by Sam Bradbury
Orlock affected amusement, playing to the room somewhat as he replied, ‘You build weapons, Stahl. I decide how to use them.’
Now Stahl stood from his chair, stubbing out his cigarette and striding across the room towards Orlock, his capture troopers in tow. ‘Am I the only person who sees a problem with this kind of archaic thinking?’ he said, voice scarred by smoke. ‘If the Helghast are going to rule, we need to adapt, like we did when we first arrived on Helghan. This so-called strategy won’t work. Overwhelming numbers alone are not enough.’
There was a muted but nonetheless all-too-audible sharp intake of breath and Admiral Orlock bristled, his two guards coming forward also, alive to the sudden threat. The senators, cowards and sycophants to a man, cringed in anticipation of violence, and Senator Gunsteling attempted to intercede, either hoping to prevent hostilities occurring, or to increase his standing in the eyes of Admiral Orlock who, on present evidence at least, looked most likely to be the next autarch.
‘Let’s not presume to tell the admiral how to do his job, shall we, Chairman?’ he said with a wheedling tone.
Stahl ignored him. ‘Why not bargain with the ISA?’ he suggested sweetly. ‘Lure them towards us. Promise them … whatever. And when they’re close … all in one place … then we kill them.’
‘Chairman Stahl,’ snapped Senator Gunsteling, finding a little resolve from somewhere, ‘that is quite enough. Return to your seat.’
Stahl treated his order with the contempt it deserved. By now he had moved to the middle of the room and was standing face to face with Admiral Orlock, Visari’s chair between them. Now it was Stahl’s turn to lay a proprietorial hand on the back of the luxurious seat. Orlock regarded the hand for a moment, as though it was not a hand, but a turd. Then his eyes went up to look directly at Stahl and there was steel in his voice as he said, ‘Visari may have tolerated you, Stahl. But I am not Visari.’
‘Yes. That much is abundantly clear,’ said Stahl with the ghost of a smile. Again the room seemed to pulsate with shock, but neither Orlock nor Stahl were aware of anything now outside of each other. And Stahl leaned forward, so close that only the admiral could hear him, and said, ‘Does it hurt? Knowing that, no matter what you do, you will never emerge from Visari’s shadow? Is that why you let him die?’
His blood up, Orlock yanked the chair from between them and it skidded away as the admiral squared up to Stahl, his eyes blazing. Stahl, though by far the smaller of the two men, did not flinch, and for a moment they stood eyeball to eyeball. Both sets of bodyguards tensed, ready to raise their weapons.
‘The Helghast will never bargain with the ISA. There will be no quarter,’ hissed Orlock.
He jabbed at a button on the console in order to address the ground troops and at last this chamber on high was linked to the conflict below. Orlock’s voice was relayed to the comlink of every Helghast soldier in the city as he said, ‘Attention, all troops. This is the admiral. Double your efforts. I want the ISA dead within the hour.’
He released the button and glared challengingly at Stahl, who backed away as though to concede his point. The guards relaxed, as did the senators, and Stahl returned to his seat, outwardly deferential to the admiral, while inwardly most pleased with the outcome.
For Jorhan Stahl had plans. Big plans.
First, however, he wanted any faith the senators had in Admiral Orlock severely shaken and, as such, the confrontation had been a success – by letting himself be provoked Orlock had played right into his hands. Stahl hid a smile as he took his seat and turned his attention to the monitor.
Now to enjoy seeing the destruction of the ISA forces, he thought, as the room watched red blips showing the Helghast moving rapidly towards the shoreline of the Corinth River.
Chapter Eight
We were over the river, on the shoreline, racing towards the crater, and the Higs were pummelling us, especially the four HAMRs leading the way. Our job was to punch a hole in their defences for the rest of the convoy to blow through: Rico and his HC, Solowka, were in HAMR Four; yours truly in the turret of HAMR Two, with my HC, Gomez, in the driver’s seat. Gomez was only happy when he was driving – and driving made him very happy. He’d learned to drive on his family’s land in the Vektan countryside and, shit, did they train those farm boys right because Gomez could really drive that thing.
We bounced along the shoreline, skeletal buildings and girders reaching from the dirt like the fingers of a corpse. Above us in a rusty, mottled sky were Helghast ships making their way to join the onslaught of our cruisers. The howl of them was deafening. The thump of automatic gunfire was deafening. The roar of the HAMR engines was deafening. My world was forged from mechanical noise.
Bullets spanged into the hull of the HAMR and I spun the turret, opening fire on Hig infantry in a building to my left. Bastards had occupied all of the higher ground and were raining gunfire on us. From another building tracer fire split the sky. Shells spattered into mud and concrete and rattled off the HAMR’s armour.
Let them come. I wanted to be off this planet so bad I could taste it.
‘Oh baby,’ shouted Gomez, so loud I wasn’t sure if I heard him over the comlink or from the driver’s seat below. ‘There’s our cruiser. Is that the Dauntless or the Compulsion?’
I swivelled in the turret, straining against the harness to see our ships. We had three cruisers in position – the Compulsion, Dauntless and Arcturus – but I saw nothing … nothing but a skyline of jagged buildings, like a row of broken teeth. Maybe Gomez was mistaken.
Suddenly: ‘It’s the Compulsion,’ shouted Rico from HAMR Four, and even over the static-soaked line I could hear the joy in his voice. I twisted as Gomez crested a busted-up bit of the highway and suddenly there it was. In the middle of a sky riven by war hung our ships, three giant sentinels barely withstanding the barrage of the Helghast missiles. Explosive blasts marbled the sky, the sound of them dull in the distance.
‘All units,’ called Rico, ‘we’ve spotted our evac. Stick together. Get everybody to the extraction site. We’ll plough the road.’
‘Copy that,’ I replied.
We were close now. Christ, we were close, and the enemy must have known that too. Their best bet was to send armour after us, but maybe they were clean out of tanks and APCs because there was no armour we could see.
‘Sev, at your six. You got armour.’
Shit. Spoke too soon. The turret whined as I spun to get visual on a line of AAPCs at our rear. My cannons spat, barrels glowing with the heat. The first carrier careered off the track in a shower of sparks and fire, but behind it was another one and it returned fire, forcing me to crouch in the turret as hot sparks rained down around me, screaming at Gomez to speed up.
‘Gimme a fucking break,’ he shrieked in reply, just as the second tank rammed us.
‘Evasive, Gomez,’ I yelled back, ‘execute evasive …’
He did and I lurched in the harness as the HAMR slid in a storm of dirt. If an AAPC could look surprised then that’s how the Hig carrier looked as suddenly we were side by side with it and it was firing at nothing. The cannon jumped in my hands as I emptied into the carrier, which rolled and exploded. Gomez whoop-whooped his approval and pulled us back on to the track, wheels spinning, picking up speed again. I looked behind and could see some of our convoy but not all, just as confirmation came over the comlink.
‘Enemy keeps reinforcing.’
‘We’ve got massive Hig build-up here.’
‘Command, we’re going to have to find another way through.’
Trying to shake off the feeling that things were falling apart, that the whole evac was FUBAR, I warned Gomez about incoming RPGs then reduced a crumbling building to dust with the cannon, seeing screaming Higs fall. Ahead of us, Rico was mopping up the last of the armour, but judging by the sound of what was coming over the comlink they’d closed in behind us, scattering even more of the column. This wasn’t over yet. Christ, not by any means.
And so mu
ch for punching a hole. When the HAMRs eventually pulled over, what came through in our wake was a skinny procession of APCs, buggies and Archers. Only a fraction of the convoy, and a demoralized fraction at that: inside the APCs troops stared out of the windows with wide, haunted eyes, and what I saw on their faces was disbelief. They couldn’t understand how we could go from being a conquering force one moment to a tattered, retreating army the next. We, the ISA, the biggest bad-asses in the galaxy. There’s no training for that. Defeat has no protocols. It was beyond their capacity to grasp.
Over the comlink we started getting reports that the Higs had fallen back to establish a perimeter, that they had set up mobile arc cannons and armour. There was no end to it. They wanted us dead as badly as we wanted to get out.
Then: ‘Alpha Squad, do you read?’ I heard in my headset.
‘Copy that, this is Sevchenko, Alpha Squad.’
‘This is PFT Gutman,’ he said. ‘We’re pinned down here and attempting to disable an arc cannon. Request back-up.’
‘Give me your location, PFT Gutman,’ I said, and indicated to Rico, raising Gomez at the same time. The dilapidated fragment of convoy trundled on towards the extraction point as our two HAMRs turned and we began negotiating the rubble towards Gutman’s signal. Elsewhere the rest of the convoy was finding other ways through; like all of us, fighting every inch of the way.
Sure, the Higs wanted us dead badly.
But we wanted to get out more badly than that.
Chapter Nine
We were close to the pinned-down squad when an enemy arc cruiser opened fire on one of our Intruders – one so close to me that I saw the pilot’s eyes widen a second before he burned to death and the Intruder exploded in a ball of flame, raining shrapnel on me in the gunner’s turret of the HAMR. I shrank down in the harness as the burning dropship flailed in the air then sank with a whine of stricken engines, finally hitting the ground.
Right in our path.
‘Gomez,’ I shouted, ‘stop.’
‘Copy that,’ replied Gomez, wrestling with the wheel and swerving at the very last second. Beside us, Rico’s HAMR also skidded to a halt.
We found ourselves below the level of a highway; from it came the sound of a firefight: Gutman and his men. I was unclipping my harness at the same time as Rico, the pair of us jumping down from our HAMRs, assault rifles ready. Gutman and his men were close.
‘Gomez, remain here,’ I said, slamming a clip into my M82.
‘No fucking way, sir.’ He grinned a big insolent farm-boy’s grin at me. ‘I’m coming with you.’ He pulled out his sidearm and cocked it to show he meant business.
‘Listen, I need you here monitoring comms and ready for evac,’ I sighed. ‘Solowka’s staying too. Keep each other company.’
Gomez pulled a face. ‘Alpha Squad business only, eh?’
‘Yeah, and business is booming.’
He frowned, but holstered his pistol. ‘You make it back in one piece, please, sir.’
I looked from the turret towards the extraction point where our cruisers battled on. ‘Sure,’ I said, and climbed down from the vehicle.
Private Gutman and his men were taking cover from hostile gunfire, most of it coming from a gantry at their twelve. They had a second Intruder in support, but as we ran over to the group a beam of petrusite fizzed into the air from the far side of the gantry. It found the Intruder and blew it into fragments, raining white-hot shrapnel down on us as we took cover, huge chunks of the dropship thunking down into the road, followed by cooking chunks of flesh.
How many? I wondered. How many had been on the ship? When do we get to stop dying?
Further up the road was another ISA group and this lot was beckoning madly to Gutman’s group to join them. Everywhere there were bodies of dead ISA. The two groups were pinned down, the men terrified, and for a second I felt a spasm of irritation: what the fuck did these guys think they were doing? Why the hell didn’t the first group move up and join the second? Use cover. Set up a grid. Lean and peek. Judging by the bodies in the street they’d been trying to run the distance between them, but it was a dumb tactic. It was getting them killed.
‘What the hell are you doing? Come forward,’ yelled the trooper from down the street. Bullets smacked into the concrete and another beam of petrusite divided the sky as though to ward off any further advance. These guys didn’t need telling twice.
‘No way, man. No way,’ Gutman was calling as Rico and I scuttled over, keeping low and squeezing off a few rounds at the hidden Helghast troops. Gutman looked us over, boggle-eyed, sweat gleaming on his brow. Seeing we were friendlies he relaxed a little. Then on realizing we were Alpha Squad he decided we were in charge right now. Never was a soldier so pleased to be demoted.
‘What are you doing?’ I snapped at him. ‘You gotta keep moving.’
‘Captain Narville said we need to take out the arc cannon,’ he managed between gasping, frightened breaths, ‘but the machine guns are tearing us apart.’ He gestured up at the gantry. ‘We just don’t have enough men. The convoy’s too scattered.’
Rico and I shared a glance. That psychic connection again.
‘See?’ said Rico to me, in a near-whisper. ‘We told Narville this was going to happen.’
I nodded. Looked around and saw a side door.
‘Okay,’ I told him, ‘I’m going to get to higher ground and take out the machine guns. You think you can get these guys to move forward?’
Rico gave me a withering look. Of course he could. And as if to prove the point he leapt up, already opening fire and urging the terrified men on, providing cover as I went left, first through the door and out of harm’s way. The last I saw was Rico yelling at the soldiers, and I grinned: they were in good hands now.
Another Intruder went down. I could hear Rico over the comlink, cursing, ordering the men to form up on him, at the same time shouting at me to clean up the machine gunners on the gantry.
Okay, Rico. One thing at a time. Making my way up I met Helghast on the stairs, exchanged fire, took them out, made my way up a floor and surprised some more guards. Two snipers were startled and tried to turn their rifles on me, but were too slow; the first I took down with a headshot, the second I shot in the stomach and he lay writhing for a moment.
I tried not to think about them, especially the writhing one, who died in agony. I tried not to think that their ancestors once lived on Earth, just as mine did, and that somewhere within all that fanaticism was a human being, with the same hopes and fears as me. I tried not to think of all that as I watched the dying sniper gurgle and spasm on the floor. Instead I thought of my mom, my dad and Amy. And then took his sniper rifle.
It was a VC32. I checked the ammo was armour-piercing and took up position. Over the other side of a courtyard were more snipers and I steadied my breathing, the VC32 snug in my shoulder. I adjusted the scope to find the first Hig sniper who was behind cover in a building opposite, oblivious to me. I positioned the crosshairs on his head, tried not to think of him as human, squeezed the trigger. His head exploded.
I worked my way to the gantry where I cleared up a couple of machine gunners. By the time I got there, Rico and the ISA group had advanced, but were still pinned down.
Below was the arc cannon – an APC with a modified turret. The cannon itself was revolving slowly, moving to coordinates, and the thick, contoured barrel seemed to shimmer, as though barely able to contain the death within. It was still shimmering as Rico’s grunts moved up, killed the crew and laid demo charges. Thumbs up; the guys retreated for the fireworks, getting as far away as possible.
It exploded with a heat that seared the skin, a wall of fire rising as high as my position. There was a moment’s silence after the explosion. None of us had seen one of these things go up before. We didn’t know the stability of petrusite; there might be secondary explosions, some unforeseen reaction. But there was nothing. The APC burned. A thick column of black, oily smoke rose up to join the nuclear haze above
, and the grunts were giving it Aroohah, and slapping each other high-fives.
Whoop it up, guys, I thought. Enjoy it while it lasts. But it was just one arc nest, and the news over the comlink was bad. The convoy was scattered in different positions around the crater, trying to break through the Higs’ perimeter. In my headset I could hear group commanders calling in, trying to raise Narville and calling for Intruder support to airlift them over the Hig defences or just to provide reinforcements or back-up. Cutting through all of them came a woman’s voice.
‘Assistance … I repeat. Echo Echo Two Three Mayday. This is Jammer, over. Can anyone hear us?’
She sounded close to panicking, just holding it together. Rico shot a glance at me and replied. ‘My name is Sergeant Velasquez. I hear you. Over.’
‘Oh, thank God,’ replied Jammer. ‘We’re in quadrant four-four-one. We have been cut off and need assistance.’
‘All right, stay calm, Jammer,’ replied Rico. ‘Send me your exact coordinates and we’ll come get you.’
We did our psychic thing. We were going to get her. She was hardly the only ISA trooper needing help, but she was nearby, and, shit – Alpha Squad never left a man behind and we sure as hell never left a woman behind. We were just about to leave the group and return to our HAMRs when Narville cut in.
‘That’s a negative,’ he barked over the comlink. ‘Jammer, hang tight. Intruders are on their way.’
Rico frowned. I knew that look. That was a look that said Rico wasn’t in the mood for trusting a word Narville said. Couldn’t blame him. I was beginning to have some fairly major doubts about the captain myself. Nobody ever said getting off this rock was going to be easy but, damn, if you wanted to be kind you’d say our retreat had not proceeded according to plan, and if you wanted to be honest you’d say there’d been one almighty screw-up. And now we were paying the price: us, the likes of Gutman and now this Jammer. The whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth and I was way to the south of hothead than Rico. I laid a hand on his shoulder to calm him down as Narville gave us our orders: ‘Stick to the plan and clear the path to the extraction point,’ he barked over the comlink. ‘Now.’
