"Yes." Lailani nodded. "I can feel him calling out to me. He's right below us. We just need to fly straight down." She wrapped her metal glove around her gun. "Let's end this. Once and for all, let's end this nightmare."
Marco stepped toward her. He placed a gauntlet on her shoulder. "We will end this."
Ben-Ari nodded. "All right, soldiers! Operation Odin's Spear is about to commence. Into your shuttles! It's time to shoot some bugs."
The Spearhead Platoon's three squads stepped toward their designated shuttles. Sergeant Bellet led the first squad. Tall, tattooed, and sporting a platinum mohawk within her helmet, she entered one shuttle. Her soldiers—including Marco, Addy, and Lailani—followed. Lieutenant Ben-Ari, commander of the platoon, entered the same shuttle. Meanwhile, Gunnery Sergeant Jones—the platoon's second-in-command—entered the second squad's shuttle. Marco was surprised to see Osiris join the third squad in their shuttle. Evidently, even the costly android would be invading today. Across the rest of the fleet, Marco knew, hundreds of thousands of marines were entering their own shuttles.
Inside the shuttle, Marco found rows of seats with metal shoulder bars. It reminded him of an amusement park ride. The soldiers sat down, and the bars snapped into place across their torsos, securing them into their seats. They looked to the world like massive, metal robots, their human faces barely visible behind their visors in the shadows of the shuttle.
For long moments, they waited. Silent.
Then a voice crackled to life from the speakers—the voice of Admiral Evan Bryan.
"Fifty years ago, the scum devastated our planet, murdering billions. Our fathers, mothers, children, siblings—they fell to the enemy. For many years, we languished in darkness, beaten, bloodied. But we rose to our knees, then to our feet, then back into the sky. Today, fifty years after that first terrible attack, we near the day of our victory. We flew from Nightwall with a hundred thousand ships and ten million brave soldiers." A long pause. "On our journey here, we've lost all but five thousand ships and half a million souls. We will forever grieve for our fallen comrades. We will forever honor their sacrifice. Those of us who remain—we are strong, we are courageous, and we are ready for victory. In a few moments you—half a million of Earth's finest—will deploy to the enemy homeworld of Abaddon. There you will fight the scum in their burrows. You will defeat them in their own homes. And you will slay their emperor. The battle will be long and difficult. Our enemy is powerful. Do not underestimate him. The scum will fight viciously. But they will fail. They will die. Earth and her allies will strike hard today. We will have victory! Good luck, warriors of Earth, and may God, the stars, and the cosmos bless you."
The hangar doors began to open. The shuttle had only a small, rectangular viewport, but through it Marco could see Abaddon's surface a few hundred kilometers away. From where he sat, he couldn't see the other shuttles nor the rest of the fleet. It felt like facing that rocky arena alone.
You're down there, Marco thought. The emperor. You who've been infecting my mind with your visions. You who hurt Lailani, who ordered her to kill my friends. You who sent your warriors to murder my mother. He clenched his fists, sudden rage flaring through him. You whom I will kill.
"Hold on to your asses!" Sergeant Jones said.
The shuttle began to move toward the hangar's open doors.
"Here we fucking go!" Addy shouted. "No fear!"
"No fear!" the soldiers replied.
"Victory!" Marco cried out, surprised at himself, his pulse pounding in his ears.
"Victory!" they all called in reply.
With roaring engines, the shuttle burst out from the Urchin's hangar and plunged down toward the planet. Thousands of other shuttles streamed down with them. The invasion of Abaddon began.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Like a shower of comets, thirty thousand shuttles rained down toward the desert planet.
Marco clung to his seat, teeth rattling. His head kept banging against the back of his helmet, and he clenched his jaw. Around him, his comrades sat, fists grabbing the handlebars. The shuttle shook madly. The sound was deafening. They plunged down, down through space, and fire blazed outside the viewport. The shuttle walls heated. Sweat drenched Marco. The shuttle screamed, an almost human sound, as it plunged through the outer layers of atmosphere, screeching, shaking, tearing through the sky of Abaddon.
With a flash, the flames vanished. Through the viewport, Marco saw yellow, endless sky and a cracked desert below.
The shuttle shook with every kilometer descended—and they were descending several per second. Marco banged against his metal suit. He forced himself to take quick, short breaths. Through the viewport, he could see the other shuttles, myriads of them spreading into the horizon, and the desert tilted. Mountains rose, taller than any on Earth, and canyons cracked the land, and mesas thrust up like teeth, a painting all in tan, yellow, and sickly brown. The sun beat down, blinding and white. The shuttle became sweltering, a searing oven.
"He's near," Lailani said, speaking through her communicator. "Right below us. I can feel him pulsing. Calling to me. Waiting in the darkness." She gasped and let out a cry. "He knows! He—Careful!"
For a moment the shuttle's flight steadied, and silence fell.
Marco stared outside.
On the surface of the planet, great volcanoes yawned open like bursting sores.
With blasts of smoke, yellow lava shot upward.
The streams of molten rock flared up, great geysers, rising many kilometers into the air. One jet washed over a shuttle nearby, pulverizing it. Across the sky, more geysers tore into other shuttles, cracking the metal, burning the soldiers within.
"Dodge them!" Ben-Ari cried to the shuttle's pilot, a soldier named Hocking.
"Got it!" Sergeant Hocking replied, tugging the controls on the shuttle. The propellers roared, and they swerved in the sky. A pillar of yellow lava soared beside them. The heat baked the side of the shuttle. Droplets hit the hull, tearing through the metal, and air whistled. The windshield shattered, and the shuttle swerved again. Another pillar of lava rose, foul, acidic, stinking. It bathed the side of the shuttle, and drops flew inside. One glob hit a soldier at Marco's side, eating through his armor. Droplets hit Marco's boot, searing the metal, and he grunted and kicked them off.
"Hocking, get us out of their path!" Ben-Ari shouted.
"Goddamn scum vomit!" Addy cried, ripping off a panel of her suit, the pus eating through it.
"Another one incoming!" shouted a man.
The shuttle tilted. Marco looked out the shattered windshield. He saw the geyser rising toward them.
Fuck.
He ripped off his seat's handlebars and leaped across the shuttle. The spray drove in, washing over seats, tearing into soldiers. Men and women screamed. The searing liquid hit a soldier's helmet, shattering the glass, eating the face within. The shuttle spun madly, out of control, rising, falling, tumbling.
"Hocking!" Ben-Ari cried, but Marco saw that the pilot was dead. As the shuttle spun, he caught glimpses of the others. Shuttle after shuttle was exploding in the sky, falling, leaving trails of smoke, and crashing onto the planet.
Marco gripped a crack in the wall. He pulled himself toward the cockpit, yanked the dead pilot out of her seat, and grabbed the controls.
"Marco, do you know how to fly?" Ben-Ari shouted.
"No, but he played lots of space video games as a kid!" Addy shouted, her arm burnt. "Maybe that'll help."
There were two joysticks here. Marco grabbed one in each hand, pulling them randomly, struggling to steady the shuttle. One of the joysticks seemed to control left and right movements, the other up and down, though Marco wasn't sure which was which. They lurched through the sky. A blast of lava rose toward them—or whatever this foul material was—and Marco tugged one of the joysticks, hoping it was the right one. They banked sharply, dodging the stream.
"Marco, to your left!" Addy shouted.
Marco looked. Another shuttle was
there, only feet away from them. He pulled hard to the right, and suddenly they were plunging nose down, and soldiers flew from their seats, and air roared through the cracks. Marco tried to steady their flight, to pull up their prow. He managed to yank up sharply, then dive to the right. The joysticks threatened to rip free from his hands. A jet sprayed toward them, and Marco tried to dodge it, missed most of it, but the blast caught their tail. One of their turbines tore free, spun through the sky, and suddenly they were spinning too. A geyser washed across a shuttle nearby, and its propellers tore off, and its door blasted outward and flew and slammed into Marco's cockpit. His propellers followed, and the two vessels slammed together, and the cockpit shattered and stabbed Marco's exoframe with a thousand hot shards. A soldier screamed behind him and flew out the breached hull, only to be sucked into another shuttle's engines, causing the vessel to explode two seconds later.
Marco's shuttle was tumbling, barely held together. Only one of their engines still worked. His suit damaged, his cockpit falling apart, he grabbed the controls, tried to steady their flight. Balls of fire rained around them—the other shuttles. The ground rushed up toward them. Marco yanked back hard on both joysticks, and their nose rose, and they skimmed over the ground.
Come on, land, land, land—
Boulders rose ahead from the ground like teeth. They tore into the shuttle. The vessel rose into the air, spun, slammed down hard upside down, and they were careening. Another soldier flew out from the hull, only for the shuttle to run him over. Sparks and blood showered. They tore grooves through the earth, racing, burning, knocking another shuttle aside, slamming through boulders before finally slowing, slowing, spinning, slower, slower . . . then coming to a stop.
Shuttles crashed down around them.
Flames crackled.
They lay on the surface of Abaddon, upside down, their shuttle smashed.
Soldiers groaned. A few were still fastened to their seats, heads dangling upside down.
"Marco," Addy said, "you obviously didn't play nearly enough video games."
Marco struggled out from his seat and began to help soldiers out from theirs. Some were injured even with their exoframes. One man's leg was bent, the bone shattered within its metal frame. Another woman was burnt. The yellow lava had melted her armor's joints and seared the skin. A third soldier hung dead from his seat, neck snapped during the crash. The survivors climbed out from the ravaged shuttle onto the cracked, beige surface of Abaddon.
The desert landscape spread before them into all horizons. Tan mountains rose in the distance. The land was rocky and cracked. Here was a desert of boulders, canyons, and mesas like giant discarded blocks. It was almost like being back at Fort Djemila—a lifeless, monochrome wasteland. Abaddon's gravity seemed heavier than Earth's. Marco could feel this at once, and he was thankful for his exoframe that provided extra strength to his legs. Most of the troops in this war weren't wearing the expensive exoframes, just their standard battle fatigues. Walking here would feel like walking with a forty-pound weight on your shoulders.
Yet even those soldiers were the lucky ones. Across the desert, countless warriors lay dead. Thousands of shuttles had crashed and burned. Corpses lay in piles of smashed and molten metal. Only ten feet away, Marco saw a corpse hanging out the shattered window of a shuttle. Below the shoulders, there was nothing but a long, dripping red mess like a bloodied rag with some hair and teeth. A few corpses lay burning in the sand. Not all the fallen were human. A Gurami floundered on the sand, suffocating without water to breathe. A human corporal was pouring water from his canteen onto the fish, to little effect. One of the Silvans, a furry disk with six tails, was dragging itself up a hillside, seeking its brethren in a shattered vessel built of crystals and amber.
"It wasn't supposed to go this way," Marco said, staring at the devastation.
"No shit, Shirley," Addy said.
"You mean Sherlock," Marco said.
"It's Shirley," Addy insisted. "Like Shirley Temple. She took no shit from nobody."
Yet some shuttles had made it down. Others were still descending, and the volcanoes on the planet's surface were still spurting up streams of yellow fluid. With every geyser, the ground shook and Marco nearly fell. Only half the shuttles were making it down. Their warriors emerged and arranged themselves into their squads and platoons. It was an impressive force, thousands of warriors gathering in the desert. But it was such a small fraction of the warriors they had left Nightwall with that Marco's belly knotted.
"Spearhead Platoon, rally here!" Ben-Ari said, emerging from the shuttle.
They gathered around their lieutenant, organizing into their three squads. The tattooed Sergeant Bellet, never losing her smirk, led Marco's squad. He stood behind her, Addy and Lailani at his sides. The others all formed rank in the desert nearby. The Spearhead Platoon had left Nightwall with fifty soldiers; they were down to forty now. Across the desert, other platoons were gathering around their own lieutenants, then grouping into their companies and battalions.
"De la Rosa," Ben-Ari said. "Can you still connect to—"
Lailani screamed.
Marco grabbed his gun. The desert began to crack open.
"Scum!" he shouted.
From countless cracks and holes across the desert, the enemy emerged.
"Fire!" Ben-Ari shouted.
The platoon needed no encouragement. They arranged themselves into fireteams, stood in a circle, and fired their guns.
Plasma bolts blasted out, slamming into scum. Marco switched his gun to automatic and spurted out a flaming turret, turning his Fyre rifle into a flamethrower. The scum screamed and burned. Thousands were advancing from all sides. For every scum that died, ten more emerged from underground. Across the desert, soldiers crumbled before them. Centipedes ripped into men and women, tearing flesh off bones. Soldiers fell, eviscerated. A man cried out for his mother. A woman wept as scum fed on her severed legs.
"Platoon, make your way to shuttlecraft 56A!" Ben-Ari shouted, pointing. "With me!"
Marco saw it there, maybe five hundred meters away. A heavy shuttlecraft, much larger than the one they had crashed. Soldiers tugged down a massive ramped doorway on the craft, and Marco saw armored vehicles inside.
Sand tigers, Marco thought, remembering them from basic. Our rides.
"Come on, squad!" Sergeant Bellet howled, firing her gun. "Stop scratching your balls and make for those sand tigers!"
They ran in two rows, spraying out plasma in all directions. Their metal boots cracked the earth. Scum died all around. Some of the centipedes leaped through the plasma, claws flashing. A soldier ahead of Marco screamed, claws tearing through his exoframe. Another scum leaped at Marco, and he swung his arm, knocking it down, and Addy stepped on it, crushing its exoskeleton. With their exoframes on, they were no longer just frail humans. They were as strong, fast, and heavy as the scum themselves. Their plasma kept tearing the creatures down.
They fought their way for every step. Another soldier fell. All across the desert, more shuttles were struggling to land, only for bursts of acid to tear into them. Those shuttles that did reach the ground faced the scum leaping from cracks and burrows. Firebirds screamed overhead, unable to bomb the scum without also hitting the soldiers. Attack choppers hovered, trying to pick out the scum one by one—agonizing work. Entire companies fell, overflowing with centipedes. As Marco ran, he saw a canyon crack open nearby, and the ground swallowed a platoon. The fifty warriors fell, screaming, into a pit of scum below.
We should never have come here, Marco thought. We can't do this. We can't defeat them on their own soil. We were fools.
He looked up, seeking the HDFS Terra in the sky. Yet it was too far to see, especially in this searing sunlight. Marco thought back to Admiral Bryan's words—both his speech to the troops and his private words to Marco. He tightened his lips.
Fifty years ago, Bryan did not despair. I won't despair now.
He fought through the scum, gun firing, fists swingin
g. Their claws slammed into his armor, denting it, cutting him, but he ran on. It was only five hundred yards, but it felt longer than his great run at the end of basic training.
Finally, winded and bleeding, the platoon reached the shuttle that was unloading the sand tigers. The armored vehicles stood in the desert on their chained caterpillar tracks, heavy machines that weighed sixty tons each, topped with .50-cal Stinger machine guns. They were thick, ugly, warty beasts of gears, chains, and heavy metal the color of sand, almost as big as tanks. Here were no slick, state-of-the-art machines of the STC. These were the rude, crude brutes Earth Territorial Command had brought with it. Marco had fought in a sand tiger at Djemila, had seen these heavy tracks crack open scum. Each vehicle was large enough to transport an entire squad. Spearhead Platoon would need three.
As scum approached from all sides, dying in helicopter fire, Sergeant Bellet pulled down the back door of one sand tiger. When opened, it formed a ramp. Their squad raced in. On the inside, the sand tiger was surprisingly small; a huge portion of its girth was the thickness of its walls. There were two benches here among boxes of supplies and ammunition. A narrow passageway led to the driver's seat, while a ladder rose to the gun turret.
"Commander," Marco said, "Lailani and I operated one of these gun turrets in the Battle of Djemila."
Sergeant Bellet nodded. She pointed to the ladder. "Get up there, both of you, and kill the scum."
It was a tight squeeze in their exoframes, but Marco and Lailani managed to scale the ladder and emerge into the turret. It was open to the air, only a low metal ring around them. The stinger rose like a scorpion's tail. As they had back in Djemila, Marco grabbed the machine gun while Lailani grabbed the wheel that aimed it.
"I can feel him," Lailani said, speaking into every helmet in the platoon. "The scum emperor. His anger is like the volcanoes. We almost landed right over him, but the crash took us a few kilometers off course. There, beyond those mountains." She grimaced. "He knows we're coming. He's not happy."
Scum were beginning to climb the sand tiger. Marco fired the machine gun, tearing them off.
Earth Rising (Earthrise Book 3) Page 18