by Jack Colrain
That was just as well, as Daniel’s overheating cannon clanked and went still. Daniel stared at it in momentary disbelief, then looked for a problem with the ammo feed. To his horror, he saw there wasn’t a problem with the mechanism; there simply wasn’t any ammo left. “Fuck!” He pounded his fist against the useless breech twice, then made a decision. “New plan, guys. We no longer have our artillery, which means the APC is defenseless.”
“You’re going to say we need to leave it, aren’t you?” Kinsella asked, with no sign of her usual joking.
“Yes,”
“Are you insane?” Wilson began, but Daniel cut him off with a look.
“No. None of us get out of this town if we’re in a defenseless vehicle. So, we get out and hold up the Gresians while Torres gets you and the APC to a safe zone, if there is such a thing. Once you and it are safe, we hook up at a rally point and figure out getting to where we’re going, and getting re-armed.”
“But you’re outnumbered by ten-fold!”
“Most of whom aren’t wearing armor or their version of Exo-suits. It’s only the tanks I’m really concerned about; we need to neutralize them so the APC’s nanoforge can generate replacement ammo.” Daniel looked at Stewart, who gave a grim nod. “You go with Torres and Wilson in case of trouble.” He made some notations on his tablet, on the aerial view his drone had recorded earlier. “There’s a rocky depression at the south edge of town, where it looks like there’s been a quarry or a meteor crater. Get into it here—” he showed Torres and Stewart the spot, “…and you should be less visible. Unless you hear otherwise from Kinsella or I, we’ll meet you there.”
“Yes, sir.” Torres and Stewart said.
Daniel turned to the rest of his soldiers. “It’s our stop. Let’s find a good defensive position.”
Seventeen
Daniel, Kinsella, Bailey, Cole, Buapeuak, Beswick, shuttle pilot Steffen, PFCs Wilkes and Collins, Gregory, and Franco all disembarked in a matter of seconds as the Super-Bradley rolled through a neighborhood of irregular buildings with no sharp edges or corners. From the drone’s aerial viewpoint, it had looked like a patch of brain tissue, except that it was charcoal matter rather than white or gray matter.
On the ground, the area provided a position from which the Hardcases could exploit narrow alleys to keep out of the line of fire while being sufficiently self-enclosed to allow defense against Gresian footsoldiers.
Most importantly, only one sinuous path went all the way through and out into the industrial outskirts of town, which meant that if Gresian armored forces wanted to pursue Trap One, they would have to come down this path, and the path was sufficiently twisted to prevent them having a direct line of sight to the APC.
A single tower that twisted a half-turn to the right stood about a third of the way in from the center of town, and Daniel sent Kinsella up it with her sniper gear—both railgun and Barrett M50—to give long-range cover. The APC was already leaving dust behind as the soldiers set up claymore mines and nanocharges in the alleyways. Daniel and his troops then took up enfiladed positions on either side of the road, noting the explosions and smoke rising from the other side of town. Daniel paused, somehow knowing in his heart that this was a sign that Hope was still the professional and effective soldier and commander that she’d been as the leader of the Webbies back at Camp Peary, back when he had found her so intimidating.
He could feel her thoughts and emotions perfectly well, so he knew she was alive and so far unharmed.
Suddenly, there was a blur about fifty yards away, and then all hell broke loose.
The remaining Gresian tank was in hot pursuit of Trap One, and wasn’t expecting to run over a nest of six claymores with a nanocharge at the center. Beswick had laid the claymores facing upwards, and he triggered them as soon as the tank was floating above them. Smoke, fire, and hundreds of steel pellets were propelled upwards into whatever device kept the tank hovering. It lurched like a rally car going over a pothole and slammed down onto the nanocharge, which dissipated into a cloud. The nanites in the cloud immediately began to decompose the metal of the tank’s skirt, desperate to get through to the organic material within.
Daniel didn’t wait to see whether they succeeded, but called “Fire!” A ripple of KEM bolts was launched from his and the other soldiers’ railguns. Most didn’t make it through the tank’s armor, but a few did in places where the nanite cloud had weakened it.
The tank wasn’t completely out of action, although it was now immobile, and its cannon fired into one of the buildings, making Bailey run for cover as his shelter collapsed. More claymores went off with loud cracks as Gresians stumbled over their tripwires, and several Gresians on foot positioned themselves to give some covering fire to their tank. These were unarmored and clearly visible, so they were easy prey for Daniel and the others. Railgun bolts vied with deer slugs and fifty-caliber rounds to claim the most Gresian lives as the footsoldiers loped forward, leaping over each other.
Daniel was slightly surprised that it was so easy as the Gresians swarmed past the tank, using it for cover before sprinting into the killing zone Daniel had set up. The tank fired again, blowing a hole through another of the melted-looking buildings, and then something sparked and smoked under it, and it fell silent. The Gresians around it gave covering fire as the armored soldiers who’d crewed the hover-tank got out to join the fight.
Daniel still couldn’t help thinking things were going too easily, and then a bolt from Bailey’s railgun speared a Gresian about ten feet behind Daniel and he realized why they had been making it easy. Shimmers flitted between buildings, and then the plasma fire began to sizzle past his ear as the armored Gresian troops who’d been brought in aboard the transport which had been dropped off by shuttle joined the fray. The easy kills had been a diversion, he realized, even as a Gresian soldier in blue and gray armor and a mirror-faced helmet leapt from the roof above him, bringing plasma rifle to bear on Daniel’s position.
For an instant, Daniel felt a moment of supreme calm; his blink was a frame holding a cluttered picture in eternal grace. Then, with a bang, the moment was gone as completely as if it had never been, and the air was ripped to shreds in a roar of automatic gunfire, crackling plasma fire, and flying metal.
Daniel flung himself backwards, firing in the general direction of the enemy as rapidly as his railgun could respond to his impulses. You didn’t dodge bullets; they moved too fast, and the same applied to plasma fire and railgun bolts, but Daniel was damned sure everyone in the fight saw it as projectile-dodging when they bolted sideways in the hopes that their enemies couldn’t shoot straight.
The Gresian landed lifelessly in front of him, and Daniel raced for the protection of a squat building with one door while Kinsella cleared a path for him by sniping every Gresian in his way. He saw one of the armored Gresians motion to a couple of others on the far side of the winding road, seemingly indicating for them to go around and outflank the humans. Daniel rolled out, opening up with three-round bursts from his railgun at the responding Gresian troops; Kinsella put a metal bolt through the Gresian leader’s faceplate from the top of the tower.
Almost immediately, a gold needle from a Gresian RPG exploded against the tower near Kinsella’s position, forcing her to leap down to the nearest roof and break their line of sight of her.
Meanwhile, Bailey took a bead on the Gresian rocketeer and opened up on him. Out of the corner of his eye, Daniel saw a Gresian trigger some sort of a grenade and start to swing it towards Bailey. Daniel ran forwards shooting at the thrower, who dropped his grenade. An explosion shredded the thrower into a bronze mist.
Everywhere Daniel looked, Gresians were falling or firing, his eyes stung by the brightness of their plasma rifles’ shots, and his team members were running for cover while returning fire. Occasionally, a Gresian or a human would stumble and fall, but the human body could tuck and roll, where the Gresians could not, so when a Gresian was knocked sideways, Kinsella had an easier shot from
wherever she had now positioned herself.
It was nightmarish, not a bullet ballet.
In some ways, it reminded Daniel of his training back at Camp Peary’s MOUT location: acquire targets, get the job done, and watch your team member’s backs. But once people got hit…. Even when he killed a Gresian, Daniel realized that it wasn’t just sweat on his face from the heat of the day and the layers of battledress, but alien blood on his face, and in his clothes, and he felt suddenly repulsed.
Not over killing them, but over the fact that they contaminated him and his life even as they died.
Daniel shot another two Gresians with deer slugs from his back-up auto shotgun, and then he had the urge to get as far away from them as he could because he didn’t want more dead alien blood touching him.
As always, of course, Daniel also felt that he couldn’t hear a thing, even through ear defenders. He knew that he could hear, in reality, but because the battle was so noisy—with gunshots, explosions, screaming, and dying—he felt the whole thing to be so loud that he just didn’t consciously register sound anymore. He wished the Gresians could have just kept the hell out of the way. The Hardcases could have just ignored their town and gone on their way. They’d still have died, all being well with the plan, when the mission was complete, but they wouldn’t have had to be shot to pieces and burned to a crisp…. Still, he reminded himself that the bastards deserved it; part of him just wished he hadn’t had to waste the time and effort involved here, endangering all of his team’s lives, and getting such foul alien blood on him.
Daniel ran a gauntlet of flying energy, trying to get at the Gresian troop transport that had delivered the soldiers who’d tried to outflank them. If he could get control of it, their mission would be a lot easier by virtue of a disguised transport. Ceramic walls and plaster exploded into dust, and Gresians ducked and leapt, slid and ran, all the while releasing hell from their claws.
“We’re clear!” Torres called from the APC.
That was all Daniel needed to hear. “Fall back,” he sent to his team. “On my six!” The chorus of acknowledgements was very much out of breath. Cole, Steffen, and Andrews gave covering fire as the others followed Daniel in the direction of the transport, which was somewhere back the way they had come.
The Big Mike suit was still smoking in pieces next to the second of the three knocked-out hover-tanks. The transport was sitting on a shorter bridge over a narrow, dry gulley, and Daniel could see a Gresian in armor framed in the side door. The Gresian started firing, but was quickly put down by several rounds, and Daniel ran right over him and into the transport, followed by Marty Beswick and Buapeuak. The others turned to open fire on yet more Gresians who had now caught up with them.
Inside the transport, a Gresian was at the controls. It snarled and immediately spun up the engine and began to turn the vehicle, trying to throw the humans off-balance while a second Gresian leapt for Beswick, extending its claws. The sudden turn knocked Buapeuak off his feet, but he rolled with it into the Gresian soldier’s legs, knocking the creature flying.
The alien came to rest against the back of a strange cylindrical seat, drawing and firing a pistol back into the cabin without hitting anything. Daniel shot it in the face as the driver floored the vehicle, which clipped the edge of the ruined tower and toppled off the edge of the bridge, lodging itself at an angle that Daniel suspected would leave it unusable. “The gulley,” he said over suit comms. “On me.”
Pipsqueak shot the driver, and then the three men slid down and into the bottom of the gulley. A few moments later, the others followed.
The streets of the little town were eerily silent when Daniel looked out from the cover of the edge of the gulley about a quarter of the way around town. He knew that empty silence was a lie, too, as they certainly hadn’t killed a hundred Gresian footsoldiers yet. He ran through several vision modes of his suit’s assistance to his eyes, checking for heat signatures. There didn’t seem to be any. He racked his brains, trying to figure out where the occupants of the town might have gone, and whether the place had been turned into a rat trap for the humans. He didn’t want to risk having to fight door to door through the whole damned place.
Their orders were to move fast, and in Daniel’s opinion, that meant avoiding too many engagements with the enemy—regardless of how satisfying it would be to kill them.
He was able to find his way to what looked strangely like a small inn or restaurant on one side of a set of pools, which may or may not have been decorative. The soldiers scuttled forward in a crouch, trying to be both quick enough to flit between cover without being seen by any watching eyes as well as quiet enough not to attract any other attention. There was no response from any occupants, though Daniel couldn’t tell whether the occupants were dead, in hiding, or absent altogether. Not wanting to push his luck, and feeling some sympathy for anyone who had to live in the firing line, he moved on along the street. A glimmer of light caught his eye at the end of the street and he realized it was a lamp showing through an open door. He approached and gestured for Bailey to join him.
They entered low and swift. “See anything, Superman?” Daniel asked.
“Clear,” Bailey replied. Daniel was reluctant to get stuck in a MOUT situation, fighting house to house, but he was more reluctant to be ambushed here, so he went through the rooms. There wasn’t a sound from anywhere in the house, but there were items which looked disturbingly familiar dotted around… odd cooking utensils, miniature vehicles that could only be toys, and even half-sized furniture for children. Or cubs, or kids, or whatever the Gresians called their young.
A half-eaten meal was on the table in the kitchen, but it was stone-cold. Nobody had been there for several hours at least, and they’d left in a hurry. Daniel had no idea what had happened to the owners of this house, but he couldn’t blame them for having fled. It was actually quite spooky—not just because the place was a ghost town, but because it reminded him so much of regular human households back on Earth. It gave off a freaky feeling, as if he was in a video game and somehow divorced from himself. Almost as if he wasn’t really there. He still had that feeling from earlier, too… someone walking over his grave.
Daniel decided to follow behind the main body of his team as rearguard, making sure there weren’t any stragglers. Kinsella had spotted three more, smaller, Gresian transports on a strip of roadway south of the bridge and he was deadset on getting to them before their owners did. Everyone was looking around for snipers or Gresian forces on foot, though it was air cover that concerned Daniel most. He knew they would turn up sooner or later, because he knew the Gresians weren’t stupid and this was their home turf. Worse, this was apparently the turf where their families and children lived, and that always made for a more determined enemy. That was just the way the world worked—with any world and any species he could think of. Even a cornered rat was a threat when backed into its nest.
The sound of shooting drew Daniel’s attention, and he called a halt to their progress through the southeastern section of town. ‘Hope?’
‘We’re still here,’ her thoughts came back. ‘We have some injuries, but the suits are healing them. I’m fine.’
‘We can hear shooting, but it’s on the opposite of town from us. Are you still in trouble?’
‘Only in the sense of not being able to regroup and make a run for our objective. The shooting is Svoboda and Palmer keeping the Gresians busy so they have to split their forces and not all come down on you.’
Daniel grinned, knowing she could feel the expression if not see it. ‘You know how to get to a man’s heart; it’s most appreciated.’
“L-T,” Kinsella called, “you’re going to want to see this. Something heavy is going on.”
“On my way.” Whatever was happening, it all seemed to be on the other side of the barricade and warehouses where they’d been ambushed earlier, and Daniel had to move through to a strange Gresian bedroom to get a clearer view of that area. Dark shapes were moving a
long the road on the far side, occasionally visible between the buildings—grey leviathans hovering on cushions of air and energy, their angular, metal skins fuzzy and distorted by their camouflage fields.
Daniel recognized them as the same kind of Gresian tanks he had seen earlier, and that was all he felt he needed to know. Pinning down the make and model was something he’d leave to Lizzie or maybe Wilson; all that mattered to Daniel was that they were something to stay the hell out of the way of. There was a sudden, rising whine of engine power from the Gresian side. Daniel looked over, startled, and saw the very last thing he wanted to. Two tanks were whispering at speed towards his team’s position in a linked pair of towers, their antipersonnel plasma guns blazing at the soldiers.
The Hardcases weren’t staying put to be shot at, and so they returned fire with railguns, though even these arms were relatively useless against the Gresian vehicles’ armor. A missile from Kinsella, positioned in the shelter of a small, ornamental fountain, hit the lead tank, catching the front of its lift generators. Shrapnel was blasted away and the tank began to turn involuntarily as a nanocharge hurled bodily by Marty Beswick hit the gun mantlet on the front of the turret. For a moment, Daniel thought the pair of them had actually managed to stop the damn thing, but who-knew-how-many tons of tank sliding at over fifty miles per hour had enough momentum to smash through the building’s wall with a tremendous cacophony.
Flames licking at the front of its turret, the Gresian tank collided with one of the transports Daniel had hoped to steal. No longer able to travel in a straight line, the tank swung around, its nose shunting into the side of a second transport. As the transports tried to disentangle themselves from the tank that was now trapped between them, the second tank negotiated the path the first had made through the barricades.