by Mel Odom
FORTY-TWO
Operation Anthill
Yeraf River
Southwest of Makaum City
0544 Hours Zulu Time
Sage raised the Roley to meet the oncoming Phrenorians and opened fire. Depleted uranium charges smashed into the enemy warriors and the catwalks alike. When the catwalk nearest Sage held a dozen Phrenorians, he fired four grenades at the supports connecting the platform to the cavern roof.
The explosions ripped the catwalk from the roof and spilled the Phrenorians into the floodwaters just as the charges along the crack in the riverbank detonated. More water rushed into the cave and covered the Sting-Tails just as Culpepper and the two soldiers with him zipped up their grappling lines to the cavern roof.
Two other soldiers zoomed up lines as well, propelled by the armor’s musculature. Sage’s HUD marked them as Murad and Corrigan.
Sage switched to the command frequency. “Glad to see you’re all right, sir.”
“I’m late to the party,” Murad said, “and my ears are still ringing, but it looks like I have a front row seat. As you were, Master Sergeant. See it through.”
“Copy that, sir.”
The new flooding threw whitecaps across the turbulent surface of the rising water. The Phrenorians clinging to the rock walls got washed away.
“Man, I am so good at what I do!” Culpepper roared.
“Get the explosives in place!” Sage yelled.
More of the Phrenorians initially stunned by the blast that had blown a hole in the riverbank were recovering, but they were struggling against the floodwaters.
Using stalactites as cover, Sage fired his grappling hook again and swung over to the designated area for his charge. Around him, the other soldiers did the same. Phrenorian laser beams and projectiles chipped away at the roof as they pursued. Some of the stalactites ripped free of the room and tumbled into the water, but oftentimes struck other Phrenorians.
After he had the charge seated, Sage spotted a cluster of Phrenorians firing on Escobedo from one of the catwalks. She was pinned down and sheltering in place as best as she could.
Sage scanned the cavern roof, selected four stalactites that looked like they were in the right position, and fired the last of his gel-grenades. The grenades stuck to the stalactites and exploded. Shorn free of the cavern roof, the stalactites dropped onto the Phrenorians, hammered the catwalk to pieces, and dropped the dead, wounded, and disoriented warriors into the water.
In quick order, the demolitions map lit up, showing that each charge was in place.
Munitions ready, the near-AI announced.
“Time to go,” Sage said. “Deploying drones.”
Sage released the two drones from his armor and set them to mapping. The small projectiles unfurled their rotors and sped toward the doors marked on the map. The vids of each opened on windows of his HUD and were joined by two others from Lieutenant Murad’s armor.
By the time the drones blew through the doors over the heads of the Phrenorians taking cover there, Sage fired his grappling hook, pulled it secure, and got ready.
“Jahup,” he called.
“Yes, Master Sergeant.”
“Do you have any grenades left?” If Jahup didn’t, Sage knew they would have to go at the problem another way.
“Three.”
That made it a little easier. “Put them in the middle of those Sting-Tails blocking our door.” Sage marked the chosen door on the map and sent it to Jahup.
Jahup fired the grenades an instant later. Two of the gel projectiles sailed true and slapped onto some of the Phrenorians on the catwalk in front of the door. The third landed against the wall behind them.
The resulting explosions threw Phrenorians in all directions.
Sage let go of his perch and swung over to the catwalk, which quivered uncertainly under him for a moment when he landed, then held, before the Phrenorians could recover. He crouched and fired depleted uranium rounds into the warriors who still lived and were lifting their weapons.
Sage turned and squeezed off bursts of suppressive fire to cover Jahup, Robinson, and Escobedo as they swung over to join him. Escobedo misjudged her approach by centimeters, but Jahup moved before anyone else could and seized her arm. He held her suspended over the water and the enemy troops for an instant till he could get his feet under him, then hauled her in as bullets and beams hammered the edge of the shaky catwalk.
Palchuk’s group, accompanied by Culpepper and his team and Murad and Corrigan, made their way to the other door. Grenades cleared the way there as well and they were inside the passageway.
“Culpepper,” Sage called as he sprinted through the passageway following the paths marked by his drones.
“Yes, Master Sergeant?” Culpepper responded.
“You’re set?”
“Affirmative, Master Sergeant. Just waiting for when we get clear. There’s enough fissionable materials in those packages to take the roof off this place.”
“I’d rather they dropped it onto everything below.”
Culpepper’s grin sounded in his voice. “Oh, they’ll do that, Master Sergeant. Or I’ll go over and stomp it down myself.”
Sage led the way out of the fortress. The drones let him know about the ambush waiting ahead. He sprinted faster and put some distance between himself and the others. At the corner, he threw himself down into a skid in a seated position with the Roley at the ready. When he slid into the corner with one leg tucked under him, he opened fire on full-auto.
The depleted uranium rounds chopped into chitin and Phrenorian flesh but ricocheted from the abbreviated armor over the vital organs.
Sage shoved himself to his feet and was a half-step behind Jahup as the younger man rounded the corner, ran up one side of the hallway over Sage, and flung himself onto the lead Phrenorian. Jahup’s forward momentum and the armor’s weight knocked his opponent down.
One of the Phrenorians was dead. A ricochet had torn through the warrior’s cephalothorax.
The Phrenorian Jahup grappled with managed to get in one tail strike and fasten his chelicerae onto the young Makaum man’s faceshield. Then Jahup drove his hunting knife into the Phrenorian’s opisthosoma and ripped the blade sideways. A steaming pile of guts evacuated the wound and the warrior died.
The second Phrenorian drove a fighting spear at Jahup’s back, but the warrior stumbled backward when Sage shot him repeatedly in the face. Jahup dropped his dead foe just before the last Phrenorian hit the stone floor.
“That was pretty stupid,” Sage said as he reloaded his weapons. “You could have gotten killed.”
“Me?” On the other side of his faceshield, Jahup looked astonished. “What about you?”
Sage replaced the two spent rounds in his pistol. “We’re not talking about me.”
“Do you want to talk about this now, Master Sergeant?” Jahup asked coolly. “Or do you think we can save it for the after-action report?”
In spite of himself and the situation, Sage had to work hard to keep a smile off his face. He said, “Move out, soldier.”
They ran.
Minutes later, they formed up with the other group, who looked worse for the wear. Two soldiers carried Private Suvari between them.
“We ran into a group of Phrenorians,” Palchuk said. “We left them lying there, but we took some damage.”
Murad pointed overhead to the north where storm clouds gathered and filled the sky with the promise of rain. “There are the four Phrenorian birds the colonel told us about.”
Sage glanced up and his faceshield automatically polarized against the dulled morning sunlight. The HUD classified the aircraft as Phrenorian Crayst-class transport ships. Those aircraft would be gunned up.
Small explosions went off inside the fortress and resonated through the surrounding jungle.
“Some little going-away presents I left,” Culpepper said. “And begging the lieutenant’s pardon, but those aircraft aren’t the big problem. There are gonna be some
mad Sting-Tails boiling out of that place here in a minute or two, in spite of the party favors I left behind us, and they still outnumber us. I suggest we use that big hammer we left hanging from the cavern roof and cut down on those odds.”
“Can’t you do it now?” Murad asked.
“If I do, and we’re standing this close to ground zero, sir, it’s more than likely we’ll drop right in there with them.”
“Take the lead, Corporal,” Murad said. “When we reach a safe area, light it up.”
“Copy that, sir.” Culpepper took off at once and the other soldiers fell in as he raced downriver.
Sage and Jahup ran slack together.
The four Phrenorian aircraft arrived at the fortress and hovered.
“What are they doing?” Jahup asked.
“Waiting for orders,” Sage answered.
The thick branches of the trees and brush hid the aircraft intermittently.
“I could save them some time if we had rocket launchers,” Jahup said.
Two of the Phrenorian ships peeled off and swooped in pursuit of the Terran soldiers. Almost immediately, they opened fire with cannons. Explosions tore through the jungle. Smoking craters opened up and ten-meter-tall fires leaped up through the trees. Several small weaponized drones whizzed through the air and shot cannons and sniper rifles.
“Pop EMP smoke!” Sage bellowed. He pulled out three EMP-charged smoke grenades from his chest pouch, pulled the rings, and tossed them a short distance away.
Most of the other soldiers threw grenades as well.
Small detonations released the purple smoke laced with ionized particles containing electromagnetic pulses from the grenades. The EMP lacing wouldn’t harm the armor because it was hardened against such a weak attack, but the Phrenorian drones would be vulnerable to it. The smoke obscured visibility.
Drones that encountered the smoke quickly fell or lost control. One of them, about a meter in diameter, smashed into a tree trunk on Sage’s right and turned into scrap.
“Grab dirt!” Culpepper warned.
Sage went to ground beside Jahup. He covered his head with his arms despite wearing the helmet. Medtech could regrow anything below the neck if a soldier could stay alive long enough to reach a biosupport tank for transport.
For a moment, everything seemed normal. Then the fortress vomited into the air and the ground around Sage rolled and pitched. The Phrenorian transport became a series of explosions that punched holes in the air, the jungle, and scattered debris in all directions.
The world turned silent as the aud dampers kicked to max and took away Sage’s hearing. He watched as the top of the riverbank collapsed in on itself. Then the mass of earth that had gotten thrown into the air came down like an avalanche of sudden death dropped from the heavens.
Sage was buried in an instant.
FORTY-THREE
Kequaem’s Needle
Makaum Space
0550 Hours Zulu Time
At least a dozen corps space stations—Silver Spin, Tri-Cargo, and SulatetDev among them—hung in clouds of debris in space. Dozens of ferries, cargo ships, and transport haulers formed smaller pockets of debris. Still more exploded and were reduced to slag as Kiwanuka watched in growing horror.
She counted four Phrenorian dreadnought-class battlecruisers powering into the orbital paths of the civilian stations and ships. The Phrenorian vessels were constructed with two forward decks backed by a superstructure that made the battlecruiser look like a giant horseshoe. MilNet believed the design was taken from one of the large ocean predators on Phrenoria, the garisul. The creature was present in a lot of the Phrenorian formative mythologies, always idealized as a strong, unrelenting god.
Smaller attack ships zipped from the dreadnoughts’ launch decks. They were the Reryt-class, and were based on venomous hive crustaceans that hunted in schools. Bright beams flashed against the darkness as the pilots attacked without mercy.
Morlortai was right in his assessment of the situation. Without a space-based defensive squad, none of the corps would stand a chance against the Phrenorians.
“Staff Sergeant Kiwanuka,” Morlortai said. “If we’re going to escape execution by the Phrenorians, we’re going to have to act quickly. In order to escape, if we can, I need those engines.”
“And we need a ship.” Kiwanuka tried not to think about how their ship had gotten destroyed shortly after their arrival.
More debris slammed into Kequaem’s Needle and rocked the ship violently.
“Then we have an agreement?” Morlortai asked.
Kiwanuka didn’t hesitate. Even if the situation she and her squad were in wasn’t as desperate as it was, and even if she had more time and more access to ways to escape the Phrenorian attack, taking Morlortai into custody was no longer a primary objective.
Arresting him and proving that he, or one of his people, had fired on General Zhoh was no longer a viable objective. The assassin’s confession might have given the Alliance ammunition to counter the Phrenorian Empire’s charges of Terran military aggression, but that no longer mattered because of the threat now imminent. The Phrenorians were making a definite bid for conquering Makaum.
“We have an agreement,” Kiwanuka answered. “Sergeant Cipriano.”
“Go, Staff Sergeant,” Cipriano replied.
“Give the captain back his ship’s engines.”
“Copy that.”
“Excellent,” Morlortai said. “Staff Sergeant Kiwanuka, bring your people up to the bridge. I give you my word that you and they will be safe until we are out of this situation. Will you guarantee the same?”
Kiwanuka resumed climbing. “Yes.”
“I look forward to meeting you.”
Kiwanuka wondered how she was going to respond to that. Before she figured it out, something collided with Kequaem’s Needle. One of her hands and both feet swung free of the plasteel plate of the shaft and she barely maintained contact with her other hand.
The lift shaft suddenly sheared away from the main body of the cargo ship. Open space, marked by the fiery flares of freighters and ferries exploding from Phrenorian cannons, yawned below her.
Noojin, evidently knocked free of the shaft wall, flailed her arms and legs wildly as she floated toward the gaping hole.
A-Pakeb Node
Strategic Intelligence Command
Makaum
30252 Akej (Phrenorian Prime)
Pride filled Zhoh as he watched the carnage unfolding on the huge monitor at the front of the room. Deafening explosions formed an undercurrent around the workstations where Phrenorian information officers tended to the constant streams of vid and aud downloading from the seven Garisul-class dreadnoughts attacking the various space stations in geosynchronous orbit around the planet.
Since space didn’t carry sound, aud was captured from scattered space stations and spacecraft frequencies. Most of them were pleas for help in several different languages, but the emotions that drove the words made the broadcasts easily understood. The crescendo of explosions, screams of frightened, wounded, and dying beings, and warning Klaxons came from the various vessels caught up in the attack.
“—came out of nowhere—”
“—no warning—”
“Help!”
“—are we supposed to—”
“—no way of protecting—”
“—are dead right in front of my—”
“They’re everywhere!”
All of the fear was music to Zhoh and he reveled in it. He knew his pheromone secretion was high, but so was every warrior’s in the room. Mato’s pheromones were strong as he stood beside Zhoh. Only personal battle would have heightened his sensation.
“Just think, triarr,” Mato said, “the Seraugh assigned that attack force to Makaum to support your efforts here. This is for you.”
“I know.” Reluctantly, Zhoh turned away from the glorious battle playing out on the huge monitor and glanced at Mato. “What is happening at the Terran fort?”
Mato slid into a workstation seat and tapped the keyboard with his secondaries. The monitor blinked and filled with six different images of Fort York.
Lights marked the training fields and some of the buildings in the fort, but Zhoh knew those were deliberately placed to allow distraction. The colonel in charge of the fort was no fool, and the being probably knew the soldiers he had involved in various pursuits there would be recognized as attempts to draw the attention of any spies away from the Terran military’s main objectives.
Still, the effort had to be made. Zhoh would have done the same himself.
“They pretend to reinforce their defensive posture,” Mato said, “but our spies at the fort tell us the soldiers’ efforts are more directed to equipping the Makaum beings fleeing the sprawl.”
Mato tapped the keyboard again. The views reconfigured and picked up vid feeds from drones monitoring the sprawl. Groups of Makaum people slipped through alleys and walked into the surrounding jungle.
“Do you have an estimate on how much of the sprawl populace has departed?” Zhoh asked.
“The numbers fluctuate between forty-two and fifty-seven percent. These figures are raw, triarr, not hard data. Our intelligence specialists have not yet gathered enough information to create the proper algorithms to reveal the actual numbers.”
Zhoh nodded, feeling somewhat irritated.
“The attack on you,” Mato said, “as well as Master Sergeant Sage’s apprehension of Throzath at around the same time, polarized the Makaum populace. However”—he tapped the keyboard rapidly—“the dreadnoughts’ attack on the space stations is currently playing over all the sprawl media outlets.”
The screens reconfigured again. This time they opened up on street scenes where sprawl inhabitants gathered in public places and gazed up at the night sky. Huge chunks of the space stations had fallen into the planet’s gravity well and streaked toward the ground, trailing fire as they burned.
“Unfortunately,” Mato said, “it appears that several pieces of the debris are going to strike the sprawl and outlying regions. They will cause even more fear and unrest.”