“So far,” said Arun. “We’ve followed the standard practice we were taught. We’ve kept united as a single group, and kept to routes with aerial cover. We’ve even carried our dead around with us to avoid leaving a trail for pursuers. That changes now!”
He glanced up to gauge their reaction. Yoshioka was trying not to look nervous, but was biting her lip; the others gave nothing away.
“We abandon our dead here,” continued Arun, “and then we trade stealth for speed. I agree with Lance Sergeant Hecht that our attempts to shield ourselves from observation may not be achieving much anyway. When I was the guest of the Hardits back in Detroit, I underestimated their ability to detect me through scent alone. It’s possible they could pick up a scent trail from a considerable distance away.”
Hecht gave a tiny nod of encouragement. More importantly, so did Gupta.
“We leave the avenues and head cross country to Detroit,” Arun said. “Our next stop will be at one of the potential battlefield sites we noted during our advance. This site will be only a slight detour. It has a stream for us to quench our thirst. From now on we don’t run, we march, Marines to carry no more than one refugee at a time. I’m aiming for eight klicks per hour. That will be a forced march for many of them, but they will have a target to aim for, which will make it psychologically easier. Once we are there, we take a three hour rest break. If we can fend off any pursuers, I’m hoping two more bounds with rest stops will bring us home to Detroit.”
None of his NCOs spoke but he sensed that planting a target in their minds to aim at had revitalized them, just as he’d intended. “Sergeant, ready us to move out in five minutes. I will advise Beowulf and Detroit of our revised plan.”
— Chapter 37 —
When they reached the rest point, Arun had nothing but further exertions in store for the fatigue-addled Marines. With Gupta’s quiet backing for the work, they had transformed the hill into a temporary fortified camp before letting those who weren’t on first watch tumble into sleep.
That included Arun, who sat down against the side of his trench and allowed his eyes to close.
Sleeping in your battlesuit had advantages. Barney knew how to relax him, adding a slight chill to the air inside his helmet, and projecting a temporary cushion of buffer gel, shaped to his human’s neck.
Of even more importance, Barney’s deep mental connection with his human partner allowed him to turn down the parts of Arun’s mind that would keep him awake.
Tomorrow would look after itself; Arun felt no need to worry about it. And the horrors of his past stayed firmly there, with no power to haunt his present.
He was at peace.
“McEwan! McEwan! Acknowledge!”
“Wha’ izzit?”
“Wake up!”
“Indiya. I’m here. Awake. Go ahead.”
“We’ve detected activity about 500 klicks northwest of your position. Reserve Captain reckons it’s an underground battle.”
“You mean the Trogs are still resisting?”
“Possibly. Or the enemy is fighting its own civil war. Either way, I thought you should know…” Indiya’s voice tailed off, before coming back with a heartfelt: “Mader zagh!”
“What now?”
“Standby! … I’m picking up EM activity about two klicks from your position. Headed straight for you. Get out of there!”
“No! We stand and fight.” Arun blinked, checking himself over to confirm he wasn’t making command decisions while half asleep. He wasn’t; they could never outrun the Hardits with those they’d rescued in tow, and he wasn’t prepared to abandon them, because that would have made the sacrifice of those who had died worthless. “Talk to you later, Indiya.”
Even before he had shut down the FTL link, and opened a tactical command channel, he heard Puja’s voice. “Sir, hostiles detected.”
“Advancing from northwest. Beowulf confirms. Assessment?”
“Infantry. A handful of AI signatures suggest limited quantity of advanced equipment. No armor. No drones.”
“Damn it, Puja. I can hear the worry in your voice. Tell me how many!”
“I estimate… 3,000!”
— Chapter 38 —
“Umarov!” snapped Springer.
“What?”
“Just checking you’re awake, Old Man. We have contact.”
“I heard. I was resting my eyes. That’s all.”
Springer laughed. Umarov was born ninety years before her, but had spent nearly all that time frozen. His status as an ancient was easily strong enough to weather the truth.
“Do you think I’ll do the same when I reach your age?” she asked.
“You’ll never know if you don’t stop jabbering.”
Before resting up, Springer’s section had scooped firing holes into the crest of the hillside, wide enough to take two Marines and deep enough to keep their heads under cover. They’d dug a second ring of holes farther back, on the reverse side of the slope up the hill, which would provide good cover from any militia at the bottom of the hill armed with crude slug-throwers. Before resting, the Marines had cut a final trench ringing the center of the hill, which was occupied by armed slaves.
Their armored gauntlets and powered exoskeletons meant the Marines were less tired and far stronger than the refugees they’d liberated, and so the Marines had dug still further holes for the humans they’d collected from the camp. Springer was tired, and her chest and leg hurt. The suit’s legs were hurt too, making walking difficult, but digging she could do well. It felt good to do something useful.
Umarov and Springer shared a firing hole on a hillside prominence to the northeast of the camp, the lynchpin that connected the survivors of 2nd Section with Hecht’s 1st Section. The rest of the section – Yoshioka, Zug, Schimschak, and Binning – were spread thinly out toward the east, one to a hole. Their eastern flank was set against a tree-lined stream that flowed down the hill.
Umarov and Springer’s position was the most exposed position of the entire camp. But it gave the best arcs of fire too.
Any doubts Springer might have harbored at the start of the mission had been vanquished, forgotten. Her leg had stood up just fine. She was a Marine, as good as she had ever been.
She sighted down her barrel. It was an illusion, of course. She was holding her carbine above her head, letting it lie in a rest scooped out from the bank of dirt around the lip of her hole. The view was coming from the worm camera that had sprouted out the top of her helmet. Saraswati put them all together to create the illusion of looking down the barrel.
If she needed greater accuracy or harder hitting power, all Springer had to do was dial up the charge setting on her gun’s rails and bring the stock against her shoulder. For the moment, she preferred the approach that didn’t have her sticking her head up.
“Fire at will,” came the order from Lance Corporal Yoshioka.
The nearest Hardits were 400 meters away to Springer’s front-left, using the cover of the night to advance cautiously up the hillside from the north. If she interpreted their side-on shuffle correctly, the scabrous monkeys were nervous as hell. It was a sideways glance of an assault, and their hesitancy gave Springer plenty of time to take a long look at what she was facing. Frakk, there were so many! She looked for officers or leaders amongst them. The braver ones. Anyone who wasn’t cowering so much.
But there was no one.
All the Hardits were desperate not to be there.
So Springer picked a target at the front of the advance and shot the veck in the head.
Other Hardits had fallen by now, the mass of troops recoiling as they realized they were under fire.
Maybe they would run?
A few Hardits began to edge backward.
“Hit the ones still advancing,” said Umarov.
“The voice of experience,” replied Springer, scanning the enemy for any still coming forward. She found none, but she did spot a few who were holding position while the majority around them were
falling back.
So she shot the steady ones. Aim. Fire! Aim. Fire!
The Marines had scattered comm repeaters around the camp, which meant that LBNet was sharing the observations from individual Marines to paint an ever more accurate picture. By the time she’d shot six Hardits, and the Legion had felled scores, LBNet was still adding newly identified targets at a far faster rate than they were being removed as casualties. There were hundreds of the monkeys. Maybe thousands.
But they were Hardit militia, a reluctant mob, not a disciplined military unit.
The aliens were now falling back to the north in disarray, shooting at the hillside as they retreated. The poorly aimed rifle rounds sent shrill whines through the air, but passed harmlessly overhead. Some of the Marines and all of the unarmored humans were on the reverse side of the slope. They shouldn’t be in any danger. Not if this lot ran.
A few Hardits at the back dropped their rifles and bounded away to their rear on all fours.
This was Springer’s moment. She selected rocket rounds and fired her entire supply into the middle of the mob.
Rocket rounds didn’t do much more damage than a standard kinetic dart, but the noise and flash — especially at night — were more frightening.
That’s what she hoped, and it did the trick.
The Hardits turned and fled en masse. Many dropping their weapons in their desperation to get away.
Springer dropped down into the bottom of her hole.
“Wake me if you find someone worth shooting at, Old Man.”
“You’ll get your chance, kid,” Umarov replied. “They’re just probing for now. Starting to wear us down.”
“Really? They didn’t achieve much. I don’t see why they bothered.”
“How many rounds have you fired?”
“You can read my ammo state off LBNet, Umarov. Or is your eyesight failing?”
“It was a rhetorical question, kid.”
Inwardly she sent herself some choice curses. Umarov’s words had bruised her confidence. She had plenty of grenades and railgun darts left, but her energy pack was reading 50% and she’d fired all her rocket rounds.
She was good for now, but what if that militia mob had just been the start of a long night of assaults?
Her spirits plummeted further when the staccato rattle of automatic fire opened up somewhere to her front.
“Flenser cannons,” Umarov reported over LBNet. “To the north of the militia advance. They’re shooting their own side! The vecks are flaying the rear of their own troops. They’re… they’re turning back, advancing toward us.”
For your enemies to shoot themselves — that was a delicious outcome. After spending a week at their mercy as an Aux slave two years earlier, she had no sympathy for the aliens. Gut them, flense them, burn them: she didn’t care how much they suffered so long as they wound up dead.
But then she thought of what flenser rounds did to an unarmored body. She’d seen cadets forced to shoot their own with flenser rounds in the Cull. The round casing split open to release pairs of tiny barbed metal balls, each orbiting the other by the monofilament wire connection: like a cross between miniature nunchucks and shuriken throwing stars. It was a particularly messy form of death.
And that would make an effective goad.
The sergeant came over the comm. “Now we know how the enemy motivates her troops: advance or be shot.” Gupta growled. “I see that as a personal challenge. They’ve called us out. We have to make the militia fear us more than their own side. On my mark, lob three frag grenades into the mass, and then pull back to the reserve holes while I watch what they do. 3… 2… 1… fire!”
Between the worm camera that extended out the top of her head, Saraswati’s guesswork, and LBNet’s picture of the enemy’s positions, Springer didn’t need to leave the shelter of her hole to fire. She braced her carbine’s stock on the rocky ground at the bottom of her pit, and sent a spread of three fragmentation grenades flying into the militia horde.
She didn’t wait around to see the results. Didn’t need to. She knew her aim had been true. With the semi-smart munitions still airborne, she scrambled up the reverse of her hole to the positions further down the reverse side of the slope.
The sergeant hadn’t needed to point out his thinking for falling back. Defense in depth wouldn’t work against such overwhelming odds. If the Hardits kept on coming, the defenders needed a more solid line and the reserve line had a shorter frontage.
Springer’s torso was out into the open, and she was pushing off with her rearmost leg when the dirt all around her exploded into angry plumes.
“Contact east,” someone shouted. “The far side of the stream.”
The crack of incoming rounds was mixed in with a couple of dull thuds.
“Two hits to the head, dear,” reported Saraswati. “Just flenser rounds. Our helmet’s good for now.”
“Incoming automatic flenser fire,” she confirmed over the comm as she slithered through the storm of fire. If all was well, LBNet would have already informed everyone. Verbal confirmation was expected, though, on a battlefield where AIs and distributed networks could be compromised by cyber attack.
The flenser cannon fire soon slackened off, and the plumes of dust kicked up by each round had meshed around each other into a dust cloud. Thick enough to provide cover.
She slotted a smoke grenade into the launcher beneath her SA-71’s barrel, and fired it off to the east where it added to the confusion with its mix of burning combustibles, ablatives and false radar and electronics signatures.
The smoke glowed with an eerie backlight. The trees that lined the stream were alight!
Just as she was about to crawl onto the second-line firing hole, a casualty alert flashed in tac-display. Two seconds later, she heard more smoke grenades going off between her and the incoming flenser cannons.
Keeping her head low, she ran to where a flashing blue dot showed the position of Marine Serge Rhenolotte — Zug.
Umarov was already there, crouched over Zug who was face down in the dirt, not moving.
Another burst of flenser fire flailed their position, firing blindly but the intensity of fire was enough that she saw first Umarov and then Zug being hit. Then she felt a crashing blow to her head.
“Helmet compromised,” reported Saraswati. “Move your sweet ass!”
“His left arm’s badly damaged,” said Umarov. “Tilt him onto his right.”
“Agreed,” Springer replied as she clamped her carbine to her back. “You take his legs.”
Umarov complied. Springer was far stronger and they both knew it. Still under fire, she twisted Zug around until he lay on his right. Then she lifted him up and shuffled backward, the need to rescue her comrade driving all thoughts of fatigue from her exhausted muscles.
They took more hits, but the smoke was enough to cover their retreat to the next line of firing holes and beyond until they fell into the reserve trench where Lance Corporal Yoshioka, their section commander, waited for them.
Without hesitation, Springer started checking over Zug’s wounds, setting his AI and Saraswati debating how best to treat him.
“Leave him to me,” said Yoshioka.
Springer ground her jaws in frustration. Tearing herself away from Zug was impossibly difficult, even though administering to casualties was part of the lance corporal’s role. She hesitated, unable to leave him.
“Vulley off and let me do my job,” shouted Yoshioka. “You two get back into the second line and stand ready.”
Yoshioka’s words were what Springer needed to get her going. She slithered out of the trench and headed north. The hole Springer aimed for was only twenty paces away but the going was extremely hard. Her legs barely seemed to function, not that she could stand anyway. The incoming fire had grown in intensity. Vicious flenser rounds clawed at her back as she crawled forward.
Saraswati’s warnings became so shrill, that Springer rolled onto her back to expose her chest armor — the thickes
t layer of protection — and wriggled backward, with her arms stretched over her head, holding her carbine.
“Well done, dear,” the AI said when Springer fell back into her new firing hole. “Now the bad news. The exomuscles amplifying hamstring movement were already damaged getting out of that labor camp. They’ve taken several more hits in the past minute. You can still walk, barely, but it will feel like your boots are weighed down by micro black holes in your heels. You can slither and crawl a little, even stand, but you’re not walking off this battlefield, let alone all the way back to Detroit. Not in this battlesuit.”
A chill descended over Springer as she thought through what that meant. When the battle was over, there would be battlesuit armor that no longer had a living owner, but it wouldn’t be fitted or calibrated to her needs. Underneath her armor, she was naked, which was merely embarrassing. Not having a left leg beneath the knee was far worse. When she reported her status to Yoshioka she had to fight to keep her voice steady. She could bear the danger of the battlefield, but not this. This was intolerable, the very thing she had dreaded from the start.
She had become a burden to her comrades.
— Chapter 39 —
The Hardits swarmed over the crest of the hill, using the borrowed courage of mob mentality to push them onward once more past the abandoned first line of firing holes and on to the second defensive line, twenty meters farther on. The shorter second line was filled with Marines and liberated slaves with captured Hardit rifles, but they kept out of the attackers’ sight, down at the bottom of their holes.
From his trench in the third and final defensive zone, Arun felled one, two, three monkeys before the hidden humans all along the second line stood and let off a volley at point blank range. The shock of these defenders appearing from nowhere, and their lethal hail of fire, made the front Hardit ranks recoil. Those behind slammed into a wall of comrades who were no longer advancing. A wave of fear rippled back from where the Hardits touched the human line.
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