by James Evans
B and C platoons were holed up in buildings adjacent to the brewery, one on the west side, the other on the east. Idol had taken direct command of A platoon, who were in the brewery itself and had lost their lieutenant earlier in the day.
The idea was for the two wings to cross the street and outflank the Deathless position. They’d be cut to ribbons if they were spotted, so A platoon had been tasked with providing a distraction. Half the platoon had worked their way up to the flat roof of the building and were now huddled along the southern edge, awaiting the go order. The rest had taken up new positions at as many of the unused windows as possible.
“Priscilla, we are going in thirty seconds,” he said, receiving a terse acknowledgement.
He and Adams jogged down to the ground floor and took up positions either side of a goods door.
“Good view of the street,” muttered Idol.
“Nice firing lines as well,” said Adams.
Taking a deep breath, he broadcast voice to A Platoon. “Fire in three, two, one.”
Bursts of fire erupted throughout the building and then seconds later, a series of explosions was heard from across the street. Lobbing grenades from the top of the roof seemed to help, and it was much harder for the enemy to return any kind of fire, let alone throw one back.
Idol sprayed a burst of fire across the street using the data on the overhead map to confirm a Deathless soldier was in the right spot. He ducked back into cover again and Adams took his turn, firing a quick burst then throwing a pair of grenades.
Then a strange sound filled the street, a loud screaming noise, something like a cross between a whistle and a whine.
“What the fuck is that?” shouted Adams.
Half a second later, the noise peaked and a thin silver shaped streaked in front of the Deathless position, so fast Idol barely saw it. It was followed by three more in quick succession. The noise was horrendous. It was the drones.
Idol watched, mouth open. He could see the Deathless reaction from the feeds on the micro-drones. They’d been hunkering down, sheltering from the militia’s heavy fire, but now they were looking frantically around for some new weapon or source of danger.
Then he heard the deafening noise of a teen pop song. No, two different songs, both equally irritating but completely different. The sparkly drones arrived carrying speakers and weaponised pop music. They floated down out of the sky to target two separate clusters of Deathless soldiers, their presence announced not just by sound but by puffs of glitter that filled each room with colourful, sparkling chaff.
Their innocuous sparkly cargo deposited, the drones shot out of windows and disappeared before the Deathless could respond, other than to desperately cough and splutter and try to waft glitter away from their faces.
“They’re on the roof, sir,” one of the grenadiers reported. “They’ve parked the drones on the roof above the Deathless position. Permission to shoot them, sir?”
“The Deathless? By all means, fire away.”
“No, sir, the drones. That music is horrendous,” the militia soldier complained.
“Yeah, well. Imagine what it sounds like to the enemy. Permission denied,” Idol responded.
He checked the status of his flanking platoons. They’d all made it. Not even an injury. Right now, they were completing their stealthy advances, getting into position before springing their attack.
Idol turned back to the feeds from the micro-drones and saw one of the Deathless Ruperts shouting at a soldier in power armour and gesturing towards the roof. The soldier nodded and bounded up the stairs.
“Grenadiers, move to the north side switch to rifles. A power armoured soldier is heading to the roof. As soon as it gets in the clear, give it everything you’ve got. Don’t stop shooting until it stops moving,” Idol ordered.
He could hear the dart-like flute drones coming in for another pass, their noise level increasing smoothly as they accelerated toward the Deathless position.
“Nice work on those new drones, Priscilla. They seem to be quite the distraction.”
“Thank you, Captain. I shall pass that along. ETA twenty seconds.”
“Roger that,” Idol confirmed.
He flipped to the view from inside the enemy position. The drone pilots had done amazing work. Idol could see the enemy officer getting agitated, waiting for the awful noise above to stop. He actually felt a twinge of sympathy for the poor bastards. That music was bad enough to make anyone take risks to silence it.
He glanced at Adams and felt a new sense of pity. The sergeant had two small children, and if tastes didn’t change soon, he’d have a house that sounded just like this one day soon enough. That was one advantage of the single life — total control over your music and vid shows.
The flute drones arrived as he finished that thought, but this time they didn’t just pass the Deathless position. The first screamed through an open ground floor window, and Idol saw the Rupert’s face register shock before the thing hit him full in the chest and knocked him to the floor.
Another drone passed all the Deathless to shatter against a wall. There was panic in the room. The drones were incredibly light, but a strike to the face at high speed would be most unpleasant, and Idol could hear the other two flute drones circling around for another pass.
Then there was a tremendous sound of fire from the roof above him. He flicked his view up to that of one of his grenadiers and watched as the hapless Deathless soldier was pummelled with rifle fire from six different locations. It staggered back and dropped to one knee but it collapsed before it could reach cover. As ordered, his team were relentless. They rained fire down on the helmet until it was shattered. One down.
And then it all kicked off. The Deathless Rupert was getting to his feet, so Adams threw a grenade at the wall in front of their position to give them something to think about. It was just as it exploded that the real trap was sprung. Bursts of fire erupted all around the Deathless position as B and C platoons swung in to complete their encircling moves.
Idol fired another burst from his doorway, the bullets spattering against the foamcrete edge of the window near the Deathless Rupert. It was strange, seeing the enemy react on a small window of his HUD while he shot at them. Idol changed magazines and looked at Adams who was doing the same.
“Ready?” Adams asked.
“For what?” shouted Idol, too late. The crazy bastard ran out into the street, rifle barking as he sprinted toward the enemy position.
“Fuck!” shouted Idol as, against all sense, he felt his legs following, like they had a mind of their own. Before he knew what was happening, he was running for dear life, hunched over and following his soon to be ex-friend into the danger zone.
Adams ran straight for the room where the Rupert hid, right in the middle of the enemy position. It was suicide; the room was heavily defended. There were three more power armoured troopers in there, plus several other Deathless. And the flanking platoons hadn’t finished with their rooms, so there was no support available.
Nevertheless, Adams charged and Idol followed. Sergeant Adams emptied his magazine through the window as he neared it, then dove to the floor just under it. Idol saw a fully armoured figure stick his head out to look into the street, staring directly at him.
/> Idol pulled the trigger of his rifle, firing from the hip as he ran and miraculously, the Deathless ducked back, despite his armour. He threw himself down beside Adams. Fuck! They were completely exposed.
He scrabbled frantically to remove his empty magazine before the troopers stepped out and ended them. Beside him, Adams reached for his webbing and pulled the pin on two grenades, reaching up with his hand over his head and almost casually dropping them over the windowsill. He didn’t even throw them, just sort of rolled them off his hand.
A wicked double explosion followed, and dust billowed out of the room to smother them. Idol finished swapping in his new magazine and looked at Adams, who seemed weirdly calm. Idol’s heart was pounding in his chest. Perhaps Adams liked this a little too much?
The sergeant threw another grenade through the window to the left of the door, and they waited for half a second for the detonation before bursting into the room. They had practised this only a few times with the Marines during training, but they all remembered the lessons.
Grenade, explosion, heartbeat, enter the room. The heartbeat allowed time to think and decide, to ‘check that the bloody thing has actually exploded,’ as Marine X had gruffly put it. “I’ve seen people follow their grenades into a room too quickly, and none of them came out with all their limbs,” he had said. “I don’t want any of you making the same mistake.”
And then to illustrate his point, as if his description hadn’t been graphic enough, he had mounted a simple demonstration with half a dozen melons and a grenade in a mid-sized room of an abandoned building. The resulting pulp-splattered walls had chillingly clarified the risks and focused everyone’s attention.
A platoon team swept the room, checking for survivors and firing precautionary bursts into the faces of the power armoured troopers. That had been another piece of Marine X’s never-ending advice. The occupant of even the most hideously mangled power armour could still bring a weapon to bear, but a few rounds to the helmet deterred even the most ardent of foes.
“Make sure they really have shuffled off their mortal coil,” was how Marine X had expressed it.
Idol’s team cleared the room, narrowly avoiding a nasty accident when a second team came through from the other direction. He lowered his rifle and took a deep breath before immediately regretting it and coughing up a lungful of dust and other airborne rubbish. Several people shouted ‘Clear’, perhaps a little belatedly, but the sudden silence was welcome.
His HUD reported twelve fresh injuries but no immediate deaths. That was good, wasn’t it? He wasn't sure.
Quickly he gathered his officers and NCOs, issuing orders to evacuate the wounded and strip the Deathless of any arms and munitions found, operational or otherwise. They called for a vehicle to pick up the armour. Grenades and automatic weapons fire might have pummeled it, but it was still extremely valuable equipment. Each suit they could pass to the Marines, whether serviceable or simply as spares, gave them an exponential advantage in the fight against the Deathless.
“What now, Captain? Are we holding this position?” Adams asked.
“Hold here? No, Sergeant,” Idol said, looking around at his command team, suddenly thirsty for more action. “No, we are not. We’re going to look for more of these bastards. We’re taking the fight to the enemy!”
18
Warden threw open the door and jumped down from the rover as it pulled up a short distance from the quarry. He hit the ground running and made his way to a row of boulders near the lip of the quarry. Milton joined him a heartbeat later, crouching next to him. They got themselves settled then inched forward until they could see past the rocks and into the quarry itself.
“You were right,” said Warden, “smoke and activity.”
Milton nodded, as if it had never been in doubt. She had called it from the vehicle, half a mile out, even though it could have been anything at that point. Up close, from their new vantage point, the wispy columns of smoke were unmistakable.
They hit the deck and crawled slowly forward until they could look right over the cliff’s edge and into the quarry. Warden was not at all surprised to see that the smoke wasn’t from a fire that had been burning for days but was instead the result of recent activity. The Deathless were on site and they were busy, working the quarry as hard as they could.
“Quarry or opencast mine, would you say?” asked Warden, trying to judge the size of the pit.
“Probably a mine, but it reminds me of abseiling in the quarries in south Wales,” said Milton.
“Damned big, though. Easily ten times the size of that place in the Brecons, I think,” said Warden, struggling to make sense of the scale. “A rich source of metal and minerals,” continued Warden, as if quoting a lecture, “and it looks like they’ve been hitting it hard.”
Which was not a surprise; terraforming a planet took vast amounts of infrastructure and this mine was one of the best sources of raw materials.
Warden activated the zoom on his HUD, carefully scanning back and forth and noting everything that the Deathless were doing. Milton was doing the same, counting heads and noting the placement of the small number of sentries and watchpoints. Their HUDs worked together, mapping the mine and logging enemy movements, compiling a complete picture of what they faced.
“Why do you think they’re here?” Milton whispered.
“Without wishing to sound sarcastic, I’d say they’re mining. I presume their needs are the same as the colonists’. They need vast quantities of raw materials to feed their manufacturing plants,” Warden replied. "Think how much that base must have needed for construction alone. Either they dropped everything they needed from orbit or, more likely, they came here to find most of their raw materials."
“Shit. I wonder how many loads they’ve taken? Who knows what they could have built after they finished the base,” said Milton as they watched a small truck manoeuvre near the cliff face.
Warden nodded then flagged something with his HUD.
“There she is, that’s the vehicle we need.”
“She?”
“All right, he. I don’t know what the correct word is; ships are female but what is a fucking enormous dumper truck?”
“It’s big, ugly and looks like it’s full of useless shit to me, Lieutenant.”
She turned to look at him and whispered, “He,” at the same time he did. Milton grinned.
“Looks about half full to me. What did they say? It would take a six hundred and fifty ton load?” Warden mused.
“I don’t think I could tell if that’s two hundred and fifty or three hundred and fifty tons, really.”
“Either way, we want that truck.”
“I suppose we’d best work out how to do that then, sir.”
“Indeed. Let’s get back to the rovers and work out a plan. We should get the snipers moving, though, just in case the Deathless decide to patrol the area.”
“Roger that,” Milton said as they shuffled away from the edge, careful not to dislodge anything that might fall into the mine and reveal their presence.
Once they were clear, they moved in a crouching run for a short distance then stood up. Milton sent orders to the snipers as they moved. They were about halfway to the rovers when they met the sniper teams coming the other way.
“I’ve marked possible positions,” said Milton, sending the information directly to the Marines’ HUDs, “but use your initiative. There’s plenty of high ground. We’re about a hundred metres higher on this side of the quarry, so you shouldn’t struggle to find decent perches.”
The rest of the troop disembarked and Warden slid open the side hatch where the techs had rigged monitors for use as a command vehicle. The data their HUDs had gathered was now displayed on a large flexi-screen as a top-down view of the quarry. There were around sixty Deathless who were obviously armed and at least another thirty others of indeterminate status. Those thirty were mostly operating the mining machinery and didn’t appear to be wearing armour or carrying guns bu
t that didn’t mean they weren’t dangerous.
“We haven’t seen any civilians yet but it’s a quarry, there could be loads of them. Standard rules of engagement – kill the soldiers unless they surrender, secure the civilians unless they become dangerous,” said Warden firmly. They hadn’t yet seen any non-military Deathless and he didn’t want to escalate this war by killing civilians, but they weren’t going to take any chances.
“The snipers are deploying now and the HUD maps will update as they scope the area. They’ll be flagging hotspots for you,” said Milton.
“Sir, do you want to wait for nightfall?” asked Lance Corporal Price.
Warden shook his head. “Negative. If we had the luxury of time or someone watching our backs from orbit, then maybe, but this is one we’re going to have to do the hard way. Fast, loud and efficient. I want these bastards to feel your maximum controlled aggression, understood?”
“Yes, sir,” Price replied.
“Good. Once the sniper teams are in place, we’ll move. We have the advantage of elevation, but we can’t just sit up here taking pot shots all afternoon. As soon as they take cover our position will become vulnerable, so we’ll be performing a forward abseil down the cliff, under cover of sniper fire and heavy weapons from the lip of the mine. Once on the ground, the sections will sweep forward and press the enemy from each flank.”
As he spoke, the map showed the expected movement for each section. He could hear the disquiet and understood it. It was a high-risk strategy, but they had no choice. Capturing the truck was crucial to their plan and they couldn’t stop just because they had found the enemy here ahead of them.
“Sir, wouldn’t it be better to send teams around to the entrance and have them attack from there? I mean, the death dive is a great way to test your bottle in training, but it hasn’t been used in combat since, well, I don’t know when,” said Price, shifting nervously.
