Roxanna heard the colonel’s venomous curse as they all instinctively turned their heads enough to shield their eyes from the burning light just ahead of them.
“Colonel,” came the shaky voice of a corporal in the other squad. “They didn’t make it, sir.”
She didn’t have to elaborate.
Andy’s teeth gritted again for a moment before she lowered her head slightly, eyes straight and determined. Her words were wrapped in steel. “Hold position until we group with you, and then we’ll move forward together. Keep your eyes open. We can’t trust anyone, or anything, here.”
26
Nerves were running higher than high as Anallin, Anath, and Jade, isolated as a Marine unit of three, made their way forward through the Arkana city streets following Anath’s memory. So far on their quest to rejoin the rest of their squad, they had managed to avoid any more canisters of gas spewing at them.
“I get dragged away into a dark building and fight my way out to reunite with my squad, just to get separated again?” Jade groused quietly as they made their way forward, cautious but as quick as they could.
“You’re not alone this time,” Anallin pointed out pragmatically.
“For which I’m grateful,” Jade said sincerely.
Anath listened to the short-lived banter but didn’t join in, as he normally would have been inclined to do. The deeper into the city they got, the more unsettled he became, which he would not have thought even possible before that moment. It was hard, at times, to keep his mind focused on the task immediately before him.
Instead, he kept wondering what would happen once they reached the palace. What would happen when they reached his father?
The sound of weapons fire—the ping of ricocheting projectiles—ahead cut into his thoughts.
Their comms filled with Marine chatter about encountering enemy soldiers ahead, and replies from nearby ESS to lend assistance. Anallin and this little group was among them, and the three hurried on forward toward the sound of the fighting.
Between the map and the auditory clues, they moved around the corner of a building, but then cut through a small alley between two others in the hopes of flanking the enemy attacking their fellow Marines. Threads of concern wound around his mind that his memory, and thus his directions now, as well as the map he’d given them, was faulty and they weren’t heading where they needed to go…
Anath in the lead, they came around another corner to be greeted with a half-panicked shout of “Arkana!” and all spinning to take a shot.
A pair of bullets ricocheted off the building just to his left before Anath realized that this new group had, in the heat of the moment, thought him one of the enemy.
“Cease fire!” This is from Anallin, whose voice was more commanding than Anath had ever heard it be as it called to the others to not kill their ally.
There was one more bullet, but the trajectory showed that the shooter pulled up just enough at the very last second.
“Dammit!” one of the other Marines shouts. “We were responding to the call and then saw the flash of a white face, and—”
Anath held up a hand. “It’s okay. Let’s just...go help now.”
Truth be told, his heart felt like it was about to jump right out of his chest to have narrowly avoided dying amid the chaos.
But he had to keep moving. Forward. They had to keep moving forward.
Every corner of the city was in turmoil.
The ESS Marines, as well as the infantrymen of the Army, marched through the capital like a wave of color against a sea of nothingness, although there were a lot of guns and many enemies inside that white void. Both sides, though, bled red.
And both sides did plenty of bleeding.
Every group of righteous invaders marched their way slowly, laboriously, tragically onward to their destinations. Many things had to happen to make this successful, and they were all acutely aware of the fact that they didn’t have all the time in the world to do them. With every shot fired, that time whittled down even further.
Clocks ticked loudly in every soldier’s head.
Their targets constantly seemed to move further away the more resistance that the enemy put up…
As an Arkana soldier rushed at Andy from a side street, she wasted no time acting on reflex to slam the butt of her rifle straight into her enemy’s throat. The soldier—in the melee, she couldn’t tell if it was male or female—stumbled back with a gurgling noise. The colonel just watched for a moment through her cracked visor-plate before turning back to the fray.
The palace was in sight up ahead, built into the pale green hillside. When blood wasn’t dripping in front of her eyes, she could see it.
But, as expected, there was a veritable horde of Arkana soldiers between them and it.
She knew her strength was finite and could already feel it flagging, and yet that contrasted with the constant flow of adrenaline that still pumped through her veins. She might collapse from exhaustion when this was all said and done, but she was going to make it to the end. She would have said ‘even if it killed her’ but she was all too painfully aware that it just might.
Shouting orders, she kicked another Arkana soldier in the mid-section as she swung her rifle back around for a shot. He was on her again too quickly and knocked the weapon back on its sling and out of her hands, leaving her to grapple with him. They exchanged blows, and she knocked his own weapon away from her before pulling her sidearm and firing into his helmet.
“Thomas!” she shouted over the comms as she turned and saw a soldier starting to emerge from the alley across from her, coming in behind Dan. “On your right!”
She had just a moment to see him turn and fire into the soldier about to flank him.
That was when they all got flanked, or at least caught off-guard.
With the palace so much in view, they ended up in view of the small towers lining the entrance to the now-visible palace road. Apparently, these towers had snipers in them as well, and they chose this moment to open fire. The energy bolts burned bright and hot as they hit one Marine, center mass, or burned into the white paved street.
“Snipers!” Roxanna shouted in her ‘sergeant’ voice. “Find cover!”
The Marines dove behind the edges of buildings and back into the recessed doorways around them, although not without some inward trepidation about ambushes lying in wait just behind those windows and doors. Still, it wasn’t like any of them had any choice. If they avoided these places, they would stay out in the open too long and would get caught by the sniper fire.
There was already one of her Marines clutching a scorched shoulder while his squad-mate used their field med-kit to tend to it in their narrow confines.
Just as Andy was setting her mind on fire to figure out the best strategy out of this, her comms erupted with chatter. She couldn’t parse it out and was about to snap at everyone to shut up and take turns, but then something happened that helped her figure out just what had happened.
A pair of fighters swooped low over the city and shot out the guard towers, with the snipers inside them.
The team had gotten through and disabled the city shield! The fighters were now free to aid the fight within the capital, and in turn free up some of the Marines to continue on to their objectives.
There were still soldiers guarding the roads to break through, but suddenly, the palace seemed a lot closer.
27
The fury of every deity of every and any race known to man, and some not, could not compare to the wrath of the ESS as it descended upon the Arkana capital city. Be it army infantryman, Marine, or fighter pilot, they pressed forward through the glistening white walls like a tidal wave. Breaking around the occasional obstacle before coming back together and flowing onward.
Always onward.
Andy led her people like an avenging angel with a rifle. She felt the dried blood, stinging bruises, and possibly damaged ribs as she fought, but she knew she couldn't afford to stop now. The palace,
their goal and target, was in sight. Enemy soldiers stood between her and that building, but they were all that was left to remove before they were inside. It was all that was left in their way, and this knowledge bolstered her strength and fortitude.
There were no snipers firing on them from here, nor any strange canisters rolling toward them. It was point and shoot, moving from limited cover to firing stances with almost mechanical precision, gained from long hours of drills and repetition. Here, the Arkana soldiers seemed to throw themselves into their defense with something near to desperation. It was an almost visible aura to their movements, which only got worse the further forward the Marines managed to press.
Over her earpiece, Andy heard reports of their similar assaults at the only other entrance into the palace. Their mission was to prevent escape, especially of their target. The fighters covered the sky and any aerial attempt, and the streets were increasingly filled with the ESS.
Anath assured them that there was no other point of escape, there was nowhere for anyone inside—nowhere for their father—to go.
They crested the top of the low rise of the road to the palace, watching as a fresh group of guards began to spill free. One was shot down before even breaching the door, the body falling over the threshold as the large white door began to slide shut again. It balked as it neared the body, however, some failsafe sending it back into the wall for a moment before trying again, to the same effect. The door was effectively unlocked, just waiting for the force heading its way.
“Keep the pressure on ’em, Marines!” Andy shouted loud enough to be heard over the chaos even without the comms. “The door!”
Andy’s rifle bucked with familiarity against her shoulder armor as she took a shot at an Arkana soldier nearer to the door, before swinging around and cracking the faceplate of another soldier who’d had the audacity to sneak up too close on her left. Why he, or she, hadn’t shot her, she had no idea, but she didn’t care.
Something splattered against her visor, and her head snapped around just in time to see the falling body of another Arkana with Anath standing just behind them, sidearm in hand.
“Thanks,” she said with a half-smile.
That was as much of a moment she afforded them both as they turned and rushed ahead again. That door was like a portal onto the final step of this whole, bloody mess of a war, of what their lives had become, and there was no way she wasn’t getting them all to it.
From that moment, it passed in a blur.
Guns fired and ricocheted.
Energy pulses sizzled.
The world became shades of white, red, and gray.
Everything was noise.
Lieutenant Colonel Andrea Dolan’s squad was the first to breach the door of the Arkana palace.
Two guards were subdued immediately, and more Marines followed them in.
“This way,” Anath said, hugging the wall as he began moving.
The area they had entered was something of a T-junction, with a wall directly ahead of them and halls going to either side. These curved as they went on, preventing any great distance for line of sight. Anath was leading them down the right-hand side, but Andy knew from their pre-mission briefings that either direction could lead them to the throne room eventually. The palace was made up of many circles.
Andy ordered specific squad leaders to follow her, while directing others to head the other way.
She was determined that it would be her and her squad to initially confront her father, but she was still a Marine. Still a leader. So long as the Marines found him, it didn’t really matter who it was.
At least, that’s what she had been reminding herself of ever since the planning for this mission started in earnest.
Leading from the front, Andy covered one side of the hall while Anath covered the other, with the rest of the Marines behind them. Anallin stood in between to pick off anyone coming out ahead of them the moment there was a shot.
Once they began moving after the initial two guards, the hallway was frighteningly empty and quiet.
“Watch the rear,” Andy ordered, struggling to pitch her voice low after shouting for the whole time they’d been fighting their way through the streets. The last thing they all needed was to finally break through into the palace but be so focused on their goal that they got shot down from behind.
As she felt her adrenaline rise higher—breath feeling more and more shallow as her heart beat even harder—she had a moment where she was absurdly drawn into the surprised thought that she didn’t think she could have had any adrenaline left.
“Three-way junction coming up,” Anath announced tightly. “We’re going left.”
“Copy that,” Andy replied, voice just as taut.
From where they stood, she couldn’t yet see the junction coming up, but there was a pronounced curve to the corridor that they were heading toward. All these blind curves and corners were unnerving, but knowing her father—even as little as she actually did—it was a plan of his in some way.
They came around the curve, and the strange quiet that had been with them now dispersed as Arkana soldiers came from all three entries of the junction. Two fell from shots from behind Andy, as the Marines reacted faster. Some energy pulses flew past her head, but she didn’t hesitate to return fire.
Noise and light and smoke. The close confines of the corridor just added to the chaos of the moment, but none of them stopped until the shots stopped flying toward them.
“Keep moving,” Andy ordered. “We’re almost there.”
28
“Door ahead,” Anath said.
Jade hadn’t kept even an idea of the time and turns that had passed since they entered the palace, but she knew that her future memories—if she survived this day—would be overwhelmingly of white. The interior and exterior of the building was all the same, just like the city and just like its people. Occasionally a hint of blue, and of course plenty of red, but it was otherwise all white.
It was like being trapped in an arctic hell that wasn’t cold.
“It’s always locked,” Anath said, “but I should be able to get through it.”
“It must have changed since you were here,” Jade heard the colonel say, even though she kept her tone low.
The colonel’s half-brother nodded. “I know a few tricks, though. I wasn’t the most well-behaved adolescent child of our august leader.”
Dolan snorted at that.
They came around another curve—too sloped to be a corner and too sharp to see around. The whole place seemed to be made of them. The architect must have gone insane.
As the new section of corridor opened before them, it widened drastically into a huge, rather ostentatious hangar bay-like door. Then again, everything about this place seemed that way, given it was called a palace in the first place.
“Cover,” Anath said, slinging his rifle back and kneeling beside the huge door. As Dolan directed them all into a position to cover his back, he typed into a small panel in the wall. Nothing happened, and he tried again. Still nothing. “Figures,” Jade could hear him mutter before he knelt beside the door and pulled a panel off. He began fussing around inside it.
A few sparks and curses later, and they seemed no closer to getting through that door than they had been minutes earlier. Tension was rising for how long they would have before they were swamped and trapped here.
“With your permission, Colonel?” Jade ventured.
“Granted,” Andy said quickly. Jade was no empath, like the sergeant, but she could hear the tension as clearly in their leader’s voice as she felt it in herself.
Jade moved back with precision, keeping her gun up until another Marine covered the gap, then she slung it back and moved beside Anath. “Sir?”
“It seems they’ve changed more than just the code,” he admitted to her ears.
“The enemy knows very well that you’re on our side now, sir,” Jade said, almost embarrassed to speak too freely in such circumstances. “But I wor
ked on that fallen craft on the planet, and in the building here in the city. I think I can do it. Sir?”
“Go for it,” he said, seeming almost embarrassed as well for not being able to open the door when he’d been sure he could.
Jade nodded once and then said nothing else, grabbing her toolkit from the leg pocket of her uniform pants and getting right to work. Her eyes moved quickly, identifying the familiar circuits and wires while simultaneously making mental markers of the ones that she didn’t recognize. This should be easier than having to hack those drones, she thought, since it was just hijacking a door opening mechanism.
She sliced through a wire, disconnecting it from one glowing circuit to bring it over to another. She examined the set just below it.
“Don’t touch that one,” Anath said suddenly, pointing to one circuit and wire bundle. “They haven’t changed everything on me, and that one is a failsafe against doing something like this.”
“Understood,” Jade said. “Thanks.”
She probably would’ve done that one next, since it seemed logical, and relief flushed through her at his timely interruption. Leaving that one alone, she moved onto the next. Knowing Arkana technology as much as she did, which was probably more than anyone outside of ESS R and D, she figured two more would do the trick.
“We’ve got company,” she heard Dan announce behind her.
A moment later, the shooting started up again. There was nothing like a soundtrack to one’s work, right?
Jade tried to drown out the sounds of combat behind her and just focus on getting through these next two bundles. She wouldn’t let it be on her head that they were stuck like fish in a barrel to be shot down.
“One more,” she said through gritted teeth.
Another moment more and she finished the last one. As predicted, the large door split open, with one part rising into the ceiling and the other into the floor.
“Move!” Dolan ordered.
Earth Space Service Space Marines Boxed Set Page 72