Absolution

by Peter Smith

  “So we cut off their escape,” Dawson added.

  “And rip out the beating heart of his special operations command.”

  General Kellen

  Westminster Bridge

  The London Eye watched over the battle as it unfolded on the eastern side of the Westminster Bridge. Kellen pulled his head around the corner of the pedestal for the Red Lion Brewery statue. The corner in front of him dissolved in a shower of dust and chunks of stone as the anti-material round passed through the space his helmet had occupied an instant before.

  The Russian Spire’s detection equipment was getting better, the enemy sniper shouldn’t have even known he was there. He could only speculate as to what experimental scope the shooter was using. As of yet, none of the other ground forces had demonstrated the ability to easily detect his Marines. James grit his teeth at the idea that one of their greatest advantages might be fading away. He dismissed the concern for now, he’d deal with that once this battle was done.

  “They’re getting ready to charge,” He stated over the command frequency. He would have preferred to have verified that with a drone reconnaissance unit, but the Russian Spire’s commandos had brought an effective counter air system. If any small aircraft got into the air, then it was burned from the sky seconds later.

  He transmitted the imagery that his visor had collected to the rest of the command staff. In the fraction of a second he had broken cover, he had gained the high definition footage. His suit AI identified the number of hostiles it could detect, cataloging their weaponry and equipment. The information was already being correlated with the rest being gathered by the variety of Marine and friendly Spire units in the area. Their networked approach to intelligence gathering was creating a complete picture of their enemy.

  The Russians had breached the defense nets stretched across the entrance to the Thames river. Then they used the waterway to dramatically shorten their above ground travel time to the London Spire. The group of commandos had launched their diversionary attack, drawing away defenses from the interior of the Spire. Then a modified Russian nuclear missile submarine had launched a series of breaching pods into the building, inserting their special forces teams.

  The men and women of the Russian force on the ground had expected to use the confusion caused by killing the two senior members of the alliance between Free Humanity and the friendly Spire families to extricate their assassins from the building and to get their way back into the Thames.

  That option had been closed to them. The mistake that the Spire families kept making was that they always assumed that Kellen, as the Supreme Commander of the allied forces, would mandate that all orders flow through him. That was how they operated in their fiefdoms, top-down control and an utter fear of giving anyone below them too much power. Their servants would revolt if given the chance, and those lieutenants that worked in their upper levels of power would betray them if given the chance.

  The only Spire patriarch who this was never a problem for, was Patterson. as he had fully embraced Artificial Intelligence. This allowed him to manage a vast global empire while also still being able to play faithful husband and doting father roles. For humans to run a successful organization, delegation or the sharing of power was essential.

  So while Kellen and James Dawson had been fighting for their lives on the upper floors of the Spire, the entire Marine officer corps did what Marines had been doing best since 1775. They took the initiative. From Colonel Rommel to the lowliest Second Lieutenant and Non-Commissioned Officer, the men responded without additional orders, moving to secure their sectors and capitalize on potential advantages.

  Sergeant Hoffman was a first lifer born and raised in the seclusion of the subterranean facilities that had kept the Marines and various other military units around the world safe during and after ‘The Fall’. He had ordered the deployment of water-based hunter killer drones into the water of the Thames. The machines swam rapidly back and forth underneath the Westminster bridge, searching for anyone that wasn’t broadcasting the appropriate Friend or Foe signal. Colonel Rommel had tasked the bulk of their force in the area to drive the commandos from the region around the base of the Spire, toward the old Parliament building. While he simultaneously dispatched a company across the Hungerford Bridge, having them swing down to the Eastern side of Westminster bridge.

  Kellen had originally planned to lead the battle from the Spire, but with strong Russian jamming in the area it became impossible for him to stay out of the fighting. Given that the number of QECs they possessed in the area was limited, he couldn’t guarantee he’d be able to maintain effective communications. So he had been forced to double time it to get his armor on and then catch up to the company that had been reposition to cut off the escape of the Russians across Westminster.

  The enemy commandos were currently taking cover in the Parliament building after several of them had made the fatal mistake of trying to get back into the water. They had hoped to use the river to swim out to sea and the safety of their submarine, but the drones made it clear that no one that entered the Thames would ever leave it again.

  The only reason he had caught up with his Marines was that they were towing along Guard Captain Dyer’s unit, ‘the wolves’. The word play hadn’t been lost on Kellen, nor that they had slowed his Marines down. It was a sacrifice that had to be made though, while his men and women were the most effective warfighter on the surface of the Earth, their numbers were in the thousands and they were spread around the globe taking part in a variety of operations.

  Their allies among the Spire families had been providing the manpower necessary to meet the needs of their objectives for months now. They supplied the bodies. The Marines brought the skill and leadership necessary to win. He would have vastly preferred the remnants of the British SAS to work alongside, but they were occupied with preparations for the invasion of St. Petersburg and were several hundred miles away at the moment.

  A scream pierced the sounds of war, cutting through the smack of bullets on ancient stone and the shattering of glass that had survived ‘The Fall’ but not this current bout of violence. He moved down the side of the pedestal, reaching the edge and looked down over a wall toward a walking path that ran above the river and along various building fronts. The London Eye still stood several blocks away, watching over the Thames. The last time he had been to the Eye had been a family trip, if he allowed himself to he could get lost in the memories of his son and daughter riding in one of the observation cars. This was not the time, however.

  His eyes focused on a person laying in the middle of the path. A woman lay on the ground, her hands gripping at a ragged stump that had been her leg. Blood was sprayed around her, fanning out toward the store front she had likely tried running from. The shooter was firing a large calibre round, that was what amputated the woman’s leg. He could see where it had imbedded itself into the material of the wall, blasting a chunk free. He looked at her face. Tears mingled with her sobs as she tried in vain to stop the bleeding. She would die if no one did anything.

  He knew it was a trap. Having failed to kill him the first time, the Russian sharpshooter had instead switched tactics, targeting a civilian to lure him out from behind the cover of the robust pedestal he was behind. There was no way a man with the accuracy of his opponent, would have misidentified the woman in her floral dress as a Marine or one of the London Spire’s soldiers.

  Kellen consulted his HUD, noting the positions of all of his Marines and their allies. No one was on the deck where the woman was dying, there was no one who could render her aid in time. Except for him. He pulled a smoke canister from his vest and tossed it onto the ground near her. It hit the stone with a sharp clang, spinning as it belched out a voluminous cloud of visual and thermal jamming particles. He whispered a small prayer to God, grateful that it hadn’t hit her and asking for the opportunity to save her life. This shooter was good, he’d get only one chance to reach the safety of the smoke.

  He
activated his com, “Hammer five this is hammer actual, do you have a visual on the enemy sniper?”

  A hoarse voice came back to him, inserted directly into his ear, “Situated somewhere on the top of Parliament”

  Kellen pulled up the data from the bullet tracking radar that had been set up by his team. It wasn’t blanketing the area so as the red tracks filled his vision gaps appeared in their lines and many had origin points that his system indicated were estimates. He filtered out the smaller caliber bullets and focused on the larger ones. A single track came from the direction of Big Ben and he let out a small sigh, Dawson would not be happy with him.

  “Suppressive fire on the clock tower when ready,” He ordered his fire support team.

  The air shook as the team’s heavy grenade launcher pummeled Big Ben with smart munitions. He stepped back several yards, shifting his right foot backward, then he knelt down into a runner's stance. He looked up and shot forward, his augmented muscles propelling him out of cover in a fraction of a second. He hit the top step of the stairway and hurled himself like a dart into the cloud of smoke.

  One moment he was sailing toward her and the cloud of billowing smoke, the next he was thrown hard to the right. His visor lit up with red warning notifications an instant before he hurtled through a storefront window. Glass shattered and then he crashed into shelves, sending bottles and bars of soap ricocheting around the store.

  He lay there looking up at the ceiling, his breath coming in shallow gasps. White hot pain crept across his side and slid over his back. His virtual vision displayed the point of impact for the anti-material round as a red line across a digital version of himself. It impacted just above his hip and grazed across his back.

  His gloved hand felt his side, his fingers slipping into a grove gouged into the synthetic muscle that slide across his lower back. The bullet hadn’t penetrated to the inner layer, but that didn’t mean that he hadn’t suffered some kind of injuries from the kinetic energy that had been transferred into him. The weapon was meant to destroy armored vehicles, he’d be lucky to get away with just minor injuries after this encounter.

  He rolled onto his knees, his armor sending him warnings about his pulse and blood pressure. A notification appeared letting him know that he might have suffered spinal damage and that it wanted to initiate a sensory and motor tests as soon as possible to determine the level of harm he might have sustained. He dismissed it and clamored out of the storefront, crawling through glass and debris on his hands and knees. His back hurt like hell but he figured that since his legs were responding the damage couldn’t be that bad, at least not bad enough to knock him out of the action. He plunged into the smoke which had crept into the storefront.

  He found her severed leg first, grabbing it and dragging it with him until his hands found her by touch. She wasn’t moving and as he brought his visor close enough to her face for the smoke to not be able to obscure his view. He could see she was pale and was unclear if she were dead or merely passed out from blood loss and trauma. He placed his hand on her throat, the sensors in the material of his glove taking her pulse. It was weak, but it was still there.

  He opened the medical pouch and removed the wad of emergency supplies. He ripped open the wrappers on two bleed pads, slapping one over the severed end of her thigh and the other over her amputated leg. He didn’t know if the appendage could be saved, but he hoped that by keeping what little blood was left in it the woman might one day be able to walk on her own leg. He grabbed an injector from the kit and pulled her left arm flat.

  His HUD highlighted the veins in the forearm and he laid the semicircular device on top of her flesh where the best artery could be found. He took out the roll of medical tape and secured the machine to her skin as the device automatically located her veins and placed injectors into them.

  It came with its own adhesive strip meant to remove this step from the lifesaving process, but every soldier learned early on that it didn’t work for shit. A yellow light showed that it was establishing a line into her body. When it switched to green, he knew that it was feeding a flow of plasma directly into her bloodstream to help her stay alive.

  The smoke was thinning. He grabbed the leg and placed it on her chest, then slipped his arms underneath her body and picked her up. They were inside the safety of the destroyed store and its back office within seconds. He lowered her to the ground and placed her leg beside her. Then he moved back to the front of the store, certain not to get close enough to the obliterated windows to expose himself to Parliament.

  He pulled up the radar data again and this time there were now two lines emanating from the clock tower, only this time they were coming from a patch of the roof of Parliament near where the tower and old legislative building met. The only good that came from him getting hit was that the shooter had given up their actual location and likely was repositioning. Someone that good would know that you didn’t get to fire more than once or twice from the same spot in the modern battlefield.

  “Hammer Five, direct fire on this area” He shared the location data, and the thumping began again.

  New notifications appeared in his vision as their unit level Restricted AI shared events to him. Rommel’s force was in position, it would only be a few more minutes and the Russians would stream out of the rear of parliament and across the Westminster bridge into his force.

  The enemy knew his team was here but not their true strength, other than the crew-served weapon that his fire support team was using. There were no other indications of their actual numbers. If everything went to plan the Russians would try to hot foot it across the bridge and right into the kill zone that they had established. The Russians would know that it was a risk to cross, but they’d likely gamble that it was a safer choice than being surrounded in parliament and cleared out room by room. In their minds, if they could get across the bridge they could melt away into London, especially the vast swaths that had been abandoned since ‘The Fall’.

  “Hammer Actual this is Hammer 2, over.”

  Kellen resisted the urge to step out from cover to get a line of sight on Parliament, “This is Hammer Actual, what’s your status?”

  Rommel’s voice responded, “Beginning our assault”

  He nodded, knowing that the man couldn’t see it but feeling the need to do it anyway, “Good hunting.“ His words were punctuated by the rapid and sharp report of a variety of weapons, from small arms to high explosives.

  Not for the last time, he felt a twinge of guilt at destroying so much of an ancient city. The history of a place like London was irreplaceable and the idea that he was contributing to its destruction bothered him immensely given what had happened, what was still happening in North America with the Patterson’s reclamation program. So many stories, erased and built over. Jacob Patterson had left many of America’s landmarks intact, but it was his judgement that saved or destroyed the remnants of human history. They may never know all the individual lines of history that were lost to the rest of humanity as the man endeavored to reshape the world.

  He cleared his thoughts and pushed aside the guilt for his part in the destruction of the human story. At least he and his men were doing it to save the lives of each other. Jacob Patterson did it because he was a narcissistic asshole who thought his way was the only one.

  Kellen pulled another smoke grenade from his pouch and pulled the pin, throwing it out of the store and onto the walkway. His cover belched from it in a fountain that obscured the front of the store. He knew he had been lucky to walk away from the first one and that if he were to take a similar caliber bullet directly to the torso, his Marines would be trying to put the pieces back together.

  He zipped out, hugging the corner as tightly as he could. Hopefully, the support team’s fire had killed or wounded the sharpshooter, or failing that they should be engaged with the allied force storming Parliament itself. His feet touched only one of the dozens of steps as he leapt toward the Lion’s perch, sailing past its corner and beh
ind the pedestal. He slid to a halt and worked his way to the opposite corner, his fingers wrapping around it again and giving him a lower resolution view of the bridge.

  The first elements of the Russian commando force were breaking cover and preparing to transit across the bridge. He couldn’t see what was happening on the opposite side of Parliament, but reports were streaming in, as were the casualty statistics.

  Most of the confirmed casualties were from the London Spire’s forces, but so far two of wounded were his own Marines. He winced at their loss, their numbers were limited and he couldn’t really to afford to lose anyone. They were trying to train other free people’s, those that were slowly coming out of hiding, to help bolster the ranks but Marine standards were taxing and most of those that enlisted never completed the training. It was a good month if they evened out in their attrition rates.

  The results from this engagement, if they went the way he wanted them to, would be critical in breaking the back of the Russian Spire and ending this conflict far earlier than it otherwise would have.

  “Enemy is advancing, hold fire until first group is in the kill zone” He ordered over this radio, the system applying quantum encryption to his message.

  The first elements of the Russian force advanced across the bridge as another group was exiting Parliament. They weren’t going to cross the bridge as one cohesive force and create a significant target. Their commander was smart, but Kellen wouldn’t give them the option to break themselves up.

  “Enemy elements on the move, press your attack Colonel.”

  A single green indicator light glowed to life next to Colonel Rommel’s ID badge. He had received the order and was following it. The sounds of gunfire and explosions grew dramatically as Rommel committed his reserve forces to purging the legislative building of Russian holdouts. More men exited from the back of the building, this time rushing from its protection and sprinting toward the bridge. The group of Russian commandos already outside left their positions and double timed it to catch up to the first force that was already halfway across the bridge.