by Jake Elwood
"That's not the only bad news," Kaur said. "We're in a roughly equatorial orbit. And guess which way we're moving."
Hammett looked at him, suddenly cold.
Kaur gave him a gallows grin. "In about ten minutes we'll be in range of that gun again."
Chapter 16 – Brennan
Captain Jean Brennan sat on the bridge of the corvette Achilles, quietly fretting. The screen to the left of her chair showed a 3D tactical view of the battle raging in orbit. The projection was pieced together from many sources, including passive scans from the Achilles and transmissions of live scan data from the Tomahawk. It showed the fury of the battle in a cold silence, as a collection of simple pixels which nevertheless stretched her nerves tight and made her stomach clench.
It showed her the Tomahawk's fighter tumbling from the sky in pieces.
Every second she remained on the surface felt like a colossal mistake, a travesty, a grotesque act of cowardice. She yearned to launch the ship into the void and join the battle. She burned to give the order.
But she couldn't do it, and the reason was on her right-hand screen. Six of her people were on the surface, and she had a grainy transmission from each of them laid out in a grid on her screen. They were well inside the city now, surrounded by courageous, determined colonists. They were depending on her to sweep in and rout the Hive troops holding the city.
She just wished they would get on with it.
One more image showed on the right-hand screen. A young man stared out at her. By the expression on his face he was trying to look solemn, but the corners of his mouth were curved up the tiniest bit. As they should be. It was his graduation photograph. He wore a specialist's dress uniform for the first time. He'd just finished the most gruelling year of his life, and he was about to be sent into space.
His name was Hudson, and he was dead.
Every time she looked at him something seemed to tear inside her chest. She'd served with him for almost a year, and you couldn’t help being close to your crewmates on a ship as small as the Achilles. She'd never lost someone under her command before. Now six more members of her unofficial family were in mortal danger, and all she could do was sit here, four hundred kilometers away, and fret.
On her left-hand screen a swarm of pixelated blobs rushed toward the Tomahawk, coalesced at the last moment, and seemed to almost merge with the corvette. The Hive weapons would be doing terrible damage to the Tomahawk, she knew, and she cringed as she watched.
The alien ship broke apart, and her heart surged as she imagined it exploding. It was just separating into component ships, though, making a poorer target as it retreated. Brennan's hands clenched into fists as she watched, powerless to help.
"Celeste," she said, and the sailor at the navigation station turned. "When the time comes, I want to sweep in fast, blast that tower, put a few shots into any enemy troops we see, and then get us upstairs as quickly as possible. That's our battle." She jerked a thumb at the ceiling of the bridge. "Not down here."
Celeste nodded. "I'll be ready, Ma'am."
The icon that represented the Tomahawk suddenly tilted, and a red circle appeared around it. Brennan leaned forward in her chair, her throat constricting. "What just happened?"
"They took a major hit," said Samson at Tactical. "I don't know where it came from, though."
None of the blips marking alien ships were close enough to use their heat weapon. They were moving in now, though. Brennan stared, horrified, at her readout. The Tomahawk had just taken a crippling hit. Her engines were dead, and the Hive ships were swarming in.
Her eyes flicked to the other display. She saw walls, streets, rooftops, crouching colonists with disassembled laser drills. The ground team was still infiltrating the city.
They didn't need her. Not quite yet. The Tomahawk, though …
"Celeste. Get us upstairs. Now!"
Brennan's seat pressed against her as the ship accelerated straight up.
"We're helping the Tomahawk. Take us into the middle of that cluster of alien ships." She turned to the Communications station. "Hopkins. Tell Nicholson to abort. We can't help him."
Hopkins gulped, then turned to his console.
Brennan watched the sky turn black and fill with stars. "Hang on, Hammett. We're coming." She kept her gaze away from her right-hand screen. She couldn’t think about Nicholson and his team, and all those courageous colonists fighting alongside him. Would they be able to exfiltrate safely?
It's out of my hands now. Good luck, Derek.
I hope I'm doing the right thing.
Chapter 17 – Nicholson
Nicholson crept through a narrow gap between buildings, his hands sweaty on his rifle. A colonist named Betty, a girl who didn't look a day over fifteen, was pressed up behind him with a hand against his back. She was his guide, but she was happy to let him go first.
A dozen more colonists crowded the alley behind him. They were armed with a bizarre collection of weapons, mostly spears but also some kitchen knives, pruning tools, and an axe. A couple of burly men lugged an industrial laser, and a woman followed them with a tripod slung across her back.
Four other teams were converging on the square near the centre of Harlequin, each one coming in from a different direction. So far, none of them had been spotted. As far as Nicholson knew, no one had seen a single alien, either.
Harlequin was deserted. It felt strange to be surrounded by buildings on all sides and to hear nothing but the wind and the footsteps of his companions. He wasn't sure why the aliens had bothered to occupy the city. Surely they could have built their mystery tower anywhere, and the human structures all around had to be as irrelevant to the aliens as anthills were to a man.
He shrugged mentally and added it to the list of puzzles he had no answer to.
The sky was a strip of soft blue above him, closer to lavender than the skies of Earth. He glanced upward, wondering how the space battle was going. It doesn't matter. It's a distraction for the aliens, and that's all. Focus.
A soft scraping sound reached his ears, as intrusive as a siren in this quiet place. Nicholson froze, then made himself creep forward. He reached the corner of the building and peeked out, just in time to see an alien round the corner of another building and vanish.
He blinked, trying to piece together what he's seen. The Achilles's computers would have a record, of course, taken by his implants and broadcast to the ship. Digital records were fragile, though, when you faced an enemy that used EMP weapons.
He'd seen pictures of the alien boarding party killed on the Alexander, and he'd seen them live during the battle at the pumping station. This alien had been superficially similar, with the same hinged torso and six limbs. There'd been something different, though, and he closed his eyes for a moment, trying to remember.
There was no glint of metal. He opened his eyes, smiling. This alien, unlike the others, was not encased in steel. Those had been commandos. This was a worker, a drone, a random citizen, or something so strange he didn't have a word for it.
But whatever it was, it would be vulnerable to weapons fire. Hell, the guy with the axe might even be able to kill it.
Nothing moved in the street. He counted slowly to a hundred, eyes and ears straining. Then he gestured to the people behind him and hurried across the street, heading for another gap between buildings.
Betty tugged on his sleeve, however, and he changed direction. She pushed him toward a broad wooden door in a tall stone structure. The door swung open when he pushed on it, and he stepped inside, scanning the shadowy room inside. He saw no movement, and he stepped aside to let the others in.
Betty closed the door, then whispered, "The church is never locked."
"Church?" He looked around, examining the space with something other than tactics in mind. It was a long room with a double row of wooden benches facing the far end. Pews? Was that what they were called? He saw a lectern at the front and an altar with a massive wooden cross above it.
; The room was dim but not completely dark, and he lifted his gaze to look for the source of light. And gasped. Sunlight shone through eight exquisitely crafted panels of stained glass. He saw angels and lambs and bearded men in bright robes, all of them lit with an unworldly glow.
"Come on," said Betty. "There's a back door."
Something about this quiet space made him want to linger. It seemed like a good place to think about the ramifications of what he was doing, the people he'd lost, the people he might yet lose. But there was simply no time for anything so abstract. He nodded and hurried after the girl.
They spilled into a broad alley. Betty led them past several buildings, then up a broad staircase. They passed a second-floor restaurant of some sort with an open-air patio. A few chairs were overturned, and Nicholson saw plates of rotten food.
She stopped beside a wall at the back of the patio and looked at Nicholson. "I need a boost."
He looked up. A ladder was mounted to the wall, just out of reach. A fire escape, he supposed. He laced his fingers together, she stepped into his hands and put a hand on his shoulder, and he lifted her up. Metal creaked and rattled, the weight on his hands decreased, and he lowered her to the floor.
She brought the ladder down with her. "Come on. We'll have a view of the plaza from up top."
She climbed, and Nicholson followed. He crawled across the rooftop, hearing the scrape of his armor on aluminum roof tiles and the creak of metal as the others climbed up behind him. The roof was flat and featureless, a metal surface that sagged a bit under his weight. When he was close to the edge he lowered himself to his stomach and wriggled forward.
The first thing he saw was the alien structure. To him it looked nothing like a tower. It looked more like a pile of junk, the top not much lower than his third-story vantage point. There were almost no flat surfaces on the building, if building it was. It was more like a vast collection of unmatched components, all stuck together in a heap about twice as high as it was wide. A chimney of some sort poked straight up from the top of the structure, reminding him uncomfortably of a gun barrel.
He could see three of the power boxes Ron had described. They were lumpy heaps, dwarfed by the structure they surrounded. Only the fat cables snaking across the ground gave a hint as to their purpose.
He thought the plaza might have been quite a nice place before it was taken over. In the center was a fountain surrounded by stone benches. Half the fountain was destroyed, filled by the alien structure. Several shade trees had been cut down, the scorched trunks dragged off to one side. He analysed them as potential cover, then continued his survey.
He saw no aliens. There were other signs of alien technology here and there, car-sized objects that might have been ships or ground vehicles or shelters or just about anything. Everything the aliens built seemed to be lumpy, strange, inconsistent. Well, I don't have to understand it. I just have to burn it down.
He spotted movement on the far side of the plaza, and reached for his binoc. He zoomed in and saw a couple of human faces in the window of a bar across the street. It was Specialist Karen Stark and a bearded colonist.
Nicholson keyed his implants and whispered, "Alpha Team is in position."
"Beta Team is ready," Stark said.
"This is Gamma," said Parrish. "We're about a block away. We're just jimmying a door."
Before the last team could check in, another voice interrupted. It sounded like Hopkins from the bridge crew. "Nicholson. Pull out. We're heading upstairs to support the Tomahawk."
Nicholson bit back a curse. "We're about to start the attack!"
"Sorry," said Hopkins, and broke the connection.
Nicholson turned to Betty, stretched on the roof beside him. "I need you to guide us back out," he said wearily. "The fight is cancelled."
She looked at him, her face strangely pale. She opened her mouth, but she didn't speak. Wider and wider her mouth opened, and then blood poured over her chin. Someone screamed, metal crackled, and then a hole opened in the roof beneath the girl. Nicholson could smell burning metal, burning flesh, and he scrambled backward, reaching for his rifle, as Betty dropped from sight.
Aliens boiled up from the hole, and he screamed, "Hopkins! We need you down here!"
There was no answer. Nicholson forgot about the ship as he swung his rifle up and opened fire.
Chapter 18 – Nicholson
The rooftop battle was brief, bloody, and one-sided. In moments half the colonists were gone, torn apart by the aliens or dragged down through the hole in the roof. The rest retreated to the edge by the ladder. Some scrambled or slid down the ladder. Others jumped to the patio level below. Nicholson went last, spraying blast shots, covering the retreat as best he could.
The attackers seemed to be a mix of what he called commandos, aliens with steel-clad limbs who deflected most of the shots that came at them, and those he called regular citizens. The regular citizens had some kind of black shell on their limbs, still hard enough to let them pierce human bodies and tear them apart. The shells were vulnerable to blast fire, though, and blew apart in a satisfying way as he hosed them with blast shots.
When the magazine clicked empty he stepped backward, letting go of the rifle with one hand and catching the edge of the rooftop as he fell past it. He felt a yank against his fingers and a moment of pain in his wrist, elbow and shoulder. He'd forgotten his chest injury. He remembered it now as the muscles of his chest sent him a pulse of white-hot pain. His body swung forward, his knees banged into the wall, and he let go. He landed, feeling fresh jabs of pain in his ankles, and reloaded as he scrambled back through the tables and chairs.
The aliens on the roof above him retreated. They apparently weren't good jumpers, a fact he filed away for future reference. More aliens were swarming out through the restaurant doors, though.
He fired a burst, watched sparks fly as a couple of commandos deflected his shots, and swore as he turned and ran. He'd killed most of the regular citizens, he realized. Only the commandos remained, which meant he had a problem.
Steel-clad legs clattered on the tiles behind him as he fled for the stairs to the street. He paused half-way down, bringing the rifle to his shoulder.
"For Christ's sake, get out of the way!"
He reacted without thought, diving over the railing beside him. He landed hard on one shoulder, rolled, and came up on one knee.
Beckett and Jackson, a burly pair of colonists who'd been lugging the industrial laser, had the weapon pointed up the staircase. They fired, roasting the flood of alien commandos pouring down the steps. The big laser was absolutely devastating at close range, and Nicholson flinched as a couple of legs tumbled onto his shoulders and bounced away. Hot metal touched the back of his hand and left a crescent-shaped burn that made him yelp.
The woman with the tripod was nowhere to be seen. Beckett worked the controls of the laser. Jackson stood in front of him, the barrel of the laser on his shoulder, one arm up to keep the weapon from falling. He aimed the laser by shifting left and right, bending and straightening his legs to move the beam up and down.
It was over in moments, the aliens sliced apart before they had time to retreat, or even slow down. Nicholson wasn't sure how many of them died, but the steps were wet with gore and blocked by a jumble of body parts by the time Beckett lifted his finger from the trigger. There was a moment of silence as they all looked at one another. There were five of them, Nicholson and the two men with the laser, a thick-shouldered woman without a weapon, and a man named Enright who carried an axe. Nicholson was pretty sure several more colonists had fled. The rest were dead.
"Thanks," Nicholson said at last. "Good job."
Jackson looked at Nicholson, his eyes too wide in a bloodless face. "What now?"
Nicholson hesitated. The truth was, retreat was as dangerous as any other option. "We came all this way," he said. "Let's take a shot at that tower."
Four sets of eyes bored into him, and he was sure they would refuse. But Beckett
nodded and lifted his end of the laser onto his shoulder. Enright hefted the axe and said, "All right. Let's do it."
Nicholson led them around the building. He was no longer getting a signal from the other teams. He didn't know if they were dead, silenced by an EMP strike, or blocked by some alien technology. If any of them lived, he might take some pressure off them by striking at the tower.
He reached the front of the building and scanned the street, then the plaza. He could hear the distant pop of blast shots from across the park, and a scream that sounded more angry than pained. "Give 'em hell, Stark," he muttered, then moved to one side to give the laser team room to work.
The two men resumed their earlier positions, Beckett at the trigger, Jackson with a shoulder under the barrel. The laser fired, and a bright spot appeared on the side of the alien machine.
Except the point of light seemed to sparkle a handspan from the lumpy metal of the structure. Nicholson cursed. "There's some kind of shield." He looked at Beckett. "Keep firing. Maybe we can overwhelm it."
"Something's happening," said the woman, and pointed toward the plaza.
Nicholson turned to look, swinging his rifle up. He fully expected to see a squad of alien commandos coming toward them, but nothing moved around the base of the structure.
His gaze rose. A red glow bathed the chimney at the top of the structure. Then, abruptly, a flash of white light appeared at the top of the chimney, arcing up into the sky. It was gone in an instant, like a bolt of lightning. He could see the line burned into his retinas, slowly fading, when he blinked.
"That's not good," the woman said. "I think they're shooting at your ships up in space."
Chapter 19 – Carruthers