by James Evans
Something clanked against his boot, and he looked down at a prone armoured trooper lying in the dust. He stepped back and brought his weapon to bear. Milton moved up beside him and reached down to pull back a sheet of wall fibre, which covered the apparent corpse. No response.
“Do you recognise this armour pattern, Sergeant?”
“No, sir, never seen anything like it. It’s thin. Delicate,” she said as she knelt beside the corpse and rolled it over. The chest was buckled in, probably from the direct force of one of the grenades. Still, Warden would have expected it to have torn the trooper limb from limb if it had hit directly. Even powered armour wasn’t invulnerable to a close-range detonation.
The head was crumpled too, not quite flat but damaged enough to give the owner a fatal headache. There were no markings on the suit that he recognised, in fact, no markings at all. It was a dull grey with a strangely shimmering surface.
Milton grabbed it by the joint at the neck and hauled the body upright. She turned to him with a puzzled look. “It’s light. I mean, really light, sir. Russian-made, maybe? Or American?”
Warden nodded towards it. “Look at that.” The suit had changed colour as she lifted it from the dust-covered rubble. “Some sort of chameleon coating.”
“That’s a new one on me. I’d keep it quiet if I’d developed that too. No wonder they got so far into the city without anyone noticing. I bet we wouldn’t have even found them without the drone,” Milton said.
“Ultra-light power armour designed for stealth by an unknown power,” he mused, shaking his head. “No way bandits get hold of gear like this. Could be an actual covert action by a Sol government.”
“I bloody well hope not, sir. Why would anyone even want this rock? It’s not even halfway terraformed yet. It’ll be, what, twenty or thirty years before this shit-hole starts to look habitable to normal people,” she said.
“Maybe there are resources on New Bristol our teams didn’t find. What’s the alternative? That some underworld group managed to build an entirely new type of power armour? Maybe they attacked a top-secret lab that some government put on a remote asteroid base?” Warden scoffed.
“Yeah, well, I didn’t say I had a better explanation, I just don’t see any Sol government sending a strike force here. It’s a huge risk for not very much reward. Well over a century since the last intra-Sol war and this would risk another.” Milton shrugged.
Warden nodded thoughtfully and sent a comm request to Captain Atticus.
“Lieutenant?” came the terse response.
“Sir, Bravo Bay has been destroyed. We encountered an enemy infiltration unit in some kind of light powered armour in a stealth configuration. They’d breached the bunker, set charges and looked to be heading towards Bay Alpha. We slotted them,” Warden reported.
“One second,” said Atticus, a burst of fire accompanying his response.
Warden turned to Goodwin.
“Get me a city-wide picture. The captain and Section 3 are bogged down in a firefight and we need to know where they are and what they’re facing,” he ordered while he waited for Atticus to come back to him.
“We’re heavily engaged. Power armour here as well but nothing light about it. They have enhanced troops too,” Atticus said as explosions went off in the background.
“They have military-grade clones?”
“Yes, and the powered armour to go with them. We have a serious problem here. We need a force multiplier, and that leaves only one option,” Atticus said.
“Civilian clones?”
“Yes,” Atticus said, patching in Governor Denmead. “Governor, our second bay has been destroyed. What shape are your bays in?”
“Shit. Let me check,” Denmead replied. “No, we used most of our standby clones already and the facility has taken some damage. It’s not able to accept downloads or start incubating new clones.”
“Noted. Incubation would take a few days anyway. In that case, Warden, check what remains of Bay Bravo. If there are any military-grade weapons or material there, get them to Governor Denmead. Check the bodies, scavenge their weapons too, then double-time it to my position and get stuck in,” Atticus ordered. “Signing off.”
Warden took a deep breath and called his section, updating them face to face. Inefficient, maybe, but a better way of breaking the bad news. They took it surprisingly well, but they were Royal Marine Space Commandos and had the best part of a millennium of predecessors to live up to. Impossible odds were nothing to get all weepy over.
“Sir, you’d best take a look at this,” said Milton.
“What’s up?” He walked over to the sergeant, who was kneeling beside one of the power armoured corpses, and crouched beside her.
She leaned to one side so he could see what she was looking at. The helmet the soldier wore had been removed and his face was exposed. Or its face, rather. It wasn’t human, not even vaguely. It wasn’t just the eyes; the whole face was inhuman. Military clones sometimes had modified eyes, particularly snipers, but nothing like the black orbs that now stared, lifeless, at Milton.
Scales covered the face, the nose was flattened and shielded with a thick plate, rather like a lizard. The bone structure wasn’t right either, too smooth, too ovoid, and the eyelids seemed reptilian. It was like looking at a humanoid dinosaur, something you’d see in a holo-show.
Warden looked at Milton, at her raised eyebrows and back down at the reptilian face.
“No,” he said.
“Yes.”
“No, absolutely not.”
“Yes, Lieutenant.”
“You want me to believe this is an alien, don’t you?”
“No, I want it to be some kind of base layer balaclava they wear under their armour, but I already tried pulling it off. It’s definitely got scales and it’s definitely not human,” said Milton.
“Well. Bollocks.”
“Sounds about right. So, shall we get on with it, then?”
4
Warden’s feet pounded the concrete as he ran towards Captain Atticus’s current position. There’d been a heavy firefight up here and the colonists were hunkered down to the south. A HUD replay of their positions showed that Section 3 had pressed the enemy hard, forcing them back into an underground facility. He jumped over an enemy body and crouched behind the concrete base of a communications relay tower as he assessed the situation.
Around him, his section took a breather. They’d sprinted over and were now only a hundred metres from the captain’s position. Regrouping in cover was the smart move.
The alien soldier wore a face-covering helmet and unpowered armour so light that it offered almost no protection, but it was the long, elegant, wings that made it notable. They stood out, as did the long-barrelled rifle nearby. A sniper’s clone, with wings to help it to reach vantage points that would otherwise be inaccessible.
The replay showed the dots that represented Atticus and Section 3 descending into the underground hydroponic and storage facility to pursue the aliens. That was the way of the Commando; press the advantage, keep advancing, never give the enemy time to regroup.
They weren’t about to worry about the presence of the first aliens humans had encountered. They knew their job, and they’d do that as efficiently as possible. Time to worry about aliens later; for now, they were just another enemy to defeat.
Goodwin’s drone reported no enemy movement above ground. Reports were fuzzy from below ground where Atticus’s team were, and Warden’s HUD reported only a sixty-five per cent chance their location info was still correct. There should have been a network mesh in the facility, but either the colonists hadn’t seen fit to install it or it had been damaged in the fighting. Either way, they would have to do this the old-fashioned way until they were underground and started to get reliable readouts from the Marines in Section 3. There was a gristly sound behind him and Warden turned to see Milton putting a blade into the neck of the sniper, just to be sure. Caution was sensible but there was no point wasting
ammunition.
“Advance,” he whispered, his voice carried clearly to each commando via their HUDs. They moved the last hundred metres, going from cover to cover, watching everything, scanning the skies. Where there was one winged alien sniper, there would doubtless be more, and the colonists had any number of relay towers, atmospheric processing units and even bio-engineered trees dotted around the city.
The entrance to the facility was still intact, though the greenhouse above it was nothing but a tangled mass of aluminium with a frosting of shattered glass. There was a goods elevator that all but screamed ‘Obvious trap, die here’.
They took the wide concrete stairs, passing another alien corpse on the way. This one was in powered armour which had been pummelled with bullets; the entire section must have fired on it to do this much damage to powered armour with carbines. No need for Milton to draw her knife here.
The stairs led into a spacious garage for the electric carts used to ferry supplies around the colony. The elevator shaft was to their left, and Milton cautiously checked that it was empty as they advanced on the double doors in front of them. The garage was well lit but beyond the doors, the lighting seemed haphazard at best.
Warden tried the comms again but Atticus and his section were quiet, unanswering. Warden shook his head and pressed on.
Through the doorway was a large hydroponics hall, at least two storeys high and the size of a football field. It should have been flooded with light for the plants but even before they pushed the doors open, they could tell that the lighting was buggered.
There had been a gunfight. Smoke still hung in the air, and everywhere they saw the tell-tale signs of grenade damage. The planters were four-metre-high shelves full of crops in compost. Some of the rows were intact, but most were shot through or had been blown apart. The cover was poor, the earth in the planters barely sufficient to slow a bullet, and there was simply too much space between them to hide anything larger than a drone. The HUD showed more rooms directly opposite the double doors and to the north.
If the aliens had stopped in the hydroponics room and made a stand, the commandos would have been just as exposed as the enemy, so they’d have fallen back as quickly as possible to the next room. Warden checked his HUD. The plans were updating now, the accuracy percentage climbing rapidly as they came into range of the first members of Section 3.
They moved through the room at double time and found their first friendly casualty, a body so badly damaged even the HUD couldn’t tell who it had been. The death would have been recorded by his colleagues’ HUDs, so there was no point in stopping to confirm. Milton ordered the Marines bringing up the rear to strip the weapons and ammunition from the deceased, and they did so with grim efficiency as the rest of Section 2 advanced.
There were two sets of double doors, all peppered with dents and bullet holes. Atticus and his Marines had fired on the fleeing enemy, chasing them into this pit. They must have been here scant minutes earlier, leaving behind only shell casings as they hunted the enemy troopers.
The doors were spaced several metres apart, but both opened into the same chamber. Marines gathered on either side of each pair of doors, ready to rush in once they were opened.
It was a warehouse, filled with large shelving units all stacked with pallets of boxes. The aisles were wide enough for forklifts, and more goods elevators waited against the east and west walls. The HUD showed a maze of rooms behind the north wall. Office space, judging by the size and layout. The dots indicating the surviving members of Atticus’s team were clustered in that area.
“Shit,” muttered Warden, looking at his team and trying to not to get distracted by the shadows.
Warden hit the open button next to him, and the doors slid quickly back into the walls, his Marines flowing through the opening as he double-timed it down the aisle. Visibility in here was better, at least in the aisle itself, and the overhead lamps still filled the room with a sickly white glow. There was no sign of gunfire in the warehouse. The Marines spread out, small groups going down each aisle to properly clear the room, carbines pointing at all corners and up towards the ceiling, looking for hidden enemies.
“Captain? Are you reading me?” Warden asked as he hastened down the aisle.
A message flashed in his HUD.
Seconds later, they approached the far side of the warehouse and could see into the office space. The offices and other rooms were constructed with stud walls to break up another large room, probably the same size as the warehouse and hydroponic farm rooms. There were two floors of rooms, but no indicators showed any of the marines upstairs.
They didn’t need their HUDs to see that the walls provided no cover. There were bullet holes, scorch marks and shattered windows everywhere.
Warden was reasonably sure if he fired at one of the walls there was a good chance his round would make it all the way to the other side of the huge space. Shit, he thought, that wasn't helpful.
Not having cover was one thing. Having the semblance of cover was worse. You couldn’t see the enemy, and it was tempting to stop behind something that seemed solid. Once you did that, your enemy could just shoot through whatever you had ducked behind. Better to have an open space that didn’t impede movement than this mess.
He could already see a few corpses, though there was so much dust and debris that he wouldn’t have been sure they were marines if his HUD hadn’t identified them. A burst of gunfire came from the alien's direction, and sure enough, the bullets shattered glass and punched through walls as if they were tissue paper, impacting in the concrete of the wall separating the offices from the warehouse.
“Milton, we’re going to have to rush through here. No one stop for casualties; we need to force them back,” he ordered.
Quickly they issued orders to the section. Warden would head for the captain, who was about twenty-five metres away through a series of walls and offices. Milton would go left with a small team, hoping to flank the enemy and make it to the northwest corner of the concrete chamber before pressing them. The rest would fan out to provide covering fire, using combined readouts from infra-red sights and their HUDs to force the aliens to keep their heads down.
“Go,” Warden said, simultaneously issuing the command via the HUD as well. The entire group rushed through the various doors and set about their tasks. As soon as Milton’s team had veered left and Warden had started his crouched sprint towards Captain Atticus, the covering fire began. Wilson followed him; the tech specialist looked grimly determined, clearly peeved that the captain had been injured. The Marines fired as they moved, expertly suppressing the enemy with short bursts from their carbines.
Goodwin’s drone made an almost certainly suicidal dash down the corridors and through shattered window holes, trying to get close enough to the enemy positions to reveal them on the HUD. If they could get a good enough update, the marines could target the aliens directly, and Atticus’s team would be able to join in. They were scattered throughout the southern half of the space, probably all lying prone to avoid getting shot by the aliens’ seemingly indiscriminate fire.
Warden would have given anything for a clear arc of fire. A few grenades might have made the difference but down here, in this mess, it would be an unacceptable risk.
With all the shredded walls and bundles of cabling dangling from semi-collapsed ceilings, he could imagine a grenade bouncing back towards his position and devastating his section. Instead, he fired a burst from his carbine in the general direction of the doors and made another sprint towards the captain.
There was an answering burst of fire from the aliens, and though it missed him, it was close enough for him to dive through an open door and land unceremoniously on the carpet, skidding to a stinging halt.
“Fucking carpet bu
rns,” he murmured in disbelief as he bounced, lucky not to crack a rib. The cloned body might only be a loaner, but he needed it to do his job and, clone or not, a broken rib still stung like hell.
Injury indifference, they called it. It was a risk all cloned soldiers faced: the semi-suicidal use of a new body that wasn’t, technically, their own. The Canadian Coalition forces had reported the same problem as their British allies. New soldiers took unnecessary risks for the first year or two until they realised just how painful the higher injury rate was and that nobody was going to grow them a new body simply because they broke an arm.
Warden gritted his teeth and scrambled forward, keeping low to the floor as his section continued to lay down covering fire. It wasn’t particularly dignified crawling around on the floor of a cheaply furnished office, but it was ultimately going to be quicker and a lot less dangerous to reach the captain this way.
Plus it was easy enough to devote some brainpower to monitoring the HUD updates. Half of Atticus’s section was already marked as terminal casualties. Colour Sergeant Jenkins and Marine Butler were dead. Not good, especially when they were facing enemies with powered armour and they didn’t yet have the weapons or kit to counter that properly. They needed numbers to make up the difference.
A short dash down an easterly corridor and a sharp turn into an office brought him to a filing cabinet, not two metres from Captain Atticus, who was slumped by a similar cabinet further along the same wall.
“Lieutenant,” the captain acknowledged through gritted teeth that glistened with blood.
“Sir. Bit of a sticky wicket?” Warden asked cheerfully, forcing a grin.
“I’ve had better days. You?”
“We meet some charming gentlemen, dressed for a nice afternoon stroll through a war zone, but they seemed much more agreeable after we dropped a building on them. Turns out they’re not from these parts and don’t have passports or identification.”
Atticus coughed in wry amusement, then cursed and spat blood.
