by Jack Colrain
From the slopes on two sides flanking this hill, plasma grenades arced over the ridgelines and burst amidst the soldiers. One landed at a soldier’s feet and blew him to gobbets of flesh while the rest of the platoon dove into natural ditches formed by years of rainfall. The grenades were followed by their throwers, two packs of Gresians charging down the slopes to either flank while larger plasma weapons crackled from the central bunker.
A rocket hit the nose of the APC, flipping it onto its side. Daniel’s troops were already running for the ends of the Gresian wings that were trying to flank them, pumping railgun bolts into as many bodies as possible while dodging the bunker’s fire.
Sergeants Stewart and Cole each triggered a nanobloc at opposite ends of the overturned APC, the cube-like blocks dissolving momentarily and then spreading and growing into thick, low walls that would give good shelter. Beswick crawled, wincing, out of the APC and into safety behind one of the growing walls. “Motherfuckers,” he muttered.
As the platoon darted towards the new defensive structures, scuttling towards them in pairs with each soldier giving the other covering fire, Daniel called out, “Get a nanowall around Wilson!”
While Cole rushed to do so, programming another nanoblock on the run, Daniel exchanged fire with a couple more Gresians and then hurled himself over the nearer structure’s wall to temporary safety. “What can we do about that bunker?” he asked Stewart. The combat engineer risked a glance at the bunker, where a few slots were now visible, the plasma gun barrels slotted into them.
“If the APC’s cannon still works, HESH rounds will be good,” Stewart said over the sounds of battle in moorland around them. Out here, the Gresians weren’t doing so well since the humans’ ability to tuck and roll, as well as their superior brand of Exo-suit, gave them the advantage. The bunker’s guns, however, were spitting electric blue death at any soldier who dared pause for an instant. Andrews had already fallen.
Daniel saw a shimmer moving along under the bunker’s firing slits, and at first thought another Gresian was there and raised his railgun. An instant before firing, he realized it was Hope, and his heart skipped a beat as he realized that he’d been about to shoot her. As he watched, she tossed a thermite bomb in through the slit, and the Gresians began to howl in unearthly agony as it went off.
The respite didn’t last long, as new gunners simply took their places, but the interruption gave Cole a chance to run for the APC turret and recover some cannon shells, which he brought to Daniel and Stewart. “Malik,” he said to Stewart, “what if we jammed these under the firing slits with a bit of a boost and gave them a target?”
“Now you’re talking.”
While Daniel’s troops picked off the remaining Gresians from their now safe defensive structures, the two engineers took advantage of the idea to make some sort of bomb. When it was done, Cole and Stewart played rock-paper-scissors, and Stewart lost.
“OK,” Cole said, “run fast until you hear the boom.”
“Don’t hurry on my account.” Stewart grinned, and then he took a few deep breaths and bolted from the defensive structure. Plasma fire tracked him immediately, and then Hope, who caught on quick, gave the guns a second target. Superman Bailey gave them a third while Daniel and the others fired at the gunports.
Malik Stewart, meanwhile, crouched low and ran equally fast until he slammed into the bunker wall next to the firing slit. He planted the explosive he’d made of the HESH rounds, which were mostly made of plastic explosives anyway, and ran off to the side, keeping out of the guns’ line of fire. “Fire in the hole!” he yelled, and a second later the whole front wall of the bunker erupted like the side of a volcano, one side of it crumbling and allowing the Hardcases’ firing to access the interior.
The Gresian guns fell silent.
On the slopes, the surviving Gresians fled while Daniel heard more of them fleeing back into the depths of the tunnel system behind the bunker’s interior doors. He was surprised to see that part of the hill’s interior was a hatch wide enough to let a hover-tank in or out.
The APC, once they had righted it—a move which took all of their combined strength—was a little dented, but otherwise still functional. Bailey checked up on the radio and found it worked, so Daniel got on the horn to the Sydney immediately. “Greyhound calling Sydney.”
“Go ahead, Greyhound.”
“I need an orbital bombardment of a tunnel system entrance and the surrounding area. I also need a LiDAR or ground penetrating radar scan of the tunnel system. If we can figure out a map, we can—”
“Request denied.” The line went dead. Shocked and angered, Daniel counted to twenty to calm himself, and then he hailed Colonel Barnett.
Barnett was a little more talkative than the tactical officer had been. “Sorry, Daniel, but it’s a negative on any of those ground density scans. Knowing the tunnel system would be a useful asset, but we can’t do it at this time.”
“Why not?” Wasn’t it the obvious solution to the problem?
“The fleet is preparing to pull out.”
Daniel couldn’t believe his ears, or find his voice. Fury stabbed at his chest.
Before Daniel could answer, Barnett went on, “We’ve lost about half the fleet so far, but worse than that, the Gresians have…. Look, Lizzie can tag you in to the C-In-C chatter. You have to hear it for yourself.”
“Lizzie, what’s going on?” Daniel demanded.
“The shit has both hit the fan and gone south, Dan,” Lizzie said. “Listen to this.”
Suddenly, Daniel heard the Sydney’s XO exclaiming over the flag level network, “Some weird shit is happening with the gateway…. I can’t get signals or navigational lock—”
“What’s happening?” The admiral asked.
“The Gresian reserve fleet is moving,” Captain Sheard said, “but not towards our fleet. I don’t get it.”
“Where are they going?”
“Towards the gateway.”
“They’re bugging out?!” The admiral sounded pleased.
“Yeah… no...”
“What?”
“The gateway coordinate hasn’t changed.” Sheard sounded utterly baffled, and not a little troubled.
“So, it’s still only an access way from our Solar system,” the admiral said breezily. “They must be planning a blockade, cutting off our route home—”
“A Gresian cruiser has gone through!” the XO exclaimed.
“That’s impossible!” Sheard snapped. “It’s one-way, and we control the Solar end of the—”
“Like they controlled this gateway?” someone asked.
“Oh, fuck!” the XO said. “The backdoor key! They’ve reversed the polarity of the gateway, using our own backdoor key!”
“Two more Gresian cruisers have entered the gateway; now a carrier—” Sheard reported disbelievingly.
“That’s what the fuckers were waiting for.” The admiral sounded astonished. “To analyze how we took control of their gateway, and do the same thing to our ability to lock them out of the Solar system. That fleet wasn’t a reserve force… it’s an invasion force, and we just gave them the keys to Earth! The motherfuckers played us!”
“Lizzie,” Daniel snapped, “can you patch me into the Sydney’s C-In-C as a projection?”
“I think so,” she said, sounding a little surprised. “Just a second—”
Daniel was suddenly face to face with a startled Colonel Barnett. Wells and Sheard glanced around momentarily from their positions by the tank, but were evidently too busy to be distracted by his appearance. Daniel barely trusted himself to speak. “Colonel… what’s happening to the soldiers on the ground?”
“The Gresians have already overrun most of the landing zones. The survivors have been ordered to defend their positions at all cost and wait for extraction at the earliest possible moment.”
“And when would that be?” Daniel’s unit being left to die on Lyonesse came back to the front of his mind suddenly; he was starting to feel a chilling sense
of familiarity.
“When the Gresians are out of the Earth’s Solar system,” Barnett said quietly. “We all know that, but nobody will say it.” He paused. “I know it’s hard… I can’t even imagine, but…. Your orders are still to continue your mission. As soon as Wilson pulls the switch, or whatever it is, the Gresians will all die and the attack will be over. The soldiers on Firebird will have no-one left to fight, and the fleet will return and pull out the survivors. It really is all on you now, Dan.”
“Incoming!” Wells shouted. Alarms began to sound. On the screens, and overlaid on Daniel’s vision when he turned, directly from the exterior sensors, a Gresian cruiser hurtled towards the Sydney. “Brace for impact!”
The entirety of the Sydney juddered and shook, knocking crewmen and objects to the floor and into the walls. Alarms began sounding at once, and one wall peeled away like foil being torn apart by a giant claw. Daniel gasped, instinctively trying to catch a last breath even though he knew he was merely present in remote form, and really still sitting in Trap One.
A wave of air he couldn’t feel flicked several officers and technicians out through the tear, their screams visible on their faces but unheard as they dissipated into space before an atmosphere shield came on in time to stop Sheard and Barnett from sharing their fate. “Main power is off-line. Life support off-line!” someone yelled.
“We can’t make it back to the gateway,” Sheard said bluntly.
“Sydney Actual from Potomac Actual. We’re matching velocities. Evacuate and we are in position to recover.”
“Acknowledged, Potomac Actual.” There was a pause, and then Sheard triggered the intercom. “All hands, this is Captain Sheard. Abandon ship. I repeat, abandon ship. Report to your assigned escape vessel and shuttle assembly points...”
The surroundings flickered, and suddenly Daniel found himself back in the APC along with a stunned-looking Lizzie who, once again, only he could see.
Twenty-Three
The Hardcases had put some distance between themselves and the bunker, and, as the sky was beginning to darken towards evening, Daniel called a halt to travel so that they could take stock, eat, hydrate, rest…. And figure out their options.
First, he explained what was happening in space, and that made for some worried soldiers. More than worried, in fact; Daniel suspected that distraught was a better word. They all had friends in the infantry. Hope and Torres both had a lot of friends in the fleet. And everybody—even Wilson, Daniel supposed—had friends and family on Earth.
“I don’t know if the brass are being any more honest with me now than they were about Lyonesse, but I’m being honest with you,” he told them. He owed them that, several times over. “This mission has been a clusterfuck from the get-go because it’s the great granddaddy of all crazy longshots. I probably should tell you that we can still succeed, but honestly, I have no idea whether that’s truth or bullshit. At this point, it doesn’t really matter anyway. Because the important thing is that it now comes down to a simple choice: succeed or die.”
Several of the Hardcases nodded, though Wilson simply stared into the distance, keeping himself and his data to himself.
“If we execute the mission and fail, we die trying, and a lot of good people on this planet and on Earth die. We’ll never know it there’ll be another chance to find a final solution to the Gresian threat. If we don’t execute the mission, we’re stranded, as are all the rest of our troops; in that case, the fleet never returns, and lots of people on Earth die, and we’ll never know. You get the picture.” He paused. “If we execute the mission and succeed, though…. The Gresians die, every human is safe, and the fleet comes back for us. With any luck. Even if they don’t, at least we have no Gresian threat. So, I think we have to proceed, and we have to succeed. Option B is… same as on Lyonesse: Camp out and hide for as long as we can, and hope our people can get back before the Gresians find us. Which, if we haven’t completed the mission, isn’t going to happen.”
“You don’t have to order us,” Hope said softly.
“If we want to beat the Gresians, now’s the time. The last time we have. Our air support is gone; we can’t call for orbital bombardments, or for imagery from space, or back-up from the ground forces. It’s just two dozen of us, and thousands of well-trained soldiers who want to kill us.
Hope stood and paced. “Without air support, we are sitting ducks. The Gresian fighter aircraft can attack at will. We will need some kind of flak option, or at least camouflage.”
Daniel smiled faintly. “Cole, Stewart, can you rig up some kind of anti-aircraft weaponry from the materials we have?”
“Damned if I know,” Stewart said, “but we’ll do our best.”
“Something I’ve noticed,” Kevin Bailey said. “So far, the Gresians look to go far out of their way to avoid Gresian casualties. I mean, there have been times when they could have pressed us a lot more than they did. They were in a hardened position with heavy weaponry back there, but once things stopped going their way, they just pulled back.”
“The same thing happened to us in town,” Kate Kinsella said.
“And us,” Svoboda agreed.
“It’s because of the way they were bred,” Doug Wilson supplied. “The Gresians hold the lives of other Gresians to be absolutely sacred. They’ll fight and die to save other Gresians, but they won’t sacrifice themselves needlessly. They’ll also do everything they can to avoid friendly fire. Much as we prefer to do the same, actually. We’re not that different.”
“That’s actually something we could use to our advantage,” Daniel said thoughtfully.
“How do you mean?” Hope asked.
“So far, we’ve avoided populated areas so as not get bogged down,” Daniel replied, “but if we stay in the countryside without air support, the Gresians will send their air assets to pick us off from a position of safety.”
“That’s inevitable,” Wilson agreed.
Daniel thought out loud, “But if we go through a populated area, the Gresians won’t risk the civilian casualties from an air strike. We’d be attacked and harried on the ground, but if we leapfrog from town to town, maybe we can rely on pure speed to get where we’re going in one piece. Don’t engage, ideally, but don’t stop for anything either.”
“That’s risky,” Erik Palmer warned. “We’re guaranteed to run into more Gresians that way… but I agree it beats being ghosted in an air strike, yeah.”
“Then it’s settled,” Daniel said firmly.
When Lizzie estimated they were forty miles out from their objective, the fields and moorland began to take on more buildings. At first, they were agricultural and industrial—barns, silos, maintenance bays, and so on—but it wasn’t long before scattered ranges of housing became more common in the form of towers and tree-houses like they’d seen before, except that the towers were much taller and wider, on squat legs that themselves held rooms and windows.
As they moved, Daniel put up the drone to scout ahead and found that, from the air, it all looked in some ways similar to housing developments on Earth. Basically, they were entering suburbs of a city. Daniel brought the drone lower until he could see movement—specks that resolved themselves into Gresians, most unarmored, scurrying through the streets.
Daniel felt the skin on the back of his neck crawling at the sight. This was the lion’s den, both figuratively and literally. There was a general flow of movement towards the path on which the APC was approaching, and Daniel looked for the nearest large building. Something that would send a message, he decided. He noted a tower with scooped-out sides coming up, just where the outskirts became a true town—and armed, albeit unarmored, Gresians were massing on the roof. Daniel marked it as a target on his suit’s optics and sent that marker to both Svoboda in the turret and the dozen or so soldiers jogging along outside the vehicle.
Daniel didn’t like the idea of attacking people who hadn’t attacked him first, but he knew his job, and, as he had been saying all along, these wer
e Gresians—not people. And if attacking first meant that the forces approaching would back off, then in the long run he’d have to attack fewer of them overall.
The HESH rounds from the APC turret slammed into the corner of the tower long before they came into plasma rifle range, blowing chunks of wall and Gresians into the air and making them fall across the street.
The soldiers outside joined in, their railguns pummeling small knots of Gresians wherever they appeared, and Svoboda blasted the occasional transport or arboreal building. When Gresians tried to block their path, the Hardcases ran clean through.
The plan worked.
Daniel saw on the drone’s feed that Gresians on other tower rooftops were pulling back out of the line of fire. “Well done,” Wilson said drily. “You’ve clearly demonstrated that we’re a threat beyond what the abilities of so-called civilian Gresians can handle. They won’t tangle with you unless they have good reason to think they’ll win.”
Daniel grunted. “If that means they’ll hunker down and let us pass rather than risk their lives—and the lives of their fellow Gresians, as well as ours in the bargain—that’s fine by me. But sooner or later, even if they can’t call in air assets, they’ll send proper troops and armor.”
“Ten klicks to target,” Lizzie called cheerfully in the APC and across the suit comms. By now, the town had truly become a city, and the Hardcases had only had a few plasma bolts directed their way. The Gresians had been growing bolder again, but were sticking to random sniper attacks. They had tried an RPG at one point, but that had only drawn a bombardment of the nearest building, so they hadn’t tried it again. Daniel knew the APC could take the plasma bolts, too, so he didn’t waste time responding to the snipers.
Ahead, the towers were taller, the buildings larger—fewer of them were draped within tree branches now, as there were no woods large enough to take such scale—and the gaps between them narrower and more like terrestrial streets. There were more lights on in the buildings here, as well.