by Dan Davis
“Don’t do this, sir,” Stirling said. “Don’t throw your life away. We can just have a firefight from here.”
I don’t want to die, he thought, but I died already.
“Every minute we can drag this out is a minute more for the assets to reach the launch site.”
He made his way out of the town toward the hex.
14.
Ram limped down the loose pile of rubble. Snow was already lying on the surface of the tumbled stones and filling the gaps between them. He slipped and jarred his leg, making his head swim as the painkillers were pumped into his system again.
“It’s just pain,” Ram muttered as he advanced over the plain toward the advancing Wayfinder. “It’s just a body.”
“What’s that, sir?”
“Nothing.”
The collaborator came forward, his white robe whipping in the intense wind and the bitter snow whipping into his face. Even so, the man smiled as he stepped closer over the frozen ground.
They drew to a stop.
“You are a big fellow, aren’t you,” the collaborator said, still smiling. His hair was dark and he had a substantial nose and bulging dark eyes.
Ram looked at the Hex arrayed behind him, each team standing ready.
They were bizarre to look on, up close and in person. It was unpleasant and uncanny, and Ram felt an urge to flee or shout at them or to simply start shooting.
You killed millions of my people. You are all my enemies.
“Your ship crashed, didn’t it,” the collaborator said. “We found the wreckage. You came in off-world, didn’t you. How did you do that?”
Ram looked down at him. “What do you want?”
The man smiled. “I’m sorry to see that you hurt your foot. It looks painful.” He held his arms out. “I am here to offer you a very simple deal. You and your, ah, teammates, give yourselves up to us and I will refrain from annihilating the town.”
“How can you do that? How can you kill so many of your own people?”
He frowned. “My own people? Sadly, that is not the case. My own people are those who have embraced the Way of the Engineers. If only they had contacted us when we had asked, they would not find themselves in this position.”
“You’re a traitor.”
“I deny your accusation.”
“You betrayed your race.”
“How can I betray what I never promised? The only oaths I have ever sworn have been to the Masters.”
Ram pointed at the hex soldiers. “Your masters are aliens. That sounds like treachery to me.”
“No, no. They are not the Masters. My brothers here are servants just as I am. Our Masters have opened my eyes to the truth. Your fear is understandable but it is misplaced. Once you come to understand—”
“You understand these squids?”
His smile faltered. “Our honored friends have acquired this planet in the proper legal fashion as commanded by the Masters and have since shown remarkable restraint during their stewardship of it.”
“Restraint?” Ram said, feeling the urge to rage against the little traitor. But something felt wrong.
Ram had come out to speak with the collaborator in order to buy his team extra time to evacuate the assets and withdraw to the west to the launch site.
The collaborator had made his offer and then had allowed Ram to divert the discussion and seemed happy to be so diverted.
“Why are you even…” Ram started and then broke off.
Thoughts rushed through Ram’s mind.
The Mayor had said the Hex had never shown up to a raid before. Perhaps they were watching the whole area, looking for signs and that had brought them.
Or perhaps the raiders had a mole who had contacted the Hex. Perhaps the raiders were in league with the Hex.
Were those raiders actually made up by humans who had embraced the worship of the Orbs or whatever the alien religion was about? If that was true then that meant the raider attack had not in fact been beaten back. The raiders might not have fled at the sight of the Hex firepower after all and even the destruction of the tank might have been choreographed.
Even if that was the case, it seemed clear that the collaborator and the hex soldiers were stalling for time. They were waiting for something.
More Hex forces could be on the way.
“Sergeant,” Ram said on the team channel, so that the traitor could not hear him. “I think he’s just trying to distract me. Trying to waste my time. Check the flanks and rear, especially the skies. We might find more hex—”
“Sir!” Fury said. “Looks like humans in the trees in the south. Hex, too.”
“Say again, Fury,” Stirling said. “You said hex and humans?”
The traitor’s smile had long turned to a sneer as he backed away slowly, still looking at Ram.
“Destroy the aircraft,” Ram said. “Fire!”
The traitor turned to run and Ram strode forward two steps and grabbed him, wrapping him tight with one arm while he brought up his sidearm and fired at the nearest Hex shoulders.
In that moment, Stirling’s AP rounds slammed into the aircraft on the left, ripping into one of the engines.
In front of him, Flores’ grenades exploded against the hull. On the right, Fury’s first AP round ripped right through the aircraft’s engine. The Hex skittered away from the explosions and incoming rounds and Ram turned, holding the traitor under his arm, and ran back toward the town wall.
Up on the walls and towers, his own team members and the armed townsfolk fired, blasting away at the aliens and their aircraft.
Blasts shook the air behind him and due to his pace, pain in his ankle shot through his entire body and he almost fell. The suit hit him with more doses of painkillers and what seemed like a massive dose of stimulants and he ran all the faster.
A bolt of white plasma flashed by him, followed by a stream of more. Ram changed direction and rushed for the gate, ducking through the twisted hole just as a stream of plasma smashed into the steel by his head. When he was inside, he kept moving.
“Cooper?” Ram said, breathing hard and speaking through gritted teeth.
“Just heading out, sir,” he replied.
“Everybody to fall back to the truck.”
“Still got ten targets in the east. No, nine.”
“Pull back,” Ram growled. “We’re going to fight our way through.”
“They’re fast,” Flores snapped, shooting as fast as she could. “Jesus. They’re so goddamn fast.”
“Come on, Flores,” Stirling shouted. “Cease fire and pull back.”
They made their way through the town. It was deserted. All of the townsfolk not shooting from the walls were now down in the emergency shelters beneath their houses or the communal bunkers or making their way into Outpost Omega.
It was weirdly quiet in the sheltered spaces between the houses and public buildings, with snow swirling in vortices down the allies and across the bare gardens. The church door flapped open and banged in the wind.
“Enemies on the walls,” Flores said and Ram caught a glimpse of an enormous hex charging into a group of townsfolk. They shot at it from point-blank range but it moved like lightning, its murderous legs whipping through the air as it shredded the people defending their home.
“Don’t stop,” Ram growled, limping as quickly as he could.
“Sir?” Fury said, her voice juddering as she ran. “Hex inside the walls.”
“Keep moving.”
The collaborator squirmed frantically under his arm so Ram cracked him on the skull with the butt of his sidearm and the man fell limp.
“We’re here.”
When he reached the truck, Ram tossed the unconscious traitor into the rear of the trailer and his skull bounced on the steel flatbed with a crunch. “Restrain him!” Ram commanded the doctor. “He is a Hex agent and a traitor.”
It was R1 who moved to obey while Henry and the doctor simply gaped from where they crouched in the steel box at
the front of the trailer behind the cab.
Stirling pointed at a group of men approaching. “Get out of here!” he said to them.
“Mayor Fraser?” Ram cried out. “I thought you were evacuating your people to the outpost?”
“We are,” Fraser shouted as they reached the trailer. “But we’re here to help you make your rendezvous.”
Ram shook his head. “But your families, you need to look—”
“We know how important this is. Everyone here volunteered.” Fraser’s expression was grim. He knew what he was getting into. “Come on.”
The mayor and half his men climbed onto three quad bikes and into two small half-tracks and pulled up to the huge garage doors while the other half unbolted them.
While they did so, Ram’s team took positions around the truck with their weapons trained on the sky back at the town, ready for the hex soldiers to come screaming down at them.
“Your foot, sir?” Stirling asked. His heart rate was dangerously high.
“Can’t walk much further,” Ram admitted, his head swimming from the drugs. “It’s shredded.”
“You’ll have to sit on the trailer,” Stirling said. “Can still shoot, right?”
“Open the doors,” Ram ordered and pulled himself up onto the rear.
The hidden exit to the underground garage opened, the two doors in the ground hinging apart. The smaller vehicles made their way out first, followed the truck which whirred as it heaved the trailer up and out.
Red rolled behind it and Stirling, Flores, and Fury jogged up.
Firing was furious on the walls and inside the town. Shouts of anger and pain echoed through the houses as they left the townsfolk to their fate. Ram glanced at Mayor Fraser in the passenger seat of the wheeled vehicle. His face was a mask of anguish as he reloaded his rifle.
The truck strained to accelerate, its tracks crunching as they struggled for purchase on the bare icy ground.
“Here they come,” Fury said and fired a shot from her rife.
The hex soldiers were supported by humans, also advancing and shooting at them from the tree line, but the aliens soon left them behind, their legs working like a cluster of thin pistons in some nightmarish machine.
Cooper opened the passenger side door of the cab and fired into the trees as the hex emerged, skittering closer and shooting their alien rifles. The incoming fire tore up the ground and flashed by them overhead.
“Get on,” Ram ordered his men as he himself turned to fire at the hex coming behind them from the garage doors before they could close again.
Ram’s team climbed into position on the flatbed and opened fire. All but Red, who rolled beside the truck, shooting relentlessly with both of his weapons as he did so.
The passengers riding on the rear of the quad bikes fired their rifles at the advancing enemy, as did those in the other vehicles.
“Floor it!” Ram shouted. “Cooper, tell him to go as fast as he can.”
“This is the vehicle’s top speed,” Cooper said, desperation in his voice.
The snow swirled in the half-light with the Hex weapons blasting at them. One of the quad bikes was hit in a blast of white fire, throwing down the driver and both passengers out onto the ground. Another stream of enemy fire tore them to pieces where they lay.
From the other flank, two hex rifles blasted toward the trailer. They clipped the steel frame Cooper and the others had welded to protect the assets, rocked the entire trailer, and half-melted the steel where it hit.
Ram shot back at the source of the incoming fire, not knowing if he hit anything.
“Shit,” Ram muttered. “Much more of that and we’ll lose the asset.”
It was darker than Ram had expected. Night was falling slowly but it was falling and blackness filled the trees. The sky in the east was already dark. The sunset ahead of them was now beyond the horizon, turning the snow-filled clouds ever grayer.
Gradually, the truck picked up speed and the hex soldiers could not keep pace. They were still coming, and random fire came arcing in from a distance, but Ram started to believe they had a chance of making it.
“How are we doing?” he asked on the team channel.
They were all low on ammo and Flores had been hit by shrapnel or by stones at some point and her suit had suffered damage. All of them showed very high levels of epinephrine and other neurotransmitters and hormones and their heart rates were sky high. All to be expected but Stirling’s was far higher than it should have been and was the only one of his team showing a stress response rated red by his team management system, rather than the orange of everyone else.
Ram’s own stats showed his injury was quite serious and that he was only going to have a short while before his blood loss and the uncontrollable pain would severely degrade his mental performance. Then again, he would only have a short while before the mission was over, whichever way it went.
“Fraser?” Ram shouted, his voice amplified. “You okay? Your people okay?”
Fraser turned from his seat on the ATV and gave him a thumbs up. His face was thunder. For him and for his men, whatever happened this was likely to be a one-way trip.
“This is it,” Cooper shouted.
Ram checked his AugHud. The mission objective icon was flashing, counting down the meters before they reached the checkpoint.
They passed the message to Fraser and his men.
“Coming up. Just here. This is the place. Hold them off.”
The truck stopped and they jumped out behind it, leaving the assets huddled unseen in their steel box for the moment. His men took up positions around the vehicles, their weapons up and out. His team’s night vision was excellent but even the best image intensifiers could not see all the way to the distant tree line on either flank and the grainy landscape faded to blackness when looking back toward the distant town.
As far as Ram could tell, the checkpoint zone was nothing but another treeless stretch of landscape. The woods were some way off now and the line of mountains jet black on the dark gray horizon. But otherwise there was nothing there but scrub and patches of grass on thin soil and uneven rough ground with clusters of stones here and there.
“You sure this is it?” Ram asked, checking his Hud again.
Cooper was on his knees twenty meters away, scraping away at the earth. “This is it. It’s right here, sir.”
“Hurry up, Cooper,” Stirling muttered.
“Command sent,” Cooper replied. A dull thud pounded the earth at their feet and then the rocks all around vibrated. Cooper laughed. “Doors are opening now.”
The ground split as the huge doors hinged open, revealing a passage below illuminated by a faint red glow.
“Well done, Cooper,” Ram said. “Alright, everyone. This is it!”
Cooper stood and turned. The faint lights inside his helmet showed the grin on his face as he spoke. “Okay, so once inside, we follow the corridor to the launch vehicle which is powering up already but then the launch preparations will take another—”
A blast of bright plasma came out of the sky at a low angle, blazing through the night sky like a meteor.
The blast smashed into Cooper and incinerated him in an instant, burning through his armor and smashing his body to pieces upon the burned ground by the open doors.
15.
Ram turned aimed into the sky and fired a burst where the fire that killed Cooper had come from, as did the rest of his team.
“Aircraft, there!” Fury said, sighting down her scope with the long barrel of her rifle pivoting up and tracking the aircraft Ram could not. She fired. “Bastard. He’s going, circling away.” She fired again and cursed as she missed once more.
“Everybody into the tunnel,” Ram said, seeing contacts pinging up on his Hud as the hex soldiers finally caught up with them. Ram limped to the trailer and leaned into the box. “Henry, Monash, R1, get out of there now and into the tunnel. Go!”
Mayor Fraser and his men took positions behind their vehicles
and fired at the advancing hex while the massive form of Henry and the tiny Doctor Monash and R1 disappeared into the open hatch.
Small arms plasma fire burst all around them. Ram dragged the unconscious collaborator from the trailer and tossed him down beside the entrance. He was not certain the man was alive and the hex clearly cared nothing for his survival, as Ram had half-hoped but perhaps he would have some intelligence value.
The Hex rushed forward just as the aircraft above came back and fired again and again. Incoming fire lit up the air and ground all around them, splashing murderous white plasma. Steam rose from the melted ice and snow.
Two of the townsfolk were hit in the same burst, killing them immediately and destroying their ATV.
Stirling made for the gear bags stowed on the back of the trailer, slapped in a drum of AP rounds and, bracing himself against the vehicle, aimed a burst at the craft overhead. He cursed as he jogged further up toward the cab and had not taken more than a couple of steps when two white streaks flashed down and smashed into the rear of the trailer, destroying it and sending the whole vehicle over into a twisted, smoking mess. Stirling fell back from the burning wreckage, still shooting.
“Got you, you bastard,” Fury said and fired. A flash of blue illuminated the sky for a moment and the aircraft rolled away at speed, heading for the trees.
“You hit it?” Ram shouted.
“Clipped an engine,” Fury said, turning to fire at the alien soldiers on the ground.
Warnings flashed and Ram turned to fire at the contacts indicated.
It was too late.
Two of the surviving Hex rushed forward out of the darkness, their legs whipping down at Flores. Both swarmed her as she fired, opening up on one point blank with her heavy weapon, shredding his armor and tearing through its carapace and killing it dead. The body fell beside her, almost crushing her but she did not move and instead turned to shoot the next target.
Instead, the other hex stabbed Flores with its two razor-sharp claws, cutting through her suit faster than Ram could even see. Stirling fired, hitting the alien and driving it away but it was too late.