by M. D. Cooper
Crunch half-turned, though with his helmet’s three-sixty vision, he had no need to. “You fire that thing next to my head, Private, and I’ll shove it so far up your ass you’ll talk through its barrel.”
Harris only laughed and repositioned next to a nearby groundcar, taking aim down the street.
“You never answered the question,” Chase said, moving next to Crunch as Harris fired his PR-99 railgun at a group of Niets advancing down the street.
“I love this shit!” Harris cried out as he fired. It wasn’t the first praise the private had lavished on the ISF-designed railgun. If the day progressed as it had been, it wouldn’t be the last, either.
The weapon allowed the operator to dial in the desired speed of the projectile, with settings from five hundred meters per second, clear up to ten kilometers per second. It fired a variety of different pellet sizes; anything from a one-gram ball, up to a ten-gram slug. Several of the options fired the pellets as a single mass that broke apart in flight, spreading out into rail-driven grapeshot.
By the sound of the discharge, Chase could tell that Harris was letting fly with three-gram pellets moving at close to the max speed. That setting meant the private was firing at armor.
A pellet moving at that speed would punch right through a soft target—which included even moderately armored humans—with less damage than a conventional bullet. But fire it at a more heavily armored target, and it would punch through, super-heating the armor and causing significant destruction within whatever it hit.
Crunch had been watching Harris as well, and called out to the private, “Shit, Harris, you shoot like my mom! Put it where the thing’s barrel meets the body.”
“He was close,” Chase chuckled. “And it is a kilometer downfield…behind a defensive barrier.”
“No excuse,” Crunch grunted. “And to answer your earlier question, yeah, I can drive a B’muth with just one leg. ISF upgraded ‘em all to use neural hookups.”
Chase nodded in satisfaction, doing his best not to flinch when an enemy round ricocheted off the concrete walkway nearby. “Good, one’s going to drop on the next street. I’ll help you hobble on over there.”
“Corporal Ben!” Crunch called out as Chase helped him rise. “Make sure to keep an eye on Harris. I think he gets the ends of his PR-99 mixed up.”
Ben only laughed in response, and Chase turned away from the fireteam to lead Crunch between the buildings.
“We’re T-minus ten on the ‘muths coming down,” he told his injured teammate.
“Saw that,” Crunch replied with a brief nod, wincing as he hopped along at Chase’s side. “Glad they brought them down to such a convenient location.”
“I could get you a little cart,” Chase offered with a laugh.
“Is it insubordination if I tell my CO to fuck off?” Crunch grunted.
Chase could tell that Crunch was in a lot more pain than he was letting on, and he glanced down at the man’s wound.
“Damn, a bit of the biofoam came off. Hold up, let me reapply.”
Crunch nodded silently, and Chase applied the biofoam as gently as he could.
the AI affirmed.
“Sergeant,” Chase said as the pair got underway once more, coming around the back of the Green Pickle restaurant. “You’re using the pain suppressors, right?”
Crunch made a noncommittal grunt, and then gave a half-shrug. “They make me feel weird, like my senses are covered in a layer of foam.”
“Is that somehow worse than agony?” Chase asked.
The sergeant didn’t reply for a few moments. “Well, no…but Rika got her limbs cut off without any numbing.”
“Yeah,” Chase snorted. “And then she passed out. I need you functional, not slumped over unconscious, driving the B’muth through a row of houses.”
Crunch drew a breath like he was going to mount a defense against Chase’s logic, but then he slumped his shoulders and nodded. “OK.”
A moment later he seemed to straighten, and Chase resisted the urge to needle the mech about his obstinance.
The pair progressed the rest of the way down the alley, and came out onto the next block, which was named Burger Street—an oddity amongst the north-south numbered streets. Chase didn’t see a single burger restaurant, so he assumed it was named for something other than food. Though that didn’t stop him from feeling more than a little hungry at the thought of how good a double cheeseburger would taste right then.
They advanced toward the forward position held by Mitch’s fireteam, and then Chase helped Crunch settle onto another bench.
“Need Bondo to get us some sort of field crutches, or something,” Crunch muttered.
“Not a terrible idea,” Chase said with a nod, and then jerked to the side as a round ricocheted off his armor.
He spun to see a group of Niets attacking from the storefronts across the street.
Return fire came from his left, and he grunted in satisfaction to see that Crunch had slid off the bench and was lying prone on the sidewalk, shooting at the enemies with unerring accuracy.
His moment of appreciation over, Chase dashed to the right, taking cover behind a car on the side of the road. Once in some modicum of cover, he slid his chaingun off his back and hooked it onto his right hip mount.
Crunch’s armor was deflecting what incoming weapons fire managed to strike him, but Chase knew that wouldn’t last. His chaingun spun up, and he eased around the car, spraying a hail of armor-piercing rounds at the storefront the Niets were set up in.
He could see figures dashing back into the store, as the enemy retreated from his barrage, but the attack didn’t flag; a second wave of Niets appeared on the rooftops of three separate buildings.
Before Chase could raise his chaingun to respond to the new threat, sections of the balustrade running along the rooftops exploded. He turned to see Corporal Mitch advancing down the street with Private Lauren, both firing sabot DPU rounds at the tops of the buildings.
The pair of mechs were right at the edge of the minimum effective range—which was also the point where the uranium rods would hit with the most force.
Chase couldn’t tell if they’d hit any of the Niets or just forced them back, but within seconds, there was no cover to be had at the roof’s edge, and the enemy fire let up.
The miniature missiles streaked across the street and into the storefront. Each contained a plasma wave generator that sprayed molten star-stuff across a ten-meter radius. It was a brutal weapon, but they were facing a brutal enemy.
The two bursts were followed by screams, and the sounds of people flailing.
The SMI-4 released a pair of drones to get a bird’s-eye view before she leapt onto the closest building, her GNR firing an electron beam as she sailed through the air.
Chase walked back around the car, and offered Crunch a hand, pulling him back onto the bench. “Not sure why you can’t just sit like a normal person.”
“Just want you to wait on me hand and foot,” Crunch replied, before gesturing over Chase’s shoulder with his chin. “Looks like the ferryman is bringing us our presents.”
MEMPHIS SPACE AND AIR
STELLAR DATE: 10.12.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Hornton Space and Airport, Memphis, Kansas
REGION: Blue Ridge System, Old Genevia, Nietzschean Empire
Jenisa groaned.
The SMI-4 highlighted her target on the combat net, and Alison gave a nod of approval.
Alison rolled her eyes, and wished Jenisa could see it. She’d have to find the private after the engagement and give her an eyeroll in person for good measure.
An explosive round hit the side of the building that Alison was crouched beside, pulling her back into the present. She spun to see a group of four Niets approaching on her left.
Alison moved behind a stack of wheels while she sent the new orders to Corporal Fred. Once that distraction was out of the way, she checked her drone feeds to see that the four approaching Niets had split up to move around either side of her cover.
That’s the problem with these idiots, she thought. They never think about how high SMIs can jump.
Alison extended her double-jointed knees and crouched down. She drew a deep breath, smelling a trace of the acrid fumes filling the air around the burning spaceport, and raced forward, planting one three-clawed foot on a wheel, then another on a tire.
She kicked on her booster jets, and sailed twenty meters into the air, high over the heads of her would-be ambushers.
Her GNR barked twice from her left arm, while the new PR-109 she clutched in her right hand fired a dozen high explosive rounds at the enemy with lethal precision.
The Nietzscheans were all dead by the time she hit the ground.
The moment her feet met the tarmac, the air was filled with the bellow of an explosion, and she knew that Jenisa’s plan had worked in the mech’s favor.
Alison didn’t ask what had caused Fred’s exclamation, and instead pulled his feeds to see a trio of enemy Terminator drones flying overhead, spraying HE rounds at the mechs.
Alison tracked one of the drones on the squad’s feeds and took aim where she expected it to appear around the hull of a heavy freighter, sitting on a cradle half a kilometer away.
The drone didn’t emerge around the forward end of the freighter’s hull when she expected, and Alison scanned the skies, looking for the thing. Then she caught sight of the Terminator as it pulled around a building on her right.
Whipping her GNR around, Alison fired a trio of projectile rounds at the drone, and one clipped it in the wing just as the Nietzschean robot fired a pair of ASM missiles at her.
Alison sprayed rounds from her PR-109 at the missiles, taking one out only seconds after it launched.
Her rounds missed the second one, and she felt a moment of terror as she struggled to track the wildly veering ASM before it reached her.
She was about to fire, when the incoming weapon exploded, and Alison looked up to see a Skyscream shriek past.
It lay across a hundred meters of runway that was used by surface-to-surface aircraft and any shuttles that came down on glide paths.
It was also completely devoid of cover.
Alison put her stealth systems through a pre-use cooling cycle, bleeding off as much heat as possible in an effort to bring the system back to maximum efficiency. The process flushed a chill through her, and she gave a shiver while reloading her PR-109, and then checked the auto-feeder on her GNR.
OK, ISF tech, don’t fail me now.
With a slow, loping run, Alison took off across the wide-open space, praying that the stealth tech—which read as only eighty percent effective at present—and the battle raging around the spaceport would be enough to keep her from being spotted.
A Nietzschean Terminator drone swept past just a few meters above her head, with two Skyscreams chasing after—though the mech craft paused in their assault so as not to hit Alison with a stray shot.
“Shit,” she whispered aloud in the confines of her helmet, hoping that no enemy targeting NSAI would pick up on the pause in the Skyscreams’ attack.
She kept moving, ready for attacks that may come from the squat, three-story administrative building ahead of her, but nothing seemed to be aimed her way, and she reached the relative safety of its walls without incident.
Alison looked over her fireteams’ placements on the combat net. They were all engaged with Nietzscheans; there was no way any of them could make it in time to back her up.
For a moment, she marveled at the estimation of the Niets’ numbers. The combat net had a tally of seven thousand five hundred and twenty-two, a number that was climbing steadily as more and more of the enemy arrived at the spaceport from elsewhere on the planet.
All to battle eighty mechs. Well, it’s almost a fair fight, but not quite.
Alison snorted.
Lieutenant Fuller flashed an acknowledgement, and Alison considered her best options for the fastest breach.
The schematics of the building—which they’d lifted from an off-planet database a week before—showed the main control room for the spaceport as being in an elevated hub in the center of the building.
Well, I can fight my way through the corridors, or I can just go up and over…
Alison slid her PR-109 onto its mounting hook, gauged the distance to the top of the building, crouched, and leapt twenty meters into the air, landing on the balustrade.
It bent under her weight, and she nearly lost her balance before she leant forward and rolled onto the roof in a mos
tly graceful move.
The surface was coated in a black, tar-like substance that had become tacky in the day’s heat, and Alison came up with a black strip running down her side, and another on her back.
She hoped no one was watching the roof, when a pair of turrets rose up a dozen meters away, and opened up with armor-piercing rounds.
* * * * *
“I still don’t have any updated targeting data,” Chief Ona said, twisting in her seat to meet Captain Heather’s gaze.
“Do the currently selected targets reflect your best estimations?” Heather asked as she rose from the command chair and stalked to the holotank, which currently showed a top-down view of Memphis.
“Yes, ma’am. Those twenty locations are where I think their hidden AA and surface-to-surface guns are…based on the scans we’ve run, which are limited due—”
“I understand why we can’t get a good reading on the city,” Heather said, cutting the chief off. “They’ve improved their counterscan tech a lot since the war. A lot a lot.”
“I’ve got the Lance’s fire control set up to hit the suspected locations. If we get targets that are too far off, it’ll take a minute to reorient,” Ona replied.
“Ferris is coming in hot,” Heather noted, gesturing at the secondary tank that showed the Marauder destroyer’s position as it dropped toward the planet. “He won’t get a second run at this in time to help, so if we don’t have updated data from Fuller’s ‘toon by the time the ‘muths hit, we fire at the targets you’ve extrapolated.”
“Aye, ma’am,” Ona replied with a nod.
Heather shook her head, the ghost of a smile tugging at her lips. Sometimes the reality she was now living was almost too much to swallow. She was standing on the bridge of what was once a Nietzschean dreadnought, giving orders to squishie naval personnel who were perfectly cordial and deferential to her.
Feels good, she thought while pacing to the other holotank, and then back to the one at the center of the bridge.
