by Isaac Stone
Now I had to figure out what to do with the men I had in place. We hadn’t lost that many. There were plenty of Invader casualties in the backfield and we had done rather well at the mouth of the caves, but the Invaders could fix that quick when they activated those portals. We’d be overwhelmed in moments the first time those gates opened. I had to come up with something better than just rushing in there all balls and bayonets style. Why oh why did those Solar jokers put a convicted bank robber in command down here?
TEN
The loss of Daphne hit me very hard. First, I’d seen Tara killed from the top of a plateau and now I saw the only other woman I’d really spent any time with get smoked by a missile attack. The sense of watching it take place and not being able to do anything was beyond frustration. At least the Force would inform her family. Daphne didn’t have some strange religious group to do it for her.
The shadows grew long as the day continued. I knew the Invaders would try another skirmish soon. It wasn’t like them to sit and wait it out. Even with the overwhelming power behind the portal they’d built in the cave, they would try something else on the other side of the forest.
It reminded me of the gangs I used to see in the old building. No matter what turf they held, there was always another space they wanted to control. The cops would come in and push them out from time to time, but they wanted their space in the building. It wasn’t hard to read the marks on the walls and know which group controlled which section. You had to know when to get out of the way when they’d go at it. No one wanted to be caught in the crossfire of plasma bolts. I’d seen men fried on the spot for walking into the wrong territory. It was another thing my mother never wanted to talk about around me. That and who my real father was.
As I got older, the relationship between my mother and me became much worse. I hardly went to school when I could avoid it. She would scream at me every other day and I’d try to ignore her. I had sisters at home and she yelled at me in front of them every chance she had. I was useless, going to hell, bound for jail and worse. I told her once that hell couldn’t be worse than living with her and had a pan thrown at me.
I suppose her own story was as bad as or worse than my own. She never knew either of her parents and grew up in some kind of state home. She was with quite a few men after leaving the home. Any one of scores of men could be my father, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t the only young man in my building that didn’t have a father at home. Most of the older men I knew about stayed down at the ground level and spent their days dreaming about the money they would never have. I didn’t want to be like them, which is why I picked my friends with such care.
Anyone I hung out with had to have some kind of skill I could use later. It was how I put together my first target-of-opportunity gang and it got me through some tight spots. After mom ran off with the other kids there wasn’t much else I could do.
“Captain,” a voice said over my headpiece. “They’re on the move again. More kaiju.” I dropped down my helmet screen and looked at what my forward observer saw.
The kaiju and stalkers were moving through the forest in our direction. I ordered the rear columns rushed to the front, and it was finally time to have a proper fight over these caves.
Thank God, our other dinosaurs were in place and ready to take on the latest thrust. As I had speculated, the stalkers wouldn’t sit still and wait this one out. Whoever commanded the ground troops would send them against us and I was right.
I caught up to Hamid just as the first dino mech clashed with kaiju. The Invader kaiju fired off three missiles at our big guy, but all of them were turned into minor impacts by his armor. I could see the flames rise from the ground all around the dino mech, and it seemed not to notice. I didn’t worry much about a forest fire as this was a rainy season and the ground was drenched.
“I’m on him,” our dinosaur’s rider radioed to me the moment his mount swung into action. He immediately fired his entire complement of missiles at the kaiju.
The missile struck the nightmare in the midsection and exploded. The armor piercing shell blew open the lower section, but not enough to kill the beast. It was seriously wounded, but could still walk. In this case, the kaiju began to smash the ground beneath it and ignore everything as it ran at us in pain.
The kaiju. It was running straight at our squad. At full speed.
To be in the front of a rampaging alien battle monster is to know more fear than ten hells. There is nothing quite as horrifying as watching the ground before you torn apart as a beast the size of a double decker hover bus charges at you.
I gave the only command that made sense. “Scatter!” I screamed into the headset. “Get out of its way!” I jumped to one side with Hamid as we pulled two Raptors each with us.
Trees were uprooted as the dying kaiju screamed past us. I saw one tree fall from the sky and pin Hamid down as the beast continued on its way.
I ran to Hamid with the men and looked at him. He was still conscious, but the pain was intense in his face. We managed to roll off the tree from his leg. I slapped an opiate patch on his arm. His face seemed to calm down a bit. We needed to make sure he wouldn’t go into shock.
“Get him to the medic station!” I ordered the Raptors before scooping up my plasma rifle and leaping back into the fray.
ELEVEN
The battle was raging once again. There was no movement yet inside the caves. Then I ran to the nearest post and found three soldiers firing wildly at an armored dinosaur that faced off with one of ours. Most of their bolts were being deflected into trees and the underbrush.
“Concentrate on the stalker support units!” I yelled at them. “You’re wasting your time!” They turned and looked at me.
“But we need to stop that thing!” one young man yelled back. “Sir!”
“You won’t do it with those low grade rifles,” I explained to them. “They’re designed to take out infantry. You might as well try to dig yourself out of a mountainside with a spoon!”
“I’ve got a railgun!” a new voice called to my right. Another Raptor appeared with one of the long rifles we’d used on Chaos.
“I turned to him. “Get over here, we need it now!” I yelled at him. He ran directly up to me.
The two armored titans were locked in combat with the riders of each desperately trying to control them. Tons of metal and flesh were ripped away in one of the bloodiest spectacles I’d ever witnessed. That’s when I realized that our dino mech pilot’s pod was sheared in half, and the pilot’s guts were streaming out. No wonder the dino mech wasn’t using its weapon pods.
The marine with the railgun dropped to one knee and sighted his weapon on the two beasts that were locked in combat. “I can’t get a good bead on it,” he exclaimed to me. “There isn’t enough room between the two!”
I walked over to him and looked down. “Give them a chance to separate,” I told him. “You only have one shot and don’t waste it.”
He concentrated through the site on the gun. “Dammit, they’re too close…wait! They’re far enough apart! I have a good target!” He squeezed the trigger and the railgun fired its projectile.
I looked up at the two creatures, now momentarily separated, and watched the head of the Invader kaiju turn red. The railgun had found its target. He’d managed to strike it right in the helmet.
The magnetic-driven shell managed to rip through the armor and into the alien beast. I watched it fall over in slow motion as our big lizard stepped back and stumbled. Two more giant steps and it fell over backwards into the forest, the wounds sustained in the fighting to much for it. The ground shook where the kaiju crashed and lay still. Now there were two less giant combatants on the field, a bad loss for both sides.
“Bad news, Captain,” a voice cut in on my headset over one of the many Raptor channels. That big dinosaur we brought with us is dead. The one you called Terry. He ended up getting overwhelmed by stalker small arms fire while hunting around on his own.”
Someh
ow, I wasn’t surprised. Terry didn’t have a rider once Daphne’s pod was blown off his back. With no one to direct his movements, he’d walked right into a large contingent of Invaders with more than enough firepower to bring him down. They turned their laser cannons on him and burned through his armor before he could respond. The battle dinosaurs were conditioned to respond to a human handler and couldn’t function much on their own.
I knew plenty of men under me fell dead from laser and impact fire, but Daphne and Terry were ones I took personally.
TWELVE
We managed to push them back by evening and there were no further intrusions by the Invaders. The entire eastern side of the Island was under our control. I gave the order to bring the feedstock in for the hungry dinosaurs. The transport surfaced a few hundred yards from the beach and drove up it to unload the goats it carried. I wish there was a means to make those dinosaurs eat their food some way other than alive, but the biologists who brought the species back didn’t know another way to do it.
I spent the evening sending reports to Orbital and looking over the position of Invader troops near us. They’d pulled back. They must be waiting for the portal to open. Once they opened the gate, an entire army could fly out of it and we’d be right in its path. If I could at least take control of the gate, we could bottle up anything they sent out of it. All I would have to do would be to place enough firepower at entrance of the cave and shoot into the jump gate once it opened. It didn’t matter how big the army was on the other side, I was confident we could hold them off long enough for the Force to bomb it from orbit.
“We have to let the enemy come to us,” I explained to Hamid as we cleaned and re-loaded our rifles. “Everyone wants to charge them down and annihilate them, but we need to let them do the work. Most of the time the stalkers rush at every target because if they don’t their officers will explode them in those suits. I can’t disrupt their transmissions because I don’t have the system they use. However, I can give them a target they won’t be able to resist and take advantage of their aggression.”
I spent the next hour changing everything. My plan was based on my suspicion they would rush us again as soon as they regrouped. When they did, I would be ready and create a trap they couldn’t resist. I’d fought the stalkers enough times to know they were predictable once you understood them. The only thing I wasn’t sure about was the portals inside the caves. Everything depended on them not being in operation. If they opened those gates at any time, we would be caught between the Invaders in front of us and another army swarming in the rear. My plan was to invite them to do just that.
I could hear the sounds of the Invaders bringing their kaiju up into formation. So much for David’s intel on there just being five of them, the guy was always a crook, charming, but a crook. It was just as I planned. The invaders were on a tight timetable, and knew they couldn’t hold back and would be trying to find some way to attack before we were ready. Except this time, the entire brigade was prepared.
The images from Orbital were not robust enough to let me know where they were located under the tree cover. I didn’t care because we had the scouts out there watching as they came closer. I’d sent Dave out there with a few of the new guys who were fast on their feet. They sent me images and descriptions on what was coming our way. It was just as I expected.
I had the inexperienced Raptors out front with the instructions not to engage unless they were fired upon. The dinosaurs, as we’d planned, were in the edges of our formation. The Invaders, as they always did, placed their kaiju right up in the middle.
“Attention center line,” I let the inexperienced guys know. “Now is the time you get to shorten your sentence.” I knew most of them were, like me, volunteers from prisons who wanted a way to reduce their time.
“When they come it will be from the jungle and the caves, but the worst of them will be from the caves. They will have the numerical advantage, but we have a good spot here, and if we hold our ground patiently this whole area will be our very own killbox. I want everyone to advance fifteen paces to the front,” I instructed them. “The trees thin out at that point and they’ll see you. When they start shooting, fall back and bring them to the pain.”
THIRTEEN
It happened just as I planned. The Invaders poured out of the caves in vast numbers just as their modest forces from the jungle began to emerge. They had their kaiju up front and they began to charge the moment our men were spotted. Our Raptors on the ground turned and ran back to the rally point we’d briefed them about earlier in the day. Under the cover of trees, the dinosaurs couldn’t use their missiles with any degree of accuracy. They were bogged down by the brush. A few of them did fire off some rockets at our side, but they went wild and burned the ground uselessly.
My helmet screen showed the feed from the NCO’s. I saw the young Raptors run back to their point, just as I’d planned. A few of them turned and fired their plasma rifles for effect at the stalkers that advanced, just to make them think it was a panic.
“I’d say ninety percent have returned to point,” Said told me from his viewpoint. He still kept one eye on the caves. Although the dinosaur guarding it was awake, it hadn’t moved from its place.
“Left and right flank,” I ordered, “close in and hit them with everything you have!”
I unleashed our side the moment all the front line troops reached the rally point.
The two groups I had stationed to the sides began to move into the direction of the Invader column. It had chased our center back to the rally point. I watched as the Raptors, who were kept behind in the forest, emerged from the trees and opened up on them. Plasma bolts lit up the air as they found their green suited targets. They tore them apart. Before the Invaders knew what they were up against, the two wings I’d left for them began to close in and hammer away at the stalkers. I ordered the new guys who had let them chase their group back to the rally point to turn around and become the anvil. As the Raptors on the sides advanced, the ones in the center held their ground and blocked any forward escape.
I divided my time between firing into the thick of the enemy ranks and watching the video feeds as the Raptors from the rear advanced into the condensed column the Invaders had sent at us. They fired with precision, just the way they were trained to do it. The big scary army from space invaders emerged from the cave into a brutal kill zone. It was a gruesome thing to watch as their metal suits fell apart and the Invaders were roasted on the inside.
But it wasn’t enough. There were more Invaders in the jungles around us than I thought. The Invader officers managed to turn around part of one phalanx and send it back at my men. I watched in horror as one of the marines on my side went down from a condensed spurt of impact shells.
By now, our dinosaurs had engaged their kaiju, and an epic clash of the titans was underway. A sixty-foot lizard was terrifying all by itself and when you added a bunch of heavy duty firepower you had one hell of a living war machine. I watched as one of our dinosaurs swept a clearing with its tail and sent the Invader forces on the ground high into the air. Another one of our dinosaurs slammed hard into a kaiju from the other side and grounded it, blasting its head off at point blank range with an arc cannon. I think that dino mech was actually Shiva, one of the originals from our time on the training asteroid.
I blasted a stalker of its feet and then watched as one rider tried to spin his green lizard around to face a threat from a kaiju that was coming up behind it. Before the dino mech could react fast enough, the kaiju clamped its jaws down on the shoulder of the great reptile. The wounded dinosaur cried out with a shriek that could be heard for miles as the kaiju and dinosaur grappled messily.
I was worried that this was the end of Shiva, one of the few other dino mechs with as much combat experience as our dear departed Terry, but I needn’t have been concerned.
At the behest of the rider, the arc cannon mounted to the dinosaur’s side whipped up and unloaded an entire chain of armor piecing she
lls. I watched as they ripped into the kaiju.
Our dinosaur was saved and back in the fight.
Off to one side I could see the Invader officer guide his men into position. As far as I knew, the standard Invader procedure was to still push them in mass toward the objective and detonate a suit bomb on any who tried to flee. They didn’t mark their suits with much difference, but by now, I could tell who the officers were.
So could Flash. He still had plenty of charge in his rifle when I found him.
“You see this stalker?” I said to him while flashing up a picture of the officer on his helmet screen. “He’s the one in charge. Can you get him at your range?”
“Won’t be no trouble bossman,” he sent back. “Captain.” Low and behold, rank did have its privileges.
In my screen, I watched as the officer was blasted apart by three close bolts from Flash. As I expected, the Invader squad under his control began to scatter. There was no longer any reason to take orders since he couldn’t do anything to them. When they scattered and got themselves mowed down, I began to look for more officers as I knew there had to be plenty out there.
FOURTEEN
I spent the rest of the battle using my snipers to take out the Invader officers. Each time they would go down, the stalkers under them would break rank and fail to keep up enough continuous fire to prevent squads of Raptors to cut them down with brutal bayonet charges. We would probably run out of ammo before they ran out of soldiers, but by god we were giving them hell. Soon enough there weren’t any more stalkers coming out of those caves, and what forces they had in the jungles had either died or disengaged. All of the kaiju were dead too, and had died bringing down all of our dino mechs save a terribly wounded Shiva.