‘The platoon commander is holding his ground,’ Yulia answered, ‘but the major wants him to attack. The platoon commander is afraid.’
I couldn’t blame him, I thought.
I rapped my knuckles against my visor thoughtfully, weighing up my options. Clearly the FEA platoon, untrained and ill-equipped, would be swept aside by the Loyalists. I had no artillery, and no saucers to aid them. All I had was me, my fire team, and however many child soldiers they had left. It would have to do.
I looked up to the heavens and cursed, then beckoned for Myers and Skelton to follow.
‘What are you planning to do?’ Yulia asked as I began to move forward in a half-crouch, keeping my head as low as possible. A spray of darts struck a tree nearby, hacking chips out of its trunk.
‘I don’t know yet,’ I replied curtly, not turning back to look at her. ‘I need to see what’s going on first.’
I dropped a crosshair onto my position and spoke to Puppy on the section net, explaining the situation to him. ‘There’s my location, mate. I’m moving forward to take a look. Can you move Wildgoose so he has eyes into the forest from where you are?’
‘Should be able to,’ Puppy replied. ‘It might take a few minutes, though. We’re trying not to get spotted.’
‘No worries. Where are the rest of the Loyalists?’
There was a pause, ‘still a kilometre away. I think they’re struggling to move through the marsh.’
We found the embattled FEA platoon pinned along a natural fold in the ground by a withering hail of Loyalist darts. Red crosshairs flickered on my visor display as the Loyalists popped up from their cover a few hundred metres away, firing a couple of darts before ducking back down again. I heard the distinctive roar of Vulcan as one of the suits hammered the undergrowth, hoping to catch anyone unfortunate enough to be in the open.
‘Shit the bed …’ Myers exclaimed, as we peered over a fallen log at the fire fight ahead of us.
I squinted, searching amongst the flickering crosshairs for any sign of the suits. My visor display would mark the machines if it could spot them, but I couldn’t see anything. They were probably firing from cover somewhere to the rear, just in case the FEA attempted to use their missiles. Fat chance of that, I thought, the silly bastards didn’t have anything at all.
‘What do you think?’ Skelton asked, grimly surveying the battle in front of us.
‘They’re pinned by the suits,’ I answered, ‘but I can’t identify them through the trees.’
If we could spot them, so could one of our smart missiles, but the Loyalists wouldn’t make it so easy. We could tell the missile to search for suits before we launched it, and then hope for the best, but it was almost certainly a waste. It would strike a tree long before it found its target.
There was only one way to do it, I decided. We couldn’t move any further forward, or we would risk being pinned down with them as well. We also couldn’t move around to the left, for fear of being exposed on the edge of the forest. Instead we would have to circle around the Loyalists, moving deeper into the forest and hooking around to the right until we found the suits. It was risky - we would be separating further from Puppy and his fire team - but we were trained to work as independent units, and if we did nothing, the FEA platoon wouldn’t last long at all.
I quickly explained my plan to Puppy, and then turned to Yulia. ‘Tell Bhasin to hold that platoon where it is. I will deal with the damned suits.’
‘He has already managed to get the platoon commander to flank to the right as well,’ Yulia argued.
‘What are they gonna do?’ I scolded. ‘Throw insults at them? Follow me!’
We dropped back, moving away from the battle, before running deeper into the forest, ripping through ferns and bushes in our haste. Darts cracked overhead, and occasionally a spray of Vulcan struck the trees above us, missing us by metres. I tried to use the folds in the ground to stay as low as possible, weaving my way around trees and rocks.
As we circled around the battle, I caught a glimpse of several FEA soldiers grouped together as they crept around in the same direction as us.
‘There they are,’ Yulia pointed, but I carried on, pushing further away from the cluster of child soldiers.
The noise of the main battle grew quieter, giving way to the roar of several Vulcan cannons firing in bursts. The suits were nearby, firing through the trees at targets identified to them by the Loyalist soldiers fighting ahead of them.
I slowed my pace dramatically, creeping through the ferns whilst using one hand to brush the foliage out of my way. I then turned back and held a single finger against my visor where my lips would be. Be quiet!
Everyone nodded, understanding that we were drawing near to the suits.
Suddenly the forest exploded with gunfire behind us, and we all dropped to the ground. Makito took up aim with his rifle, but was quickly stopped by Yulia.
‘It is not us,’ she hissed at him.
We lay there for a few seconds, listening as the small group of FEA we had seen fought their own miniature battle against the Loyalists. I wondered if both sides had attempted to flank the other, meeting in the middle by accident. Just as well I had chosen to stay away from them, I thought.
With an upward wave of my hand we rose, continuing to creep through the undergrowth as the fire fight died behind us.
The Loyalists had probably been successful in killing the tiny group of attacking FEA, I decided, since the young soldiers probably didn’t even know how to operate their rifles properly. It was like lambs to the slaughter, all orchestrated by Major Bhasin from the rear. Like a sick, twisted puppet master, he would happily allow them all to die as long as it suited the plan cooked up by the Guard. I knew that troopers were expendable, but those poor wretches were like meat thrown into a grinder, and the thought of it twisted my stomach. Their one chance was in me destroying those suits.
Something flickered orange on my visor display, and I quickly fell to one knee, motioning for the others to follow me down.
An orange crosshair marked possible targets that my visor couldn’t properly identify, usually things that appeared out of the ordinary, or unexpected changes in thermal signature that couldn’t be explained by the computer housed within my respirator. Orange was good enough for me. We were in a forest, but it was highly unlikely that my visor had mistaken a tree for a target.
I looked behind me and pointed at Myers, motioning for him to close up to me.
The young trooper blinked fiercely as he crawled through the ferns, stopping right next to me so that I could unclip the launcher from his daysack.
Just as I did so there was a mighty roar as the nearby suit opened fire on an unseen target, servos whirring as it moved in between the trees. I smiled; there was confirmation.
Once it had been unclipped, I handed Myers the launcher, and the young trooper kept his body low as he carefully set it up onto his shoulder.
‘Silent,’ he whispered. ‘Armoured suit in trees.’
A tiny light lit up on the launcher, telling him without a sound that the missile understood its mission.
I looked back at the others, who remained crouched in the undergrowth. I silently patted the launcher, then patted the grenade launcher under my rifle. Launcher fires first, then grenades after.
They nodded - it was a simple plan - it needed to be.
I held up my hand in front of Myers’s face, counting down the seconds as the suit fired again into the forest. Five, four, three, two, one … launch!
Myers burst out from the ferns, his launcher already on his shoulder and prepped to fire. With a puff of smoke and a mighty bang he fired, and less than a second later there was a second bang as the missile broke through the suit’s armour, detonating inside it. Far too powerful for its intended target, the missile sent great chunks of metal flying through the trees as it blew the suit to pieces.
I emerged beside Myers, instantly firing a string of three high explosive grenades toward the
stricken suit. I didn’t have the time to identify any additional targets, instead I fired them blindly in the hope that the targeting computers inside the tiny missiles managed to find something instead. At the same time the others followed, Alliance rifles and Union mammoth gun firing together and hammering the forest with darts.
‘Contact!’ I announced to Puppy, dropping another blue crosshair to show him where I was. ‘One suit destroyed!’
‘Roger! I’ve got eyes on another on the edge of the forest, just trying to move Wildgoose to get a shot!’
There was another suit in front of us, I saw, just ten metres beyond the first. It spun around to face its new threat, its Vulcan cannon spraying a wall of darts at the guided grenades fired by my launcher. It managed to hit the first two, causing them to explode in mid-air in front of it, but the third managed to get close enough to blow it off its feet. The mighty machine toppled over, claw-like feet flying up in the air as it virtually went head over heels. It would have looked quite comical if we had been somewhere else.
Every weapon was firing at the suit as it struggled to stand back up. Designed only as a mobile weapons platform, the suit wasn’t as agile as a human being, and with so many darts striking its armoured hull it was unable to right itself.
Myers was still reloading his launcher, but I decided I didn’t need it. The key to success in battle was the rapid exploitation of perceived weaknesses in the enemy, and I saw that second of weakness.
‘Skelton!’ I hollered over the din. ‘I’ll move, you cover!’
‘Roger!’ Skelton didn’t stop firing, the magnets in his mammoth screaming as it chewed through its ammunition box.
I bounded forward toward the fallen suit, before taking a knee again and resuming firing. ‘Move!’ I yelled.
Skelton didn’t need to be told, he was already moving, charging through the undergrowth until he was in line with me. As soon as he was firing I picked myself up again, running ever closer to the suit.
A dart is significantly more powerful at close range, able to penetrate through several centimetres of armour with relative ease. As we bounded closer to the suit, one firing while the other moved, its fight to stand up became even more difficult.
Finally realising what was happening, the operator made one final attempt to fight back, pointing his Vulcan cannon toward us.
He was too late. Skelton fired a burst along the length of the arm from less than five metres away, destroying the complex magnets and machinery that enabled it to fire.
I bounded right up to the suit and fired directly into its chest. The dart went in, but it never came out, filling the occupant with tens of holes as it bounced around inside, before finally losing energy. The machine went limp.
‘Pretty rubbish, these things,’ Skelton said as I stepped down from the suit.
I flicked my head toward the FEA platoon. ‘Try telling them that.’
I heard a crack from somewhere ahead of me, then my visor flashed orange as I caught a glimpse of something big falling over on the edge of the forest, hitting the ground with a thump.
‘That’s another suit down!’ Puppy announced triumphantly. Wildgoose had destroyed a third suit, most likely by aiming for the knee. Even at a distance, the high-powered darts from the Orion would penetrate the suit’s armour with ease, and a single well-aimed shot to the knee would break the joint and cause it to topple. The act was made even more brutal because the wearer’s leg was inside the suit leg. I swore I could hear somebody screaming.
The noise of the battle between the remaining Loyalists and the FEA intensified.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ I ordered, and we both ran back toward the others as fast as our legs would allow us to move.
As we ran Myers opened fire, picking off a Loyalist soldier running back through the forest toward the suits. He had probably been sent to find out what had happened, and the game was most definitely up. We needed to get away fast.
I ran into the depths of the forest, crashing through the undergrowth as though the Devil himself was chasing me. Unlike in my dreams, my legs worked fine, and I set a fierce pace as I tried to get as much distance as possible between me and the Loyalists.
Finally, after running for a good few hundred metres, I stopped to listen to the battle, and to wait for the others to catch up.
Yulia was first to arrive, panting slightly as she took a knee beside me, and she scanned her arcs with her rifle. She must have been an Alliance trooper before the war, I figured, because she took everything happening around her in her stride. ‘Once a soldier; always a trooper’, went the saying. She was too professional to be home-grown Presidential Guard.
‘I have told Major Bhasin that three suits are destroyed,’ she said, as the others closed up with us, breathing heavily.
‘Good. Are they attacking again?’
‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘the platoon is advancing.’
I frowned. ‘What?’
Yulia glanced at me. ‘The platoon commander is dead. He tried to attack on the right flank when we did, which is why we heard shooting before we attacked the suits.’
‘So who is leading them?’
‘Major Bhasin is leading them. They are advancing.’
I knew by the look on her face that Yulia wasn’t telling me everything. ‘Is he with them?’
Her jaw clenched, but she said nothing. The blood rushed from my face as I realised what was happening on the edge of the forest, and Myers blinked when I looked back at him and Skelton.
‘Come on!’
I looked across the scene of carnage, my face contorted in disgust. It was butchery. There was no other way to describe it.
The FEA platoon had advanced head-on into the remaining Loyalists in the forest, like an army from centuries ago. Leaderless and armed with nothing other than the rifles and bayonets they held in their hands, they had charged toward the Loyalists in their final effort to halt the advance.
They had succeeded. Shaken by the sudden loss of their suits, then faced by a horde of FEA running at them through the trees, the Loyalists had withdrawn. But it had been a controlled, fighting withdrawal, unlike the mindless charge of the child soldiers sent forward by Bhasin. Their bodies littered the ground, blood spattered across the undergrowth.
Makito looked at the scattered corpses indifferently, and the blank expression on his face made me want to vomit.
‘Poor fucking bastards,’ Myers whispered.
I didn’t respond, instead speaking to Puppy over the net I asked, ‘What’s happening out there?’
‘There’s a body of men withdrawing from the forest, so I’m guessing your attack was successful.’
I glanced at Yulia. ‘You could say that. What about the main body?’
‘They’ve gone firm, but I think they’re about to withdraw.’
‘Good. Have Wildgoose harass them all the way out. Go for their commanders.’
‘Will do.’
I looked again at the gruesome spectacle. ‘Poor bastards,’ I muttered - I couldn’t stop saying it. What a tragic, total waste of human life. The Loyalists had been forced into retreat, but at the cost of tens of lives, and all because Bhasin wasn’t prepared to lead them properly himself. He must have known how to attack the Loyalists properly - he was Presidential Guard after all – but he didn’t want to risk leading his men from the front, so instead he sacrificed them like cattle; meat into the grinder.
‘Poor bastards,’ I repeated.
There was movement in amongst the ferns, only a few metres away. I walked over, only to find a young girl, no older than her mid-teens, lying in a bloody pool on the forest floor.
She was convulsing, several darts had pierced her stomach and upper legs, and her left calf had been severed entirely, exposing a section of white bone beneath quivering flaps of flesh. Blood poured from her wounds, staining the ferns and soaking into the dirt below.
Her eyes were wild, darting between us in terror. She knew that she wasn’t far from death
.
‘Myers!’ I ordered. ‘Get me a tourniquet!’
I pulled open my medical pouch, ripping out my quick clot foam. We needed to stop the blood flow from her calf before she bled out, but meanwhile I could attempt to seal the other wounds to her abdomen. Her breathing was fast, her chest rising and falling rapidly, but both sides appeared to be moving equally suggesting that neither of her lungs had collapsed.
‘Andy,’ Yulia said, crouching beside me, ‘there is no medical chain.’
‘Well make one,’ I snapped, stuffing the first piece of foam into one of the holes in her stomach.
‘It cannot be done,’ she said. ‘I am sorry.’
‘There must be something you can do,’ I argued, continuing my work. Blood dripped from my gloves.
Myers hadn’t applied his tourniquet, instead he held it in his hand, blinking as he watched me try to save the girl’s life.
‘Come on, Myers, get the damned tourniquet on!’
Yulia’s hand rested on my shoulder. ‘There is nothing we can do. She will die here.’
I couldn’t draw the next piece of foam from its packet - my hands were shaking too much, affecting my dexterity. I grew angry at myself for not being able to complete such a simple task, and the angrier I became the less control I had over my hands.
Finally I tossed the packet at the ground. ‘Fuck it!’
‘Andy …’
‘No!’ I shouted. ‘Jesus! Fuck!’ I pointed down at the dying girl. ‘Look at her! Fucking look at her! She’s a child!’
‘We can’t save her, Andy,’ Yulia repeated. Her dark, cold brown eyes softened for a brief moment, as though she was about to cry. She was telling the truth.
I pulled out an auto-injector from my medical pouch and placed it against the girl’s thigh. I couldn’t leave her like that, lying in the forest waiting to die.
Skelton frowned. ‘What are you doing?’
‘What does it look like?’ I activated the injector, pumping painkillers into the girl’s body, before reaching for another one.
Surprising all of us, Yulia crouched down beside the girl’s head, cupping it in her hands as I prepared the second auto-injector. She whispered soothing words into the girl’s ear.
EDEN (The Union Series) Page 16