by Jack Colrain
More buildings meant more cover, and that meant more chances for the Gresians to place themselves with heavier weapons. Every doorway and gap between buildings was one that Daniel expected to see a muzzle flash from, and that didn’t help his nerves. When he paused from the drone display to look at his hands, he saw they were trembling, and his biceps felt like jelly. Anxiety and tiredness were taking hold.
Daniel kept the drone up, though, watching for guerrilla Gresians ready to strike. Now plasma rifles were becoming more of a threat to the soldiers outside the APC, as they were more necessarily bunched together in the streets. Something hit the side of the vehicle, and Daniel instantly zoomed in on the cause. “Two Gresians on the walkway, ten o’clock,” he called to Svoboda, who immediately put an explosive shell between them.
Outside, Kinsella loosed a couple of railgun bolts into an alleyway, and said, “Two more down.”
Daniel’s leg continued to jiggle nervously in his seat. “They’re definitely getting bolder,” he muttered.
“They’re psyching themselves up for a proper ambush,” Hope agreed. “But we’re so close.”
“Yeah,” Daniel agreed. Through both the drone feed and the viewport, he could see that the eastern quarter of the city was built on higher ground, and there was parkland up there. It looked odd to see it from this angle, after only having had a fuzzy, high-altitude satellite picture before, but he recognized it all the same. That was the park containing the ancient Shaldine ruins, and their objective was buried underneath it.
Between them and it were several towers, though one had no lights on. It was still silhouetted against the evening sky about fifty yards away, so the Gresians weren’t trying to hide it, Daniel thought, but if that was the case… why was it dark? The only reason he could think of was that Gresian troops inside didn’t want to be backlit when they launched an ambush from inside. “Svoboda,” he called, “the tower block with no lights on, just ahead. Open f—”
And then a deep rumble rolled across them from ahead as flashes illuminated the building, and clouds of dust punched out from its base. Torres stomped on the brakes as the whole building’s nearest side—barely twenty yards away—crumbled, flinging gouts of dust and rubble into the air, and then the whole building slammed down across their path, sending the Hardcases outside the APC diving for shelter.
Immediately, golden RPG rounds began bracketing the APC as Daniel realized that the building had been dark because it had been emptied for demolition. Plasma fire erupted everywhere from the other blocks in front and on either side of them, and two of his soldiers fell right away, twitching and burning.
Torres threw the APC into reverse, but another series of concussive blasts sounded out and a second building fell, rubble crashing down upon the APC. Daniel felt the vehicle’s suspension snap as the roof buckled. “Everybody out!” Daniel yelled. “Find cover!”
He grabbed a stunned Doug Wilson and dragged him out of the shotgun seat’s hatch while Svoboda and Torres pulled themselves free through their hatches. As the others followed them out of the vehicle, a third building fell across a couple more of Daniel’s soldiers. The survivors of the group who had been outside the APC were scrambling across the rubble towards cover in the wreckage of the first fallen building. Daniel followed, barely able to breathe as thick dust choked the entire street. The wreckage was the best place to go because, by definition, the fallen buildings couldn’t fall again.
Plasma bolts rained down on them from the buildings still standing, and several indistinct running figures—Gresians in their version of Exo-suits—leapt from place to place while firing at them.
Beswick hurled a nanocharge into a group of Gresians gathered in a ground floor window and then ran, while Kinella sniped the ones on the street to cover him. Pipsqueak, Bailey, and Palmer opened fire on Gresians on surrounding rooftops while Gregory and Hope drop-slid into cover beside Daniel and Wilson. Gregory gave Wilson a quick once-over and said, “Shock, but he’ll be OK.”
“Can you give him something?” Daniel asked.
“Sure.”
“We need to get out of here!” Hope shouted over the noise.
“I see two options,” Daniel said breathlessly. “Run down the street and risk the Gresians dropping more buildings on us, or get off the street through a building full of Gresians.”
“I see it that way, too,” she said, “and I vote option B.”
“We can’t tell which buildings the Gresians have rigged for demolition, though,” Wilson managed to say through a coughing fit.
“Sure, we can,” Daniel told him. “Those are the ones they’re not shooting from.”
Twenty-Four
A Gresian City, Firebird
Daniel led his team scuttling across the rubble like termites on a mound, heading towards an inverted pyramid of a building. The Gresians were shooting down from a floor that overhung from above, so the Hardcases bopped smoke and trusted the Exo-suits’ stealth abilities as best they could.
Beswick used a LAWS rocket launcher to make a hole in the building’s ground floor so that they could run in. Running into some kind of stone garden on the ground floor of the building, Daniel called to Palmer, “No black hats so far. They’re staying upstairs for now—”
At that instant, several grenades dropped through from the floor above. Daniel flung himself flat as they went off, yelling over the din as shrapnel seared through his left thigh and across his ribs.
Lizzie suddenly piped up in Daniel’s ear as Hope, Palmer, Beswick and the rest ran in. “Bad news, fellas: Gresian reinforcements are stuffing themselves into the building like shoppers on Black Friday.”
“Shit.”
“At least it’s not a building on the head,” Palmer said, spraying railgun bolts up through the ceiling. Daniel switched to thermal vision and looked up, seeing that several Gresian heat signatures were up there, and three had already fallen. Their comrades were shooting down through holes in their floor, the plasma bolts appearing like some kind of weird nightclub effect.
Daniel looked for the access to the stairwell and found it sealed behind a plate of strong, thick alloy. He released a cloud of nanites from his suit, to each side of the hatch. It wasn’t especially loud, but the nanites disassembled pieces of the hinges on a molecular level, and effectively cut through the hatch quite neatly. Daniel booted it through and led the way to a spiral climbing frame, which Daniel guessed served the same purpose for the Gresians as a staircase would have for humans…
A Gresian immediately leapt downwards from above, slamming into Daniel, and he just managed to brace himself against the wall and kick it in the chest with both feet before smashing it in the faceplate with his shotgun butt. Human-made weapons were more advantageous in confined spaces than the long and bulky railguns, which they’d slung across their backs before entering.
The Gresian extended its claws, reaching to disembowel him, but too late. Palmer shot it in the head three times with a Desert Eagle while Daniel held it against the wall.
They continued up, and tossed stun grenades into the room at the top of the stairwell, momentarily blinding the remaining Gresians. One of them got a plasma shot off that scorched the wall by Daniel’s head, but then the Hardcases started pumping deer slugs into them. After a few seconds more, they could pause to take stock while listening to the movements of Gresians at the rear of the building.
The central floor of the building was a low maze of chest-high consoles and equipment that Daniel thought might have been kitchen gear, entertainment systems, or art installations of some kind. He just hoped they weren’t alarms or sensors watching out for human intrusion. Standing up, he noticed that the space was open-plan, but a seated or short person—or Gresian—would have been in a maze, and probably watched all the time by some Gresian Gestapo or thought police.
Daniel momentarily wondered if this was even some sort of Gresian cubicle farm, where they cold-called each other to sell one another crap. The wide window across one
wall was the building’s only real exterior window, and it looked down on another of the ubiquitous stone gardens that the Gresians seemed so fond of.
The Hardcases moved swiftly and quietly through the main floor, Daniel in the lead. Wilson and Gregory were in the middle of the line, guarded by the most experienced and best shots. Daniel kept his auto shotgun in hand as they moved. He could hear movement elsewhere in the building, and muffled alien vocalizations that rasped and hissed, but no alarms or shooting yet. At the next doorway, Daniel slid to one side and Hope took the other side. Beyond the doorway, a wide, plain corridor stretched the length of the building, lit with dim blue lights. On the left, a couple of rooms were open, shadows moving within, and thick obsidian blocks separated them.
A pair of Gresians in blue armor suddenly sprang from the rooms on the right and ran towards him. He and Hope both opened fire with their shotguns. One Gresian fell in a bronze spray, but at the last moment, the other turned left and ducked behind a doorway, then returned fire. Daniel and Hope sidled from the doorway as the plasma bolts burst forth. Kate Kinsella unslung her railgun and put several bolts through the doorway from the opposite end of the room, sending the bolts through the walls, as well, just to make sure.
Daniel immediately ran through the door and along the passageway to the other side of the building, followed by Hope, Palmer, Kinsella, and fifteen others. At the far end was a wide mezzanine where an armored Gresian had its back to Daniel. It seemed to be gesturing to comrades below, so Daniel hoped to sneak up on it unawares, but, at the last moment, when he was almost within arm’s reach, the creature stiffened and started to turn, and Daniel shot it through the back of its helmet. Daniel crossed the floor in two loping steps. Another Gresian had reached a stairwell there and begun to climb.
Daniel put three deer slugs through its flat skull. The shots and the corpse’s tumble to the floor drew another Gresian, who snapped off a couple of plasma bolts, running back towards the corpse, and Daniel let it have a burst to the chest. The Gresian staggered, and before he could either return fire or fall down dead, a second burst redistributed its helmet and the contents around the room, just to be on the safe side.
Several more Gresians rushed in, guns blazing, and Palmer tossed a couple of grenades into the middle of them while the others filled the mezzanine with flying lead and tungsten.
Halfway down, Daniel caught a glimpse of more Gresians on the street below, which paralleled the one which was now full of collapsed building. He switched back to his railgun and sprayed them with bolts, but then one of the Gresians that had fallen to Palmer’s grenade suddenly whipped its leg out behind Daniel’s calves, and its shoulder turned its arms aside and pushed. A railgun bolt went into the ceiling as Daniel and the Gresian fell through a shattered window into the street below. The creature was shockingly quick for its size and build, and its clawed boot slammed down into Daniel, red pain exploding through his head.
Daniel barely managed to start turning side-on to take the next blow to his shoulder instead of his jaw. He pirouetted, throwing the Gresian against a tree trunk. Daniel leapt after it as it screeched, and a pair of other alien howls answered it. Two more Gresians dropped to the street, plasma rifles raised, and Daniel, using all his strength and desperation, twisted the first creature’s arm up behind its back, pulling it in front of him to serve as an inhuman shield.
The Gresians hesitated, and the one in Daniel’s grasp snarled. The Gresian on the left raised its rifle, and immediately fell with two railgun bolts through its helmet. Hope dropped to the ground a few feet from Daniel, and her shotgun boomed and bucked, gouging a couple of holes in the other Gresian’s torso and helmet.
As the bodies fell, Daniel’s prisoner slammed its clawed boot down on his instep, only the Exo-suit nanites’ abilities to react to pressure preventing Daniel’s foot from shattering under the impact. A backwards elbow into Daniel’s gut broke the creature loose, but Daniel was grappling with it again in an instant. It snarled behind its reflective faceplate and tried to headbutt Daniel before extending its claws. Knowing it was too close to him for any of his team, even Hope, to get a clear shot, Daniel pulled his K-bar military issue knife.
The alien launched a slash with one razor-tipped paw to make Daniel defend against that and position him for the lightning-fast follow-up with its other hand, which ripped past Daniel’s torso as he dodged outside the line of attack. Momentarily, Daniel couldn’t tell whether he’d been cut or not. It always took a few long seconds for the pain to follow a cut from a really sharp edge.
Daniel leapt on top of the creature, scenting its blood, literally, and his brain seethed with rage as he nailed the razor-sharp steel through one outstretched paw. The creature rolled to throw Daniel, but in the process the blade ripped its way out of its hand, tearing from wrist to thin air between the middle and third claws.
The Gresian ran, and Daniel drew his Desert Eagle and shot it in the back of its helmet before it could get into cover. It fell. More were already shooting at the Hardcases, though, as they bolted diagonally across the street and blew a hole in the nearest door.
Two unarmored Gresians were waiting, firing. Beswick’s sleeve burst into flame while Hope and Palmer shot them down. Kit Gregory got the fire out and helped a cursing Beswick along as Daniel led them through and up onto a wide tree branch. A shorter Gresian—perhaps female, Daniel thought—hurled a grenade into the window that he was passing, and he shot back instinctively. There was a row of rooms ahead on one side of a corridor, and Kinsella sprayed railgun bolts through them just in case.
They turned left, Daniel trying to bear more or less towards the ruins on the hillside park that was their destination. They went through a small room with a strange sort of sleeping cot, treading on miniature tanks as they flowed out through the window without breaking stride.
Plasma bolts slammed into the walls around the window as they dropped to the ground, and Beswick got a measure of revenge by shooting the Gresians who had that exit covered. Daniel darted across what turned out to be a central courtyard of a house, and on through the door opposite into a kitchen. Then there came a wide-open room with scattered logs and cushions, and some kind of wooden animal discarded on the floor, which could only have been a toy.
He hesitated, remembering that he had seen toys in a room in the riverside town where they had first been ambushed. He felt a chill run down his spine at this new sign of childhood. That had surely been a small family home, and this a larger one…
Hope was suddenly at his side, others taking cover and sweeping the street with their weapons for more Gresians. “Are you all right?”
Daniel wasn’t sure, though he thought he had no reason not to be. “Yeah, I…. Yeah.” He pressed on, leading the team out of the house, running a gauntlet of sniper and rifle fire towards what looked like a small vehicle storage building—a garage?—connected to something resembling an apartment building on Earth. A square-topped tower on four massive legs, like the base of the Eiffel tower. There were two or three such buildings visible in this neighborhood.
Dodging plasma fire from the rooftops, Daniel thanked his lucky stars that his suit had already dulled the pain from the shrapnel wounds he’d received earlier. He ran straight at the small garage-like building, and gave covering fire against the rooftop snipers while Sergeant Cole fitted a breaching charge to the door. “Fire in the hole!” Cole yelled, and there sounded out a sharp bang before the door was suddenly open. Daniel threw himself to the floor as he entered. He had no intention of walking into a shotgun blast or a bullet.
The garage had gray walls and black floor. A ramp led up to an interior entrance to the apartment block overhead. There were a couple of wheel-less trucks parked at the far end, which had the look of some kind of municipal service vehicles about them. A Gresian in some kind of overalls was pushing a plastic cart up into one of them as the Hardcases piled into the room and spread out.
Daniel levelled the auto shotgun as he ducked behin
d a pillar, but the Gresian was alert and forewarned, and darted between the trucks. A moment later, he reappeared with a plasma rifle and started shooting. Electric blue energy bolts began clawing out concrete from the side of Daniel’s pillar. The shotgun boomed, louder than ever in the echoing garage, but the creature had taken cover.
A sudden metallic scraping came from the end of the garage behind Daniel, and he momentarily thought that the Gresian had hidden himself there.
It was worse than that.
Two metal gratings next to one of the trucks were sliding aside, figures rising out of them. Rippling shadows in blue armor and mirror-faced helmets came forth, armed with plasma rifles and some kind of shotguns of their own. And then the unarmored Gresian by the trucks opened up again. This time, he wasn’t shooting at Daniel, but at Hope. She went down with a leg wound, and his teammates returned fire.
As the bullets and plasma bolts sparked loudly against the walls and trucks, another Gresian targeted Daniel. Daniel dove for cover as the concrete exploded into gravel that stung his eyes and scratched his face.
Pipsqueak downed the unarmored Gresian, but there was a truck between Daniel and his nearest enemy, and Daniel figured he could outflank him by circling between the trucks.
It was the worst possible moment for another unarmored Gresian to step out of the second truck. He opened up on Daniel while the Gresian infantry kept up fire on the Hardcases. Daniel gritted his teeth and ran for their position by the trucks. The civilian was shooting at the lights, which Daniel suspected was in the hope of blinding the humans since felinoids like the Gresians had better night vision. He presumably didn’t know they had vision enhancement. Daniel had reloaded his Desert Eagle already, and he put a couple of rounds through his flat-topped skull.
As the last Gresian soldier fell, Daniel charged through the doorway into the apartment building, and up the strange climbing steps that he found there, to a lobby in one of the building’s legs. Opposite Daniel, an elevator door opened with a soft chime, disgorging half a dozen armored Gresians. Daniel cursed. One of the Gresians was looking straight at him, the others already raising their weapons towards the Hardcases who had followed him.
