“That’s Laverna!” Sun cried.
Jenkins corrected her. “It’s Sergeant Laverna when she’s wearing the fifteen stars.”
It took Sun a moment to process that. The Laverna she’d known was a de-security specialist, meaning she took something that was secure—such as a sealed vault—and made it not secure at all. She had always left the violence to others.
“Turns out that our Sergeant Laverna is quite the marksman,” said Jenkins, the pride ripe in his voice.
On the map, Pegnodella’s underwater team advanced rapidly up the inner lagoon, while Yendel pressed along the shoreline, running parallel with the obsidian hills on a course for the main Scythe concentration.
“Where is their response?” worried Sun. “Why aren’t they putting up a stiffer resistance?” She tapped Branco on the shoulder. “Can you see what their dropships are doing?”
Branco grimaced as he put a further load on his pinplants.
“Yendel has redeployed a pair of drones to head straight for the dropships,” he grunted, adding drone’s-eye view panels showing rapid travel over the sand.
Suddenly, he hissed. “For the Devil!”
“What’s happened?”
The Tri-V windows from the drone feeds and the main battle map shut down, and the blue dots of Yendel’s team started turning black. Branco hooked a link to another drone and the explanation became all too clear.
The Scythe had mined the beach. Deadly plumes of sand sprayed high into the blue skies, taking whoever was nearby with them. The danger zone seemed to stretch from the obsidian ridge all the way across the beach to the lagoon.
“Yendel is dead,” said Branco. “So is his deputy. Incoming message—”
“Wurgitar here,” said a frightened voice over the speaker set into the Tri-V projector. “I guess I’m senior now. What the hell do I do?”
“Pull back,” Sun told the Jivool.
Wurgitar hesitated. “Who is this?”
“Major Sun. I’m in command now. Right, Captain Jenkins?”
“She’s right,” he confirmed. “Do as the major says, Wurgitar.”
“Okay. I’m pulling everyone back to the inlet. No—Entropy! I can’t. Sergeant Laverna has taken her squad into the hills…said she wanted to command the high ground.”
“She has good instincts,” said Sun. “Let her be. Pull the rest of your land forces halfway back to the beachhead.”
“Roger that. Wurgitar out.”
“Branco, can you get hold of Laverna for me?”
He nodded. A few moments later a Blevin’s voice came over the speaker. “Go for Laverna.”
“It’s Sun. Give me your squad’s numbers and armament.”
“Fifteen Patriots. A couple of them are lugging a long-barreled Gauss cannon. The rest of us have laser carbines.”
“Excellent. Can you fire on the minefield from your position?”
“That’s why we’re here. Sorry. Yes, Sun. We have good cover, though if they fire kinetic rounds this obsidian will shatter like…well…glass.”
“Here’s what you need to do. I expect the Scythe to send something to pursue Wurgitar. Maybe hovercraft. Blast the hell out of whatever they send, and then retreat a hundred yards back to the inlet before they can return heavy fire.”
“Roger that.”
“Pegnodella, report.”
“We’ve laid charges on one submersible,” said the Cartar commander assaulting the enemy base from underwater. “The place is practically deserted, and we see signs to confirm there were four submersibles docked here. Three are missing.”
“Finish the job, then retreat to the center of the lagoon. I’ll need you to either support a counterattack by Patriot land forces, or cover their retreat off the beach.”
“It’s Major Sun I’m talking to, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
Sun bit her lip, expecting trouble. But Pegnodella wasn’t interested in playing a seniority pissing contest. “Thank the Divine Heavens. We need you, Major. I will comply with your orders. Pegnodella out.”
Friendly drone views showed Scythe forces pouring out from concealed structures buried in the sand. They were riding dune buggies bristling with guns. Behind them, two dropships extended turrets from their upper hulls and began firing shells at Wurgitar’s retreating Patriots.
Sun would have loved to call a missile strike or artillery barrage down upon the dropships, but she had no such assets to call upon.
Scythe drones launched, fighting a machine-to-machine air war with their Patriot opposite numbers. The view rapidly became patchier, and then failed completely as the last battlefield drone died over the enemy base.
The only remaining Patriot drone hovered near Wurgitar himself. It showed a wave of sand heading his way as the column of buggies raced across the beach.
The bombardment from the dropships was terrifying Wurgitar’s Patriots, but Sun reckoned they had lucked out. “Wurgitar, tell your fighters to keep in open order; don’t bunch. Those shells coming down are armor piercing, not anti-personnel. You need to hold your ground just long enough for Laverna’s team to hit those Scythe buggies hard.”
The buggies bothered her more than the artillery. Were they going to drive right over the minefield?
“Branco, I’m guessing those buggies are broadcasting friendly IFF codes. Do we have means to jam them, corrupt them, or read them for our own use?”
“Maybe with the drone. But lose that and I’ve got no way to—Wait, they aren’t using IFF codes. Watch.”
He brought the drone forward and focused its view on the dune buggies. They’d come to a halt on the far side of the minefield and were exchanging long-range fire with Wurgitar’s Patriots.
Then the beach levitated!
It took a few moments for Sun to realize what she was seeing. The buggies had parked on buried hover barges, the kind of levitating platforms you would see at waterfront construction sites or used as harbor ferries.
“They baited this trap good and proper,” Sun growled. “They must really want to kill your Patriots, Skipper.”
There were three enormous barges, each carrying fifteen heavily armed buggies. Four enormous ducted fans at each corner lifted the barges six feet. Smaller tilt fans mounted front and rear whirred into action, pushing them onto the minefield. Sun just had time to see angled armor shields deploy in front of the barges before they started a rolling barrage of smoke that quickly wiped out her view.
“Laverna, you still got eyes on the target?”
“You bet, Major. Smoke is to the front.”
“Fire upon the front engines only.”
The Blevin was on the cusp of protesting. Then she got it. “Righteous. I like your thinking.”
When the barges were halfway across the minefield, Laverna’s team opened up on the front lift fans. With the armor facing only to the front, the volleys of laser fire perforated the fans, which the heavy Gauss cannon shattered into scrap.
Sun could see none of this, relying on Laverna’s concise commentary. There was plenty to hear through the dense smoke, though. The screams of panic, the return fire seeking targets in the hills, and the beating drone of ducted fans out of phase.
The middle barge dipped its nose suddenly, digging into the sand, flipping it over. Sun saw dune buggies being flung out of the smoke like buckshot. Then the barge itself came pinwheeling out into clean air. By the time its upper surface impacted the ground and activated the pressure sensitive mines, the barges to either side had already been shattered by multiple mine explosions.
“The enemy’s taken heavy punishment,” Laverna reported, “but they’re rallying already. There’s a detachment pushing up into the hills to flush us out.”
Sun keyed to the general channel. “Time to bug out, Laverna. All units, secure the beachhead and get ready to withdraw.”
“But we have them on the run,” Wurgitar protested. “Let’s finish this. Forward to Victory.”
“Negative. Laverna’s flan
k attack bought us time. That’s all. Our mission was to make a surprise attack to wipe out the Scythe. We failed. It looks like their main assault force wasn’t even there. Our priority now—”
A grinding noise from outside the command post ripped the words out of Sun’s mouth. Something heavy was crunching its way through the coral reef that ringed the beach.
“Situation update,” said Captain Jenkins, who was peering out the window. “I think we just found one of the missing subs.”
* * * * *
Chapter Fifty
Patriot Command Post, Kobbister Atoll
Branco had to lift himself out of his seat to see out the window. The sight that greeted him was of a shitfest about to explode.
A Scythe submersible was beached on the reef. Soldiers boiled out from its bulbous rear compartment. They formed up in the shelter of the sub, a first line swimming through the shallows while a second line knelt and put bursts of rifle fire into the handful of Patriots guarding the approach to the pleasure-palace-turned-command-post.
The attackers didn’t have it all their own way. Two Scythe soldiers were hit by the Patriot defenders, blood darkening the pristine tropical water. He didn’t recognize the species, but the aliens bled if you shot them. That was all he needed to know for the moment.
The answering screams of the defenders were pitiful.
“They’re getting slaughtered,” said Branco. “We’ve got to help.”
“My new friend—” Jenkins drew alongside him at the window, “—it’s too late for the Patriots out there. We need to secure this building if we’re going to keep Sun safe for as long as we can.”
Branco glanced behind him, a little surprised Jenkins placed such store in her. Sun was watching and listening to them. She had her throwing knives in her hands, but she didn’t falter in issuing her orders to the fighters withdrawing from Stromsay.
The attackers bounded past their front line and splashed ten meters forward to allow the line behind to take a knee and fire, cutting short the suffering of the Patriot wounded.
Shit. It was a lovely place to die, but Sun didn’t have Branco’s death sentence. He had to save her. But how?
He stared out at the attackers, desperately seeking a weakness in what he saw. Their fire and movement tactics were rudimentary, possibly ill-advised when they had the numbers to storm the island, but they were well rehearsed. These were disciplined troops.
But what were they?
Mouths filled with teeth extended from faces covered in tough-looking, jet-black hide. Collars of burbling water attached to tanks on the backs of what was obviously a water-breathing species. Natural spiked armor pierced the back of their clothing, as did long boney tails that ended in flat paddles. When his head stopped hurting, he ran through his augmented memories to look for matches, but he felt sure he would find nothing on this mystery race.
A laser weapon lanced out from the top of their building, sizzling the seawater into vapor, and then it angled up and sliced through the port beam of the submersible.
Scythe laser rifles responded, slicing at the upper roof, but they couldn’t get the angle and the heavy weapon kept up its punishing fire on the submersible. The sub itself made the fatal reply; a turret popped up from its upper deck and twin chain guns lashed out.
The laser didn’t fire again.
The turret barrels dropped, hammering twin tracks of devastation across the outside of the wall in search of Branco, Sun, and Jenkins. The noise alone was enough to make Branco want to tear his ears off.
“Get down!” he screamed at Sun. She was crouching at the center of the room with the absent look of someone concentrating on her pinplants, oblivious to the heavy fire that would be streaming through the window in moments.
He knew he was too late, but he gunned his chair and raced for her anyway.
The firing stopped, replaced by a silence so sudden it hurt.
Out on the reef, a muffled explosion suggested why the turret had stopped firing.
Branco chanced a look out the window. The Patriot laser had done its work after all. A second explosion inside the sub blew off the turret, releasing a column of greasy smoke.
The respite was momentary. The Scythe invaders in the water sent bullets and laser beams through the window, passing an inch or so over Branco’s head and pitting the far wall. Jenkins sank to his knees. Holstering his brace of laser pistols, he crawled back to Sun and the heap of equipment at her feet.
“Hurry up,” shouted Branco. He backed away a little and swapped out mags on his HP-4 pistol for 13mm armor piercing rounds. With a relaxed two-handed grip, he readied to engage anything that appeared in that window.
Suddenly, polished green metal erupted to cover the window, plunging the room into darkness lit only by the Tri-V battle map left frozen when Branco had abandoned it.
Branco looked wide eyed at Jenkins. “Did you do that?”
The big man grabbed his nine-barrel volley gun off the floor. “No. Did you?”
In perfect unison, they turned to Sun.
She rolled her eyes at them. “Unlike you men, I can multitask. While I was organizing the withdrawal from Stromsay, I was also exploring this building. I just deployed the blast shields over all doors and windows—”
“Then we’re secure?” asked Branco.
“Over all doors and windows on the lower floor. Unfortunately, the power’s out to the top two floors.”
“Then we are royally screwed,” said Jenkins.
“I expect so,” she said. “But we have a possible advantage. We are, after all, inside a Bakulu love shack.”
“So?” Branco frowned. “Come on, Sun. You’re not normally this annoying. You’re not your sister. What’s special about being in an alien sex den?”
She raised an eyebrow. “I thought you were a man of the galaxy, Branco.”
Jenkins nodded his understanding. “This place is riddled with love tunnels.”
“Exactly.”
Branco looked at Sun curiously, wondering how she knew so much about Bakulu sex?
Sun smiled sweetly. “Jealous, sweetheart?”
Jenkins laughed uproariously as he activated his volley gun. “Sun was good friends with one of my marines. A Bakulu called Sevig Rhu. He had boundary issues when discussing his amorous adventures.”
“Yeah,” Sun agreed. “Boundary issues, as in he didn’t have any boundaries. Branco, I want you to activate everything that Jeha Jenkins put in that chair of yours and aim it at the door. Skipper, I think your overcoat with the shoulder pads will have to sit out the rest of this fight because you’re going through the love hole.”
* * * * *
Chapter Fifty-One
“The problem with youngsters today,” mused Captain Jenkins as he crawled through the tube hidden in the thick outer wall of the building, “is that they’ve no respect for their elders.”
He hesitated before a turn in the tunnel. “If a loved-up Bakulu can get through that in their shell,” he told himself, “then it’s no difficulty for a mature Human gentleman such as myself.”
He pushed his Nock Niner around the bend and wriggled headfirst after it.
“The cheek of asking me to take my coat off. I can still crawl through a Bakulu sex den with it on as easily as I could thirty years ago.”
Except he couldn’t. His back was locked up in a spasm, his legs were numb, and his broad shoulders—broadened further by his red coat—were firmly wedged against the sides of the tunnel. He looked down, trying to see the cause of the blockage while illuminating his predicament with his wrist slate. It was a disastrous mistake. He couldn’t reach his slate to activate it, and for good measure he banged his head on the tunnel roof. Now he was even more stuck than before and panic welled up inside of him.
He shut his eyes and thought about where he was.
Over the years, he’d traded with a few rich Bakulu. Their dirtside homes were always the same; mirroring their natural shell, the mollusk-like aliens built home
s buttressed by thick walls pierced by narrow doors and slitted windows. For a wealthy Bakulu, their home was very much their castle.
That much was obvious to everyone, but if you didn’t know the Bakulu, you might not realize that the more ensconced a Bakulu felt, the more randy they became. He had set up the command post in the thickest walled portion of the building, and knowing Bakulu architecture, that made this the orgy room. Bakulu took voyeuristic delight in watching others enjoy their pleasure. Tunnels wide enough for a Bakulu shell wormed through the walls with one-way viewports allowing them to spy on the party fun. Occasionally the passages widened enough to allow a pair of Bakulu to indulge in shell-to-shell action.
Jenkins shuddered at the thought of what had gone on in the tunnels he was squeezing through. His disgust made him shrink in on himself. Suddenly the curve in the tunnel was easy to navigate.
“I still got it,” he murmured and pushed on a few more yards until he reached what he had been hoping to find. It was an alcove with a voyeur’s viewport, but this one looked out the exterior surface onto the beach by the main door.
He spied a medieval reenactment scene with a cast of water-breathing aliens. Under the watchful eyes of the few sentries, the Scythe had sliced through some coconut trees with their lasers and lashed them together with vines to make crude ladders. They were about to use them to scale the sheer walls of the Bakulu fortress-cum-sex den.
It bothered him that he didn’t recognize the species. He’d worked the Spine Nebula for over thirty years and never seen this horrible lot. There was something unmistakably aggressive about them. They looked as if they were sea skeletons animated from dark bones of pebble-smooth stone. An armored fan swept back from bulbous heads to protect the exposed vertebrae of their back. The long, skeletal tails terminated in a sharpened tip. They seemed to sense their environment through a mix of wet sniffs and flicks of their long tongues. If they possessed eyes, he couldn’t see them.
They looked nothing like Besquith or Tortantulas, but they shared the same aura of extreme viciousness. These were killers, through and through.
Endless Night (The Guild Wars Book 3) Page 24