Desperate Fire (Angel in the Whirlwind Book 4)

by Christopher Nuttall

  “They can’t bring their starships into orbit because that will expose them to our fire,” Samuilu said calmly. “They’ll start attempting to land their marines. And we will be ready for them.”

  “Our men have been primed with the zeal to fight for us,” Lord Cleric Eliseus proclaimed, loudly. His booming voice echoed through the giant chamber. “And even the unarmed have been told to give their lives to kill unbelievers.”

  “We should start issuing weapons,” Samuilu ordered. “As soon as we know where they’re landing, we must move at once to crush them.”

  “Of course,” Nehemiah agreed. He didn’t like the idea of distributing weapons, knowing they might end up being pointed at him, but there was no choice. Unarmed civilians would be slaughtered like bugs if they were told to charge enemy positions. “Order your forces to move as soon as possible.”

  “Of course, Your Holiness,” Samuilu said.

  “Commodore,” General Winters said. His face appeared in front of her. “We have picked out a suitable landing site to turn into a spacehead.”

  And Pat will be in the lead, Kat thought. Bitter guilt tore at her. She shouldn’t have pressed for him to get the job. If he lands in the first wave he will either win or die.

  “Understood,” she said. She pushed her feelings into a compartment at the back of her mind and locked the door. “I’ll have the fleet move into position to support you.”

  “Deploy additional waves of drones,” General Winters urged. The display updated, showing how the landing force intended to slip through the atmosphere and reach the ground. Kat couldn’t help feeling that the maneuver seemed excessively risky. “I think we’re going to need them.”

  Kat nodded. “I will, General,” she said. She wished she knew him better. Admiral Christian and General Winters had been old friends, she recalled from a formal dinner. The general wouldn’t be quite so impressed with her, even though ironclad regulations named her as the operation’s commanding officer. “They have a lot of firepower down there.”

  “We can take it,” General Winters said. He sounded assured. Kat rather envied him. “Even if those ships come back, we can take it.”

  “Yes, General,” Kat said. She took a breath. The missing enemy ships might be a serious problem if they were plotting a counteroffensive or even intending to head out into unexplored space and set up a whole new Theocracy. “The word is given. Land the landing force!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  So tell me, Pat’s thoughts urged. Whose bright idea was this?

  Yours, his thoughts answered.

  He gritted his teeth as the suit rocketed on its ballistic trajectory towards Ahura Mazda, tiny gas jets steering him towards the optimal reentry point. Hundreds of other marines were floating near him, he knew, but he found that hard to believe when they were keeping strict radio silence. They didn’t even dare risk using lasers to communicate, despite knowing that the odds of being detected were ridiculously low. It was chillingly easy to believe that he was all alone in the vastness of space, utterly dwarfed by the giant planet looming above him.

  And yet, his suit’s passive sensors kept picking up signs of life, flashing up warnings about chunks of space debris falling into the planet’s atmosphere. It was highly unlikely that he or any of the marines would actually collide with a piece of debris, but the problem could not be entirely dismissed. A large number of marines were heading through a relatively small region of space, a region crammed with the plummeting wreckage of a heated battle. And if they did hit something, the odds of survival were very low indeed.

  Pat forced himself to wait, counting sheep under his breath as the planet grew closer and closer. The enemy would be looking for them, he knew; they had to assume an invasion was on the way. And they knew enough about Commonwealth doctrine to have a reasonable idea what form it would take, even if flying assault shuttles through low orbit was asking for trouble. They’d be looking for suited marines dropping from orbit.

  A low tremor ran through the suit as it touched the uppermost edges of the planet’s atmosphere. Pat closed his eyes as the suit spun him around, trying to keep a firm grasp on his surroundings as the planet shifted from distant orb to the ground far below him. His perspective was altered, time and time again; he reminded himself, firmly, that he was still perfectly safe. The enemy didn’t seem to have noticed their arrival.

  Too much debris entering the planet’s atmosphere, he thought. His suit was tracking countless pieces of debris burning up below him, a handful of scattered fragments remaining intact long enough to hit the ground. We’re too small to be noticed.

  He opened his eyes. The ground was below him, growing steadily larger as he fell towards the planet. He’d done high-altitude, low-opening deployments before, of course, as well as space-based insertions, but this was different. He was staring down at an enemy target—no, the enemy target. The coming battle would determine the end of the war. His suit’s HUD kept updating, picking out cities and matching them to the maps they’d obtained from Admiral Junayd. The enemy force shields were clearly visible, hanging in the air over the larger cities and PDCs.

  And then the enemy opened fire.

  Pat cursed as missiles and energy pulses flashed past him, the decoys going active seconds later and soaking up the barrage. Something had tipped the enemy off, something that had convinced them that the marines were finally on their way. A puzzle . . . he pushed it aside. The ground came up towards him, his eyes seeking out prospective landing sites as his suit’s antigravity generators powered up. A series of explosions blasted out above him as the enemy continued firing, aiming at the second wave of marines. His suit flipped around as the antigravity field cut in the instant before he hit the ground. He touched down, already having deployed his weapons and equipment.

  “A field,” Sergeant Bones said. The remaining marines touched down and spread out, hunting for prospective targets. “Nothing more than a muddy field.”

  Pat was inclined to agree. He was no expert, but the cornfield looked as if it were lying fallow; in the distance, he could see sheep munching contentedly on green grass, utterly unmoved by the battle above them. A small farmhouse lay at the edge of the field, two young boys staring at the marines in complete disbelief. One of them turned and hurried inside as the marines spread out, the other continuing to stare. And then an older man appeared, barked orders at the remaining boy and dragged him into their home.

  “Colonel,” Sergeant Bones said, “should we let them go?”

  “They know we’re here,” Pat said. The spacehead was small, but it would grow. And the enemy knew it. “Let them go.”

  He glanced up as his HUD reported incoming targets. Five aircraft, sweeping low as they closed in on the marines. His suit automatically tracked them and opened fire, blowing the lead aircraft out of the sky. The other marines opened fire a second later, taking down the remaining four. Within moments, the next wave of marines and their supplies landed. Pat barked orders, directing them to set up defense systems and then start preparing the spacehead to receive shuttles.

  “Picking up an alert from the stealthed recon probes,” Corporal Wallace said. “We have crowds massing in the nearby settlement.”

  “Understood,” Pat said. “Armed crowds?”

  “Unsure,” Corporal Wallace said. “But there’s a lot of them.”

  He paused. “And long-range shellfire has just been detected.”

  Pat nodded as the point defense systems started to engage, sweeping the shells out of the air before they could reach their targets. The enemy might decide to use nukes to clear the way to the spacehead, he thought, but anything less would have real problems reaching the marines. Even if a spy was on the Chesty Puller, he wouldn’t have been able to tell the Theocrats where the marines were going to land when the marines didn’t know themselves.

  He snapped out orders as more and more marines landed, taking a platoon himself to sweep the farmhouse. It was an odd design, he noted as they push
ed down the door and walked inside; a third of the house seemed to be isolated from the rest of the structure. He couldn’t help wondering, as they searched the remainder of the building, just who or what had been kept in the run-down third. There wasn’t much luxury in the farmhouse, but clearly the isolated section was very basic indeed. The inhabitants had completely vanished.

  “They would have kept the women here,” Bones said. She sounded deeply shocked—and angry. “This place is practically a prison.”

  She was right, Pat decided, as they poked through piles of clothes. The only garments to be found in the isolated section of the building were long shapeless robes and veils, the latter meant to hide the wearer’s face. There were no bras, no cosmetics—nothing he would have expected to find in a woman’s room. There was nothing to do but wait—it was like being in a prison. He shuddered at the thought of Kat, or any of her sisters, growing up in such a nightmare, and then he turned and walked out of the building. The farmhouse, already badly damaged by so many armored men tramping in and out, didn’t look as though it would survive for long. It would merely be the first of many destroyed buildings.

  “Got more incoming fire,” Captain Jackson snapped. Another wave of marines landed, hard on the heels of a hail of shellfire. “They’ve set up guns to the west as well as to the east.”

  “Understood,” Pat said. “Keep defending the spacehead, Captain. I’ll—”

  “Incoming,” Sergeant Bones said sharply. “A large crowd, marching down the road towards us.”

  “On my way,” Pat said.

  The road was really nothing more than a muddy track, Pat noted. That puzzled him. Hebrides had been a poorer world in many ways, yet the roads had been better; but then, the Theocracy probably didn’t want its people to move from place to place easily. No doubt they would all have ID cards, and somewhere they would have stored complete records of the entire planet’s population.

  He pushed the thought aside as the crowd came into view, a mob of men carrying primitive weapons and chanting loudly as they marched. He had no idea if the chant was a prayer or cry of defiance.

  “That man in the back is urging them on,” Bones commented.

  Pat nodded. A man in red robes was standing at the rear, his gaze flickering constantly between the marines and the advancing crowd. Pat had no trouble recognizing a rabble-rouser, someone who would happily whip up a mob and then vanish, leaving said mob to be brutally crushed or killed. Even relatively gentle ways of dealing with an impromptu gang tended to be thoroughly unpleasant for its members.

  “They don’t have any heavy weapons,” he said softly. “There’s no need to crush them.”

  “Yes, sir,” Bones said reluctantly.

  The marines lined up in formation as the crowd closed in. It would have been suicide against an armed enemy, but not against an unarmed and unarmored mob. Pat felt a sudden surge of hatred for the red-robed man, the man who’d sent hundreds of farmers to be killed, bashing their heads against an immoveable object. He lifted his rifle, targeted the man, and put an explosive bullet through his head. His body exploded into flame as it dropped to the ground.

  “THIS REGION IS NOW UNDER OCCUPATION,” he said, using the suit to amplify his words. The sound was so loud that anyone without ear protection recoiled in horror. “GO BACK TO YOUR HOMES. STAY THERE.”

  The crowd seemed to hesitate, a number slipping back now that the red-robe was dead. But others kept coming, howling as they broke into a run. Pat cursed under his breath, then gave the order to prepare the stunners as rocks, knives, and improvised weapons rained down around the marines. The crowd clearly hadn’t had any real time to prepare for the brief encounter.

  “Stun them,” he ordered.

  Blue sparks flared from body to body, sending the maddened crowd falling to the ground like ninepins. Pat felt a flicker of remorse, then led the marines forward as more alerts popped up in front of him. The enemy was sending actual troops forward now, staging them through the nearby village. He knew the marines should sweep up the stunned crowd and dump them in a POW camp, but there was no time to set one up. The enemy was clearly doing everything they could to get reinforcements into position to attack.

  A shuttle roared overhead, followed by five more. Pat allowed himself a moment of relief that the spacehead was growing stronger, then led the marines down towards the town. He wasn’t sure what he’d expected, but he had to admit the scene looked odd. Red brick buildings dominated, all seemingly deserted. The church at the far end of the town looked open, as if it was waiting for him. Pat glanced up sharply as a bullet bounced off his helmet. He directed a stream of plasma pulses towards the sniper. The entire building disintegrated into rubble, the sniper falling to his death somewhere within the debris. Thankfully, the local defenders didn’t seem to be equipped with anything more dangerous than small arms.

  That will change, he thought grimly.

  “Colonel,” Bones said, “here they come.”

  Pat glanced up abruptly as a second howling mob appeared from the side streets and charged towards the marines, followed by men who were clearly soldiers or militia. He braced himself as Molotov cocktails started to smash into the combat armor, then relaxed as it became clear that they weren’t strong enough to do real damage. But the mob kept coming, bare hands tearing at his armor as if they thought they could break through by sheer force of will. Pat rapidly found himself buried in swarming bodies, his suit rocking backwards as they pressed down on him. His servomotors whined as he fought to stay upright.

  Gritting his teeth, he triggered the stunner and spun around, shocking everyone within reach until he could see again. The soldiers were hurling grenades, utterly heedless of the mass of civilians around the marines. Pat cursed as he realized the grenades could harm his marines. They were stronger than the ones the Theocracy normally used, as if the enemy leaders had anticipated their landing.

  He lifted his weapon and fired, blowing the soldiers away as the rest of his men freed themselves. Hundreds of civilians were dead or wounded, but there was no time to worry about them. More and more updates were popping up in front of him, cautioning him that the enemy was deploying additional troops to crush the spacehead. The Theocratic soldiers fell back, some trying to hold their ground while others turned and fled. Pat took a peculiarly savage delight in shooting the latter in the back. They’d gotten hundreds of innocent civilians killed for nothing.

  “Two suits lightly damaged,” Bones reported. “No injuries.”

  “Sweep the rest of the town,” Pat ordered. More shuttles were landing, unloading hundreds of marines. General Winters would take command soon. “Hunt down the rest of the bastards before they get away.”

  The town was almost deserted, they discovered, save for a handful of men who either tried to attack the marines or simply ran in the opposite direction. Pat felt that something was missing as they searched a house, but it took him several moments to realize that they hadn’t seen any women or girls at all. Come to think of it, they hadn’t seen any children in the town, female or male. The youngest man they’d seen had been at least fourteen.

  “You’d expect a town this size to have at least an equal number of women,” he mused as they searched a house. Like all the others, there was a female section, bare and barren compared to the male side of the house. But it was deserted. “Where are they?”

  “Maybe they all fled,” Bones suggested. “The Theocracy’s forces have a habit of raping every woman they see. Maybe they think we’ll do the same.”

  Pat felt sick. Accidents happened in war—he’d been a soldier long enough to know that accidents happened—but rape was no accident. A Commonwealth soldier or spacer who was convicted of rape would be escorted to the nearest airlock and kicked out if he or she didn’t beg for a firing squad or the hangman instead. His troops would not rape a local girl, no matter how much they hated their surroundings. But he was sure the Theocrats would have told their people that the marines were all rapists. What b
etter way to encourage them to resist?

  He walked out of the house and checked the stream of status reports. The spacehead was growing, despite the constant rain of shells. A couple of shuttles had been blown out of the air and three more had been damaged while they were on the ground, but the attacks hadn’t been enough to stop the marines from reinforcing. More companies were forming up, spreading out around the spacehead. He sent orders to one company to establish a POW camp, then followed Bones into the next house. She stopped dead as she peered into the kitchen.

  “Interesting,” she said. “What do you make of this, sir?”

  Pat looked past her. A man lay on the ground, his throat cut. Pat was no expert, but he figured the man hadn’t been dead for more than an hour. The blood didn’t seem to have congealed, which puzzled him. Had the knife been primed with something designed to stop the blood from clotting? Or had the victim died only a few minutes ago?

  “I don’t know,” he said. A mystery, one he doubted they’d ever be able to solve. One more death amidst hundreds of thousands—no one would care enough to try to find out. “Sweep the rest of the house.”

  Pat’s contingent worked their way through the town, slowly closing in on the church. He had expected fanatical resistance around the building, but instead the area was as dark and silent as the grave. Pat inched forward, half expecting to encounter a booby trap. The door opened as soon as he touched it, silently beckoning him inside. His suit’s sensors revealed nothing to worry about, save for the darkness. He opened the inner door and jumped back as warnings flashed up in front of him.

  “Nerve gas,” he said. Sweat prickled on his forehead, even though he knew the gas couldn’t get into the suit. Gas had always scared the pants off him, ever since entering the gas chamber during boot camp. Hardened marines still cringed when they remembered those minutes of pure terror. “Lethal shit.”

  “Shine a light in there,” Bones suggested. She sounded uneasy. “Sir?”