Kastor thought of what else he might say, then realized that everyone listening was so nervous they’d probably forgotten half of what he’d just said. No use trying to condense years of military academy into a few trite tips anyway.
The rocket in the case beside him had a padded recess toward the back. He picked it up and fitted the padded recess onto his shoulder. Flicked off the safety. Popped open the sight from a slot on the side.
“On my shot,” he said into his cuff.
He inhaled a long, full breath and let it out slow. Those around him murmured their oft-repeated platitude, “All glory to God.”
No, he thought.Not all of it.
Kastor thrust himself into a kneeling position, back erect, and aimed the launcher over the concrete lip at one of the armored vehicles across the distance. In seconds, one of the Confed guards on the lower-tier rooftop of the OCSS spotted him and shouted to alert his comrades, but it no longer mattered. Kastor pulled the trigger. The launcher emitted a deafening hiss and spat out the projectile, trailing smoke all the way down. It contacted with the upper module and created a fiery explosion. Two more rockets fired. Grenades from the flanking teams flew. The second vehicle sprayed rounds from its heavy machine gun until being pummeled into submission from direct, explosive hits. Combat rifles opened up, sending a hail of bullets down on the unsuspecting soldiers behind sandbag walls. Snipers worked quickly to pick off their Confed counterparts.
In the five seconds it took Kastor to load another rocket in the launcher, the entire lot of posted guards had gone down, but doors had opened on the roof and at the front entrance of the building, letting out a stream of soldiers in black, kevlar body armor. They returned fire, and soon a chaotic crisscross of lightning-fast rounds filled the urban canyon between the OCSS and its surrounds. More and more Confed troops emerged to join the fight. Kastor realized his folly—thinking that they might’ve actually caught them off guard, that they could take down their defenses and infiltrate their most important building in one swift stroke. But of course the Confed had been expecting this. They had been ready for a fight here.
Kastor aimed down the sight at a door on the lower tier rooftop and fired. The weapon hissed angrily, sending the rocket on a path through the zipping lines of fire. It blew a hole into the wall where the Confed soldiers had been exiting from a door. The blast and resulting fire cloud consumed five troops and flung several others across the rooftop. Another rocket whipped into the covered alcove where Confed soldiers flooded out the front doors. The explosive burst dropped a wave of them, but when the smoke thinned out, Kastor noticed that it had only charred and scratched the glass panels. Ballistic glass. Shooting their way in would be more difficult than he’d expected.
The outward flow of Confed soldiers resumed a moment later. They ran out and made beelines to sandbag bunkers. Soon, the powerful thud of machine guns began blaring, spewing out frighteningly destructive rounds, tearing chunks out of the surrounding buildings, pinning down the flanking Defender teams. Some of the Confed soldiers ran through the fence gates and took cover behind their ruined, scorched vehicles. A second later, they launched a salvo of grenades from tubes attached to their guns. Explosive bursts dug craters into the buildings where the Defenders hid, launching debris and dust into the street.
With a hard, fleshy thunk, a shot tore through the cheek of the man kneeling beside Kastor, making the man’s head kick back violently. His gun slid out of his hands, and his body slunk backwards. His face came to rest away from Kastor, giving an eyeful of the messy, gaping exit wound at the back of his skull.
More bullets peppered the concrete barrier, so Kastor ducked behind it, clenched his teeth, and reached for another rocket.
This would be harder than he thought. They didn’t have time for hard.
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Cristiana held onto a handle hanging from a strap overhead, surrounded by dozens of her fellow Sagittarian warriors, all of them noble warrior-born, all of them dressed from neck to ankle in beige Terran Confederacy uniforms. Confed combat rifles hung from their shoulders, barrels aimed at the floor. No blazers. No repeaters. Nothing to mark them as Sagittarian. They were huddled on a Confed transport shuttle, headed into the eye of the storm. To the Defenders and anyone else who saw, they would look like just another batch of Terran reinforcements.
Larkin, standing next to her with his gun slung behind his back, stared at his tablet, watching the latest live updates on the Confed’s CGI-rendered tactical map. Tiny red dots represented the last known locations of every Defender of Glory fighter. Tiny green dots represented all living Confed soldiers and personnel. Red dots had the entire Old City surrounded, held at bay to the west, northwest, and southwest by a heavy concentration of green dots. Red and green mixed in a disorderly jumble on the southeast and northeast corners of the Old City, while a cluster of reds claimed an uncontested foothold on the western edge.
“Cristiana,” Larkin said, “take a look at this.”
She leaned in as he zoomed in on a small piece of action in the northern central part of the Old City. A scattering of red formed a semi-circle around a bright green blob. Larkin pointed at it.
“That’s the Old City Security Station,” he said. “It’s where the Confed controls the Bastion. It’s under attack.”
“How serious?” Cristiana asked.
Larkin shook his head. “Don’t know. But they’re calling for backup. I’ve already volunteered you for the job. Take half our warriors and go deal with it.”
Cristiana nodded. “Gladly. Heard any talk of orbital strikes yet?”
“I’m not privy to that,” Larkin replied. He lifted the tablet a bit to highlight it. “Just to the tactical map.”
Bullets tinged against the underside of the shuttle. It swerved one direction, then the other, causing all the huddled bodies to swerve with it. A muffled explosion outside rocked the shuttle and made the lights flicker. They lost altitude for a few seconds, then evened out. The tinging of bullets against the hull died down. The shuttle slowed and descended. Soon, it set down on its landing legs, and the back ramp slid open with a groan, letting in a wash of warm, dry air. The warrior-born filed out in swift strides.
Larkin pointed at something at the base of Cristiana’s neck. “Your nanoflex.”
She looked down and noticed a little of her tight nanoflex armor peeking above her buttoned uniform shirt. She buttoned the second from the top and made sure the armor was covered, then headed after the others.
Outside the shuttle, Confed troops bustled everywhere. Military tents had been set up in open spaces, some with triple bunk beds, some housing ordnance and supply crates, and others with computer and holo stations for the high command. Sandbag barricades ran along the eastern and southern walls, where snipers and machine gunners and spotters with binocs waited. Apparently, the Defenders had given up trying to attack from that direction—or had never even tried. Too much open space beyond for a frontal assault, Cristiana guessed.
Larkin and the other warrior-born headed west. Cristiana followed, awing at the stone arches and smoky black dome of the mosque to her left and to her right, the majestic, blue and white, mosaic-walled structure capped with that iconic gold dome. The Dome of the Rock. The designs inlaid in its exterior walls became more intricate the closer she walked to it.
A few hefty forklifts hauled ten-foot-tall concrete barriers across the stone courtyard above to deposit them in a big circle around the Dome. Another forklift did the same for the mosque. A wall of concrete barriers stretched along the side, ten meters or so from the building, and stopped at the front. The last few pieces had not been set down yet. Men in coveralls and hart hats busily worked between the concrete barriers and the building, lifting up huge steel sheets to drill into the concrete—an extra eight feet or so of protection from stray gunshots of shrapnel.
“Cristiana!” Larkin called from across the courtyard. When he’d gotten her attention, he pointed at another bullet-battered
shuttle just landing and spilling its warrior-born in Confed uniforms onto the Temple Mount. “Take that group and head to the security station.” He pointed to the other side of himself. “Northwest. No time to waste.”
Larkin turned around to greet a few approaching Confed officers and their staff. One of the officers looked Chinese, the others European or American. No Levant natives among them.
Cristiana walked back toward the landing zone to take command of her new contingent of “Confed” soldiers.
Chapter Fifty-Nine
With a shrill hiss right in his ear, Kastor’s launcher sent down his last rocket. It impacted exactly on target, behind a semi-circular barricade of sandbags hiding at least a half dozen Confed soldiers. The explosive blast ripped through body armor and flesh alike and toppled the sandbags. By the time the smoke cleared, a few more black-armored Confed troops had ran into the remnants of the barricade for cover.
Fifteen minutes of exchanging fire across the street had gotten the Defenders no closer to the OCSS. This strategy would render them nothing. The Confed had the defensive advantage—no need to cross an open space in order to get what they wanted. Kastor didn’t have a count of his losses, but he estimated that a third of his fighters had taken hits, whether fatal or not. Many dozens more Confed soldiers had gone down, their bodies now littering the ground around spilled-open sandbags and rocky debris, but it didn’t matter. The Terrans had the time and numbers to expend.
Kastor let the rocket slump off his shoulder and back into its case, then grabbed his combat rifle. He peered through his scope and snapped off shots at every semi-open target he could find. A Confed soldier lifted himself up enough to expose his neck, and Kastor pulled the trigger. Through his scope, he saw blood paint the pavement behind the collapsing soldier. Then Kastor ducked as a wave of rounds chased him in response, chewing up the concrete lip and whizzing overhead. He scooted down and duck walked past the corpse beside him to reposition himself away from his last known location.
Kastor stopped by the woman sniper, an olive-skinned girl probably two and a half decades into life, wearing a worn, backwards cap and pressing her face against the stock of her rifle. The thunks of rounds slamming into the concrete lip began to fade, so Kastor prepared to pop up again to fire. He heard something in the distance and paused, frozen, listening.
He heard it again—a quick whistle and then a deep, earth-shaking thud. It happened a third time. He swept his eyes across the hazy horizon in the direction it had come from. At first, he saw nothing. Just the same mottled cityscape of rooftops, solar panels, and skeletal, steel towers. Then he glimpsed a flash streaking straight down from the clouds like a shooting star. The sound—that quick whistle followed by a deep thud—came a few seconds later.
Shit.
Kastor’s heart skipped a few beats, then jumped up to twice its normal pace.
“Qasim!” he shouted across the rooftop. “We have to go! Now!”
The plump head tech stepped out from behind a HVAC unit, still crouched, and glanced around. Kastor ran, keeping low, toward the HVAC unit and pointed at a steady stream of flashes coming down in the distance all around them. Soon, the crashing rumbles were unmistakable. When Qasim realized what it was, his eyes burst open.
“Orbital strikes,” Kastor said. “They could come down on us any second. We need to get control of the Bastion.”
Qasim nodded nervously, then looked at his techs, apparently trying to figure out what to say. What to do.
Kastor reached down, picked up his blazer sword, sheathed in its scabbard, and slung it over his back, tying the strap over his chest. He stepped to a poly-manila rope coiled in a pile in front of the HVAC unit, one end anchored to a leg of the huge machine, and picked it up. Whistles picked up from all directions as Kastor sprinted across the roof toward the edge. He didn’t have time to repel the proper way, so he’d have to settle for an improper way: namely, jumping off the eleventh story rooftop with the coil of rope pressed against his chest and taking it down with him at free fall. Halfway down, feeling a rush of air whipping past him, Kastor dropped the clump of rope but clasped his hands around the end still extending back up toward the roof and let it slide through them. He pressed feet over the rope underneath him and did the same.
At about three floors above ground, he squeezed his hands and clamped his feet together. It burned the skin of his palms like grabbing a glowing ember, but it worked. He slowed and swung back toward the building, outstretching his feet to absorb the shock of impact against the bullet-pocked building. After one bounce off the exterior wall, he landed on the ground and immediately went into a zigzagging sprint across the street toward the OCSS. Shots zipped past his head. He could see Confed soldiers’ helmets bobbing behind sandbags, gun barrels shifting trying to predict his movements. Bullets sank into the pavement around his feet, kicking up sharp beads of gravel that bit through his pants and into the skin of his calves. But it didn’t slow him. Kastor felt a fire in his veins, a closeness to death that energized him, gave him strength and speed beyond what he could summon through sheer power of will.
The Defenders had seen his gambit and increased their fire to provide cover. Confed troops recoiled from hits as they turned their attention away from the surrounding buildings and toward the approaching man in the black and white shemagh, unarmed save a blazer and a sidearm. Once close enough to see the fear in their eyes, Kastor pulled out his handgun, extended a rigid arm to aim, and found the nearest enemy with gun barrel pointed at him.
Fired, blasting off the man’s ear and a few centimeters of his cheek along with it.
Moved to the next, still taking swift strides toward the OCSS, using the destroyed vehicles for cover.
Fired, sinking a bullet right into the bridge of a man’s nose, making his head slam backwards and his body drop instantly.
Two body-armored soldier stepped out from behind the smoking vehicles at the same time, weapons up. Their guns fired just as quickly as Kastor’s, but his aim proved superior. The first Terran doubled over from a hit to the waist where Kastor perceived a gap between the flak jacket and kevlar pants. The second had his gun knocked loose in his hands from a hit to the shoulder, then stumbled backwards from a shot square in the chest. Then Kastor put a bullet straight through the jawbone into the brain.
As he strode between the ruined vehicles, he holstered his handgun and wrapped his fingers around the handle of his blazer sword over his shoulder. Oh, how wonderful it felt. How natural. A powerful sensation gripped him, as if his skin was made of three layers of steel, as if his blood was pure petroleum that had been set ablaze.
Kastor unsheathed his blazer in a brisk swipe and powered it up. He hid behind the charred vehicle, listening to the blazer’s internal nano-conductors crackle like breaking ice, superheating the blade edge as Confed soldiers shouted back and forth to each other, trying to figure out where he’d gone. He spared a glance down to watch the blade shift from silver to red to orange to white, far above any natural metal’s melting point.
The orbital strikes were getting closer, the whistles now echoing shrieks, the thuds now making the ground tremble under Kastor’s feet.
He dashed out from behind cover, heading straight for the open chain link gate and the sandbag bunkers behind. The Terrans shouted frantically. Guns opened up. Muzzles flashed. Bullets whizzed past his head. He snaked across the distance with quick steps, feet falling in the spaces between bloody corpses and rubble and spent ammo cartridges and abandoned rifles. A Terran rose above a sandbag wall ahead and opened fire. Kastor ducked to avoid the stream of rounds, leaped to the side, then lifted his blazer and brought it down on the rifle’s barrel, slicing straight through. Then soldier panicked but didn’t have time to react to his suddenly nonfunctioning gun before Kastor twisted the blade and plunged it halfway through his exposed neck. It seared like a fish in a frying pan until Kastor vaulted over the meter-tall sandbag wall and yanked it away, spraying the other three soldiers in the bunker
with blood.
Kastor slashed his blazer into one man’s shoulder, feeling it crunch through the collarbone, sinking the blade satisfyingly deep. With his other hand he batted away another Terran’s gun barrel before wrenching the blazer out of its current host and splitting open the middle man’s through on its way to the Terran’s chest. The tip of the superheated blade punctured the kevlar armor, but Kastor had to grab the wailing man by the shoulder and shove the blazer handle hard to push it fatally deep. Once he had, he kicked over the middle man, who had fallen to his knees grasping at his bleeding, severed esophagus.
With blazer still stuck in the Terran’s chest, Kastor hauled the man’s limp body along in front of him, his heels dragging along the pavement as Kastor crossed the distance between himself and the next sandbag bunker. Confed soldiers pummeled the human shield with rounds until Kastor got close enough to launch the body into their hiding place and jump in after it. In the sudden chaos of movement, Kastor swished his blazer left and right, slicing singed gashes through arms and legs as he darted around the sandbag pit to avoid potshots. He dropped to a crouch as one Terran soldier swung his automatic combat rifle around, spewing rounds. Kastor sliced him across the waist, and the Terran crumpled, pressing his hands over his wound to prevent his steaming guts from spilling out.
Kastor twirled around and brought his blazer down directly on another Terran’s helmeted head. The man’s eyes bugged out as the blade split through metal and skull alike. Kastor ducked behind cover and pulled his handgun to put his agonized living victims out of their misery. Two shots, one for each of the last two.
One of the Terrans in another sandbag bunker had emerged from cover and walked toward Kastor’s sandbag cover, firing his combat rifle from the hip at a fast enough rate to keep Kastor pinned down. Getting closer, judging from the angle of the bullets sinking into the sandbags. Then Kastor heard a grunt and the shots cut off for a moment. His Defenders were raining fire down on the Confed soldier. Kastor stood to see. The Terran stumbled backward, holding his flak jacket-covered elbow over his face as a shield.
Horns of the Ram (Dominion Book 2) Page 27
