The Battle of Chiba-1, part 1

The ear-splitting clamor of the security alarms wasn’t warning about a jailbreak. After a few seconds, the shrieking of the sirens dwindled to a growl as an artificial female voice came over the outdoor speakers.

“Attention. EMP is imminent. Switch off all electronics until the initial burst has passed.” The voice spoke in calm tones that were calculated to relax the listener. It had about the same sense of urgency as a robot waiter taking a drink order. “Please take shelter and secure unshielded electronic items.”

The warning repeated as I snatched up a weapons belt and fastened it around my waist, then helped Lev and Benji secure the YFT guards in an unoccupied storage container. We sheltered inside another one as a second alert was announced.

“EMP pulse in three… two… one.” A thunderclap of noise rocked the container as the electromagnetic pulse wave washed over us. It was a massive explosion, far more powerful than any of the other anomaly events I’d been part of. I hoped that there were no aircraft aloft when the rip opened.

Doc levered the container door open. “Into the jeep!” he ordered. He pushed my old ship’s headset into my hands and hustled me into the passenger side of a hoverjeep sporting a Japan Air Self Defense Forces logo. “Lev, you’re on the gun. Don’t shoot until Jim or I say so. Hurry!”

Without hesitation, Lev jumped into the back of the open topped vehicle and grasped the firing grip of what I recognized as the minigun he’d wielded when we fought the spider drones on Kimura Jima. This time, though, it was on a pedestal mount.

Doc cracked a smile. “That minigun is one of the items Minori left for me to pick up. She unloaded a lot of ordnance into storage here before taking off to the shipyard.”

He fired up the engines and the jeep jumped upward several inches on a bed of air, then tilted forward as we accelerated.

“Benji, the Mistral is about to come under attack,” I shouted at him over the rush of air.

“Are you certain?”

“Not 100 percent, no,” I admitted. “But we need to warn Minori.”

“The Mistral is too far away to reach on these headsets,” he grumbled, bending low over the steering wheel and increasing speed. “We need to go to the air traffic control center and --”

Benji and I both gaped at the sight in front of us. Gun motors whined to life behind me as Lev whirled the minigun around to face forward.

“Looks like someone got here first,” I said.

Smoke poured out of a hole in the side of the main control tower in the center of the airfield. As I watched, I heard the unmistakable whoosh of a rocket. It impacted the side of the mushroom-shaped structure, visibly shaking it.

I followed the rocket’s smoke trail back to its launcher and was horrified to see who -- or rather, what -- had fired it off.

A hulking Cyclad raider in an urban gray camouflage suit of armor dropped the disposable rocket tube and brought up its charged-particle rifle. As our jeep drew closer to the tower, wave after wave of raiders dropped into view from the newly-generated rip.

I hadn’t been this close to an anomaly since one had destroyed the C-130 transport Doc and I had been flying in. From underneath, it looked like a giant neon red jellyfish, with stringy tendrils of static discharges reaching for the ground. Cyclads descended from this apparition on their contra-grav packs, which they jettisoned as soon as they reached the ground.

They discharged their missiles into the tower, then the vehicles and aircraft parked on the tarmac. Once their explosive payload had been expended, they formed into a line and moved forward, turning their guns on the civilians fleeing the destruction. Screams came from the crowds of people fleeing from the Cyclads.

The body of a middle-aged office worker came into view. She lay still and unmoving, crumpled up like a piece of refuse on the airfield. Smoke still curled up from the CPB bolt that had struck her in the back. Hearing our approaching jeep, several of her killers turned their skull-like faces in our direction.

I shouted at our gunner, “Lev, targets front, Cyclad raiders! Light ‘em up!”

The words were hardly out of my mouth when a stream of bullets poured out of the Dreadnought’s weapon. The nearest Cyclad burst in a satisfying display of metal guts and steel confetti while the rest took cover from the withering burst of fire.

Reason vanished as rage consumed me. I gripped the edge of the windshield, readying myself to vault from the jeep into the mass of cyborg killers.

It was then I experienced one of those weird moments in combat, when everything around me was happening at light-speed but I seemed to be inside a separate bubble of calm.

Doc’s hand was on my arm. He looked at me with the same compassion that made him so popular with his patients. “Don’t, Jim. This isn’t Alsfeld.”

Alsfeld. I’d been a helpless, terrified soldier in my first battle, unable to stop the massacre of the town’s civilians as Dreadnought cyborgs swept deliberately through the streets and old-world houses, killing indiscriminately.

The bubble of calm evaporated and time accelerated back to normal. I took a deep breath. Benji had pulled me back from the edge.

I nodded my thanks. “Change of plans. Doc, circle around to the other side of the tower,” I said. “If we can get to the radios we’ll be able to warn the Mistral. Stay near the edge of the airfield but don’t fall off. It’s a ten-meter drop to the grav-carrier field on the next level.”

“On it,” he replied. Behind me, Lev kept up a steady stream of fire as our jeep arced away from the mass of enemy cyborgs. I was thankful that the hearing protection built into my headset filtered out most of the thunder from the minigun’s six barrels.

One of the raiders to my far right staggered under the impact of machine gun bullets fired from an unseen gun, then toppled over. The other raiders nearby shifted their attention away from the jeep and fired at a handful of blue uniformed Chiba-1 security troops that had emerged to engage the raiders from scattered positions around the airfield. Looking closer, I saw other gun barrels poked out from behind burning wreckage and smoking debris, adding their firepower to Lev’s.

I was feeling left out of the action and looked behind me to see if there was anything I could use as a weapon. Next to the ammo cases for Lev’s minigun was a mound covered by a tarp. I spotted the buttstock of my assault rifle peeking out from under it. “Doc! You picked up my stuff?”

Benji swerved around a burning pile of metal that had been a VTOL aircraft, rocking the jeep and forcing Lev and me to grab onto handholds. A trace of a sad smile appeared on his face. “Yes, Minori wanted it all off the ship, so I took custody of it.”

My heart sank again at the reminder that I was still branded as a traitor. Doc caught the look on my face. “Hey, don’t worry. We’ll clear your name soon enough.”

I tugged the cover off the mound to see what else it concealed. “What’s this, a coffin? Do you have a side job as a graverobber?”

“It’s that exo-frame Keenan and I were working on. He’s got plenty of them to work with so I claimed this one. I was thinking that with a little more work, it could be turned into something that might help people walk. People like Rio.”

Of course, I’d been thinking of ways to mount weapons and armor on it and felt a moment of shame. I knew Doc’s empathy alone would make him a better Challenger crew member than me, and hoped he’d end up back on the Mistral. If we survived.

In between bursts of Lev’s minigun I heard aircraft engine noises and the rhythmic whirring sound of MHD drives. I craned my neck looking for the source. “Hold on a minute. Where’s the Levchenko?”

Doc shrugged. “It was here when Lev and I arrived. If it was in the air nearby, it would have been knocked out by the EMP.”

The noise grew in volume, far louder than the Mistral’s engines. I glanced to my left, just a few meters from the airfield’s edge.

The Levchenko rose up from the lower space where it had apparently taken refuge from the EMP. Too large to fit easily, the huge ship had crushed several smaller vehicles, pieces of which fell off the bottom of the military grav-carrier like mud dripping off the sole of a boot.

Two of the larger blisters on the top of the ship slid open to reveal naval cannons with flattened tubes. I recognized them as railguns that fired hypervelocity projectiles propelled by ultra-powerful magnets along the length of the barrel. At the speeds they achieved, even non-explosive shells would do incredible damage when they hit.

The Levchenko activated its lateral thrusters and drifted away from Chiba-1. With growing alarm, I watched as the heavy guns rotated in their turrets, taking aim at the upper airfield that our hoverjeep was speeding across.

“Uh, Doc.…”

“Yeah, I see it. What are they thinking? Are they --”

A double boom came from one of the cannons as its shell erupted out of its barrel. The control tower seemed to jump as the projectile impacted, toppling the shattered structure backward to disappear in a cloud of smoke and dust.

I heard another whump-WHUMP and a second railgun round instantly slashed a trench into the airfield’s surface, throwing concrete shrapnel in the air and scoring a furrow that stretched dozens of meters. The lower deck beneath the airfield was left exposed in several places, and the Chiba-1 defense forces were thrown into disarray. The impact even obliterated several Cyclad raiders that had advanced too near their opponent’s positions.

I wasn’t even aware that a third cannon shell had been fired until it hit near the jeep.

The impact threw our vehicle end over end. The roar of the explosion was so loud, so deafening, I felt it throughout my entire body. Doc and I were ejected and hurled onto the broken tarmac of the airfield.