“Yee-haw!” the XO screeched over the net. “Crutch bagged one. We’re coming in hot, so cover us!”
The pirates were not registering on their reticules, but the XO’s team was. Eight Marines were in a full-out sprint, coming right at them. In the open, the Marines could make it in five minutes. With full battle rattle and in the trees, it would take them longer, but they were making good time. Ryck watched the avatars, beginning to hope that all would reach their position.
Hope is not to be relied on in battle, though. At 500 meters away, the first Marine avatar grayed out, immediately followed by another. Sergeant Tillis and Doc Lotulelei were gone, just like that. Then a few moments later, Gunny Ming was down, but WIA. Five avatars kept coming, and Ryck could now hear their Rimskies firing. The small caliber dart guns would have no effect on the Nizzies, and firing slowed the Marines down, but still they fired, keeping the pirate’s attention.
Two more Marines fell, one wounded and one dead, and Ryck could hear the remaining three Marine’s battle cries as they got within sight of the kill zone. Ryck could hear the heavy tread of the Nizzies as they pounded through the forest, guns blazing.
The forest was thick enough that the Nizzies were slowed, and both their kinetic and energy weapons were marginalized. But as the XO and two other Marines burst into the kill zone, the open area allowed the Nizzie’s pulse rifles to fire unabated. The XO and Sergeant Sierra were caught in the open and fried as the big two mega-joule guns opened up on them.
Liplock, the last Marine, broke to the right and into the trees just as the first Nizzies lumbered into the clearing, sending a stream of seek-and-kill rounds into the brush where Liplock had disappeared.
Wait, Ryck silently implored to his Banshee team.
Both gunners had been position at the far side of the kill zone, well within the trees, but with cleared lines of fire into it. It would be a balancing act. They needed to wait long enough for more Nizzies to enter the kill zone, but they couldn’t wait too long or the Nizzies would be too close for their missiles to arm.
The lead Nizzie, in hot pursuit, burst through the brush after Liplock and out of the kill zone. Behind him, several other Nizzies followed, but at a slower pace. It was hard to give emotions to a hunk of armor, but Ryck felt he could almost see the suspicion mounting in the pirates inside that armor.
The pop of a Banshee signaled the start of the ambush. A moment later, the pop of the seconds Banshee sounded just at the first impacted on the third Nizzie. Ryck hadn’t thought about it, but the gunner had. He didn’t have to take out the first one, and by taking out one further away, he ensured his missile was armed. It hit with a flash of fire as the Nizzie simply came apart. The second missile hit the fifth Nizzie in line with similar results.
Without fear of knocking out the relatively slow missiles, the rest of the Marines opened up. Ineffective dart and small arms fire peppered the Nizzies, hopefully confusing them with too many targets while the HGL gunners picked their targets and fired. The first Nizzie in the line stumbled, then fell down to lie still. Another had an arm blown off.
The Nizzies were not simply standing still, though. They opened up with all their weapons. On Ryck’s reticule, avatars started to gray out in sweeps as the pulse guns unleashed. Above his head, a branch, severed by one of their kinetic weapons, fell, hitting Ryck on his sore shoulder. He ignored the pain and poured his own darts into the fight, knowing only a very lucky shot could do any damage at all to the pirates.
Another Nizzie went down as five or six stood in the middle of the kill zone, simply pouring out fire as their defense. Then two more fell.
That seemed to break their will, at least as far as just standing and slugging it out. They suddenly broke and rushed into their own assault. To Ryck’s right, a Marine stood up, a toad in his hand, ready to throw it, but the Nizzie ran him down, the toad going over the Nizzie’s shoulder to fall uselessly on the ground.
Ryck checked his reticule. In less than a minute, he’d lost close to half of the Marines in the ambush. It was time for Phase Two.
“Scatter!” he passed, jumping out of his hole and running along his pre-determined egress route. Too few Marines were with him, though.
Ryck felt the tingle of an energy weapon, but whether it was a miss or if the forest once again dissipated the weapon’s effectiveness, Ryck didn’t know. He just kept his head low, and with Çağlar on his ass, ran to where the deadfalls and tiger pits in his little sector had been placed. He had to squirm to the side to get past one pit, but he kept going for another 100 meters before stopping. He turned around before realizing that the pit was now out of sight.
If they happened to catch a Nizzie in any of these traps, they would have to act fast. The soft loam that made digging the tiger pits so easy would be no match for a man in a Nizzie. He could simply dig his way out.
Ryck could hear crashing and shouting throughout the forest, but nothing was near him. If a Nizzie had followed Çağlar and him, it had broken off. Ryck motioned for Çağlar to get up, and the two of them cautiously moved forward.
“Commanders, report when you can,” he passed, cognizant that some might have their hands full at the moment.
The net remained eerily silent, though, while the woods were full of the noise of combat.
“Holy shit, we’ve got one!” someone shouted to Ryck’s right.
Ryck took off at a run, closing the distance quickly. This was out of his sector, but it looked like no enemy had followed the two of them into theirs. Within moments, Ryck could see two Marines, trying to edge forward to one of the tiger holes. A stream of fire was erupting from the hole, a volcano of high explosives reaching for the sky. Branches and leaves rained down in counterpoint.
Ryck saw it was Ling and Staff Sergeant Quintero, and he pointed at the near edge of the hole with his Rimsky. Ling nodded and started firing, sending clods of dirt into the hole. Quintero added his fire.
The fire from inside shifted, focusing on the edge as well, the stream of rounds eating away at it. If the Nizzie has enough ammo, he’d be able to shoot his way out. Ryck wasn’t going to let him.
He quietly walked to the far side of the hole and peeked over into it. The head of the Nizzie was right there in front of him, only a meter below the lip of the pit. The boys had done a great job in digging the pit in the short time they’d had.
Ryck reached into his cargo pocket and pulled out a toad of his own. He’d made a name of himself with the little incendiary device, and with a wry smile, he pulled the pin. It always seemed to come down to toads with him.
The man in the Nizzie never looked up as Ryck moved forward. They had never seen Nolan hanging in the trees after that fight, so Ryck was not surprised. Evidently the design of the Nizzie was not conducive to visibility, nor were its sensors very sophisticated. With a gentle underhanded toss, he lobbed the toad onto the back of the Nizzie, right at the neck juncture. The tacky coating made it stick with barely a sound. It must have been enough, though, to alert the pirate inside because he stopped firing and slowly turned around. Ryck caught the man’s eyes through the clear visor just at the toad ignited and started it exorable burning journey through his armor.
Ryck didn’t bother to watch his handiwork. It was time to break contact.
“All hands, orange, I say again, orange,” he passed.
He turned to head deeper into the woods, and followed by the other three, started his circuitous route to the rally point where he’d take stock of the situation and plan. He thought at least 12 of the Nizzies had been destroyed, more than he could have expected. But it wasn’t over until all of the vermin had been exterminated.
Chapter 36
Ryck looked around the rally point. He had 52 Marines and two corpsmen with him, 36 being effectives. Steady Doc Lyon was tending to the wounded, and Gunny St. Almans was getting ziplocked. The other wounded didn’t need that, but they were combat ineffective.
Luke O’Leary and eight Marines had not made it b
ack to the rally point. They’d been cut off, and were now running further away with five pirates in chase. Each time they tried to double back, the pirates cut them off. Ryck was monitoring the chase, but there wasn’t much he could do at the moment other than offering encouragement. O’Leary seemed in good spirits though, confident in their ability to evade the clumsier, if far more powerful Nizzies.
The ambush had been successful, but at a high cost. Thirteen Nizzies had been destroyed or put out of action. Eleven had fallen at the ambush site, one at the charging station, and one more had been found by Sandy abandoned and empty while he and six others made their way to the rally point. A toad put the abandoned suit out of action permanently. Where the pirate who had used the suit had gone, no one knew.
Only one of the many booby traps had worked, the one to which Ryck had responded. Sams said a deadfall had been tripped and knocked a pirate down, but he had gotten right back up and continued the fight. He was under the impression that might have been the abandoned Nizzie, but Ryck thought that was wishful thinking. A couple pirates had fallen into tiger pits, but they had easily clambered back out.
All told, the fact that they had knocked out 13 of them was rather remarkable. Except that Ryck didn’t feel much like celebrating. He had lost too many Marines. Of a battalion of over 500 souls, there were only 71 alive, to the best of his knowledge. He had to assume that Bert and the rest who’d been underground were lost. The cream of the Corps, the grand Raider experiment, had been gutted.
He still had the fire burning inside of him to kill the rest of the SOG, and he’d see it through, but there was no joy in the situation. He was just exterminating rats, nothing more.
He mindlessly munched on the last of his energy bars. Normally, he liked the raspberry sunrise flavor, but now it was just calories. He finished the bar, and with a force of will, stood up. He had to make his rounds. Çağlar saw him and started to get up, but Ryck waved him back down. Surprising, his shadow relented and sank back.
“We kicked some ass, Major,” one of the Alpha Marines said as Ryck walked up.
“Sure did, son,” Ryck said, putting on a positive face.
He had to keep them motivated and ready to go.
“No one can stand up to us,” Ryck said to the nods of several Marines.
Sams came up to stand beside him. “We’re not done yet,” he said, “but we’ll get the last few and then go home. We’ve got the major here with us, and he never fails.”
Ryck wanted to correct Sams, but he left it at that. He almost never failed, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to fail now.
Chapter 38
During the night, Siaomai and six Marines who’d been left at the schoolhouse managed to link up with O’Leary and his team, taking over as rabbits. A grateful O’Leary snuck his Marines off and collapsed for some needed rest. Captain Lee took off, followed by the five Nizzies. Several times throughout the night and into the morning, the Nizzies looked to be about to break off, and each time, Siomai came back to engage them. Twice, they had fired grenades, but neither time registered a kill despite at least one direct hit.
Early in the afternoon, the captain passed to Ryck that the Nizzies had broken off, this time for good, in his opinion. He had no more grenades, so Ryck told him to break off as well and make his way back to the rest of them.
“So what do you think?” he asked Sandy and Sams as they stood slightly apart from the sleeping Marines, those who’d been on watch all night.
“I think you’re right, sir,” Sandy said. “They’ve been running since yesterday afternoon, all night and half of the today. They’ve got to be running low.”
“So, is it worth it?” he asked, more to himself than to the other two.
He came to a decision, which was surprisingly easy to make.
“Go get Wright,” he told Sandy, who ran off to get the new Alpha Company commander, taking over with Trap’s death during the fight.
“In for a penny, right Sams?”
“Yeah, a penny, a credit, whatever,” Sams said, his mood upbeat. “I’ll go gather the ducklings.”
Ryck had no idea if his plan would work. I just depended on too many moving parts, and any one going wrong could result in a catastrophe. But it was the best plan he could device given the situation. The first required part had evidently worked, so he had to try.
Sandy and Wright came up, and Ryck briefed the captain on his plan. Wright balked at first, but an order was an order, and he understood that as the second senior man on the scene, he was needed to be ready to take command.
With Wright onboard, the three officers walked to where Sams had gathered 15 Marines, the most agile and physically capable ones he could find. They looked up eagerly as Ryck stood in front of him.
“What’s up, sir?’ Ling asked for all of them.
“We’re going hunting,” Ryck said.
Chapter 39
Ryck squirmed, trying to get comfortable. With one foot jammed into the V, it was difficult to keep it from going to sleep.
“Is the major having problems? A little uncomfortable?” Sams passed on the P2P.
“Eat me,” Ryck said.
“All the little squirrels, sitting in the trees,” Sams went on, “looking for some rats, onto which we’ll pee.”
Ryck rolled his eyes. Fucking Sams!
He looked around him. He could see four Marines in the trees around him. They’d climbed them almost four hours before, after a brisk run to the charging station. By now, his body was beginning to ache.
Ryck was beginning to think that this was going to be a bust. He knew the Nizzies needed power, but there could be another power station somewhere that they could use. And if they powered up and hit the rest of the Marines back with Captain Wright, it could be pretty bad. He hated splitting his forces, but too many at this ambush site could blow it, and he’d needed Captain Lee to relieve O’Leary. Now he had Marines in four separate places. If this didn’t work, and somehow he’d make it back in one piece, he’d have a lot to answer for.
He kept wondering if he should pull the plug on this and consolidate his forces again. They may not have much in the way of weaponry, but still, more Marines were better than fewer. If O’Leary hadn’t reported finding another abandoned Nizzie, powerless, he might have done just that, but the hope that they would come back to this position to recharge kept him going.
For the moment.
He over at Sandy in the next tree over. If anything, Sandy looked more uncomfortable than him. His tree had smaller branches than Ryck’s, and he kept shifting his weight around.
“What do you think?” he asked his captain.
“I don’t know. We don’t have many options.”
Just then, then cicadas to the south of them, one of the more common insects introduced during terra-forming, ceased their incessant droning. Ryck immediately felt his senses go on high alert, his discomfort forgotten. He focused on what could have caused the insects to go silent.
He almost missed it, but almost 30 meters away, a lone Nizzie edged to the tree line. He stood there, behind a large chestnut tree, motionless as he looked out. Just above him, some five meters up, Staff Sergeant Albert “X-Ray” Portis crouched, a toad in his hand.
“Steady,” Ryck passed on the P2P.
Portis gave a thumbs up, never breaking his gaze from the pirate below him.
After a century or so, the pirate seemed to make a decision. He turned to look back with the posture of someone talking. A minute or two later, two more Nizzies came out of the forest. The first one pointed at the charging station and then stepped out into the open.
At that moment, Portis dropped his toad, scoring a direct hit. The pirate didn’t seem to notice it until it erupted with the temperature of a small star. He took one step forward, sparks shooting spectacularly into the air, and collapsed on his face, his legs twitching once or twice before going still. The other two immediately started firing, spraying the area. They were aiming as ground level th
ough.
Sams and two others lofted their toads, but with the distance, neither one hit. Ryck juggled his toad in his hand, but it was just too far to attempt. In a moment, the two pirates had to figure that the Marines were above them, and the Marines would be sitting ducks.
Out of the first tree, Portis jumped to the ground. He fired his Rimsky at the two pirates, getting their attention before bolting toward Sandy and Ryck.
He dove to the ground just as both pirates opened up with their pulse guns. The low, dense laurel absorbed most of the energy of the blast, and Portis madly scrambled forward.
With three huge steps, the Nizzies were under Sandy’s tree, trying to get a clear shot at the staff sergeant. Sandy leaned forward, arm out, and dropped his toad.
And missed!
It fell to the ground beside one of the pirates. The man took a step to his right to get another shot at Portis—and stepped right on the toad as it ignited. Fire shot up into the leg, and with a lurch, the big combat suit fell over as the man inside tried to crawl away from the awful heat. Ryck could see the suit began an emergency molt, but his attention was on the last pirate, who somehow had not noticed what had happened to his comrade.
Ryck stood up in the V of the tree, ready to drop. As he extended his arm, it cramped up.
“Mother grubbing shit!” he shouted, bringing his arm back before he lost the toad.
Below him, Portis looked up and caught his eye. The staff sergeant nodded.
“No!” Ryck shouted, but it was too late.
X-Ray stood up and darted around the pirate and ran straight away. The pirate swung about, took two steps forward, and shot Portis down. He took one more step, as if to check the Marine, and that put him directly under Ryck.
Ryck stepped off the branch and fell almost two meters to land on the pirate’s shoulder. Agony flashed through his right foot, but he managed to get his left arm around the Nizzie’s neck. With his cramping right arm, he slammed the toad to the side of the pirate’s helmet. He let go and fell to the ground as the pirate took a stumbling step back, his foot landing on Ryck’s ankle. The toad flared, and the man did a little dance of agony before he collapsed, almost landing on Ryck in the process.
Major (The United Federation Marine Corps Book 5) Page 20