheated the water in the trees. The water flashes to steam, the steam expands, and boom.”
“Oh, stars,” Lhyn said, forgetting to translate. “People have water in them, too.”
Ekatya wished she could have spared her this. “Yes, they do. And yes, that’s what happens if the beam hits a person in the torso.”
“Or the head,” Baldassar added unhelpfully.
Lhyn closed her eyes for a moment, then swallowed and translated for the Alseans. They didn’t seem fazed, instead discussing amongst themselves the probable function for such a weapon.
“To dismantle infrastructure,” Ekatya said. “You want to collapse a bridge? Just cut out the supports. Make high-speed transit systems unusable? One slice through the tube or the tracks. And you can destroy a power station with a few well-placed shots.”
This was received with much head-nodding, and Ekatya had the feeling that Shantu, at least, was taking mental notes. He was clearly the type of soldier who loved weaponry for its own sake.
“That leaves the mortars. They’re designed for maximum explosive power, to burn and disintegrate. Mortars are what destroyed the village, and a ground pounder carries a thousand of them. So as you can see, a single ground pounder could
easily destroy twenty villages like the one we saw, along with half of Whitesun’s transport fleet, and still have plenty of weaponry left.”
“I never knew any of this,” Lhyn said quietly as the Alseans conversed. “Holy Shippers, what an awful creation. No wonder the Voloth subdue native populations so easily. They just blow them out of existence. I don’t understand the minds that can bring this kind of evil into being, let alone go out there and use it.”
Lancer Tal asked a question, bringing Lhyn to attention. “She wants to know how it operates. Is it all artificial intelligence, or are there warriors running the systems?”
Yes, that was a rather important part of the equation. “Every ground pounder needs four crew members to run it: one pilot, two weapons specialists, and one systems engineer.”
For some reason, that seemed to brighten everyone’s mood. Ekatya guessed it was the familiarity of knowing there were living people inside it, rather than the whole thing being some monstrous, indestructible machine. People could be killed.
When they had quieted, she added, “Each of the weapons specialists covers two sides of the ground pounder, which is one of its only weaknesses. The specialists can easily track a target from one of their sides to the other, but handing off a target to the next chair isn’t seamless. There can be a second or half a second of delay.”
This inspired some excited discussion, with a request for her to illustrate exactly which corners were the transition points. Lancer Tal opened up her reader card, tapped an image of the ground pounder onto it, and showed Ekatya how to draw on it with her finger.
Ekatya quickly identified the rapidguns, mortar barrels, and missile launchers, along with a few other details and arrows pointing to the sides each officer would cover. Lancer Tal then uploaded the image to everyone else’s reader cards and to the hundred transports currently flying toward their target.
The next half hour was spent in a strategy brainstorming session, with various Alseans asking questions that both Ekatya and Baldassar answered as best they could, while Lhyn worked harder than any of them. With the countdown clock inexorably marking off the ticks, the stress soon climbed to unbearable levels. It wasn’t helped when the original cargo pilot called in to report that she’d located the rescue pilot. He had managed to blow his cabin release, but since his transport had been in a spiral at the time, the result hadn’t been pretty. While his crash collar had done its job, it could protect only his head and neck. The rest had not fared well, and he was barely alive. She had stabilized him as well as she could and was waiting for the backup squadron, which by now was just minutes away.
Not long after that, another pilot called in to report that he had all of the downed crew aboard and was headed for the healing center at Redmoon. The remaining transports in the squadron went into a holding pattern, waiting to rejoin the rest of the fleet.
The brainstorming resumed, but Ekatya felt a new edge in the room. She wasn’t surprised when, after being told yet again that an idea would not work, Shantu threw his reader card on the table and shouted something. She’d been expecting someone to break, and he was her first pick. Lhyn didn’t even try to translate, instead curling her good arm on the table and resting her head on it.
Baldassar looked over her bent back with concern. “This is very hard on Dr. Rivers. We should take a break before she starts losing her accuracy.”
“We should take a break before all of us start losing our minds,” Ekatya said, but the Alseans had a different idea. Lancer Tal said something to Colonel Debrett, who nodded and vanished from the screen. In his place was the video footage they’d seen in the hospital conference room.
Lhyn looked up and groaned. “I do not want to see this.”
“You don’t have to.”
“Yes, I do.” She pushed herself upright and watched, her face pale.
When the video ended a new discussion started, with much pointing at the screen. By now Lhyn was so tired that she translated only half of what she heard. Then Colonel Northcliff snapped something, and everyone sat back while the video was shown a second time. Ekatya was getting heartily sick of watching those two transports get blown out of the sky.
As the screen went dark, Lhyn said, “I have a stupid question.”
“I doubt it’s stupid, but ask away.”
“You said that the shielding covers its legs too, but if it does, why isn’t the water level showing that?”
“What?” Ekatya asked in confusion. From the corner of her eye, she saw Lancer Tal leaning forward to watch them.
“The water level should be reacting to the shield, shouldn’t it? I mean…” Lhyn used her fingers to imitate a ground pounder, resting their tips on the table. “Damn, I need two hands. Here, do this.”
Ekatya put her own fingertips on the table in the same formation.
“Thank you. When it’s standing in the current, the water should be rising up across the whole face of the shield, right? So we should see it doing this.” Lhyn laid a horizontal finger across Ekatya’s, representing the water level. “But what I saw was the water rising higher against the legs. Just the legs. In between them, it’s not changing.”
Ekatya’s jaw loosened as she stared first at Lhyn, then at Baldassar. He looked as shocked as she felt.
Lancer Tal spoke urgently, and Lhyn sighed. “She wants to know why you two are so stunned. I told you it was stupid.”
Ekatya couldn’t help herself; she laughed. “Great galaxies, you genius of a woman! You’ve just found a weakness nobody in the Protectorate Fleet ever thought of!”
“I did?”
Baldassar was smiling as well. “You did, Dr. Rivers. We believed their shields were always bubbles, like the shield of a ship. They certainly are when the ground pounders are dropped from orbit, because that’s what protects them through the atmosphere. But once they’re on the ground they can’t maintain that configuration, because the shield has to interact with the ground. Or in this case, the river.”
“If it were still a bubble, it would be digging into the ground and slowing the thing down,” Ekatya said. “So they must have designed it to adapt to the surface it’s moving over. It’s shifting up and down to keep drag to a minimum.”
“Meaning it’s just above the surface of the water,” Baldassar said. “That’s why the only thing disrupting the water surface is the legs.”
“Meaning that anything under the water can actually pass under the shield.” Ekatya could not believe she hadn’t seen it before.
“Okay,” Lhyn said slowly. “How exactly does that help? I mean, you can’t fly a transport under it.”
“No, but something smaller might go unnoticed.”
Lancer Tal spoke again, and this time her voice had the unmistakable crack of authority. Lhyn straightened and began to explain. When she finished, all of the Alseans looked at each other in silence, then burst into shouts and exclamations.
“Well, that’s got them excited.” Lhyn had perked up as well. “Can they really beat this thing?”
“They’ve got a far better shot at it than they did before your little stroke of genius.”
The video was put onscreen yet again, but this time Ekatya watched it with new interest, focusing solely on the ground pounder’s movement through the river. Sure enough, as it waded downstream, the water rose up against the legs but remained level elsewhere. When it stopped to fire at the transports, the current flowing past it clearly outlined the legs and nothing else. It was a tiny detail, one that a roomful of military experts had repeatedly missed, because they were all focusing on the battle, the weapons, the strategy. But Lhyn, bless her pacifist, detail-oriented soul, hadn’t wanted to watch the fighting. She’d paid attention to the small things.
It was always the small things, wasn’t it?
Colonel Debrett came back onscreen with a triumphant grin that was matched by everyone in the room, and the ensuing buzz of conversation had a sense of confidence that had been lacking before.
Ek
atya thought of something. “Tell them that whatever they use, it can’t have a power signature. It has to be inert or close to it, or the ground pounder will detect it.”
Lhyn passed that on, and the Alseans got down to business. Within fifteen minutes they’d come up with a simple and elegant plan. Colonel Debrett had tapped the best engineer in his fleet, a weapons officer aboard one of the bombers, to pull a class five missile and rig it for a radio-controlled remote detonation. That bomber and three others would fly far enough downstream to escape detection and give the warriors time to carry out their mission. They would lower the missile and their weapons officers, all four of whom would be needed to guide the heavy missile into the water and set it on the riverbed.
There wasn’t enough time to pick the warriors up again. Two of them would have had to stay behind anyway, one as a spotter and one to operate the detonator. But while Ekatya would have agonized over risking four of her people when only two were necessary, the Alseans seemed to feel this was just more glory to share around.
Lancer Tal activated some sort of holographic display on the floor and populated it with orbital map data of the river canyon in three dimensions. The same map appeared in two-dimensional form on one of the large viewscreens, with a blinking yellow dot indicating the current location of the ground pounder on both maps. It was alarmingly close to the next village. Debrett said the village had been evacuated, but Ekatya couldn’t help worrying. In her experience, evacuations were rarely complete.
After a flurry of discussion and much pointing at the holographic map, the Alseans determined that the ambush site would be just before a curve in the river, where the high canyon walls would enable the warriors to conceal themselves from both visual and thermal detection.
To give the scheme its best chance of success, the Alsean fleet would launch a full attack as the ground pounder approached the missile’s location, diverting its attention both from the hidden warriors and the minuscule power signature of the battery in the remote detonator. Ekatya thought it probable that if the ground pounder’s shielding was constantly flaring with energy from a bombardment, the battery’s power signature would be lost in the electromagnetic noise.