“Saves me some time,” Andy said. She turned to finish what she was in the middle of with Anallin, but didn’t wait long to stand and turn to Roxanna. She examined the wound closely and thought that in different circumstances, it probably would be better served by stitches, but she knew she didn’t have that kind of time. Instead, she carefully applied the sealant like she had with Anallin, but more of it.
By the time she was done, her own med-kit was empty, but the “line” was done. The others looked to be in good shape.
She stepped away from her squad for a moment and pressed the channel button on her earpiece twice, which sent out a “status request” tone. Anyone who was able to reply would do so and let her know the situation.
The next few moments were balanced between incoming calls and waiting. Some squads reported that their positions were quiet but they could hear combat from other sections, while others reported contact. Some didn’t report at all, and she chose to believe that they were engaged in combat at that moment, rather than the alternative.
Andy blew out a breath and took another look around her.
There were no signs of enemy activity near their position, leaving them to recover and ready themselves for whatever else may come...and then wait.
The urge to run off to one of the other positions was strong, but she knew that she couldn’t be everywhere at once. What location would even be the priority? And did they even need the help or was it hubris? Of course, any unit in active combat could use backup, but she wasn’t going to fall onto contingencies unless it was absolutely necessary.
In the distance, she could hear the sounds of gunfire and shouting. It was indistinct, but she knew it for exactly what it was. She wondered if this was what it was like for her ancestors on Earth, fighting in the wars they saw. The ESS hadn’t seen true war for decades, certainly not in Andy’s lifetime. But now, here it was. Did it compare to how it used to be? Did time change anything? Or was war always just...war?
Her earpiece chirped and pierced through her musing. She answered quickly.
“Sergeant Kavar here, Sir,” the leader of Theta Squad reported in. “We have captured the loose Arkana soldier.”
“Good work, Sergeant,” Andy replied. “Bring him to our location to be placed with the other prisoners.” She heard the acknowledgement and the call chirped to an end. At this, she cast a glance over at the group they had bound and saw that, so far, they were all still alive. This was curious to her and she wondered if it would last, but she couldn’t afford to give it too much thought.
For now, it just was what it was.
It didn’t take long for Kavar and his squad to come into sight, bringing a restrained Arkana along with them. Luckily for them, though perplexing in its way, the Arkana was walking without giving them too much trouble. Maybe they thought the ESS wouldn’t be able to hold them off, in the end, so being captured wouldn’t matter. They would be freed when the rest of their people were in control of the planet.
Andy was determined to disappoint them.
As the prisoner was added to the pile, there was another chirp and another call for Andy to hastily answer. This time, it was from the 21st. The voice was almost lost amid the sounds of active combat right around the speaker.
“Major, we have a problem!”
17
Andy wasn’t sure if it was irony or not—that being a concept she had never been sure she understood completely—but just minutes after determining that she did not want to change plans unless it was really needed...well, it became really needed.
The 21st had been positioned where Andy had thought it was the least likely they would need a heavy defensive line. This had been true through the initial onslaught that the 15th and 33rd had to face, but it didn’t last. Eventually, the Arkana had moved to that position with enough troops that the 21st couldn’t hold.
Theta had been her contingency, and she left Kavar and his squad to hold Alpha’s former position while they—as the closest to where the lines had broken for the 21st—rushed to aid their fellow Marines. The 21st had managed to hold after the initial onslaught, but a full group of Arkana had broken through and were now loose in the city.
A group of Arkana loose was a problem, and Andy didn’t want to let them get too deep into the city where they could start taking over critical systems.
Andy knew which direction they had been heading so she angled Alpha Squad’s path to reach where they were likely to be headed rather than trailing them. It was an educated guess at best, but it was their best chance.
She called them to slow from their run as they drew toward the likely intercept point, signaling for them to spread out slightly and start looking down every street and checking in every building. She didn’t imagine the Arkana were going to try to hide, but she couldn’t rule it out. They might try to conceal themselves to lull them into the idea that they were gone.
Andy wasn’t going to let that happen.
They looked everywhere, and tried to listen to everything. Combat still echoed in the distance, but it was quieter here. Other noises began to intrude as they slowly made their way forward, very slowly. It felt a lot like hurry up and wait, even though they were still moving.
One by one, they passed buildings, checking doors and windows, but almost all were sealed and showed no signs of tampering. The occasional one that seemed to have been opened was thoroughly checked out by a pair of Marines while the others kept watch from the street, waiting for the all clear. Each building they looked at was given an all clear.
The further along they moved, the more the “other noises” began to intrude. Soon they realized they were moving more into an industrial area of the city and while the populace had cleared out, many of the automated systems had been left running to keep the city and the planet running, even during the battle.
“I feel like they are here,” Roxanna said in a low voice beside her. “But it’s hard to pick out anything specific. Emotions are running high from every being on the planet, and it’s difficult to separate the Arkana from the Marines and citizens that are still in the city. I don’t think they are far from here, though.”
“Thank you, Sergeant,” Andy said just as quietly, without looking at the Selerid.
There was as much noise for the ears as for the empathic senses, apparently. Even though Andy didn’t have those kinds of senses herself, she could imagine that it was a lot more difficult to differentiate in a city than it was on their ship. There, she knew everyone on board well enough to pick them out. Here, it would be different. She knew they couldn’t rely too heavily on the Selerid to warn them of an ambush.
They would just have to stick with their own senses, and the power of being a group.
When Alpha Squad reached an intersection of streets, Andy called them to a halt and she looked in all directions. Since even as recently as that morning, it had been a busy street, there were no discernible signs that would tell which way the Arkana went, or even if they had come through the area at all.
She inhaled slowly and let her dark eyes roam. There were three different ways that they could proceed from where they were, and she knew that two of them would lead toward the city center where all the “important stuff” was. It was assumed that the Arkana were going to try to head there, since that was the entire purpose of being on the planet.
Control those, and the planet was theirs. It would put them in a better position to fight off the ESS as well, and they couldn’t have that.
“They’re heading towards city center,” Roxanna said, although it was with a frown. “I am almost sure of it.”
“Scans are being distorted, but what I can see would concur,” Anallin agreed, looking up from the handheld scanner. Those things seemed to be distorted more often than not, and Andy wondered why they even carried them.
Between the two streets, there were no obvious signs of which way they had gone, so she once again had to make the best guess she could. She looked down one and then the other
one more time before gesturing for them to follow the one that was the most direct route to the city’s center.
With their new direction chosen, they began moving ahead again. Weapons up and eyes open, they returned to their pattern of watching all sides of the street and checking every building and door and window they passed.
It didn’t take an empath to feel the tension radiating between them, each wondering if they were on the right path and, if they were, where the Arkana would be. Were they walking into an ambush? Would they be right in the open and make this easy? Would the Arkana find a good sniper location and pick them off one by one?
Andy had all of these questions going through her mind simultaneously, and she knew she wasn’t the only one. No one said it, but everyone was thinking of it.
As they made their way slowly down that street, they didn’t find any of the Arkana soldiers that were on the loose. Even the number of unlocked windows and doors were few and far between.
She was just beginning to wonder if she had chosen the wrong street when she saw something odd up ahead. She called a halt as she gave it a thorough visual examination, although she couldn’t make out much of it because of the distance. From what she could see, however, it looked like some sort of hastily formed barricade across the street.
“Thoughts?” she asked.
“The citizens trying to stop any invaders from getting through?” Jade suggested.
“The Arkana trying to block our pursuit?” Dan said.
Either seemed likely, but the only way to find out was to get closer. She gave the signal for them to move forward again, although this time at an even slower pace. She looked at the barricade, then to either side, then at the barricade again. She could see the crates and what seemed like...random industrial debris? It was hard to figure out what it all was, but it was clearly not a thought-out design.
She still didn’t see anything suggesting there were living beings around now, so she nodded towards it. “Let’s start pulling this apart and try to get a better look at the other side of the street.”
Dan and Anallin were the first two forward, and they began to pull the makeshift barricade apart.
Suddenly, Roxanna called out urgently, “Stop!”
18
The abrupt warning gave Dan and Anallin just enough time to throw themselves to the sides of the barricade. It was just in time, because within a heartbeat of their movements, a large energy blast broke through the barricade and sent pieces of it everywhere.
Had the two Marines still been in position, they may well have been killed.
Andy stifled a long string of curses that wanted to escape, because there simply wasn’t time to let them out. They pressed themselves to either side of the street, but had little cover now that most of the barricade had been destroyed. At least they knew where the Arkana were, now.
Bringing up her rifle, she took aim and returned fire. It became a basic firefight then, although each group had just enough cover, distance, and obstructions to keep from scoring any good hits.
At one point, Jade cried out and Andy spared a glance. The young Marine’s arm had taken a glancing hit from an energy bolt. Her uniform sleeve was melted away, and the skin underneath was bright red. Andy couldn’t tell if it had melted to muscle or was just really angry skin. Jade was visibly gritting her teeth, the arm held against her side protectively, but she did not drop her weapon and she kept firing.
Andy leaned forward slightly, trying to get a better look at the enemy without putting herself too far in the line of fire.
She spotted one and aimed her rifle. He spotted her at the same time. There was a long heartbeat between them before she pulled the trigger, and felt the recoil of her rifle. She flowed with that motion to pull herself back behind what little cover she had, narrowly avoiding the energy bolt that lanced the air.
Roxanna fired a shot from the other side of the street, and Andy heard a cry and a soft thud. At least someone had hit one of them.
Suddenly, there was silence.
“Hold fire,” Andy said in a low voice. None of them moved, however, or relaxed in the least. Instead, they waited for several long, terrible moments before Andy leaned forward to look again. “They’re running,” she hissed, then gestured for them to pursue.
They ran after the Arkana. The enemy would occasionally turn and try to fire, but they could not take time to fire accurately without risking being caught.
“Don’t let them get any further ahead,” the major hissed as her boots slammed into the pavement, one foot after the other. Her body was under the influence of an adrenaline rush and she knew that her body would pay the price, when all was said and done.
With their long legs and slender builds, the Arkana were all good runners, but somehow, Alpha Squad managed to gain a little ground on them. Perhaps it was because those being pursued couldn’t stop looking back and taking haphazard shots. That was just poor strategy, and self-control, Andy reasoned somewhere in her mind.
As she tried to look beyond those they were chasing, she could see that another intersection was coming up. This one didn’t form the perfect four-way stop that the previous one had and was more like a Y, with the street splitting off into two angled streets. She knew, somehow, that they were going to split up.
She counted, in between the jarring of her brain from the headlong sprint. Five Arkana. Five Marines. How were they going to divide themselves?
Andy leaned forward slightly, trying to push herself to get any extra speed that she could. She hoped that maybe they could reach the Arkana before they even entered the junction and stop the choice from even being made. But the Arkana were fast. Too fast. Although she tried, and knew that the others were trying hard right alongside her, she could soon tell that they would not stop them before they had the opportunity to split up.
Maybe they wouldn’t split and it would continue as a straight pursuit, but she couldn’t imagine that happening. Not really. It was just wishful thinking.
The Arkana reached the split of the Y and, just as she figured they would, they split up, with three going right and two going left. Andy didn’t see any sort of gesture, so she guessed there was just a random divide. As far as she knew, the Arkana did not possess any sort of telepathy—just a resistance to it when others tried to use it on them.
Andy, however, knew for sure that she wasn’t telepathic. “Thomas with me,” she ordered tightly, her voice reverberating with the pounding of her feet. She gestured down the left fork, after the group of two. “The rest, after them.”
No one acknowledged the order, because they really didn’t need to. Dan was the closest to her because she was a good runner and in the lead, and he otherwise had the longest legs in the group. Anallin trailed, being shorter and stouter, but they all kept up.
They reached the split themselves, just moments behind the others, and each went the way Andy had ordered them to.
The Arkana looked behind themselves again and saw that Andy and Dan were still in tight pursuit. They looked like they cursed, although she couldn’t hear them, and started swinging their heads around. Looking for an escape or way to slow the Marines down, no doubt.
One of the two turned again and tried to shoot. The shot just barely missed Dan’s head, and Andy tried to return fire. Miraculously, her shot landed and the soldier hit the ground. The other one looked like it wanted to help, but then kept running. So much for loyalty, Andy thought as she pushed herself to keep on. The one on the ground wasn’t moving, so they didn’t stop to restrain him.
The remaining alien turned and found an open door. It was one of the only ones Andy had seen that was left open. Lucky for the Arkana, but less so for Andy and Dan. “Make sure there’s no back way out of here,” she ordered as she rushed into the building after the enemy soldier.
19
As she ran into the building and was making her way across the front room in hot pursuit, she heard an abrupt crashing from just outside the door. Although she knew it g
ave the other soldier more time—maybe too much—she had to stop and take at least one look back, which was just enough to see that...something had crashed in front of the door and blocked it.
That meant that unless there was another entrance that Dan would find, she was alone in the building with an enemy soldier...which meant that she had just done something kind of stupid.
She did not have time to fix it now, however. She would either have to trust in her squad-mates to dig her out, or dig herself out once she’d caught the Arkana. She didn’t waste any more time staring at the blocked door and instead rushed into the building after the escaping soldier.
There wasn’t much by way of furniture in this building, for which Andy was grateful. None of the lights were on, but there were several windows that let in the sun and provided enough light to see by. She hurried through the first room and then came to an abrupt halt at the doorway, bringing up her rifle and swinging around the door in the way she had been trained to.
The Arkana was not in sight, but she could hear the thudding footsteps ahead of her.
What she was looking at was a flight of stairs. The light filtering into the staircase was far more sparse, but she could make things out just enough once her eyes adjusted. She moved up the staircase, ears straining for any sign that the soldier was coming back for her, but at least there were no hiding places along the stairway that he could come out of.
Her heart was thumping in her ears in the sudden quiet of the building. Although it had been very loud outside, with the ambient noise of machines and industry and what it took to maintain the city, all of that was blocked out by this building, likely by design. Now it was quiet, so quiet that it was almost loud in its own right.
Keeping her back to the wall, she slid her way up the stairs until she reached the top and she looked around warily as her head rose by increments to see what was beyond. All she saw was a long, semi-dark hallway and no sign of the so-pale-they-were-almost-glowing Arkana.
Earth Space Service Space Marines Boxed Set Page 20
