“Uh, Lieutenant Gray, this is PFC Mallet,” Kevin called on the comm net.
“Go ahead, Mallet. And that was quick thinking taking the high ground,” the lieutenant replied.
“Uh, well, sir, we’ve got movement about four blocks uptown headed this way.”
“What kind of movement, Private?”
“Um, well, it looks like the entire damned Uey Army is marching this way!”
“What do you mean we lost the entire recon team? To who?” Colonel Suarez couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “The damned Loonies couldn’t have taken out a well-trained force recon squad with paintball guns.”
“Colonel, they were loaded for bear. Full-auto rifles and grenades as far as we can tell,” Master Gunnery Sergeant Kelly Vors responded back on the tactical net. “Our forward three squads are ready to move in but I’d recommend more.”
“How many troops strong are they, you think? And where the Hell did they get guns and grenades?”
“I’m guessing they are less than twenty or thirty at best,” Vors said. “No idea about the weapons, ma’am, but I’d suggest we assume they all are armed somehow. Should probably pass that intel up.”
“General Mac is gonna want to know that. You’re right. Hang on.” She switched up a channel. “General McMillis, its Suarez.”
“Go, Colonel.”
“We’ve seen armed resistance on the southwest end of North Dome. Rifles and grenades, sir,” Suarez told him.
“Well, that’s new, and maybe unexpected,” McMillis replied. “How many Loonies you think there are?”
“We’re estimating a few tens, sir.”
“Not enough to be afraid of, Colonel Suarez. Keep pushing in and take the dome. We’ll meet in the middle farther north. Mac out.”
“Yes, sir.” She switched back to the tactical net. “Vors. Keep pressing. I’m right behind you.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“That is a full company at least marching straight for us!” Lieutenant Chris “Christy” Gray was pointing directions so rapidly his arms were waving about like a bird’s wings. He thought he’d take off the ground if he kept it up much longer. “Staff Sergeant Ames, get the rest of the South Burrow Militia two blocks south of the fountain and I want you to lay out every type of IED, claymore, and kitchen explosive you can in the next ten minutes.
“Sergeant Moralles, keep the rest of the East Burrow Militia moving as fast as you can and get set up here and here by the elementary school. Use the building for cover and set the killing field up nearest the busses. If they start to overrun you hit the emergency exits and get outside the dome. Blow the buses and the school on your way out.” Chris looked up to the top of the two-story mauve-colored clothing store where PFC Mallet was still perched. “Status, Private?”
“They’re moving again, sir. I’d say we’ve got less than seven minutes until they are in range.” Mallet sounded very nervous.
“Alright, get me ten good shots up on these buildings right here and there. As soon as your sights say they have targets in range start sniping. Get as many clean targets as you can then retreat. The rest of you are falling back now.”
Chris nodded to the staff sergeants and waved them on. He took two bounding steps and put a foot against the wall of a single-story shop and grabbed the edge of the roof with one hand hauling him up. He got a run-and-go and bounded parkour fashion, grabbing the edge of the second-story roof next to Mallet. A couple quick pulls and a kick off the wall and he was rolling to his feet. Carefully, he found a spot a meter or so to the right of the young private. Hell, Chris wasn’t much older than Mallet, but he’d been part of the militia longer. Up until about ten months prior that just meant he was part of fire brigades and emergency response.
“They’re getting really close, sir,” Kevin told him. “Should probably take cover. Jesus, it sure is a lot of them.”
“We just need to slow them down, and draw them in. We don’t have to get all of them.” Chris thought for a moment about something useful to say, but didn’t really have much. It was his first real combat too. “Kevin, what d’ya say we don’t stay here too long and we live to fight another day, huh?”
“My sentiments exactly, sir.” Kevin adjusted his sights and then turned back to the lieutenant. “My sights just locked in. They’re in range.”
Chris looked through his red dot and nodded in agreement. Then he tapped his forearm and opened the tactical channel. “Alright, let’s light ’em up.”
Chris put the red dot right on the chest of one of the soldiers moving in the stack on the west side of the boulevard. The ballistic computer in the sight had him tilt the muzzle upward slightly and then it locked on. He slowly squeezed the trigger almost at the same time Private First Class Mallet did. Two of the soldiers went down. There were several other shots from across the rooftops and the Ueys started scattering for cover.
“Keep the fire on them, Loonies!” he shouted over the net. “That’s slowing them down a bit.”
“Got one of ’em!” he heard someone announce.
“Take that, you sonsabitches!”
“Cernan Dome!”
“I’m out. Reloading,” Mallet said.
“Covering.” Chris fired until he felt the click and then he noted the counter on his sight showed he was empty. He was beginning to think they needed larger magazines. Mallet started firing again quickly.
“I’m out. Reloading.” He depressed the lever under the trigger guard, ejecting the magazine. Without missing a beat, he rolled onto his back and slipped a second one from his belt, snapping in the housing. “Firing.”
For about the next ten to twelve minutes the snipers on the rooftops of the Main Street and Dish Boulevard crossing held their ground. But then something big started rolling down the street in the distance.
“What the Hell is that?” somebody shouted over the net.
“Armored vehicle,” somebody else responded.
Chris looked at it carefully through his telescopic sight and didn’t like what he saw. Almost as soon as he zoomed in on it there was a glint of a fifty-caliber turret-mounted machine gun pointed in their general direction. Then all Hell broke loose. Muzzle flashes appeared from the weapon and suddenly bricks, concrete, and other debris started flying up from the edge of the rooftop in front of him. A small piece of stone ricocheted off of his mask, leaving a scratch in the visor, and the HUD went crazy for a brief instant.
“Shit, move!” Chris pushed backward, slapping his rifle against the concrete roof and using it to push him in the other direction as he scooted in a prone position. “Fall back! Fall back!”
The fifty-caliber rounds chewed through the walls like they weren’t even there. Chris knew that they were going to have to get several layers of building between them and that damned armored vehicle or they were toast.
“Terrence is down!” he heard and then, “Fuck, I’m hit!” There was a lot of chatter on the channel. He tuned it out.
“Follow me, sir!” PFC Mallet dove headfirst off the second-story clothing shop and judo-rolled onto the top of the single-story building connected to it. “Two buildings up there’s a hole in the roof we can drop to ground level and get under cover.”
They raced as fast as they could, bouncing many meters at time until they reached the alleyway between the next set of buildings. The private didn’t stop and leaped midair across the road below onto the rooftop of the Ice-Cream Shoppe. The building was torn to Hell and gone but the kid was right. There was a hole in the top of the building allowing them to drop to ground level.
Chris dropped through the hole and then bounded over the glass on the southside wall of the shop and started running as fast as he could manage. In two leaps they were over the concrete barricades at the end of the street and then they were past the fountain and the park.
“Head count of my snipers!” Lieutenant Gray ordered.
“Marcus, I’m hit, but here.”
“Tailor here.”
&nbs
p; “Samuels here.”
“Mallet here.”
And that was it. Out of ten of the snipers, five of them counting himself were accounted for. He hadn’t counted on the armored vehicle and the heavy caliber, but he should have.
“Okay, get back to your squads and spread out. Sergeants Ames and Moralles, are you ready?” he radioed. “We’re coming in with heavy artillery right on our heels.”
“Moralles here, LT.”
“Go, Moralles.”
“We have the buses lined up for cover and if they try to break through them that’s where they’ll hit the booby traps. We can lay into them from inside the school.”
“Good. On our way.”
“General Jones, Meeks.”
“Go, Sergeant.”
“The UNE Companies from the south have completely entered the North Dome. Our militia has engaged and are pretty much on the run.”
“I’m watching the tacnet feeds, Shawn,” Tamika told him.
“Yes, ma’am. But, they’re all inside on the South. And they are split from the troops to the North.”
“We don’t want to get surrounded, though. Tell the South Burrow Militia to keep retreating past Aldrinville Elementary right up to the West Dome tunnel.” She pulled up the battle map and could see where the North Burrow Militia had engaged with the two companies to the north. They were retreating in the exact opposite direction and the two groups would soon be crossing each other’s paths, drawing both General McMillis from the north and Colonel Suarez from the south right into each other. As far as they thought they were about to surround and capture the Aldrinville militia. Tami grinned knowingly.
“Keep coming. Keep coming,” she said to herself. And then thought to warn the sergeant. “Shawn, get the word to the North and South Burrow militias to watch out for cross fire and blue on blue as they start retreating into each other.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Ten more minutes. Jones out.” She changed the channel over to the external wide-area feed. It was encrypted but the Ueys might have broken it so she used code. “Gravelpit, Gravelpit, this is Dogleg, copy?”
“Go, Dogleg.”
“Ten minutes and counting.”
“Understood, Dogleg. We’ll make it. Any word from Schooner?”
“Not yet.”
“Schooner here and in place. Do you copy?”
“Good copy, Schooner. Dogleg copies.”
“Gravelpit copies.”
“Dogleg out.” Tami looked at the battlescape map as the red dots and blue dots were moved about by intel inputs, computer updates, and troop-suit coordinate updates. “Ten minutes . . .”
Major Teri Carboni had been the ranking officer in the North Burrow Militia for almost three minutes now since Colonel Jonathan Gurley was torn in half by that damned fifty cal those Uey bastards had brought with them. Teri had grown up in Aldrinville and knew the northern burrows like they were the back of her hand. The five squads of the North Burrow Militia had been whittled down to two full squads of five. A few isolated others were moving and still fighting but they were wounded. Teri had finally realized that staying and fighting the overwhelming and overpowering force was suicide. She sounded the retreat, telling the militia just to get away and not even consider fighting back unless that was the only way they had of escaping. The order given was “Run! And don’t look back!”
The northern end of the dome was mostly residential—housing units and apartment habitats that were stacked in tight against each other lining the outer walls of the dome and in straight lines running along the streets east and west. The volcanic dome top was a bit lower here and was only a good thirty meters overhead. The tallest of the residential buildings were apartment rises that went up to about ten stories. There were only a handful of those. The rest of the buildings were single- to three-story private homes. This was the oldest section of Aldrinville and it looked like any city that had been around for a couple decades and was still growing. Or it had. Now it looked war-torn as the UNE forces marched through, chewing up the buildings with automatic-weapons fire.
Teri led the two remaining squads through habitats across the streets and inward to the central nexus of downtown as fast as she could. All the while the damned Ueys were heavy on their heels. She wished she had a truckload of claymores she could leave behind, but the militia only ever had a handful of those and they’d used them up at the start of the skirmish.
“Stay between the dwellings. They’ll be too close together for that damned armored vehicle to get through,” she ordered her troops. “Don’t look back, just run!”
“Major, we can take cover near the transport tube for West Dome and make a stand!” Sergeant Orville Burns told her audibly with his visor up. She’d lifted hers as well as it was fogging up something terribly. The atmosphere in the dome was still holding, and Teri would have taken her helmet off had she not been worried about getting shot in the head—not that the helmet would really offer much protection anyway.
“No way we can stand against that army,” Teri replied. She was panting hard, barely able to catch her breath. Her heartrate had to be over two hundred beats per minute. “As soon as we get there and holed-up, they’ll be on top of us. And worse, the South Burrow squads are running right at us with an equally sized army on their heels.”
“Jesus, we’re so screwed.”
“We have to make it to the West Dome tunnel,” she told the sergeant.
“Then what?”
“Then, we hope General Jones will be there.” She connected to the net. “Listen up, everyone! No firing to the south. We’re expecting to see friendlies running right for us any second. Pay attention to your blue force trackers. Our goal is the West Dome tunnel. Get there! Get there as fast as you can and don’t look back. Don’t stop to fight. Don’t stop to set traps. Don’t stop until you get to safety.”
“Lie still,” Tami said softly over the tactical-net channel. “Nobody fires until I do. Nobody moves until I do. Hold still. Patience . . .”
Tami held position in the window of the five-story office building about seven blocks north of the elementary school and one block east of the West Dome tunnel entrance. She’d moved her company underground using the alien transport system and then moved them through the sewer and up into the buildings along the western wall of the dome just outside of downtown. She could see City Hall and the mayoral office about three blocks down to her right. She watched north then turned to the south and could see the signs of the militias’ retreat and the UNE Forces’ advance. As long as they held still, the Ueys would never know they were there, at least not until the Loonie Volunteers showed them they were there.
The sound of rifle fire got closer and then all Hell seemed to break loose at Aldrinville Elementary School. Tami was pretty sure the school had just exploded. Fifty-cal fire rattled the street just to the north and Tami could now see the North Burrow Militia squads running for their lives for the tunnel with what had to be more than a hundred Ueys hot behind them. Several armored vehicles followed tearing through buildings and down the street. Heavy-caliber rounds chipped up concrete all around them and they were only barely managing to stay out of the line of fire.
“Shawn, have your rocket teams lock in on those armored trucks. Take them out first.” She looked down below as the two and a half some-odd squads from the north continued their panicked run. “Engage! I repeat, all teams attack!”
The windows and rooftops along the western wall of the North Dome suddenly sprang to life with automatic-rifle fire and a barrage of rocket-propelled grenades careening downward into the sea of United Nations of Earth Armored Forces, leaving sinewing trails of smoke in their wakes. Several of the RPGs hit home, throwing jets of orange-white flame in every direction. The debris from blasted vehicles splattered about, raining down in the low lunar gravity.
Tami took aim with her rifle at the driver of one of the trucks that hadn’t been hit by the first barrage of RPGs. She aimed carefully through th
e windshield of the vehicle and adjusted the ballistic computer until the dot locked on red. She squeezed and held the trigger and watched as the windshield was chewed away with multiple hits. The bulletproof glass protected the soldier from being shot but it startled him to the point that he lost control of the vehicle and slammed it headlong into a streetlamp that in turn crashed onto the fifty-cal gunner, killing him instantly.
“Damn, that worked better than I thought it would.” Tami swept her rifle to the south, looking for targets putting the most pressure on her retreating volunteers. Then she caught a glimpse of a school bus barreling down a sidestreet two blocks west of Main Street. There were several soldiers on top of the bus in prone position, firing behind them and doing their level best to hang on. “School bus to the south! Give it cover fire!”
“Hang on, Lieutenant!” Sergeant Moralles shouted over the net to them. PFC Mallet was wondering who had taught the sergeant how to drive.
“There!” Mallet shifted his grip on the bus with his left hand and did his best to fire his rifle with his right. “Sergeant! Turn left! NO! My left! Right! Turn to your RIGHT!”
The bus lurched to the left and then right, almost rocking up on two sets of wheels. Mallet was thrown off his feet and across the back of the bus. As the bus fell back down onto all wheels he managed to reach into and through the glass of one of the rear windows on the driver’s side. He gripped with all his strength, knowing that if he got thrown from the bus the Ueys would have him for certain. Just as he lost his grip Lieutenant Gray’s hand grasped him about the wrist of his left hand.
“Hang on, Mallet!” Lieutenant Gray shouted. Several rounds zipped through the side of the bus centimeters from Kevin’s helmet, scaring the shit out of him.
“Jesus!” Kevin placed his boots against the bus and kicked upward, tossing him in an arc away from the bus. Had the lieutenant not had a good grip on him he’d have flung himself out across the sidewalk to the west of the sidestreet. But as it was, he came back down on top of the lieutenant with a thud! “Shit! Shit! Shit! Thank you, sir!”
Battle Luna Page 30
