Outside, another command vehicle skidded to a stop and a group of officers jumped out and headed for the door.

"Why 'Quarter'? As in, he gives none?"

"Something like that."

No more could be said about it however, because the last collection of majors and captains just entered the room, dripping wet. With their arrival, everyone started taking places. His father had been talking directly with Colonel Neils, but now searched for and found Kaethan as Neils attended to his presentation display. Toman gave up his red plush seat to stand with his son and Walter around the perimeter of chairs.

"How are things going?" Toman asked as everyone was quieting.

"No problems so far," Kaethan only said.

The flicker of the colonel's display was the signal for everyone to quiet down, and no more words were said. This was promised to be a short briefing, only detailing the operation that was being planned, nothing more. The notice that was sent to the battalion commanders mentioned the temporary loss of the Blackstone turret, and the downing of most of the attacking fleet, but offered few details. Kaethan hoped he would have time to talk to his father after the briefing to find out more.

"Good evening, gentlemen," Colonel Neils began. "This meeting will be brief, after which we will be moving out. The Chandoine Guard headed out an hour ago, and we have to get on their tails. Their lead elements have already pa.s.sed the Tigris River Bridge and are deploying there. We will then be leap-frogging ahead of them."

The flat-screen display was now shining with a full color map of south Deladin being presented to everyone. The east-west highway was highlighted prominently.

"The enemy transport that slipped through our guard this morning set down somewhere in the area highlighted in blue."

A light blue oval appeared then, highlighting a large area of rocky terrain about midway between Telville and Reims in the center of southern Deladin.

"Travelers on the highway reported seeing the transport set down south of the road, but we have conflicting accounts of exactly where. About thirty minutes ago, a narrow beam, subs.p.a.ce transmission was detected by the starports at Reims and Starveil. Their triangulation information was forwarded to the Chandoine Guard who then bombarded the position with their heavy rocket batteries. There is no way to tell whether this was the transport, or what the effect of our attack was, but this position has now become the primary objective of Telville Corps."

A bright white triangle appeared on the screen, near center of the blue oval.

"Alien infantry have been reported attacking several plantations along the Witch River. One plantation owner who escaped in his grav-car reported alien infantry in full suits of body armor that were impervious to the shotguns that they use to fend off seyzarrs. Their infantry are using needle rifles and are being transported by wheeled armored vehicles, with larger needle rifles mounted on turrets. Also, escorting these vehicles are other wheeled vehicles that we were told discharge lightning bolts at their targets. These could be electron guns or perhaps ion cannons. So far, this man's emergency call is the only information that we have received concerning the makeup of the ground forces that we will be facing."

As Colonel Neils was talking, the map highlighted the Witch River, and then the plantations that were hit. Also highlighted now was a system of back roads the led up into the mountains of southern Deladin and several small mining communities there. It would be difficult to use them for flanking operations, however, since they went so deeply into the mountains before connecting.

But then the colonel turned the display off. Neils always finished his briefings by turning off the display and giving a motivational speech while he had everyone's attention.

"This transport was sent in before all others, trusted to hold a beachhead for their invasion to set down within. We believe that these are elite troops with their best weaponry. They are also on the defensive in rough terrain, fully deployed and raiding the surrounding territory at will."

So far, Kaethan thought, this wasn't very motivational. Neils usually had a good finish, however.

"On the other hand, our enemy is heavily outnumbered, and in a territory that they are not accustomed to. We must use these advantages as best we can. This beachhead must be eliminated as quickly as possible, for our command believes that their last attack was only a test of our defenses. Their next attack will be in force. This pocket must be cleared by then so that we can be free to react to their invasion."

Kaethan suddenly had the idea that the Telville Corps was being asked to charge their positions in a direct a.s.sault. Certainly their leaders realized that this was exactly what the aliens would be expecting, and would be best prepared for . . .

"Any questions?" Colonel Neils opened the floor.

"What will Tigris Guard be doing?" asked Major Thurman of 1st Mechanized.

"They will be supporting us, of course, though farther back. Depending on how we manage, they will either reinforce us, or be held back in protection of Telville along with the Chandoine Guard. Any other questions?"

Colonel Neils was making it plain that he was not encouraging questions, only suffering them. If anyone had any, they'd better be good.

"Will Reims be sending any forces from the other side?" asked Captain Held of 3rd Recon.

"Negative. We can't lose the starport, gentlemen. Any other questions?"

No one said anything, though everyone may have just felt so blindsided by that last news that they couldn't speak. Colonel Neils wrapped things up quickly.

"Then head back to your units, gentlemen. Detailed marching orders are waiting for you there. Dismissed! Captain Ishida?"

Kaethan was just about to start questioning his father when Colonel Neils called him over. He felt rather embarra.s.sed as both his father and Walter tagged along behind him as he worked his way over to Neils. Everyone else was clearing out of the lobby quickly, and Kaethan had to thread his way through the rapidly exiting bodies.

"Yes, Colonel?" Kaethan asked when he got to him.

"You'll have all three recon companies ahead of you, Captain, but I want my heaviest strikers as lead battalion. That means you, Captain."

"Yes, Colonel. Any specific orders?"

"Just get us there quick, Captain, and don't wait for anyone to tell you where to go or what to do."

"Yes, sir."

The two exchanged brief salutes and Neils left in a rush. As Kaethan turned around, he found that Walter and his father had already exchanged introductions, and were talking about Chains and Quarter.

"No," his father was saying, "without his turret, Rokoyan wants my Bolos held back for planetary defense."

"I thought that local governments couldn't order Concordiat units around once shots were fired," Walter replied.

"They can't, but this is a judgment call. Rokoyan has reason to be worried. A second wave could hit us any moment, and he believes that your forces can handle the beachhead alone."

"Father," Kaethan interrupted, recalling his mother's long diatribes on Dela.s.sian politics, "what Rokoyan wants is to prove that we can handle the defense of our planet ourselves, and therefore there is no reason to put a Concordiat military base here."

The conversation ended then, as they both considered what he said. Walter then nodded, reluctantly agreeing. Delas hated government interference, and with a Concordiat base on the planet, there would be plenty to go around.

His father grimaced and shook his head.

"That fits," Colonel Ishida agreed. "Well, if you guys start having trouble, I'll be able to see it and call one of them in."

"You're coming to the front?" Kaethan asked defensively.

"Yes, Neils gave me permission to tag along with your unit. Do you mind?"

A wave of nausea swept through Kaethan's entire body. The thought of his father watching over him during a fight was horrifying! The man had more combat experience than the combined population of Delas! Every maneuver that Kaethan executed, every order he gave, would be graded and judged according to impossible standards! All his mistakes would be instantly noticed and thrown back into his face as his father corrected him. G.o.d forbid anyone would die under his command, for he'd only have to look to his father to find out who was to blame. And, without doubt, his father would see every mistake that Kaethan made as a reflection upon himself.

"Of course not, Colonel," he said.

Our missile supplies are nearly exhausted. Only two missiles remain in my vertical launch tubes, from my original storehouse of twenty. Unit DBQ has none left. All have been expended against the transports that successfully made planetfall and now approach the east and west coasts of Deladin. My remaining conventional warheads were not designed for use against such large targets, and we fear that our attacks may have been insufficient to stop them. The 39th's MFOR-x.x.x-II (Melconian Front Optimization Refit for Bolo Mark x.x.xs, Version Two) gave each of us five Isis...o...b..tal denial thermonuclear missiles, but only fifteen Icehawk anti-armor missiles, designed more for penetration than for expansive damage.

The Dela.s.sian defense net has limited capability to track targets below the horizon, and these aliens approach slowly at wave-top level. They are communications silent and emit no active sensor sweeps. Our most effective method of acquiring these targets has been detecting the radiation that they are emitting from their fusion thrusters. This, unfortunately, is inexact, and our missiles must search for their thermal signature once they arrive in the area.

My last two missiles, however, have been saved for one last contact whose pa.s.sage through the ocean net has been like a ghost. It approaches much slower than the others, and likely has radiation shielding protecting its exhaust. It threads its way between the Dela.s.sian detectors as if it were provided a map, though I calculate that likelihood as being infinitesimal. Instead, I must attribute its opportune zigzag approach to nothing more than luck. Even now, as it finally approaches the southern Dela.s.sian coast, far off detectors can only approximate its position as north of Telville and south of Candelith.

Once this transport reaches land, we risk it deploying its forces. But firing my missiles at such an elusive target may waste the last of our extreme range ordnance. My stage-one heuristic dilemma switches have tripped, but it is unnecessary that I invoke my stage two circuitry.

I call my Commander . . .

The Kezdai a.s.sault dropship never detected the approaching missile. Its particle beam defenses remained utterly still, useless without direction from the ship's impressive sensor arrays, which were off. Its crew saw only the blackness of the south Deladin sh.o.r.eline, looming larger and larger on their forward view screen. The light from their fusion drive, up until now reflecting off nothing but the waves only meters below, now was beginning to cast a bluish glow over the white sand beach that they were approaching. Is-kaldai Riffen's elite forces had been flying manually over the ocean, and planned on remaining on manual navigation for their flight over land. There were just too many active sensors sweeping the skies between them and Adakradai Khoriss' landing area to risk plotting anything beforehand.

Their plans, however, had to be rewritten.

Coming down on the dropship from above, the Icehawk missile locked in on their forward left thruster and ignited its powerful magnetic dynamo. At the split moment of impact, the warhead was fed a stream of antimatter particles that annihilated instantly. Molten shards of crystalline carbon exploded high into the air in a sparkling cloud as an impossibly narrow beam of focused plasma drilled deep into the Triamond lattice hull. Drive shielding was sliced clean through, causing an explosion that blasted the thruster clean off its housing.

The sudden explosion could be seen thirty kilometers up and down the coast, but even that wasn't enough for anyone to notice it. The peninsula that the dropship had to crash upon was over twenty kilometers from the nearest human dwellings, with no roads leading to it. No one was around to see that the dropship remained intact after smashing a two-hundred-meter long swathe through the dense rainforest, or that soldiers and equipment descended unhurt from the burning hulk.

No one, including the Kezdai, noticed the large black fin that cut through the waves just offsh.o.r.e.

As the first light of dawn glowed deep blue in the eastern sky, Captain Kaethan Ishida and the Alabaster Coast Heavy Armor was still point battalion in Telville Corps' drive inland. While his ten Templars of Alpha team were running up the eastern lane of the highway, his Bravo team was paralleling him on the western lane. Charlie team followed behind. Somewhere around the fifth hour, it had become obvious to the captain that their "leap" ahead of the Chandoine Guard had become a permanent condition. There would be no deployment to allow the Tigris Guard to jump ahead of them. Someone upstairs wanted contact to be made as soon as possible, and his unit was just lucky enough to be out front when that decision was made.

Kaethan was driving Templar One as Sergeant Pritchard slept. Andrea kept watch from her turret position. When Zen awoke in an hour, they all would have had four hours sleep during the night as they traded duties. The nights on Delas were fifteen hours and about thirty minutes, with little variation from the planet's almost perfectly vertical axis. At nearly fifty kilometers per hour, Kaethan's column had traveled six hundred kilometers inland in the last twelve hours. The tall mountains of south Deladin were looming high into the clouds far to the south. The rain forest that they drove through was giving way to the limestone foothills that dominated the approaches to the granite peaks.

Contact was expected soon, but the three recon companies ahead of them had still not reported anything. Everyone was on radio silence except for them, and they were to break it only in an emergency. Even the running lights on the Templars were off, forcing Kaethan to use his thermal and low-light scopes to keep in line.

So when their radio did crackle with traffic, Kaethan was all ears.

"This is Recon Bravo Two. Contact at my position."

A red circle popped up on Kaethan's navigation map that was scrolling on the display before him as he drove. It was about eight kilometers ahead of him, directly on the highway. He did not recognize the voice, but whoever it was, he was exceedingly calm. Obviously Bravo Two had driven into an ambush site, but the aliens were hoping for something tastier to feed on than just a recon unit.

Kaethan didn't wait for confirmation, however. By hitting a virtual b.u.t.ton on his left panel, he put his entire battalion on alert. And with a yell, he woke up Zen. As acknowledgements were sent back to him from his Templar commanders, lighting up his left-hand display with bright icons for each tank, he continued to listen to command channels.

"Are you sure, Bravo?" said a quiet female voice over the radio. "You're two kilometers behind us."

The female voice was that of Recon Alpha commander, Captain Beth Nichols.

"Forget your thermals. Use your low-light." Bravo Two replied. "They must have cooled armor . . ."

Standard procedure in this situation was for the Recon unit to keep advancing, but much slower. It was now the column's job to catch up quickly and extract it. A glance at his left-hand display showed the alert acknowledgements coming back quickly.

As a flurry of artillery plots lit up along the treeline ahead of him on his navigation map, Kaethan turned his transmitter to his battalion channel.

"Wake up boys and girls!" he called. "Our recon companies have just walked into a pa.s.sive ambush seven klicks ahead. It's our job to go in and hold the jaws open while recon gets the h.e.l.l out. Teams acknowledge!"

"Aye," called Lieutenant Peter Birch of his Bravo team.

"Aye," called Lieutenant Ellen Holowitz of his Charlie team.

"n.o.body is to fire until the action starts! Once it begins, Alpha and Bravo are to stop and plant where they are! Charlie will come up and deploy across our front. Got that?"

"Aye." They replied.

Kaethan suddenly closed his eyes and groaned as he remembered that Walter and his father tagging along in the prototype Sentinel.

"Bicks, are you there?"

"Yes, Captain!"

"You take Walter's toy into the depression in the middle of our box and stay there!"

"Yes, sir!"

The highway was taking a gradual turn as he talked, and a long, flat straightaway was ahead of them. Dense groves of trees lined both sides, with a sharp rise at the far end, and many rocky knolls and outcroppings to hide any enemy armor. It was the perfect place for an ambush, with nowhere for them to hide once the firing started.

Of course, the Templar Mark XI was never meant to hide.

Ad-akradai Khoriss watched as the rising light of the alien sun turned the eastern sky lavender and pink. It had been raining, off and on, since he had landed upon this world, and this was the first time the skies were mostly clear. In his exhilaration, he had succ.u.mbed to his terrible urge to remove his helmet and breathe in the unfiltered air of this world. It was dangerous, yes, but there was danger everywhere here. Such a swamp-ridden world as this was the breeding ground of countless bacteria and germs, and the Kezdai immune system was weak from evolving on a desert world that was so devoid of them.

The hot, moist air, though, was less than refreshing.

The aliens on this world traveled without protection, he had noticed. They called themselves "Humans." A wounded male farm worker had been captured and interrogated as best they could before he died. Very little else was learned from him, but then little was expected. He was only a farmer, what must be their lowest caste, as it was with the Kezdai.

To the west, explosions and antiartillery discharges could be heard as his forces engaged the Humans along the narrow stretch of highway that cut through the rainforest and impa.s.sable rocky terrain of the area. All of his armor remained dug in along the highway perimeter, unable to travel over ground because their tires would sink to their floor into the muddy ground. Maneuver was impossible in this country, and if he were on the offensive, he'd be going mad in frustration right now. But he wasn't. His forces were on the defense, and the Humans could reach him with only a fraction of their forces at a time.

From his vantage point on top of a rocky outcropping, he could see a portion of the highway to the northwest. Many vehicles were scattered over the ground in various stages of destruction. Some were burning, sending faint columns of smoke into the air. Most were not, however, having little inside that caught fire. Most of the vehicles were Human, but several were Kezdai.

His carefully laid ambush turned into a disappointing standoff as the Humans detected their positions before the trap was sprung. Seeing the enemy recon units falling back, many of his commanders attacked anyway, leading to an open field firefight. The armor plating protecting the Humans' troop carriers was so laughably thin that even the Kezdai's infantry needle rifles could riddle the vehicle with holes. But their large, tracked vehicles with the huge railguns were a different story.

While the Human troop carriers attempted to flee or were abandoned, their heavy armor held ground, blasting their missiles with twin turrets firing crackling bolts of energy, and protecting their skies overhead with a laser battery kept safe in their center. Their ma.s.sive railguns traversed the battlefield at an astounding speed for their size, punching huge holes in any Kezdai armor that attempted to rush them. With concentrated, direct missile fire from his infantry, several of these tanks on their flanks had finally been knocked out. The remaining pocket, however, used the dead hulks as cover, becoming even harder to break.

And there the Humans stood ground while their infantry deployed in the forests on their flanks. The infantry firefights within the trees were quick and b.l.o.o.d.y, with neither side's bodyarmor effective against the Kezdai needle rifles or the Humans' bulky and powerful gauss rifles. The Kezdai soldiers, however, were sorely outnumbered.

Below his precipice, a command vehicle approached up the gravel road that wound through the trees. It stopped behind Khorris' own vehicle and Akradai Zaekiss stepped out. Having seen all that he could see from this outcropping, Khoriss decided to climb down to meet his infantry commander instead of forcing him to climb up. Ever since the first bombardment that targeted their transport, he had ordered that all reports were to be given to him in person. Their communications equipment was only used in emergencies.

"So what have you learned, Zaekiss?" Khorris' sarcasm was as thick as the mud that covered this planet.

Zaekiss appreciated the sarcasm, but didn't show it. He removed his helmet as Khoriss leapt the last twenty feet to the ground before reporting to him in his vibrant, somber voice, unusual for a Kezdai. A huge scar across his throat marked the old surias wound that had so altered his voice.

"Our soldiers are being forced to retreat, Ad-akradai. These Humans are patient, always waiting for their artillery to wreak their havoc before advancing a minimal distance. It is slow progress, but our dischargers are constantly being overwhelmed by the sh.e.l.ls."

Khorris' hood drooped noticeably. His plan to decimate their lead elements, and overrun their rear, was in tatters. He had lost his element of surprise, but had been still hoping that the Humans would again attempt to rush his lines. This latest news, however, crushed that hope. Personally, Khoriss disliked artillery, and had decided not to waste room on his transport carrying them. These Humans, though, continued to use it well ever since their first bombardment hit just when his infantry were about to open fire on their lead heavy armor.

"How do they fight, Zaekiss? What do your soldiers tell you?"

The Akradai hesitated as he tried to understand exactly what his leader was asking. Khoriss saw the confusion.

"The Humans, Zaekiss," Khoriss tried to explain, "what kind of soldiers are they?"