Except we got separated in the fields of towering rubble, our Battlefield Awareness Systems tangled by the strange ripples of reality disruption the Leviathans leaked.
“Not supposed to be possible.” That’s what Control had said in the pre-mission briefing. “You’re immune. Those upgrades to your armor will protect you. The shielding’s the best we can do.”
Wrong answer, Control. Wrong. Answer.
Gerhardt’s voice drew me back. “Five minutes to drop! Sergeants, gather your teams and get them into their torps.” That’s when his hands went to his hips. Always. “And remember: trust your training; trust your gear; trust your fellow soldier. You’ll make it out of this.” Hand clap, then, “Let’s go!”
Virtuoso performance! Bravo!
I checked my BAS, picked up the signals from the patchwork squad I’d inherited from Travis.
Private Madsen. The big Dane with his blue eyes and high-and-tight wheat-colored hair. He was the fearless one, the one who held Travis’s wounds against me. Fair call. Madsen was actually more experienced than me, just not with the Elite Response Force. Now he was one of my acting corporals.
It didn’t take a psychic to realize that Gerhardt would’ve preferred a fellow macho Aryan over someone like me. I was too dark—Mom’s Angolan skin sort of ran roughshod over Dad’s British-Euromutt-Chinese pale gold. And I was definitely too feminine for the Testosterone Troop they envisioned.
Private Preen—the last piece of the remaining trio of our original group. He was older, smarter, and maybe just a little too timid, even by my standards. The crazy thing was that he was fit enough and taller than most. Plus, he had this wavy brown hair and a cleft chin that seemed more appropriate for a stoic movie hero. But…timid. He’d completed training alongside Travis and me with a bang. Like us, he was another colonist but from Bermuda colony. Maybe that’s what made him so hard to figure. A lot of folks from Bermuda were hard to make sense of.
And then there were the remnants we’d picked up from squads that had been mostly wiped out.
Private Beyers, the quiet former Marine.
Quiet Marine. That’s a unicorn, from what everyone else said.
Shifty hazel eyes, warm copper skin, and body language that always seemed on the edge of psychotic violence. A survivor. He’d been off Earth when the Leviathans attacked, and he’d signed up with the ERF the second he’d managed passage to the headquarters on Plymouth colony. The “elite” part of the ERF concept had been compromised by then. We were looking for anyone who could hold a gun. Someone a few years out from two tours? Move to the front of the line, sir.
And now he was my other acting corporal.
Private Dong. Nobody would have believed he would be the lone survivor of The Rough Raiders, one of the more experienced ERF platoons. Wiry, always smirking, with big, expressive eyes. He was the last to risk his butt for anyone else. No one called him a coward, but no one wanted him covering their back, either.
And finally, Privates Sklar and Thompkins. Wide-eyed, middle-aged, soft, barely graduated from boot camp. You could tell them apart by the shaved head—Sklar—and the perpetual five o’ clock shadow—Thompkins. Both of them were family men who’d lost everything back on Earth while traveling the stars. Their hearts were in the right place, but if folks in the platoon were cynical enough to run a dead pool, good money would be on one of them going first.
I had $50 on Thompkins, because he’d had a flare-up of gout during boot camp. And before you think I’m reprehensible scum, I had $20 on me (to be paid out to Travis if I “won”).
It wasn’t the same quality team Travis had led onto Azure. Then again, I had been his best soldier, and I’d caught him with a grenade.
Some teammate.
Gerhardt thumped armored gloves on my armored shoulders. “Sergeant Wilson. You with me?”
“Never left, Sergeant.”
“I need you in this. Focused. SS6 says we’ve got the shielding problems licked. This weapon’s gonna be the thing that—”
“The thing that turns the tide of war. Yeah. I think we heard that same briefing before our drop on Azure.”
“Hey, it’s different this time. Earth. We’ve got a little surprise for the enemy. Turn the tide here, we—”
“Sergeant Gerhardt, I get it.”
His blue-gray eyes squinted; his pink skin turned bright red. But he pulled his hands away. “I need better from my non-commissioned officers. Hear me?”
You’re an NCO now, Wilson! “I hear you.”
“The human race. Just remember we’re fighting for our survival.”
How could I forget? This was the world that birthed us, even if I’d only ever seen it on a few visits in my teens. I was supposed to feel something for it. Did I?
I marched the squad into the drop bay, lined them up in front of their individual torps, had them put their helmets on and check their atmosphere readings, then got them secured inside.
Thompkins smiled anxiously as I closed the lid on his torp. “Like a coffin, huh?”
“I guess.”
Three meters long, tapering to a rounded point at the front, with long fins halfway back and at the rear. Made out of a clear glass-like material that supposedly could pull off the dual purpose of evading Leviathan detection systems and converting heat into battery power. We would plummet in these at terminal velocity until five hundred meters off the ground. That’s when we’d go into a guided descent, using embedded propellers running off the batteries to decelerate.
The torps worked. I’d ridden in two on Plymouth for training. I just didn’t buy the SS6 line that they were immune to detection.
Yeah, they were a lot like coffins.
I climbed into my own little death device and Gerhardt sealed it shut with a final glare that told me just how little confidence he had in me.
“Trust your instincts, Sergeant Wilson.” That had been his answer when I’d asked him how the hell I was supposed to run a squad that had no experience working together.
But I had no instincts. Not anymore. Not after Azure. He didn’t care.
We waited.
Not for long, but it seemed like it.
Then the bay door opened, revealing gloomy sunlight reflecting off dark gray clouds below. Not fat with rain but choked with smoke. Nearly a year into the conquest, and the Leviathans were still finding things to burn and wreck.
Down dropped the fronts of the torps, and our BASes disconnected from the Catapult’s network. I could eyeball my squad’s descent, and that would be about it until we rejoined on the ground and created our own little Grid. There wasn’t anything left of Earth’s Grid to connect to—power, telecommunications, networking…all gone.
A timer popped up on the faceplate of the helmet of my Juggernaut armor: 10…9…8…7…
I swallowed, tried to twist around to check on Thompkins, then…
We dropped. Plunging through clouds, seeing nothing but gray, collecting fine water pellets and finer grit on the clear skin. The water tracked away. The grit clung for a bit.
Face down, speeding like a missile. You can’t feel much more powerless than that.
Terminal velocity. We reached that in no time. The fins kept us straight, headed unerringly down. But if the propellers failed to deploy, neither the torp nor our armor would be enough to keep us from turning into paste.
I broke through the clouds into a butterscotch haze. Columns of black smoke rose lazily from the charcoal smear of Cincinnati far below.
Our target.
There were three torps to my left, three to my right. No sniper in the squad. Kind of pointless with weapons that didn’t affect most of the aliens.
The torp to my left suddenly picked up a little wobble.
Thompkins.
His helmet came around toward me as the wobble intensified. The Juggernaut’s optics were good enough that I could make out a sweat bead passing through the shadow of his whiskers and the twitch of his eye that asked, “Hey, Sarge, is this normal?
”
Then the slight wobble turned into a crazy bucking, and the torp started hopping, like a dolphin breaching.
Until the midway fins tore away. That’s when it began to spin. Around and around.
For a couple seconds.
The tail fins went next, and the torp went into a tumble, end over end.
I twisted to watch it as I shot past. “Eject! Use your parachute!”
As if he could hear me without me transmitting. We had to follow radio silence until we hit the ground or risk being detected.
We’d gone over it about a hundred times. Nothing’s going to happen to your torp. Nothing. It works. It’s proven tech.
But.
If something did happen to it, punch the ejection button.
We weren’t hauling backpacks down because our armor had a parachute packed for emergencies. Everything we’d need for the mission was being dropped separately.
Trust your gear.
The torp flipped and flopped, then disappeared from sight.
In theory, we wouldn’t be in anyone else’s path as they descended. That assumed a fairly straight drop, though.
Down one.
Even if Thompkins pulled his shit together and ejected, he was going to be dozens of kilometers off course. Hundreds.
We lanced through the air, closing on our destination. There were as many as twenty-five of us per Catapult, and four Catapults. Nearly a hundred soldiers, their gear, and our secret weapons dropping over fifty square kilometers.
The odds of running into each other in the air should be negligible.
I caught sight of something speeding beneath the clouds. At first, it was like the sun glinting off milky glass. Then I made out the wispy little contrail coming off it.
A Marauder. Two of them. Three.
The Leviathans loved their twisted little experiments, introducing their science that was closer to eldritch wizardry to our comparatively primitive minds any time we showed a hint of figuring them out. Marauders were how they maintained air superiority.
Eight meters long, with a wingspan three times that, they were like giant ravens. If ravens were made of glass. And had lizard bodies.
And snail heads.
It was the snail heads that would get you. Four pair of antennae, and a mouth that could open wide enough to swallow someone in Juggernaut armor. I’d actually seen that happen on Azure.
But the biggest threat the head had was its ability to project a force that was best described as, well, concussion. Devastating concussion.
If they turned that thing on you, you were dead.
Two of the Marauders banked and came toward us. The third angled toward the last place I’d seen Thompkins.
They obviously saw us, despite SS6’s assurances.
We were still six kilometers up. We had speed. We had distance.
The Marauders closed like we were standing still.
Options.
One, ride it out and see if we could slip past them.
Two, eject and hope the Juggernaut’s parachute could handle 150 kilograms of armor hurtling from the sky at terrible speeds.
Three…? See option one or two.
I went with one. The squad stuck with me.
The first Marauder skimmed over us, sensor stalks wiggling as it passed. Maybe it didn’t see us. It looked hopeful.
Until the second Marauder approached. More wiggling eyestalks, but as it drew nearer to Sklar, its neck craned around curiously, and its mouth opened. The slick skin rippled like a pond disrupted by a big rock striking center.
Sklar’s torp just…crumpled. The Juggernaut armor that was meant to survive a railgun round collapsed with the same ease, and blood splashed along the inside of the torp before it tore apart.
The Marauders swept up into the clouds.
My heart pounded, and sweat tickled my armpits. Had we survived? Were they done with us?
Of course not.
They fell from the clouds and came at us again.
Staying in the torp was suicide. They could sense the things as easily as any other tech we had. At least the Juggernaut was smaller and offered some actual chameleon effect stealth.
I slammed my hand against the eject button, and the torp split in half like a peanut shell, the two pieces wildly spinning away. The Juggernaut armor extended my arms forward and straightened my legs until I was a diver, streamlined and aiming for a graceful landing far, far below. If the Marauders pursued me, I would only know in the millisecond of agony when they blasted me.
But that agony never came, and seconds later, the armor’s limited maneuvering rockets had me inverted, feet pointed to the ground. More accurately, it was a concrete courtyard between buildings north of an ugly, brown river.
My chute deployed, yanking hard against me, killing my momentum, changing my direction. I shot past the courtyard, headed right for the building front off to my left. The glass facade was gone, nothing but sparkling blue shards on the cracked pavement now. The Juggernaut compensated, but this was an emergency measure, not the primary means of getting to the ground. Finally, the armor just detached the parachute.
What was worse: falling against concrete at high speed from ten meters up or crashing into steel and concrete at an equally high speed?
I was about to find out.
I hit the pavement hard and dropped into a roll that took me into the field of glass. I skidded across with a deafening scraping. The Juggernaut sucked up most of the energy, but my ankles, feet, and knees still throbbed from the impact.
Instinct told me to just lay there for a bit, moaning and rolling around and having a good cry over the experience.
Military training is a little different. No time for crying over pain.
Get up! Go! Sit still and you die!
I popped my faceplate and filled my lungs with some good old Earth air—rotten, sulfuric, like a giant, ruptured intestine.
The world was dead.
I closed the helmet and hobbled into the building for cover, noting as I passed through the lobby the warped girders and cracked concrete columns. Ceramic tile had been shattered and blown clear of thick concrete slabs where troughs had been gouged out.
I was sitting at ground zero of a Leviathan attack.
Signals popped up on my BAS—Preen, Beyers, Dong.
No Madsen. Apparently, Marauders gave zero shits about how badass you thought you were.
The closest signal was Beyers, nearly six hundred meters east.
I did what I could to close that distance quickly while sticking to cover. Out of one ruined building shell, into another, audio cranked to its fullest, watching the gloomy sky. On splintered concrete, the Juggernaut was anything but quiet.
Other signals began rolling in as I drew into range of my fellow soldiers and our personal Grid expanded: more soldiers, some gear cases.
I hit one of the gear cases about midway to Beyers. Unopened, sitting on a crushed utility vehicle roof in a parking lot. I retrieved a CAWS-5 and magazines of armor-piercing rounds and Porcupine explosive rounds.
I checked Beyers’s signal again. He hadn’t moved. His vitals were all over the place—up, down, up again.
I grabbed two more assault carbines and the grenades—frag, incendiary, and smoke.
Beyers had gone down in a field. It was about twice the size of a futbol pitch, level, overgrown with crazy weeds that didn’t care at all that there were aliens crawling all over the world that had birthed us. I didn’t like the idea of being out in the open, but Beyers was out there somewhere.
I settled on sprinting to his position.
About thirty meters out, I stopped and dashed back to cover. Beyers must have abandoned his torp around the same time I did and tried the parachute.
His hadn’t deployed.
He was planted in the field, knee-deep in the dirt.
Sort of. His leg armor had telescoped maybe thirty centimeters, meaning his legs had done the same or worse. He was alive, but he was in shock a
nd without medical help, he was dead.
We didn’t have even a medic with us, and certainly no hospital to get him to.
Far overhead, something circled: a Marauder.
The next closest signal was someone I didn’t recognize: Private Hopkins. Not even from our platoon.
One hundred twenty meters northwest. I could either risk a sprint through the field under the Marauder’s watchful eyestalks, or I could double back to a complex of buildings and make my way through those.
An easy choice.
The buildings had suffered extensive structural damage at some point. It looked like something had fallen in through the roof. Going was slow, but there was a positive sign: Private Hopkins was moving toward me. Slow, indirect...it seemed like we had the same idea.
Then I stumbled out of the last building and saw Hopkins in the shadow of a retaining wall and realized it wasn’t caution or cleverness that led to the slow movement but a horrible injury. The left leg of Hopkins’s armor looked like it was made of cloth instead of super materials. From about mid-shin down, the armor was flattened and…folded. At a forty-five degree angle. How the hell anyone could hop around like that was beyond me.
Unlike Beyers, Hopkins wasn’t in shock and dying. I couldn’t run away.
So I hurried to the retaining wall and offered a hand. “Shit, Private, how’re you even standing?”
A nervous laugh preceded the soldier—a young woman with pale, puffy cheeks and big, dark eyes—taking my arm. “Had some stims with me. The armor’s doing the rest.”
And it was. Sort of. The armor had gone completely rigid below the knee. She could walk on it and put almost no pressure on the damaged part of her leg.
Still, she had to be in a lot of pain, even if the armor numbed the ruined flesh and bone up with the embedded local anesthetics. The sweat trickling down her face said she was.
I hooked an arm around her. “See you found a gear case.”
“CAWS-5. WP and frag grenades. Smoke.” She put her weight against me. “We the only ones?”
“I’ve got two more signals from my squad. Moving. Half a klick from here.”
“Half a klick. I can do that.”
It was tough work, the sort powered armor didn’t help all that much with. I was sweating just as bad as Hopkins by the time we reached Preen’s signal. He was somewhere on the raised street above where Hopkins and I had been hopping along. I found some steps and added a new experience to my resume, at first springing along with Hopkins, then carrying her.
The Expanding Universe 4: Space Adventure, Alien Contact, & Military Science Fiction (Science Fiction Anthology) Page 47