by Richard Fox
“Who the hell?” He looked at Tongea and the line of armor after him. The Maori shrugged. None of the rest of the armor’s gauss cannons were smoking.
Martel looked back and found a half-dozen smoking craters where the attacking fighters had been. The Kesaht had broken off their attack and were in the middle of a dogfight with black fighter craft with forward-swept wings.
A fighter roared overhead. Martel caught a Templar cross painted under the wings.
“That’s not one of ours,” Tongea said.
“Ibarrans. If they keep not shooting at us, our situation will be slightly less terrible,” Martel said. “To the city. Follow me!”
He swung a hand overhead toward the embattled city and transformed his legs into treads, rolling forward, at the point of his lance. The rest of his armor formed into a diamond-shaped formation.
They closed on the city quickly. As he caught up to an APC, a line of broken track trailing from the left side, Martel shifted back into his walking configuration. The hatch was down, and Rangers crouched next to it, about to abandon the vehicle.
“Back inside!” Martel shouted. He ran to the front and grabbed the forward edge of the vehicle, the metal bending in his grip. Tongea herded the Rangers back up the ramp, then broke the ramp off with a quick stomp and gripped the sides.
The dozen Rangers inside held very still as the armor hefted their entire APC off the ground and began running. When a Kesaht fighter strayed too close, Tongea’s rotary cannon snapped up and fired on it.
Martel twisted his helm up and all the way around to watch the skies. A dogfight raged overhead. Black Ibarran fighters and gray Terran Eagles battled the Kesaht craft. Alien landers exploded and arced toward the planet on columns of smoke and fire. In the distance, pairs of the oversized landers took off and vanished over the mountains.
Explosions popped throughout the sky, and Martel knew the battle extended well into orbit.
“Saint Kallen…witness this day,” Martel said.
“She is ever with us, brother,” Tongea said.
They passed a burning building and dropped the APC next to a hastily formed motor pool in a parking lot.
Captain Sobieski, standing next to open metal doors leading underneath a mostly intact building, motioned Martel over.
Just beneath ground level were three Ibarran legionnaires, the faceplates of their armor covered with a subdued red Templar cross. A rabble of men and women in light armor and carrying gauss carbines clustered behind them.
“This is my commander,” Sobieski said, the rattle of gauss fire and whoosh of missiles sounding in the distance.
“Captain Hanson,” the legionnaire said, giving Martel a nod. “I’ve got a company of reservists that are supposed to man the walls. How many Rangers have you got?”
Martel looked back at the APCs. Just how few made it to the city hit him like a punch to the gut. The city’s edge tapered down to a few low buildings and dirt. In the distance, where he’d seen the Kesaht landers, a wide plume of dust rose up. Something big was coming.
“Maybe two hundred. Walls?” Martel asked.
As if on cue, horns blared around them. Just beyond the city’s edge, a ten-foot-tall slanted metal wall rose up out of the ground. Another section rose behind that, forming covered battlements with firing positions.
“That’s a neat trick,” Martel said to Hanson.
“We knew this day would come,” he said. “Just didn’t think it would come so soon.”
“Sir?” A Ranger with bloodstained armor and a cracked faceplate jogged over to Martel. “Major Whitelaw, I’ve got command of our Rangers after we lost Jones and the XO.”
“Major, I’ll leave you with Hanson to coordinate local defense,” Martel said, looking into the city where a lander lifted off a few blocks away. “My armor has other priorities.”
Hanson grabbed a reservist by the shoulder and shouted into the tunnel.
“We’ve got friendlies out here. If it’s alien, shoot it. If it’s human, then it’s worth dying for. Move, move, move!” He practically threw the man up the stairs and Ibarrans boiled out of the tunnel and made for the walls.
Hanson looked up at Martel and beat his fist against his chest in salute.
Martel banged his fist against his heart, and the ring carried along the wall.
“We’ll man the wall, Colonel. Come running if you hear us shooting,” Hanson said.
“Fight well.” Martel raised his gauss cannons and took off running down a street. “Templar! With me!”
Chapter 24
Roland felt the slow turn of his drop pod as it fell through Balmaseda’s atmosphere, his borrowed armor detecting no rise in temperature. He ran a system check on his sensor. Nothing as large as a three-suit drop pod could skirt through atmo with no friction heat.
“Stop screwing around, bean head,” Morrigan said through their local IR. “You’ll trigger your active scanners and spotlight us for the enemy.”
“Something’s off with my sensors. Did your crews not integrate my womb correctly?” Roland asked.
“I won’t tell Master Chief Nieves you said that,” Morrigan said as she sent him a wire diagram of their drop pod. “We’re rigged for stealth. Active thermal and atmo maskers. Hull will absorb or refract any radar waves. The pod takes more time and resources to assemble than our armor, but the cost is worth getting us to the ground in one piece to fight.”
“That sounds a lot better than those damned insertion torpedoes. And who are you calling a ‘bean head’?”
“You. Bean head. You haven’t done a combat drop yet,” she said.
“What? I’ve done three drops—”
“Not with us, you haven’t.” Nicodemus popped up in Roland’s HUD, a map of Balmaseda City with him. A red field bulged into the eastern part of the city. “Fortifications failed to emplace to the east. Hydraulics probably took a hit during the initial bombardment. Governor Thrace’s moving what he can to stem the tide.”
A line of blue traced along the enemy’s advance and unit icons popped up behind it. Roland found some relief that the Ibarrans hadn’t strayed too far from Terran battle command methods.
“Our LZ’s near their reserve,” Nicodemus said. “We’ll spearhead the counterattack. Can you do a skid stop, bean head?”
“You really should have asked me this before you loaded me into the drop pod—”
“Answer!”
Roland flinched inside his womb. He wasn’t in his old lance, and the lance he was with was about to drop into the middle of a fight. That he was joking around filled him with guilt.
“Yes, sir. I’m rated excellent on skid stops and have done one in combat,” Roland said.
“I’m telling him,” Morrigan said. “Roland, two things you need to know. First: Nicodemus has a quantum dot communicator on his helm. Looks like a normal shortwave unit, but it has two red chevrons on it. That’s how we’re getting around the Kesaht jamming. If necessary, you take it and coordinate what you can with the city’s defenders. We don’t have many of them.”
The only reason I’d need it is if you two are dead, Roland thought.
“Second: Terrans are here,” she said.
Roland’s eyebrows shot up. The implications raced through his mind, and he managed one word.
“Oh.”
“Good news is that we’re fighting on the same side, for now,” Morrigan said. “Your friends showed up intending to remove our colony and take everyone away in chains. We’ll see if the truce holds long enough for us to get our people off the planet.”
“I…I won’t fire on them,” Roland said.
“Nor do we expect you to,” Nicodemus said. “Fight Kesaht. Help with the evac. What happens after that is anyone’s guess.”
Roland squirmed inside his womb. It was bad enough that he wore Ibarra colors on his armor, was prepared to shed blood for them…but the idea of fighting Terran forces almost made him want to throw up. He wouldn’t fire on them, but to any Ranger
or Strike Marine watching him down a weapon sight, he looked like any other Ibarran armor.
If they somehow identified him…
“Nicodemus, are there any Terran armor down there?” Roland asked.
“Prep for drop,” Nicodemus said. “Three…two…one…mark.”
The metal lid on his bay broke away and Roland saw a distant mountain range. He had a split second to note the burning buildings and fighters battling around him. The pod pushed him out and a wall of wind smacked into him. He kicked his feet down and activated the jet pack on his back.
Jets blasted, slowing him almost to a stop. To one watching on the ground, it looked like a giant angel had suddenly appeared on wings of fire.
Roland faced down a wide boulevard, wrecked and burning cars littering the road. Figures on foot milled around buildings leading all the back to a highway that extended beyond the city, where the fortifications jutted a few feet above the ground.
He jettisoned the pack and fell to the road, using his momentum to propel him into a run.
A rifle shot snapped over a car, and Roland’s HUD marked a Rakka foot soldier. Just behind it were three Sanheel, none of whom looked prepared for Roland’s arrival.
Roland charged toward them, obliterating the Rakka and the vehicle it was using for cover with a single gauss round. Shields flared around the Sanheel, protecting them from the blast.
The three readied their long rifles as Roland closed the distance. As he brought his gauss cannons to bear, Roland swore he heard the Sanheel snort in laughter. He lowered his aim and fired at their feet.
The round blew a hole in the ground and sent one of the centaurs stumbling into another. The impact fouled the other’s aim and it fired into the air.
Roland kicked a smoldering piece of the destroyed ground car at the third Sanheel. He knew it wouldn’t break through the alien’s shields, but the Sanheel flinched all the same, a victim of its own reflexes and instincts.
Fort Knox trained armor to be armor—killing machines, not simply soldiers wearing a suit. If any Sanheel tried the same trick on him, they’d receive a bullet to the face at the same time they realized how clever they weren’t.
Roland grabbed the third Sanheel’s rifle and thrust the weapon against its chest, snapping it in half and earning a pained grunt from the alien. Roland grabbed the stunned Sanheel by the wrist and jammed the broken end of the rifle into its face. The metal pierced the Sanheel below the chin and stopped when it hit the top of his skull.
A Sanheel thrust its rifle at Roland but he caught it by the barrel and pushed the muzzle aside just as it fired. He felt heat flare against his shoulder. The alien snarled at Roland, spittle flecking from thick lips and off needle sharp teeth.
A bayonet snapped out from the side of the rifle, the blade humming as a cutting field formed along the edge. The Sanheel struggled to push the bayonet home, but its muscles were no match for Roland’s armor.
“The flesh is weak,” Roland said as he twisted his upper body around on the waist actuators, doing a 360 that ripped the rifle out of the Sanheel’s grasp. Roland angled the butt of the weapon around and crushed his enemy’s skull when it hit home.
The final Sanheel ran off at a gallop before its companion hit the ground.
Hefting the rifle up like a javelin, Roland hurled it. The blade passed through the shields and buried itself in the alien’s hindquarters. It stumbled forward and reached back to grasp at the weapon, then froze, staring at Roland.
The Sanheel’s head exploded with a boom.
Roland looked behind him. Nicodemus and Morrigan carried their Mauser recoilless rifles, and smoke rose off both barrels. Seeing them in their black armor, in the middle of a combat zone, caught him off guard, and his first reaction was to see them as the enemy, no matter how much time he’d spent with them out of armor. Then he looked down at his own black arms and legs, stained with alien blood.
I am armor, he thought, just not the same armor I was.
“Something wrong with your Mauser, Roland?” Morrigan asked.
“I…” Roland reached to his back and unsnapped the mag locks securing his own Mauser to his armor. “I forgot I had it. Guess the field trials are a success?”
“The enemy made their push before Thrace could launch his,” Nicodemus said. “We are behind enemy lines. You know what a schwerpunkt is?”
“A small force that’s made a breakthrough,” Roland replied, looking into his Mauser’s breach and checking that it was loaded.
“They still teach the classics at Knox,” Morrigan said.
“Time to exploit that breakthrough.” Nicodemus pointed down the boulevard leading to the city. “Let’s find their headquarters and pay a visit.”
****
The squeal of treads over broken concrete echoed down the city street. Ranger Jerry Morris huddled against a wall, nestled in a pile of broken glass and what remained of a cooler. The soft drinks it once held had burst apart in the blast that wrecked the room, leaving a thin film of sticky sugar mist on everything. The Ranger’s power armor kept him safe from minor cuts and abrasions that were part and parcel of urban combat, but knowing that he’d reek of rotting sugar in a few days gnawed at him.
He clutched his gauss rifle against his chest and quietly pulled a grenade from his belt. He took a quick glance over the windowsill and dropped back down. He couldn’t see the tank, but it was close.
“Go now?” One floor up, an Ibarran woman, wearing light fatigues and a flack vest, leaned over the side of a gap in the ceiling.
“No,” Morris hissed. “You wait for my signal.”
A legionnaire grabbed her by the shoulder and yanked her away from the edge. Morris heard a one-sided conversation begin in Basque as the professional soldier imparted wisdom on the militia woman.
Morris looked over at Yeltzin, his squad mate, a few windows over. Yeltzin mimed a yacking mouth with his hand. In the hours since the Rangers had barely made it into the city, nothing had gone right. Comms were down. The chain of command was remade and then broken again after the next Kesaht attack hit a command post and killed half the remaining officers.
Morris’s squad got separated from what remained of their platoon when Rakka overran their fighting position. A group of Ibarran defenders had pulled them into a tunnel and incorporated him and Yeltzin into their ad hoc defense team. This, he’d decided, was not in the recruitment video he’d seen back in Phoenix.
The few legionnaires had proved more than capable. The militia all seemed to have been through basic training and knew which end of the rifle to point at the enemy, but their tactical acumen fell off rapidly after that.
He heard the tank stop, then the snap and squeal of treads against pavement as it changed direction. Placing his thumb against the grenade, Morris set it to Anti-Armor Close Range. The grenade would explode into a shaped charge and send a small depleted uranium lance of metal into whatever he threw it at. Getting close enough to do the job was the hard part.
The floor bumped up, knocking debris everywhere.
Morris fumbled with his rifle and tried to scramble into the corner. A metal hatch lifted up and slammed into the floor, sending dust billowing everywhere. Glowing lights pierced through the cloud and a giant shadow rose up.
Morris thumbed his safety off, his training taking over.
“Friendly.” Gideon’s voice cut through the dust. The upper half of his armor became clear as the dust settled.
Morris glanced out a window again, the sound of the Kesaht tank lost in the noise of Gideon’s arrival.
“Tank,” Morris said.
“What did you call me?” Gideon asked.
“Kesaht tank.” Morris jammed a thumb at the wall.
Gideon crawled out of the tunnel in the floor and knelt next to the blown-out gap in the building’s wall.
“How many?” he asked.
“We see two up here,” the legionnaire said from the second floor.
Gideon’s helm and rotary cannon
snapped up. The legionnaires ducked away.
“They’re friendly too,” Morris said. “Where did you come from?”
“Outlying pump station. I have civilian prisoners and their wounded,” Gideon said. Etor climbed out of the tunnel and helped more of his people out. “Etor, this is not the utility district.”
“Knew we should’ve taken that left,” Etor grumbled.
“Prisoners?” the legionnaire said from the second floor. “You’ve got the wrong idea here.”
“Tactical situation’s been in flux,” Yeltzin said to Gideon. “We’ve gone from controlled chaos to complete mess and back again more than once. Ibarras are evaccing their civilians through the spaceport. Colonel Martel’s got us holding the line while that happens.”
“And in the absence of further orders, we’ll attack,” Morris said.
“Where’s Martel?” Gideon asked.
“Sir, I don’t exactly know where the hell we are.” Morris pointed to the ceiling. “Locals don’t need maps and have yet to lead us astray.”
Gideon looked up at the legionnaire.
“Can you get these civilians to an evac point? Got one on a stretcher,” the armor said.
“I can,” the Ibarran said, pointing toward the Kesaht lines. “But we won’t get far with those tanks on us, and we’ll move slow with the wounded.”
“I’ll deal with the tank,” Gideon said. “I didn’t come here to babysit. Aignar.” The other armor’s helm popped up out of the tunnel and he lifted two civilians up. “I’ll draw their fire, you attack once I have their attention. Cha’ril will transport the wounded with the locals. Link back up with us after that.”
“Comms are out,” Cha’ril’s voice echoed out of the tunnel. “How do I find you?”
“Is the cavalry here? How many of you are down there?” Morris leaned over to peer into the tunnel.
“We’ll find Colonel Martel. He’ll be where the fighting’s the hardest. Meet us there,” Gideon said. He crawled out of the building and rose to his full height. The Ibarrans on the second floor tensed up as he looked at them.
