Fortress Frontier

by Myke Cole

  “Where are you going?” Blake shouted back at him.

  “I’m staying here,” Bookbinder answered. At least until I’m sure everyone is ready to go.

  With that he was up, racing among the FOB’s original force, shouting at them to head for the plaza, settling the QRF guardsmen into their old positions, shoving them into the pillboxes, exhorting them on.

  The gap between the two groups widened. Bookbinder threw himself behind a Stryker and peeked around its giant tire, then back along the perimeter line. The uniforms around him were all fresh and clean-looking, QRF guardsmen. He leaned back, and shouted to Blake. “It’s clear! Start falling back to the plaza!”

  Bookbinder heard a thud behind him and spun to face Thorsson, filthy, bleeding and grinning like a wolf. “Looking pretty bad for the enemy.”

  “Outstanding. Help me get everyone the hell out of here. Britton is gating us out from the central plaza.”

  Thorsson gave a thumbs–up and leapt skyward again.

  The QRF guardsmen began to move backward in good order, following the original defenders toward the plaza, moving and covering as they’d been trained. Bookbinder retrieved a fallen carbine and moved with them, firing in three-round bursts. The weapon bucked and it was impossible to hit anything, but he figured the stream of bullets would make the goblins keep their heads down, and that was something.

  The goblins sensed the change in the defenders’ posture and surged forward. Squadrons of rocs clouded the skies over them as the air cover fell back to circle over the plaza. The good order of the guardsmen began to flag as they sensed the enemy’s surge in momentum. Within moments, the first of them had turned his back on the enemy, running pell-mell for the plaza. Bookbinder shouted to no avail. The stream became a river and the guardsmen abandoned all pretense at order, running for escape.

  Bookbinder cursed and ran with them. Men fell around him, javelins quivering in their backs. A column of fire jetted through their ranks, sending men howling to roll in the mud. Elbows jostled Bookbinder’s ribs, and he nearly went down as a goblin Terramancer raised a doglike thing with spiked teeth made of glittering rock, sending it lurching into the column. He dodged around it, pushing along the muddy track, screaming at the men to move faster. He glanced skyward, grateful for the circling air cover, the only thing keeping this rout from becoming a massacre.

  Horror rose in his gut.

  Even with this relief force, the enemy was not sufficiently repulsed. The goblins were hot on their heels, leaving them the choice of standing and fighting until their ammunition ran out or running for the gate and being cut to pieces, back to their enemy.

  One army wasn’t enough.

  An arrow whistled by Bookbinder’s ear, and he heard the horns sound again, answered by a howl of victory from the goblins as they began to pour past the now-abandoned perimeter, hot on the retreating soldiers’ trail. Thorsson landed beside him, his eyes wide with worry.

  “What?” Bookbinder shouted to him. “I don’t need bad news right now!”

  “Britton’s gone.”

  Bookbinder cursed as they crested a rise in the track, giving him a clear view of the plaza before them. The gardens were churned to mud by the FOB’s original defenders. They’d arrived first, and now clustered together in confusion, looking for a gate home that was nowhere to be found. A cry went up from them and they began firing. Bookbinder winced for a moment until he realized they were shooting in another direction.

  Then he froze. Goblins came pouring into the plaza from the east, cutting off the retreating defenders from the ones clustered in the plaza before them, blocking their escape. The guardsmen let out of cry of despair and stopped, slamming into one another.

  Crucible had been wrong. The goblins had hit the perimeter from another direction and punched through.

  Worse, Britton was gone, and with him, their way out. For the second time, the defenders of FOB Frontier were cut off.

  Bookbinder turned to Thorsson. “Get us some fucking cover!”

  Without waiting for the major, he turned to the nearest guardsmen and yanked on his body armor’s back strap, hauling him around to face the pursing goblins. “Pour it on!” he shouted, racing among the other guardsmen, trying to organize them into something approaching a firing line.

  It was a stupid way to fight, more befitting Napoleon’s troops than a modern force, but there was no cover and no retreat. The narrow track was hemmed in on either side by housing units ringed with sandbags. Ahead of them, the other goblin force was hotly engaged with the FOB’s original defenders in the plaza’s center, buying them some time from the rear for now. Either those goblins would overwhelm that unit and pin them against their pursuers, or the original defenders’ bullets would cut through them and start slicing into the QRF guardsmen’s backs.

  Either way. They were finished.

  He felt his wedding band sliding along his finger, pressed against the gun’s grip. Julie, the girls. You won’t see them again.

  The sadness was followed by a spike of hot pride. You led from the front. You stayed with your people, and you are putting down your life for theirs. You’re a soldier. No one can ever gainsay that now.

  With that thought, he scrambled with the guardsmen clustering behind the fleeing Strykers. He was done shouting. He’d imposed what order he could, led as best he knew how. From here on out, there was only fighting. The thought brought him a measure of peace as he tapped a soldier on the shoulder, received a full magazine, swapped, out and started firing.

  An explosion blossomed to his left, a shock wave swatting him aside like a hot hand. One of the QRF’s Blackhawks had crashed into the housing pod on that side of the track, its rotors covered in thick ice. Chunks of the cabin spun away, blazing shrapnel slicing through the QRF’s ranks. A guardsman spun toward Bookbinder, his arm sliced off, his face slick pale, mouth working silently before he dropped. Bookbinder forced himself to turn away, pouring fire back the way they had come until the barrel of his carbine smoked. He couldn’t see anything through the smoke and spraying earth of the track, but with the enemy packed so thickly behind them, it was impossible to miss.

  A shriek sounded, high and piercing, trilling above the din of gunfire and shouting voices. Both sides paused in the silence that followed, craning necks behind the goblin horde. The shriek sounded again, and the goblins began to part, admitting a small troop of giants, shambling their way up the muddy trail. They surrounded three creatures that oozed liquid blackness, gliding over the surface of the ground, shadows from a nightmare. Every soldier who’d seen news clips of the Apache insurgency had glimpsed them before, had heard the rumors of their existence in the midst of the reservation’s violent ferment, but none had thought to see them here.

  The Apache called them their “Mountain Gods.” Everyone else called them monsters. What the hell were they doing here?

  The Mountain Gods shrieked again, stuttering forward on the trail, one moment in the midst of the goblin army, the next shifting a hundred feet closer, flickering in and out of vision.

  Their long, thin limbs absorbed the morning light, the uniform sable of pooled india ink. Their fingers tapered to kitchen-knife claws, equally as long as their teeth, and just as sharp. The white cut of their mouths was the only feature in their narrow, horned, black heads.

  “Holy shit,” said a guardsman, opening fire. The bullets arced across the intervening distance and vanished in their black mass as if they’d been swallowed. The Mountain Gods cried out once more, flickered, and were suddenly in the midst of them.

  What little order remained shattered in an instant. The scream that went up from Blake’s force rivaled the shrieking of the monsters among them as they swept about with their long claws, shattering bones and tossing the guardsmen in the air like uniformed rag dolls. Bookbinder shouted for them to hold, but it was useless, as soon as the first few shots passed harmlessly into the Mountain Gods’ liquid black skins, the soldiers threw down their weapons and fled in th
e opposite direction.

  Straight into the goblins now battling the FOB’s original defenders, who began to turn their spears on the panicked, unarmed soldiers charging into their midst. Bookbinder shouted at them, reached out to grab at the grab-handle on a fleeing soldier’s body armor, and missed as the woman ran screaming onto the point of a goblin spear. She doubled over, the plate of her body armor turning the point aside, and Bookbinder reached her in three steps, reaching over her shoulder to punch the goblin in the face as she dropped to the ground. The goblin staggered back, shook off the blow, angry eyes turning to slits as it raised its spear.

  Then abruptly widening in terror. The goblin dropped the spear and backed away quickly, until it vanished in the melee behind it. Bookbinder turned just as the Mountain God’s dagger claws swept down toward him.

  He got his carbine up in time, jarring his shoulders from the impact of the creature’s arm. The monster gripped the carbine, wrenching it back, dragging Bookbinder with it. Crouched so close, he could feel the chilly air that emanated from its skin.

  His hands went numb as the metal in the gun conducted the cold to his fingers, making his arms leaden, difficult to keep up. His hands felt thick, clumsy. He fell back in the mud as the Mountain God wrenched the weapon from his hands and threw it away. Its head flickered forward, dagger teeth glinting wetly.

  Then it cried out, wreathed in lightning, as Harlequin swooped over its shoulder, ribbons of electricity arcing from his fingers, engulfing the creature’s head and shoulders. Black mist wafted from the wounds, so cold that Bookbinder’s teeth chattered despite being several feet away from the outpouring. The creature flailed, covering its head, snarling up at Harlequin, who somersaulted in the air and rocketed upward, dodging the feeble swipe it directed at him. He steadied himself for another blaze of the magic, then jerked aside as a roc dove at him, nearly catching him in its jaws. A white-painted goblin Aeromancer followed behind the giant bird, unleashing a torrent of lightning that Harlequin dove low to avoid. The goblin Aeromancer streaked past him and banked sharply, coming back for another pass.

  Bookbinder scrambled in the mud as the Mountain God shook off its wounds and turned back to him, still bleeding that freezing black mist. He dragged himself forward, wincing as a fleeing guardsman stepped on his hand, scrambled to get to his knees. He jerked upright, planting his fists in the dirt to push himself to his feet, feeling his knuckles brush against a wooden cylinder.

  The goblin’s spear.

  He gripped the haft and spun, holding it at waist level, pointing it at the Mountain God. The creature paused, arms spread.

  The black smoke cascaded from its head and shoulders, rising above its curling horns, Bookbinder gritted his teeth to stop himself from shaking. Over the creature’s shoulder, Harlequin did battle with the roc, kicking it in the beak and using the momentum to carry him over backward as he channeled a burst of lightning that ignited the bird’s features and sent it flapping backward.

  The giant bird kept coming, keeping his attention as the goblin Aeromancer finished its turn and came at Harlequin from behind, extending its hand for another burst of lightning.

  Bookbinder forced himself to take a step forward, could swear he sensed a look of incredulous surprise in the featureless black space above the giant mouth. Then he extended a hand, Drawing hard for the goblin Aeromancer’s magic, Binding it into the spear tip with everything he had.

  The goblin Aeromancer screamed and plummeted to the earth, its magic suddenly gone. The Mountain God howled in time as the spearhead blazed into a dazzling cone of crackling blue lightning.

  Bookbinder screamed and thrust the point toward the Mountain God’s chest. The creature batted it away with one long hand, then flinched as the crackle of electricity singed its claws, unleashing more of the freezing smoke. Bookbinder spun with the spear’s momentum, swinging it over his head, bringing the added length down so that the crackling tip cut across the monster’s face. It screamed, flickered backward into one of the giants, knocking it to one side with a grunt. The Mountain God grunted, falling on its back, scrambling flickering arms to get to its feet.

  Bookbinder was determined not to give it the chance.

  With a yell, he leapt, reversing the spear, coming down to land one foot on the creature’s stomach, the cold penetrating his boots and making his knee ache and go numb in a matter of moments.

  The Mountain God screamed, and Bookbinder screamed back, bringing the point down, straight through the monster’s chest, pinning it into the mud and leaping aside as the black smoke fountained into the air, numbing his shoulders as he rolled away.

  The Mountain God’s death throes drew the attention of the other two, who flickered backward in shock at their sight of their own being felled by a human. The giants stood their ground, dumbly staring at the thing dying at their feet. A moment later, Harlequin seized the momentum, blazing lightning down on another of the Mountain Gods, so that they shrieked, fading backward into the goblin lines.

  Bookbinder pointed to the spear, still blazing with electricity in the sinking cavity of the Mountain God’s chest. “They . . . duh . . . die!” He managed through chattering teeth. The fleeing guardsmen were mostly engaged with the goblins around them, but a few turned their heads, took in the sight, hefted their guns.

  Harlequin blazed in the sky like a flickering star. Tongues of lightning lashed the two remaining creatures, who faded backward once more, until they were gone from sight. He swooped closer to Bookbinder, who knelt in the mud, recovering a carbine with trembling hands, only just beginning to regain some of their feeling. “You okay?”

  “Fuh . . . fuh . . . fucking . . . cold,” Bookbinder managed.

  Then he knelt and opened up with the weapon, emptying the magazine into the stunned goblin horde, still trying to reconstitute around the fleeing Mountain Gods. He couldn’t feel his fingers, his own flesh chilled corpse rubber. But pulling a trigger didn’t exactly take fine motor skills. A few of the other guardsmen lent their fire to his, spinning goblins in circles before they collapsed in the earth.

  Harlequin streaked overhead, making sure the Mountain Gods kept running, while Bookbinder and some of the guardsmen took cover behind a Stryker, pouring on fire. At last, the goblins gathered their wits and came on with a cry. He looked around him. A few of the QRF had found their courage and stood beside him, firing with the cold discipline he expected of professional soldiers. But they were so few. Nothing to be done about it now. Standing and fighting took courage, but it didn’t take a lot of thought. Bookbinder was happy to put his brain on hold and concentrate instead on the slowly returning feeling in his finger, pulling the trigger over and over.

  As he paused to swap out magazines again, he heard the din of gunfire give way before screams and clashing metal as the first of the goblins slammed into the QRF’s ranks and the brutal hand–to–hand combat commenced. A goblin launched itself over the Stryker’s turret, gutting the gunner with a short, curving sword before plunging down the other side. Bookbinder upended his carbine and took a baseball swing as it passed him, smacking its skull into the Stryker’s side and knocking it off its feet.

  He jumped onto the Stryker’s turret, clubbing with his carbine and calling to the men behind him. “Come on!”

  And then he raced down the other side, the QRF soldiers alongside him, batting aside a spear and kicking its wielder in the face. Bookbinder jumped onto the goblin’s body and laid about him, eyes half-closed, the tight press of men and goblin barely leaving him room to swing, the heat of bodies like a furnace, the stink of sweat and blood thick in his nostrils.

  For a moment, Bookbinder forgot where and who he was.

  There was only the steady rhythm of the carbine, rising and falling, the pumping exertion of his shoulders, the buzz of the fighting around him, coming to his ears as if from a long way off. He was dead. Every second he breathed, the pain lancing through his thigh as something cut him, was a stolen moment, borrowed from the reaper, fil
ling his heart with joy.

  Oh, Julie, he thought. When I see you in heaven, I am going to have such stories to tell you.

  Up, down, the carbine went. Somewhere in the thick of things, the plastic butt stock had broken off, the heavy upper receiver was rimed with dripping blood, fragments of bone, gray slop that was probably brain.

  A snarling face appeared before him, and he headbutted it, sending the goblin reeling back a pace before it shouted something and dove forward, slashing at him with a knife and sinking its teeth into his shoulder. He didn’t scream. The pain was a gift, another sensation, another moment of life. Instead, he thrust his fingers into the goblin’s eye sockets, businesslike, and yanked its head back before kicking it in the gut and clubbing it into bloody silence.

  The ground shook, and Bookbinder looked up. Before him stood one of the giants, a steel pauldron belted across its scarred chest. It hefted an uprooted tree studded with iron nails the size of railroad spikes and roared at him, crushing a guardsman beneath one massive, hobnailed boot. Bookbinder craned his head, felt for a current. No one nearby was using magic. The broken carbine looked pathetic in his hands, now red and aching as the cold left them.

  What the hell, Bookbinder thought. Might as well go out with a bang. He howled right back and charged, his stubby, broken carbine pathetic in his hands.

  The giant lifted its club, then screamed, gurgling and falling back. Bookbinder swiped at its knee and missed as the creature retreated. He looked up in surprise. A spear quivered in the giant’s throat.

  A goblin spear.

  He looked behind him. A cheer had gone up, horns were blowing. Banners waved, a gnarled tree on a square of blue.

  They flapped in the freezing wind, snapping back and forth before a flickering gate, its shimmering light dancing over the backs of hundreds of goblin warriors. A squadron of them, mounted on huge snarling wolves, leapt over the Stryker, plunging into the enemy, laying about with short, wicked swords, screaming a battle cry. Behind them, waves of their comrades followed, spears waving.