“Haugen, we’re going to suit up everyone we can. I want only enough men left on board to operate the pummel guns to guard our retreat.”
#
Boghammer went in hot and fast, only turning the engines on a few thousand feet above the surface. Wasteland would be a glowing mass a few miles above him, gradually converging on his position. The two star wolves would land within a few hundred yards of each other, and have a hundred raiders in mech suits disgorged within three minutes of touchdown.
A classic two-ship raid.
Svensen was strapped into his harness, glad that his face was hidden inside his helmet as the atmosphere tossed and buffeted them. Antigrav was off, and his stomach crawled into his throat. This freefall was terrifying in a way that the void of space never was. He knew the fear was visceral, and not logical, but it didn’t matter. The ship had antigrav designed to handle violent changes in velocity, and the tyrillium armor could absorb kinetic fire traveling at terrific speeds; even if Boghammer somehow misjudged and struck the ground, there was a chance they’d survive the impact.
Kelly’s voice came into his helmet. “Two minutes to landing.”
“I can read my own blasted display,” he said.
It galled him to see her hanging in a sling next to him, wearing svelte gray armor with the twin rampant Albion lions emblazoned in gold on her chest. Sure, she had guns, grenade launchers, and the like, and yes, she was a former marine, and he knew firsthand that those people could fight, but Kelly’s mech suit just looked wrong. That’s all there was to it.
Lund remained on the bridge, plus a handful of crew in the gunnery and engine rooms. And now there was a new shudder in the ship as the pummel guns let loose, clearing a landing site, making sure that nothing was moving or even twitching when the ship came down. A heavier thump, thump—those were bombs going down to level the ground for their arrival. Conventional only, although the mech suits could have handled the radiation if they’d needed to nuke the site.
But there was no sense hitting the locals harder than they needed to.
“One minute,” Kelly said.
“At least have the sense to turn off the general channel,” he said. “You don’t need to give us a blow by blow.”
“Fine. This is for your ears only. I’ve been looking into your history.”
“Spying, you mean.”
“Call it what you want. I have an encrypted copy of the fleet database and access to your records. I know how you lost your hand.”
“I’m not complaining. Could have been my guts. I saw men eviscerated by Apex drones before my eyes.”
“Sounds like you saved some men.”
“Big deal.”
The ship hit the ground with a shudder. The minute had passed, thank the gods. He didn’t have to listen to Kelly anymore.
The bays opened, and light, real light, flooded inside. He was unstrapped, and flying down the chute to the ground, thumbing on controls and cycling up a hand cannon, all without thinking.
Moments later, he stood on rubble, the dust of it still hanging in the air from the pummel guns and bombs. The haze was so thick it seemed like twilight, and his helmet went to infrared to scan his surroundings.
Boghammer was at his back, a big, low-slung thing that glowed white hot from the descent and had to be filtered. Ten- and twenty-story buildings rose around the landing site, their windows blown out and leaning heavily. Surrounding them was the rubble of other buildings, the source of all the dust.
The mech suit took him twenty feet from the ship in a pair of bounds. He crouched next to a trio of raiders setting up a heavy machine gun. He trained weapons on the nearest of the buildings, looking for threats, while two other newcomers aimed at something opposite. Moments later, the big gun was ready to go.
Kelly trotted over, looking clumsy, he noted with satisfaction. “Seems to be deserted,” she said.
“Your suit looks ridiculous, you know. Albion lions?”
“And you look like a big green bug. How is that better? And that guy has a bloody fin down his back. What’s that about?”
“It generates an electrical pulse.”
“Wouldn’t kill you to standardize your equipment is all I’m saying. You know what else I picked up in the database?”
“Not interested, Kelly. Not one bit.”
“Heads up!” someone shouted over the com.
Svensen glanced up to see one of the buildings tottering like a drunk man. Masonry and glass rained down on Boghammer, and then suddenly the building itself was collapsing. Men bounded clear in time, but the building buried the front of the ship. The landing bays were open, too. Going to be a pain to clear out all that dust.
Haugen came on the com. “Wasteland has landed. Two hundred yards west of your position. Are you taking fire?”
“Building collapsed is all. We’re fine.”
Haugen chuckled. “We came down in a vacant lot. Weeds and brush. We roasted a few birds in a fire, but that’s about it. Wonder if they’re good eating. Look kind of leathery.”
“Move out. We’ll track you down later.”
Svensen had his men gather their guns and move west. There wasn’t a street—or if there had been, he’d covered it with so much debris it couldn’t be picked out, and so they identified one of the more stable-looking buildings, kicked in the front door, and moved through a deserted, rubble-filled lobby, down a corridor, and into some sort of parking garage for small wheeled transports. The wall on the back side was only a couple of feet thick, and a pair of raiders tore holes to get through.
“You know what really had me wondering?” Kelly said, and he turned to see her standing off his right shoulder. “Your English. Not that you speak it—you Scandians are barbarians, but you’re clever enough. Helps you take thralls when you can speak the local language. But your accent.”
“Your Scandian is pretty good, too,” he said. “You’re berating me with it right now.”
“I don’t mean good, Svensen. You sound like a Mercian. Not the most common dialect, is it?”
“Obviously, a Mercian taught me English.”
“Obviously,” Kelly said.
There was something in her voice that he didn’t like. Surely, the blasted navy database didn’t have the whole of it. Nobody knew. And he wasn’t about to admit it, either. Not to her, not to anyone.
They emerged through the wall and onto an actual road, now beyond the range of their landing assault, and apart from a few gaping holes in the ground, there was no evidence of their pummel guns.
Svensen took in his surroundings, and knew: the city had died long ago.
Weeds and brush grew through the pavement. The looming buildings stared down, forlorn and decrepit, with their windows broken and missing. Here and there, visible evidence of fighting—craters and wrecked fighting vehicles—but it was old, all of it. Decades, he thought.
“If I had to guess, I’d say thirty-eight years,” he told Kelly.
“Wang’s calculation of the nuclear attack on the elevator,” she said. “And they never rebuilt. Do you really think they were exterminated?”
“Looks like they were driven from the city, anyway. Whoever it was didn’t obliterate the place, but it might have been a neutron bomb. That would have killed everyone and rendered it uninhabitable for a while.”
Someone found a human skull. Later, a cache of bones, white and bleaching in the dry climate. Hard to say if the dead had been heaped in place or if scavengers had done it.
He opened the com and called Haugen. “You seeing what I’m seeing?”
“There’s nothing here.” Haugen sounded glum.
“You could almost call it a wasteland.”
“Real funny, Svensen. My ship makes wastelands, we don’t raid them. Anyway, what’s a bog hammer?”
“I’ll be honest with you,” Svensen said. “I tried hammering a bog once, and it was unsatisfying.”
Haugen laughed at this. “All right, so what now? Go back to our ships?
”
“We may as well have a closer look, now that we’re here. Start smashing stuff, and see if anyone comes out.”
“And if they do?”
“Whoever is out there, they’re no match for mechanized raiders.”
“You got that right.” Haugen sounded happier.
The gunfire started the instant the call ended, light fire from the other side of a row of buildings. That would be Wasteland’s raiders. Svensen gave his men free rein, and they started shooting at windows and buildings. The crew of Wasteland seemed to be moving north, so Svensen took his raiders along a boulevard to the southeast.
Hand cannons and grenade launchers struck already-weakened buildings, as men competed to knock them down. A flamethrower ignited a thick, scaly tree with purple leaves, and it went up like a torch. Some men had a competition knocking down old street signs, which seemed to be written in a strange dialect related to modern English. Or maybe it was that dialect the New Dutch spoke. Nobody was looking that carefully.
Some minor excitement came when someone shot up a church. Dozens of huge, leathery creatures came flying out of a hole in the roof. Evolved to monstrous proportions in Castillo’s high-oxygen, low-gravity environment, they had the wingspan of small airplanes and huge, toothy snouts, more like flying wolves than bats. Three of them spotted a raider standing by himself and dove toward him.
The man shrieked for help over the com and flailed his arms wildly as they slammed into him. But he was in a mech suit, and they were just giant, hideous, flying . . . things. They had a hard time prying him off the ground, and by then, several laughing companions were shooting the creatures while the first man continued crying for help out of all proportion to the threat.
The animals were aggressive, and more swooped and attacked other raiders, even as gunfire blasted them from the sky. Svensen joined the shootout, and pumped his gun-holding fist when he clipped one as it dove for him with outstretched claws and snapping teeth. It slammed into the ground at his feet and flopped, hissing and snapping, until he put it down with a gunshot to the head.
“Having fun?” Kelly asked over the com, her tone acidic. She stood across the street from him, her gun in its holster and her mechanized arms folded.
“Yeah, kind of.”
The rest of the creatures flapped their wings and flew to safety, utilizing what wisdom creation had bestowed upon their tiny brains.
“There’s no threat here,” she said. “No missile banks, that’s for sure. We’ll return to the ships and fly them up and down the plains for a couple of hours.”
He clomped across the street to her side. “And then?”
“Then I’ll send a subspace and tell admiralty it’s clear on the surface. Commence operations, and all of that.”
“So, another base. Or are we talking a full colony?”
“Not my call.”
“You’ve taken three subspace messages since we left the asteroid belt,” he said, “and I want to know what they said.”
“It’s not all bad news. Come on, we shouldn’t stand still.”
That was true enough. The excitement with the flying bird/bat/wolf things over with, Svensen ordered his raiders to advance. They cut down a side street, next to the wreckage of a military aircraft that half jutted out of a building where it had crashed during some long-forgotten battle. He was still looking for non-human bones or equipment, knowing that as old as the battle site was, he might be walking past important clues concealed beneath fallen masonry or buried in the ground and overgrown with dry brush.
“Well?” he demanded once he had Kelly back on a private channel.
“The navy got a few supply ships through, and they’re on their way to the Castillo System with ordnance. Going to drop some gear here, too, probably pre-fab, and install heavy weapons in our base in the belt.”
“About what I expected. If there’s one thing the last war taught us, it’s how to throw up defenses in a hurry. So what’s the bad part?”
“The bad part is that it was a merchant fleet. Practically unescorted,” she said. “Whatever military assets we have are furiously trying to keep the enemy from breaking out of Nebuchadnezzar. They got a convoy out—if I understand right—but no cruisers or the like.”
“Then we’re lucky it’s been so quiet in the system.”
“There’s a navy task force out there, but it got mauled pretty badly, and I have no idea where it is now.”
A bullet pinged off his armor—he assumed some fool with bad aim—and he got on the general com to snarl at the raiders to be careful or he was going to crack some skulls. Another bullet struck him, this one in the helmet.
The surrounding buildings erupted with gunfire, all directed at Svensen and his raiders.
Chapter Nine
Gunfire came from windows, from gaping holes in the masonry, from atop the roofs. Svensen’s raiders had been moving down a narrow alley, growing sloppy, and if the fire had come from hand cannons or heavy, armor-piercing weapons, it would have cut them down. A massacre. But as fierce as the gunfire was, it was coming from small arms, and it dinged off his armor and that of his fellow raiders.
The Scandians formed ranks and returned a devastating counterpunch, even as Svensen sent Jörvak and two others to pull down a wall and get them into another building for cover. From there, they’d break through to another street and out of this ambush point. An explosion ripped into the air ahead of them. One of Svensen’s men had ducked for cover behind a burned-out, rusting vehicle and triggered a bomb or mine of some kind. Three other raiders went after him and dragged him back. The man was badly hurt.
Svensen called Haugen. “We’re under attack.”
“I got your distress signal already.” Haugen was all business now. “We’re only two streets away. I’m on my way. Hunker down and—” His voice cut out, replaced by shouts and gunfire. He came back on. “Yeah, they’ve hit us, too. Don’t worry about us, get yourself out of there.”
Something struck Svensen in the shoulder, and he went down hard. He sprang back to his feet, guns at the ready. Minor suit damage registered on his helmet display. Kelly dropped to one knee next to him, her gun attachments blazing fire up at a nearby roof. Svensen joined her, and masonry and other building material rained down on them.
Part of the roof dislodged, and the enemy fell, still clutching a heavy weapon, but there was so much gunfire and smoke and explosions and debris from the surrounding buildings that he couldn’t see who or what had been targeting them.
The wall collapsed and opened a passageway into the building. Raiders poured inside. One man tossed an incendiary into the alley behind them, and it went off with a whoosh of fire and smoke. They clomped through the building, bashing walls and doors that blocked their way, and shortly emerged into a street on the opposite side. Once the last of the raiders had burst out, two men with RPG attachments launched incendiary grenades back into the building behind them.
Soon, the whole structure was on fire, and presumably forcing their enemies to fall back. Svensen had spotted movement on the roof, as well as that figure who had fallen earlier, but he still didn’t know if they were facing humans or aliens, let alone their numbers or weaponry. He’d seen enough burned-out heavy vehicles in the street, smashed tanks and aircraft, that he worried something heavier than small arms fire might be coming this way.
Haugen called and warned that he was approaching from their left, and not to fire, and then the second group of raiders poured into the street ahead of them. They were returning fire at someone attacking their rear, but he seemed to have it under control. By now the surrounding ruins were ablaze from all the incendiaries.
Haugen tromped up in his red mech suit with its Gatling gun attachment on one arm and twin hand cannons on the other. “We lost a man.”
“We took a casualty, too,” Svensen said.
He glanced over to where they’d dropped the injured raider. They’d breached a seal on his elbow joint to give him a shot of somethi
ng. The man would probably live.
“Who are we facing?” Svensen asked.
“Aliens. Not human.”
“Aliens? You’re sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure,” Haugen said with a growl. “One of ’em dropped right in front of me.”
He sounded so definite that Svensen did a double take when four humans suddenly broke from a building in front of them and made a run for it.
Raiders shot two of the humans in the back before Svensen got them to stand down. He sprinted after the two survivors. Kelly and Haugen ran after him. The mech suits were powered, the gravity only sixty percent, and they overtook the pair before they had reached the end of the block.
Svensen swept out an arm and sent the first person flying. The second, a woman, dove behind a burned-out ground car and lifted her assault rifle to fire. Svensen and Haugen grabbed the car and flipped it end over end. Kelly pounced and pinned the woman to the ground with her forearm. The woman gaped, eyes bulging, babbling in some unknown tongue.
“Aliens?” Svensen said, disgusted. “Really?”
Haugen growled. “I know what I saw.”
Given that the street signs were in some English-like dialect, he’d assumed the humans of the planet would look roughly Albionish, with fair hair and skin, but this one was of a darker complexion, although her eyes were a hazel bordering on green. He wasn’t sure about the one he’d knocked over, but he supposed that the locals would have developed their own distinctive look derived from an unknown mix of colonists and a half millennium of isolation.
Gunfire lashed from the broken-out windows of an adjacent building. Other raiders came up the street behind, but they were slow in arriving, and under fire themselves, and it fell on the three of them to shoot it out with the new attackers. Haugen and Svensen fired their hand cannons, while Kelly trained a heavy assault rifle on the source of the fiercest incoming fire. They ducked to cover behind the overturned vehicle. Kelly kept the prisoner in her grasp with one hand, firing with the other.
Several more enemies dove out of the building and threw themselves behind a heap of brick and rubble. Svensen caught a glimpse of the last one. Long-limbed, purple skin.
The Alliance Trilogy Page 9