“We’ll hold out.”
“Good luck, boss. I’ll see you soon. Scheherazade out.” She clicked off the comm, and there was a brief burst of static in my head, followed by nothing. I kept looking out at the distance, watching the grass slowly begin its iridescent glow again. I’d set the traps; I’d prepared Esa for what was to come as best I could.
Now all that was left to do was wait and see who got here first—Scheherazade, or the Pax.
CHAPTER 18
It was the Pax.
Of course it was. We saw their first scouts cross over the ridge, pushing their way through the fields of wild grasses just as dawn was beginning to stain its way across the far horizon. There were only a few of them, but they were moving like they had a purpose, like they were looking for something. And of course, the tower was the only thing to see for miles around.
“Think they know we’re here?” the Preacher asked, her rifle raised up to her eye.
“Probably,” I nodded, my position much the same, even though they were still far out of the effective range of my gun.
“Want me to shoot them?”
I shook my head. “Don’t waste the rounds. A scouting party that doesn’t return tells an officer where their enemy is just as surely as one that comes back with a complete report.”
“Is that some kind of terrible proverb?”
“I learned a great many terrible proverbs during the wars.”
It was difficult to make out at this distance, but it looked like the Pax were gesturing toward the tower. Again—not surprising. It was the only place we possibly could have been. It seemed like they were having some kind of argument—maybe one wanted to come closer, to investigate and return with a full report, hopefully earn a promotion, while the other two wanted to retreat back to the safety of the rest of their company, thank you very much. Even among the indoctrinated ranks of the Pax there were varying levels of self-preservation.
Eventually, the two cowards won out by the expedient process of one of them cracking the dissenter across the back of the head with his own rifle. They left him where he lay—I mean, it’s not like they weren’t planning to return—and retreated back over the ridge.
I could have ended them then—or at least told the Preacher to take the shot—but there would be no point: like I’d said to the Preacher, a missing squad would give away our location just as soon as a report would, and I didn’t want the rest of the Pax to know exactly what they were up against. The report of a gauss rifle is a . . . distinctive sound, after all. I didn’t want them to have even a rough estimate of within what range they’d start taking fire.
“So this is it,” the Preacher said, watching the scouts retreat. “They’re committed now.” She turned to look at me once the two Pax soldiers had vanished. “How long ’til your ship arrives?”
I checked my HUD, the countdown clock I’d set in place ticking away, in constant motion. “Four hours, twenty-three minutes,” I said. “Roughly a day cycle.”
“You figure the Pax will be here in, what, two?”
“Sounds about right.”
“Two hours plus is a long time to hold off an enemy assault.”
I shrugged. “That’s why we have all the death traps.”
“The death traps. As opposed to the usual cuddly-teddy-bear traps.”
“Is this really the goddamned time for semantics? They’re traps that make people die, Preacher, what do you want me to call them?”
“I really think just ‘traps’ would do fine.”
We settled back in to wait, both of us viewing the fields below through the sights of our guns.
Eventually, the Pax soldiers started to form up on the top of the ridge, right on time. I’m sure they looked dashing and brave standing up there, perfect for a Pax recruitment video—if the Pax recruited by propaganda and not by force—but the idiocy of standing out in the open when you were about to assault a higher position made my trigger finger twitch. I wanted to shoot them on general principle, but I also wanted to lure them in closer before the dying started.
They started marching down toward the tower in perfect parade formation. If they were unhappy to have been at least pseudo-abandoned on this planet, their marching hadn’t suffered, at least, the goose-stepping bastards. Even when I’d been a soldier, I’d despised fancy marching formations. You might as well paint a target on your puffed-out chest.
The Preacher had her rifle raised up again. “I suppose you want me to focus fire on their officers first,” she said.
“If they’re stupid enough to wear rank insignia in a combat zone, they’re stupid enough to die first,” I agreed.
“I remember when wars were fought with honor,” she sighed.
“Do you?”
“No. Not really. When do you want me to start the ball?”
“Wait until they’re well inside of my range, too. They’ll scatter in all directions once you let off with that big fucker under your arm; I want to be able to pick off the ones that run toward the minefield.”
“I wouldn’t think you’d be worried about that particular batch—won’t they pretty much be dealt with by the very fact that they’re running into a field of mines?”
“Yes, but I’d rather not waste the element of surprise on just a couple stragglers.”
“Ah. How very bloody minded.”
“I don’t like this kind of work, Preacher, but I am very good at it.” I kept scanning the approaching troops, but they weren’t quite where I wanted them, so I kept talking. “I did it for a long time, which tells you something, and I survived doing it for a long time, which tells you more. The Pax want to rule the galaxy, and they want to use force to break whoever stands in their way. Fuck the Pax. I’d kill twice this many Pax—I’d kill thousands of Pax—to get that girl where she needs to go.”
The Preacher was silent for a moment, watching her target. “ ‘Whomever,’ ” she said finally.
“What?”
“They’d ‘use force to break whomever stands in their way.’ ”
I sighed; the troops were finally in range. “Just fire the fucking rifle,” I said. She did.
CHAPTER 19
Here’s the thing about gauss rifles: they’re just rifles. The only difference between the weapon in the Preacher’s hands and the weapon in mine was that my rifle used the force of a tiny gunpowder explosion to propel its bullets along the barrel and then from the barrel to its target, and the gauss rifle used a series of magnetic coils to achieve the same result. The coils, however, accelerated the round so fast that when it did hit its mark, they didn’t so much get “penetrated” as they did “detonated.” The other thing about gauss rifles was that the projectile traveled so fast—for all intents and purposes, it hit at pretty much the same moment it exited the barrel—that it left the speed of sound far, far behind.
What all that meant was that the Pax were just calmly marching through a field, wading through waist-high grass, toward a structure that might or might not be prepared to mount a defense—otherwise known as just another day in the Pax army—when one of their lieutenants exploded all over them. They had no warning, no hint that it was about to happen; everything was fine, and then everything was not, and they were covered in lieutenant bits, their visors coated in lieutenant gore.
They panicked and ran, some back the direction they had come, most forward, in the direction they’d already been heading. I mean, of course they did. There was no cover, there was no place to take up a firing position, there was just half a mile of open ground between them and the tower, and all of a sudden they were in a gunfight. Even Pax conditioning has its limits.
I opened fire, picking my targets from the plethora of options available to me. I didn’t particularly care where I hit them, just that they went down—a bleeding, screaming, wounded soldier was just as good as a dead one, maybe even better, because that just added to the chaos. At this range, I wasn’t ac-curate enough to guarantee a kill shot anyway, so I pretty m
uch just aimed at center mass and went for a double tap.
The Preacher was still firing—I could see her out of the corner of my eye, and it was actually kind of eerie, the way she was just entirely rooted from the waist down, but her torso spun and shifted like it was on a gimbal as she fired, found a new target, sighted down, fired again. She burned through her magazine almost as fast as I burned through mine, despite the fact that her weapon was significantly more complex, harder to aim and fire.
We both reloaded. I activated one of the drones, sent it sailing out over the enemy company as they scrambled through the fields that had become a killing ground.
The Pax were starting to try and return fire at that point, or at least some of them were. We had pretty good cover—high up, and with those handy waist-high walls to crouch behind—but there were a great many of them. Most were using ballistic rifles, their fancier energy weapons long since drained or eaten up by the radiation in the atmosphere. My intention shields were raised, and the few rounds that got close bounced off the edges of the field, dampening the force of each shot until it felt like a gentle push rather than a sledgehammer slam. Still, it meant picking shots got a lot harder pretty quickly.
The drone was marking targets all across my HUD—looking down on the field was like looking at a swarm of crimson fireflies—but it sent a warning message singing across the bottom of my vision as it found something of note. One of the crews closer to the front of the company was trying to deploy some fancy tech: an entrenching drone.
A smart move—the radiation would burn the thing out, but probably not until after it got the trench dug. The thing about the Pax, though, is that even when they are smart, they’re always smart in the same way. I’d known they’d bring entrenching drones, and I’d planned for it. We’d turn the trench against them, later on.
In the meantime the Preacher and I kept firing, laying out Pax all across the field, splashing the lovely pink and purple and green fronds of grass with various shades of gore from the various species hidden behind all that Pax armor. Some of the Pax—those in the rear—were still trying to retreat back over the ridge, but most still tried to rush forward, trying to overcome our assault through sheer number of bodies. A great deal of training went into that single moment, training mostly composed of being told—and witnessing—that if they ran instead of advanced, they’d get a bullet between the eyes. I’d known that was coming too; I was counting on it, as well.
A few of the Pax were fitted out with antigrav boots. It was a risk, using them—the radiation might burn them out before they could reach the top of the tower, and then they would have a very long way to fall—but apparently, they thought trying was better than dying in the field. After all, if you get assigned fancy tech, getting shot without ever using it must feel like a real waste.
The problem with that line of thinking was that hovering up into the air over their dying comrades just made them cleaner targets. The Preacher shot them down like they were skeet. I even saw her pick one off so cleanly that the round continued on and hit another soldier still on the ground below. Preacher, my ass.
Meanwhile, the entrenching tool was churning away, flinging dirt and chopped grass into the air. The Pax were piling into the trench as it got longer and deeper—a risk, given that the drone was more than capable of taking off a leg as it worked, but getting shot from the tower was dangerous too, I suppose. Most of the rest of the force was rushing forward, trying to get into the trench as well, out from under the hail of death the Preacher and I were laying down.
That was when I let my rifle rest for a moment, and triggered the detonator on my belt.
I hadn’t just planted incendiary devices on the stairs to the tower; I’d planted them out in the fields, too. It hadn’t rained since I’d arrived on this planet, and there was a great deal of dry grass out there, all that lovely purple and pink and green tinder dry. The Pax had dug me a lovely little firebreak with their entrenching drones, which was good, because grass fires spread quick.
A sizable number of them were burned alive in the ensuing wall of flame.
I picked off a few more with my rifle—the Preacher slapped another magazine into hers; two down—then I dropped my primary weapon and picked up the grenade launcher. We weren’t under much fire anymore—a great fuck-off wall of flame will do that—which meant I was clear to take my time and plot the arc in my HUD, a bright green line tracing from the barrel of the gun to exactly where I wanted the grenade to land. Namely, in the middle of the trench.
The launcher made a hollow “thunk” as it spat out one grenade after another, the recoil thumping into my shoulder. My first recon drone fizzled and died from the rads about that time, so I didn’t get real-time information on exactly how many Pax were piled on top of each other in that trench, but it was a great many. I put the grenades on top of the biggest clusters of red fireflies I could find.
The Pax decided they didn’t much like the trench after that.
They spilled over the top, some even back into the fires, and I went back to my rifle after activating another drone. I was picking off soldiers nearer the back of the group than the front at this point—I wanted them packed as close to the tower as possible for the next bit.
That was about when they got into the extended range of the turret up beside us, and it opened up with a massively loud burst of chatter, making me thankful my comm implant had expandable earplugs attached. That Pax conditioning held strong; most of them just ran through the rain of lead, but enough were pinned down that I still had plenty of targets to pick from, even through the smoke rising up from the flames below.
We were starting to lose the Pax furthest in the lead; they were close enough to the tower now, almost underneath the platform, that we didn’t have a firing position on them. That was fine; we’d known that was coming. That was what the minefields and the autoturrets on the stairs were for.
So far, the Pax were not having a great day.
CHAPTER 20
First rifle’s done,” the Preacher said, tossing the steaming gauss rifle to the side. I nodded, reloading my own gun; that had been about what I had expected. Outside of the entrenching drone, a handful of antigrav boots, and a few scattered energy weapons, the Pax weren’t really using fancy tech, which meant the pulse radiation was free to concentrate on our gear. Not ideal, but we’d known it was a possibility.
The Preacher was reaching for her second rifle when a Pax soldier just appeared, hovering at the edge of the observation platform. Apparently, she’d been smart enough to save her antigrav boots for when she was close enough to ascend without being seen, and she’d lucked out into appearing just when both the Preacher and I were weaponless. Her luck wasn’t that good, though, because the autocannon on the Preacher’s shoulder was still loaded: it roared to life and cut her in two.
Her top half plummeted back down toward the battlefield; her lower bit went sailing even higher as the antigrav boots failed to compensate for the fact that the mass it was trying to lift was suddenly half as heavy. The Preacher and I just stared at each other for a moment, our eyes wide. There was really nothing you could say when that sort of thing happens; you’ll see the weirdest shit in combat sometimes, things that no one else would ever believe if they hadn’t been there.
Finally, without a word, we each just picked up our weapons and went back to firing over the edge. We might never speak of that ludicrous moment again—in a month, I might doubt that it had actually happened.
Meanwhile, while we were distracted by a flying set of legs, the Pax below had run into both the minefield and the killzone of the second autoturret. The force of the explosions below was enough to—not shake the tower, not exactly, but set it to swaying more than a little bit, which was disconcerting in its own special way. I picked off a few more targets from the edge of the platform, then grabbed my gear and ducked away, first into the bunker to check on Esa.
“You okay in here?” I asked her, sticking my head in.
“It’s really loud,” she complained, crouched in the corner with her hands over her ears—and my pistol in her lap.
“Yeah, it is,” I agreed, eyeing the door; no change yet. “Hang in there. We’re doing well.” She was alive, uninjured, and feeling well enough that she could complain—she was doing fine in my book.
I went through the door and dropped down to the first platform of the stairwell. From here, I had a firing angle on the soldiers underneath the observation platform, those pinned down by the autoturret a couple of flights below me. They were a great deal too preoccupied by that to notice my appearance, and I raised up my rifle, taking my time.
I started picking them off, one by one, the sound of my fire lost in the chatter of the turret. This was significantly more within the intended range of my weapon than the lip of the observation platform had been—both because of the slight differential in height, and just because the Pax below were closer—and I was hitting my shots with increasing frequency. The only real difficulty was when another Pax would wander into the minefield below, and the resulting blast would send the tower to swaying again.
When the third—and last—autoturret kicked in, I fled back up the stairwell, slamming and locking the door to the bunker. That autoturret’s activation meant the enemy was climbing the tower itself. I’d known it was coming, but it had come sooner than I’d thought it might.
I found the Preacher just discarding her second gauss rifle, an annoyed expression on her face. “How are we doing?” I asked her. She was a Barious—she would have been running numbers and statistics and probabilities during the whole fight.
“We’ve inflicted a great deal of casualties on them; more than I would have thought,” she replied. “I doubt there’s a third of the original force trying to push their way up the stairs.”
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