Nert nodded. “The second reason?”
The mushroom cloud impressed Shauna. Anything that big should have been created by a nuke, yet she knew the lizards would not risk using nuclear weapons on a habitable world. The explosion must have been caused by railguns. “If there are Legion soldiers in that area, they may need our help.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“I’m fine, Colonel,” Ross grunted, pressing the Ruhar bandage to his injured ribs. Blood had soaked through his uniform top before he had time to stop and get the wound tended to. A rocket had whooshed past him and exploded against a tree, throwing deadly splinters of wood flying. The general had been struck by either a wooden dagger, shrapnel from the warhead or both. Whatever had torn through the armor panel of his vest had bounced away, after it cracked two of his ribs and left a bloody gouge down his left side. The fancy bandage, really a thick gel mat, stuck itself to his skin when Perkins had applied it to the wound, now he grimaced from pain as the nanofibers dug into him. Supposedly a person could not feel the ultrathin fibers probing an injury, analyzing the damage and sending back data to the medical kit, so the kit could decide how best to treat the wound. The nanofibers numbed nerves as they wriggled their way through the flesh, so the person being treated not only did not feel pain from the injury, they did not feel the creepy fibers digging into them.
That, Ross decided, was bullshit. The pain was worse after the bandage was applied, and he definitely could feel something moving around under the thick gel. Gritting his teeth, he ignored the sensation. “I’m mobile. Let’s get out of here.”
“Sir,” Perkins pressed down on the general’s shoulder, making him gasp from a fresh wave of pain. “We don’t know which direction is safe. Safest. Less dangerous. Let the scouts report.”
“We are bait for artillery here,” Ross protested. The enemy had not used artillery since the larger truck had endured a near-miss that threw it on its side and disabled the maser air-defense turret. With that truck out of the fight, the four crewmen had scrambled out and hopped in the back of the truck Ross was driving, riding along for a short distance before that truck was hit by a rocket that blew off one of the wheels and killed the two soldiers who were not wearing armored skinsuits. Since then, the six survivors had been engaged in a running battle with what Perkins guessed was a squad of twelve to sixteen Kristang. The four surviving Legion soldiers had skinsuits and they mostly kept Ross and Perkins protected while they dashed across the countryside from one thin stand of trees to another.
The enemy’s numbers were an advantage, forcing the Legion soldiers on the defensive. Other than numbers, Perkins had at first been puzzled and then relieved to see the enemy had only four of their number equipped with powered armor. The others wore armor panels and were larger, faster and tougher than unaugmented humans, and if the enemy had acted professionally, Ross and Perkins would be captured or dead. Perkins had quickly assessed that their opposition was not regular warrior caste killers, she thought it mostly likely they were fighting civilians, or warrior caste who had not much training. The four Legion soldiers in skinsuits had used their superior training and experience to quickly cut the enemy’s numbers down to eight, then the fight had devolved into a running battle where the enemy leapfrogged ahead to snipe and harass the humans.
Now Ross and his team were down to two fully effective skinsuits, plus the wounded general and the Maverick lieutenant colonel. One soldier was dead, having taken a direct hit from a rocket while pinned down by intense rifle fire. That action had been the only time in the battle where it looked like the enemy was capable of coordinating their attack, rather than individuals taking potshots whenever they could. A second skinsuit was partly disabled, its control system scrambled after a direct hit between the shoulder blades had thrown that soldier to the ground and cracked his helmet. Perkins was worried about that soldier, the burst blood vessels in his eyes, plus the trickle of blood coming from his nose and one ear told of internal damage that was at least a severe concussion. The soldier, a French paratrooper, insisted that she was still able to carry a rifle, but Perkins had cast aside the cracked helmet as being useless dead weight on her shoulders. “Your bucket is busted,” she had told the defiant soldier. “Use your suit’s power to carry one of us, if we’re down.”
Minutes later, Ross had been hit and the paratrooper had to carry him, stumbling across open ground not due to the general’s weight, but because her suit couldn’t assist her strides by scanning the ground in front of her with the sensors on her discarded helmet.
“There hasn’t been any artillery directed at us since we left the road,” Perkins observed. “I don’t think they know who you are, or they would have called in reinforcements by now. But we can’t stay here.” She ducked down, rolled on her back and pulled her phone out of a pocket.
“Comms restored?” Ross asked hopefully. They were not only under attack by superior numbers, they also had no way to call for help.
“No,” Perkins checked the signal strength icon on the phone anyway. It was still blank. “I’m trying a Hail Mary,” she explained as her fingers flew across the screen, typing out a message.
“You want to clue me in, Colonel?”
“In a moment, Sir.” She pressed the Send button. “We will know in about six minutes. Until then, can you make it along this streambed to those trees, if I help you?”
Ross grunted as he rolled to his knees, keeping down below the top of the shallow depression they were huddling in. “What the hell. Let’s give it a shot. Maybe we’ll give the enemy something to shoot at, so they ignore our scout.”
They got to the trees and took cover under roots that stuck out in the air, the tree having been undercut by spring flooding of the stream. “You want to tell me about your Hail Mary, Perkins?” Ross asked more to distract himself from the pain than from needing to know.
She pointed to the western horizon. “I sent a message up to our beetle friends.”
“Your private star carrier?” Ross grimaced. The Ruhar bandage was either going to stabilize his wound, or kill him from pain. “Why didn’t you try that before?”
“Because the Deal Me In is parked three lightminutes away. I had to wait for the planet to rotate until the ship is line of sight from here.”
“Oh. Did it work?”
“We’ll know if they text me a reply in,” she checked the clock on her phone, “two minutes.”
“Um,” Irene bit her lower lip. “New course,” she peered at her zPhone then at the instrument panel of the Buzzard. “Come right to one four zero.”
“Honey,” Derek forgot protocol. “That’s ninety degrees away from where we just agreed we want to go.”
“Yeah, change of plans,” she waved her phone. “We just got a message from Perkins. She’s on the ground with Ross and they’re in trouble, need immediate evac.”
“A message? How?” Even with the advanced gear aboard their aircraft, getting a message out had been a difficult task. Incoming message traffic was low bandwidth and spotty.
“Relayed though our beetle friends upstairs. Em,” she used Dave Czajka’s private nickname for their commanding officer, “is on the ground. General Ross and another soldier are hit, and they’re outnumbered. Running low on ammo also.”
“Ok,” Derek said without argument, advancing the throttles and swinging the wings back for high-speed dash flight.
Irene put her hand over his on the throttles. “We can’t maintain stealth at that speed.” Since being attacked by shoulder-launched missiles, they had been flying low and slow, avoiding any populated areas.
“The Colonel is in trouble. Sounds like if we show up late to the party, we might as well stay home.”
Irene considered that for only a second. “Ok, you’re right. We dash until we’re ten klicks away, then see if we can pick up a direct signal from Em.”
“Better make it twenty klicks. These turbines need time to cool down before we are over the target, or we’ll be radiating e
nough heat to be detected right through our stealth field.”
“Affirmative,” Irene was in all-business mode. “Approach vector plotted. Punch it.”
Ross crawled forward on his elbows and belly. The pain from his cracked ribs was numbed so he couldn’t feel anything, but his body still knew he was badly injured, and the ungentle movement was putting him on the verge of shock and making him nauseous. “If we can get to-”
“Hold,” Perkins reached into her helmet to press a finger over her ear, to better hear sound coming through her earpiece. The fact that field helmets did not seal out sound the way skinsuit helmets did was another significant drawback to the Legion dropping into action without having skinsuits for everyone, plus spares. She was determined to not let that shit happen ever again. “My helmet acoustic sensors are picking something up. Aircraft approaching.”
“Theirs or ours?” The only weapons Ross had were a pistol and a knife, neither of which would be any use against a high-tech aircraft that could hit his position with stand-off missiles.
She shook her head. “Don’t know. We should get back under cover.”
“Negative. We’re not going back. That area is too,” he covered his mouth to suppress a cough, and his hand came away wet with blood. “Too hot.”
“We can’t go out- Wait.” The zPhone in her pocket vibrated and she pulled it out. It was a simple text message. She smiled. “The cavalry is here.” Her fingers flew across the screen.
Ross shuddered from a combination of shock and relief. “What are you doing?”
“The bird wants to know where to drop off party favors.”
“Got it,” Irene announced grimly. “Feeding coordinates to the targeting system. Uh, looks like we’ll need to swing around and approach from the-”
“I see it,” Derek glanced over at the display. “Pulling around to the west. Missile is at your command.”
“Not yet. Transferring instructions now. Three, two, one, drop.” Irene pressed a button and a door on the back of a blister hanging below the Buzzard’s belly opened just long enough to allow a missile to be magnetically ejected backwards, then the door snapped closed to preserve the smooth airflow that was critical to the aircraft’s stealth. The missile fell until it cleared the pitch-black stealth field wrapped around its mother ship, then it deployed long, thin wings and glided, engaging its tiny turbine motor only when it was at the treetops. Acting as instructed, the missile
orbited the area almost silently, its chameleonware skin matching the color of the sky from below and the top surface alternating between the dark trees and tan field below. The missile’s tiny brain was barely able to control its eagerness for action.
Jost-au-kel Zajetra growled futile orders into his helmet microphone, then cut the mic and unleashed a string of vile curses. The curse words did no good for the outcome of the battle, but did make him feel marginally better. Before turning the microphone on again, he took several deep breaths to calm himself. His training told him that troops, especially inexperienced troops, respond better to a leader who projects calm confidence rather than angry shouting. However, Zajetra was certain that the warriors who trained him never had to deal with the idiots under his nominal command at the moment. “Red Five, move out left on my command. Get behind that cluster of trees on the streambank, from there you can fire up the stream. Reds Two and Four, cover Five when he moves.”
The response from the three amateurs was the proper three clicks rather than a long acknowledgment, keeping the transmissions short to make it more difficult for enemy sensors to pinpoint their location. The problem was, Zajetra had instructed them four times that morning to use one click for an affirmative response. And not to leave their microphone open like Reds Two and Four had done. He could hear their excited breathing. Four sounded like he was sobbing or choking.
“Turn off your microphones,” he snapped and was rewarded by one, then the other idiot going silent. At least he had that going for himself. “On my mark. Three, two, one, mark!”
Five sprung up, using too much power in his amateur enthusiasm and soaring too high in the air, exposing himself to enemy fire. When he came down, he wobbled on unsteady legs, fell, nearly lost his rifle and when he got his shit together to run, sprinted off the wrong way.
“No, you-” Zajetra groaned. “Your other left.”
The over-enthusiastic amateur idiot designated Red Five ran into the covering fire from his fellows, who used the technique of spraying and praying rather than foolish alternatives such as actually aiming at something. On full auto despite orders to conserve their dwindling ammunition, the rounds arced out wildly. Fortunately for Five, the covering fire was so scattered and ineffective that only two impacted his armor. The first round was a glancing blow to his left shoulder, hitting at such a sharp angle the explosive tip did not arm itself. The impact spun him around so he caught the second round square in the chest, knocking him backwards.
Red Five’s life was saved by the ammunition being old, so old that round’s explosive tip fizzled rather than exploding. Having the round’s casing separate but not explode, transferred less kinetic energy to his chest than a non-explosive round would have. The idiot would-be warrior cartwheeled backwards to bounce off a tree stump, his rifle flying away. Understanding he had screwed up and that his fellow amateurs were watching, he power-crawled on hands and knees, flinging damp clods of soil behind him until he fell on top of his rifle.
Zajetra’s mouth gaped open, unable to believe what he had just seen. Red Five should be dead, that was certain. The fact that he was alive confirmed the ammo they had been issued was ancient junk. Zajetra estimated no more than one in ten rounds had exploded as designed that morning, making his task exponentially more difficult.
“My other-” Red Five wheezed, coughing and making choking sounds. The impact must have knocked the breath from his lungs. “Other left. Understood. Cover m-”
“No!” Zajetra roared over an open channel, not taking the time to record the message and send it via burst transmission. “Stay where you are!”
“I can make it!” The over-eager young fool playing at being a warrior pleaded.
There was an uninvited tap on Zajetra’s right shoulder, an unwise gesture that in most circumstances would have received an immediate response of a powered-armor backhand. As it was, Zajetra had steeled himself to be interfered with by his official squad leader.
Koos-al-tam Hevertz tapped again, harder, to get the professional warrior’s attention. Damping down his flare of righteous anger, Zajetra turned slowly though the line-of-sight laserlink between helmets meant that members of the squad did not need to look at each other to communicate. “Yes, Hevertz?”
The pampered fool, placed in command of the squad only by his father’s influence, pointed across the field. “Five should be allowed to continue,” he argued, knowing that the stupid actions of the squad reflected poorly on him, as he had personally chosen the squad members.
“He will only get himself-” Zajetra bit back the rest of his reply. It was useless and technically treason for him to refuse the squad leader’s orders, or even to question those orders. For the hundredth time since he landed on Feznako, he cursed his bad luck. First, he had been shipped off to a backwater planet controlled by a rival clan. Second, the fight was not against frontline Ruhar but rather against a new, bastard force of dishonored Kristang and weakling humans. Finally, his assignment was to act as a professional ‘advisor’ to reserve troops pulled from the local civilian population. The reservists were members of lower castes who wanted to play at being warriors, usually younger sons who were desperate to impress their fathers and a random selection of females. The warrior caste used reservists as cannon fodder, often in conflicts between clans instead of against external enemies.
On Feznako, the entire Kristang people were supposed to be backing a fight that threatened the existence of their society and culture. Technically, only the warrior caste was directly threatened but that distin
ction did not matter. If the dishonorable traitors who called themselves ‘Verd-kris’ succeeded on Feznako, the Ruhar could gain billions of highly-motivated warriors. Zajetra had been told, in an inspiring speech before he shipped out, that Feznako was the most important fight of his life, and that the fight to crush the Alien Legion would have whatever resources were needed.
In reality, Zajetra had seen the ‘full support of the Kristang people’ meant a handful of small, mostly obsolete ships, as no clan was willing to risk their own defenses with a civil war raging. Supplies had apparently been pulled from the moldy depths of warehouses. The powered armor issued to the reservists was of a design so ancient, Zajetra had only seen it in museums. A third of the suits provided had to be used for spare parts to get the others even marginally operational.
Lack of proper equipment was not what bothered Zajetra the most, in his career he had most often had to deal with old or poorly-maintained gear. What he truly hated was taking orders from the reservist squad leader, a silly boy who had pulled together a group of his silly friends for what they thought would be a great adventure.
Jost-au-kel Zajetra was heartily sick of it. “Of course, honored squad leader,” he agreed. Attempting to control the squad was a futile waste of time. Only once had the squad actually done what he wanted, a coordinated attack that killed one of the skinsuit-clad human soldiers. Instead of seeing the wisdom of following the orders of the only professional warrior in the squad, the successful action got the young morons so pumped up they promptly lost all discipline. It should have been an easy fight. Two trucks full of humans on a lonely road, a target of opportunity he had chosen to give the squad an easy victory at minimal risk. The squad had even been promised several minutes of artillery support, before the big guns needed to shift fire to more important targets.
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