by Terry Mixon
However they’d gotten themselves into position, they’d done so without disturbing the living grass enough for him to notice. In fact, he’d wager that they’d done well enough to fool even Captain Beauchamp and her people.
“So how do we go about this?” Adrian Scala asked from where he lay beside Talbot. The two of them were a short distance in advance of the column, peering through the tall grass at the crest of the hill they were on. The smell of the earth and grass felt like it was helping conceal them, too.
“I think the best way to get this started is to drive them out of hiding before we engage,” Talbot said in a low voice. “We have a pretty decent idea of how many people we’re looking at, based on the infrared signature, but I’d rather see them running around so I can be sure. Besides, we won’t be able to see what kind of weaponry they have unless they’re out and about. I wonder what they did with their horses?”
There were no horses anywhere within the tactical drones’ range. If he had to guess, Talbot would wager that the horde had brought extra people to lead the horses away. Off to the right of their hiding place, set way back from where the column could see it from the ground, there was evidence that a large number of horses had recently been there, so the ambushers must’ve ridden in from off to the side of the known path, allowed the riders to dismount, and then had the horses led away.
No doubt the people with the spare horses were waiting somewhere in the distance, likely ready to come in once the ambush was sprung. Just one more thing for him to keep an eye on, but one with a potential upside. They could always use more horses, either for trade or for their own use. They still had fifteen hundred kilometers or so to travel, and extra horses would make that journey easier.
“So how do you want to spring the ambush?” Scala asked.
Talbot grinned. “We use our technology to our advantage. We have the drones start buzzing their position, out of reach of their hand-to-hand weaponry, and see if that gets them to come out and do something ill-considered.
“The drones will be inside bow range, and potentially even a thrown spear, but I’d wager the odds of a hit are low. The drones will be moving quickly and using at least a little bit of jinking to keep from being an easy target, so we won’t get very many hits.”
Scala nodded. “Okay, let’s say that works, we spring the trap, and everyone comes running out. They have other forces in the area that they might be able to signal. If we get bogged down in a heavy fight, and more forces come in to pin us in place, a lot of people are going to die.”
Talbot nodded grimly. “You got that right. So, we make sure we deal with these guys quickly. Most of the marines are back at the column, but with the flechette rifles our people here have, we should be able to take care of most of them. We’ll have the drone coverage up, and if we see other attackers coming in, we’ll modify the plan on the fly to deal with them. No matter how we play this, it’s going to be quick and ugly.”
He looked across what he could see of the plain and felt sad that such a beautiful area was being used for such a bloody purpose. Under other circumstances, he could imagine these fields filled with crops tended to by large machines, like the ones they’d found in the building.
This place had once been the breadbasket of Terra. Maybe at some point in the future it would be again, but until then, it was going to have a little bit of blood soaked into the ground.
He opened a communication channel back to Carl Owlet, who had a number of people controlling the drones for the marines, so that the fighters could be focused on what they needed to do.
“Carl, execute plan bravo.”
“Copy that,” his young friend said. “We’ve got some drones coming in from a couple of different angles and we’ll buzz them as close to the ground as we can, then circle around and come in from other directions. With the pattern we’re working up, it’s going to seem like a lot more drones than we actually have. We’ve also arranged a little surprise for them that I think will probably help get them out into the open.”
His friend’s words filled him with a little bit of dread. “What are you planning? This isn’t going to cause any big explosions, is it?”
Carl laughed. “Nothing like that. We took some of the smoke grenades that your people recovered from the crashed pinnaces, and we’ve attached them to the drones. Once the bad guys start moving around, we’ll drop smoke into the middle of them to confuse their situation even more. That shouldn’t obscure them from your advanced optics.”
Talbot thought about that for a moment and then nodded. “That sounds like a good idea. Make it happen.”
He switched channels to the general marine frequency. “Squad Charlie, this is Talbot. As soon as the drones come onto the scene and flush our ambushers, you are cleared to take them down. Make sure you hit your targets but be sparing with the ammunition. We need to take all of these people down as quickly as possible, but we don’t have many reloads.
“We’re going to drop smoke into the middle of them, so don’t get excited about anyone you can’t clearly see. Wait for your targets. Use the drone feeds to figure out who’s going where and keep engaging them.
“Squad Delta, circle around and be ready to keep them from getting away. Once we lay enough firepower into them, they’re going to make a break for it, and there are other fighters from the horde out there. We’ve got to be ready to interdict them.”
Even as he finished speaking, the drones flew in from seemingly every direction and began buzzing over the target area. For a moment there was no response, and then large swaths of grass flipped over.
Screaming men and women came boiling out from under the mats and charged toward where the column would be, only to find Talbot and his marines on the hill between them.
There were more dismounted horsemen than he’d expected. At a guess, he was looking at over a hundred people. Maybe as many as a hundred and fifty. His ability to count was disrupted when the drones began dropping smoke into the middle of the charging enemies.
That disturbed them a lot. The smooth charge of the armed men and women was quickly turned into a chaotic rush, as people were both charging forward to fight while others ran away from what they thought was deadly danger.
Talbot didn’t notice any of the antiarmor weapons, but visibility was crap. He had to assume that they had them until he knew for sure they didn’t.
“All marines,” he said in a flat tone. “Open fire.”
Every marine with him on the low rise opened fire, sending flechettes into the screaming confusion below them. With that kind of firepower, it wouldn’t take long to mow down the fighters they were facing.
“Enemy contact!” Chloe Laird shouted over the command frequency. “There’s a second group just off to the side of the column popping out of concealment. Holy hell, there has to be two hundred people there. We’re engaged. We’re heavily engaged and need backup ASAP.”
“Hold them as best you can,” Talbot said as he stood. “Adrian, stop these bastards here while I go back and help the column.”
“Got you covered, boss.”
Talbot took off at a run, using his powered armor to build speed. This was an unmitigated disaster. With that many bad guys, the column was going to be overrun no matter what they did. The chances of keeping them off the civilians and unarmed Fleet personnel were effectively zero.
Talbot hoped the admiral had a good plan, because he didn’t know of anything that he could do that was going to change the outcome now. All he could do was fight. With any luck, he’d make it back to Kelsey, so that they could stand back-to-back when the horde rolled over them.
21
Jared was watching the ambush play out over his implants when disaster struck. He heard shouts of alarm off to his right and turned in the saddle to find a lot of fresh enemies coming out from under grass mats barely fifty meters away from the column.
The new attackers were leading off with bows and arrows, shooting at Captain Beauchamp’s warriors. They
also paid particular attention to anyone with a rifle.
The marines quickly turned their flechette rifles—those that had any—onto the attackers. Captain Beauchamp’s mounted forces charged toward the intruders, drawing weapons as they moved. There was a lot of yelling, screaming, and whooping in the air.
Jared turned his attention to the noncombatants and started ordering them to the other side of the column. He had to get armed warriors between the ambushers and the people that couldn’t defend themselves.
He saw Kelsey racing toward the attackers, her powered armor making her leaps seem effortless. She had both of her swords out and seemed prepared to go in swinging. He wasn’t sure it was going to be enough, considering how many people the horde had coming in.
This group looked at least as large as what Talbot had reported ahead of them, and they also had the mounted column that the ready response team was attempting to deal with. If that group also managed to disengage and get to the column in fighting order, he and his people were in extremely dire straits.
“How the hell did we miss these people?” Elise asked as she moved closer to him. She had a small flechette pistol in her hand, but she was obviously not confident that it was going to be enough.
Neither was he, though he drew his own weapon.
“I don’t know,” he said grimly. “Maybe we’ll have time to figure it out after we’ve dealt with them. We’ve got to form everybody into a circle so that we can protect the group from every angle.”
He sent out orders to that effect over the implant coms, and his people coalesced into a ball with all of their weapons pointing outward.
The situation had changed so quickly. They’d gone from almost being to the outpost to being caught in a deadly ambush just a few kilometers away from supposed safety.
He wanted to think that they were going to come out of this okay, but the situation seemed too ugly for that. It didn’t seem as if they were going to have an opportunity to get this situation sorted out in their favor. Their enemy had been far cleverer than he’d imagined possible.
A number of them had already begun firing antiarmor weapons at Kelsey, but she seemed to be everywhere. She dodged left and then right, allowing the explosives to fly past her as she waded into the enemy. Her blades flashed out, severing arms, heads, weapons, and anything else that got in her way.
A crashing off to his left brought his attention around as Talbot came thundering out of the grass, barely pausing as he rushed toward the fighting in his powered armor.
He wasn’t as lucky as his wife. One of the antiarmor weapons smashed into the ground right in front of him, exploding in a bright flash and sending the marine tumbling through the air to slam into the ground hard. A number of the enemy cheered his fall and rushed toward him.
“Kelsey,” he said over the command channel. “Talbot is down off to your left.”
His sister whirled in place, cutting a man down to clear the way for her to jump forward. With her powered armor, she was able to achieve an impressive height and came down on another warrior, crushing him in place as she sprinted toward her husband. She planted her feet near him and diced anyone that came close.
Jared felt a very bad feeling. As the enemy was massing to overwhelm Captain Beauchamp’s forces, they’d split off a good chunk to face Kelsey as well. Several of them were already bringing antiarmor weapons to bear.
This was not going to end well.
Kelsey drew her neural disruptor with her off hand and began shooting the men holding antiarmor weapons. The bolts sent them spasming to the ground, dead before they fell. She couldn’t hit them all, unfortunately and at least one person managed to fire before he went down. Thankfully, his aim was somewhat off, but that was no reprieve.
The warhead flew past her and impacted in the middle of the column with terrible effect. It sent Fleet personnel and civilians flying in every direction, dead or wounded. Mostly dead.
Captain Beauchamp’s people were also heavily engaged with the ambushers, but the odds were stacked against them.
To add insult to injury, that’s when Major Scala called on the general com channel with word that while the ambushers had lost a lot of people, they’d split around the marines and were making their way toward the column. The marines were in pursuit, but the enemy had left a force to slow them down. They weren’t going to be able to keep the horde warriors from reaching the column.
Perfect.
She didn’t have a chance to check Talbot, but her implants told her that he was still alive. He wasn’t even terribly injured. The impact had just knocked him out. The problem was that she couldn’t move him while still defending their position. She was stuck by his side or she’d have to abandon him, something that she would never do.
A quick check of the drones revealed that the force coming in from the ambush site was going to hit the circle of Fleet personnel and civilians, and they were going to do it hard. She sent a quick warning to Jared and focused her attention on using her weapons to the best of their ability.
She’d sheathed her swords even as she was running for Talbot and had a flechette pistol in one hand and a neural disruptor in the other. Both were taking a toll on the enemy, but the power supply for the neural disruptor and the magazine for the flechette pistol weren’t infinite. She’d have to put one weapon away to reload the other.
Even though she was cutting down swaths of the enemy, they didn’t seem inclined to retreat. The deaths of their fellows only pushed them to charge her harder. It was almost as if they were suicidal.
Even as she was being forced to choose which weapon to reload, she saw something else happening back where the ambushers had concealed themselves. Several of them were dragging a large device out of the pit where they’d been hiding.
She didn’t recognize what it was, but it had to be something bad.
Choosing her flechette pistol, she smashed one of the attackers out of her way with her other hand and emptied the small magazine at the enemy working on the machine. She took them down, but unfortunately, she didn’t kill them all. One managed to crawl his way back up to his knees and continued doing something to the machine.
Kelsey fired her neural disruptor. Too bad he was out of range.
The top of the machine opened, and a metallic ball shot into the sky. She had no idea what it was and no time to figure it out because when it reached about fifty meters in height, it glowed as brightly as the sun and the world around her went dark.
Julia had circled around just like Corporal Boske had instructed her to and found a good hiding place in the tall grass. She’d opened fire on command with the plasma rifle, sending the two unbearably bright spots of coherent light flashing into the middle of the column of enemy horsemen, where they’d detonated with tremendous explosions.
The blasts not only threw horses and people in every direction, it had incinerated those closest to the point of impact. Much like Boske had anticipated, the horsemen had immediately split apart and began fleeing in multiple directions.
Julia fired the third authorized blast from the plasma rifle at the man who seemed to be in charge and took out him and the half a dozen riders still too close to avoid destruction.
Her three shots had started a fire that would likely rage out of control in the flat grassland. Luckily, the wind wasn’t blowing in their direction, or toward the outpost. It would end up being a crisis somewhere, but it wasn’t something she could worry about now.
With that, she backed away from the fighting, as ordered. She raced around to the left, using a slight rise in the ground to hide her movements from the enemy. Her new course took her to a seasonal stream bed and toward a low hill that the water had cut into the base of.
When she was right beside it, she leapt as far onto it as she could and caught herself at the top of the incline. That sounded impressive, but it wasn’t much of a hill. She’d only cleared a dozen meters over the base of jumbled rock.
When she was on the top of the rise, th
e additional height gave her the perspective to see where all of the horsemen were. She settled down into a good hiding spot and started calling off the locations to Boske.
She’d barely gotten started when a bright flash off to her left seemed to slam against her with psychic force. It didn’t move her body, but it still knocked her out.
An indeterminate amount of time later, she blinked as consciousness returned. She was immersed in complete darkness. What the hell had that been? She tried to get her mind to work, but her thoughts were as slow as molasses.
She tried rolling over, but her armor refused to cooperate. Thankfully, she had the internal musculature to force it.
Only her artificial muscles weren’t working either. She pushed, but nothing happened. She felt as weak as a kitten.
A quick check showed that her implants were offline. She’d never experienced that before. The armor wasn’t transmitting any visuals to her implants, or her implants weren’t receiving them.
Based on the evidence in front of her, she thought both of those things might be true. Somehow the enemy had managed to disrupt not only her armor, but her implants and her Raider augmentation.
Her armor was made so that it could be opened manually, so she reached up and found the manual releases for the helmet. They weren’t made to be easy to manipulate, because no one wanted an enemy to get their armor open while they were inside it.
Still, Kelsey had trained her hard on knowing that part about her armor. The woman seemed to know everything about Marine Raider this and Marine Raider that. In this case, Julia was happy that she hadn’t argued.
It took a minute of fumbling around to finally get the helmet to come free. The fresh air slammed into her face, cooling her immediately. She had no idea how long she’d been out, but the sun was still shining brightly down on her face.
