Fire Base (Drop Trooper Book 6), page 21
Good to know.
But it didn’t stop them from whipping those spiked tails down at me and I barely slid out of the way in time. The spikes slammed into the chimera I’d come down beside and threw it sideways, its clawed feet scrabbling at the deck, distracting it long enough for me to duck a shoulder under its upper torso, jam the emitter of my Gatling laser under its chin and fire. Heat washed through my armor and steaming black fluid splashed out of the thing, spattering over the Vigilante’s head and shoulders. The chimera shuddered and collapsed and I leaned forward, blasting the jets behind me.
I had a vague sense of the things sliding past on either side of me, a blur of darkness and nebulous lines that my sensors couldn’t quite put a finger on, but I knew where they were and I knew how big they were, and years of training and experience did the rest. Spiked tails and taloned load-bearing arms swung at me and hit the deck instead. The deck was made of something spongey and black, and the spikes sank into it but didn’t leave a crater when they withdrew.
I was spinning and bouncing off the deck and the legs of the chimera, pinballing around the deck, just a microsecond ahead of one smashing blow after another, but I couldn’t keep it up. The jets were already pushing the red and the second I shut them down and stopped moving, I was dead. Except for one thing. My jets worked underwater. I had an intuition these things couldn’t swim.
I aimed at one of the chimeras that was riding close to the edge of the deck and slammed my shoulder into its rear leg. It was a lot like running headlong into a brick wall and stars swam across my vision, but physics was physics and the thing moved. And fell. And so did I.
The ocean was comparatively shallow, but only comparatively. The oceans on Earth could be hundreds or even thousands of meters deep, and this one was only about eighty meters deep here within sight of the bay and that was enough. The thing went down like a stone, and I wasn’t far behind it when I hit the jets. They weren’t optimized to work in water, but I’d been assured they could, that the intakes would suck in anything liquid or gaseous and run it through the isotope reactor, heating it and expelling it and making the Vigilante go.
It was sluggish, less of the immediate response I got when I flew in an atmosphere, but the water did something else that the air couldn’t do. It cooled down the turbines. The temperature gauge went from riding the border of the red, only moments from overheating, back to the green and I was still rising. The chimera was gone and I whispered a prayer that the things needed to breathe air. If they didn’t, the thing could just walk along the ocean floor and might be strong enough to climb up onto the island and I would have accomplished nothing with the collision except a minor concussion.
Water parted around me, boiling to steam from the exhaust of my jets and I was in the air again, coming up fifty meters behind the hydrofoil. Wade was heading back to the wall and I guessed he was getting close to overheating and needed to put down. But he’d distracted them and they were firing at him instead of me…which gave me an opening, and a chance to keep him from getting his silly ass fried.
I didn’t want to run dry on Gatling ammo so soon in the fight, so when I came down onto the back of one of the creatures, I wedged the barrel of one of the Gauss rifles mounted in my left shoulder into the gap between its armor plates and fired it full-auto. Bits of armor and black ichor sprayed out of the gap and the thing bucked like an untamed horse, but I was already gone, not waiting around to see how much damage I’d done.
Back into the water, because I guessed though I couldn’t prove that the plasma blasts would at least be attenuated by passing through the seawater. I got the chance to find out when the sun seemed to rise only a couple dozen meters off to my side and the water swelled with the heat, boiling to a vapor, and sucking me toward the empty bubble the gas had created once it rose out into the atmosphere. My suit jets lifted me away from the maelstrom and sweat trickled down my back, creating an obscene itch I couldn’t scratch, but couldn’t ignore. It felt like a gun barrel aimed at my back and I was sure one of the energy cannons was going to cut me down before I made the wall.
It almost did. The shot was a half-second late and instead of erasing me from existence, it blew out the top meter of the wall and would have obliterated one of the coil-guns if we’d left it in place. Flaming debris rained down as I made a run for the storage buildings and the barricades there. Cargo trucks, bulldozers, front-loaders, whatever they’d been able to find were stacked deep between the wall and the storage buildings and I hopped over them with a short burst from my jets and landed beside Vicky and Wade, trying to get a bead on the wall, waiting. On either side of us, the coil-gun turrets tracked back and forth under the impatient ministrations of the Kurotong gunners, scanning restlessly for a target.
“Told you I’d be back,” I said to Vicky.
“How many did you get?” Wade asked.
“Three, I think. You?”
“I shot four of them, but I think I only took out two. I might have slowed down the others, though.”
“We’ll call it even, then,” I ceded the point to him. “Of course, that means you’ll have to catch up to us, Vicky.”
“I don’t think it’ll be a problem,” she told me. “Though finding anyone to keep count might be tricky.”
“Hey, you stinky-assed groundpounders,” a familiar voice crackled inside my helmet. “You guys said you needed some help from the true masters of combat, the Attack Command?”
“You’re not the Attack Command anymore, Dunstan,” I reminded him, laughing with relief, “but you’ll do. How far out are you?”
“One mike,” he reported. “What’s your position?”
“You got our IFF. We’re set up in a defensive position, but I don’t know how long it’ll last. Everything in front of us is fair game and you are cleared for danger close air support. The enemy is coming off a hydrofoil and it’s equipped with deflector shields. Don’t know if they can survive a proton cannon hit, but they shrugged off the coil-gun turret from the lander. Lander is gone and so is Gardeck. I’m sorry.”
It felt weird having to say that. In combat during the war, I would never have stopped in the middle of a report to tell someone I was sorry a friend of theirs had died. But this wasn’t the war and neither of them had signed on with the CSF to get killed.
“Aw, fuck.” Dunstan moaned, physical pain in his tone like someone had punched him in the gut. “Baker, you poor son of a bitch.” He sighed and seemed to pull himself together. “Let’s make the fuckers pay for it. Keep your asses in one piece until I get there.”
“No promises,” I said.
The wall gave way. I hadn’t realized how close the Skrela were, hadn’t heard the boat engines approaching, but when an energy weapon hit the harbor gate, it disappeared in a ball of fire, molten bits of it spattering against the side of a cargo truck and setting the tarp stretched across its frame ablaze.
“Here they come!” Wade said, in what might have been one of the most redundant warnings I’d ever heard.
They skittered through the gap like insects, like army ants streaming across a jungle to devour everything in their path, and I was about to yell at the coil-gun crews to open fire when Isabella beat me to it. She’d appropriated the plasma projector from her mother and had found a helmet with a half-visor to go with it to shield from the blast. I wanted to ask her if she had a few more of the heavy weapons available, but I figured it was a stupid question. If they had more, they would be using them.
“Fire!” she yelled, punctuating the command by triggering the plasma projector.
Thunder rolled across the plain of the courtyard and Isabella staggered, the armor on her shoulder and the side of her helmet charred black. The gout of sun-hot plasma made me long for my old, familiar weapon, and so did the effect it had on the chimera it struck. The bolt of super-ionized hydrogen blew off the thing’s right-hand load-bearing arm and burned through the power connection to the energy weapon on the chimera’s shoulder. The creature skittered backward, not dead but not at all eager to be first in line anymore.
The explosion of the ball of plasma seemed to have left a vacuum behind it, and the coil-guns fired into that gap. If the plasma weapon had been a crack of thunder, the coil-guns were a jack-hammer pounding against the inside of my head, a constant stream of tungsten slugs breaking the sound barrier, too fast to see. Their effects weren’t invisible, though. Our Gauss rifles, powerful as they were, hadn’t come close to penetrating the armor of the chimeras, but the rain of metal from the coil-guns chopped through their thick chitinous plates as if they weren’t there. Legs and arms fell away in sprays of black fluid, and if the rounds couldn’t quite blow apart the heavier armor over the torsos and heads, it still cut through it.
A dozen of the creatures fell in less than ten seconds, and hope surged in my chest as I watched the guns do their job, but more of the things were swarming through the gap in the wall and over it and there were just too many for them to take out.
“Get the ones coming over the wall!” I shouted to Vicky and Wade, practicing what I preached, sending a long burst of laser fire into the shoulder of one of the chimeras as it pulled itself over the wall. “Concentrate your fire with mine!”
Three fire-hose flares of coherent light converged on the same spot on the chimera, aiming for the connection of the thing’s energy weapon to its shoulder and blowing the thing right off in a spray of sparks, sending the Skrela creature toppling back over the wall.
It took too long. The Kurotong soldiers were firing as well, but their Gyroc rounds might as well have been spitballs for all the good they did against the biomechanical constructs. The hope trickled away with the ticking of a clock inside my head, the knowledge that the time we’d bought was slipping away.
A fusillade of energy beams punctuated the time and the hope running out, slamming into the barricades, turning huge chunks of cargo trucks and earth-movers into expanding clouds of superhot gas. We kept firing, but killing just one of the things took long seconds, even for the coil-guns.
I saw it coming, saw the massing cluster of chimeras and shouted a warning. I had time to grab the person closest to me and jump out before the world exploded. Well, it wasn’t the world, but it was close enough, and if I didn’t know exactly what had happened until a few seconds after, I should have. The coil-gun turret only ten meters from where I’d been standing had ceased to exist, and it had taken a dozen people with it, swallowing them up in a wash of pure energy and sublimated metal.
I came down in the lee of an overturned cargo truck, half of its cab blown away by an energy weapon and set Isabella Kamara down as gently as I could. She stared up at me through the cracked visor of her helmet, through a mask of blood from a cut over her eye, and I wasn’t sure if I saw doubt or gratitude.
One thing I was sure of was that I heard the whine of turbojets coming in fast.
“Coming in hot!” Dunstan warned me.
“Stay down!” I told her, then followed the IFF signal to Vicky.
She’d been sent tumbling by the blast, her armor charred and cratered across her left side, but she was moving, trying to get to her feet. Wade had hit the jets as well and wound up on the other side of one of the storage buildings, and if neither of them had been targeted yet, it was only because there was still one coil-gun firing, though it wouldn’t be for long unless…
I flinched when the proton cannon fired, thinking it was the second coil-gun exploding. But this blast of raw power came from the sky, the fiery judgement of an ancient god, and where it touched, the bonds between atoms surrendered and matter turned to energy. The wave of Skrela coming through the wall were gone, wiped from reality, the soil where they’d been turned to black glass, the water of the inlet exploding with steam and showering the compound with boiling rain.
People were screaming, running, shielding their faces from the scalding rain, but I was watching, because I knew the show wasn’t over. A second blast took down a dozen of the Skrela and the harbor wall with them, then two more walked down the shore and though I couldn’t see what they hit, I sure saw the domes of fire rising above the palm trees.
Intercept One was a massive silver delta gleaming in the rays of dawn, curving a course around the beached hydrofoil, jets screaming, meters ahead of the energy beams arcing up from the Skrela still on the deck of the watercraft. Cheers replaced the screams as the Kurotong defenders realized what was happening, that the cutter was their salvation rather than just another apocalyptic nightmare threat thrown at them. I didn’t join the cheers just yet, eyes glued to the spectacle, the light show of a battle between gods and demons in some mythic time when the outcome wasn’t assured, when humans still weren’t sure if their fates would be decided by the forces of darkness, if the winter would ever end or the sunshine again.
And I was just as helpless as those men and women of old, huddling in a mud hut as the earth shook beneath them or lightning crackled against the mountains. But Dunstan was not. He held the power of the gods in his hands and despite being an obnoxious Zoomie shit, he knew how to use it.
Intercept One banked and rolled and spun, and the incandescent spears of energy rising from the hydrofoil couldn’t touch him. The proton cannon spoke again and a halo of light surrounded the deck of the boat for a fraction of a second, but the raw energy of a fusion reactor was too much for even the deflector the Skrela had grown into the fabric of the boat, and it popped like a soap bubble. The heat energy it had stored up for that instant loosed itself with impatient fury on the deck of the hydrofoil, a directed, compact, focused nuclear blast.
Maybe cockroaches could survive that sort of heat, but the chimeras couldn’t. They weren’t vaporized, not quite, but what was left of them was melted, smoking, and barely recognizable. The surface of the deck sagged and fractured but didn’t catch fire, a minor miracle because everything else at the docks was on fire, even the metal. The hydrofoil was drooping to one side, low in the water but not yet sunk. Dunstan made one more pass, coming in low behind the bow of the craft and firing a blast into her engines. Whatever powered them went up in a mushroom cloud and the concussion from the blast scoured everything with a blast of dust and debris all the way back to the storage building.
Anyone who’d still been standing was knocked off their feet, except the gunner for the remaining coil-gun, who ducked behind the splinter shield and hung on for dear life. He was a plump, chubby-cheeked middle-aged man wearing an armored vest over a white T-shirt and cargo shorts, and he still wore the flip-flops he’d had on when he’d come out to investigate the attack on the front entrance. He looked more like one of the street vendors I’d seen in the Trans-Angeles Underground, selling black-market cuts of meat that was more likely feline, canine or rodent than bovine, but the scowl of determination on his face would have been at home on any combat Marine I’d known.
Dunstan’s howl of triumph on my helmet comms drew my attention away from the gunner and back up to the soaring silver wedge of metal.
“All right-all right!” the pilot crowed. “Got that shit taken care of. You want me to swing down and….”
I frowned, thinking maybe he’d broken off because he’d taken a hit. The flashing icon in my comms display told a different story: wide-spectrum jamming. Which shouldn’t affect the laser line-of-sight comms between us and Intercept One, and yet it did. And there was only one reason I could think of that there would still be jamming.
“Cam,” Vicky said, the transmission crackling and broken even though she was only a couple of meters away from me. “Look.”
I followed the emitter of her Gatling laser out to sea, past the smudge of roiling smoke pouring off the wreckage of the hydrofoil. Black specks on the horizon drew my eyes and my suit sensors, though the sensors couldn’t identify them. I knew what they were.
The Skrela hadn’t thrown everything they had at us. They’d sent a probe to test our defenses, and we’d fallen for it.
“What is it?” Mama Bindy asked, hobbling up to us, using a section of rebar as a cane, her carbine still tucked into her other arm. “What’s wrong?”
“More of them,” I told her. At least my external speakers worked. “I don’t think we can take them all. You should try to get to shelter.”
“I thought you said there was no shelter against these things.” She showed no signs of panic, of course. She wouldn’t. She was Mama Bindy.
“There isn’t,” I admitted.
She tossed away the makeshift cane and held her carbine at high port.
“Then let us die on our feet.”
22
“You’re up,” I told Wade, slapping the feed tray shut on his Gatling laser.
I’d performed the reload by rote, all my attention focused out to sea. There were three of the ships this time and although I couldn’t make out individual chimeras on the deck yet, we had to figure there’d be just as many per ship as before. Hundreds of them. And we were down to the one coil-gun.
While we reloaded and refitted, Bindy and Isabella were busy rearranging their people, trying to get them all behind sufficient cover. I hadn’t realized until afterward how many had died. The firefight had been brief and devastating, and most of the dead had left nothing behind but ashes, but just going by how many I’d seen before the Skrela had hit us, I estimated at least two dozen people were gone. More than that had been injured and evacuated back to the main house, as if there was any safety to be had there.
But mostly, I was looking at Intercept One. I couldn’t talk to Dunstan, and I wouldn’t have known what to tell him if I could. Maybe I would have advised him to get the hell out of here, to go warn the Commonwealth military what was coming for them. That, I was sure, would have been a forlorn hope. The only way to kill these things permanently would be to destroy the pod and the nanotechnological fabricator inside it, and the Skrela had made those things tough enough to survive a fall from orbit and tens of thousands of years buried underground.
