“They’re called Tyzhounes,” said the major as she jumped up into the waiting clutches of Jex and Turnaround. “And there’s an army’s worth of them.”
This new enemy was armed with projectile weapons that spat explosive rounds. The penetrating power was low against Goltar armor, and even less effective against the CASPers, but there were already thirty on the beach, and more were emerging from the waves every moment. The volume of enemy fire had already taken its toll in damage to the CASPers.
Automatic projectile weapons opened up to the rear of the Tyzhounes emerging from the waves. The attack came from the three motorboats that had swept around the back of the Tyzhoune advance and were now conducting small arms broadsides. The Patriot fighters on the decks were an unruly mix of Selroth, Zuul, Cartar, Humans, and more.
The Tyzhounes didn’t seem to have a response and were cut down in droves from the crossfire between the boats and the Midnighters on the cliff.
However, some of the first wave of Tyzhounes had found good cover in the wrecked dropships and armor from the failed Selroth attack. Their fire was steadily punishing the Midnighters.
“Turnaround, Plunger,” ordered Jex. “Keep firing on the fresh wave coming out the sea. Everyone else, keep the heads down of those behind cover.”
“I’ve lost two fighters,” Mishkan-Ijk reported.
“We’re getting whittled down, too,” said Jex. “Major, our ammo is very low.”
“Don’t let up,” Sun urged. “When the Patriots get on the beach, they’ll soon take out the last Tyzhounes.”
Suddenly, the sea erupted into explosions that sent broken bodies and boats high into the air.
The motorboats were shredded, the survivors tumbling into the sea to be met by Tyzhoune warriors slicing at them with whiplike tails.
Simultaneously, the larger Patriot boats that had taken station just offshore launched depth charges into the Tyzhoune force still making for the beach.
What a mess. Hitherto, Jex’d only had theoretical understanding of the ramped-up power of explosions in underwater combat. From the shattered bodies of the Tyzhoune sea devils tossed high by the depth charges, the bad guys were delivering all the practical experience Jex needed.
One of the Patriot vessels—it looked like a bulk carrier, perhaps a grain ship—picked up speed, the water churning in its wake as it made for the beach.
Boiling with frustration, Jex watched all this from behind the cover of one of the access points to the underground tunnels. His MAC was out of action and he couldn’t get his fat CASPer fingers to fire the captured Selroth weapons. He itched to get down to the beach and introduce those Tyzhounes to his sword blade.
He itched even more when the Tyzhounes on the beach shifted orientation to concentrate their fire on the grain ship coming in on fast approach.
“Damn!” He had a clear line of fire at the back of one of their bony heads. He called to one of the pollywiggles sharing his cover. “Oi, mate!”
The Goltar turned his head toward him.
Their battle net systems weren’t integrated yet so he couldn’t paint the target. Instead he pointed with a CASPer finger. The Goltar seem to understand. It pushed itself up on its multitude of limbs, aimed its carbine that looked as if it had been grown out of coral, and put a round through the back of the Tyzhoune’s bulbous head.
There wasn’t much of an entry wound, and no sign of exit at all, but the Tyzhoune twitched and slumped over the tracks of the ruined tank it had been sheltering behind.
“Nice one, pal.”
He found these pollywiggles difficult to figure out. Rather than acknowledging Jex in any way, or even ignoring him, it tilted over instead and stared at the ground beneath its tentacles.
A dangerous rumble came from underneath.
Then the building exploded, taking chunks of cliff with it.
Jex was blown back onto his CASPer’s backside. Bricks, dirt, and shattered rocks filled the air and pummeled his armor.
The shockwave passed through him like the Ipswich to Colchester bullet train. The sandwiched layers of composite armor, and the padding of his harness took the brunt of the overpressure. The Goltar he’d been speaking to wasn’t so lucky, as it was sliced and smashed, and then hurled around the clifftop like a discarded heap of unwanted sushi.
As he tried to check the status of his squad, Jex saw Tyzhounes spewing out of the hole in the cliff like oversized termites boiling out of a disturbed nest.
“You know,” Jex told the sea devils as he got his CASPer to its feet, “I really don’t like you lot.”
Sword out, he charged the Tyzhounes, but halted suddenly, with his gyros working overtime to maintain his balance as more fierce tremors shook the ground.
“Oh, for pity sake. What now?”
The cliff collapsed.
On instinct, Jex hit his jumpjets, but half of his exhaust ports had been damaged in the explosion and he had only a thimbleful of fuel remaining. He spun around like a child’s plastic windmill planted on Southwold beach.
His jump juice flashed empty. With a combination of skill and probably rather more luck, he squeezed out the very last drops of jump juice to right himself and fall onto the beach in the middle of the melee.
Confusion reigned supreme.
There were Patriots from a dozen races on the beach. Tyzhounes. Goltar. And CASPers, too. There was even a man in a red greatcoat swinging a bronze headed mace. A proper brawl.
The grain ship thundered up the shore, deliberately beaching itself in a banshee squeal from the protesting keel. Patriots abseiled down the side of the hull as their comrades provided covering fire from the deck.
Three feet in front of him, a Tyzhoune emerged from cover behind a twisted spar of metal, blasting its weapon at him on auto.
Jex’s status board was already mostly amber and red. He didn’t have time to examine the details, but it was definitely turning redder. Fast.
As the Tyzhoune swapped mags, Jex ripped the devil’s rifle from its grip and beat it around the head with its own weapon, snapping it in two. As the alien tottered on the sand, Jex brought his left arm around in a wide arc and beheaded it.
“Where the devil did you spring from?” he asked the collapsing torso. As it fell across the spar, its image pixelated and disappeared.
“Bugger. I’m going blind.”
“All units to the beach,” ordered Sun. “Extraction is inbound.”
A burst of fire from behind him took out an actuator in Jex’s left knee.
Jex couldn’t see his enemy. His rear view was completely dead.
He hobbled around, readying his sword to jab. Instead of a Tyzhoune sea devil, he saw an octopus-squid creature wielding several shock-prods whose tips sparkled with electrical arcs.
The Tyzhoune lay dead before it.
At least, it acted dead. Jex hacked off its tail and a leg to make sure. “Nice one,” he told the alien. At first, he thought it was a Goltar, but its body was too wet and rubbery and it had a water rebreather system. Must be a Cartar, then.
“The ferry’s coming in,” said the Cartar, pointing out to sea.
Jex frowned, trying to figure out what the alien was jabbering about.
In the end, he gave up and turned around. He needed to anyway, to get some situational awareness. He could hear fighting all around him, but his vision was limited to a narrow cone directly in front of him.
Bullets hit him. He had no idea where the fire was coming from, but then it stopped. He ignored it. Amid the chaos of the melee, there was nothing else he could do.
Out to sea, a flat vehicle ferry came into view, the kind that took your car across to the opposite bank of a big river. It looked terribly vulnerable, but the Patriots from the grain ship were charging up the beach in numbers, and the statuses of his squad seemed to be turning red at a slower rate.
He decided to let the turmoil in the water take care of itself for the moment and tracked around to locate some of his squad. He spotted Pl
unger, Stix, and Watson standing back-to-back in close quarter combat with a crush of Tyzhounes.
“Are you coming with?” he said, addressing the Patriot Cartar. He guessed the aquatic was still nearby but was out of his field of vision. Without waiting for a response, Jex charged across the sand to his comrades, yelling the old Suffolk Punch battle cry:
“Punch it!”
* * * * *
Chapter Seventy-Seven
Contact with the defenders of the Infinite Flow had ceased. Reports from her planetside mercs was sporadic but told of losses against a powerful foe.
When Colonel Goz-Han had first reported his assessment of the Romalin defenses, he had described a defense so numerous that Gloriana had almost felt embarrassed to be reinforcing it with a mere two companies. It seemed Xal-Ssap’s mission to keep the source of the Infinite Flow in Goltar tentacles had succeeded more than she had imagined possible.
This redoubt should have repelled the invaders with ease, and yet the fighting continued.
And now she was being informed that Endless Night was behind all this.
The catastrophic mess that was the Goltar operation in the Spine Nebula was becoming clearer. It was not, however, looking any easier to resolve.
Three Goltar juniors had worked for her dear Xal-Ssap, secretly directing the Infinite Flow under the snouts of the Spine Nebula’s citizens. By some barbaric outrage that had yet to become clear, all four had been killed at the same time. Without their direction, control of the Infinite Flow had drifted. Underlings had grown restive and had thoughts above their station.
Damn Peepo to all five hells. If her invasion of Earth hadn’t soaked up so much Goltar attention, the trouble in the nebula would have been corrected faster, and perhaps she would have delivered justice to Xal-Ssap’s murderers.
Endless Night had played a clever game. They hadn’t dared to make an appearance in the Aneb system until now, but they must have worked out it was the source of the shipments flowing out of the nebula. Knowing that, they could interdict the trade flow, stealing the shipments for themselves and reconnect the Infinite Flow out of the nebula to new buyers. This time, though, the pirates would be the beneficiaries.
But their plan was doomed.
Endless Night might have seized the F11 flowing out from Aneb, and if somehow their attack here was successful, they would also gain the production facility on Romalin. But they neither controlled nor understood the slow shadow game the Goltar had played for a thousand years that left them with a significant share of the galactic F11 trade, all laundered under the noses of the Union.
It couldn’t be long before the major F11 corporations and the Trade and Merchant Guilds sniffed out something was wrong and followed the trail that would lead them to Aneb-4.
She regarded the planet she orbited, a spinning bauble in a blackness tinted with the greens and violets of the nebula’s immense gas clouds. For so long it had been the secret wellspring of Goltar wealth. Now it was a liability. The Peacemakers, the conglomerates, even the Merchant and Trade Guilds would be united for once in their condemnation. There would be many who would look upon these operations in horror and pin the blame firmly on the Goltar.
Her instinct was to withdraw to the shadows, but it was too late now. After her long tenure on the High Council, the Goltar would both emerge from the shadows and lose their greatest source of wealth. But emerge they had, and the energy factory on Romalin was far too dangerous to leave in non-Goltar hands for long.
The best she could hope for was to allow Endless Night to war upon the Patriots and the defenders of the Infinite Flow. Their forces would wear themselves out. If the Goltar Reserve Fleet could be brought here in time, it could unleash destruction upon this world and either seize control or destroy the evidence.
A communication alert pinged in her pinplants, rousing her from her plotting. It was the upstart Human who piloted her ship.
Gloriana cracked her beak, unable to control her anger.
Several members of the crew curled their tentacles in distaste at this loss of control. Her shame calmed her.
She would like to coil her tentacles around Captain Blue’s neck and squeeze until her head popped from her silly little body. But, for now, there was still no one better to lead a Keesius attack on Lytoshaan. The bigger the disaster Romalin became, the more likely they would need the option of destroying their greatest foe’s home world.
She accepted the link and the Human’s image appeared in her pinview from a camera looking into the open canopy of Blue’s cocoon.
“I’ve got someone wants to talk with you,” said the Human.
Tantalizing fantasies nourished Gloriana. This Human featured prominently because she would lead an antimatter bombardment to eradicate Lytoshaan. Furry Veetanho bodies would be ripped instantly into plasma. Their deaths would be too swift to bring pain, but those in the moon stations and further afield would witness the horror of what had happened to their world in the brief moments before the energy shockwave hit them, too.
“Gloriana? Are you there?”
And then on to the true target of the Goltar revenge: the cockroaches who had destroyed her own world. Burnt to the ground and seeding the soil and the oceans with poison. With the Veetanho weakened, the Goka would know the meaning of vengeance.
“Gloriana? I have the Spine Patriot leader on the blower. He wishes to discuss a temporary truce.”
“Put him through,” snapped Gloriana.
It was another Human. Of course, it was. This one was male with more hair, darker skin, and greater mass than Blue. Whatever the overt differences, Gloriana knew immediately that this man was every bit as troublesome as the two sisters. Gloriana’s implants offered an identity. Captain Lenworth Rushby Jenkins of the Unlikely Regret.
It just had to be him.
“My name is—”
“Jenkins. I know who you are. State your plea.”
“My plea? Don’t get ahead of yourself, madam. Endless Night and their allies have launched an invasion. They know about the Infinite Flow and they want it all for themselves.”
“Infinite Flow! Who told you that name?”
“It was a Zuul, in fact. One of your jackbooted, thuggish underlings we call the Scythe. I don’t think Grenshal ever understood what the Flow really was, but we’re the Spine Patriots, Gloriana. We represent the entire nebula through which you’ve been running this operation for centuries. Probably longer. We had all the pieces of the jigsaw, but the Scythe cut so low that it’s taken until now to piece them together. Your secret is out. You can no longer maintain operations without our consent. Either join forces and together we’ll defeat Endless Night, or we’ll sit back until the fighting’s done and then take it for our own.”
Gloriana twisted her face into a frown. Probably the Humans were incapable of reading her expression, but they were cunning and could see through much that was supposed to be hidden. In truth, she was delighted with the offer from Jenkins. It just suited her to appear reluctant.
“The Patriots and Midnighters can unite,” suggested yet another Human voice. “Unified, we’re stronger.”
Her pinplants identified the voice, although with difficulty as she appeared to be speaking through crude amplified speakers.
“Major Sun?” she queried, knowing full well who it was. As a hostage of the Goltar, Sun could provide excellent leverage against Blue.
Jenkins moved his wrist slate, angling the camera at one of the Human mechs—a CASPer. It looked larger than normal.
“Yes, ma’am. It’s Major Sun, suited up, and ready for action.”
“You Humans never cease to impress me,” said Gloriana, flattering the deep belief in their specialness that was the race’s greatest weakness. “Tell me what you propose…”
* * * * *
Chapter Seventy-Eight
“Any change?” Gloriana asked of Ferikik-Irk, Uzhan’s captain.
“No, Councilor. Reports show the Maki are keeping a secondary for
ce on highguard near the emergence point. Meanwhile, the main force is on the opposite side of Aneb-4 from us, guarding the Selroth landings. They are making no aggressive moves, and the fact they have declined to destroy our drones makes me think they are signaling an intention not to engage us unless forced to do so.”
“A wise decision on the part of the Maki commander.” Gloriana reminded herself not to be suckered into believing that the alien leader thought the same way she did. Nonetheless, she would have done the same. The Maki contract would be to escort the Selroth troop ships and protect them while they made the drop from orbit. What happened to the Selroth once they entered the atmosphere of Aneb-4 was not the Maki’s problem. She suspected their commander thought they could win against the combined Midnighter and Spine Patriot fleets, but the losses they would suffer would be heavy. Better to forego combat bonuses than to lose valuable ships and pay a hefty figure in death benefits.
“I don’t like this,” said Blue, radioing from Midnight Sun. “It’s not like we’re holding geostationary orbit. The Patriot ships are expending a lot of fuel to keep station and avoid crashing into one another. They can’t keep it up for much longer, and I don’t want to. There’s fighting raging all along Romalin. The Patriots won’t sit tight in orbit while their compatriots fight dirtside.”
“Captain Blue, I require you to keep your Patriot friends here just a little while longer.”
“I think we should attack while the Patriot ships still have enough fuel for battle maneuvers. There can be no fancy tactics this time, Gloriana. We can charge around the planet and take out the Maki on the other side. They’ve got the weight and the experience, but we’ve got the numbers.”
“I forbid it! There is no need to engage the Maki. I repeat, no need. The Selroth attack doesn’t stand a chance. I expect to hear of their surrender at any moment. We do not need to engage with the Maki today.”
“I hope you’re right, Gloriana. Because if you’re not, the Patriots will attack anyway, and I won’t sit back and let them do so without Midnight Sun in support.”
Endless Night (The Guild Wars Book 3) Page 35