Sybutu’s plan had been to gun down whatever made it through the gap. Enthree had other ideas. She had laid out food and water for the animals by repurposing the plants ready to be put into the tilled soil.
The beasts ignored the food. Instead, they fought each other to lap up the water Enthree had poured into the beds of unhitched trailers.
Nice one, Big Bug.
Vetch’s tub lifted off the ground a little but maintained its distance from the archway.
He’d kept a sight picture on it. The first enemy soldiers advanced cautiously through, poking rifles around the edge of the gap and firing at the tubs. Vetch and the others poured inaccurate blaster fire their way; the three jacks fired flechettes from their PA-71s that took out several Corrupted. The only ones not firing weapons were the two droids, and Enthree and Sinofar, who were busy cutting more steps and the firing ledge into the wall.
The exchange of fire continued for about a minute before the enemy rushed the gate in numbers.
While some laid down covering fire from the gateway, most charged in as fast as they could.
It was almost comical because the mutations they’d undergone had left them slow and cumbersome. Fine for driving tractors and digging holes. Not so good for infantry assaults. Nonetheless, they displayed some basic training. Around a dozen of the oncoming force took a knee and laid down suppressing fire on the armored hover-tubs, while around twice that number bounded forward to either side.
They were rudimentary fire-and-movement tactics, but didn’t work because their lack of physical coordination meant they not only ran like badly beaten drunkards, but they aimed like ones too.
A bullet whined off the armored side of Vetch’s vehicle.
“Lucky shot!” Vetch shouted.
The lead group of Corrupted paused to lay down covering fire while the rear groups took their turns bounding forward.
Vetch spent freely of his charge pack, sending bolts into the attackers. Range: 350meters. His PPR3’s accuracy degraded rapidly after 180 meters, but he wasn’t about to get his head blown off by a lucky shot from an alien-mutant zombie without shooting back.
He opened up, panning slowly as he squeezed off shots with the four-bolt burst setting.
The rest of Chimera Company kept up a steady fire too. The PA-71s were taking a heavy toll, although not as heavy as they could have, and the blaster bolts were screaming through the air and fusing the dirt between the enemy’s feet as they landed.
Most foes would be intimidated if they advanced into fire like that.
The Corrupted didn’t seem to care. Vetch guessed that was a natural reaction for people who were already dead.
“Yes!” Vetch sent a bolt into a former human’s face. The man fell onto his back and didn’t get up.
“Oh, shite,” Vetch muttered, noting the canisters slung across the man’s chest. Others wore them too. Grenades. If just one of those landed inside the tub, it would be all over.
“Come on, Sybutu,” he growled over the squad channel. “What are you waiting for?”
“The right moment,” came the reply.
One of the closest Corrupted—a Littorane—lobbed a grenade at Vetch. The amphibians could use their tails as slingshots to make awesome long throws, but Vetch could tell this lob would fall a little short.
He fired a few bolts at the Littorane. Missed. But one of the jacks put several darts through its neck, killing it.
The grenade landed about forty meters away. Vetch ducked inside the vehicle and felt it rock as the shockwave hit.
He stood and resighted his targets. At the gate, a further score of Corrupted raced through.
“Take cover!” Sybutu yelled.
Vetch ducked again. He was only halfway down when the entire skragging planet exploded.
The grenade had rocked it, but this new explosion was a shockwave tsunami that made the vehicle’s ceramalloy walls sing. Dirt and pebbles rained down on the open top vehicle.
When the dust settled enough for them to see, most of the attackers were dead, and the dazed survivors crawling over the edge of the smoking crater were about to be.
The hover-tubs advanced on the carnage, their occupants adding to it. It was butchery carried out by blaster and railgun rifle.
“They’re already dead,” Vetch kept telling himself. He knew that to be true, but it was a grim business all the same.
“How did you manage that, Sybutu?” he asked. “With just a case of grenades?”
“I found some det packs in my tub,” Bronze explained. “It seemed a shame to waste them.”
“We’re sappers of the Legion,” Sybutu said. “We know how to build things. And we know how to blow them up.”
“We’re experts at drains and digging ditches too,” said Zavage. “But the sarge always leaves that part out.”
Vetch smiled when he heard Green Fish stifle a guffaw over the net. He’d missed the banter now that he wasn’t at the heart of it.
For the first time since his commander had sent Raven Company to die on Rho-Torkis, it felt like he’d found his family.
* * *
“Trouble,” Lynx warned. “I believe the enemy intends to subject us to indirect fire.”
Lynx’s drone footage was doubly troubling. The beds of the trucks had transformed. Each had eight tubes buried in it, angled slightly toward Chimera Company’s position.
Machines had been deployed beside the trucks. Soldiers cut and dug the ground. They fed the broken rock and soil into the machines, which were also fed by tubes from canisters of liquid. Oily exhaust fumes chugged out. From the bottom of the machines came a steady stream of shaped cylinders with nose cones and stabilizer fins.
Orion’s beard! They were making solid, ceramic, mortar bombs, and they were stacking them in the trucks ready to fire.
The mortar crews acted with speed and precision in sharp contrast to most of the Corrupted Vetch had seen. He put that down to the two commanders watching, goading, and marshalling. They were humanoids, blown up to titanic size and equipped with additional pairs of muscled arms that rose from their shoulder blades.
The junior of the two commanders, judging by the body language, was a mutated human male. Pale skin. Bearded. Ripped. He wore torn short pants and boots. Nothing else.
Superficially, the Corrupted man resembled the view Vetch saw in the mirror on a good day…if Vetch possessed three times the muscle mass. The proportions were wrong, though. The chest was too cylindrical, and he was unfeasibly wide across the shoulders. He wasn’t just muscled but was so top heavy he looked as if he would pitch over if he moved. He didn’t, though. He moved with the grace of a big predator.
If he was a titan, the commanding officer was a titaness. She’d been a Zhoogene woman once, but the ten-foot-high monster was something else now.
Her people were naturally narrow hipped and small chested compared to human women, but The Corruption had left her bursting with muscle, and with breasts and hips to put a fertility goddess to shame. She was naked too. Poor thing. Vetch supposed it must be tough clothes shopping when you were a supersized mutant on a secret world.
A horrifying thought struck him. Perhaps, once they reached this level of mutation, the Corrupted could breed. Maybe that was the plan? The next stage of the invasion?
He imagined an army of titans born on broken worlds beyond the fringe of the Federation.
The titaness froze. She looked up, directly at Vetch. She drew a pistol slung under one enormous wrist and fired.
The feed in Vetch’s wrist slate went dead and switched to one of the other drones. But the commander-mutants shot down the rest of the surviving surveillance machines.
Vetch’s slate blackened. He was blind.
A screaming banshee howl rose from the enemy position. Moments later, it was followed by a salvo of mortar rounds rising into the sky.
He watched through the open top of his vehicle as the ‘bombs’ reached the vertex of their trajectory and began to descend from t
he heavens.
He told himself they were firing blind, that the chances of hitting him were slim.
Before they landed, another howl screamed from the other side of the wall, announcing the next salvo.
“Hold your positions,” said Lieutenant Lily. “Stay inside the vehicles. Bronze, join Sinofar on the firing step. When you get there, I want you to take out the mortar trucks.”
The SpecMish operative ran for the wall. Vetch remembered something about Bronze being the jacks’ crack shot. He remembered Sward too. The best sniper in Raven Company. But Vetch had buried his Zhoogene comrade beneath a hill on Eiylah-Bremah.
The mortar salvo hit.
Dust splashed into the air, revealing miniature craters where the shaped rocks hit. A projectile bounced off one of the vehicles, but no one looked hurt.
It was a weird experience. Without explosives, it was more like being attacked by ancient catapults. Being hit without hitting back still sucked. Same as it always did.
And that was why, if he were in charge, they would be hugging the arch for cover and laying down blaster fire.
Lily had better be right.
Vetch looked up. Another salvo. Several bombs were falling on him.
He ducked, arms over his head.
One of the projectiles clanged against the top of the tub’s side wall. Zan Fey grunted.
“Izza! No!”
The scream came from Ree.
“Leave her to me,” Vetch bellowed. He pushed past the robots and the Glaenwi to check on Zan Fey.
She was slumped over in the driver’s position, groaning. Blood was welling up from a gash on the back of her skull.
Gently, he tested the wound with his fingers.
“What happened?” Fitz demanded over the radio.
“Wait one,” Vetch replied.
Blood was flowing copiously. It looked horrific, but the bones weren’t damaged. If there was a serious injury, it was internal. “Lieutenant Zan Fey took a rebound to the back of her head,” he said as he sprayed cleanse-heal over the wound. “She’s stunned, but alive.”
“Copy.” Fitz sounded surprisingly calm. “If she worsens, take her to Sinofar.”
“Roger that.”
The ground thundered under another mortar salvo, but this time, Vetch didn’t hesitate to get Zan Fey out of her seat and back to Ree.
“Tell me if she worsens,” he told the smuggler boss.
Zan Fey mumbled incoherently and waved her hands at them. Vetch didn’t understand a word, but he suspected she meant: “Stop fussing!”
Vetch had meant for Ree to keep Zan Fey comfortable while he took the driver’s position. Instead, Ree handed the Zhoogene over to Lynx who extruded a padded neck brace to keep her safe. Who knew?
“I’ll drive,” Ree told Vetch.
Another salvo crashed into the ground.
The bombardment was more widely dispersed now. The enemy was likely guessing the tubs had moved away from the shelter of the wall to escape the mortars.
Maybe it was better that Vetch wasn’t in the driver’s seat. He knew he would find it hellish to resist the temptation to drive anywhere rather than sit out the bombardment.
He nodded at Ree.
“Look after her,” he told the crime boss and then went to his gunner’s station at the rear.
* * * * *
Chapter 42: Hines “Bronze” Zy Pel
Bronze fired at the trucks. But gripping the narrow ledge by his toenails was not an ideal position from which to let loose with his PA-71.
In training, he’d fired its ancient predecessor, the SA-71. A full auto burst with the earlier weapon felt as gentle as dabbing the enemy with soft down plucked from a baby bird. Not so the modern rifle. Even when pulled correctly up against his shoulder, its recoil thumped so hard, every shot hurt. He was expending all his concentration to keep from blasting himself back off the ledge. At least, it distracted him from the bolts screaming his way from the enemy position.
A truck went up in flames as, beside him on the firing ledge, Sinofar’s Khrone cannon slammed home another 110mm shell.
Bronze changed tactics, switching his rifle to low-velocity mode, and sighting in on the machines making the bombs.
He sent a burst of NG-enriched supermetal flechettes into one of the machines. It rattled and dented but kept working. Bronze switched again to the Corrupted tending the machines. They started going down. But some were getting up again. Low power was so frustrating!
He set the fire selector to ten-round bursts and let rip. It was a battle to keep the barrel from rising, but he knocked over a machine and felled everyone nearby.
Panning left, he selected the next machine and took that one out too.
The scream of the mortar salvoes was a little quieter now.
On to the next target, but his rifle wouldn’t fire. The overheat indicator was lit, and he didn’t dare override it because Fitz had made it clear that there were no replacement charge rails. He ducked beneath the wall and activated the cool and cleanse cycle. Coolant flooded the barrel and chemically stripped any charring from the charge rail helix. The system automatically chambered a cleansing wad.
All he had to do now was wait thirty seconds, fire the wad to clean out the barrel, and get back to work. Even the best PA-71s were prone to occasional overheating, and this was not a good one.
“Bronze, is there a problem?”
The question came from Enthree, who was out of sight of the enemy, a short distance away from the firing ledge, with a periscope she was using to give status updates to the others in the hover-tubs. She was clinging to the vertical surfaces like a fly. If the enemy probed through the archway, the plan was to fire on them from above and let Enthree drop down on their heads and slice them with her swords.
“Need to cool my barrel,” he explained.
She seemed to accept his words. What she’d really been asking was whether he was falling under the influence of the demigoddess out there. Which he wasn’t.
But her interruption made him think about the blue wonder standing beside him on the ledge. Filled with sudden admiration, he gave her a low whistle. He thought of himself as a man of the galaxy, but he was standing beside a woman who carried a Hunndrin & Rax HPW-3 as a spare.
It gave him an idea.
“Sinofar,” he said. “Can I borrow your HPW?”
She looked across at him with delight written on her face from ear to ear. Suddenly, it all added up. Sinofar had been offhanded with him ever since he’d gotten back on the Phantom. Behind her overly casual façade, the day they’d enjoyed in her cabin after that time on Flux City must have meant more than she’d let on.
Not now, Verlys.
Slinging his PA-71 around his chest, he took the HPW from her, lifted the longer-barreled weapon over the top of the wall, and began firing. He yelled with pleasure as the characteristic hellfire-red 28mm bolts tore through flesh and metal. There was a reason HPW-3s were mainstays at gun clubs across the Federation.
Even so, his fire against the trucks was not delivering the damage the Khrone was, so he switched back to the remaining machines making the mortar rounds and the teams serving them.
Hellfire bolts dealt savage blows, putting the machines out of action as he systematically panned from the right of the enemy line to the left. One after another fell to the heavy blaster.
He sighted one of the last machines. His trigger finger tensed, then moved of its own accord off the trigger and onto the guard.
The super Zhoogene commander filled his sight picture. She was wondrous to behold. Her glorious scent filled his sinuses. She was everything.
She was authority.
“Are you all right, Bronzy?”
Sinofar sounded far more distant than the supreme Zhoogene commander. But the worry in her voice demanded an answer.
“Yes,” he replied. He sniffed the air. The Zhoogene demigoddess smelled divine. How could it be otherwise? But he knew she was his enemy, and she had no comma
nd over him. “Yes, Verlys,” he said with far more certainty.
The enemy commander flinched when Sinofar took out the mortar truck nearest her.
By now, the enemy mortar fire had greatly reduced, though blaster bolts continued to fly at the wall and over their heads.
“We make a great team,” said Sinofar.
“That we do, big blue.”
“You think I’m large?”
Dammit, Verlys. Not now.
“I think you’re perfect,” he told her. “Even though you’re not…”
Azhanti! He’d nearly said, “Even though you’re not comparable with my demigoddess.”
“I’m not what?” Sinofar sent five shells into one of the last trucks. When the bolts had dissipated, they could see that the vehicle’s metal frame had melted, and its combustibles had incinerated to ash.
“Verlys, you’re not good company for people who like bland and safe.”
“That is true.” She sounded immeasurably happier. “I am not safe…as those Corrupted will find out. Bronze, we’ve taken out most of the mortars. Switch targets. Shoot those big, ugly, mutated brutes.”
He knew Sinofar was right, but it would be such a shame to kill them. They weren’t ugly brutes. They were beautiful.
Instead of shooting them, he put a flurry of rounds through the last undamaged truck, setting it ablaze.
“Why aren’t you firing at the leaders?” Sinofar asked. The suspicion chilled her voice. She knew all about his weakness, having witnessed it firsthand on Flux City.
“They’re moving to confer,” he told her. “Wait until they’re in the same spot, and we’ll take both out together. The soldiers will be so confused, we can easily push through them to the Phantom.”
She gave him a look of narrow-eyed suspicion.
I know, he thought guiltily, why didn’t I say that in the first place?
“Very well,” she said. “You and me together.”
The enemy commanders were gesticulating and pointing at the gate, organizing the 70-odd effective soldiers who remained. There were still too many for Chimera Company to punch through without taking serious casualties.
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