Chapter Fifteen
Sergeant Eric McKinney was pretty sure he and his squad were about to die, though he had no intention of going down without a fight. The smaller shuttle, which he’d observed laying down fire only a short while earlier approached leisurely, crossing over the undamaged comms hub as it came towards the squad’s position on the far side of the pile of rubble. High above, a much larger craft – this one over two hundred metres in length – floated menacingly. McKinney was certain this second vessel was directing the first.
“Webb, shoot that smaller one down,” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
Webb was a few metres below the top, staying out of sight. He climbed to his feet, lifting the plasma tube onto his shoulder. With a sudden movement, he strode closer to the top of the pile. The launchers had a brief warm-up time and McKinney heard a whine as its coils powered up. The tube whooshed and a projectile burst from the wide muzzle. Webb dropped out of sight quickly.
“Direct hit,” he said with confidence. “It’s going to need a second.”
His words were drowned out by the thumping sound of a plasma detonation.
“How long till recharge?” asked McKinney.
“Not long.”
A shape flew overhead, plasma still burning across its front quarter. McKinney looked up and saw the glint of something hanging from beneath its nose – a weapon with many barrels. He fired his gauss rifle instinctively, sending a short burst of slugs to clatter against the armoured underside. The other men did likewise, though it was easy to see it was too little, too late.
Webb fired again. The plasma rocket crossed the intervening space in a split second and detonated against the shuttle’s hull. Droplets of white-hot flame burst away, falling towards McKinney and his squad below.
“Got them,” said Webb in satisfaction.
“No you haven’t,” said McKinney.
The shuttle was badly damaged and its engines thrummed unevenly, but the pilot didn’t break off. Instead, he rotated the craft jerkily around, bringing the nose cannon to bear. The men below shouted in defiance and continued their fusillade of gauss fire.
“Not going to be enough,” said McKinney grimly. A blob of metal and plasma landed at his feet, spitting and writhing. He ignored it and fired at the shuttle again.
“Still got the big one to deal with after this, Sergeant,” said Webb.
McKinney didn’t respond. Though he kept firing, his gaze was transfixed by the nose cannon, which was now aimed directly towards him. His mind idly noted the peculiar design – it was a collection of three distinct sets of three barrels, each set arranged in a triangular pattern and then arranged into a cluster. He had no idea how it worked and had better things to worry about. McKinney didn’t want to die, yet he refused to look away.
Fate had other plans for Sergeant Eric McKinney. Just as the moment appeared to be on the verge of becoming a barrage of high-calibre slugs, something hit the shuttle with such ferocity that the vessel was pummelled sideways across the sky. Its side wall crumpled as though a giant fist had struck it with appalling force. The noise was incredible, like a steel sledgehammer crashing into the side of a hollow metal barrel. The shuttle was hit again and again until it was hurled to the ground on the other side of the rubble.
“Look!” said Stein.
McKinney hardly needed to turn his head to see. The larger of the two craft suffered a similar onslaught. A hundred huge-calibre Gallenium slugs punched into it, crumpling it out of shape. Dozens of holes appeared through its armour, easily visible from the ground. The sound of it reached the squad, distant hailstones upon a metal roof.
With his mouth open in awe, McKinney watched the enemy spaceship as it was destroyed and thrown towards the ground, ruined as easily as the shuttle.
“What the hell was that?” asked Garcia, his voice distant with shock. He raised his hand and made the sign of the cross over his heart, something McKinney hadn’t seen in years.
“I have no idea, soldier.”
The answer was revealed soon enough. A shape descended through the air, this one far larger than the two alien spaceships. This vessel glowed with a brightness that confounded the sensors on McKinney’s suit until they were able to adjust. Heat spilled away and a trail of orange reached as far as the horizon and beyond. The spaceship passed directly over the base, the wave of sound yet to reach the squad.
McKinney recognized it – even through the burning heat and with its hull misshapen, he knew it was a Space Corps destroyer. He could also see it was so badly damaged that any landing was unlikely to be a smooth one. He saw the hillside, a few kilometres away, a dark silhouette against the steadily-lightening sky.
“Get off this rubble!” he shouted, certain it was already too late.
Their position on top of the rubble was precarious given what he felt sure was to come. Taking the lead, McKinney slung his rifle across his back and scrambled his way downwards, his feet struggling for purchase. The others caught on quickly and they came afterwards – men in fear of imminent death.
The noise of the spaceship’s passing finally reached them as the air carried the sound in the vessel’s wake. The rumble of tortured engines was terrifying and the rubble shuddered, some of the smaller pieces tumbling away ahead of the squad as they slithered down the myriad of different angled slopes.
Then, the ground started to shudder. There was no build-up – the whole Tillos base shook violently as if it were suffering the most powerful earthquake ever felt on Atlantis.
McKinney tried to go faster in his headlong flight. A piece of broken wall detached itself from the mound to his left and bounced past him, leaving a colossal shroud of dust blossoming into the air. He lost his footing and put out a hand to steady himself. It was no good and McKinney found himself sliding at an ever-increasing speed towards the ground. All the while, he felt the earthquake from the spaceship’s nearby impact build in intensity.
Just when McKinney thought he might make it unscathed, one particularly large convulsion cast him up into the air. He came down again – hard – and rolled the final few metres until he struck a block of steel-reinforced concrete which brought him to a halt.
He coughed and tried to roll to his feet. His visor HUD provided an evaluation of his physical condition, but he was too dazed to make sense of it. He felt a sharp pain in his chest as his spacesuit injected him with a drug – battlefield adrenaline he guessed. One of the squad took his arm and dragged him towards the ramp leading to the underground bunker’s Section D entrance.
Eventually, the ground stopped shaking, except for a few much fainter aftershocks. Crouched halfway along the ramp, McKinney patted himself down, scarcely able to believe he was still alive. He was bruised and winded, though fortunately nothing was broken. In fact, he felt sharp and alert as a consequence of the synthetic adrenaline coursing through his bloodstream. Apart from a few superficial scrapes, the exterior of his suit looked undamaged. He gave mental thanks to the men and women in the lab who’d figured out how to make the combat suits so damned tough.
“I can’t see Boon and Stein,” he said across the open channel. The two rankers had vanished from the comms network, but there was a chance they might have suffered a visor malfunction and be alive somewhere.
“A slab fell on them, sir,” said Bannerman, somehow still carrying his portable comms pack. “Poor bastards didn’t stand a chance.”
The first men I’ve lost, thought McKinney. In the aftermath of the quake, the pile of rubble was lower than before and spread over a wider area. It made him angry to think he’d recently taken his squad to the top of it and now here they were on the Section D ramp, back where they started except with two of their number dead. He knew he’d feel sorrow later. For the moment, he was energised by the battlefield adrenaline. There were rumours the drug was designed to numb emotions, to help a soldier carry on in the face of the worst imaginable horrors and he was starting to believe there was some truth to it.
&n
bsp; “Bannerman, try and reach that spaceship,” he said. “It was a Corps vessel.”
“It didn’t look in very good shape,” Garcia replied. “It’s probably in even worse shape after hitting that hillside. Everyone on board has got to be dead.”
“What do you think shot those enemy shuttles down?” asked McKinney. “Bulwark cannons, that’s what. If there’s anyone alive on that warship, we owe it to them to help out.”
“I’m unable to reach them, Sergeant,” said Bannerman. “There are no open receptors on their comms system.”
“Does that mean they’re dead?”
“It means nothing more than I said, sir.”
McKinney was torn. He felt as if he had a debt to the crew of the crashed warship. Equally, he believed the enemy were up to no good in the comms hub and it was incumbent upon him to do everything possible to stop them.
He saw an opening – a way to put off the difficult decision for a few more minutes.
“We’re going up that pile again,” he said to the others. “We can see what’s happened to the hub. If there’s no way in, we can skirt around and go looking for the spaceship.”
It wasn’t the most well-thought of plans. The others didn’t need a promotion to see it, though they kept their mouths shut, glad they weren’t the ones having to make the decisions. The enemy soldiers had surely been stirred up when their support vessels were shot down. Luckily, they hadn’t yet come to check out the Section D entrance ramp.
“Doesn’t look as if they have a crapload of troops on the ground,” said McCall. “I thought it would be crawling with them.”
“Maybe,” said McKinney. “They know they’ve won – could be they only sent a few down to check the place out.”
“If they’re going for the comms hub, why not pack it with their troops?”
“These are aliens,” said Webb, going out of his way to emphasise the word. “They probably don’t think like we do.”
“Yeah, well they took out the base pretty easily, so they must have something going for them militarily,” said Garcia. “And for all we know, they could have dropped a hundred thousand of these metal soldier things off at Tansul, Teklo and Tivon. Maybe Tillos isn’t the main target.”
“Tillos is the primary Atlantis base,” said McKinney. A sudden thought came to him and he welcomed it, since it made the looming choice a much easier one to make. “What about the Central Command Building?” he asked.
“Yeah, what about it?” asked Garcia, clearly not understanding.
“It’s about eighteen hundred metres over that way,” said McKinney, pointing across the broken slabs of concrete. “We wouldn’t have been able to see it from our position up top. What if that was the main target, rather than the comms hub? The aliens around here might only be hunting survivors – they’ve probably got significant numbers holding the CCB.”
“Are we going into the hub, then, Sergeant?”
“No. I wouldn’t know what the hell to do when I got in there anyway. Let these bastards have it – we’re going to see if there are any survivors from that crashed destroyer.” Another thought flashed into his head, illuminating in its perfection. “Maybe one of them knows how to get onto the ES Lucid and maybe they’ll know how to fly it. They could shoot down a few of the enemy. Maybe save Atlantis.”
“Yeah, Sergeant,” said Webb eagerly. “I’ve never been on a Galactic before.”
With his mind made up, McKinney checked in with Corporals Li and Evans.
“We’ve seen a Corps destroyer come down nearby. We’re going to check for survivors. We lost Boon and Stein.”
“They were good men,” said Evans. “I hope they gave as good as they got.”
“They brought hell to the enemy, Corporal,” McKinney lied. He didn’t know what else to say. “Any sign of hostiles in the bunker?”
“It’s quiet down here, Sergeant,” said Li. “Most of the doors are open, but we’ve not found any more personnel.”
“We believe the main attacking force may be concentrating on the CCB. We’ve seen them – they’re aliens all right. Dressed in some kind of metal, like robots and flesh in one. If we’re lucky, they might not have a clue the ES Lucid is down there.”
“A new theory every minute, Sergeant,” said Li.
Li had a knack of making his wry comments in a way that was entirely inoffensive.
“It’s an ever-changing situation, Corporal.”
“What do they want at the CCB?” asked Evans.
“Probably trying to tap into our databanks or something,” McKinney guessed. “For us, it’s secondary. We’re going for the destroyer.”
“Good luck, sir.”
“Hold your positions. If things work out, we’ll come back with someone able to fly the Lucid.”
“Then we’ll blow the crap out of them.”
“Yeah. Then we’ll blow the crap out of them.”
McKinney closed the comms link and did a scan of the area with his visor’s heat and movement sensors. Daytime was approaching rapidly and the squad would soon be able to rely on their eyes alone. There was no sign of the enemy. He stared in the direction the destroyer had come down and tried to plot a route in his head. It was pointless – the destruction of the base was so complete he had no way of knowing what lay beyond the broken buildings surrounding his squad.
After one final check of the area, McKinney clambered over the edge of the ramp and onto level ground. The others followed, spreading themselves out so as not to be an easy target for repeater fire. They set off at a jog, trying to keep the sound of their footfall to a minimum. Running at point and with his gauss rifle held across his chest, McKinney felt a relief that stemmed from more than just the battlefield adrenaline. He’d made his decision and now all he had to do was follow this path to the end.
Chapter Sixteen
“More bodies,” whispered Lieutenant Maria Cruz.
She didn’t need or want to examine them in detail. A repeater weapon had ripped the two humans to pieces, leaving bloody chunks spread across the floor. It was hard to tell if they were male or female, though enough of their uniforms remained to tell Cruz these were civilians rather than soldiers.
She tipped her head to one side and listened carefully. There were noises which seemed to come from all around, some far away and some at an indeterminate distance.
Realising she and Keller were exposed in the middle of the corridor, Cruz advanced quickly. Her heart beat rapidly in her chest and so heavily it felt as though she was being punched on the inside of her ribcage. She tried to put her training into practise. Long, deep breaths, she thought. Keep my mind focused. Death is death. It comes to us all.
Something clicked inside her mind and body. The beating of her heart slowed, dropping close to a normal level. Slightly elevated. That’s to be expected. She saw things in greater detail – the tiny imperfections in the bare, metal walls. Scuffs on the carpet tiles. The rapid flickering of the lighting further along the corridor. The faintest of humming from the gauss rifle’s coils and the metallic odour which it expelled through tiny vents on top.
“It’s the second right turning, remember,” whispered Keller. He sounded sick to his stomach.
At the first right, Cruz heard something – footsteps either coming or going. She leaned out carefully and quickly withdrew her head. She made a signal with her fingers which she’d learned in training, letting Keller know there were two enemy soldiers twenty metres away and walking in the opposite direction to their position. He stared at her blankly.
She put one finger over her mouth. “Shhh.”
He nodded in understanding.
Cruz leaned out again. The light was poor, disguising some details and altering others. The two enemy soldiers continued at a measured pace, heading away. From the back they were nearly the same as the one she’d killed earlier – grey skin in parts, alloy plates and patches of ragged, filthy hair. With disgust, she realised their bare skulls were exposed. Trying not to think too
hard about it, she squinted past them – the corridor turned right a little further along and she hoped they’d follow it until they were out of sight.
She waited a long ten seconds. The sound of footsteps receded further and Cruz risked another look.
“Gone,” she whispered, closing her eyes in relief and breathing out.
She didn’t hesitate - three quick strides took her past the opening to the corridor. Keller followed, one of his feet making a loud scrape across the floor in his haste. He cringed, whilst Cruz was once again left regretting her decision to allow him to come along.
The second right turn was another twenty paces away. The corridor continued past, reaching a T-junction at the end.
Once again, Cruz checked carefully before heading along the turning. It appeared as though Keller’s memory was accurate so far – the new passage continued for a short distance before it opened into a room filled with curved banks of operator consoles.
There was no sign of enemies ahead and she was reluctant to wait any longer than necessary in the corridor, so Cruz set off along the new passage. She walked in a half-crouch, with her shoulder close to the left-hand corridor wall and her rifle pointed ahead. Keller followed along a few steps behind, clumsily attempting to copy her stance.
The closer she came to the room, the more she could see - it looked like a large space, which had presumably seen use back in the days of the Ghast wars. The consoles looked ancient and a layer of dust clung to them – the forgotten technology of a war long ago fought.
From her crouch, the view was obscured. Carefully, she lifted her head slightly in order to see the passageway opposite which Keller believed would lead to their goal. A sign hung from the ceiling, a near-repeat of the one a few hundred metres behind. Hub Core Processing Area. Unauthorised Personnel Will Be Incarcerated.
There was no sound here – even the distant noises elsewhere in the hub were muted. She took another few paces and stopped in her tracks. There were two of the aliens in the centre-left of the room – visible through a wide gap in the consoles. With a whispered curse, she dropped out of sight and kept her rifle steady, hoping they hadn’t seen her.
Negation Force (Obsidiar Fleet Book 1) Page 13