ONSET: Blood of the Innocent

by Glynn Stewart

  “Unidentified aircraft, this is the US Air Force,” Colonel Dallas’s voice rumbled in David’s headset. “We have reason to believe you are illegally transporting stolen munitions and vehicles. You will divert ninety degrees south and prepare to be escorted to Mountain Home AFB for internment and search.

  “If you do not divert, we will be forced to shoot you down.”

  David watched the icons continue to move on his HUD. The closing USAF fighters were tiny green arrowheads, closing with the red icons of the transport planes. Red icons that did not appear to be changing course.

  “Transport fleet,” Dallas hailed them again. “You will divert ninety degrees south and prepare for escort or I will open fire.”

  Seconds ticked away, the jet fighters rapidly closing toward the limited but deadly range of their internal cannons.

  “This is Alpha-One,” Dallas declared to his squadron. “Going live. Guns. Guns. Guns.”

  Something happened…but not what David had been expecting. One moment, twenty-four green icons were closing on the transport planes and Dallas was about to open fire.

  The next, green icons were disappearing off his screen with terrifying suddenness and finality. David suddenly had no connection, his radio link to Dallas cut off as the icons flashed out of existence.

  “Leitz!” he snapped. “What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know!” she exclaimed. “We lost contact with Colonel Dallas, overhead says…” She stopped, her words disintegrating into a shocked, choking sob.

  “Overhead says that his own people opened fire on him,” Leitz whispered. “I’m reading missile fire, cannon fire… most of the planes are just gone.”

  “Get me Lange,” David ordered harshly, his hope of an easy victory turning to ashes in his mouth. “Get me anyone!”

  “THIS IS LANGE.”

  The Air Force Major sounded broken. Exhausted. If David hadn’t known he was talking to the same man, he would have thought Leitz had connected the wrong person.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “We…failed,” Lange said slowly. “The transports continue on their way. We…no longer have the ability to carry out ground strikes. I have…four fighters left. All are damaged. My pilots are in shock. We…we can’t do it, Commander. I’m sorry.”

  “What happened?” David repeated.

  “That’s…” Lange inhaled loudly. “That’s going to be for JAG and the MPs to sort out now, I’m afraid. If we ever work it out.

  “Four of our jets opened fire when Dallas went in to shoot down the transports. They took out the Colonel before any of us even realized what was happening and just kept shooting.” The Major sighed. “They had to know the only way they’d survive was if they shot down everyone else, so that’s what they tried to do.

  “We took them out. But…I’d known some of the pilots who turned on us for ten years. Some of the men they killed for twenty. My God. I don’t…I don’t understand.”

  Thralls. Either the squadron selection had been as unlucky as it was possible to be, or the vampires had explicitly infiltrated the squadrons with in-the-know COs—a grouping they shouldn’t have been able to identify.

  A Thrall wouldn’t have been able to question why they needed to shoot down their friends. They would have been running a side communication channel, one Dallas wasn’t aware of, and once they’d reported in what was happening…

  Their vampire masters had told them to kill the rest of their squadron, and they hadn’t even hesitated, even knowing that they almost certainly wouldn’t survive the attempt.

  “Major, you have to complete the air strike,” David told the Air Force man. “You can’t change the course of this anymore, but I need every edge I can get. I need you to hit that assembly point with whatever you have left.

  “I know what you’re feeling,” he admitted, “I’ve lost people under my command to these bastards as well. But I need you to drop those bombs.”

  Seconds ticked by in silence, and then he heard Lange take a long, gasping breath through his oxygen mask.

  “I understand,” he said. “One pass, high-level. I can’t ask these men for more. Not after they had to shoot down their friends.”

  “I understand,” David echoed back. “But even that one pass will save lives, Major, and may make all the difference tonight.”

  Whatever conversation Lange had with his remaining three pilots was on a different channel. They diverted back toward the target several seconds later, though, and the command channel linked back up.

  “We are inbound on target, increasing altitude to avoid potential AA fire,” Lange said, his voice mechanical now as his training took over.

  “Range is five miles and closing. Weapons free, weapons free,” he chanted.

  David didn’t have enough information on his HUD to confirm any details on the aircraft. All he had was their location, closing in on the vampire’s assembly site at high speed.

  “Target is padlocked, we are engaging. Rifle away, repeat Rifle away.” Pause. “Bombing range, Pickles away, Pickles away.”

  A moment of silence.

  “Look to the east, Commander, you’re about to have a light show. We’re done and bingo on ammo. Good luck.”

  David followed the instructions, watching the bright flashes lighting up the horizon as, despite everything, the last four fighters delivered their weapons on target.

  Hopefully, it would be enough.

  32

  The clock was ticking.

  David stood outside the main entrance to the Mountain, waiting for the hammer to fall. They weren’t sure how much of the force the Familias had concentrated at the airstrip had survived, but he did know when the tanks the enemy had stolen from the National Guard were going to arrive.

  Part of him hoped that the vampires were foolish enough to send the tanks in on their own. Without any support, even the immensely powerful Abrams would be vulnerable to the anti-tank weapons and Mages at his command.

  If they had the crews to drive the tanks, however, he assumed they had people who knew how to use them. Most of the vampires the Familias commanded were under a hundred years old; they almost certainly had men who were veterans of the tank campaigns of the Second World War, Vietnam or Iraq in their ranks.

  That meant they’d meet up with the lighter vehicles and ground troops from the airstrip and move on his position in the kind of combined-arms mechanized assault that had never officially happened in North America.

  With Dallas and Lange’s squadrons shattered, there was no way he could get further air support. There were, he was certain, other Air Force officers in the know, but none were close enough to be able to get ground-attack-equipped aircraft to his position tonight.

  “We have movement from the airstrip,” Leitz reported over his radio. “Hard to say what was there originally, but I’ve got Strykers, Bradleys, and M113s moving out in columns. That’s a lot of hardware, sir.”

  “How much is a lot?”

  “Twenty Strykers. Twenty Bradleys. Forty APCs,” she reeled off. “I don’t know how the hell they got their hands on that much gear or concentrated it in less than a day without us noticing.” She sighed. “We’ve confirmed thirty of the M1s on the move, too. They are ripping the hell out of the road, but they’ll be in position in just over an hour.”

  “Assume they rendezvous with the APCs,” David told her. “When will they be able to bring the hammer down?”

  “Midnight, sir. Give or take thirty minutes, depending on how long they need to coordinate. We don’t know who’s in charge out there.”

  “With Romanov dead and Dresden letting his enemies beat themselves to death on us, I’m guessing a committee,” he replied. “If we have an advantage here, it’s that there are seven Familias leaders trying to decide how to run this operation, and I doubt any of them are willing to hand it over to anyone else.”

  “Sir, that’s over a hundred armored vehicles and a thousand vampires and Thralls,” the analyst sai
d quietly. “A disunified command is a slim thread of hope.”

  “I know. I need you to talk to Warner,” he said. “If there’s any chance, at all, that we can get some kind of reinforcements…”

  “I’ll try, sir.”

  “I don’t think you’ll succeed,” David admitted. He knew what the plan that had been dropped on Warner was, after all. “But I need you to try.”

  THE LAST TRACES of light were long gone as David walked the perimeter, checking in with his Agents and the Elfin Warriors. Despite only having two days to build their positions, they’d done solid work. Multiple sandbagged bastions covered the slopes, their crisscrossing lines of fire making certain that nothing was going to make its way up to the Mountain without having to take fire from at least three positions.

  The downside, of course, was that each position only had two or three people in it. They were all supernaturals, but the powers ranged from Klein and Mason, fully trained battle Mages almost up to the weight of an Elfin Lord like Riley, to men and women like McCreery, with “merely” superhuman agility and three-dimensional sense.

  He stopped at ONSET Thirteen’s position, where Stone and Hellet were checking over the two machine guns they’d dug in with. McCreery remained in charge of the helicopter bridge, the missiles they’d fired the previous night replaced for the new battle to come.

  “All quiet so far,” Hellet told him. “How long?”

  “They’re converging as we speak,” David admitted. “Outside of range of Wilbur’s artillery, sadly. Smart buggers.”

  “Most of that armor can take anything short of a direct hit or close miss from even his guns,” Stone pointed out. “We needed a bigger battery if we were going to face off against a cavalry regiment.”

  “We were supposed to be assaulting a fortified position, not holding one,” David pointed out. “It’s been a hell of a few days and it’s not over yet.”

  “We’ll still be here when it is,” the big Empowered told his Commander. “Since when have vampires been an insurmountable threat to ONSET, after all?”

  David shook his head silently. The only group who’d been responsible for more ONSET casualties in actions he’d been involved in was the Black Sun cult, and they’d had a demon infiltrate OSPI to set up a massive trap.

  A thousand vampires and their mind-controlled servants were a problem.

  “We needed an army,” he told his people. “But I guess we’ll have to do.”

  “You’ve seen what everyone here can do,” Hellet pointed out. “Would an army really be more useful than fifty combat-trained supernaturals?”

  “I don’t know,” David admitted. “We’re not exactly used to fighting tanks and armored vehicles.”

  “And the vampires aren’t used to using them,” she replied. “They know how to fight ONSET with commandos and Mages. But they’ve never fought us with tanks—they might have people who can use the tanks, but they won’t have fought Mages in them!”

  “We can hope,” he agreed. “One thing I’m sure of: they are not going to know what hit them.”

  “No question,” Stone agreed, patting the heavy machine gun next to him. “Though I suspect they might work out relatively quickly that at least some of it is bullets.”

  “COMMANDER.”

  Leitz’s voice echoed in David’s ears as he stepped away from the sandbagged position, heading into the dark toward the next one.

  “Yes?” he replied.

  “They’ve completed whatever discussions they’re having on command,” she told him. “They’re moving into road formation, with the tanks at the back.”

  “Makes sense. None of those vehicles are leaving the road in great condition, but the tanks will wreck it,” David noted.

  “Yes, sir.” She paused. “They’ll reach the access road from the highway in twenty minutes. After that…”

  “They’ll spread out and come up the mountain,” he concluded. “They’re not going to play games or make probing raids or any of that. They’ve assembled the kind of armored fist that’s supposed to be the monopoly of the US Army, and they are going to hammer it right at us.”

  “Can you stop them?” the analyst asked softly.

  “I don’t know. But I do know this: when this is over, the Familias will be broken.”

  33

  David felt the rumble in the ground first. His Empowered hearing picked up the engines and the crunching of tracks through dirt and gravel only moments later, but the vibration of a hundred-plus armored vehicles traveled through the ground with terrifying speed.

  “I have them in sight,” one of the Elfin Warriors reported. “Laser designator online, pinging the lead unit.”

  “We have Target One,” Major Wilbur confirmed. “I need designators on six targets, people. We’re only going to get full efficiency on the first barrage.”

  “Roger,” another voice reported. “Taking to the treetops. Lining up.”

  There were six Elfin Warriors with the Army’s laser designators out on the edge of the forest, all supernaturals with an affinity for stealth and the forest, sneaking through the shadowy darkness to align invisible beams of light on their targets.

  “That’s six,” Wilbur reported a few seconds later. “Copperheads loaded, targets acquired. Standby for barrage in five. Four. Three. Two. One.”

  “Fire.”

  The M109A7 Paladins were over a mile farther up Mount Scott from where David stood, but the crash of the guns washed over where he stood in the final defensive position like a wave of water. There was barely enough time for the first shock wave to pass over before the next arrived, the big guns firing in sequence to allow the lasers to bring the guided rounds in on target.

  “Hold your beams until terminal impact,” the Major ordered. “Copperheads going terminal. Impact…now.”

  The shells were sequenced, each one dropping on a tank several seconds after the previous one. Powerful as the tanks were, they were also exactly what the shell had been designed to take out.

  “Confirm kills, all six,” the lead scout reported. “Remaining targets are now maneuvering. They know we’re here.”

  “We are reloading. Get me more targets,” Wilbur ordered.

  Forty seconds later, thunder shook the mountain again and another salvo of guided shells dropped on the advancing vampire force.

  “Two targets still intact. We are redesignating.” The scout paused. “They are starting to fire on the trees; we’ve got machine gun fire from all units and grenade fire from the Strykers. This’ll be the last clean shot you get, Major; we need to fall back.”

  “Understood. Barrage in five.”

  The guns echoed again, but now David could also hear gunfire down the mountainside as the vampires began to shred the forest around them, hunting out the scouts they knew had to be there with machine gun fire.

  “Coral is down; her designator is out,” the scout snapped. “Brown is hit—Lyle, Morris, hold your targets, then drag him out. Holland, you’re with me.”

  More shells slammed home, but no one was telling them how many tanks had died.

  “Silas, what’s your status?” the artillery Major demanded. “Get out of there!”

  Another explosion lit up the night as the tanks opened fire with their main guns, canister shells spraying their payloads through the woods.

  “Still here,” the scout replied grimly. “Fuckers are aiming too low. They got Holland.” He was silent for a long moment. “You got six rounds left, right, Major?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll ping ’em as they come. Make them count.”

  “Wilco, Silas.”

  The first gun fired. David closed his eyes, listening to the sounds as the artillery worked their way down. It took several seconds for each shell to arrive. More time for the Elfin scout to move and bring his designator onto a new target.

  There was nothing he could do but listen.

  Three Copperheads dropped. Four. Five.

  “That’s it, sir,”
Silas finally said, a new strained sound to his voice. “I’m hit, lost the designator. I’m going to ground; they won’t find me…but before I Shift, you gotta know: they’re dismounting ground troops and moving up the hill.”

  “Thank you, Warrior,” David told the werefox, hoping he caught Silas before the man changed shape. “Major?”

  “I have the grid,” the Army officer said flatly. “Dumping the last Copperhead; stand by for rolling barrage. Give me thirty seconds.”

  “Understood. Let’s see what they do.”

  WHAT THEY DID WAS CHARGE.

  The tanks came first, the massive seventy-ton weight of the main battle tanks smashing trees to kindling as they hammered their way up the hill. The APCs and infantry fighting vehicles weren’t far behind them, tracked and wheeled vehicles alike turning the forest to debris as the vampires deployed around them.

  The first troops on the ground were definitely vampires. They kept up with the vehicles plowing up the hill at thirty miles an hour with bounding leaps, their guns swinging as they hunted the scouts whose laser designators had taken such a toll on their advance.

  And then the artillery barrage arrived.

  Six shells at a time slammed into the ground, a steady metronome of one salvo every minute as the vampires made their way up the hill. A hundred guns might have stopped the advance, forging a wall of fire and steel no living being could cross.

  Six…just wasn’t enough. Not against vehicles that could shrug off anything short of a direct hit. Not against infantry that could survive near misses and keep coming.

  The vampires simply swung around the craters and kept coming. Machine guns and grenade launchers opened fire as they spotted the first positions, rocket launchers and more machine guns returning fire.