Be like Norskine, Eilentes thought. Get back up off the ground. Don’t let anything slow you down.
“Okay, the commerce building is on the other side of this row.” Caden pointed to the buildings directly ahead of them. “Eilentes, I want you up high. Keep an eye on our entry point: I don’t want to come back out and find the position over-run.”
“You got it,” she said.
“You good for this job?”
“I am, yes. Trust me.”
“I do, Eilentes. I really do.”
She saw in his face that the sentiment was genuine, and her cheeks and the back of her neck burned with shame. She almost forgot why she had even been annoyed with him.
“Norskine,” said Daxon. “Want to go with Eilentes?”
“Trying to cut out the dead wood, Corp?”
“No, I just think you’d be better off up high. And I don’t want anyone going off on their own.”
“Fair enough.” She turned to Eilentes. “You and me, sister.”
Eilentes smiled back at her. Norskine was regaining her composure minute by minute, and Eilentes had no misgivings about trusting the private to watch her back.
“Let’s do it,” she said.
They had reached the end of the road, a T-junction running west and east. The sound of the fighting was loudest to the west, somewhere beyond a wide plaza that was visible a hundred metres or so down the road. Even as they hurried across to the foot of the buildings opposite, a heavy bombardment turned the paved area into a cratered dead zone.
“Need a way in,” Eilentes said.
Norskine answered by smashing a window with the butt of her rifle. She stood back, away from the falling glass, and knocked away more of the pane to make a hole that was large enough to be safe.
“That’ll do it,” said Eilentes.
“Don’t forget to check in,” said Caden. “Hopefully this won’t take long, but if we’re gone more than half an hour you might want to start worrying.”
“Oh yeah, I’ll worry all right.”
Eilentes ducked through the broken window and into the gloom. Outside, the others moved off towards the east end of the road.
Eilentes looked around, and saw the room was an open-plan office of some sort. Whoever had been working here had left in a hurry; there were private holos still in standby mode, personal effects and clothing left behind, even half-eaten food at some of the work stations.
“This way,” Norskine said. “Stairs and elevators.”
“Oh please, let the elevators be working,” said Eilentes. “I can do without climbing eight storeys.”
Five minutes later, after failing to have her wish granted, she emerged from the roof access door. Huffing and puffing, she clasped her hands behind her neck and sucked the air into her lungs.
“Thought I was fitter than that, too,” Norskine panted.
“Stairs…” Eilentes gasped. “Flat ground, I can go on forever. Stairs? Fuck right off.”
“You two in position yet?”
Caden’s voice came over their links without any warning, and Eilentes realised the channel had been open the whole time.
“Yep,” said Eilentes. “And thanks for that, by the way.”
“Wasn’t me who killed the power grid.”
Eilentes imagined Caden and the others having a good chuckle at their expense, and rolled her eyes at Norskine.
She went to the edge of the roof and glanced over the parapet that ran along it. Below them was a large public square, dotted with utilitarian stone benches and the ubiquitous native trees. The central feature of the square was the domed commerce hall, no different — as far as she could tell — from the commerce hall of any other Imperial world. She imagined the square would be full of kiosks and marquees on trading days.
“You look clear from up here,” she said. “Nothing moving at all. There’s some armour standing at the western edge of the square, but nobody with it. Looks like Viskr artillery.”
“Keep an eye on that, Norskine,” Daxon’s voice said. “If it looks like it’s going to be moved into play, light it up with a targeting laser. Bro says our air support is now being deployed by Fleet.”
“Roger that.”
“We’re going in,” said Caden.
While Eilentes set herself up, Norskine looked over the edge to watch the small figures below running towards the commerce hall. Eilentes kept her attention on what she was doing; the last thing she wanted now was a misfire at a critical moment.
She popped a small, matte-black tripod from the clips on her thigh guard, flicked out the legs, and set it down atop the small wall at the edge of the roof. Then she rested Ambrast on the tripod, marrying up the screw thread with the socket in the rifle. She tightened the nut as much as she felt necessary, and pressed the stud that told the rifle to skinprint. Ambrast’s outer layer shifted until it closely matched the hue and texture of the wall, then locked in the pattern.
There was not much she could do to blend her own silhouette into the surroundings, so she took a scrim from one of her pouches and strung it up behind her, between two comms antennae. From the ground, it would hopefully look like miscellaneous rooftop junk. It was not exactly ideal, but as long as she was not visible from below as a distinct head and shoulders she was happy with that.
A good ten minutes had passed before movement to the west caught her attention. She lifted a spotting scope to her eye, and took a closer look.
Down on the ground, a group of Viskr had entered the square on foot. They were close to the armoured transport that carried artillery on its back, but as far as she could see they were not trying to move or use it.
She zoomed in for a closer look.
It was the clearest view she had had of Viskr in the flesh. Of course she had seen holo footage and images in training, and there had been those few times where she had seen blurred glimpses during combat and from her hide site on Woe Tantalum, but the only Viskr she had seen up close and personal had been the desiccated, ragged corpses left behind on Echo.
These Viskr were not half-degraded, in a crowd with humans, or darting quickly in and out of cover. They were alive, away from the fighting, and moving casually.
She studied one of them carefully. She remembered being taught that the old enemy had two genders, like humans, but she could not tell if it was a male or female she was looking at.
The Viskr had coppery skin, rough and deeply fissured as if it were made from old bark or thick, dried mud. Its head was a flattened diamond, the front side the deepest. The long axis of its skull was parallel with the shoulders, and its black eyes were placed only slightly above the line of a narrow mouth. On top of the head, two bony ridges ran from each brow to the back of the neck, bowed outwards. She could make out smaller crenelations and bumps arrayed in rows between them.
It reminded her of a fantastical cartoon character she recalled vaguely from childhood; a man with a pastry for a head. Only it had a gun, which it held in clawed hands. The pastry man, whatever he had been called, had never had a gun. Or claws.
She realised it was the general humanoid shape of the creature which made it look so strange to her; without evolutionary context, her mind tried its best to reconcile this unearthly biped with its model of humankind, and found the differences repellent. But it was not a relative or an off-shoot or a distant cousin. It had evolved somewhere else entirely, without any biological contact with man.
She wondered if that was what made the Viskr so easy to hate.
The Viskr’s head and torso moved out of her view, and she dialled back the zoom to recapture it. When she did so, she saw the odd configuration of the leg bones. The ankles were much longer than they were in humans, giving the impression the alien might lurch forward at any moment, pouncing or springing into a run. It made the figure look predatory.
“Should maybe light them up?” Norskine was tapping a thin targeting laser against the palm of her gloved left hand.
“They don’t look like much
of a threat at the moment,” said Eilentes. “If we call in a strike, it might just draw more of their buddies here.”
Norskine nodded towards Ambrast. “You could take them out.”
Eilentes considered the idea. The risk was that there might be others out of her line of sight who could make her position and sound the alarm. The benefit was that… well, she couldn’t think of anything in particular.
“I think we should leave them to it for now. They’re not enough of a threat to make us draw unwanted attention.”
“If you say so,” said Norskine. “So… anyway: what’s the deal with you and Throam?”
“I wish I knew.” Eilentes looked away, and continued to survey the square below. Every few seconds she cast her eyes back to check on the small squad of Viskr.
“You are sleeping with him, right?”
“I was. Not sure if I want to carry on with that, if I’m honest.”
“Are you sure? He’s one sexy man-beast.”
“Oh, he is. But I know him from way back, and he’s not changed at all.”
“How do you mean?”
“We were together on the Embolden, for near enough a whole Solar. Turns out it was just sex to him. He left me to go work with Caden and didn’t look back.”
“Ouch, that’s gotta hurt. Why are you back sleeping with him now then?”
“I don’t know, Taliam. I guess because” — she paused momentarily, realisation dawning on her — “I guess because it’s easy.”
“So it is just sex then.”
“I suppose. I do love him, I think. But it doesn’t feel like it goes both ways.”
“Get rid, Hon. Bro is free.”
“I thought you two were—“
Norskine snorted. “He wishes!”
“You know, I think he does.”
“Really?”
“You work together. How could you not know?”
“I just don’t look at him that way. He’s my bro, you know?”
“Clever.”
“Thought it up all by myself.”
“Well maybe— Hey, check it out.”
Eilentes grabbed to the side for Norskine, caught her sleeve, and pulled her low and close.
“Where?”
“Over there.” Eilentes pointed to the eastern corner of the square.
Another squad of Viskr were marching hurriedly from the end of a road, passing through a row of bollards and entering the square itself. A gangling polybot came after them, its movements mechanical yet sinuous.
“This place is starting to get crowded,” Norskine whispered. “Crusty central.”
Eilentes closed her eyes for a brief moment, considering the tactical situation below.
“Okay, we light up the armour.”
“You sure?”
“If anything, it will keep them occupied. Caden will be coming back out of that hall any minute now, and the last thing we want is for his team to end up stuck between two lines of fire.”
“What if they make our position?”
“We’ll have to cross that bridge when we come to it.”
“Seems like we’ll already have burned it by then.”
“Cute. You’ve got the laser. Do the honours?”
Norskine leaned against the inside of the wall, and shone the targeting laser at the artillery. She managed to splash it across the top of the armour, where the troops on the ground would have no view.
“Guess we wait?” Eilentes said.
“Yep.”
The wait was not a long one. Eilentes heard a muffled roaring sound build steadily behind them, then suddenly a MAGA atmospheric gunship was directly overhead, its vertical lift turbines blasting hot air down onto the rooftop. It hovered for a moment, moved over the square, then tilted forward and sideways, circling the armour nose-first.
The Viskr to the east ran to cover. Those by the armour scrambled for cover too, one of them loosing a rocket first. The rocket made it just half way to the gunship before it was shot down.
The gunship pulled back, lifted its nose, and fired off a missile of its own.
Even their rooftop trembled with the force of the explosion below, and a column of smoke billowed from the crater which remained.
“Yes!” Norskine shouted.
The gunship hovered for a moment more before heading north, strafing its chain guns along a street beyond their view.
“—I say again: Eilentes, report.”
Eilentes tapped her link. “Caden; Eilentes. MAGA just took out that armour. There are some Viskr in the square now, but nothing we can’t handle from up here.”
“Glad to hear it. We’re coming up now. Be advised we have non-combatants with us.”
“Understood.” She closed the channel. “They’re coming back out. We need to start clearing that square.”
“Finally,” said Norskine.
They both leaned on the wall, peering over the top. Eilentes took hold of Ambrast, placed her eye to the scope, and found her first target.
“One,” she said. In the square below, a Viskr soldier dropped from his inadequate cover and sprawled on the ground.
“Two.” Another Viskr dropped dead.
“Three—“
“Hey, we got a new problem,” Norskine said, tapping her shoulder.
“What…?”
Eilentes followed Norskine’s gaze, and saw immediately what that problem was.
The best part of a platoon was rolling into the square from the north road, accompanied by a column of crawlers. The commandos marched alongside the vehicles, not one of them as tall as the crawlers’ oversized wheels.
On the west corner, skulkers had rolled up to the crater and rattled around it as if quizzical about what had occurred there. The polybot that had arrived with the smaller squad gambolled across to them, rummaging through the mangled debris and chattering to itself.
“Okay,” said Norskine. “Now it’s Crusty central.”
Eilentes hit her link. “Caden, you might want to hold your position for a moment. Either that, or hurry the fuck up.”
“What’s the problem?”
“You’re about to have company. Lots of company.”
Norskine pointed again, and Eilentes looked down. Caden and his group were already emerging from the commerce hall.
“Location and disposition?”
“Other side of the commerce hall, coming into the square now. They do seem to be focused on the crater we just made.”
“Brilliant.”
“Can you get into our building from down there?”
“I think so. There are doors this side.”
“They may well be insecure. When we came through the building, it looked like the work force had left in a hurry.”
“Okay. So we run for it.”
“Got you covered.”
Eilentes looked down, and saw Caden, Throam, and the others. Civilians in rich-looking fabrics ran with them, guided along by Daxon and Bro. Bruiser was now in the rear, watching warily for any opposition.
They ran out of her line of sight, and there was a moment in which she was sure something must have gone wrong.
“We’re in,” Caden said. “Going to get off the ground floor. Keep eyes on the square, and don’t be seen.”
“Bit too late for that,” said Norskine.
From below, Eilentes heard a horrible noise, somewhere between the wailing of a distressed baby and the honking of a proximity alarm. She looked towards the source of the sound and saw the polybot bounding across the open space of the square. It was making a beeline right for them.
“Can those things climb?” She asked.
“Yes,” said Norskine. “And it will kill us if it gets up here.”
“They’re starting to look this way,” Eilentes said. “Looking to see what it’s screaming about.”
“Fuck ‘em,” said Norskine. “We’ve got the high ground.”
“You’re right.” Eilentes wasted no more time. She was back at the wall again,
cradling Ambrast, taking shot after shot.
“Four. Five. Six.”
“Leave some for me!”
“Seven. You have to kill that damned robot. Eight. Nine.”
“Oh fuck, yeah.”
Eilentes was peripherally aware of Norskine moving away from the edge, and heard her stand. Then moving off down the roof, towards the west end of their edge. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Norskine lean over the wall, with her assault rifle held in front of her.
“I see it,” Norskine said. “It’s reached the wall.”
Eilentes scanned the square quickly, made sure the Viskr below were still in disarray, and risked sticking her head over the edge to glance down.
The polybot was below, already climbing the wall halfway between her and Norskine. It twittered and honked angrily, smashing its own footholds into the stone with the ends of its six appendages. Eilentes imagined it could do much worse to a soft human body.
Norskine opened up, and the robot’s front right leg snapped back from the wall. The last section of the limb fell away, tumbling back to the ground, and the polybot jerked its small, angular head towards the private.
“Oh balls,” said Norskine.
The polybot came faster, turning towards her and marching steadily up the sheer face of the building with an iron will.
Eilentes let go of Ambrast, leaving the long range rifle on the tripod, and popped her assault rifle off its mag-tag. She fired on the polybot.
This time, its two front left limbs took the brunt of the damage. They remained intact, but were clearly disabled. They dangled limply down, the middle one banging against the rear leg.
The polybot paused its ascent, snapped its head towards Eilentes, and screeched.
She ducked back behind the wall as rounds from below began to pepper the building. Norskine had retreated to cover too, and the pair of them looked at each other.
Books One to Three Omnibus (Armada Wars) Page 42
