Gateway War

by Jack Colrain

  “Too clever by at least three quarters,” Lizzie agreed.

  It was hard to count the numbers of Gresians swarming out across rooftops and visible through the barricade or between buildings, but Daniel thought it looked like there might be a hundred of them. “Jesus H. Christ, this isn’t half a company; this is the whole damn town.”

  “Lieutenant West,” Lieutenant Caine’s voice came over the radio. “Thanks for the assist. If I was in a downed shuttle, I’d be pleased by your concern. Goodbye.”

  Sixteen

  There were Gresians on the rooftops of the barn-like warehouse structures and behind carefully-placed gaps in the blockade, and plasma bolts quickly began to rain down on the Super-Bradleys. Sergeant Stewart opened fire on the attackers on the roof to his left, but had barely gotten off a couple of shots before a Gresian RPG round streaked down at him.

  The Big Mike armor was built to take it, but the ground in front of him was not, and that’s where the round exploded in a golden flash, blasting a crater out of the stone garden. The upblast caught the Big Mike’s legs, sending Stewart flying sideways to crash to the ground.

  “RPG, two o’clock, forty meters,” Daniel snapped out to Doug Beswick and Mili Svoboda in the two turrets. Beswick was already firing, the shells exploding against the barricade and blasting chunks of obsidian alloy from the welded vehicles.

  Stewart was already back on his feet and shooting while Palmer was turning his APC around, plasma bursts blazing and writhing across the hull every time a strand of the Gresians’ wire coils touched it. “What the fuck is this shit?” he demanded. “We lose some power every time we touch it.”

  Daniel wished he had an answer, but all he could say was “Try shooting it.”

  Trap Two’s turret cannon boomed as Svoboda obliged, but the vehicle was too close to the wire and only blew another pothole in the ground beyond it. “I’ll drag it off,” Stewart suggested, running for the wire.

  Hope shouted, “Belay that!” just before the Big Mike could grab the highly charged wire coil. “It’s some kind of EMP effect. It will drain your armor’s power!”

  Both APC turrets were now firing, but so were plenty of Gresians. One fell right in front of Daniel’s viewport, and he was surprised to see that the felinoid creature was wearing some kind of jumpsuit, but no armor or Exo-suit equivalent. For a moment, he thought perhaps the creature was simply off-duty, and then he noticed that he didn’t see any of the mirrored faceplates he had seen on Gresians before—not with any of the quick glimpses of fanged, snarling faces he got between shots. Meanwhile, the Gresian plasma rifle fire was still pouring into the APCs, and while none of it was getting through the dwarf star alloy armor, it was getting uncomfortably warm inside the vehicle.

  Stewart fired a few more rounds through the gaps in the barricade, as he had better targeting and accuracy, while the turret gunners laid down fire on the roofs. Already, the roof of one building was sagging and full of holes; the Gresians could be seen backing away as they fired.

  Stewart suddenly took a short but speedy run at the EMP wire, and he leapt over it. Now free of the killing zone the Gresians had set up, he used the mechanized suit’s strength to tear a middling-sized tree out of the ground. The Gresians must have realized what he was about to do at the same time as Daniel did, though they must have felt the opposite of Daniel’s sudden elation, because they switched to concentrating their fire on the Big Mike. It was too late, though, and he was too quick and mobile, dodging the shots with surprising ease.

  Another Gresian RPG round flashed past Daniel’s viewport toward the Big Mike, but missed, the round exploding against a tower beyond it, wreathing it in smoke. Stewart leapt at the wire, swinging the tree, and caught it dead center. The coruscating wire coils snapped around the tree trunk and then away, clattering and sparking into a couple of other treetops which immediately began smolder.

  Palmer didn’t waste any time getting Trap Two into gear, reversing hurriedly out of the kill-zone, and—though Daniel knew it wasn’t what the military would have wanted him to think or feel—his immediate relief was over the fact that Palmer was taking Hope out of imminent danger.

  Bailey suddenly jerked forward in his seat with a yelp. “This wall is fucking burning!” Daniel had noticed it getting hot in the APC, and now that his vehicle was the one still in the plasma rifle crossfire, it was soaking up ever more plasma fire. He touched his fingertips to the ceiling and instantly pulled them back in agony, his hand spasming, as the metal felt as if it was red hot. Now he remembered what Cole and Stewart had said about the dwarf star armor: It would keep shots out, yeah, but it would also heat up quick and cook the occupants.

  “Fuck that,” Daniel muttered to himself as Torres kicked the APC into a spin on the spot and set off after Stewart and Trap Two.

  “What’s the plan, Daniel?” Hope asked. “Do we clear this area?”

  Daniel felt the burn in his head that urged him to do exactly that. These creatures ought to be killed for their backstabbing trap, but…. He had a mission to complete, and didn’t want to get bogged down. And the Gresians here would surely die anyway when the mission was done. “No,” he said. “We leave this shit-show behind and do what we came here to do.”

  “That’s what I hoped you’d say.”

  The two APCs were still rolling, but Daniel could see Gresians running along parallel streets, catching glimpses of them between building. “If they let us—” he grumbled.

  Without warning, the wall of the closest barn burst outward in a cloud of dust and shards. A leviathan lumbered unsteadily out of the destruction like a chick tumbling from an eggshell. It had a sloping front like the APC Daniel was in, but was much larger, and heavily armed with a giant plasma cannon. Rippling skirts protected the underside as it floated menacingly above the ground while the flattened, diamond-shaped turret narrowed to a small square at the front. The fiddly details were lost to Daniel, though, because his eyes had developed a horrible fixation on the biggest gun he had ever seen. It was stretched out from that narrow front of the turret, and seemed to be pointed right between his eyes. “Holy shit,” he breathed, in a very small voice in case it heard him. “What in the actual fuck is that? Is that a tank?”

  “Looks like a bloody tank to me, mate,” Beswick whispered back.

  “Yeah,” Lizzie agreed, leaning against Beswick’s legs as Torres hurriedly threw the APC into reverse. “We might be screwed.” She grinned at Daniel and added, “Unless, you know, you do something about it and kill them first.”

  “If someone’s gonna kill me,” Daniel said, switching places with Beswick in Trap One’s turret, “I want the bastard to feel it was more trouble than it was worth, not enjoy it. You got a problem with that?”

  “Only with the getting-killed part,” Kinsella said plaintively.

  “What’s the matter—you wanna live forever?”

  “I dunno yet,” said Kinsella. “Ask me again in five hundred years.”

  Daniel laughed, the first genuine sound of mirth he had had on this planet. Well, it was early days yet. “Oh hell. We better stay alive then!” he quipped. With that, Daniel fired the APC’s gun. The shell hit the Gresian tank square-on, and the blast momentarily blotted out all view of it. “Yippee-ki-a...” Daniel’s elated voice died as the smoke and dust cleared. Though a few flames licked ineffectually at its hull, the Gresian tank shook itself free of the remains of the wall and turned its turret to aim at them again. “Crap.”

  Torres pushed and pulled at the steering levers frantically. “I hate driving stick-shift; you know that, right?” The APC lurched and turned, then darted backwards just as the Gresian tank fired. There was a bone-shaking crash like being in an earthquake, and Daniel thought the ceiling was falling in, though the shell explosion came from somewhere off to the right. He realized that Torres had reversed into a building, chunks of which had collapsed on top of them.

  “Trap Two, Sergeant Stewart,” Daniel called over comms. “Kill that fu
cker!”

  “The Gresians are weaker at the back of the skull,” Hope reminded him. “Maybe that happens in their mechanized armor, too.”

  Of course, there was no real reason to assume that was the case, but Daniel decided that was no reason not to try. Sergeant Stewart’s armored Big Mike suit loped past, his heavier railguns pummeling the tank while Hope’s APC turned into a gap under a snake-like treehouse to try and get a better shot at the rear of the tank.

  “Nothing ventured,” Daniel said, even as Trap Two fired. An explosion wrapped around the back of the tank turret, and it rocked slightly, but then it merely fired again. Another shell burst in the place where Trap One had been as Bella Torres sent it careening through a squat house. The Gresian hover-tank whipped its turret around to aim at Trap Two, but Stewart was there in his Big Mike, the powered armor catching the plasma cannon’s barrel in both hands and digging his heels into the ground to try to stop it getting a bearing on Hope’s APC.

  The Big Mike was strong, but not strong enough, and the Gresian tank spun around with a strange and massive agility, sweeping Stewart’s legs out from under him. He crashed to the ground and the hover-tank whined over him. “Jesus!” Stewart exclaimed as the tank swept down the next street. The air or energy cushion under it had spared Stewart, Daniel knew; if the tank had had wheels or tracks, it would surely have crushed him.

  “Where are we going?” Torres asked.

  “To find Hope,” Daniel said cheerily. He got the terrifying impression that he was actually enjoying this in some way. “And then any other Gresian tanks.”

  “Others?” everybody in the APC exclaimed.

  “Trust me. We don’t really want to get bogged down in a lot of engagements, but we don’t want the ones who’ve already seen us chasing us and harrying us either. It’ll be more time-effective to deal with them first while we can maybe try to call on air cover if shit goes south, and hope to hell that some’s available. So, trust me and hope I judge this right.” The APC slammed through another wall, cutting across the path of a new and different Gresian vehicle.

  It was a hover-vehicle, too, but wider and with no turret. Rather, it was some kind of troop transport, already disgorging infantry in blue and gray armor. The hover-tank was coming up behind that, and its gunner fired instinctively. Torres, however, had judged things perfectly. The shot from the plasma cannon hit the rear of the Gresian assault transport, which was jerked sideways by the blast. In flames, and with its crew not knowing from where they were being fired upon, it looked for a target to return fire upon. Daniel joined in pounding the tank.

  The front armor was strong enough to not allow a breach, and Hope called, “The tower!” Daniel couldn’t see where Trap Two was, but knew Hope must be able to see his vehicle because he saw that the tank they were fighting had indeed backed into the corner of a tower with some kind of soaring spire. Daniel fired at the tower’s base, and other shells from the out-of-sight Trap Two did likewise.

  Hi-ex rounds burst in rapid succession against the base of the tower. Smoke and dust billowed up around it like exhaust from a rocket launch, but the spire toppled sideways rather than rising into the air. It chopped down across the tank with an indescribable noise, and Daniel wondered if the tank could have survived even that. At the very least, it had been gouged into the ground, unable to hover or move because of the weight of the fallen structure.

  Out of the viewport, Daniel could see the visible part of the enemy tank’s turret attempt to turn its gun on them. There was too much weight resting on the front deck, however, and the barrel couldn’t shift it aside. The tank’s engine howled and whined as it started trying to pull itself free of the collapsed tower. That was when Stewart, in his mechanized suit, leapt in from the side, firing at the remaining Gresians and ripping a section of skirt from the side of the hover-tank’s hull. An actinic blue glow was revealed, and Stewart shouted, “This is its hover-engine! I saw it when it ran over me.”

  “Aim for that glow,” Daniel passed along to Svoboda in Trap Two as he fired, the rounds cracking against the Gresian tank’s side armor and sending smashed pieces of it flying away. He fired again, this time clipping the glowing engine on the underside. Blue fire engulfed the hover-tank and it sagged to the ground, falling silent.

  “They ain’t going nowhere now,” Stewart confirmed.

  “Good.” Bella Torres gunned the APC’s engine and reversed out of the area. Through the viewport, Daniel could see the driver’s hatch of the Gresian tank—the only hatch still free—open, and Gresians start to emerge. They looked very unsteady on their feet, and it was obvious that they were in no condition to fight anymore.

  Daniel and his troops opened fire through the APC’s gun-ports anyway, skewering the Gresian soldiers with railgun bolts.

  The second Gresian vehicle, the transport, was now burning merrily, and the tall aliens were jumping from that, too. Daniel would have given a bottle of single-malt Scotch to eavesdrop on what the two crews would have to say to each other in hell as they were gunned down also.

  Then there came a series of explosions from the far side of the tower, and two more Gresian tanks slid in to either side of Daniel’s field of vision, trying to outflank his troops. “It never rains but it pours,” he muttered. He glanced at the APC’s instrument panel, tuning in a readout that would show the location of Trap Two. The other APC was apparently circling the town a few hundred meters north, which would take it into the flank of one of the newly-arriving tanks. ‘Hope,’ he thought, figuring it would be harder for the Gresians to listen in to their thoughts than their radios or suit comms. ‘You have two tanks ahead of you.’

  ‘And I’m planning to make it none, or at least one.’

  ‘Be careful, conserve ammo, and make shots count.’

  ‘That’s the plan.’

  Daniel was glad to hear it, and now looked for Stewart in his Big Mike. The mechanized armor was climbing the wrecked base of the fallen tower to get a better angle on the approaching enemy forces, and he started firing grenade rounds as soon as he had a clear shot. “If I can bounce one of these suckers under the skirt,” he called to Daniel, “I can stop them here.”

  Daniel wished he had some mines or IEDs, but had to settle for opening fire with the APC’s cannon as the first hovering tank rounded the base of another tower opposite them. The supposedly armor-piercing rounds didn’t live up to their name against the hover-tank’s armor, but the HESH—high explosive squash head—rounds they had been equipped with for use against enemies enfiladed in buildings at least disrupted their movement by pushing them aside, and had a better chance of detonating on the ground below and maybe taking out the drive that powered its ability to hover.

  Or so Daniel hoped, anyway. Gresians on foot were starting to rush out from between buildings also, and Daniel had to trust his squad to pick them off with railguns of fifty-caliber slugs through the gun ports in the APC’s sides. Torres was at least doing a pretty good job of keeping the APC out of the line of the tank’s main gun while Daniel pounded it. As the tanks moved closer, Stewart had to abandon his position and run a gauntlet of plasma fire, heading for a complex of hourglass-shaped buildings supported by thick tree branches.

  Several Gresians were firing from one of those buildings, and Stewart leapt into the cover of another and returned fire. Daniel saw the extra-powerful Big Mike railgun bolts smash clean through the building occupied by Gresians, but only a couple of the creatures behind it were hit, falling twitching to the dusky earth below.

  “Stewart, drop!” Daniel yelled, and he swung the turret away from the Gresian tank for a moment to put a HESH round into the enemy building as Stewart dropped to the ground. The enemy tree-building was ripped apart by the detonation of the flattening, high-velocity plastic explosive round. Pieces of building and bronze-blooded body parts flew across the little patch of green park in every direction.

  The Gresians weren’t done with Stewart, though. A plasma cannon blast ripped through the hou
rglass-shaped arboreal building, which rolled backwards onto the mechanized suit of armor, pulling the largest tree down with it. The Big Mike’s armored back slammed into the ground under the impact and he tried to roll aside, visibly dazed. The Gresian tank glided forward, the plasma rifles fitted next to its cannon pouring sizzling streams of energy into not their armored enemy, but the tree and the construction. The tree trunk smoldered and burst into flame, the fire quickly lapping along branches and into the seams of the Big Mike armor.

  Stewart rolled the burning wreckage off and threw himself aside into cover as Daniel kept pounding the tank with rapid-fire HESH rounds. None of them did much good, but as the tank slid over the mechanized suit, the Big Mike exploded and the tank dropped heavily to the ground. Torres finally spun the APC around, breaking the enemy armor’s line of sight. “Stewart,” Daniel called, “get your ass over here!”

  “On my way. Get me some weapons ready.”

  Cole was already pulling some of the spare weapons from a rack and checking them over. In a few moments, there was a hammering on the rear hatch, and Stewart yelled, “It’s me!” Cole let him in and then put a deer slug through the mouth of an unarmored Gresian who’d been about six feet from either grabbing Stewart or leaping into the now uncomfortably crowded APC.

  “Greyhound, this is Trap Two,” Hope’s voice came over the radio. “We’re under heavy fire.” Daniel paused instantly to listen to the breathless sound of her voice. She felt and sounded somewhat rushed, not having enough time to be afraid. Daniel knew the feeling. “We can handle them, but can’t get to you.”

  “Understood, Trap Two,” Daniel called back. “You know where we’re headed. Meet us there if you don’t hear any different.”

  “Understood. Good luck.”

  ‘You too, Hope.’

  Something droned overhead and, from his position in the APC’s turret, Daniel saw a Gresian shuttle flaring in low and dropping one of their troop carriers into another stone garden on the edge of town. By now, the second hover-tank had also appeared behind the APC. Daniel wondered how the hell it had managed to outflank him as he swung the turret around, pouring another set of HESH rounds into its armored skirt. It turned slightly, its plasma cannon barrel jamming momentarily against a tree.