by E A Wicklund
The Xerxes had acquired—murdering many owners in the process—nearly one hundred vehicles to bring their large force to the facility. From her earlier reconnoiter, she knew they had parked as far as two kilometers away from it, far from where she last saw the mercenaries. That gave her ample opportunity to sneak back and acquire one of the ill-gotten transports.
She traveled down the packed ruddy dirt and gravel of the drive. Luckily no one remained behind to see her. She parked the Martinsyde next to a rugged electric Jensen truck, about a kilometer from Arcoplex.
Aja zipped up her grey running jacket and donned the hood to conceal her feminine features. She collected a Branson 6mm with silencer from the Martinsyde’s store of weaponry and slipped it into her pocket. The pistol’s muzzle velocity wasn’t nearly as shattering as the Merkel’s, but it was deadly enough for close-in work. She walked along the cars, searching for something suitable to load all the marines into. As she looked, Aja paused to stare back towards Arcoplex and watch what the Xerxes were doing.
Parts of the building were already burning. Windows were smashed and smoke billowed out. Many of the Xerxes outside stood around, screaming and firing their weapons in the air. Others hurled still-screaming guards out third-story windows.
Aja felt sick at the sight. That sort of undisciplined behavior was typical of the Xerxes Regiment. They may have started as professional fighting men, but the unit managed to collect the most twisted, the most violent, and the most emotionally unstable soldiers in all of Madkhal, placing them into one group that only made them worse. They were more of a psychological weapon than a weapon of war, more terrorist than professional soldier. She spat in the dirt. Such maniacs disgusted true professionals like herself.
Though she abhorred them, at least their demented ways made her present task easier. They enjoyed an overwhelming numerical advantage, but only half of her original estimate of eight hundred looked like they were forming up to pursue McCray and company. That meant the other half occupied themselves with pointless destruction at Arcoplex. Aja guessed that nearly one hundred of them were running on foot towards where McCray’s shuttle crashed. She noticed a larger group standing by waiting to receive fresh oxygen tanks. A smaller cluster of thirty or so were rushing up the road to collect vehicles. She had only scant minutes to find something before these last men encountered her.
Cursing herself for not having foreseen this possibility, she hesitated, wondering if she was better off changing her plan and racing back to McCray and the marines right away. If the Xerxes heading for McCray reached the shuttle and the marines were still unconscious, they wouldn’t stand a chance. But having come this far it would take less time to find a new vehicle than head back to the Martinsyde on foot.
She walked briskly along the vehicles. Looking calm was the best way to avoid drawing attention to herself, acting as if she had every right to be there. At last, she found a commuter bus with room for thirty, one of the many mass transit sliders traveling between cities. It had been shot up a bit; holes peppered the sides, and bloodstains framed bullet holes in the windows. Under different circumstances, a bus in such condition would have attracted attention, but it was parked far from Arcoplex and the staff had other concerns at the moment.
Through the open doors, she saw a bearded fellow sitting in the driver’s seat. Obviously, he belonged to the small group she’d seen heading to the vehicles, and he found this one before she did. He carried an assault weapon at his side—a Xerxes. She knocked at the entrance to get his attention, turning to hide her feminine features. The driver turned and smiled, having no reason to expect anyone other than another Xerxes. He peered through the doorway as the bus’s repellers charged up. “Welcome, brother. Is it finished already? Who are you?”
“Death,” she said and shot him in the head.
She climbed aboard and dragged the body to a rear seat. The whole vehicle smelled of blood and feces. Long streaks of bodily fluids ran along the floorboards, the remains of those killed for this bus. The sight only validated her low opinion of the Xerxes. Most people were nauseated by such things because they represented the cutting short of a life, and thus they cleaned it up to remove the reminder. The Xerxes reveled in killing, and hardly minded the evidence of wanton murder.
But Aja cleaned off her mess. The blood and brains of the dead Xerxes splattering the window, blocked her view.
She pulled out, hovering the slider bus no more than two feet above the ground, hoping not to attract attention. She watched the road in the rear view mirrors, searching for signs of pursuit. No one followed. In the distant field bordering the lake, she saw the leading group of Xerxes advancing towards the water. Soon, they would attack McCray’s crashed shuttle, and Aja had no idea if the men were conscious yet. She still had time to get to them if she hustled up.
After recovering the Merkel from her slider, Aja stomped on the bus’s accelerator and raced towards the crash site in a wide sweeping loop around the Xerxes. She kept low hills between her and the mercs to avoid detection, but even as she dashed to the lakeside, the plan seemed doomed. A few mercenaries, sweeping wide, looked like they formed a wide pincer to trap the vulnerable survivors against the water. Even though she could still recover the men from the main force in time, this group of three could take the bus under fire as they escaped.
Distant gunfire proved the rest of the pincer encountered opposition. The boys were awake and defending themselves well. A good sign, but these three mercs needed to be dealt with in the least time possible. There wasn’t time for a firefight; she needed to take them out quickly.
She powered the bus ahead, intending to decapitate them with a low pass. Unfortunately, the gods of battle granted her no luck. One of the three turned in time to see her screaming towards them. He snapped around and his spray of fire shattered the bus’s right forward repeller. It began to spin and dive to the right. With milliseconds before it crashed, she shot out the left driver side window with her pistol and leapt through, her highly classified and powerful musculature easily hurling her clear.
When the big vehicle struck the ground, it tumbled across the turf past the three Xerxes with sickening crunches. Aja, having landed like a ballerina—though one traveling at sixty kph—ran alongside it for cover as it hurtled.
When it stopped, she paused beside it, using it for cover. She counted on the likelihood that these Xerxes wouldn’t risk leaving a possible enemy in their rear. She didn’t have to wait long before they stalked close, checking for survivors. The first mercenary peered around the wreck to her hiding place. Aja snatched his gun barrel and spun him around with it, simultaneously grabbing the crown of his head in her left hand with nanotech-augmented strength. The vertebrae of his neck were torqued to the limit as Aja twisted his head. Yanking backward and snapping his neck with that hand, she aimed and fired his own weapon at the trailing men with the other. It all happened in the blink of an eye.
Her aim with the mercenary’s weapon proved perfect and hypervelocity rounds stitched across her target’s body. He folded like perforated paper. Aja ducked back behind the bus, corpse still in hand, but with her kill’s weapon in the other. Out of curiosity, she wondered if an old trick would work and waved the body out from cover, nano-enhanced muscles easily holding him up.
Incoming fire obliterated her ghastly decoy. The last man realized what he’d done and howled, “My God. I killed Fritz!”
As the fellow stared in shock, Aja ducked out again and fired, removing the man’s worries, and his head.
She collected the Merkel from the crumpled bus and ran alongside the lakeshore, anxious to add her weapons to McCray’s defense.
***
Erosion had produced steep banks of ruddy clay, rising from the beach composed of stone, mud, and gravel a few meters wide at the lake’s edge. McCray, Castellano, and the Cretins took cover at the tip of this four-hundred meter long and four-hundred meter wide tongue of land extending into the lake. The steep banks offered a bulwa
rk of protection as they stood at a firing position, only their heads and shoulders peeking above the level of the field. Reeds, crawling with salamander-like amphibians, provided additional concealment as they established firing positions.
He checked the action of his Durette P-23 assault weapon, collected from the mercenaries at Arcoplex. It wasn’t the best out there, but still better than nothing. The 6.1mm rounds contained crude scramjets that ignited after leaving the barrel. The tiny engines inside each bullet accelerated them up to Mach 4.7. Once hitting a human target, the destructive shockwave from such high velocity rounds ripped apart human flesh and bone, and more than overcame their small size.
As he watched a group of eighty-plus mercenaries approaching from several hundreds of yards away, he gave thanks for Castellano’s tactical brilliance. Minutes before, with an economy of words that left McCray wondering what he’d said, the Madkhali marine had organized his twenty men into a deadly ambush. That any kind of an ambush could be formed when their enemy knew where they were simply proved Catellano’s tactical genius. The Cretin’s formation stretched around the edges of this small strip of land, forming a wide U shape. McCray, Castellano, and seven other marines, formed the center group, while two other groups formed to the right and left further up towards the tips of the U.
McCray watched the mercs approaching across the short grasses and wild flowers of the field beyond. The lack of even small hillocks proved this had once been cultivated for crops at one time. Such a featureless terrain would provide little cover for the attackers.
At Castellano’s signal the center group fired first to draw the attention of the advancing Madkhalis. The enemy charged, fully focused on the middle, clearly failing to notice the flanks.
And that’s where they hurtled into certain death.
Castellano waited until the mercs entered the target area and, at his visual signal to the other two groups, they opened fire. Bullets screamed into the clustered mercs from three directions. The interlocking fields of fire ensured many rounds filled every square meter, raining death across a bloody field where nothing larger than a gopher could survive.
“Up!” barked Castellano and McCray hurled up the bank to a firing position.
A squeeze of his trigger and his rounds struck a target full in the chest. The un-armored man’s upper body flew apart in an explosion of blood and bone.
“Down!” called Castellano, and McCray dived for the mud of the bank, taking care to keep his weapon free of the ooze.
A spray of fire plowed through the space he’d occupied a moment before. Bits of grass and soil showered over him as he huddled down.
“Up!”
McCray shifted to a different location and stood up once more, rejoining the fight.
After a few cycles of this, McCray realized the verbal orders directed him alone. The other men moved perfectly without direction, knowing what to do. These special ops marines had trained together for years and knew how to move in a coordinated fashion with an instinct borne of intensive training, movements that McCray needed orders to perform at the proper time. They moved like one body, the synchronised parts of single entity. These were an elite even among elite specops warriors.
Most of the time, during the scant seconds he was ordered up to fire, McCray only managed to hit a single target. The Cretins around him killed two, sometimes three before they dived for cover once more. Their astonishing accuracy, and the way they used constant movement to advantage proved to McCray that they were like demi-gods of war battling mere mortals. Though their small band was severely outnumbered nearly five to one, McCray could see that they were crushing the opposition.
A last Xerxes’s body shattered and the attacking wave of mercs collapsed, unable to overcome the deadly crossfire and the preternatural accuracy of the Cretins. Several survivors tried to crawl away, but even flat on the ground they offered plenty of target area for the sharpshooting marines, until only Death stirred across the bloody field.
McCray slumped into the muddy clay of the bank, exhausted. His head felt heavy and he struggled to hold a coherent thought. The low oxygen of Huralon was taking a toll on him, but it didn’t seem that way for Castellano. He used the break in the action to advantage and signaled with complex hand gestures to the other groups. Shortly, someone ran past carrying teargas grenades from the crashed shuttle. McCray snorted. While his own thoughts were muddy and vague, Castellano was already planning ahead.
Looking to the west he saw one of the marines laying half in the water as bloody waves swirled around the body. Even the very best of warriors could not survive forever. The sheer volume of rounds fired at their tiny band meant some must meet their end here. Even as McCray struggled on hands and knees to catch his breath in the thin air, he knew a larger group of mercenaries formed up around Arcoplex and the cost of defeating that group would be far higher.
Someone placed an oxygen mask over his face and strapped an oxygen tank with sling across his shoulders. He sucked hard on the cool air, slowly feeling the fog lift away from his thoughts. After a couple of minutes, he turned to look over the bloody field again. Some of the Cretins were returning from raiding ammo and oxygen tanks from the bodies of their fallen foes. At least the feeble air of this planet wouldn’t kill them.
The second assault, double the size of the first, began in earnest and without warning. A human wave of mercs burst forth, firing as they ran. McCray returned fire, his face half buried in the lakeside embankment’s churned up grass and dirt. The earthy scents filled his nose while the throaty crack of hypersonic rounds and the screams of the dying assaulted his ears.
Ar least he’d been trained properly, and he fired sparingly, squeezing the trigger only when he found a target. He made certain to fire into the enemy’s clustered groups where his hypersonic bullets penetrated two, sometimes three, targets at once.
The Cretins killed their enemies with a terrifyingly cool professionalism. McCray found a leaker who slipped in close, and he fired, striking his target in the clavicle. The explosion of flesh and blood in the chest cavity ripped away so much bodily material it also decapitated the man.
He realised he must look exactly as unfeeling and cold as the Cretins, but their survival depended on it. Nothing was gained by panic or terror. Any such feelings he had were turned inward and converted into extreme focus upon the task at hand.
A nearby scream from his right told him another of their own had met his end. McCray’s focus found a challenge in that moment. Another friend was gone. He found himself forming a silent prayer to the Emergent Mind that a comrade be taken with gentle hands into the Elysian Fields of the afterlife.
“Down!” called Castellano.
McCray ducked away from his position. The prayer remained unfinished. He had no time for it, and made the next target pay when he rose again.
McCray hurled himself back into the cover of the clay at Castellano’s order, his chest heaving. He had enough oxygen now, but this fast-paced sort of war was like nothing he had ever trained for. On a ship, he had time to think. Here, the human brain moved too slow; only instinct would keep a man alive.
Blood splattered the right side of his face. He turned to see the decapitated body of a marine slide down the bank. McCray couldn’t remember the guy’s name, only that he had an easy smile.
“Up!”
McCray rose up and stared into the eyes of a merc crawling on his belly. His blue eyes looked shocked at McCray’s sudden appearance. McCray was surprised too, but he recovered first, moving scant millimeters to fire quicker. The mercenary exploded, the three-round hypersonic burst ripping through his body from head to anus, showering the green grass with blood and entrails.
“Down!”
More leakers were getting through.The roughly two-hundred mercs were slowly overwhelming the Cretin’s ability to kill them in time. To make things worse, the Xerxes formed a pincer movement to outflank the defenders by spreading their crescent-shaped assault over a wide area. This fu
rther diluted the volume of the Cretins’ fire, who had to turn away from the designated killing field and fire on the flankers.
The counter-move was good, but McCray was relieved to find the special ops professionals knew how to defeat that. Castellano sent runners, crouching low under the cover of the bank, to pass the word with elaborate hand signals to the nearest man of each flank many tens of yards away. They in turn, passed it on to the next. The system worked well considering verbal commands at a distance were impossible above the din of battle. In under a minute, the plan had gone out to everyone. At the critical moment, Castellano raised his arm above the level of the field where all could see, and pumped it. Watchers for his signal passed the signal and all teams tossed out tear gas grenades. The stinging fumes drove the mercenaries back into the middle, back into the crossfire where they began dying quickly.
McCray didn’t know how long the fight went on. His existence became measured in increments of milliseconds, actions of fight or flight. Up. Fire. Down. Move to another position. Up. Fire.
“Ceasefire!” called Castellano.
McCray heard the command, but the word had no meaning to his numbed brain. He leaped back to a firing position, searching for targets, but all he could find were piles of bodies and loose body parts.
“McCray, McCray. Stand down!”
McCray, unable to process anything that meant something other than kill or hide, stared at the major. The man strode quickly over, concern visible on his face through caking of mud. Gently, Castellano peeled his hands away from his weapon.
“It’s okay.” He spoke softly as though soothing a panicked animal. “We broke the wave. You can relax.”
McCray flopped against the churned up clay of the bank. He’d never felt so exhausted in all his life.
“You’re not a bad shot,” said Castellano into the silence. “I’m surprised.”