Planetside

by Michael Mammay

  A figure flew through the air and landed inside our small perimeter. He had to have leaped more than twenty meters. He pointed his weapon at Baxter, who lay in a prone firing position and hadn’t turned to face him yet.

  “Mallot!” I yelled, playing a hunch.

  He hesitated for a second, his head turning toward me.

  It wasn’t Mallot.

  Baxter slammed her foot up into his groin, and he groaned and sagged, but recovered enough to level his rifle at her face.

  His head exploded.

  Baxter lay on her back and stared at the body as it fell, her body armor covered in brain matter and blood.

  A new source of fire came from a different direction. “Sir, tell everyone to get down. Anyone standing is an enemy.” Mac’s voice on the radio, calling on the old frequency.

  “Everyone stay down! Friendlies coming from sixty degrees.” I relayed the message to the platoon on the current channel. I didn’t know how many of us could stand, anyway.

  For a moment we stemmed the enemy attack. Mac’s force coming from a new direction caused them to hesitate, and we took several of them down before they could regroup. I didn’t know how many soldiers Mac had with him, but it had to be three or four, given the volume of fire.

  Our advantage only lasted a minute. The enemy brought their heavier weapons to bear, and Mac’s team had to go to ground.

  “Two minutes.” Baxter over the radio. “Flip on your markers.”

  “Mac, air inbound. Markers,” I relayed. I didn’t want to take time to bring everyone onto the same channel with the fight going on, but his team needed to mark themselves. By turning on the beacons in their helmets, they’d light up to the inbound aircraft, allowing the pilots to pick out the good guys.

  The enemy fire started to dwindle and draw farther away. They must have known about the air support.

  I gave a silent thank-you for their mistake. They should have come closer, made a mad rush. Being on top of us would have made it impossible for the bombs to hit them without hitting us, too. I’m glad I didn’t have to make that decision. Dropping bombs on your own position was a last resort I didn’t want to try. If the enemy wanted to help us out, I’d happily take the assist.

  The two ships screamed overhead and I instinctively put my head down. Whatever munition they fired in their first pass, we wouldn’t hear it over the sound of the engines until it hit. I didn’t know what information Baxter fed them, if any, or what she requested. It didn’t matter. The birds would pick out the targets and blow the shit out of them.

  The impact came from both directions almost simultaneously, hitting the attackers on both sides. The force wave nearly lifted me from the ground. Sonic cutters mixed with some high explosives, if I had to guess. The world went quiet for a moment in the wake of the aircrafts’ hasty departure.

  “We’re coming in, sir!” Mac saw his opportunity to close our ranks and took it. Great thinking. At least somebody’s brain didn’t get scrambled by the air support.

  “Hold your fire. Friendlies coming in,” I relayed to whatever was left of our force.

  Mac hit the ground right beside me. “Didn’t think we were going to find you. If the whole world hadn’t lit up with gunfire, we wouldn’t have.”

  “You picked a good time to show,” I said, but my last words were drowned in the whine of the fighters on their second pass. “Alternate frequency,” I shouted before they’d quite departed. The second set of bombs shook the ground. My hearing came back just in time to register a large tree falling slowly through the dark a couple hundred meters away.

  “Fighters picked a good time to show too,” he said.

  “Extract in ninety seconds,” said Baxter.

  I looked at Mac to see if he heard it and had the new frequency. He nodded.

  “One more fighter pass,” I said. He nodded again, then laid his face to his rifle and looked through his scope, scanning for targets.

  The fighters zipped through again, this time firing rockets. They’d be targeting small groups of enemy survivors. The rockets sliced through the air with an evil hiss, followed by flashes from half a dozen locations, the sound and shockwave coming a few seconds later.

  “Call in for extract,” radioed Baxter. One by one our crew called in. Six, including Baxter and me.

  After a moment of silence on the net, Mac spoke. “Four plus me for five more, ma’am.” Eleven. Less than half of what we started the day with. No telling how many of the eleven were wounded. Probably most, though Mac’s team seemed to move well, so maybe they’d avoided the worst of it.

  The two lift aircraft came in slower than the fighters, but still fast. The trick to spotting them was to look ahead of where you heard the noise. By the time you heard them, they’d already moved from that location.

  I tried to find one, only to watch a yellow-and-orange fireball light the sky. A split second later the loud fwaaaap of a large pulse weapon cut through the night. More distortion of light and sound. A ship had exploded before we heard the weapon that killed it.

  One of the landing craft had disintegrated.

  Light streaked across the sky in golden fingers. Missiles. At least six, maybe more. Another flash, then another less than a second behind it. Both fighters hit, one explosion eclipsing the other.

  A sinking, queasy feeling grabbed at my gut. They’d just eliminated our rescue with a big pulse weapon and a bunch of surface-to-air missiles. But the enemy didn’t have those weapons—they weren’t supposed to, anyway. Those missiles hadn’t been small shoulder-fired SAMs, either. They had high-end stuff. Dangerous.

  I put the implications of what just happened behind me for a minute and scanned the sky. We still had one transport left, and with our reduced numbers, they had space to carry us all out if they could get to us.

  Another missile streaked into the sky like a fiery sword.

  The second transport flung flares from its hull and dove hard, but the missile had locked in. A golden blossom of death lit the sky and the transport spun toward the ground, spitting flames. A quirk of fate set its descent almost directly toward the source of the missile that killed it.

  “Ejects,” said Mac, softly so it didn’t carry.

  I scanned the sky and found the pilots with my night-vision optics. “Got them. Looks like they both popped clear. You think anyone else popped? From the other birds?” The chutes drifted toward Cappa in a controlled fall.

  “Don’t know, sir,” said Mac. “I doubt it. They flashed pretty big.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  Baxter stood and hurried over to me, taking a knee. “Sir, what the fuck do we do?” Her voice rose a few notes.

  “Call it in,” I said.

  “Sir, the jammer. We’ve got no off-planet commo again.”

  Shit. “They must have moved in a mobile.” Even as I said it, I doubted it. The enemy had pulled back when the fighters attacked. Nothing could have survived that barrage. They had to be jamming the satellites directly. That meant a bigger problem, but one for another day. We had to live through this, first.

  My mind scrambled for a solution. “There’s no way that Cappa Base doesn’t know what’s going on now.” I kept my voice level, hoping it would help Baxter do the same. “They’ll send help. Wait for the next ships to come into range, then signal them in. You’ll know they’re close, because they’re going to blow the crap out of that anti-aircraft site before they get here, now that they know about it.”

  “It will take at least twenty-five or thirty minutes until they arrive,” she said.

  She was right, and we didn’t have thirty minutes. With the ships down, the enemy would move back in. “Let’s go,” I said.

  “Where, sir?” she asked.

  “Anywhere but here. Let’s not give them an easy target.”

  “We should head for the downed pilots,” said Mac.

  “Perfect,” I answered. “They’ll have beacons, not the markers we’ve got. Transmitters that broadcast without satel
lites. All the pilots do. And if there’s one thing you can guarantee, it’s that the squadron isn’t going to leave their fellow pilots down here.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Baxter, her voice steady, the moment of indecision gone. She was going to make it in our business, assuming she lived through this fight. That’s what the good ones did. If they panicked, they got over it fast.

  “Move now, two groups of four, three in the middle,” radioed Baxter.

  “We’ve got tail,” I told her. Mac grabbed two of the soldiers who came with him to round out our team and linked the others up with another element. We started moving fifteen seconds later, three wedges, our trailing group inverted so the point faced back. If the fighters hadn’t destroyed the enemy in front of us, we’d know soon. And if we made it past that, I hoped that the downed pilots didn’t shoot at us thinking we were enemy. We didn’t have any way to speak to them, and trusting scared pilots on the ground was risky. Another problem for later.

  Even with night vision, the branches slapped against my face plate, and low scrub grabbed at my feet and ankles. It kept us to a quick walk, and we still made more noise than I’d have liked. Thirty minutes.

  Less than five minutes later, four rockets slammed the ground to our front, throwing dirt, rock, and branches, shaking our already wobbly legs. They knew we were moving. They had to. They only missed by a hundred meters. By unspoken accord, we picked up our pace. Someone might fall in a hole or smash a knee on a rock, but it beat being cut in half by hot metal.

  Another barrage ripped through the trees, off to the right this time, farther away. An enemy machine gun tore through the night, also off the mark. The bullets hunted through the woods, meandering slowly, looking for a target without knowing where to start.

  Recon by fire. They wanted us to shoot back. I flipped open the channel to tell everyone to hold their fire.

  Too late.

  The man beside me let off a three-round burst. “Cease fire.” I tried to keep my voice calm on the net. No use yelling about it now.

  “I had his position marked,” said the soldier who fired. She sounded confused more than defensive.

  “We don’t want to give away our position,” I called over the net. “We need to move. Now.”

  Two heavy weapons and at least a dozen smaller ones raked the ground around us, ripping chunks out of trees and flinging up dirt, flashing off of rocks. Without firing back, we had nothing to keep the enemy’s head down. Even from three hundred meters, if they kept enough bullets flying, they’d get lucky soon enough.

  “Keep moving,” I radioed. “My team will stop and pour down some fire for thirty seconds, then catch up.”

  Mac flashed me a thumbs-up to show me that he heard. He grabbed one of the other soldiers and physically put her into position behind a head-sized rock. He put the other behind a tree. That didn’t leave much cover for him or me, so we grabbed the ground and got as low as we could.

  “Fire when I do,” I radioed. “Slow and steady. Thirty seconds, twenty rounds. Explosive if you’ve still got them. Pick targets if you can, if not, try to silence the bigger guns.”

  I took a deep breath and silently counted to three for no particular reason. I squeezed my first shot off in the direction of one of the heavy guns, then fired three more in a pattern right around it. The staccato burst of my own team firing close by drowned out the sound of the enemy. Vaguely I sensed bullets getting closer.

  Something cracked into my left shoulder, wrenching my weapon from that hand. A burst of molten fire jolted my shoulder joint, then my whole arm went numb.

  I didn’t think the bullet penetrated my armor, though I had no way to tell in the dark. The force of the bullet did enough, even with the protection I had from my gear. I shook my numb hand, trying to find some feeling.

  Belatedly, I rolled over twice to a new position in case someone had homed in on my location. Always have to remember the fundamentals.

  A dozen bullets ricocheted off the rock our soldier hid behind, throwing sparks into the air and momentarily screwing with my night optics.

  I aimed in the general direction of the fire with my one working arm and squeezed off half a dozen useless shots before rolling again.

  “Ten seconds until we move,” I said. “Shoot ’em if you got ’em.” The pops around me intensified. No fire came from behind the rock, so I crawled on my belly toward the soldier’s position, pulling with my good arm.

  She lay still, her helmet shattered.

  I grabbed her and rolled her toward me, but I knew even before I finished moving her that we’d lost her. Too many cracks in the helmet, too many bullets.

  Shit. I didn’t even know her name. I grabbed her ammo.

  “Let’s go,” I called. “We’re just three. On my move.” I leaped to my feet, not waiting to see if Mac or the other soldier followed.

  The next fifteen seconds felt like an hour, running uphill with death chasing us. I sprinted, then tripped after a moment, sprawling. I caught myself with my bad arm, and screamed for half a heartbeat before cutting it off. At least I felt it.

  I pushed off with my good arm and scrambled to my feet, scanning as I ran, trying to find where Baxter and the team had gone.

  “Left a hundred mils.” Baxter on the radio. I still didn’t see her, but she could see me. I turned left by a small margin and kept running, sharp Cappan leaves scraping as they bounced off my visor.

  “Keep on the same course,” said Baxter. “We’re in a cave.”

  I almost tripped again, this time on a fallen log, jumping over it at the last second. A cave.

  Shit.

  I saw the dark spot in the hillside and ran through. Baxter’s people opened fire from the mouth of the cave right after we passed, the reassuring pops of their weapons once again drowning out the enemy. For a moment it almost made me forget we were trapped.

  I paused for a minute to gasp at some air. My thighs burned, though that paled in comparison to the pain in my shoulder.

  I found Baxter. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

  “Why, sir? This is good cover.”

  As if to answer, heavy bullets ripped into the opening. A male soldier screamed and crumpled.

  “Never mind. They’ve got us pinned in. What is this place?”

  “It’s a mine, sir.”

  “How deep does it go?”

  “I don’t know, sir,” said Baxter. “A ways. There’s equipment at the back of this section.”

  “How long do you think we’ve got to hold out?” asked Mac.

  “I don’t know. Depends how long it takes our ships to find us,” I answered.

  “Shit, sir, that’s at least fifteen minutes,” said Mac.

  I looked at him, a red blob in my thermals, identified by his name in pale blue text on my heads-up. “See what’s here that we can use for a barricade.”

  “Yes, sir.” He disappeared at a run. Bullets continued to screech off the walls and roof.

  I checked my ammunition. A magazine and a half. We wouldn’t give them a fight for very long. “How much fire you got left?”

  Baxter checked her kit. “One, sir. How much you got, Ramirez?”

  “Half, ma’am,” answered a soldier.

  I tossed Ramirez my half magazine and loaded my last one. “Explosive. Make them count.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Pull your people back from the entrance. We’ll try to make a stand farther back,” I said.

  “Roger that, sir,” answered Baxter.

  I headed for the back of the cave and found Mac in the dark, throwing around metal boxes. “What is this stuff?”

  “Military equipment boxes,” he said. “They’re empty, but they’ll stop bullets.”

  “That’ll have to do,” I said. I didn’t have time to worry about why a mine had military equipment boxes in it.

  “How are we going to get to the birds when they show, sir?”

  “No idea.”

  The remnants of the team arrived a
few seconds later. They limped and staggered, one man holding another up. The fire outside ceased, and every scraping footstep echoed off the walls in the silence.

  Soldiers’ heads darted back and forth, searching for answers, nobody wanting to speak.

  “They’re gearing up for an assault,” said Mac.

  “Fire discipline,” said Baxter. “Single shots, pick your targets. We’re low on ammo.”

  A flash lit the mouth of the cave, blinding me, followed by a whump that threw me backward two meters and onto my ass. I coughed, my lungs filling with dust and grit until my air filter caught up.

  I crawled forward to our makeshift barrier and prepared myself for the attack.

  “Colonel Butler.” An amplified voice from outside. “Colonel Butler. If Colonel Butler is alive, he’s the only one we want. Send him out and the rest of you live.”

  Chapter Thirty

  For a minute everyone looked at each other, but nobody spoke. I took my last magazine of ammunition and handed it to Mac.

  “What are you doing, sir?” He pulled his hand back and didn’t take it.

  “I’m going out. Take it.”

  “Sir, you can’t trust them.”

  “They’ve got rockets, Mac. If we stay here, they’re going to bring this whole place down on us, and everyone dies. If I go out, at least there’s a chance.” I shook the magazine and he finally grabbed it.

  “Baxter,” I called.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Once I’m clear, do whatever you have to in order to get back spaceside. No heroics. Just get out of here if you can.”

  She hesitated before finally speaking. “Yes, sir.”

  “This is Colonel Butler. I’m coming out!” I walked toward the mouth of the mine letting my rifle hang down from its strap. I put my hands out to each side, away from my body and visible. The last thing I needed was someone outside with a case of nerves to shoot me. If I had to die, I wanted someone to do it on purpose. I’d have raised them over my head, but I didn’t think I could get my left arm up if I tried.