One of the donks Huzu had shot down off the platoon leader was getting back to his knees. The jihadi lunged for the prone officer’s back with a long curving knife.
Huzu rushed forward, bringing his blaster, which had been pointed at the flank attack, to bear on the donk. But his charge brought him close fast, and instead he delivered a savage kick with his armored combat boot to what he thought would be the donk’s unusually swollen belly. Instead of gut, the boot connected with ceramic molded armor, but the donk still went down, through sheer ballistic physics. As he rolled over the sand he brought up a small blaster pistol and fired at Huzu, all his shots missing and flying off into the white smoke that was now choking out everything beyond five meters.
“Iron sights,” Huzu reminded himself as per training when engaged in SMAFF conditions.
He drew a bead with the N-4’s sight and had just enough time before trigger pull to notice the zhee was wearing some kind of advanced armor system similar to Legion armor. But even Legion armor often did little good if you fired close and knew where to shoot.
With a quick yet precise adjustment of his elbows Huzu, landed the small matte-black sight at the leading edge of the barrel on the donk’s wide and comically ridiculous muzzle. Then the PFC pulled the trigger on the combat blaster, smashing the donk’s skull with a blaster bolt.
And for good measure he put two more in the ruined chest armor. A stab seemed unnecessary since the donk’s gray brains were seeping out onto the sand.
Blaster fire came from out of the smoke, wild and un-aimed. It barely missed caressing Huzu’s armor. He even felt like he’d dodged each shot at the last second as his reactions flared into some kind of overdrive and the bolts seemed to move almost in slow motion. Maybe an optical trick brought on by the swirling smoke.
The LT was still down on the ground, and when Huzu shouted for the officer to get up, the man didn’t move. He was saying something, but there was so much blaster fire and braying and squad chatter over the jammed comm system that he barely heard the man until he bent low, covering the wall of smoke in front of them with his weapon, oriented on where he thought the next zhee attack would come from.
Though honestly, Huzu admitted to himself, it was hard to tell what direction was what direction at the moment.
“I’m cut,” whispered the LT hoarsely through gritted teeth. He was obviously in a lot of pain.
“Where?” shouted Huzu. A group of donks came through the smoke, close and crouching. Huzu fired at them. They fired back.
The LT’s comm came through on the HUD. “Got me in the gut. If I stand up… it’ll all come out.”
Huzu was looking at four dead donks in the sand ahead. They’d been firing at someone else, and he’d managed to knock them down with some unseen help from another quarter. “Stay low, sir. Keep pressure on your wound. Use your hands. C’mon…”
Huzu picked up the LT’s rifle and shepherded the man to what he thought was the rear. The LT crouched and stumbled ahead of Huzu, who kept watch on their rear, expecting the donks to come out of the shifting fog with knives out at any moment, braying for blood.
A moment later they walked into a full-bore fire fight between two larger elements of zhee and leejes who were both using the fallen dead for the bare cover the bodies provided. A legionnaire sergeant major was pulling wounded men back while returning firing with his blaster pistol.
“LT’s hit, Sergeant Major!”
The sergeant major bent down to the wounded LT. “You all right, Lieutenant Vay?”
“Not Vay,” muttered the LT. Blood was seeping through his gauntlets as they clasped the wound beneath the chest plate of his armor. “Lorca…” he whispered.
And then the LT died, his body going limp without ceremony. Like some sack of undone laundry, or a thing not needed anymore, cast aside into the gutters and alleys of the galaxy.
“Ah, hell, kid,” whined the sergeant major. “Waste of a fine officer. Thought he was Vay. Vay was all ate up. Lorca was okay in my book.”
The sergeant major spoke at the top of his lungs. He seemed to like to talk for the sake of talking, and Huzu would find that the man was in love with the sound of his own voice, which was at once wry and hectoring.
Behind them the legionnaires at the front of the battle intensified their fire as more donks surged into the impromptu firefight.
“Look like we’re about to be overrun, kid. What unit you with?”
“Two nine!” shouted Huzu over the fusillade of blaster fire.
“Two nine?” cried the sergeant major. “You’re lost, son. This is the three sixteen. Either that or we’re just as lost as you.”
The sergeant major moved forward to the firing legionnaires, and Huzu followed close behind. Out of nowhere, a mule, firing its N-50 on full auto, careened out of the swirling smoke and lit up the advancing wave of zhee, cutting them to shreds in great piles and barely missing a few legionnaires it almost drove over.
“Move forward, boys!” cried the sergeant major. He turned back to Huzu. “Come on, kid. You’re with me now. Name’s MakRaven. Stay close and don’t get lost. We’ll fold you into our network on the L-comm once the smoke clears. Looks like we got us a real cantina dance goin’ on!”
They’d only moved about twenty meters deeper into the smoke, shooting down any zhee they encountered, when they heard the rise of a chorus of more zhee braying. Above this it sounded like someone was beating pots and pans to create a disturbingly untimed din within the chaotic cacophony of donk war-braying.
“It’s a Zhuzwafa!” cried Sergeant Major MakRaven. “Form up on me, boys, and use them bodies for cover. They’re coming at us in full in about the next two minutes. If you were gonna tell your sweetie you loved her you shoulda done it already, because I doubt most of you are gonna survive this!”
Huzu began to drag the heavy and lifeless bodies of the zhee away from the spot where the sergeant major had positioned himself as though he were some kind of flap pole that could not be moved. The bodies were piled into a rough circle, stacked one on top of the other.
“What’s a Zhuzwafa, Mak?” asked one of the legionnaires as he dug sand, creating a quick fighting position among the bodies.
“A Zhuzwafa is when they get real uptight and swear to kill all o’ their enemies of their brothers regardless of pain or injury to themselves. It’s their version of a last stand, but it’s kinda like a full-bore charge for the most part. Also, they’re probably on drugs. They chew up lotus grass to get immune to pain and such. But they still die if you shoot ’em. A couple o’ times at least.”
He stopped Huzu, who was dragging a particularly large dead zhee warrior across the sand. “Hey,” he said. “Gimme that one.” The sergeant major bent down and unsheathed a kankari knife just like the ones the zhee carried. “Good thing you got me here, boys. This here is one of their big ol’ head men. So we might just pull a little trick on ’em.”
The sergeant major began to pull back the zhee’s armor, exposing the alien’s swollen gut. “You are no doubt most likely prone to wonder at I’m doin’,” he opined. “Right?”
Huzu didn’t respond.
“Here they come!” shouted one of the legionnaires. “KTF!”
Huzu, kneeling next to sergeant major, had no idea from which direction the zhee assault was coming. But the smoke was beginning to clear, and within its drifting depths he could see men and vehicles running or firing at other half-seen shapes in the fog banks. The dead of both sides were like islands in the sandscape. In the distance an artillery strike fell across the sands, and the ground trembled beneath their feet.
Sergeant Major MakRaven paid no regard to the impending assault and surrounding battle. He continued on with his monologue as he dug around inside the donk’s guts.
“You may not know it, but I’m the Legion’s foremost donk fighter, and though I lack humility, I am at the same time one of the zhee’s greatest friends. I know all their tricks, ’cause they taught ’em to me when I was
working with group to train insurgent tribes to fight one another. Been fightin’ zhee for almost my entire career. What no one bothers to learn, though I have lectured many, is that the zhee have a musk gland…”
Mak stuck half his arm into the zhee’s swollen guts and rooted around with his un-gauntled hand. Even through the legionnaire armor’s filtration system, the smell was simply awful.
“Good thing we got our buckets on, kid! This don’t smell like flowers, do it? But sometimes a little taste’ll get through and all. If it do… try not to throw up in your bucket, ’cause that’ll make things much worse. Trust me on that one.”
The legionnaires continued to defend their impromptu fort of bodies, firing into the charging zhee horde that looked like bloodthirsty demons surging out of some nether pit.
MakRaven pulled out what he had been looking for. A hint of its scent managed to slip through to Huzu, and the young PFC almost gagged.
“This here is their scent gland,” said the sergeant major. “It’s how they rule one another. The head men and big tribal chiefs have a certain scent that makes the others afraid of ’em. Makes ’em more docile and amenable to what they want ’em to do. And we’re gonna need this in about thirty seconds ’cause it’s about to turn into a real knife and gun show, boys!”
Even though the legionnaires all around were keeping up a steady stream of fire, dropping the charging zhee in heavy numbers, more appeared through the gaps, stomping their dead pack brothers as they came, firing blasters that struck down some of the legionnaires. The nightmare aliens gnashed their giant buckteeth around their kankari knives and charged into the fray, intent on closing for the kill no matter how many times they were shot dead.
Sergeant Major MakRaven stood up and held the swollen musk gland high above his head like he’d just won some bag of candy at a carnival for throwing pins and knocking down enough targets. Then with a whoop and a deft flick of his kankari blade, he sliced the fleshy sack and showered the legionnaires beneath him with its putrid contents.
Ten seconds later the zhee line slammed into the small stand of legionnaires on the sand. Except in the last moment they came up short as though suddenly unsure of themselves. They even neighed and snuffled loudly as though their massive sinus cavities had filled with mucous. And as they came to a dead stop, those behind them flew into them, beating and kicking their pack brothers to move forward into the kill.
The legionnaires filled that first rank with intense blaster fire at almost point-blank range.
Whatever objection had come over the following zhee from the smell of what one leej said was like “cat piss gone bad” was overcome within seconds of seeing the gratuitous massacre of the front rank. They stumbled badly, but regained their composure as the scent of blood tried drowned out the overwhelming musk.
Zhee warriors tackled legionnaires, knives flailing and stabbing for the kill. One massive legionnaire deployed his bayonet from the end of his blaster and began hacking and slashing at the zhee who came in close to taste his fury. His squadmates closed in behind and fired into the swarming zhee. Any break in the Legion line meant death for them all.
Huzu dropped to one knee fired into the horde, dropping five zhee who got within two meters of him. Each shot was desperate, close, and tense. He aimed for headshots against these bobbing, weaving monsters that charged like runaway bulls gone mad.
Sergeant Major MakRaven directed the defense, calling out fire concentrations. Every legionnaire fighting from the pile of bodies concluded that the sergeant major’s joke about saying goodbye to their sweeties hadn’t been so much a joke as a promise. At the height of the chaos, every one of them was completely convinced that they were making their last stand. Taking their last breath. Looking out upon the galaxy one last time here along the edge.
Then, as quickly as the wave had come, the zhee assault broke. And when the last blaster shot whined off into the smoke, the surviving legionnaires were staring at a sand field littered with the dead bodies of the zhee.
And closer at hand… the bodies of their own.
Distant artillery shocked the sky with booming eruptions. Shells whistled overhead through the clearing smoke, promising destruction farther ahead.
***
“All right, boys!” cried Sergeant Major MakRaven. “The L-comm is back up! Follow me. Orders say we’re to take the trenches. Drone recon cannot, I say cannot, identify their current occupation statues because yes, the zhee actually do have good snipers and they keep takin’ our little flying bots out. Of course, I coulda told ’em that, but no one listens to an old zhee fighter like me.”
The smoke was now drifting off in large continents at the behest of a light morning breeze, revealing more and more of the battlefield carnage that spread across the quarter mile from the big assault carriers to the trenches. Other units of legionnaires, moving swiftly in wide wedges, raced for the trench works just a few hundred yards ahead.
The batteries and blaster turrets atop Fortress Gibraltaar had ceased firing for the moment, but behind the legionnaires the ground shook in small, regularly timed earthquakes—the result of the four HK-PPs that towered over the battlefield, firing at unseen targets within the trenches. Their forward turrets swiveled and rotated, sending massive blaster shots across the battlefield as their legs articulated forward with each slow step.
“Ooah, boys!” whooped the sergeant major. “Now let’s go kill the enemy for darin’ to oppose our formidable wrath.” Except this was said in a way that didn’t seem triumphant. It came off as more matter-of-fact.
Within moments their wedge was moving at a trot, closing on the massive trenches that lay before the giant rising fortress rock.
Fire from the fortress opened up all at once. At first ranged sniper fire, then the massive N-50 gun emplacements, raked the desert, and sand exploded in volcanoes all around the waves of legionnaires as they sprinted the last stretch and took cover behind a defensive wall that wasn’t defended.
Huzu, sticking close to the sergeant major and now folded into their L-comm network, shuddered as the brand new duracrete wall at his back shuddered and exploded in sprays of fragments displaced by the high-cycle, high-power fire coming from within the fortress.
“Breaching charges!” wailed the sergeant major as he moved down the line pointing at two specific spots on the wall. “Here and here!”
Two legionnaires rushed to obey. Farther down along the wall on both sides, other leejes did the same, at the direction of their own commanders.
“Stand back, boys. We’re goin’ through.”
A blast from one of the zhee-operated N-50s punched through a wall and gutted a nearby legionnaire in an instant. The man fell over dead. Another legionnaire had his head blown off by a sniper a second later.
When the breaching charges were set and the count was underway, Huzu, down the wall and far enough away from the pending explosion, had a moment to survey the sands they’d come through. The consequence of the blind battle they’d been in. The smoke was gone now. Out in the distance the massive assault carriers were still lobbing shells into the fortress and the trenches. They arced overhead like dark angels being cast down from heaven. And on the sands between the fortress and the carriers lay uncountable dead, both zhee and Legion. Each one was someone’s one too many.
Still, there were more living legionnaires than there were out there dead and dying on the wastes.
All up and down the wall, the breaching charges went off, shattering the duracrete and exploding inward in fragmented sprays.
As the first leejes roared and charged through the gaps in the wall, jumping down into the trench eight feet below, the zhee tried to range the breach and kill them with blaster fire. The sergeants pushed their men through.
A flight of three SLICs, gunship-configured, came in over the trenches. They were flying low, their mounted blaster pods spooling out high-cycle blaster fire in adult-sized doses. One fired an AGM that lanced out deeper into the trenches, but Huzu didn’
t have the time to see where it went. There was a terrific explosion as he landed on the duracrete floor of the trench.
The trench corridor ran the length of the wall they’d been crouched behind, and all along this wall, teams, squads, and companies of legionnaires were spilling down into the trenches, escaping the fire of the zhee, who sprayed them with every weapon they had.
As Huzu dropped down, his armor easily absorbing the impact, he found himself inside a scene of unrealistic carnage. Even though the dead all around him were the enemy—even though the dead were the zhee, the most hated race in the galaxy—the shock and horror of seeing what had been done to them defied his mind’s ability to rationalize. Maimed and mangled bodies lay in every position, with the occasional horror show of a donk face staring back at him from amid the bloody carnage.
The entire corridor had apparently been hit by a massive artillery barrage—and within the last few minutes it seemed, because many of the bodies were still smoking. Or rather, pieces of the bodies that remained were still smoking. The artillery batteries aboard the assault carriers had prepped the trench works with highly accurate fire, no doubt assisted by drone-enhanced targeting. An entire company of zhee had been stationed here, only to end up mutilated beyond recognition.
“Hey, this one’s smilin’,” said one of the legionnaires over L-comm.
Sergeant Major MakRaven erupted over the comm. “All right boys, time to form up. Sounds like the other units are already fighting their way through the secondary access routes that lead deeper into the trenches. Our line of attack is being assigned now, and it don’t look like no cake walk from what I can see. Though I will say some cake would be good right now.”
Distant blaster fire mixed with the sound of fragger explosions. Sniper fire whined. And the turrets atop the rock were still firing into the trenches. Even the artillery from the assault carriers had shifted forward, “walking” across the desert in front of the advancing legionnaires in other sections along the line of assault.
Turning Point (Galaxy's Edge Book 7) Page 16