Sparks nodded and helped her to her feet. “The Kreelan ships hit us as they passed over, and one of the bastards crashed right into the middle of the city.” He had already been outside and seen the huge mushroom cloud rising from Foshan’s center. It hadn’t been a nuclear explosion, for there was no trace of ionizing radiation on the command vehicle’s sensors, but with a ship that must have massed on the order of a hundred thousand metric tons, with power cores that could propel it through space, it didn’t have to be a nuclear weapon. The energy release of something like that hitting the surface, even at a comparatively low velocity, combined with the engine cores breaching would still be measured in hundreds of kilotons of explosive power. “Foshan has pretty much been wiped out,” he told her grimly. He felt a terrible rending in his heart at the civilians who must have been killed, the people he and his regiment had been sent to try and save.
But at the same time he was indescribably relieved that his men and women had been deployed on the outskirts of the city. Most of the blast had been absorbed by the buildings between the crash site and here, although the command vehicle had still been tossed around like a toy, and the building they had hidden in had largely collapsed on top of them. Ironically, that had provided some incidental protection from the salvoes the other Kreelan ships had fired at them when they passed overhead. Built on the chassis of the M-87 Wolfhound tank, the command vehicle had been hammered hard, but had managed to protect its occupants from serious harm. “We’ve also lost contact with everyone, including division and corps, which definitely isn’t good news.”
“So what do you plan to do?” she asked, taking a drink of water from her canteen.
Sparks looked at her with fire in his eyes, glinting in the red combat lighting. “As soon as I can reestablish contact with at least some of my units and figure out where the hell the enemy is, I plan to attack.”
“Sir,” the driver called back to him as he struggled out of the cramped forward compartment. “This bitch is history. Oh,” he said, embarrassed as he noticed Steph. “Sorry, ma’am,” he mumbled.
“I’ve heard the term before, corporal,” she reassured him with a tired smile.
“Uh, yes, ma’am. Anyway, sir,” he went on, “the left track is busted and we’ve got half a dozen faults on the drive panel. Without the guys in the repair track working on this tub for a day, after they haul us out of this rubble, we’re stuck. So if we need to go anywhere, we’re gonna have to walk.”
“Had our horse shot out from under us, have we?” Sparks said, already gathering up his personal combat gear. “Hadley,” he called to the vehicle commander, “grab one of the extra rifles and give Miss Guillaume a crash-course in how to use it, then give her a combat harness and ammo. No grenades. You’ve got five minutes.”
“But, colonel,” Steph protested, “as a journalist, I can’t carry a weapon. I’m legally a noncombatant.”
Strapping the belt that held his cavalry saber to his waist, Sparks told her, “Not anymore, Miss Guillaume. Do you think for an instant that the Kreelans are going to give a damn about your legal status? They just nose-dived a starship into the center of the biggest city on the planet. That tells me a lot about their articles of war.” He drew the massive pistol from its holster under his left arm and checked that the magazine was full. “I don’t expect you to be a trooper, but you need to be able to help defend yourself.” Turning to his ops officer, he said, “Do we have contact with anybody yet?”
“Yes, sir,” the woman told him. “Colonel Grishin just came up on the tac-com.” They had just had time to lay a tactical communications line between the 7th Cavalry and 1er REC command posts before the Kreelans attacked. By a small miracle it hadn’t been affected by the weapons the Kreelans had fired or the cruiser’s explosion. “He says they have incoming enemy paratroops.” She paused, a glint of fear in her eye as she heard a terrified shriek in the background. “They’re coming in right on top of his positions.”
* * *
The scream had come from one of the crewmen of Grishin’s vehicle, who had been bodily wrenched from the rear hatch by what looked like an alien version of what was known as a “cat o’ nine tails,” a multi-tailed whip. One moment the man was telling Grishin there were alien paratroopers falling on top of them, the next he was gone. Grishin was sure that he had heard the hapless man’s skull and legs shatter against the metal hatch coaming, even with the protection of his helmet and leg armor.
Beyond his broken body, which had landed in the dirt a few meters from the vehicle, stood a huge alien warrior that made a mockery out of the verbal descriptions and artist’s renderings the Terran military attaché had provided the Alliance. With a snap of her arm the whip’s barbed tendrils detached from the dead legionnaire as if they were alive, and her demonic eyes were fixed on him as she bared her ivory fangs and snapped the whip back, preparing for another attack.
“Go, go, go!” Grishin shouted through the intercom to his driver, reflexively pushing himself deeper into his seat to get away from the ferocious-looking warrior. The driver didn’t need any encouragement: the command vehicle suddenly roared out of the pit the engineers had dug for it, snapping the thin tac-com cable that had connected Grishin with the Terran regimental commander. In any normal battle, being dug-in would have given their vehicle some cover and concealment from an approaching enemy. But when the enemy was literally landing right on top of you, the only thing the pit was good for was a grave.
The command vehicle shared the same wheeled chassis as the light tanks of the 1er REC’s combat squadrons, but had no turret and no main gun. One of the legionnaires was manning the vehicle’s only weapon, the modern-day equivalent of a machine gun on a flexi-mount on the vehicle’s roof, and was firing rounds non-stop at the warriors that were now landing all around them.
“Conserve your ammunition, you fool!” the vehicle commander shouted at him. But the legionnaire continued to hold down the trigger. The weapon’s barrel was red hot.
Suddenly the firing ceased, and Grishin was relieved that the gunner had come to his senses. If he had kept firing that way, they would be out of ammunition in a matter of a few minutes, if that.
“Putain!” the vehicle commander swore, and Grishin looked up to see the legionnaire gunner slide back into the vehicle. Headless.
Focus, Grishin told himself as he fought back a wave of nausea. It wasn’t the headless legionnaire that bothered him, for he had seen that and much worse in his career in the Légion. It had been the enormous enemy warrior about to snare him with that hellish whip. Let the crew fight the immediate battle. You’ve got a regiment to worry about. You’re their leader: so lead!
That thought brought him back to his senses. Unfortunately, he had no communications right now with anyone: all types of radio communications were out, and the Légion did not have the funding for the latest vehicle-to-vehicle laser communications.
That left the old fashioned method. “Turn around,” he ordered the driver. To this point, they had been barreling down the road that led toward the rear of the regiment’s deployment area, and then to the Terran regiment, if any of them had survived the crazy cavalryman’s idea of stuffing their huge tanks into buildings. He could see the mushroom cloud over Foshan through one of the vehicle’s armored viewports, the orange and black writhing as if it were a living thing. All around it, the city was burning fiercely, and it was difficult for him to imagine the devastation. He wished Sparks and his troops good luck. But now he had to make some luck of his own. He needed to get back to his regiment.
“Sir?” the driver asked, his voice shaking. While they had all been told that aliens might come, none of them had really believed it. And none of them had been truly prepared for the sight of thousands of alien warriors dropping from the sky.
“Turn us around, soldat,” Grishin ordered. “Without radio, I must make direct contact with our units. I’ve got to at least get to the squadron commanders.”
The driver made no move to
respond to Grishin’s order.
“Tomaszewski,” the vehicle commander said in a low voice over the intercom, “turn us around or I’ll blow your fucking head off.”
“Oui, sergent,” the driver replied shakily, slowing the six-wheeled vehicle around enough to turn it without tipping them over.
Pulling the gunner’s headless body out of the way, the vehicle commander took his place at the gun on the roof, hiking up his chest armor to try and protect his neck as they headed back toward the rest of their besieged regiment.
* * *
Tesh-Dar and the other warriors had been badly buffeted by the explosion as the cruiser hit the human city. But like many of the human warriors, they had received some protection as the buildings around the city absorbed much of the blast wave. A number of the warriors had lost control and crashed, with some of them no doubt killed. But the majority from her ship, nearly eight hundred, had survived. Around them, thousands of other warriors dropped by the other ships plummeted toward the human city and its defenders.
As they fell rapidly toward the ground, Tesh-Dar saw that they were almost perfectly positioned against one of the groups of human warriors. Almost all of this group were in large, boxy vehicles that were clearly heavily armed. Her blood thrilled with the challenge, for it would be difficult to kill the humans in vehicles such as these. She did not need to look around her to know that her warriors felt the same way, for their emotions sang from their very blood. But she looked anyway, turning to see Li’ara-Zhurah and Kamal-Utai flying beside her, their fangs bared in excitement.
Then it was time for the warriors to deploy their wings. Similar to a human-designed parafoil, they were actually much more akin to a natural wing: mounted to the warrior’s back, with the wing supported by a thin but strong framework much like the bones of a bat’s wing, it provided exceptional maneuverability.
While expressions of amazement and disbelief at Tesh-Dar’s abilities were nothing new to her since she had become high priestess of the Desh-Ka order, she took some bemused enjoyment from the astonished looks on the faces of her warriors as they deployed their wings and she did not. Yet she continued to fly alongside them as if she did. The powers that she had inherited as part of the acceptance of the ways of the Desh-Ka were not infinite, and were nothing compared to the power of the Empress. But controlling her body above the earth was one of the gifts she had received, as was walking through solid objects. She herself did not understand how such things were possible, only that they were.
By now the humans had seen them swooping down upon their positions and began to fire projectile weapons. A number of warriors fell, stricken, while others fired back with weapons akin to those the humans were using. Tesh-Dar preferred close combat, but in this type of attack she would not have let her warriors be exposed at extended ranges to human weapons without being able to fight back. Challenge, she sought; wanton slaughter of her warriors, she did not.
Easing ahead of the other warriors, she arrowed toward a group of vehicles near the center of the area occupied by larger groups of spread-out vehicles. Touching down lightly near one of the vehicles, her sandals leaving no mark upon the dusty ground, she uncoiled her grakh’ta, the seven-barbed whip, from her belt.
A human momentarily stared at her open-mouthed from a hatch in the rear of the vehicle, then he turned away to say something in what was, to Tesh-Dar, one of their incomprehensible languages to someone inside. Baring her fangs, she snapped the grakh’ta behind her, then whipped it forward. It was a terribly difficult weapon to handle with precision, but Tesh-Dar had many, many cycles of practice and was expert in its use. The whip cracked as the seven barbed tips reached into the vehicle, wrapping themselves around the hapless human. With a titanic heave, she yanked the alien’s body from the vehicle with such force that it smashed its head and legs to splinters against the armored interior.
As she snapped the whip again to clear the barbs from the human’s flesh, her heightened senses warned her that danger was near. With a leap to one side that no human who witnessed it would have ever believed, she easily dodged the projectiles fired by the primitive weapon mounted on the vehicle. She watched as the vehicle suddenly burst from the hole the humans had dug for it to head quickly down the road, the human on top still firing madly at her warriors, and missing most of them. One of the warriors finally tired of him and took his head with a shrekka.
With her blood roaring a symphony in her spiritual ears, Tesh-Dar coiled her grakh’ta and set off toward one of the other vehicles, seeking new prey.
* * *
Grishin stood in one of the hatches, accepting the risk to his neck in exchange for the ability to see more clearly as the command vehicle swept around a bend in the road that passed by the positions of the 1er Escadron de combat, the regiment’s first tank squadron.
“Merde...” the vehicle commander cursed just before he started firing the top-mounted gun. There was certainly no shortage of targets.
Grishin looked on in horror as Kreelan warriors clad in black armor swarmed over the wheeled tanks of the 1er Escadron like black ants. A few of the vehicles had made it out of their firing pits and were trying to keep the warriors at a distance while blasting away at them. Some vehicles had not, and Grishin saw a warrior atop a buttoned up tank stab her sword right through the armored commander’s hatch. As she pulled the blade out of the metal, he saw that it was slick with blood.
Impossible, he thought. No metal blade could cut through steel alloy armor like that! Granted, it was not nearly so thick as the armor that protected the heavy Terran tanks, but it was simply not possible.
But it was. Other warriors did the same thing, stabbing their weapons through the armor of the driver’s and gunner’s hatches. Then one of them affixed some sort of bomb to the rear of the vehicle, and the warriors leaped clear as the light tank was consumed by what looked like a massive electrical discharge that left behind a smoldering, charred wreck.
“Putain!” the vehicle commander hissed, using one of his favorite curses. He dropped into the vehicle, his right arm hanging by a thread of flesh: most of the muscle and the bone had been cut through halfway above the elbow. “One of those bitches hit me with one of those flying things,” he gasped, his face already turning pale from shock.
“Help me,” Grishin ordered the last legionnaire left in the rear compartment, who had been firing his rifle at the enemy through one of the vehicle’s gun ports. Unlike his Terran counterpart, Sparks, Grishin had his main staff officers in different vehicles, which was both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because if one of them was hit, the entire command staff would not be wiped out, and the most senior surviving officer could take over. A curse because without communications, he had no idea if any of them were even still alive to help get the regiment out of this disaster.
Grishin grabbed the sergeant around his chest, ignoring the blood cascading over his arms as he did so. The other legionnaire grabbed his legs, and together they moved him onto one of the combat seats along the side of the compartment.
“Do what you can for him,” Grishin ordered before standing up through the roof hatch and manning the machine gun. He managed to clear some of the warriors off of the top of one of the tanks as it backed out of its firing pit, and he signaled for the commander to join on him. Two other tanks also joined up, and they quickly formed an echelon left, with the three tanks in a staggered line that gave all of them clear fields of fire into the bulk of the rampaging aliens, with Grishin’s vehicle following close behind them.
Past their shock now, the legionnaires manning the three tanks began to give a good accounting of themselves as they poured machinegun fire into the groups of warriors attacking other tanks that hadn’t had a chance to get out of their firing pits. The tank crews fired antipersonnel rounds, carrying thousands of needle-like flechettes, from their main guns, literally blasting the Kreelans from the backs of some of the tanks in clouds of bloody flesh and shrapnel.
Surely the e
nemy must be about to break, Grishin told himself as they killed Kreelans by the dozens, even as the warriors charged the tanks with swords raised high and war cries on their lips.
But they didn’t break: the alien warriors kept on coming.
While the Kreelans had held the upper hand in the beginning, Grishin’s legionnaires were now giving as good as they had gotten. But the enemy did not die easily, nor were they slaughtered without cost. As his formation swept along the rear of each of his companies, rallying the survivors, the enemy warriors fought even harder. They hurled themselves at his tanks, sometimes singly, sometimes in groups, but all as suicidal maniacs, and he could hear their fierce war cries through the chattering of the machine guns and the booming of the tanks’ main guns.
When they made it to the rear of the last company, the 5ème Escadron, and rallied what was left of it, Grishin was momentarily struck by despair. Of the roughly forty-eight tanks of the four tank squadrons, plus the various other vehicles that made up the regiment, he now only had half a dozen tanks and a handful of the other vehicles, most of which were as lightly armed as his command vehicle. Suicidal maniacs the Kreelans may have been, but they had effectively gutted his unit. And there were still hundreds left alive behind him.
From here, on the far right edge of his regiment’s assigned area of responsibility, he should have been able to see the positions of the 2ème Régiment étranger de parachutistes, the famous 2ème REP, next to them. He had heard that the paratroops’ commander had been livid at having to deploy his unit as regular infantry in prepared trenches, but those were his orders and he had carried them out. Now Grishin could see nothing of the famous elite unit, only a massive swarm of alien warriors. Looking through his field scope at the ferocious close combat there, he could think of no way to help them: the legionnaires were locked in bitter hand to hand fighting, and he could not use his tanks to good effect without killing his fellow legionnaires.
In Her Name: The Last War Page 30