by Rick Partlow
“And there’ll be no more fire support,” she said with resignation in her voice.
Ari didn’t answer: there was no need. Instead, he keyed his helmet radio, tuned to the company net. “Wrap it up, ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “The day’s not over yet.”
Tom Crossman fought to control his breathing as he jogged the game trail that led over the gently rolling hills on the other side of the dry creek bed. He hadn’t slept more than an hour in days, his body’s resources were being tapped by the medical nanotech still repairing his wounds from within and he was buzzing on stimulants. His heart felt as if it were about to beat out of his chest and he seemed to be constantly on the verge of hyperventilating, but he pushed on, ignoring it all, ignoring the weight of the load he was carrying in his backpack and concentrating on trying to make sense of the input from the thermal and infrared lenses in his helmet in the pitch blackness.
The trail was closed in by young trees but as it cleared the next hill, it opened out onto an old secondary road that exited off the main highway. The road was crumbling and overgrown, but it was wide and clear enough for even the big cargo haulers, much less the APCs, which could have gone cross-country at need. That was why Tom and his squad were there.
“Where are their scouts, Colonel?” he radioed to Shannon Stark as he crouched in the trees beside the old road. He could hear Aaron Diehl slowly moving into place beside him and could see the rest of the squad’s avatars on his HUD as they took up positions on both sides of the road.
“They’re heading your way, Tom,” she warned him. “Two APCs. You’ve got maybe two minutes.”
“Roger that, ma’am.” He switched two Sgt. Diehl’s channel. “Sam, we have two enemy vehicles inbound, ETA two minutes. Take Manning and the last two missile launchers and stop them.”
“Got it, boss,” Diehl said, sprinting across the road and slapping Manning on the arm. The two of them grabbed a pair of anti-armor launchers from the backpack of one of the other Special Ops troops then headed down the road toward the intersection.
“Griffin!” Tom snapped at another of the newly-graduated operators. “Get over here and grab these charges from my backpack! We got ourselves a road to blow up!”
Tanya Manning gripped the twin handles of the missile launcher tightly, trying very hard to keep her hands from shaking. She could see the two armored vehicles approaching now, their thermal signature dim but still visible through the trees lining the road, and she touched the launcher’s targeting control, seeing a red reticle appear in her helmet’s HUD. The reticle flashed yellow as the launcher detected the trees between it and its intended target, but she waited, knowing the APCs would clear the obstructions in a few seconds.
Her finger was tightening slightly on the trigger when both armored vehicles stopped in the middle of the road four hundred meters away, their turbines mosquito whines in the distance. She froze, certain they’d been seen, watching the 25mm cannon on the upper turret of both APCs traversing back and forth and waiting for the inevitable flash of fire and the explosion of shells…
What she got instead was the thump of the rear ramps on both vehicles opening and the faint clatter of armored boots as each APC disgorged a squad of a dozen of the biomech troopers.
“We have dismounts from the scout vehicles,” Diehl’s calm pronouncement sounded in her helmet speakers. “We’re going to need some support up here.” He seemed so calm about it, as if this was something that happened every day. She felt awe when she heard him or Sgt. Crossman react that way; she was sure of her own courage, but nowhere near as sure of her unflappability.
“I’m sending what we can spare,” Tom Crossman told him, a shrug in his voice. “Hold them off until we get these charges planted.”
“Roger that, boss. Manning,” Diehl directed her, “come get this other launcher from me.”
Without questioning it, she slung her own launcher and quickly high-crawled across the road to Sgt. Diehl’s position, taking the jagged pavement on the padded knees and elbows of her armor to minimize the noise. Reaching Diehl’s side, she rose to a crouch and accepted the proffered missile launcher from him.
“Cut through the trees,” he instructed, “and get into a position where you have a clear shot at both those APCs. We’ll hold off the dismounts, but we need those vehicles gone.”
“Got it, Sergeant,” she acknowledged, slinging the second launcher over her shoulder, then pulling her carbine loose against its chest straps. “I’ll take care of it.”
She felt the strain in her quads as she pushed up the steep hill on that side of the road, weaving between the trees. Loamy soil shifted under her boots and she shifted her weight forward to keep from sliding back down the hill, trying to make as little noise as possible. She fervently hoped that the crew of the APC was focused on the road ahead, because if they opened up on her right now, she had no cover and no clear shot back at them.
She hadn’t gone more than fifty meters through the woods, struggling to keep her balance on the steep hillside, when she heard gunfire erupt behind her. She risked a quick check on her HUD and saw six friendly icons on the road, engaging at least twenty of the enemy, who weren’t accommodating enough to provide IFF transponders to let her know where they were.
She forced herself not to think about the danger her friends faced, concentrating instead on the square icons glowing a faint red on the thermal sensors in her helmet, still over 200 meters away. She’d intended to skirt the edge of the road and come out behind the vehicles, giving them less time to react after the first shot, but with the dismounted biomechs already engaging the Special Ops troops on the road…
Dammit. The APCs were slowly rolling forward, moving up to support their squads. No choice now.
Manning dashed straight down the hillside, grunting in pain as she bounced off one tree after another, using the impacts to keep herself upright despite the steep grade. Coming to the bottom, she took the last meter in a leap to the pavement, absorbing the landing on flexed knees and still having to slap a hand on the hard ground in front of her to keep from toppling over.
Her head tilted up and she could see the two armored vehicles looming a hundred meters away, the muzzles of their cannons and assault guns seeming to be pointing directly at her. She let her carbine fall free of her grasp, allowing its sling to pull it tight against her chest armor as she unslung the first of the missile launchers, activating its targeting system even before she brought it up to her shoulder.
The APC to her left was closer by about 50 meters, and she instinctively made it her first target, squeezing the trigger the second the reticle flashed red, then throwing the spent launcher aside and flattening on the ground. The missile hit before she was fully down and the concussion tossed her backwards, sending her tumbling along the broken pavement, her weapons and equipment jabbing into her painfully despite her armor, adding to the bruises she’d already collected and crushing the breath from her lungs. Heat washed over her as the APC was consumed in a fireball of hyperexplosives and she felt a chunk of debris smack painfully against her helmet, leaving her ears ringing, her vision filled with stars and her faceplate starred and cracked.
Manning desperately forced her brain to work, forced her limbs to respond. She brought her knees beneath her and scrambled to her feet, running to the left to put the burning vehicle between her and the intact APC. She thought she heard the deep drumbeat of an assault gun opening up at her, but she didn’t dare turn to make sure; instead she kept running, pushing into a sprint that made her heart pound like a triphammer and her breath rasp in her throat.
She had almost cleared the edge of the burning wreckage of the left-hand APC and reached cover when she felt something tug at the back of her right calf and she stumbled but refused to go down, not even bothering to look to see how badly she was hit: there just wasn’t time. Her calf was numb and her foot didn’t seem to want to work right so she dragged it and limped-ran, cutting closer to the flames of the burning hulk t
han she’d wanted to. Her armor was fire-resistant but the wash of raw heat that washed over her made her light-headed and stole the breath from her lungs.
Tears filled her eyes and she blinked them away angrily, compartmentalizing the pain, shutting it away. There was one job left to do, then she could cry. She unslung the last missile launcher, tried to activate her helmet’s targeting system, but her HUD was down, damaged in the blast from the first APC.
“Fuck it,” she snarled aloud to herself. “I’ll shove the damned thing up their ass.”
She giggled a bit deliriously at the thought that her father would have been horrified to hear her use that sort of language. Captain Alfred Manning had been a pillar of moral rectitude, first in his class at the Republic Military Academy and the model officer and gentleman… right up until Republic Spacefleet Headquarters had vanished in a sphere of fusion fire five years ago, killing off over half the Fleet’s officers in one shot. Her mother had screamed at her, then cried, then pleaded when she had told her that she was enlisting after the invasion, but none of her mom’s words could speak louder than her father’s silent example.
The external audio pickup in her helmet was dead, and besides the ragged rasp of her own breathing, all she could hear was the muted roar of the fire that was consuming the enemy APC. So when she rounded the end of the destroyed vehicle, she felt a dull surprise at the sight of the second APC backing up at high speed away from her, trying to bring its guns to bear on her position.
She fell to one knee, brought the launcher up to her shoulder and used the secondary sights mounted on the weapon itself to target the vehicle only 50 meters away. There was a flash from the APC’s main gun just as she pulled the trigger and the world disappeared in a sunburst of white fire…
Tom Crossman cursed and hugged the pavement as a grenade went off way too close to him and the five kilos of hyperexplosives beside him. The biomechs had pushed through the fire team he’d sent to stop them through the simple tactic of ignoring what would have been fatal wounds on a human and a liberal use of rifle grenades. Four of the six men and women he’d sent were dead, the other two were wounded and he and the four troops who’d been helping him set the charges to crater the road were pinned down by heavy fire.
He pushed his carbine out in front of him, using the weapon’s sight’s connection to his helmet targeting system to aim at the biomech who’d fired the grenade. It was nearly 50 meters away and he was firing from an awkward position, but he managed to walk a burst up from the thing’s leg to its chest. It stumbled backwards, but kept its feet and tried to return fire… only to find that its weapon wouldn’t function, having been hit by Crossman’s barrage. The thing dropped the useless rifle and began to walk forward, pulling a combat knife from a sheath on its belt.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Tom muttered. He shifted aim and managed to put a burst into the thing’s helmet, sending it crashing to the ground, motionless.
Tom came up to his elbows and pulled the cratering charge in front of him, ignoring the gunfire all around him as he punched a pair of detonators into the spongy block of hyperexplosives.
“Colonel Stark,” he transmitted as he worked, “we have at least four KIA, two WIA and Manning is MIA-her transponder is inactive. We’re being overrun but I’m setting the last cratering charge right now.” He tapped a code into the detonator’s control panel and was in the process of synching the device with his helmet controls when a massive concussion threw him three meters sideways, tumbling off the jagged edge of the road and into the drainage ditch beside it.
Crossman’s head swam, his vision blurred and he couldn’t seem to make his arms and legs obey his commands. Slowly, his sight cleared enough that he could see, through a web of cracks in his fractured faceplate, another of his men lying in the ditch beside him. It had to be Mathers, part of his mind realized through the fog of concussion, the junior NCO who’d been setting one of the other charges. His chest was riddled with bullets and his armor was soaked in blood; he looked very dead, and Crossman wondered if he himself looked any better.
There wasn’t any pain yet, but he knew there would be, and he would have welcomed it if only he could have made himself move faster. He managed to get a hand beneath him and push himself up enough to look over the edge of the ditch. Three biomechs were moving towards him-their armor was scorched and bloody but they were still upright and functioning, which was more than he could say for himself. He patted at his chest, trying to find his carbine, not coherent enough to be desperate but knowing somewhere deep down that he should have been. He felt the buttstock of his carbine and yanked at it with all the strength he could muster, but it was trapped under his body and he just couldn’t move fast enough to free it…
When the grenade exploded, his first thought was that it was aimed at him and he ducked his head instinctively at the flash and gut-punch percussion, but the fact that he was still alive made him look back up. Two of the biomechs were down, one of them in pieces-the grenade must have hit him directly, Tom thought. The third was staggered but still on its feet, trying to swing its rifle around.as the smoke from the detonation swirled around it.
Tom’s ears were battered from the explosions, the noise-cancelling headphones in his helmet damaged by the grenade blast that had shattered his visor, so he didn’t hear the gunshots, but he saw the biomech stumble backwards, saw the bullet holes punch through its chest then climb upwards to penetrate its helmet in a spray of blood. The thing fell to its knees, then collapsed forward to the pavement, motionless.
When the lone shooter stepped forward, Tom could barely see it in the spare moonlight-his helmet’s night vision was gone with the broken visor-but he could tell immediately it wasn’t a biomech. It was short, and not wearing a helmet, and it was limping badly, a carbine cradled in one arm. Tom gave up clutching at his trapped carbine and pulled a flashlight from his belt, shining it on the approaching figure.
Tanya Manning’s spiky hair was matted with blood from a nasty gash on the left side of her head, and her armor was scorched and battered, stained with blood in at least four places, including a nasty gunshot wound on her calf that was causing the limp. Her eyes looked nearly vacant, but there was a grim and relentless purpose to the set of her mouth.
Tom tried to speak and had to cough his throat clear and spit through his broken visor before he could manage it. “Manning,” he said hoarsely. “Gotta set off these charges. Helmet controls are fragged.”
“A grenade should do it,” she said in a voice curiously cool and casual, except for the way she slightly slurred her words.
She stepped over to the cratering charge, still sitting in the middle of the road, and knelt down next to it. She pulled a rifle grenade from a bandolier on her chest and methodically unscrewed the base, discarding the tail portion that held the propellant for launching it from the tube beneath her carbine’s rifle barrel. Inside that base was a simple dial with time measured out in seconds and minutes around its perimeter. She twisted the timer, set the bomb down next to the lump of hyperexplosives, then pushed herself slowly and painfully to her feet and limped towards Tom.
“Five minutes to get clear, Sgt. Crossman,” she murmured as she pulled him to his feet. Crossman bit back a gasp as a wave of agony went through his right leg, and leaned into her for support.
“Anyone else alive?” he managed to ask her as they limp-jogged down the road. He knew the answer, but he had to make sure.
“No, Master Sergeant,” she told him, eyes fixed on the road ahead. “Just you and me.”
“Damn,” he hissed, pain and exhaustion and a sense of utter hopelessness filling his voice. “This had better mean something.” He glanced upwards towards the stars and what flew among them. “They’d better win this fucking fight.”
Chapter Forty-Five
“Five minutes to orbital insertion,” Bevins reported, watching the blue green image of the planet growing huge in the holographic display.
“Where’s our frie
nd, Larry?” Minishimi asked, absent-mindedly tugging her harness tighter in anticipation of impending zero gravity.
“Still on course to Earth orbit, ma’am,” Larry Gianeto told her, nodding toward the red icon in his Tactical projection. “Depending on how fast they decelerate, somewhere between 30 minutes to an hour behind us. The Sheridan is trailing him a few light seconds back; they’ll reach orbit right after he does.”
“Why’s he heading for orbit?” Franks wondered aloud. At Minishimi’s questioning look, he went on. “Ma’am, it’s just that… last time around, Antonov parked his flagship in orbit and threatened to nuke our cities if we didn’t surrender. We haven’t heard any demands this time and he knows that if he drops field and tries to hit ground targets, we’ll be there taking potshots at him.”
“Maybe he’s going after Fleet Headquarters?” Commander Lee suggested. “They haven’t attacked it yet.”
“They don’t need an FTL cruiser to take out Fleet HQ,” Gianeto pointed out. “They still have enough conventional ships out there to do that, if we aren’t able to take them out.”
“He’s here to take us out of the equation,” Minishimi said, nodding. “Everything about this attack has been about stripping away our defenses… and they knew there would be at least one FTL cruiser insystem. The ramships were the first wave, and when they didn’t work, they sent their biggest gun.”
“So why’s he heading for Earth orbit then?” Lee asked, confused.
“Because he knows we’ll have to try to stop him,” Minishimi answered her. “And he’s right.”
“We’re at minimum safe distance for field activation,” Bevins announced, reaching out to slide down a control. “Drive at station keeping.” Gravity faded and Frank’s stomach fluttered with the sensation.
“Helm,” Minishimi ordered, “link the drive field controls to Tactical. Mr. Gianeto, prepare to deactivate field when the enemy does and target him with Gauss cannon and forward lasers.” She swung around in her chair. “Communications, signal the Sheridan. Time to earn our pay.”