Back Into the Fire, page 8
Kia chewed her lip. That meant they knew, and would expend their scarce heavy rounds and smart-ammunition only if Beta was really hard-pressed. Tanks coming over that rise, she thought through a thickening fog of fear, oh yeah, we’re gonna be hard-pressed.
“Hold off with the blastcannon,” Rogers said. “Don’t give away their positions, at first. Let the armor get out in the open.”
“I know how to run a fight,” Kia growled back before she thought better of it.
A pause from Rogers. “That’s good,” he said coldly, “‘cause those dragon guns are what’s going to keep the Shiny” Union marine slang for Alliance “from pushing right over us.”
Kia forced down rage that really wasn’t aimed at the CO, was just anger that she was here, in the middle of this gritty, itchy hell, about to get run over. “Understood.”
“Make sure you do.” Another pause. “Won’t be long.” Kia’s earbud clicked as Rogers cut the link.
Leaning against the wall of the trench, Kia cursed softly and checked her blastrifle, BR-19 assault model, with the stubby, shorter barrel. Not so great for a long fight, but perfect in-close, like she and her marines had been all too often of late. Skin greased with a flush of cold sweat and memory—a face exploding in shreds of meat and teeth from a blaster bolt pumped into it at half a meter. She couldn’t remember when it’d happened, anymore, so many horrors piling up in the months.
But it was always that one that came back.
Kia spit again and let Fury’s slightly higher-than-standard gravity drag her down to the bottom of the trench. Shiny, she thought with a grim smirk. The nickname had started early on at the fact that the Alliance always had new gear. In the desperate first weeks, as the Union fought to cling to its beach head on Fury, they’d religiously loot any Alliance position they overran—even the dead, after a while. Ain’t none of us Shiny, anymore.
“Movement,” Cintas’s voice crackled in her earbud.
Kia stiffened back up to the lip of the trench, this time risking a quick peek over the top before shrugging down and keying her communicator. “We get the dragons fed?”
“They’re both working,” he replied breathlessly, sounded like he was on the move, jogging from one position to the next, “for a change. Rocket team’s up, too.” His huffing slowed and she could hear the clank of his body armor as he stopped. “Down to three shots, though. AP-rounds, at least.”
“Save ‘em for after the dragons strip the tanks’ shields,” Kia replied. “No waste, this time.”
“I hear ya.”
The air seemed to shiver around her with the rising rumble of the Alliance. The tactical display inside her helm flashed across icons, identifying and counting as fusion bottle emissions gave away the full complement of Alliance armor. More, fresh pointers outlined what the AI was estimating as bodies of troops, gauging from sensor data of seismic vibrations, electronic noise, and good old-fashioned dust clouds. Kia had seen the latter, when she’d looked, a miasma of it bunching in the lower valley.
Mechanized combat team, she thought, reinforced. Fear sparkled down her nerves, cooling guts and liquifying muscle. She could feel a scream at the base of her throat. She didn’t want to be here—God, she didn’t. But she was a marine. Not Alliance, hell no, not anymore. But a Marine. The Lucky Thirteenth is counting on you, today, lady.
Felt like the whole Union, the whole godforsaken galaxy was.
The horizon to the south flickered and growled. The air warbled a second later as artillery began to fall. A millisecond after that, the ruby glitter of point-defense lasers—fired from well-back behind them, at the aerodrome at the head of the valley—slashed the sky. Wherever the beams ended, they picked off incoming rounds, bursting them in smears of black. The nervous flutter of their fire intensified as the artillery bombardment grew, their song an ongoing sizzle background by the crack-crack of their prey dying.
A womp shook the slope below Kia as one of the shells got through, sent already savaged soil spouting high. The ground beneath her flopped as a second slipped in, exploded just below her position, a crash that went on as shrapnel skirled overhead. Debris rained into her trench as she steadied herself just below its lip. A stuttering crash sounded somewhere off behind her as another round got through and secondary explosions cooked off.
Somebody was screaming.
On it went, the sky freckled with blasts as the energy beams clawed incoming from the heavens. Plumes rose from Union-held ridge as hits got through, left craters to smolder and haze the valley. Marines crouched low in their trenches and foxholes, curled up into armored balls as the storm walked over, a fickle, terrible, killing thing.
Some died.
And then it was over.
Shivering, her teeth aching from being clenched, Kia slid her blastrifle up over the lip of the trench and let her helmet sensors get a long look. She was ice now, knew what came after this. Her visor showed her fumes and flames and jagged, blasted hill. But through that, the helm AI picked up movement and emissions, began painting targeting icons across the distance, topping the rise south of them.
Hundreds of icons.
“Get set!” she barked into her mike.
The hovertanks were nosing over the top of the southern ridge, the silhouettes of their hulls vaguely blurred by the energy fields of their deflector shields. Behind them, scuttling from crater-to-crater, hugging every imperfection, came a swarm of infantry.
Kia’s guts knotted to see those, men and women in the same armor and kit as hers, just with different trim and markings. But familiar ones. The old First Division—what would be comrades in another time. Brother and sister dog-faces who’d stayed loyal to the Alliance and were ready to kill for that oath—the oath Kia and hers had broken.
But an oath the Alliance had broken with them, too.
Hate this war.
The Carapace APC’s shouldered up over the rise as the tanks and infantry flowed downslope and crossed the no man’s land below the Union-held ridge. They had lousy shields and Kia could see their beetle-like outlines quite clearly. Too, she could see the cupola-mounted quad-blasters, which strobed as they settled atop the heights, sent streaks stabbing out for her.
Plasma snarled along the Union positions. Cyan packets burst with an ongoing snap-snap-snap, shattered dirt and rock, sent Marines ducking low. A brilliant smear ripped the left corner from Kia’s vision for an instant as a lucky blast caught one of her people, slapped the man’s upper body backwards in a crash of shattered metal and flesh.
“Lieutenant,” Cintas’s voice almost whined with tension in her earbud.
“Hold your fire,” she grated back. A plasma bolt smacked a chunk from the trench a meter to her right, speckled her in super-heated granules. Exposed skin screamed. But she didn’t move. “Wait for the tanks.”
He wouldn’t have long. The Smilodons were slowing as they reached the lower slope. They’d fed so much power to their shields they looked like eerie half-globes of darkness, absorbing even the ambient light. They’d slow even further, to a crawl, as their defenses actually blinded them, left them feeling their way by ground sensors. But nothing could hurt them.
Yet.
“Target the right one,” she told Cintas, at the same time fixing an icon on the subject of her attention. “All fire there. Ready—”
A chain of blasts slammed across the lower slope with such violence Kia was knocked backwards into the trench.
Dazed, she tried to rolled back onto her knees. But the trench quaked beneath her. A flash like the world ending glazed the sky above and another blast seemed to yank the ground out from under her, then fling it back, slamming the breath from her, sparkling her vision as she flopped onto her back. She didn’t hear anything for a second, realized the helmet was deadening sound to save her ears. The reason for that mushroomed skyward, a column of yellow-orange, superheated gas that only blackened as it reached a thousand meters high.
A vulpine shape slashed through it and whipped across the sky with a grav-drive howl.
Kia staggered back to her shins, labored to put a shaking hand up to the top of the trench. The air shivered with azure and cyan, crashed with more explosions. But they seemed to be moving away from her. Another howl shredded the air above, puffed dust and smoke into wild vortices. Her hearing was back and the tactical channel was full of a wild sound. Cheering, she realized after an incredulous moment.
Daring to look over the lip of the trench, Kia stared downhill into hell.
An inferno was eating what remained of one of the hovertanks, the cracked eggshell ruin of its shelling still glowing white-hot from its death. The other was retreating wildly, dumping power to propulsion to such a degree the shields went transparent again. Union fire spat out after it, licking those deflectors as they weakened. Dante’s dragon guns.
Kia was about to key her mike to call him off, not waste power. But a pair of azure bolts connected with the tank from above, carved through the shield and into the exposed pancake of armor. Blastisteel hull splashed molten. Sparks flew as the shield projector coils failed. And a fist of flame belched from the cupola of the tank’s turret, sent a curve of it spinning skyward on a plume of black smoke. The tank settled and burned in place, anticlimactically.
The rest of the attack force was running, chased by blasts at their heels. The infantry scrambled through the flames, through explosions, crumpling, flying apart, running for their lives. Kia hurt for them, couldn’t help it. She’d seen her share of routs.
Another metallic shape screamed overhead and she got a good look this time at one of their saviors. She blinked and wasn’t sure she’d seen what her eyes had shown her. But yet another of the spacecraft was coming in, and another. The aerodrome, she understood now. They’re coming for the field. Which Beta and its sister companies had been defending for weeks now, hoping—praying—for the reinforcements that would use it.
But she’d expected the delta-shape of a Valkyrie or the wing-hull of a Firestorm—not the wolfish profiles that prowled out of the sky, now, through the smoke of the devastation they’d wrought.
She sure hadn’t expected the crest she saw clearly emblazoned on one’s fuselage, a grinning skull crowned with a motely cap.
“I’ll be damned,” Kia Munro breathed. “Hell’s fucking Jesters!”
“AH, typical!” Jerry shrieked as a flurry of ground-fired plasma bolts splattered across his port shield, jolting the Hog into a momentary bank. “Out of the frying pan and into the fire!”
The tactical hologram shimmered with hostile icons, a blanket of them spread across the smoldering landscape of Fury. The Jesters had come down into the middle of a full-scale ground battle. AI painted at least three obvious thrusts for the aerodrome that it noted as the Jester’s projected landing site. Explosions blistered across dust-choked hilltops. Energy blasts traced back and forth in narrow valleys and missile trails looped out—some of these veering erratically into the sky, as their targeting computers picked up higher priority targets in the form of the arriving Jesters.
One of these took an interest in the Hog, leapt up across their path. Jerry flicked the weapons selector to particle beam, waiting half a heartbeat for the targeting icon, and squeezed the trigger. A sky-bright bolt smeared the rocket out of existence with contemptuous ease.
“We’ve, ah, been noticed!” Cory exclaimed.
Wailing alarms and flashing missile trails on the tactical made her words unnecessary. A schematic jumped up in one quadrant, highlighted a hovertruck chassis bulging with tubes on its back—Alliance Porcupine-class drone platform. This flashed and suddenly a fresh tangle of missiles was leaping into the sky from its cliff-top perch.
Azure bolts slashed down from the sky to carve the poorly-shielded vehicle into flaming ribbons and it blew apart with a half-hearted ripple of secondary explosions. Half the payload it’d unleashed, though, veered up after the Hellhound that suddenly dipped into view off to starboard. The Jester peeled away violently and they pursued.
The other three looped around for the Hog.
“Chaff!” Jerry barked at the AI and tore straight back on the stick, felt the Hog shudder around him with the strain. The old girl was a slog in space; climbing through atmosphere, she was practically a brick.
He felt a chunk-chunk pattern to aft as the ship ejected decoy pods. Eyes flicked to the tactical, blinking through sweat as he watched the tendrils of the missiles elongate after them, close in. The winking icons of the decoys dropped by and one of the trails writhed, twisted after the bait, which drew it diving all the way into the ground. The other two continued their climb.
“Cory...”
“I got ‘em!”
The Hog shook as the tail gun opened up. Cory picked off the closest one with a three-round burst, then hosed a longer one after the second, which juked and wheeled to avoid her fire. Proximity alarms squalled as the missile put on a burst of speed, nosed abreast of them into their blind spot.
“Can’t see it!” Cory squawked.
“Hold on!”
Jerry simultaneously killed the engines and pulled back again on the stick. The sky and surface of Fury reversed with a sickening wobble as the Hog’s climb stalled. Despite the inertial dampeners, Jerry’s stomach flopped as the ship tumbled backwards and plummeted nose-down for the ground. The missile screamed across their tail, finding the air where they’d been.
And crossing straight across Cory’s tail-gunner arch. “Now, I see you!” She cut loose with the quad blaster and the antimatter warhead roared apart in a flash whiter than a star.
Concussion slammed through the Hog in a way it wouldn’t in space and, for a moment, its fall was very real and very out of control. Fumbling for the controls, Jerry fed power back to the thrusters and maneuvering fields and tore against the stick. Grav drives shrieked as their course punished them. A systems display winked yellow and then red. But the Hog levelled out, howling just above the jagged, ice-crowned peaks of Fury.
“Nice flying, Jerry!”
“Yeah,” he wheezed and mopped sweat from his with a shaking hand, “it just might do.”
The Jester shuttles and transports were coming in now, the latter like airborne whales, gracefully lumbering for the aerodrome. Energy bolts wove towards them from the ground, were joined in moments by streaks of freshly-fired missiles as every Alliance gun supporting the ground battle suddenly turned their attention skyward. The Basilisks, flying abreast the transports, erupted with anti-missile fire, carving the air into cyan splinters and explosions.
But transports flashed with hits.
“Shields failing!” a familiar voice crackled through the cacophony of the tactical network. “They’ve got a bead on us! Help, please!”
Jerry couldn’t say ever he’d felt the peculiar rush of panic in his nerves at the sound of Josie Wheeler’s call. But he reacted without thought, banking the Hog and feeding her engine power as he pointed her nose for what had been the first transport in line, now the second, trailing smoke and its deflectors flickering. These strobed as a cerulean shaft of ground-based particle beam slashed across them, probing. Jerry saw the sickening sparkle of dying generator coils, saw fresh smoke and debris twine free.
“Number Four scatter pack!” he ordered. The weapons displayed greened and he stroked the trigger before the targeting icon pinged. The Hog quivered as its last pack emptied its six-rocket spread. They wove uncertainly before acquiring guidance from the Hog and lunging for the surface and what the tactical indicated was a hover tank, turning its turret on airborne targets.
A flutter of cyan quested out, and the tank’s lighter, AI-guided armaments struck one of the rockets away. But the remaining five dove on the tank, nestled in a narrow ravine, filling the narrow space with flashes of dying shield, then a gout of flame that shot a thousand meters high. Jerry had to bank to avoid streaks of debris.
“Well, you might not dance,” Wheeler called, “but you sure have moves, Rodann!”
Jerry wiped away sweat again and snorted. “Why do people think I can’t dance?”
The proximity alarm squalled, cut off any response she might have offered. Jerry’s gaze flicked to the tactical and a red icon streaking from aft, weapons flashing as it tore up the length of the Jesters’ transport convoy, hideously vulnerable as they began their landing cycle. Jerry stared dumbly, no time to react, caught completely out of position as what appeared to be a lone Valkyrie screamed for them.
“Eat this!” Cory shrieked.
The Hog’s quad blaster vomited a torrent of firefly streaks into the Valkyrie’s path as it charged Wheeler’s ship. Shields seared up through the spectrum of colors, went white as desperately-juking Basilisks added their own fire. Caught in the crossfire, the Valkyrie peeled out of its strafing run, strobed actinically as deflectors absorbed multiple direct hits and blew out, left it trailing smoke across the Fury sky.
“Damn!” Jerry blew out a breath. “Was that the same one as before?”
A Hellhound punched through a wisp of cloud high above and dove on the retreating Valkyrie. Jerry could clearly hear the scream of gravity drives. Particle beams pulsed their deadly, azure pattern. The Alliance fighter flamed and began a shredding tumble that ended in parts of it raining down across several kilometers of red-brown terrain in a ripple of explosions.
“I don’t think so,” Cory answered him.
Jerry shook his head at the bravery—or fanaticism...not sure which. That Valkyrie jock had to know he wasn’t getting out of the tangle alive.
The battered Jester transports were beginning their final approach as the Hog and a collection of Basilisks and Hellhounds settled in protectively around them. A kilometers wide arch of inky columns of smoke and glittering blazes outlined the battlefields below them. Savage strobes of blue-white marked spots of heavy fighting. But these lessened as the Jesters came in, their arrival having disrupted what had obviously been a major Alliance push, and the beginnings of a withdrawal were already obvious.
