Death Skies (Fire and Rust Book 4)

by Anthony James

  “Let’s get the hell out of here and beware hostiles.” He turned right, and peered at the exit door. One of the Fangrin was in the way of the access panel. “What light do we have on that?”

  “Red, sir,” said Kemp.

  “In that case, we’re getting out through this hole. Everyone grab your kit. Make sure you bring those anti-stealth packs. Corporal Freeman, get on the comms - find out what happened and who lived through it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Conway stepped away from the bench. He was about four paces from where the transport had split, offering him a sharp, unwanted reminder about the margins of life and death. The vessel had finished nose down, so this end was tilted into the air, which offered some cover from any Raggers that might be watching.

  Private Lundbauer’s remains sat upright, held in place by the lower straps of his harness. The floor grating was slick with the man’s blood and Conway trod carefully to avoid slipping. He’d once seen a soldier run through heavy fire without taking a bullet and then break his neck when he fell over a low wall. The memory had stuck with Conway for years as a reminder of something he never wanted to see repeated.

  At the broken edge of the transport, Conway peered cautiously outside. The vessel had come through the upper floors of a building and ended up in a large open space filled with mounds of what appeared to be dark grey dust. A powerful wind howled through the opening, yet without disturbing the piles. The environmental monitor in Conway’s suit told him it was no colder than a winter’s day in Durham and it also detected medium levels of gamma radiation – a reading which he expected to climb rapidly in the coming minutes.

  Fifty or sixty meters to the right, he saw two vehicles which resembled short-boomed excavators. When he turned his head, he detected the bass rumble of an engine coming from that direction. Before he could turn away, he spotted a pale, round face, with huge black eyes, peering through the clear windshield.

  “Sir, we’re ready to move out,” said Lockhart.

  “Wait up. Ragger.”

  The alien was looking at the shuttle, but not at Conway. He lifted his rifle carefully into position and took aim. Before he could fire, the sound of other gunshots came and the excavator windshield was filled with star-pattern impact marks. The face vanished, leaving Conway unsure if the alien was dead or if it was protected by whatever material the windshield was made from.

  “Corporal Freeman, I need an update from whoever the hell else you can find from the two transports. Someone just shot that Ragger and it wasn’t me.”

  “I’ve been on it, sir. The second transport set down about eight klicks west without significant casualties. Colonel Thornton is alive and well.”

  “Orders?”

  “Proceed to the mission objective.”

  “Without rendezvous?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What about this transport?” asked Conway. He knew that others had made it through the crash, and he watched a group of soldiers sprinting towards the excavators. A couple of them crouched and fired at a target he couldn’t see. A Fangrin appeared and was joined by three more. They were looking for something to shoot.

  “Lieutenants Sawyer and Ashby’s squads made it with minimal casualties, sir.”

  It wasn’t difficult to add things up. “Forty-five of us left on transport one.”

  “Give or take.”

  “In that case, let’s make the best of a bad start.”

  What remained of Conway’s squad was waiting for him to get moving so that they could get away from the transport. The crash landing was already forgotten, like it was past history - a minor challenge they’d overcome. Now they wanted to get on with the job.

  Conway wasn’t going to stand in the path of progress. “Let’s go.”

  Chapter Ten

  It wasn’t too far to the ground, though much further than Conway was willing to jump. He clambered over the sheared edge of the bay, taking care to avoid the sharpest pieces of metal, and then dropped onto what he guessed was the inside of the transport’s armor plating. From there, it was another two meters to the ground. He moved quickly away to give the others room to follow and kept a cautious watch for Raggers.

  The Gilner fire stopped, leaving only the sound of the wind and the pinging of the damaged transport’s hull. Sergeant Lockhart finished his descent and strode over to join Conway. “What’s all this crap?” he asked, pointing at one of the two visible mounds of grey dust. From ground level, the mounds seemed much taller than they had from the transport. The surrounding area was covered in a thin layer and Conway crouched to touch it, without lowering his eyes.

  “Tharniol.”

  “I thought it was solid.”

  “Sometimes it’s solid, sometimes it’s like this,” said Conway. “I think they use the powdered version in a tharniol drive.”

  Lockhart stooped and ran his fingers through it. “Dense stuff,” he grunted.

  “Yeah.”

  “You know what? I’m going to take some of this,” declared Kemp, bending down to scoop up a palmful. He dumped it into the side pocket of his ammo bag. “Spoils of war.”

  The ULAF would confiscate the tharniol if they knew about it, but Conway wasn’t going to tell Kemp to put it back where he found it.

  The last survivors from the bay reached the ground. Conway pushed himself upright and spoke to Lieutenants Ashby and Sawyer on the comms. They’d received the same orders from Colonel Thornton.

  “I reckon we’re considered a lost cause,” said Ashby, his voice deep and accent unusual.

  “Yeah, maybe,” said Sawyer. “That’s not going to stop me proving otherwise.”

  “That’s how I look at it too,” said Conway. “This mission is an active one and we’re part of it.”

  Conway led his soldiers around the sheared end of the transport and towards the nose section where the other two surviving squads had gathered. They looked pristine with no marks on their combat suits and no obvious injuries. He counted sixteen Fangrin amongst them, mingled with the humans like they’d never been enemies.

  “We got lucky,” said Sawyer, walking out to meet Conway. She was in her early thirties, with piercing green eyes and blonde hair. “The pilots are both dead.”

  The transport looked as battered as an iron trashcan which had gone over a waterfall onto rocks below. The plating was scraped and split, with two huge pieces completely missing. Yet it had done its job and the soldiers inside – or some of them anyway – had made it out alive.

  “Did you recover what we need?” asked Conway.

  “Shoulder launchers, stealth zappers, guns, explosives. A couple of the Fangrin brought chain guns.”

  Conway glanced at Rembra and Nixil, who also carried chain guns. The weapons were heavy and brutal, designed to spray enough bullets that it didn’t matter too much if the opponent was wearing a stealth suit or not.

  Hacher and Private Warner both carried the new stealth zappers, as they were colloquially named. The devices had been rushed into service so quickly that the ULAF didn’t yet have a proper approved name for them.

  The zappers were contained in cloth packs and activated remotely by the combat suit computer. They were designed to emit some kind of short-range scrambling field to temporarily disrupt the Ragger stealth suits. At least that’s what Conway had been told. Apparently, the zappers worked just fine in a lab.

  “We’re getting patchy comms to AF2,” said Conway, bringing up the next problem.

  “Air support. A luxury you can never rely on,” said Sawyer, bringing just the right amount of sardonic bitterness to the words.

  “Let’s get to it,” said Conway, unwilling to wait any longer. Colonel Thornton had made it clear this was a mission with a tight schedule and the longer it took, the greater the chance the main fleet would have to withdraw from Qali-5. When that happened, Conway had every intention of being onboard the Trojan with his squad.

  The warehouse building had several exits and the one in the
north wall, mostly hidden behind a pile of tharniol, was open. The soldiers ran for it, watching carefully for Raggers. In Conway’s mind, this part of Qali-5 might well be fully operational since AF2 hadn’t dropped any bombs here.

  Beyond the doorway was an immensely-wide road made from concrete and steel mesh. Conway kept himself near to one of the thick doorway pillars and looked around.

  At the far side of the road was another building like the one hit by the transport. East, the road continued, flanked by more huge buildings, until everything was lost in smoke. Several large vehicles trundled along, their purpose and destinations unclear.

  West was more of the same, except the cylindrical towers of the target building were visible over the tops of the adjacent structures. Conway spotted other vehicles. Their shapes were so indistinct they could have been horse-drawn carriages in fog. He didn’t like their presence and he didn’t like not knowing.

  He cursed sourly to himself. This was the kind of place the Raggers seemed expert at putting together – a bleak homage to every industrial atrocity conceived since the universe began.

  “Gamma radiation climbing,” said Ashby. “I think I’d rather be exposed to that crap than have to breathe in any of this smoke.”

  “I’ve getting another reading,” said Sawyer. “The HUD just says NULL.”

  Conway had the same thing on his display. He couldn’t let it worry him. A recent comm from Colonel Thornton had left him in charge of these troops. It was a responsibility that Conway was comfortable taking on, but it was going to require extra care to find the balance between attack and caution with all the extra bodies to look after. “Whatever it is, ignore it. We’re going west.”

  “It’s a bit open,” said Ashby.

  “I’m going to request a local area bombardment.”

  “Good luck with that, the receptors are grey.”

  “I’m carrying boosters.” Luckily for Conway once you had a combat suit fitted, it was yours until you broke it. The one he was wearing still had the booster units Captain Brad Roberts had given him on the shuttle journey to Reol. Nobody had ever asked for their return and they were too useful to voluntarily give up.

  The Hurricane was out of sight, but it was up there somewhere and its receptor flickered from green to grey. Conway got a connection and spoke to Lieutenant Kenyon. Within seconds, he received the response he was looking for.

  “Captain Griffin’s promised us a flyover,” he told his platoon. “Anything they don’t like is going up in flames and that’s our chance.”

  “Are they sticking around?”

  “Unlikely. This area of Qali-5 has turned into a flashpoint.”

  “What about AF2?” asked Sawyer. “Think they can win this one?”

  “I didn’t ask – we can worry about it later.”

  “Yeah, let’s save the big man and get the hell out of Dodge,” said Ashby.

  Conway turned once to see the platoon he commanded. The visors of both human and Fangrin spacesuits hid mostly everything apart from the eyes, unless you were up close. Every single pair of those eyes was nailed straight on him. He grinned, offered a thumbs up and then exited the building.

  On the road he set a hard pace that would cover the distance quickly while leaving the soldiers with sufficient breath to aim straight and fire. Several of the Fangrin were weighed down with heavy weapons and Conway glanced behind to make sure they were able to keep up. The dogs loped easily alongside the human soldiers, apparently unbothered by their loadouts.

  A channel opened in Conway’s comms and Lieutenant Kenyon gave him the news. “Missiles incoming. We’re engaged with an enemy warship, so don’t expect us to be on call.”

  “Thanks,” said Conway, but Kenyon was already gone. He switched to the open channel. “Incoming,” he said, slowing to a walk.

  The closest vehicles were a few hundred meters away. A streak of movement alerted Conway and he averted his eyes. Ultor-VIs rained down onto the road, obliterating the Ragger vehicles and the buildings to either side. The sound of the missiles’ propulsion caught up a second later and joined in with the rumble of the blasts.

  “Missile strikes behind,” said Lockhart, way back at the rear of the platoon.

  Conway didn’t look – he’d seen the vehicles that way too, and assumed Captain Griffin had decided to take them out as well.

  The sound of the explosions faded, though the fires burned still. In the light of the flames, Conway could see the silhouettes of the enemy vehicles. He didn’t know if they’d been a threat or not and he didn’t much care. They were out of the equation and the risk was no more.

  With the air support gone and perhaps not returning, Conway resumed the fast jog towards the target building. His helmet sensor didn’t like the smoke and it wasn’t giving him an accurate distance reading. Conway’s eyes were good enough to estimate that the closest of the towers was within a thousand meters.

  They came to the first of the vehicles. It burned still, in the center of the road. Whatever it had once been, the plasma missiles had reduced it to a half-melted shapeless mess as big as a Fangrin ore truck. The heat came off it in waves and Conway gave it a wide berth.

  A dozen or more fires gave indication of how much Ragger activity was taking place on this part of Qali-5. The fact that no enemy soldiers had shown up yet was a hopeful sign that they were stationed elsewhere, though Conway wasn’t ready to believe it just yet.

  The easy progress came to an end. With the first tower only a few hundred meters away, a massive door in the side of one building lifted with a whirr of motors. The light inside was poor, but sufficient for Conway to make out the front section and enormous gun of a Ragger tank.

  He swore and looked around for cover. The last of the burning vehicles was a hundred meters behind and the roads between the buildings were far too wide to offer cover or escape.

  “Gundro - hit that bastard.” Conway saw two other Fangrin carrying shoulder launchers as well. He didn’t know their names. “Anyone else with a launcher, do likewise.”

  Gundro was only a few paces away and he took one purposeful step forward. His shoulder launcher looked no more sophisticated than a pipe with a ten-inch bore and a handle. The alien activated the two-second charge-up before the weapon was even in the firing position. He aimed it straight and the rocket whooshed from the end of the tube. It screamed towards the tank, leaving a propellant trail in its wake.

  Considering they were hand-held, the Fangrin launchers packed a real punch. The front of the tank was engulfed in the blast. Shortly after, two other rockets punched into its front armor, filling the doorway, the street and the building behind with flames.

  Conway had seen what these weapons could do to personnel and armor alike, but he wanted to be sure. “Is that enough?” he asked.

  “Yes,” said Gundro without hesitation. “The enemy vehicle is disabled.”

  “Then let’s move,” said Conway.

  He started running and then slowed in disbelief. It seemed as though the tank was still moving out of the building. Conway could see enough to be sure that it was wrecked, yet he could hear its engine and see it coming. He suddenly understood – a second tank was inside and it was pushing the smashed hull of the first onto the street.

  “Back!” shouted Conway.

  The platoon ran for the wreckage behind them on the road, their footsteps muted against the hard ground. Conway tried to watch both his feet and the emerging tank. The wrecked one was nearly clear and he could hear the engine of the second straining.

  “How long to recharge?” he asked Gundro.

  “Between one and two minutes until the launcher will fire again.”

  The vehicle which had been struck by Ultor-VIs was large enough to provide cover for everyone without much bunching. It was hot, but not enough to prevent the soldiers from getting out of sight. The vehicle’s cargo of tharniol was spread everywhere and it crunched underfoot. From its rectangular shape, Conway guessed this might have been some k
ind of hauler or an ore truck before it got hit by missiles. Most importantly, it was big and he was thankful for it.

  With a thunder of engines, the second tank pushed the blockage out into the street and emerged after it. From his vantage, Conway watched, careful not to show too much of himself in case the tank crew saw him. The vehicle was a mean-looking construction of many angular sides, floating on a gravity engine. Its hull measured fifteen meters in length and its main armament seemed almost as long. Aside from the primary gun, the tank was equipped with shoulder chain guns.

  “Full field of view on those guns,” said Gundro. “We can’t blindside it.”

  “You’ve seen these tanks before?”

  “Many times. This is one of the Raggers’ mid-sized offensive vehicles.”

  The enemy tank paused for long seconds and Conway was sure its crew were trying to work out where the soldiers were hiding.

  “We need some air support,” said Sawyer.

  “Don’t I know it,” Conway replied. “No visible receptors.”

  “Well damn. So much for the boosters.”

  “Gundro, how long on the charge up?”

  “Forty-five seconds.”

  Conway heard a new sound and it was the high-pitched whining of turret motors.

  “I think it’s found us,” said Kemp.

  “Crap,” said Conway. He stepped further into the cover of the wreckage and waited for the blast.

  Chapter Eleven

  The Ragger tank’s gun boomed and a shell struck the far side of the vehicle which was protecting the platoon. The wreckage shifted a couple of inches and the shell exploded. The ground lit up with the starkness of the light and Conway’s suit detected a sharp increase in temperature. Hidden out of sight, the soldiers were unharmed.

  “What’s the reload time on those?” asked Conway.

  “Not long,” said Gundro. “Seconds.”

  The gun boomed for a second time and the wreckage shifted a little further. The plasma explosion was large, but not enough to expand all the way around the hauler. An increase in the volume of the tank’s engine told Conway that the enemy were coming to take a closer look. A third shell clanged against the hauler and he tried to judge the angle in order that he and his platoon could shift position to remain in cover.