by Nick Cole
“Negative, Sergeant. Gold Squad is waiting this thing out in here with me. The sleds are… we should be clear of the road soon. Over.”
“Sir, with all due respect,” I’m careful here, aware that I’m broadcasting on L-comm for all to hear. “That tank isn’t going to let every sled squirt out. We need to take it down. Requesting permission to go without Gold Squad.”
“Sergeant, it’s fine. We should have Camp Forge on the comm soon. There’s some residual interference, but then I’ll request an artillery cannon barrage. I’m ordering all units to return to their CS and await… wait for their turn to get off the road, over.”
I open my mouth to reply when the sensational krak-bdew of the N-18 ruptures the air around me, followed by the hiss of super-heated gases escaping the rifle’s barrel. My eyes go to the ridge, and I see a koob tumbling down like a rag doll. The HUD on my visor shows one less red dot.
Twenties found his mark.
And from the looks of it, the old MBT has settled in on one of its own. My visor traces the potential trajectory. The gunner is looking to blast one of the sleds at the end of the column, still locked in place. I call out the danger on L-comm. “Silver 6, Silver 6, this is LS-55 on overwatch. Do you copy?”
Whoever is in that sled is going to be lit up if they don’t disembark right now.
“What is it now, Sergeant?”
Of course it’s Captain Devers’s sled. If there weren’t basics and leejes in there with him, I might well keep my mouth closed. “Silver 6, Silver 6, confirmed hostile MBT zeroed on your location. Disembark! Disembark!”
“Belay that order,” Devers says with all the postured regality of an admiral of the Core. “These koobs don’t have munitions for that thing or they would have fired by—”
The MBT’s turret spews out fire. A shell blasts into the rock wall, saving the sled from a direct hit. The tank begins to compensate, raising its cannon.
“All units, disembark! Disembark!” The order is called in by Lieutenant Ford, LS-33. His men call him Wraith due to his penchant for appearing undetected, commenting on conversations you didn’t know he was there to listen in on. Wraith oversees Hammerfall and Specter Squads, and I can see the red bar painted on his shoulder plates as he stands with Exo and Rook at the marshaling point.
Doors drop, and legionnaires begin to spill out of the immobile sleds. But something is delaying Silver 6. Captain Devers isn’t opening the door. The tank makes a final adjustment. Having overcompensated, it ratchets back down. Whoever’s sitting behind the gun isn’t comfortable, thankfully.
The cannon belches a booming fire. I suck in a breath as Silver 6’s drop door flings down. A single leej stumbles out seconds before a high-explosive shell pierces the sled’s armor.
An eruption of flames issues from every conceivable opening in the sled. It comes out of the port leading up to the twins like a funnel. It blows through the front windshield and billows out the open ramp. A couple more leejes stumble out, both of them engulfed in flames.
I can hear them screaming until their bucket comms short out from the heat.
Legionnaire armor will save you from a lot of things, but burning alive ain’t one of ’em. Other than the lone survivor, the entirety of Gold Squad is wiped out.
Oba, what a way to go.
The silvene lining, if there is one, is that the senior leej, in this case Captain Devers, is always at the back of the line. The last one off the sled. Looks like we’ll take that ridge after all.
03
When I was a kid there was nothing I loved more than watching the Galactic Fighting Championships. I knew the name of every fighter in every species index and weight class. For a while, I thought I’d be a GFC champion. I would “train” by punching and kicking our domestic bot, D2O (Ditto) while it attempted to clean. I still have a holopic somewhere of six-year-old me holding Ditto in a rear naked choke, its shining gilded arms waving helplessly. Good times from our family apartment on Tiamu City.
Yeah, I’m a Teema boy. Born and raised.
Anyhow, when Republic aptitude testing consigned me to the Legionnaire Corps, my GFC dreams tapped out. But I still love combat sports. We even have something we call “LFC”—Legionnaire Fighting Championships—on board the Chiasm.
Did, anyhow.
Of all the fighting formats, my all-time favorite is tag team. You’ve got four equally classed fighters, two on each team. One man per team starts the fight and can tag in their partner at any time, provided they can reach them. Those fights have a strategy that you don’t see in one-on-one bouts. There’s a thing called the hot tag that always causes the ampistadiums to erupt. A fighter will get isolated, and the opposite team just works ’em over while his partner desperately stretches out a gloved hand to tag himself in. Usually these guys don’t have the stamina to keep going, and tap or get knocked out. But sometimes they hold on and make it across the octagon to tag in the fresh fighter.
Right now I feel like the partner waiting to be tagged in. I’m watching the leej assigned to watch Twenties’s back run up to the house we’ve occupied. The moment that leej, a kid from Magnum Squad, reports for duty, I’m gone.
He makes his way in through a window. Time to go. Stairs take too long, and every second counts. I hop over the side and drop fifteen feet or so into what passes for a koob front yard.
It’s that kind of stuff that’ll force me to get cybernetic knees before I’m thirty. But hey, what old soldier isn’t a cyborg?
I sprint straight to the marshaling point and slam into the rock wall as a rough and ready group of legionnaires awaits the order to move out. An order that should come from the senior officer on site, even though the plan was orchestrated by me.
“LS-55 reporting, ready to execute battle plan,” I say, slightly winded, to Lieutenant Ford—Wraith.
The lieutenant looks at me a moment. “Still no comm connection to Camp Forge, so let’s not pretend we’ve got air or artillery. It’s all on us. Initial plan was yours, Sergeant Chhun. Give the word and we move.”
I wish every officer was more like Wraith.
“Roger,” I say, struggling to control my breathing so the other leejes don’t get the feeling I’m panting in their audio receptors like Uncle Creepy. “We push straight up and don’t stop until we reach the base of that ridge. Magnum takes left, Hammerfall right, and Doomsday up the gut. We’ll climb up on either side in a pincer maneuver and hammer them inward.”
Twenty-three helmets nod in understanding. A comment comes on our mission channel. “We move too fast and the koobs’ll be firing at our backs.”
Exo chimes in. “We don’t move fast enough and we’re going to lose the last five sleds bottled up here.”
As if in confirmation, the tank booms again, missing its target high. The tank’s gunner has finally managed to make up his mind. He’s no doubt realized by now that the fast-moving sleds in open ground are too tough to hit, and can’t penetrate his armor with their twins. So he’s ignoring the sleds that were able to back out and is focusing on picking off the immobile vics one by one. The way they’re all lined up… not good.
I offer the assault team clarification. “The tip of the spear—I need a sprinter to volunteer—will draw them out, eliminating targets of opportunity as they appear on the HUD. It’s up to the rest of us to drop those koobs before they have a chance to send a slug or a blaster charge into our runner’s back. Most of us will be able to keep moving, but I want Hyena Squad to stick around and verify clear all buildings and trenches while the main force continues to the ridge.”
Wraith stands and checks his N-4. “That’s settled, then. I get my run in today after all. See you up top.”
Before I have the chance to object to Lieutenant Ford assuming the most dangerous position in the assault, he’s up and over the wall without so much as an “Ooah!”
The remaining legionna
ires are stunned for perhaps a half second, but quickly follow, not wanting to leave him isolated.
Wraith runs like he’s alone on a yellow sand beach somewhere in a subtropic system, the only sentient being for miles. His form is perfect and upright, and he’s moving at a pace that seems impossible to maintain all the way to the ridge. The idea was to move quickly but deliberately, making sure not to get too far behind enemy lines that we could be encircled. But Wraith has pretty much overrun the koob position singlehandedly.
They just don’t know it yet.
Between us and the ridge lies a small crop of stone huts and three-foot-high rock walls. Beyond all that is an open plain leading to the ridge, peppered throughout with craggy boulders.
The tank fires again and hits its target, incinerating an empty CS.
Impossible as it seems, Wraith is putting distance between himself and the rest of the legionnaires. He’s easily fifty yards in front of us now, approaching a low stone wall with yellow dots on the other side, signifying that koobs were spotted in that location before legionnaire suppressive fire made them one with the dirt. He hurdles the wall without breaking stride.
I can see a trio of koob heads pop up in astonishment and turn to watch Wraith sprinting past them and toward the stone buildings.
“Dust ’em!” I scream.
So many legionnaires score head shots on these koobs that there isn’t much left of them except shredded air sacs and drooping shoulders. They didn’t even get close to bringing their slug throwers—and at least one PK-9A blaster rifle—to their shoulders.
Legionnaires are expert marksmen.
The run for the ridge continues at breakneck speed. I hear a loud krak-bdew a millisecond after seeing a blaster bolt strike a koob on a distant rooftop. Those blisters don’t seem to be bothering Twenties too much.
Two koobs spring from around the corners of adjacent huts, looking to light up Wraith in convergent fields of fire. Effortlessly, Lieutenant Ford double-taps his N-4 and hits each koob center mass, dropping them. He continues unabated in his loping stride, clears the final field wall, and streaks across the plain toward the ridge.
Men from Hyena fan out and make sure every last koob is eliminated while the rest of us do our best to keep up after Wraith. I can hear the booms of fraggers and blaster fire from the Hyena leejes behind me. Twenties is busy from his spot, too. Every single shot he takes removes a dot from my HUD.
I reach the field. Wraith has stretched his lead to over sixty yards.
“South wall is secure!” comes the call over the mission channel.
Boom.
That fast.
Most beings in the galaxy aren’t going to stand up well against legionnaires in an open fight, even a species as warlike as the koobs.
Running in the craggy field is difficult. Snaking beneath the wind-whipped sea of ankle-high grass is some kind of an old riverbed. It must have zigzagged quite a bit, because I can distinctly feel my boots curve around the smooth river rocks, like they can’t quite get a firm footing and are always slipping just a little bit. It’s definitely slowing me down, and by the number of green dots on my HUD, it’s slowing down the rest of the force, too.
Except for Wraith. He’s going to storm the ridge by himself if this keeps up.
Just in case I couldn’t tell that I was a step slow, my visor issues a stream of text, the temporary block I’d placed earlier now expired.
LS-55, Sergeant C.Chhun.
Advisory: Suboptimal speed.
Legionnaires of DOOMSDAY squad are moving 7.82% slower than their last standardized PT stress run.
Log for infraction review? Y/N
“Combat override DS8-RV6!” I shout into my mic. Thankfully, these sorts of messages don’t pop up on every leej’s visor, otherwise our armorer would need a kip shuttle full of assistants to fix all the shots we’d absorb while barking cancellation codes. No, Repub-Tek just installed the software in the buckets of rank sergeant and above. The joys of being a squad leader.
Combat override acknowledged. A record will remain on file for 15 days. This log to be transmitted to your OIC, Captain S. Devers.
Joke’s on you, technological embodiment of meddling bureaucratic overreach. Point is dead.
I expected we would lose at least two combat sleds before we reached the ridge. As I get within four hundred yards, I realize that the tank hasn’t fired a shot since it scored a hit on the empty sled just before the assault. Maybe Devers wasn’t far off and the koobs used all the shells they had access to.
Or maybe…
I flick open the Doomsday comm with my tongue. “Twenties,” I say between panting breaths, “tell me about that tank.”
“On it, Sarge.”
There’s a pause as Twenties looks through his scope at the archaic MBT, shrouded behind rock and branch. “Yeah, it ain’t interested in the sleds no more. Be advised, trajectory forecasts show that the main gun is looking to fire on advancing legionnaires.”
“Roger.”
I switch back to the assault comm channel. “That koob tank is looking to send some heat our way! Don’t group up!”
The green dots on my HUD spread out. Still, I see a concentration of about three legionnaires, all with the laughing skull of Hyena Squad painted on the sides of their buckets. I turn around for visual and see they’re bottlenecked by a series of boulders. Evidently the koob tank gunner sees the same thing. The tank rocks backward from the massive blast of its cannon, and the ground around the Hyena Squad trio explodes. It looks like a portal just opened up from the hells of the Arcturus Maelstrom. A grim rainfall of dirt, rocks, and pieces of legionnaire falls back to the ground.
The tactical L-comm floods up with shouts.
“Stay spread!”
“Get some pressure on that ridge!”
“Who has mortar bots?”
“Mortar bots were on that last sled that blew.”
“Oba!”
The tank is looking for targets in the field of legionnaires, but there aren’t any groupings of leejes as sweet as that first one. As I move closer, I can see that the tank is equipped with a coaxial MG—slug thrower of course—but they must not have the needed caliber of ammunition. The gunner is trying to snipe us with high-explosive incendiary shells.
The main gun booms again, and I can feel the force of the air as the shell blisters above me, exploding much too close behind me. I feel the ground shake. The heat from the torrid blast penetrates my armor’s cooling system. I feel like a skillet left out over a fire.
That was too close.
“This is Specter-1, I’ve reached the base of the ridge.” Wraith doesn’t even sound tired.
Twenties’s voice comes up on the L-comm. “Copy, I have eyes on you, Lieutenant Ford. Looks like the koobs know you’re down there, too. They’re looking for an angle to engage.”
“Copy.”
The koobs don’t seem to be able to find a good line of fire on Wraith. But they’re right out in the open, croaking orders at each other, looking for that magic view that will kill them a legionnaire. These muck buckers have been pinned down for most of the assault by our rear line and sleds, but once our assault force got close to the ridge, the suppressive fire slowed for fear of leej-on-leej casualties.
Unable to get a clean shot at Wraith, the koobs unleash a hellish volley of PK-9A blaster fire and slug-throwing machine guns on those of us still advancing. Red blaster bolts sizzle overhead, and bullets fly thickly. I’ve gotten used to the sensation of a nearby blaster bolt—the air sort of sizzles as the burning shot scorches by you. But having slugs flying around you is a totally different experience. The air seems to snap and crack each time a bullet whizzes past. More than the blaster bolts, this gets my adrenals fired up, and I run even faster to join Wraith at the base of the ridge.
“Be advised,” Twenties says cal
mly from his position in overwatch. “I see a pair of koobs climbing a tree fifteen degrees left of Specter-1.”
Krak-bdew!
Twenties fires his N-18. “One koob eliminated, Specter-1, but I can’t get a shot on the other.”
“Copy,” Wraith answers. “I’ll see if I can spot him.”
Wraith rolls out away from the ridge’s sheer base and drops to a knee. His N-4 points upward in a fluid motion, graceful like a ballet dancer at Uynora Hall. He fires two blaster bolts into a part of the tree thick with green, triangular leaves, and spins back against the cliff. Koob counter-fire kicks up the dirt where he stood only moments before. A koob corpse falls out of the tree all the way to the bottom of the ridge.
Wraith puts another round in it. Just to be sure, I suppose.
I’m the third legionnaire to reach the base of the ridge. We found out later that the koobs call it Kr’kik Ridge in their language. I had no way of knowing that this was the beginning of an onslaught endured by Victory Company of the 131st Legionnaires. No way of knowing that the cost we would pay in blood and lives would make us famous throughout the galaxy.
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