The rebels didn’t take their pain without answer. Blaster bolts shot through the factory windows, missing the troopers, and adding fresh scars to the building’s inner carcass.
Behind the enemy line, another SFG started up. To the assistant gunner’s ear, it was another 13T or possibly a 13S. This wasn’t a Militia weapon, though. It meant the Sensors and Signals team was right. The ISD was here.
They were the Rebellion’s new hope, here to put righteous backbone into the Panhandler troops. ISD—the Ideological Support Division. The sick blue bastards fired behind their own rebel troopers, sending segmented rounds into the street. They kicked up lines of dust and debris, the rounds fragmenting and pinging off the ruins of Pirna. One of the Panhandlers screamed as a ricochet hit him, but the ISD wasn’t yet deliberately shooting the assault troopers in the back. This was just a message. A reminder that the only way was forward.
Zaydok’s gun hadn’t gotten a line on the ISD position, but someone had down on the street. Rockets streaked out from the Militia barricade and burst in a shower of dust and ferrocrete chips.
The ISD suppression gun fell silent.
Cheers lifted from the street to the second floor of the gravitics factory. Not all of them had come from the Militia.
It was a minuscule victory. And it didn’t last long.
In the distance, a new sound announced itself to the battle zone, a faint crackle of pops, quite unlike the showy noise and light show of the incoming air-to-ground missiles. If Zaydok’s ears hadn’t been attuned to the sound, he’d have dismissed it as imaginary.
This was an artillery salvo. Big guns.
Shells screamed through the air with long, piercing whistles. Zaydok released a little of his tension. A long-enough whistle meant they would overshoot too far away to kill him.
The new kid, Pendleton, dropped to the floor, every muscle rigid.
He would learn. If a shell had your name on it, there wasn’t anything you could do, so you may as well relax into oblivion.
And if you didn’t die, you had to pick up the pieces as best you could and do your job while you waited your turn.
He missed the sound of the next salvo being fired.
But he heard its demonic whistle.
It lasted barely a second, just long enough to register how short the sound was. Then explosions shook the ground at the factory’s foundation.
The dust was still choking the air when the Panhandlers yelled their battle cry.
“Purity! Purity! Strength through purity! Purity through strength!”
The words chilled him more than the sounds of the incoming artillery shells.
“Steady,” the sergeant warned. “Wait for my signal.”
When the Rebellion had come to this world, the rebel troopers had been a blend of society’s gutter filth outcasts, much like himself and many of the other Militia troopers. The main difference between the two armies had been the officer corps. The enemy’s had been believers in a progressive path to a more tolerant and equal society, albeit one littered with the corpses of those who didn’t share their ideology. Most Militia officers had purchased their commissions. Their belief was that they deserved a handsome return on their investment in credits and social position.
In the early days, there’d been a trickle of Militia troopers deserting to the rebels.
He watched the Panhandlers advance along the street, hugging stumps of lampposts, and crawling between the lumps of beached ferrocrete.
He couldn’t figure these people out. For most of its existence, the Rebellion had been a loose collection of slate warriors, protesters, and smear spreaders. The Pan-Human Progressive Alliance, they called themselves. They used mob tactics to detach and destroy their political opponents, terrorizing people until they were too afraid to criticize their ideology.
After the first dramatic years, when the PHPA had appeared unstoppable, the people of the Federation saw through their contradictions. They weren’t a mass movement. They were a small group of rich agitators, privileged, yet unsatisfied middle classes who railed against oppression they had never themselves experienced and were often contributors toward. They were a joke. That’s when the Panhandler nickname had taken hold.
Then something had happened that Zaydok didn’t understand. A few years ago, the Rebellion had reappeared with trained combat units. The new rebels were well equipped with modern weapons and filled with righteous revolutionary zeal.
They’d arrived on 21-Gionesse with smart leather jackets, shiny boots, and highly polished certainties. That first wave had never encountered the real world before, but they encountered a gutful of it at Gionesse. They found it dirty, cold, confusing, and degrading.
“For liberty!” had been their battle cry in the early days. They seemed unaware of how similar that was to the Militia’s proud cry from the Hammer of Democracy incident.
And, as the wars across contested Federation worlds had settled into stalemate and attrition, they’d lost the stomach for a battle cry.
They were yelling out there on the streets, but it wasn’t their words they shouted now.
“Strength through purity! Purity through strength!”
The ISD had shown up and given them the cry of the Cora’s World extremists.
“Wait for it,” the sergeant said.
Onward they came, firing from the hip as they rushed the barricade.
Bolts and bullets flew up at the second floor of the factory.
The sarge let them commit themselves to the assault, to the open funnel of the street. Then he unleashed his guns once more. “Fire!”
Brrrrrt! Brrrrrt! Brrrrrrrt!
The SFGs reaped the rebel assault troops, sending them spinning and jerking across the street. Panhandler grenadiers shot rockets up at the factory, but they fell short.
The rebels went to ground, sheltering in the enormous craters blown out of the street, transforming them into giant firing pits.
Down by the bridge, the 3031st’s last two mortars opened up, their magazines pumping rounds into the dusty air. They arced briefly before coming down onto the two largest craters with pinpoint accuracy, having zeroed in on the targets the day before.
The results were as sickening as they were effective.
The fight went out of the rebel survivors, who resorted to sniping ineffectively from cover.
In response—or so it seemed—the rebel artillery started up again.
It soon became clear that the Militia mortars weren’t their target. This was a rolling barrage aimed behind the rebel assault troopers and creeping forward. It was a crude whip cracking against the backs of the rebels.
The sergeant had tried to explain the bewildering complexities of rebel politics when Zaydok had joined the squad. To the Cora’s World soldiers and the other ISD extremists, this was an ideological war. The conflict of bullets, blaster bolts, and ruined flesh was important, but only as a means to win the war for minds. In victory and defeat, the ISD recorded everything. The Panhandlers down in the street wouldn’t be the first unit to be executed by their own side to provide a motivating example for others.
The cause of the rebellion was righteous, which meant every act performed in its service was morally justified. Torture and execution awaited anyone accused of questioning that.
“Madness,” Pendleton muttered in wonder at the ISD brutality.
Before the Battle for Pirna, Zaydok would have agreed. Now he wasn’t so sure. Scores of reluctant rebels emerged from the ruins where they’d been hiding and joined in the assault. It regained momentum.
Pendleton, Wrenchy, the sarge, and the two grenadiers fired down with blaster rifles, but the two SFGs waited for the sergeant’s fire order. They had just two drums left apiece.
It seemed impossible that anyone would still be alive in the craters the mortars had turned into charnel pits, but rebels put their heads over the lips of the craters and threw grenades at the barricade. One had a missile launcher over his shoulder and walked back u
ntil he could acquire Zaydok’s position.
“Prince!” Zaydok warned, but his gunner was alert to the threat and fired a three-second burst into the pit. The rocketeer fell back without firing his weapon.
Zaydok waited for an explosion as the rocket went off inside the pit. He was disappointed by the silence.
An ISD heavy machine gun lashed the rear of the rebels and sent them into a blind panic. They ran, all of them, at the Militia defense line.
“Prince, Southam,” the sergeant said, “make it count. Light ’em up.”
Zaydok assisted with sighting target strikes and checked the drum feed, but there wasn’t much he could contribute until the drum needed changing. The rebels came at them like a machine gunner’s fantasy. Prince thanked them for the opportunity and mowed them down.
It looked like they would weather this attack.
Then an explosion from the other side of the street pounded Zaydok’s skull and tore at his lungs. He looked over and saw their sister SFG squad in the hotel had been taken out.
“I saw multiple rocket launch flashes,” Pendleton yelled, “620 yards up the street on the right. I don’t have eyes on the firers. They took out the hotel.”
“They’ll double back and find cover on the left,” Prince said. “Kill us from there.”
“Maybe not,” the sarge said. “Prince, train your gun on where Pendleton saw the flashes. Southam, keep supporting the barricade.”
“Roger that.”
Southam put several bursts into the Panhandlers surging toward the Militia line. Then Kreisha yelled, “Barrel hot. Swapping barrels.”
“Damn!” The sergeant hesitated for a moment. “Prince, cover for Southam.”
“Roger.” Prince dragged the SFG’s aim along the street, clusters of impact plumes illustrating its path.
It seemed to Zaydok that their gun had taken the sting out of the attack once more, but, by now, a dozen rebels were over the barricade and dealing death from their blasters.
“Low marker,” Zaydok announced as the ammo drum signaled it was down to the last 2,000 rounds.
One drum left. After that, they’d still have enough juice to fire the guns in sonic attack mode, but that was designed to stun the enemy so conventional bullets and bolts could take their toll more easily.
He blinked as a new sun briefly appeared high in the sky. “What was that?” he groaned. “Airburst nuke?”
The searing light died, but its afterimage burned strongly. “I can’t see,” Zaydok warned his gunner.
“It can’t be.” Pendleton’s voice carried a weird mix of disbelief and wonder.
“Pendleton, you’re my spotter now,” Prince growled at the boy. “Spot targets for me to kill.”
“Eyes on the action downstairs,” the sarge added. “Wrenchy, keep watching for anyone trying to flank us. Pendleton, assist Prince while Zaydok is out of it. Everyone else, keep watching for those rocketeers. If they get a clean shot, we’re all dead.” He sighed. “What got you so excited, Pendleton?”
“That flash in the sky, Sergeant. It’s a ship, emerged from jump space.”
“Don’t talk pig’s drent,” Zaydok told him. “Ships can’t jump that close to a planet.”
“I know, but I swear that’s what it was. I worked the space docks since I was 10. I know what a jump emergence looks like.”
“Kid’s clutching at straws,” Zaydok muttered to himself, but then he remembered the captain talking about reinforcements. Could that be what this was?
At Zaydok’s urging, Prince described the battle scene to him. Despite all the ISD encouragement, the rebel attack had halted, the survivors hugging cover as best they could, caught between a rock and the hard place that was the barrage creeping up the street, only a few hundred yards away.
At the barricade, the Iron Lady still stood strong, but the battalion had taken heavy casualties.
The position was hopeless, but maybe the survivors of the 3031st could slip away in the night.
The Panhandler battery commander received fresh orders. Zaydok’s hopes were dashed. Shells exploded over the barricade and smashed into the surrounding buildings—what was left of them.
Some fell among the Panhandler assault troopers, but Zaydok had little room to care when a thunderclap erupted through the gravitics factory, throwing him off his feet and setting Prince cursing as their gun’s aim was thrown off.
“That last one took out the logistics warehouse below us,” Wrenchy said from the side window. “If this dust ever clears, I’ll have a better field of view, now that it’s gone.”
The afterimage of the aerial flash cleared enough for Zaydok to see. He found himself looking at an aircraft streaking across the sky. It was an aerospace ship with sycamore wings and horns curving back from a cockpit. He’d never heard of a ship like it.
Surface-to-air missiles rose from behind the enemy lines to swat it away. Plumes of exhaust gasses reached out from the low hills outside Pirna. The missiles at their head would cross over just as the aerospace craft hit that patch of sky.
But they didn’t.
The missiles changed course to a straight vertical assent, then they tumbled through a 180 turn and relit their engines. They burned for their own launch sites.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” the sergeant said.
“That aircraft,” Pendleton said, and Zaydok could tell from his voice that the idiot was grinning. “It is there, but it isn’t one of theirs. Looks like you’ll have to rewrite the aircraft recognition training, Sarge.”
Zaydok winced. Technically, the replacement was correct, but in every other way he’d just made a critical error by contradicting the sergeant in front of everyone and calling him Sarge. Troopers had been eviscerated and made to eat their own intestines for less.
The aircraft flew low, out of sight, but he could hear the thunder of distant explosions.
And the reason he could hear them was because the enemy artillery fire had ceased.
Zaydok laughed. Pendleton would live long enough for the sergeant to rip him some new orifices.
“They’re fleeing,” Pendleton shouted, oblivious to his doom. “The Panhandlers. I can see them running back through the buildings to either side.”
“Heive,” the Iron Lady announced over the general channel, “let them flee. The captain and I want to see what happens.”
What happened first to the fleeing rebel troopers was running into the remnants of the Ideological Support Division.
Automatic weapons fire gunned then down. The screams of Panhandlers hideously burned by blaster bolts pierced the battle zone.
But the survivors of the assault column were like savage beasts, cornered and in pain. They would no longer respond to the blows of the ISD. Instead, they lashed out, first with sporadic return fire, and then with deadly efficiency, as small groups worked to flank the ISD teams and wipe them out.
Pendleton murmured that the sight was funny. Employing artful linguistic imagery, the sergeant expressed what he thought of the boy’s opinion, and Pendleton shut the fuck up.
“I don’t like what this means,” Prince said.
“How do you figure that?” Zaydok asked.
“Thing like this happens, there are consequences. Those rebel extremists always gotta have the last say. Only question is, how they’re going to phrase it, and when.”
“Aircraft inbound from southeast,” Wrenchy warned from his post watching the flanks.
Zaydok had been so intent on the drama unfolding down in the streets that he’d forgotten the skies.
“It’s a single bogey,” Wrenchy continued. “That ship with the horns. If it really did come from j-space, it’s the first spaceship with a cockpit you can see through. Pilot is Human male, dressed like a rebel. Zhoogene copilot. She’s dressed like I’d really like to take her to dinner.”
The aerospace craft swooped down over the city, opening fire on the remaining ISD strongholds with guns mounted beneath each of the two stubby sycamore wings.
“What the hell is that?” Zaydok wondered out loud. The wing guns stitched converging lines of destruction across the urban ruin. They didn’t pulverize and blast; instead, they vaporized. This was a whole new order of killpower. He supposed they’d have to be to cut through the hull armor of battleships.
Having wiped out the last of the ISD, the aircraft circled.
“Apologies for interrupting your battle,” a man’s voice said over the general channel, “but we need to speak with some of your people. This message is going out to both belligerent parties. You are all to cease fire and hold your positions until we’ve finished with you.”
“Under whose authority?” Captain Iredalie demanded over the same channel.
“Captain…Iredalie, is it? A pleasure to meet you. We come on the highest authority. Not from the Senate. Not the president, nor the first general of the Legion or the high marshal of the Militia. More VIP than all those.”
“And who might that be?” the captain asked.
The ship dropped altitude and made a slow approach above the street toward the Militia garrison.
“Hold your fire,” the Iron Lady warned, “but ready on my command to shoot out that cockpit.”
“You heard the Lady,” the sergeant repeated to his two SFG gunners, but they were already tracking the incoming aircraft.
It came to a halt and hovered, driving up a tunnel of dust.
A hatch opened, and eight armored figures dropped gently, feather light. What the hell? They should have plummeted down the 40-foot drop and joined the broken bodies in the rubble.
Over the radio, the man groaned. “Sorry, Captain. I can’t say who sent us. Not yet.” It sounded like he dearly wanted to. “Let’s bargain instead. I just saved your detachment’s lives, at least until the next assault. I can do better, but first we need a word with one of your people.”
“Very well,” Iredalie replied. “Who have you come to see?”
“The chap in question is…let’s see…born 3022 in Herstal Municipal Zone 4 on Loralys Delta…”
Zaydok froze.
Hold the Line (Chimera Company Book 5) Page 4