It would happen soon. The shuddering increased in Junebug’s mind. Number three engine had cooked its bearings in the long, full tilt, run across the ocean. Within fifteen minutes it would shake itself to scrap. That was fine. They only had three minutes and twenty seven seconds left. Light Attack Vehicle Hotel 3-1- Hello Hellfire, jounced on her uneven thrust as she bounced up the front of the beach and across a carpet of thick lantana. The intakes made a grinding sound as a storm of dissected plant matter bounced from their particle shields to be spewed outwards as a jet of sap and salad. They came over the low strand nose up, dangerously high, exposing the open plenum chamber to the enemy troops for a critical second before gravity slammed them back down. Fortunately the inhabitants of the fire base were too panicked to take advantage. Rifle shots bloomed out in the night, the stars of muzzle flash lobbing the deceptively slow moving tracer rounds that snapped overhead. High, too high. The front of Hello Hellfire crashed to the ground as she lost pressure in the chamber, spraying gravel and clods of turf as her skirts bit. The LAV bunny hopped on momentum, rattling Sayeeda’s teeth before thrust balanced and they rushed down into the rear of the firebase. The enemy defenses were on the landward side, they had never anticipated an attack from the sea. The shuddering was worse. It wouldn’t matter. Three minutes, twelve seconds. Sayeeda peered through the sight of the light plasma cannon that was her vehicle's primary armament. The holographic stabilizer compensated for the shuddering. The left half of her visor projected a plot position indicator in a twenty percent mask. Blue phosphor dots marked the other LAVs of her platoon. 3-2 Hot Stuff, 3-3 Hocus Pocus, 3-5 How the Fuck and 3-7 Hacksaw were all crossing the strand in a neat echelon. That was luck rather than parade ground precision, as they should have been crossing line abreast, but it wouldn’t matter, it hadn’t mattered. The shuddering. How was number three holding together? The firebase blazed with hostile fire. Infantry weapons the computer said, no threat, unless you were unlucky. The real enemy was the armored company picketed on the far side, guns pointed towards the land approach they expected to have to defend. The night screamed with the buzz saw rip of the LAVs rotary mounts. The twin pods fired seven hundred caseless rounds per second in a ruinous stream. There were no tracers, but the holographic overlay reported the radar tracks of the projectiles as wavy lines reaching out to snuff out the disorganized enemy. It was neat in the dark. You couldn’t see men torn to blood and gristle, or disemboweled by the sweep of a sleet of hyper velocity hard rounds. She couldn’t even smell the death yet, only the sweetly poisonous chemical residues being sucked behind her by her wake. The night air quivered as the remaining cars opened up, their gunners taking full advantage of their enemies confusion and questionable cover. Sayeeda filled her sight picture with a barracks and fired the plasma cannon twice with a world ending CRACK CRACK which dimmed the rotary mounts to insignificance. The barracks, a two story construction of wood and mud brick, exploded, the sun hot lance of plasma of the main gun converting the residual moisture to superheated steam which literally blew the building apart from within. No fantasy of darkness could mask her handiwork. A thirty foot tall column of flame blazed skywards, the ruins of the building serving as a directional chimney for the funeral pyre of its inhabitants. A flaming body tumbled lazily away to crash into the roof of a neighboring supply shed, a half second before a pair of bolts from Hocus Pocus obliterated that building too. Fire slacked under the combined shock of the onrushing LAVs. Padma, Sayeeda’ driver, jinked them sideways so they slalomed between a guard tower and a shed of corrugated iron, kicking up a storm of gravel which rattled off the metal like a storm of shrapnel. Sayeeda caught a glimpse of a shirtless enemy soldier clutching pistol in abject terror as armored death crashed past. They were in the open field in the center of the base now, a parade ground, a training field? Sayeeda had slewed her turrent at a thirty degree angle to their line of advance based on Imagery from a satellite over flight three days before. You learned not to trust satellite when it came to enemy units, but buildings could generally be relied upon not to move. The headquarters building was made of brick with a roof of fired clay tiles, great, vaulted brick archways formed its base. It was built to last a statement of intent of the government that they were in this thing for the long haul. Sayeeda let the LAVs motion drag her gunsight along the front of the building. Her mind didn’t register her pulling the trigger but she must have because each of the successive brick arches blew apart in gorgeous white flames. At the temperature of plasma everything burned. The calcium in the bricks sparkled incandescent white as sun hot bolts completed their combustion in a fraction of a second. One section of the building was a communications station, probably the only real target that mattered given the quality of enemy officers. It mushroomed skyward as it was spitted by converging fire from Hello Hellfire and Hocus Pocus as the formed a base of a triangle with the burning building at its apex. The masts and antennae burned brilliant blue and green against the night sky. Gunfire rattled off the hull of the LAV as Padma began to turn. One of the threat carrots in Sayeeda’s display lit red as a shoulder mounted launcher turned on its active radar a second before she caught the puff of its rocket igniter. An alarm icon flashed and there was a whirring sound as one of the three laser projection heads of the point defense system aligned itself and dumped its capacitor through a weapons grade ruby that cost more than Sayeeda made in a month. The ultra high yield laser discharge shattered the ruby and cooked the lens as it pulsed outward. The incoming warhead exploded in a dirty orange fireball that contrasted hideously with the beautiful bursts of the plasma flames. Pieces of warhead and rocket casing rattled off the turret facing, no more dangerous than a handful of confetti. Rotary pods from three different LAVs pureed the man into mist before he could duck back into cover, leaving his loader coated in gore and screaming as he threw himself flat. A plasma bolt from How the Fuck ended any lingering threat in a white hot fireball. “No.” Sayeeda thought/said but her mouth didn’t form the words. Instead she heard herself saying, as though from an impossible distance: ‘All units advance, hit’em girls or they will chop us.” “Roger that moving…” Daisy Bell, commander of Hacksaw began to respond but was cut off as her vehicle was suddenly slammed sideways by a concussive detonation. A second rocketeer had gotten lucky, his missile smashing low into the vehicle's hull. Something, perhaps a piece of airborne debris had deflected the PDS. The rocket blast shredded the skirts and dropped Hacksaw to the ground. The two ton vehicle carrened across the parade ground like a plowshare, throwing up a bow wave of dirt as her momentum died. Someone was screaming over the comm, probably Sanchez, Daisy’s driver as she was peppered with shrapnel inside the driving compartment. I regret to inform you that your daughter Carmen Sanchez was killed in action. She died instantly when… Carmen’s screams continued to echo for a moment before the communications AI mercifully cut the transmission. There was a sudden whump of exploding gasses as the crowd control gas and smoke grenade canisters in the ruined LAV detonated, blasting out in a donut shaped screen of toxic mist. Enemy infantry rushing towards the downed vehicles dropped their rifles and screamed as the gas burned their eyes and throats. In theory the gas dump would give any survivors, immunized against the gas, a chance to escape before the enemy could close in. If there were any survivors, and if they were in any condition to escape. One minute thirty seconds. The four surviving LAVs roared past the burning headquarters building, their fans swirling the flames into great curving blades of fire. The real target lay ahead. A score of armored vehicles, local tanks and gun carriers lay in position behind a slotted berm of bull dozed earth, designed for the tanks to be able to roll up and fire when necessary. Support vehicles of all kinds, light trucks, ambulances, fuel carriers were all drawn up in neat rows. The formation was in chaos. Men running from their billets were leaping into their vehicles, the air was thick with diesel smoke as the tanks came online, multi-ton tanks maneuvering in cramped spaces. The local vehicles were light tanks, wheeled instead of tracked to give them speed and maneuverability on the coastal plains. They were slabbed with green and khaki sheets of ablative armor over a steel core. Sayeeda saw a rotating turret bat a truck away like a top. She could smell the cooked meat on the air even before she opened fire. One minute two seconds. The shuddering was so bad the world seemed to fuzz around her. The first shot hit the rear deck of a gun carrier, the ravening bolt of white hot plasma spurting in through an open crew hatch, blowing the tank apart from the inside out. The turret blasted upwards on a column of flame only lightly coloured by the fuel air explosion of its vaporized tanks. Sayeeda was already slewing the main gun right, snapping off two shots at a second tank. The glancing hits smashed the ablative armor in a spray of ceramics which cut down crewmen still scrambling aboard. The berm lit up like a fireworks display as dug in infantry in bunkers and fox holes opened fire with personal weapons. Threat icons blossomed as anti-armor weapons came online. Two plasma bolts hit a bunker opening within a fraction of a second, pumping megajoules of hellfire into the confined space. Something, stores of munitions maybe, detonated blasting out a forty foot section of the wall in a spray of dirt which rained down on friend and foe alike. Hello Hellfire slewed sideways as Padma adjusted course to run down the curve of the wall. The hull rattled with bullet strikes and the point defense system fired twice more, the bolts visible in the dust and smoke in a way they were not in clear air. The red ‘lenses exhausted’ warning light lit. No further countermeasures available. “Pod out!” Cassel, Sayeeda’s gunner, shouted. She popped from an open hatch and ripped the ammunition drum free, throwing it over the side and swinging a fresh one into its place. There was an autoloader, but it would have taken thirty seconds to bring up a drum from the internal storage. Cassel dropped back into the shelter of her gunnery station. The buzzing roar of the rotary pods resumed. Forty Seconds. There was fire everywhere. Tanks and support vehicles blazed. A fuel bowser went off in a low order explosion that shook the night. Flames reflected off the berm in a flickering rendition of hell. The sudden crack, crack, crack of hyper velocity rounds rent the night as one of the enemy vehicles finally cleared for action. The locals used 20mm tungsten penetrators in three round clips. Hocus Pocus flipped like a flicked coin, turning a half revolution in the air before smashing down onto the ground, exposed fans howling and sucking ribbons of flames towards its intakes like the fingers of a demon. I regret to inform you that your daughter Cassie Bix was killed instantly when… Twenty one seconds. The shudder was so bad Sayeeda could feel her teeth chattering. They were nearly clear. They just had to run back to the sea. Padma was pouring the juice to the engines as the survivors sped away. Sayeeda fired constantly in time with the shimmer, the barrel of the plasma cannon glowing white hot as it overheated. If the barrel warped it could easily destroy the LAV when a fresh charge burst on the deformed barrel. Hello Hellfire climbed the low rise to the lantana. She was trailing razor wire like the tendrils of a jellyfish, it ripped and tore at the ground cover like a flail. Three… two… An enemy tank emerged from a maintenance bay a hundred meters behind her. Sayeeda watched it happen with her mind's eye. She desperately tried to wrench the controls aside but her hands remained steady and inert. Her eyes saw the glittering sea beyond the rise, it was very beautiful, as dark and mysterious as space. One… zero… The tank fired. The first shot glanced upwards off Hello Hellfire’s armor like a comet. The LAV rang like a giant bell for the fraction of a second before the second round hit, punching into the vehicles fusion bottle breaching the magnetic containment. The reactor went off like a miniature fusion bomb. I regret to inform you that your daughters Padma Singh and Johanna Cassel were killed instantly when… The blast gutted the hull of the LAV from the inside. Sayeeda felt herself lift as the turret housing rose on the concussion, slamming her into her restraints a moment before the canvas parted and she flew outwards and upwards away from the death of her crew. She turned a slow summersault in the air, watching alternate views of glittering sea and burning base whirl through her mind. I regret to inform you that your daughter Sayeeda Cyckali survived a hasty and ill conceived operation in which elven other troopers were killed.. Weird, she could still feel the shuddering of number three engine as the black waters of the ocean rushed up to meet her. Sayeeda started awake, out of bed and into her boots before she was fully conscious. She was shivering , clammy and soaked in sweat as she ran for the cockpit, taking the ladder in three quick steps. She burst in naked except for her boots, eyes locked on the sensor readouts. Neil turned in his couch, hands coming away from the controls as alarm claxons began to quiet. He arched an eyebrow. “Good morning to you too.”