Coyle had seen that most of the new arrivals had thrown down their weapons after they’d run out of ammunition, so they weren’t even armed. She tried to get at least some of them to run over and grab weapons from the dead Legion paratroopers, but they refused. The captain ordered her to attend to her duties, although in not very polite terms.
Disgusted to the point she was sure she would shoot the man, she ordered the survivors of the 7th Cavalry to gather weapons and ammunition. And like the professionals they were, they obeyed. But if looks could kill, the nameless captain would have died a hundred deaths.
As the cavalrymen trotted toward the paratroopers’ former positions to hunt for weapons, Mills said to his comrades, “Once the boats get here, our blue lady friends will be back, and the honeymoon, lads, will be over.” Then, with a nod to Coyle, he led them after the Terran troops to pick up more ammunition for their own weapons. He had no illusions that their survival to this point had been anything more than a stay of execution, and thought the Terran captain was an incredibly ignorant ass for not making sure everyone was armed before the boats arrived.
Coyle was willing to put up with the garbage the captain from the other brigade had dished out to that point, but when he tried to move Sparks, Hadley, and the regiment’s other injured soldiers out of the battered civilian van that had carried them out of Foshan and arrange them in the group with the other survivors of his own brigade, she rebelled.
“I am ordering you to get your colonel and the other wounded in the first boat,” the captain told her. He had been forced to come over and deal with the situation directly after Coyle and the other 7th Cav troopers who hadn’t gone with Mills had faced off against the enlisted men the captain had sent over to take Colonel Sparks and the others away.
“Excuse me, sir,” she told the captain icily from her cupola, “but my colonel stays with his regiment. We’ll load him and our other wounded when it’s our turn to board. Whenever that may be.”
“Are you disobeying a direct order, soldier?” the officer said, his soot-covered face reddening with anger.
Looking down on him from the height of the tank’s turret, Coyle thought tiredly, What a jackass. “Yes, sir, I am. With all due respect.”
“Sergeant!” the captain snapped to the senior NCO of the gaggle of soldiers he’d brought over to take the wounded and deal with any insubordination. “Place this woman under arrest and escort her to the boat.”
“Yes, sir,” the sergeant said, saluting smartly, a grin on his face.
The grin vanished as he turned and found himself staring down the muzzles of a dozen assault rifles. Looking up, he saw that Coyle’s gatling gun was pointed straight at him.
“This is mutiny,” the captain breathed. “Sergeant, take her!”
“Sir,” the NCO said quietly, staring at the tense 7th Cav troopers, “we don’t have any weapons. You ordered us to ditch them all when we ran out of the city.”
The captain, his face turning a deep purple, turned back to Coyle. “I’ll have you shot for this, soldier,” he grated.
“You know, captain,” she told him, “that would probably be a relief for me right now.” Her finger was shaking over the controls of the gatling gun. Part of her really wanted to shoot him, just for being such a prick. But another part didn’t want to waste the ammunition, because she knew they’d need it. Soon. “But I think it’d just be best if you and your crunchies just left us alone so we can save your asses when the Kreelans come after us. Sir.”
Without another word, the captain turned and stalked off, shouting orders at his troops, taking out his frustrations on them.
Meanwhile, the cavalry troopers and legionnaires worked quickly to pick up weapons and enough ammunition to try and defend the LZ. When they were finished, Coyle had about a hundred and twenty troops altogether, about the size of an infantry company. The survivors of the equivalent of two combat brigades.
Without bothering to consult the captain, she had her NCOs break the group down into ad-hoc squads that took up positions around the LZ, facing in the direction of the smoldering city.
“I wish we had more ammo,” Yuri lamented as he redistributed the rounds between the tank’s coaxial gun and Coyle’s gatling gun, giving her most of it. “We’re going to be nothing but a pissed-off pillbox pretty soon.” They hadn’t fired any more rounds from the main gun, so they still had ten left in the magazine. But the anti-tank rounds were useless for killing anything but other armored vehicles.
“We’ll do what we can,” she said, hearing the roar of the boats as they came in. She couldn’t see them yet, as they were making a low approach over the forest behind them, trying to stay masked by the terrain as long as possible.
“There they are!” someone shouted, and everyone stood up and whooped with joy as the dark gray Navy assault boats came in to land in the open area in the rear of the position originally occupied by the 1er REC.
Steph snorted. “We don’t have enough people to fill up one of them,” she said. “Why’d they send two?”
“Without comms,” Coyle told her, shouting now over the deafening scream of the boats’ engines, “they wouldn’t have any idea how many survivors there might be. Better there’s too much room than too little.”
Steph nodded, shielding her eyes from the dust kicked up by the big assault boats. “Boat” was perhaps a misnomer, as the vessels now settling down on their massive landing struts massed roughly two thousand tons and were over half as long as a football field. Each could carry a full company of Wolfhound tanks or an entire battalion of mechanized infantry. Despite their size, they carried no armor or weapons, sacrificing those traits for more lift capacity.
As the ships settled low to the ground, the boats’ engines throttled back to a muted howl. The main rear ramps began to descend and the side personnel doors opened, with ladders sliding from the hull to drop to the ground. The loadmasters came out to help get everyone aboard.
“Coyle!” she heard Yuri shout from the top of the turret. She turned and saw him pointing in the direction of the city.
As if they had simply appeared out of nowhere, hundreds of Kreelan warriors stood on the slight rise, just over a hundred meters away, between the landing zone and the outer edge of Foshan. In the center stood a huge warrior, her body and face an odd maroon color.
It took Coyle a moment to realize that it was blood. Human blood.
“Open fire!” she screamed as the shock of adrenaline once more hit her system and she bolted for Chiquita.
The infantry nearest to her, the only ones who had been able to hear her order, began to fire.
With the first shot the Kreelans, all but the huge warrior and two others, charged.
* * *
Tesh-Dar held back Li’ara-Zhurah and Kamai-Utal from the massed attack, not to deny them glory, but to have them learn and, in Li’ara-Zhurah’s case, to rest for a moment. The young warrior had given glory enough to the Empress simply in the passion of her pursuit of the human machine and its wily crew, and the great priestess would not see her blood spent here. Not yet. The charging warriors knew that the vehicle was to be left to Li’ara-Zhurah, and they ignored it, concentrating on the other humans.
Seeing some of the humans she had let live after her own small Challenge earlier with the solitary human, she felt a surge of relief: they were fighting back. Tesh-Dar had not intended it this way, but she would have been bitterly disappointed had they used her earlier magnanimity as an excuse to simply watch as their fellow animals were butchered, thinking themselves safe. Had they done so, they all would have died by her own hand.
As it was, she reconsidered her original plan to not let any of the humans go. Her thoughts were driven not by pity, for she felt none, but by the knowledge that some of them had proven such worthy adversaries that they might be used another day to bring glory to the Empress. It was a small enough sacrifice for Tesh-Dar to make.
She watched the line of her warriors surging forward toward
the humans, and made her decision: if any of the humans were able to fend off her warriors and make their escape in these ships, she would allow them to leave the surface. From there, fate would have to favor them.
One of the humans, however, she would not allow to leave: the one who commanded the armored vehicle. That one’s life belonged to Li’ara-Zhurah.
The warriors howled past the great vehicle to attack the humans who sought to leave without first offering battle.
* * *
Yuri had dropped back down in the turret after alerting Coyle and was firing nonstop at the rapidly approaching mass of howling alien warriors.
“Where the fuck did they come from?” Coyle asked frantically as she trained the gatling gun around to fire at the enemy.
“I don’t know!” he said, pausing momentarily as he swiveled the turret slightly to try and keep up with the Kreelan line. He’d fired hundreds of rounds already, but the damned warriors seemed a lot more nimble than before, half of them dodging out of his line of fire at the last instant. “It’s like they bloody stood up right out of the ground!”
Coyle squeezed the trigger for the gatling gun, sending a spray of twenty millimeter rounds through a section of the Kreelan line. Half a dozen of them were cut down: it wasn’t easy to avoid being hit by a weapon that fired a hundred rounds per second.
“Shit!” Yuri shouted. “They’re too close! I can’t hit them!”
The Kreelans swarmed past her tank and the defensive positions of the infantry, ignoring them completely as they headed straight toward the first assault boat.
“Jesus, they’re going right for the first boat!” Coyle cried as she spun the gatling gun around. She watched in horror as the wave of Kreelans reached the ship. The loadmasters had gotten everyone aboard and had closed the side personnel doors. Now they were frantically trying to bring up the rear ramp, which took nearly twenty seconds to close.
It was halfway shut when the Kreelans got there, and Coyle watched in horrified wonder as the lead warriors suddenly turned into acrobats, with a pair of warriors instantly stooping down to act as a jumping platform for a third. They did it smoothly, as if they practiced such a move all the time. Several groups did this, and half a dozen warriors were vaulted over the top of the closing ramp to disappear inside.
Other warriors, again propelled by their sisters, tried to climb up the hull, using their talons to gain purchase in the metal. All of them failed except for one, a smaller warrior who steadily climbed all the way to the cockpit window and began to batter away at the clearsteel with a long dagger. Coyle had no idea if she’d be able to get through, but she wouldn’t have traded positions with the pilots for anything. She’d already had more than her fair share of close encounters.
Around her the legionnaires and infantry from her regiment fired at the enemy, but many of them were now on the far side of the assault boat, protected by its hull.
Coyle decided that there was no point in just sticking around. She felt sorry for the poor slobs in the first boat who were no doubt being cut to ribbons, since most of the fools had no weapons, but she’d take whatever advantage she could. “Run for it!” she screamed over the loudspeakers. “Get to the other boat! Mannie, move toward the boat, but don’t run anybody over!”
The squads of her ad-hoc command leaped from their positions and dashed for the second boat, which had already closed the rear ramp and was spooling up its engines. The loadmasters were closing the personnel doors, the ladder already retracting from the ground.
“Don’t leave us, you fuckers!” Coyle shouted at them as she blasted a few more Kreelans with her gatling gun. In her mind she could hear Lieutenant Krumholtz’s voice, begging the same of her. She brutally shoved the thought to the back of her mind.
Suddenly Mills was at the boat. The big legionnaire jumped up and caught the bottom rung of the ladder as it retracted, then managed to reach up and grab the loadmaster’s ankle as the ladder slid into the hull. The loadmaster tried to shake him off until another legionnaire leaped up and grabbed onto Mills’ legs, their combined weight pulling the loadmaster halfway out of the boat.
“Take us right up to the hatch, Mannie!” Coyle ordered her driver.
“Shit, look!” Yuri cried.
The other boat, carrying the bastard captain and his gaggle of survivors, was taking off, but only made it a few meters into the air before it began to wobble. The Kreelans on the ground surrounding it ran toward the forest, trying to avoid the heat of the hover engines. Coyle thought for a moment that the pilots were maneuvering intentionally to kill the enemy, until the boat yawed drunkenly and she could see the small cockpit above the forward clamshell doors. The Kreelan who had been there had fallen off, but the inside of the windshield was spattered with blood. Then one of the personnel hatches opened and people started flinging themselves out. The boat wasn’t very high yet, but it was certainly high enough that jumping wasn’t an option. The bodies hit the unyielding ground and lay still.
The boat hit the trees and paused for just a moment, almost as if it might gently rebound to drift back over the LZ. Then it suddenly tipped over and crashed to the ground, its lift and drive engines still roaring, setting the forest on fire.
Mannie swiveled Chiquita around and brought her rear engine deck right under the personnel hatch of the second boat where Mills and the other legionnaire still dangled. The legionnaire released his grip and rolled to the ground, dashing out of the tank’s way, as Mills flailed his feet, finally gaining purchase on the vehicle’s rear deck. Then he hauled the loadmaster out of the boat and hammered him once in the face with an already bloodied fist. The man crumpled to the hot armor plate, holding both hands to his face to stem the blood from his shattered nose before Mills grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and tossed him off the tank. Then Mills ordered two other legionnaires, weapons at the ready, up into the boat.
Coyle couldn’t hear what he said to them over the growing roar of the boat’s lift engines: the pilots were trying to take off, the loadmaster and the rest of them be damned. She could see it start to rise, the landing struts extending as the boat’s lift engines went to full power.
Suddenly the boat stopped going up, then settled back down. Coyle looked at Mills, who grinned and put his index finger to his temple, his thumb raised in the air to mime a pistol.
“Get aboard!” she shouted through the loudspeakers at the others, who were now clustered around Chiquita.
The first ones up were the two injured colonels, who were handed up as carefully as was possible in such a ludicrous situation, followed quickly by the rest of the injured.
Mills kept order on the back deck of the tank when it came time for everyone else to board the boat, making sure nobody pushed or shoved to try and get aboard ahead of someone else. The couple who tried that were tossed off the tank to wait their turn at the end of the line.
“Mannie, Yuri,” she said, “up and out. Get in the boat!”
“We’re not leaving you,” Yuri said stubbornly. Mannie said nothing, but he didn’t open his hatch to get out.
“Goddammit, get out of the tank!” she yelled at them. “You can’t do anything else here.”
“Fuck off, Coyle,” Yuri told her, turning around as she dropped back into the turret. Looking her in the eyes, he told her, “We’ve come this far together. When you’re ready to leave, we’ll go with you. Not before.”
She didn’t know whether to punch him or kiss him. In the end she settled for saying, “You’re both dumb fucks, you know that? But I’m glad you’re here.”
Looking back out the cupola, she saw that Mills had almost everyone aboard and was gesturing at her to come. “Okay, you idiots, I think it’s our turn to get on the bus. Let’s-”
Suddenly the huge warrior was simply there, right on the tank’s engine deck next to Mills, right in front of the open hatch to the assault boat.
His eyes wide with disbelief, Mills lunged at her, trying to knock her off the tank. She did som
ething - Coyle wasn’t sure what, because it happened so fast her eyes couldn’t follow it - and Mills was down on the deck, lying very still.
“No!” Coyle screamed, as a legionnaire standing in the boat’s hatchway fired a full magazine from his rifle into the alien apparition. The rounds simply passed through her to ricochet off the tank’s armor.
Baring her fangs, the alien reached up with one arm and plucked the legionnaire who had fired on her from the boat, sinking her talons into his chest before hurling his body to the ground. Then she did something even more unexpected: she picked up Mills like a huge rag doll and handed him up to the disbelieving soldiers crowded into the hatchway.
Coyle didn’t want to believe that she had seen the legionnaire’s bullets pass right through the big warrior, and was tempted to try and blow her away with the gatling gun. But she would’ve hit the boat, and that wouldn’t do. Not after all this.
The warrior stood there, looking at her, then pointed past the front of the tank. A lone warrior stood there, waiting. Coyle recognized her as the leader of the group that had been hunting Chiquita during the regiment’s escape from the city.
With a sinking feeling, Coyle suddenly understood. “Yuri, Mannie,” she said in a brittle voice, “get out of the tank and get on the boat. Now.”
“But-”
“Now, boys,” she told them. “There’s no more time.” With that, she took her helmet off and dropped it on the ground beside the tank. She wouldn’t need it anymore.
Yuri and Mannie opened their hatches uncertainly, then climbed out on top of the tank. Seeing the hulking warrior at the rear, next to the hatch to the boat, they stopped.
“It’s okay,” Coyle shouted. “Ignore her. Get in the damned boat.”
“What about you?”
“Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine,” she lied.
In Her Name: The Last War Page 41