by Tim C Taylor
“Attention! Attention!” The gun crew snapped a salute at the sound of the battery commander’s voice barking from the speaker in the gun’s control console. “Enemy targets acquired. Coming from directly above. Individual drop formation. Range, twenty miles. Fire at will and stain the sands with human blood. A week’s hunting license to the gun team registering the most kills.”
Sil-Sfhanikel leapt back to her post at the targeting console. “You’re in luck, Zayk’Z. You’ve never enjoyed a week hunting human civilians. They make better sport than you’d guess.”
“I’d rather hunt Marines,” she replied, taking her perch at the secondary console next to the gun leader. “They’re psychotic cyborgs. Completely insane.”
“Or brave and deservedly confident,” said Wokmar, which won a warning glare from Sil-Sfhanikel.
Sho seemed to agree, though. As the gun team assistant, she wasn’t expected to speak in the presence of her betters unless spoken to first, but she calmly dropped her shovel and grabbed a rifle. She reached into the ammo box to pick out armor piercing rounds.
Individual drop formation.
Wokmar was a Janissary: brave, expert in her trade, and loyal to Supreme Commander Tawfiq and the Hardit New Order Empire. But she was also a fallible mortal. Individual drop formation. The battery commander’s words made her pulse race and chest tighten.
It meant the humans were falling out of orbit in their accursed armor suits. That hadn’t been the supreme commander’s plan. The batteries concentrated in this hellish desert had expected to engage nefnast warships high up in orbit. Neighboring batteries had already engaged enemy dropships in the upper atmosphere, making Wokmar grind her teeth in frustration to be kept in reserve. She had looked in on their action with excitement that had slowly twisted into wariness. Something about the human assault had not been right. It had been too fleeting. Almost as if it had been a feint designed to draw fire and reveal battery positions.
With a start, she realized that she had buried herself in habit, and was inspecting their gun’s cooling tubes to check their fit was snug.
She stepped back and regarded their hellspewer, an awesome engine of war half-buried in this desert the humans called Sahara.
The squat mechanism of ceramic, metal, gels and fluids was essentially a reverse-engineered starship engine mounted in a recoilless harness and pointed arse-end up into the sky.
The supreme commander had massed a mighty force of nearly two hundred hellspewers to slaughter any Legion warships that emerged still functioning after the punishment meted out by the orbital defense platforms
Hellspewers weren’t designed to take out individual drop troopers.
Zayk’Z and Sil-Sfhanikel had worked furiously to re-purpose the targeting parameters to select the falling Legion troopers, but just as they appeared ready to fire, Zayk’Z let out a subtle scent of horror. Wokmar examined her auxiliary console to see what had caused her comrade’s consternation. When the targeting data resolved, and she saw the targets were multiplying before her eyes, she let out her own scent of horror to merge into the pheromone rich odors swirling around the gun emplacement.
“What is this?” asked Zayk’Z on everyone’s behalf. “Flares? Drones?”
“Drop shields,” answered Sho.
“What would a lowly assistant know of such matters?” barked Zayk’Z.
“Because I’ve seen it before,” Sho replied, though with plenty of respect scent. “On the Legion assault against Klin-Tula, and again at the Battle of Tallerman-4. The Legion Assault Marines hold a drop shield – in the shape of an inverted parasol – that splits away at an altitude of about ten miles, and then again at about five miles. After that, we will face only Marines in suits.”
“The shields are hotter than the humans behind them,” Sil-Sfhanikel pointed out. “The gun marks them as higher priority targets. Can you screen them out?” she asked Zayk’Z.
“Already on it,” answered the targeting specialist.
Over to the northeast, on another sand dune, Gun #3 lanced its beam through the sky, belching out a bolt of brutal lilac, which bathed the gun emplacement in a harsh light that threw hard shadows against the sand.
A moment later, the dune shook beneath Wokmar’s feet. She checked the gun platform stabilizers, not daring to suck in another breath until she was sure the dune wasn’t collapsing around them.
Arguments had raged for weeks on the question of gun emplacements in the Sahara. Should the guns be placed atop the shifting dunes, or down in the valleys below and risk being buried? The commander of their battery insisted Janissaries should always advance toward their foe, so the guns were placed on top of these unstable foundations of sand.
“Why do you not fire?” came the battery commander’s voice over the gun speaker.
“Still acquiring targets,” Sil-Sfhanikel replied. “Gun team, prepare to fire.”
“Sir,” whispered Zayk’Z to Sil-Sfhanikel. “I don’t have a firing solution.”
“Firing!” barked the gun team leader and pressed the firing stud anyway.
The hellspewer reached into the quantum foam and mined the fundamental energy of the universe, shooting a blast of power up through the atmosphere that reached as far as space.
At Sil-Sfhanikel’s fire command, Wokmar’s goggles had automatically blackened. Even so, the sudden flash of light temporarily blinded her, and a blast of superheated air slammed her into the bottom of the pit.
She fought hard against the brutal punishment from their hellspewer, scrambling to her knees and listening to the protesting hum of the exhaust conduits buried into the walls of the emplacement.
They grumbled, but it was the right kind of grumble. She would have grinned if that hadn’t been an invitation for hot sand to blast through her mask and into her snout.
The hellspewer shut down, and Wokmar flew to her auxiliary station to check coolant status.
“Well?” asked Sil-Sfhanikel.
“I’m reading coolant at 82%.”
“I didn’t ask you to read what the control interface tells you. I can query that myself. What does Gunner Wokmar say?”
She detached the inspection panel in the gun block and assessed the coolant tubes by eye. Some had slightly scorched ends, and the blue-tinted fluid had darkened in several more.
“I concur,” she announced. “82% coolant readiness.”
“Replace all tubes,” Sil-Sfhanikel ordered.
Beneath the tough blue fabric of her gunner’s uniform, with its proud hellspewer scent marker, Wokmar’s fur was drenched in sweat. Nonetheless, Sil-Sfhanikel’s words chilled her to the bone.
“Why do you not obey?” Sil-Sfhanikel asked.
Wokmar raced to carry out the order, marveling at Sil-Sfhanikel’s courage while she snapped out the barely used tubes and threw them out of the emplacement to roll away down the dune.
With the confidence and efficiency of long practice, Sho threw replacement tubes to Wokmar, which she rapidly snapped into the coolant chamber.
“Gun #8,” growled the battery commander over the speaker, “why have you stopped firing?”
“Malfunction,” Sil-Sfhanikel lied. “Correcting now.”
“Fix it quickly! Imbecile coward. The battery faces… many targets.”
But it was the battery commander who was the imbecile coward in this matter, thought Wokmar. By taking their gun temporarily out of action, Sil-Sfhanikel was saving wear on the barrel and reducing the risk of the sand shifting beneath them before they had targets available they could actually hit.
“Coolant replaced, sir,” Wokmar announced, making a point to add a little admiration scent to her words.
“Very good, Wokmar. I’m about to fire an extended burst. Forget your normal duties. I want you to concentrate exclusively on giving status updates regarding the coolant system.”
“I obey.”
“Targeting on visual,” said Zayk’Z. “Tracking…”
Wokmar couldn’t resist glancing at
the aerial battlefield. The air was awash with fire from the hellspewer batteries, but hidden within the burning skies, thousands of the foe were raining down like vengeful stars.
“Ready,” warned Sil-Sfhanikel. “Firing!”
With the goggles set to maximum darkness, Wokmar braced herself on all fours, her head near the coolant access panel.
The air lit up in fury as their gun spoke.
She let the hot gases wash over her, cooking her fur. Ignoring the hell the gun spewed forth over its own gunners, Wokmar forced herself to breathe so she could perform her duty.
“Coolant at 92%,” she screamed above the sounds of battle.
The air heated rapidly, turning the emplacement into an oven.
“81%,” she shouted, and then the first coolant tube shattered, releasing a toxic spray that burned through gauntlets and uniform to bite her flesh.
“74%.”
“Nefnast is moving hard,” Zayk’Z explained. “We have to lead it by eye.”
Wokmar nodded and snapped in a replacement tube, trying not to yield to dismay at Zayk’Z’s words. Their artillery piece was designed to track the fast but predictable vectors of enemy capital ships. They weren’t meant to be aimed by eye.
“Focus, Gunner Wokmar,” snapped Sil-Sfhanikel. “Report!”
Two more tubes had shattered, and the others were darkening rapidly. Wokmar closed her eyes and imagined she was the gun. In many ways she was. She knew Gun #8, Hellspewer Battery 14, better than she knew her own body, and that meant she was a better judge of its status than the control intelligence, which always gave lagging information.
“40%,” she said.
“Keep firing,” urged Sil-Sfhanikel with impressive calm.
Wokmar ignored the pain in her burning hands as she hot-swapped tubes but they were degenerating fast. So was she: her fur was smoldering beneath her uniform.
“21%,” she gasped through a burning throat coated in toxic fumes “Burnout is imminent.”
“Dog of a human,” cursed Zayk’Z. “Nearly got it.”
“14%,” said Wokmar.
“Your doom is almost upon you, human,” said Sil-Sfhanikel.
So is ours, thought Wokmar, if the gun overheats. At least our deaths will be instant.
“8%… 6%… 4…”
“Got it!” screamed Sil-Sfhanikel and Zayk’Z in unison.
The gun had ceased firing.
For a second, all Wokmar could do was stare at the hellspewer that had come so close the vaporizing its crew. And all this to shoot down just a single nefnast Marine?
Then she remembered she was a proud Janissary gunner and worked with Sho to swap out the cooling tubes at the double. Even though the gun wasn’t firing, the machine was still running very hot, and could still explode.
“Detaching barrel!” warned Zayk’Z. Three heartbeats later, explosive bolts fired, and the hot barrel, undoubtedly warped, flew through the air to land on the dune’s slope and begin rolling away.
Sho readied the replacement barrel while Wokmar finished resetting the coolant, trying not to think of the punishment her legs and hands were about to experience as she clambered up the hot gun block to attach the new barrel.
“Incoming!” announced Zayk’Z.
Wokmar snapped her head up in time to see the battery pounded by a missile salvo that stirred a sandstorm high above their heads.
“Shit!” growled the gun leader. “Gonna make targeting difficult.”
Her voice tailed away as the power hum vanished. On every control interface, screens and status lights went out. Screams and curses rang out from every gun emplacement. It looked like the power was down for the entire battery, and if they couldn’t bring it back up, they were gunners without guns: no more than worthless debris.
Without the deafening roar of the hellspewers, the propulsion systems of the Legion Marines thrummed their lethal beat into her head, and through the clearing sand spray the missiles had thrown up, it was already apparent that the desert sky was no longer a sea of endless blue. Angry dots filled her vision, each one bent on slaughtering every Hardit it could find. Each dot growing rapidly in size.
“What do we do now?” she asked.
Sil-Sfhanikel cleared her throat. “I’ll tell you what we do, Gunner. We are Janissaries – the proud warriors of the New Order. We seek out our enemies and destroy them.”
Wokmar swallowed hard with shame and fear. “Of course, sir.”
Without needing to be told, the gunners all grabbed rifles and stuffed pouches with spare magazines. For now, they were infantry.
A single shot rang out to the north, in the vicinity of Gun #6.
Wokmar braced her rifle on the lip of the emplacement and prepared to sell her life dearly for the Order.
But instead of the metal monsters she feared had arrived sooner than expected, she saw Battery Commander Graen-El standing over a gun emplacement, arm extended and exhaust gases streaming from her pistol.
“Retreat will not be an option,” Sho observed.
“Your worthless opinion was not sought,” growled Zayk’Z, and Wokmar too felt a tinge of disgust that an assistant would offer advice.
“Listen up, you worms,” barked Sil-Sfhanikel. “The power went with that nefnast missile attack, and it’s not coming back. It was a deliberate strike, not a loose connection or an overwrought generator. If we’re going to survive the coming fight, we must think and fight like infantry. Sho is a lowly gun assistant, but she was once an infantry officer. Sho, I order you to take command of our crew.”
“Acknowledged, Gun Leader. The first thing we do is abandon our hellspewer. It’s now a target marker that will get us killed. We regroup a hundred paces away down the slope to the north. Do not bunch!”
It took a painful tug to her tail from Sil-Sfhanikel for Wokmar to take instructions from Sho, but then she was scrambling out onto the burning sands and rolling down to their rallying point.
By the time the battery commander came across them, they were digging firing holes into the sand.
“Good work,” said Graen-El. “I knew I wouldn’t have to encourage Gun Team #8 to stand firm and do their duty. Orders from General Ayit-Synax are to make a stand here. We shall all die, of course, but with every second we delay the nefnast advance, we buy our reserves time to ready their revenge.”
The commander punched her fist into the air. “One scent!” she roared.
“One scent,” the gun team replied.
“One people!” they shouted.
“One Order!” finished the commander, to a more ragged reply from the others. Usually the third chant was “One leader.”
For the first time in her life, Gunner Wokmar imagined the possibility of a New Order led by someone other than Tawfiq Woomer-Calix.
“Comrades,” said Commander Graen-El. “I look forward to remaking your acquaintance in the afterlife.”
Thunder cracked over the desert as the enemy opened fire with their accursed carbines. Hypersonic darts reduced Battery Commander Graen-El to a chaotic mess of flesh, bone, and fur.
Wokmar stared at the horrific sight, transfixed.
“Get your stupid head under cover,” shouted Sho, “or you’ll be next.”
The spell snapped and Wokmar hunkered down as far as she could into the bottom of her firing hole and awaited her end at the hands of these merciless human cyborgs. She didn’t expect to wait long.
— Chapter 31 —
Springer wiped the blood from her visor, only to fly through a fresh cloud of gore as she grabbed the passageway handhold and came to a halt.
She looked behind and cursed herself, because she had let Arun fall over fifty yards behind. He didn’t complain, but she could tell he was tiring rapidly. In a human station, they would be using their suit motors to fly through the passageways that were filled with the grisly legacy of Colonel Platov’s advance through the Hardit defenses, but the Hardit-designed orbital stations were so narrow and twisting that Arun with his compro
mised balance would just knock himself out if he used his motors. So they went old school: hand over hand along the recessed bulkhead grips.
Unwarned by Saraswati, a sudden motion surprised her ahead in the passageway. She raised her carbine to fire, but it was only a decapitated head floating past. Three glassy yellow eyes looked at her down a furry snout partially obscured by a fogged helmet visor.
What weapon caused that damage? she wondered.
Cutlass by the looks of it, offered Saraswati. I remember them being standard issue for boarding actions when I was a girl.
Springer laughed, while batting the remnants of the Hardit corpse out of her field of vision. You were never a girl.
That’s wounding, Saraswati snapped. We were all young once. Even you.
Springer wanted to fight Hardits, not her AI. She knew that Saraswati’s tetchiness was a symptom of nerves, but Springer was too worried about Arun to calm her AI as well.
He was almost in touching distance when he suddenly pushed off the bulkhead awkwardly. Arun tumble-turned in midair to bring his gun pointing along the direction they just covered.
“What the hell?” said Springer over the microwave comm link.
Station’s moving, explained Saraswati. Spooked your lover.
Moving… why?
Unknown.
She felt something nudge her foot. It was an equipment box mounted on the bulkhead, pushing against her because the entire station was tilting around its center.
“Contact,” said Arun. “Around the corner.”
Trusting Saraswati and Barney to exchange everything they knew about this new threat, and at a faster rate than human speech, Springer allowed her AI to take brief control of her helmet until it looked 30 yards ahead where the passageway ended in a T-junction. The AIs had agreed an orientation between them, and labeled one branch starboard and one port, even though the Hardits clearly had no need for the orthogonal visual cues humans often employed.