by Jack Colrain
It crossed the bridge speedily and paused at the end, just long enough to blast a gigantic plasma round into the nearer transport.
The transport lurched and then erupted in electric fire, sparks, and smoke. As the smoke darkened, the cab arced through the air for several dozen yards, propelled by the exploding fuel and weapons within. Daniel’s jaw dropped, amazed that such a heavy object could be flipped so far so easily. If he’d seen it in a movie, he would have laughed at how unrealistic it seemed.
The second tank now gave covering fire while the crew of the first jumped down from their burning vehicle and took up positions as infantry. They opened up on Kinsella’s position with plasma fire. Kinsella ducked back in time, but PFC Wilkes wasn’t so lucky, and fell from the tower with a scream, landing on his head and shoulders, snapping his neck. Even the exo-suits couldn’t heal that amount of instant brain trauma. Railgun bolts erupted from a shopfront on the corner and the tank blasted it into a cloud of dust and rubble. It spooled up its engine and pushed the burning hulk of its comrade off the end of the bridge, shoving it towards the surviving transport.
Daniel realized that there was no point trying to hijack an enemy transport. Not here, anyway. The number of tanks in the area suggested that it was some kind of staging post for the Gresians’ resistance to the invasion, which meant that the Hardcases were seriously outgunned. Worse, the Gresians had hardened locations, and armor, and were just far more familiar with this environment and territory. Intimately familiar, in fact.
“We’re never going to kill all of these fuckers,” he said over their suit comms. “It’s like one of those videogames where spawn points just spawn enemies indefinitely.” He sighed. “Plan C. Exfiltrate and regroup.”
“Even if we do that,” Hope called from her APC, “they’ll never let us get to the Shaldine facility.”
“Then we’ve been doing this the wrong way. We need to get out of town in order to deal with it.”
“I think I know what you mean.”
“Good. New orders. You rendezvous with Trap One, share out some ammo, and pick up Wilson. Then push on ahead. That way, if we don’t make our rendezvous with Trap One, you and Wilson can still complete the mission.”
‘Don’t talk like you won’t make it,’ she thought back to him.
“When Torres picks us up, we’ll follow on. We both know where we’re going.”
“Roger that,” Hope replied, with a measure of reluctance.
“I’ll be in touch when we get out,” Daniel promised.
Daniel sometimes wondered how he managed to work in all this noise and confusion, but he did. Somehow or other, he was able to find a calm center from which to aim the railgun that he commanded. Perhaps it was something to do with being responsible for so many people: If he could sleep through what it meant to be shouldering the responsibility for their lives and wellbeing, then tuning out the cacophony of battle was no problem. Perhaps more miraculous was how the others in his crew were able to follow orders that they surely couldn’t actually hear. As he ran for a new firing position, it occurred to Daniel that he could hit the stranded tank again and kill its crew while they were exposed outside it. But what would be the point in wasting ammunition like that? They were most definitely out of the fight. Besides, the other tank was the greater threat. Already, it was turning its plasma cannon towards their position by the fountain. “Get an armor-piercing round into that tank!” Daniel called out.
Beswick slammed the appropriate missile into the second tank from a hand-held launcher, the round skipping off the deflective armor and exploding into the wall at the edge of the bridge. “Damn,” Daniel gasped. “Run!”
They ran, making sure to keep out of the tank’s line of fire. Keeping out of the Gresians’ line of fire was a whole different matter as plasma bolts criss-crossed the area. Franco and Pipsqueak were giving covering fire from behind a wall. The tank fired and the ornamental fountain was ripped apart, the centerpiece statue of cavorting somethings torn into dust. Daniel slammed into the ground amid a shower of rubble and rolled aside. With a tremendous crash, the mangled building above crumbled and ploughed into the street a few yards to his left, right on top of Franco and Pipsqueak’s position.
It felt like a stone had dropped into the pit of Daniel’s stomach, and he found himself almost freezing, an open target. Almost, but not quite. He kept running. At least one of the men was groaning insensibly, but Daniel couldn’t tell which. His ears ringing, Daniel groaned and looked for the rest of his team. Pipsqueak was lying in a bloody pool a few yards away, with some kind of coral and ceramic masonry lying across his back and legs. Franco had vanished entirely, and Daniel had no idea whether he was buried under rubble or had taken off for better cover.
Under cover of the dust and stone fragments that were still hanging in the air, Daniel bolted for more secure cover himself. He wasn’t dumb enough to think he could stand up to the Gresian tanks while completely out in the open. He drop-slid into a small pond beside Beswick and gasped at how cold the water was. Daniel glanced back to the Gresian side of the plaza, alerted by more metallic rumblings and yells from below about “Incoming armor!”
“Pipsqueak, Franco?”
“I… I’m trapped, I think,” Pipsqueak replied. At least, Daniel thought, he was alive.
“OK, we’ll come get you. Franco?! Franco? Sing out, Franco!” There was no answer. “Corpsman!”
“I think I can see him from my position,” Kit Gregory responded.
“Good. Beswick and I will grab him and drag him to you. Kinsella, cover us.”
“On it,” Kinsella said.
Daniel and Beswick hauled themselves out of the pond and dashed for the fallen Thai soldier. Something exploded behind them, but neither risked looking round. Kinsella’s railgun was dropping Gresians to their right as they dove for Buapeuak’s position, flattening themselves to stay below the level of the rubble that had buried Franco.
As they pulled the debris off of Pipsqueak to free him, Daniel looked at where Franco ought to be, under the rubble, to see if he was OK. The soldier’s head wasn’t attached to the rest of him, and that was another injury an Exo-suit couldn’t repair.
Daniel and Beswick each grabbed one of Pipsqueak’s arms, and dragged him swiftly between two buildings and into a ruined third. A plasma bolt tore off the upper corner of the building, raining pieces of wood and brick upon them, the shock wave knocking Daniel down. It was quite clear that the humans were losing this fight.
Gregory looked over Pipsqueak and shivered. “It’s lucky he’s wearing an Exo-suit, sir, or your dragging him the way you did would have killed him. His suit’s healing him now, though.”
“Good. You and Cole get him into one of the sewer pipes we spotted under the bridge. The Gresians can’t curl up like we can because they have chestplates instead of ribs. He should be safe there. We’ll cover you and follow.”
In a matter of moments, the medic and the New Yorker had carried a moaning Buapeuak off to what Daniel hoped was safety. “The rest of us,” Daniel told his team, “will circle around and lead any Gresians off our guys’ trail, then make our way down by another route.”
“Good plan,” Kinsella agreed. At Daniel’s nod, she and he began to fire, covering the movements of the others as they slipped out. When they were the only two left, Daniel and Kinsella followed.
They had barely left when several Gresians rushed into the building and set off a claymore that Beswick had placed for them. Daniel heard the blast sound out behind him as he hurried through a hole in a wall and into a room full of strange, cylindrical furniture and tree branches. A Gresian soldier was just trying to come the other way, and got a deer slug in the face.
“Trap One from Greyhound,” Daniel called out to Lieutenant Torres over the comms as he moved and shot.
“Trap One here,” she responded. He could vaguely hear some complaining in the background, which sounded like a rather testy Doug Wilson and a persuasive Hope, and was glad
the professor wasn’t able to wear an Exo-suit—so he couldn’t interrupt when Daniel spoke to his team over the suits’ comms. “Trap Two has rendezvoused with us,” Torres continued, “and will be taking Professor Wilson on ahead while we wait for you.”
“How is the ammunition situation?” Daniel asked.
“We’ve replenished the ammo for the turret cannon, and some railgun and fifty-caliber ammo. Sergeant Stewart says we’d need more raw materials to fully replenish the railgun bolts.”
“Noted.” Daniel gave Torres a set of coordinates. “That’s some woodland east of town. It’s not as dense as the forest we saw first, so you should be able to negotiate it and keep out of Gresian vision.”
“Roger that, sir,” Torres replied. “We’ll be waiting for you.”
Eighteen
Daniel kept low, scuttling behind piles of rubble with the Hardcases leapfrogging from broken pillar to burning vehicle, then on to small houses and back as they circled round the outskirts of town heading in the direction of the woodland where Torres, Stewart, and Wilson were waiting with the Super-Bradley.
The sounds of Gresian activity remained concentrated in the center of town, but Daniel wasn’t dumb enough to trust things to stay that way. They moved silently, in full stealth mode, their camouflage digies and Exo-suit fields leaving them as vague moving patches of shades of blue in the shadows.
After twenty minutes or so of cautious movement, constantly watching and listening for Gresian footfalls nearby, as well as expecting the searing blast of a plasma shot to land between their shoulder blades at any moment, they finally found their way into a shallow stream that led away from the river and towards the woods. Shallow, Daniel thought, was too mild a word; to keep below the edge of it, they now had to crawl through the red mud on their elbows, faces almost breathing it in with every inch they moved. Daniel thought it looked like offal and smelled like shit from a rotting dead animal.
Suddenly, startlingly, the whine of a Gresian hover-tank came rushing towards them, and it was all Daniel could do not to scramble to his feet and run. Then a huge and heavy, glowing weight was pressing down on his back like the boot of a giant, and he could feel his ribs starting to flex and bend–
It was gone in an instant, the hover-tank continuing into the distance after having crossed over the ditch. He heard a couple of the soldiers immediately behind him groan in pain, as they’d been under the shadow of the tank, too.
“Keep going,” he whispered.
A couple of minutes later, the stream reached the cover of the woods and the team was able to climb out in a crouch. They kept their weapons up, scanning the trees as Daniel checked their position on his tablet. He pointed the team in the direction of the APC’s position, which was about seven hundred meters away, and began to move.
They didn’t move far, however, as a familiar whine returned.
Daniel could think of better places to be than in a forest of dried-out, ancient hedges listening to two Gresian AFVs whirring towards him. There were huge splintering crashes deeper in the skeletal forest as the Gresian vehicles shattered hedges that they didn’t have room to go around. Even here, where the tanks—for want of a better word, anyway—were far enough away to still look tiny, dust was being shaken loose from the desiccated deadwood all around the team members. For about the hundredth time, Daniel calmly checked the status of his railgun.
He felt as if his lungs were simply too small for all the air he needed. In his head, he knew it was because of the slightly different gravity and atmosphere on this planet, but his heart wasn’t listening. It sped up, as if he was more afraid than he actually felt. He glanced across at the corpsman, Gregory, a few yards away. The medic looked sick with fear, but he was holding firm and being professional. Daniel had no doubts that he would do the unit proud. The reverse wasn’t true, judging by the man’s nervous appearance. As if to prove him right, Gregory glanced around, and seemed to draw strength from Daniel’s apparent calm. Daniel himself felt a little better for being able to boost Gregory’s confidence. “You ready?” he asked.
Gregory hesitated before answering. “No, sir,” he admitted finally. “But nobody ever is, so I guess I’m as ready as anyone else here. You?”
Daniel smiled. “Same.” It wasn’t really possible to feel ready for something like this. They exchanged another look, and Daniel knew that Gregory understood that, too. You just had to go for it anyway.
By now, the Gresians were close enough to hit with a thrown object as they churned through the fallen splinters. Daniel hefted a nanocharge grenade and thumbed the activator. He threw it at the lead Gresian tank, and heard it clang against the hull a moment before it exploded into a soot-like swarm of nanites. To one side of him, Kinsella leaned out from the side of a tree and fired a burst from her railgun. Daniel did likewise. He knew that the railgun bolts could punch through an M1 Abrams’ armor easily, but he wasn’t stupid enough to assume that the Gresians wouldn’t have developed a countermeasure back in the days when they’d fought live Mozari armed with them. With that in mind, he drew a bead on the patch of armor that was starting to pit and crumble from the nanocharge. The nanites didn’t seem to be eating all the way through the hull, but all Daniel needed them to do was thin it, just enough.
Railgun bolts buried themselves in with a metallic ‘chank’ sort of noise, and he saw a few go through. The other tank paused, its turret purring around. It was terrifying looking down the barrel of a huge plasma cannon, but Daniel hoped that the Gresian military training taught its tank crews not to waste the resources of an artillery piece on a couple of individual footsoldiers. A pair of smaller weapons set beside the cannon opened fire instead, but Daniel and Svoboda had already taken cover as the petrified hedges around them blackened and in some places burst into flames.
Worse still, a burning tree collapsed onto PFC Collins, who writhed and screamed as, Daniel knew, his suit kept him alive while he was burned. Daniel started forward, hoping to grab him and put the fire out, but before he got near, a plasma blast hit Wilkes directly, vaporizing him outright.
Marty Beswick grabbed Daniel’s shoulder and pulled him back. There was no more sound other than crackling and splintering for a moment, and Daniel began to wonder if maybe the tank crews had decided that a couple of men weren’t worth bothering with at all. Then he heard the sounds of more railgun bolts spiking into vehicle armor, and knew that Kinsella and Pipsqueak had regained their attention.
He turned, pausing long enough to fire off a few rounds at the tank but not long enough to let them get a bead on him. It didn’t matter how inaccurate his own shooting was—he wasn’t sure how much damage the railguns could do to the tanks anyway; he just needed to get their attention. And then the Gresian vehicles’ engines whined and howled, and he knew he had them. The trick now was to stay just out of killing range, but close enough to lead the Gresians away from the APC’s position. It shouldn’t be too difficult, Daniel reasoned, since the rough ground and petrified tangle was hampering the vehicles. There was, he thought, little danger of them catching up.
The Hardcases ran back to where they’d emerged from the stream’s channel, but this time kept going a short distance before stopping and taking cover behind some of the petrified trees.
The tank moved forward, and Daniel aimed for where the driver’s position would be on a human-made tank, under the plasma cannon. He didn’t expect the railgun bolts to make it through the deflective, sloping front armor. He did, however, expect them to kept the Gresians’ attention and piss them off. In this, he was not disappointed.
Which was unfortunate for the Gresians.
The tank continued towards them, gliding over the channel that was too shallow for its crew to even notice it. The nanocharge and claymores went off right when the center of its underside—the vulnerable power system for their anti-gravity hovering ability—was a couple of feet above them. The tank hit the ground before the echo of the explosions died.
As the top of the
turret irised open to allow the crew to escape, Daniel sprang up, firing short, controlled bursts at a couple of Gresian troopers who were first out. They fell, with bolts through their breastplates, but then a burst of plasma fire made him duck back. Another mirror-helmeted Gresian leapt from the tank, having swept the surroundings with blind fire, and he was followed by two more.
Collins and Gregory opened fire from opposite flanks, together putting down one of the Gresians, but the two others returned fire. Gregory ducked just in time, but a plasma blast took Collins’ head clean off.
Suddenly, an explosive shell hit the knocked-out tank, the explosion hurling both Gresians into the trees. Daniel let out a “Yes!” at the sight of the now re-armed Super-Bradley smashing its way towards them. Kinsella shot one of the Gresians as it staggered to its feet, but the other leapt atop the APC with a snarl and started blasting at the turret’s hatch from behind it. Whoever was in the turret swung the cannon around, but couldn’t shake the creature off.
Daniel ran up the knocked-out tank, planted a foot on the roof, and launched himself across the gap between vehicles. It wasn’t easy at the speed of the approaching transport, but the Exo-suit carried him over. He slammed into the rear deck and damn near slid right back off. He whipped out an arm to wrap around one of the exterior handgrips. All the same, he lost his momentum as well as his railgun, and the Gresian trying to break into the turret turned. Daniel pulled his Desert Eagle and fired blind as the Gresian leaned out to bring his own plasma weapon to bear. The shot caught the Gresian in the shoulder, denting its armor and causing it to lose its balance so that it went tumbling from the transport with a hiss.
