by James Evans
With no weapon mounts, the Marines would have to dismount to engage the enemy, so they planned to get as close as they could without bringing the vehicles into view, then yomp across the remaining distance under cover of their snipers and light support weapons.
Warden sat with Sergeant Milton at a navigation and mapping station going over all the data the colonists had gathered about the ground between the city and North Solar Farm. They were looking for somewhere that they could test the alien weapons in relative safety, far enough from both the city and their destination that the enemy would not know what they were doing.
“There,” said Sergeant Milton, pointing at a shallow canyon in the top right of the screen. “It’s deep enough to contain any firing and the gradient leading into it should be manageable by the rover.”
“It’s a little further out of the way than I’d hoped,” Warden replied, “but I suppose it’s better to be discreet than get into an unexpected firefight.”
“There’s a cliff face over there, but there’s nothing to shield it from either side and no cover for the teams staying with the vehicles. There are rocks by the canyon mouth that we can use as fire positions in case the aliens do find us.”
Warden nodded. “Agreed.” He used a stylus at the station to enter a change of route on the nav computer and sent it to the driver, a colonist who had volunteered to get them to North Solar Farm. She called back to him to confirm she’d received the updated route, “Why there, though, Captain?”
“It’s Lieutenant Warden, actually. We captured some weapons and we want to test them, make sure we can use them before we have to rely on them. The emergency bays don’t carry the heavy weapons we’d want for a task like this and we don’t have time to wait for the fabricators to produce them. The canyon is a good place to test them away from enemy sight lines and without getting too far away from our attack vector. Can you get us there safely?” he asked.
“Not a problem for the rover, Lieutenant. It can handle the trip easily, even with this load. I’ll pass the details to the other rovers,” she replied before hailing the drivers in the two trailing vehicles.
Warden turned to Milton. “So, what’s your bet on the contents of our haul?”
“I’d eat my socks if we don’t have a few railguns there. Two of them are very similar with drum magazines and big shells, but I think one is a grenade launcher and the other is some sort of heavy shotgun. The shells are big, though, so it’s either massive explosions or a ridiculous load of pellets,” she replied, rocking her hand side to side to indicate the uncertainty about those weapons.
“Railguns would be useful against vehicles or infantry in powered armour. I want the base intact, if possible, but I’m guessing we’ll have to flush them out of the buildings once we’ve taken care of their perimeter personnel,” Warden said.
“Yes, sir. The shotgun might be useful for room clearance, but you can’t be letting off railguns in a civilian habitat. The rounds will go straight through the walls, and if there are pressurised canisters in the building or one of the team is out of position… It’s a recipe for disaster. A grenade launcher would be even worse. Flashbangs only inside, I think,” Milton answered.
“We do have a couple of rifles and some personal weapons that might be useful if we’ve got enough ammunition,” mused Warden.
“Possibly. Our carbines are great in close quarters, but if we can use the rifles, we should. I think it’s safe to assume they’ll have more troops in power armour defending this site, if it really is their forward operating base. The carbines are next to useless against armour – far too risky to rely on them for that – and if we don’t want to use our grenade launchers or the alien’s heavy weapons inside, armour is going to be a real problem,” Milton said.
“If there’s evidence of significant armour, we have to do everything we can to overwhelm it before we step inside the buildings. You saw how little damage those armoured scouts took, even after we’d dropped a building on them. Their armour is tougher and lighter than ours. If they have heavier suits for assault troops, we’re screwed if we get too close to them.”
“Lieutenant? We’ve reached the canyon,” the driver called back over her shoulder.
“Thanks. We’ll go on foot from here, shouldn’t be more than half an hour,” Warden said, turning to the squad. “Masks on, everyone. This far from the habitats, I don’t want our performance suffering from the thin atmosphere.” The commandos duly attached their breathing gear, checking function and the levels of gas from their HUDs. The gear they had was nothing like a space suit or powered armour but it was more than enough to handle the local environment. It was comforting to know that equipment or air supply failure, even out here, wasn’t going to cause them to suffocate in the air of New Bristol. But it would dramatically slow them down.
The driver hit the seal on the cockpit and a thin door slid across, separating the passenger and cargo area from the front of the vehicle. It was a simple way to reduce the amount of atmosphere lost when loading and unloading the vehicle.
Moments later the Marines were on the ground, walking down the shallow incline to the canyon floor. Twenty metres in they found a suitable spot, a bend in the canyon that gave them a good backstop for the weapons to discharge against and sufficient range to keep them safe from ricochets or explosives.
It actually took longer to set up, safety check the weapons and establish a testing protocol than it did to run the tests. They’d recovered a fair amount of ammunition for all the items they had brought along but Warden didn’t want to waste too much all the same.
They quickly established that the function of each weapon was nearly identical to their own heavier armaments. The railguns were clearly sniping weapons, with near silent operation and very high target penetration, similar to their own weapons, though they couldn’t be exact in a test against a rock wall.
Fired within or at the buildings of the solar farm, the railgun’s rounds would punch through the walls and anything that might be on the other side. Warden gave instructions to use these only sparingly, as Milton had suggested. There was a reason nobody had ever produced a railgun capable of burst fire.
The grenade launcher and shotgun were more easily tested. They had anti-armour high explosive grenades as well as fragmentation models, differentiated by colours, just as their own were, although the markings and design were quite different. The shotgun was entirely dull, though it would be useful for clearing rooms of lightly armoured hostiles.
The pistols were high calibre but perfectly usable as backup weapons. All had integral silencers, suggesting that they were intended for stealthy takedowns during the opening stages of an attack. The commandos rarely used pistols because it wasn’t necessary to have so much weaponry on a typical deployment but they had their uses.
The alien rifles were full-length assault rifles, not the smaller bullpup carbines the Marines had taken from the armoury. The rounds were a heavier calibre, making them preferable to the carbines, even in close quarters, and they were much more likely to penetrate powered armour than the weapons the Marines carried.
All in all, Warden was pleased. He would have preferred weapons they were familiar with but despite the outward appearances of all of these, the functional designs were similar enough that the Marines weren’t going to have any problems changing magazines or firing the weapons. It seemed strange that the first aliens they had encountered were sufficiently similar to humans to be able to use their weapons but he wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth and now wasn’t the time for serious introspection.
They were back in the rovers within half an hour. Warden and Milton distributed the railguns to the snipers. Each section had at least one Marine who had been through the extensive training required to qualify as a sniper. Lance Corporal Bailey was the senior sniper in A Troop and would lead the team of three snipers, along with their spotters, and the tech specialists who would be using drones to sweep the area.
They
gave the grenade launcher and shotgun to the spotters. Without clear targets, their main role was to protect the snipers.
There were only a few assault rifles, so they went to the close quarter specialists, while Milton handed out the alien pistols to as many people as possible. Anyone left with only standard-issue carbines was given more grenades for the underslung launchers. If they encountered powered armour, a grenade would be their best option. Either that or they’d flag the enemy in their HUD and hope the railguns could shoot it through a wall.
Warden looked around the vehicle, checking his team. The Marines looked confident, comfortable. They were as ready as they would ever be.
“Move out,” he ordered.
7
As soon as they were underway, Warden reviewed the layout of the solar plant and the settlers’ plans of the base with Milton, looking for ways to incorporate the alien weapons into their plan. Together they selected overwatch positions for the snipers, agreed on an approach route and found a rock formation close to the base for the drivers to park behind. Then they polished their plan of attack and issued it to the commandos via their HUDs.
The Marines sat in silence while they reviewed their assigned positions and the lines of attack. The HUDs showed their expected flow through the buildings to clear them, so by the time they reached the vehicles parked, they were ready to do the job.
They piled out of the vehicles without a word, snipers and their support teams breaking away to find positions on a formation of basalt columns. Warden blinked in surprise and spared a glance for Milton, who stood open-mouthed.
“Perfect for snipers,” he muttered, watching as the teams climbed the natural terraces and disappeared. The column tops were flat and lacked concealing vegetation but that hardly mattered in this case; the attack would be swift and brutal, and if the snipers were under fire, you couldn’t ask for better cover than the hard rock.
While the snipers found their spots, the tech specialists launched their drones, sending them zipping over the columns of rock and down the other side. The drones hugged the ground, skimming low to avoid detection. No bigger than a hummingbird, their bird-like movements would be totally out of place on New Bristol. The indigenous lifeforms generally kept well away from the colonists, and it looked like the local bird equivalents weren’t keen on the Marines either. The drones’ movements would stand out like a sore thumb to any alien sentries, but it was a risk they had to take.
Warden and Milton split the remaining Marines into two teams while they waited for updated maps to be built from the information returned by the drones. They were watching the video feeds from the drones as some flitted clockwise and some counter-clockwise around the solar plant, scanning everything.
“There,” said Warden, zooming in, “that looks like a dropship to me. A large one.”
“Seems too big, doesn’t it?” said Milton sceptically. “If that was full of troops when it landed, where are they? This camp should be swarming.”
“One platoon at the city, a few patrols at other sites.” Warden frowned. “There could be two or three platoons here if that thing came down full.”
“Unless they carry something else. Vehicles, perhaps? They could have their own colony equipment in there. Do they want to kill us or capture New Bristol and colonise it?”
Warden shrugged. “There’s little value in New Bristol, it won’t be terraformed for decades, and they don’t seem so dissimilar from us that they’d want to call this rock home. Would you come to another solar system and fight a war only to colonise a planet you still had to terraform?”
“No, I wouldn’t, but our own history has a lot of similar examples. Maybe aliens are just as stupid as humans?”
“Fair point,” conceded Warden with a shrug. “Can’t really argue with that. Either way, we can’t charge in there unless we know more about their numbers. Agreed?”
“Yes, sir. I have no interest in finding out the hard way that they have three platoons of power armoured troopers just waiting to welcome us.”
Warden nodded and briefed the tech specialists, sending new instructions via the HUD. In moments, a dozen more drones were in the air and heading into the camp.
“Now we’ll see,” murmured Warden as the camp’s plan unfolded in his HUD.
He turned his attention back to the drone feeds, but there wasn’t anything new. The updated layout showed only superficial changes, like new tool sheds and shifted storage containers, but nothing that presented a challenge for their plan of attack. The only remaining question was the number of enemy troops.
“Milton, get the grenade launchers up on the ridge in case they twig to the drones,” he said, advancing on the ridge himself as the sergeant set about reorganising the teams.
Warden climbed the stepped columns, making his way up towards the highest point. He picked a spot a couple of metres down from the peak and hoped he would avoid the sight line of any sentries. Being silhouetted on a ridge was a classic mistake that had been thoroughly drilled out of him in commando training. You could only take so many paintball bruises from the sniping instructors before you got the point about keeping your head down.
The data from the drones and the various displays and map overlays he could access from his HUD were good, he knew, but there was nothing quite like a Mark 1 eyeball to make a location seem real. He glanced to either side. The snipers waited a little below his position, scanning back and forth, looking for targets.
He took a deep breath and raised his head just far enough above the rock to see the alien spaceship. As he’d seen from the drones, it was large and odd-looking to boot. There were similarities to human ships but it was smoother and less blocky than the Royal Navy’s ships, more elegant, somehow.
Dropships didn’t need to be attractive beasts and the Navy’s certainly weren’t, but this one had a somewhat pleasing aesthetic, even if the metal was a strange swirling mix of blues and greens.
But the camouflage hadn't been achieved with mere paint; it was built into the metal of the hull. There was little point camouflaging a dropship designed for rapid entry; it was hardly a subtle affair. Warden shook his head. Alien paint schemes were a puzzle for a quieter day.
There were no sentries around the base and that surprised him. It would be incredibly lax of the enemy commander to have no patrols or sentries guarding their perimeter. Perhaps they were using drones or dumb sensors? Maybe they had launched an attack elsewhere?
“Anyone got an update for me? Come on, people, give me something,” he said, clenching his fist, trying to keep the frustration from his voice. He needed to know what was going on here, where the enemy were and how many of them were running around. If they didn’t get something soon, they’d have to push on regardless. The captain had given him a job to do and the colonists expected results. He gave the solar plant one last look and then began to descend the steps of rock.
“Grenade launchers are in place, sir,” said Milton. “We're three hundred metres from the first building we can use as cover. Do you want to move in now or wait to confirm numbers?”
“We’ll give the techs two more minutes, then we move. We’ll just have to risk it.”
Milton nodded and they moved to their respective teams, walking them towards the side of the rock formation. The drones had advanced well into the plant by the time Milton’s and Warden’s teams reached the last of the rocks. Any further and they would be in the open terrain between the rocks and the first buildings.
Cooke, the tech specialist for Section 1 responded, sending his report to Warden and Milton only.
He glanced at the time on his HUD, counting down, “Three, two, one. Go!” he called as he broke into a run. Even wearing breathers, the thin air took its toll; without them, the three hundred metre dash would have been a real lung-buster. Warden’s heart pounded in his chest as he broke free of the safety offered by the basalt.
Section 2 followed behind him, eyes on the base, everyone looking for the first sign of trouble. The ground was flat and hard, no dips to dive into or boulders to shelter behind. They were horribly exposed to enemy fire.
They skidded to a halt behind the first building, not much more than a low concrete ridge topped with thin metal walls and a roof. It wasn’t the best cover but it was long enough that both teams could shelter behind it while they caught their breath. Warden took a moment to check the drone feeds. Still no sign of enemy movement.
It was beginning to irritate him. Where were the bastards? He would almost rather see sentries and some defensive positions, if only to confirm that they were in the right place. He checked the bio-readouts for his team; heart rates were almost settled, so he moved up from his crouch and made another run.
The teams split up now, filtering through the buildings in smaller groups, double-checking the drones’ information as they went, bursting through doors and checking for concealed sentries.