Another explosion sounded to the southeast, possibly 200 meters down the slope, making them all instinctively duck.
“Merl just got another,” Tim said. “Coming up the trail, though.”
“I’d be most happy to tell you about my father sometime, hopefully, back at Patras a long time from now. But I think we’ve got a job to do at the moment.”
“Right, and we need to get in position, ” Esther said. “Any saved rounds?”
They shook their heads. This was a fluid situation, but the Marines had been trained well, and the soldiers didn’t lack for heart.
“OK, let’s kick some ass.”
She grabbed Constantine by the arm as everyone spun to get into position.
“Keep your head down, OK?”
“Sure thing, Blue . . . uh, Esther, if that’s OK.”
“No, not Esther. Call me Ess.”
Chapter 36
Bob and his crew of four were plugging away with measured shots. Esther watched the feed from the Gnat above, and four of the Hands were sprawled motionless in the grass while the rest were scurrying back. Esther didn’t know if any of the soldiers had made a kill or if it had been all Bob, but their combined fire was having an effect. One of the crawling Hands started to get rise up, and he immediately took a shot to the head. Even with the Gnat’s relatively low resolution, the blowback of blood and brain matter was obvious.
“Now,” she passed to Tim.
The first wave of RHG fighters were massing below the military crest to the east while another 30 or so were making their way up the trail which would loop them around to the south and then reach the summit from the southwest. If the ones below them charged up, they could be in among them in 30 seconds, and Esther wanted to hit them before that could happen. And now with Bob in position and keeping the base of fire’s heads down, she could move her soldiers forward.
Twenty-three soldiers, “led” by Lieutenant Dillard, followed Tim and Master Sergeant Kang as he rushed forward to take a position close to the crown’s brow that delineated the perimeter of their battle position. This wasn’t like the cliff to the west. The crown itself was a shallowly-sloping platform that gave way over the brown to a much steeper slope. Each of the soldiers had been given two micro-grenades carried by the team. Ten soldiers rushed to the start of the drop-off and lofted a single grenade each before falling back to whatever cover they’d been able to prepare before the RHG base of fire had chased them away.
Esther couldn’t see the tiny grenades as they fell, but she could see the results on her feed. One landed short, six went long and detonated below the Hands, but three landed on the trail amongst them. The fighters were packed tight, so their bodies acted as shields for each other, but at least ten of them were down.
“No more blind throws,” Esther told Tim. “They need to see their targets. We just wasted seven micros.”
There were three distinct thunks from off in the distance. It seemed as if the first mortar was merely ranging after all. They’d just fired three more rounds, and these would be much closer.
“Incoming!” she shouted. “Thirty seconds.”
They couldn’t just hug the ground and wait for the rounds to impact. In thirty seconds, a lot could happen, to include Hands breaching their perimeter.
“Stay here,” she told Constantine as she rushed forward.
“You and me,” she told Tim, taking out two micros out of their pouch.
The little 40mm mortars wouldn’t do much to either of the two Marines, and a few more grenades should blunt an over-eager rush up the steep slope.
With Tim a few meters to her right, she edged forward, forgetting the Gnat feed for a moment. She couldn’t deal with two spatial references at the same time, and she wanted to simply rely on her eyes.
One more step forward, and she saw the heads and shoulders of half-a-dozen soldiers rushing up. She could see them, so they could see her, and one fighter raised a rifle to fire at her, but missing by a wide margin—firing up hill was something that had to be practiced to get it right. Esther thumbed the micro-grenades live, then with simple underhand tosses, lofted the small, but power-packed spheres out about 20 meters. Four seconds later, she was rewarded with two blasts, followed almost immediately by two more. She pulled up the Gnat feed.
Both Tim and her grenades had gone a little long, taking out a handful of the fighters, but leaving the leading ten or twelve still climbing.
“Get ready,” she told Tim, raising her M114.
And the hill was rocked with two huge explosions, one knocking Esther to her knees.
That’s no freaking 40mm!
There were shouts from behind her.
“You OK?” she asked Tim, her heart falling as his avatar switched to light blue.
“Fuck that hurts,” he said, shaking his left hand, drops of blood flying with each shake. “Yeah, I’m fine. Fucking shrapnel got me in the glove line,” he said as he pulled at the glove’s edge with his right hand and looked inside.
Shouts for Doctor Willis and Doc Buren were called out. Behind her, soldiers were down, a couple horribly mangled.
“Doc, get up here now,” she passed.
“Can you shoot?” she asked Tim.
“Just give me a target,” he said.
She spun back around to engage the oncoming Hands and saw a cloud of dust rising from below. Finally focusing on her feed, she couldn’t see anyone rushing up the slope. More Hands were arriving on the trail below, but the slope to the crest only had mangled bodies, and four men dragging themselves back down the hill.
Knowing what she’d see, she backtracked 20 seconds and re-ran the feed. She saw their four grenade blasts, she saw the damage, and then both Tim and her getting ready. Then came three blasts, not two, all within a second. Two were on the crown among her men, and one hit the slope below them, right in the middle of the group of Hands rushing up. Bodies and body parts were lifted into the air.
The initial wave had been stopped by their own side.
“They suckered us,” Tim said after the feed jumped to real-time.
The first mortar shot probably had been a ranging round, but that wasn’t its only purpose. It also lulled Esther and her men into thinking all they faced was the 40mm. Her decision to have Tim and her lob the grenades was predicated on that. The Marines’ bones were adequate protection against a knee-capper, but what was fired looked to be 90mms. And a direct hit with one of those would have killed either one of them.
“What do we have, Doc?” she asked on the net, turning her attention away from the four wounded Hands.
“Looks like six or seven KIA. Another six WIA.”
Esther looked at the mess. As Tim had said, they’d been played, and soldiers had been killed.
Three more thunks sounded in the distance.
“More incoming! Thirty seconds!”
There was an immediate sense of urgency on the peak. One of the soldiers who’d just survived the blast took off at a dead run away from the area.
“Bug, you’ve got someone running. Tackle his ass when he gets to you.”
“Roger that.”
“Everybody down!” Tim shouted, running among the survivors.
Esther got down, too, still on the Gnat feed, watching for another attempt, but the mass of fighters was a confused mess. It would take time for them to reorganize, even longer with them on the constrained mountain trail.
To the south, out of her sight, firing opened up. The second mass of RHG fighters were within range of Third Platoon.
The next three rounds landed just to the north of the summit. The closest showered the nearest soldiers with small rocks, but it had landed below the military crest, and Mount Zeus had absorbed the bulk of the blast.
Even without further casualties, what had been 23 soldiers facing east was now down to half that. She needed to shore them up.
“Constantine, shift ten men to fill in the gaps,” she shouted.
He raised a thumbs up and da
rted off.
On her feed, one of the Hands got back to his feet and swung what looked to be a massive, but century-old plasma rifle of some type. He pointed it up and started waving it around as he fired, the air shimmering as it ionized. Esther wasn’t familiar with the specific weapon, but by holding the trigger like that, it had to run out of power in pretty quickly.
She started to tell Tim to keep everyone back until the rifle ran out of juice when her Gnat stopped transmitting, and she immediately knew what had happened.
On a childhood vacation with Ben, Noah, and her mother while her father was deployed, they’d gone to Tarawa’s Big Mushy, the wetlands that had been an engine for terraforming and were now a tourist destination. The wild wetlands were packed with Earth wildlife, to include mosquitoes (although Esther had always wondered as to why anyone would introduce mosquitoes onto a new world). Each room at the resort was equipped with what Ben had simply called a zapper; a brightly colored tennis-racquet-looking tool that they swung in the air to clear it of the buzzing blood-suckers. They couldn’t really see the tiny bugs well, but a loud zap and a blue flashing light of victory let them know when they’d fried one. Noah had demurred, but Esther and Ben had enjoyed being mosquito hunters, swinging the zapper wildly in hopes of connecting with one.
The RHG fighters knew that their opponents surely had surveillance drones. And while they might have detected the Dragonflies, they didn’t have anything sophisticated enough to locate a Gnat. So they were resorting to the mosquito-zapper method. And unbelievably, by simply firing a plasma rifle into the air and waving it around, they destroyed another of her drones.
“We’re blind until I get another Gnat here,” she told Tim. “Do not let the Hands gain the crest.”
Constantine returned with ten soldiers, all of them with eyes wide when the saw the carnage. Tim grabbed them and physically put them into position, sometimes in the middle of a gory mess.
Esther kept listening for more thunks, but through the now scattered firing, the distance was thankfully quiet. It was possible that the RHG had shot their load, but she wasn’t about to assume anything else.
“We’ve got movement to the west,” Bug passed to her.
“Can you see what they’re doing?”
“Not yet. It looks like . . . shit, they’ve got dunkers.”
Esther couldn’t hear the grenade launchers fire, but she said, “Keep their heads down” as she ran forward, Constantine on her ass.
Part of her knew she should keep the brigade commander away from her. If she went down, he needed to take control of his troops. But she ignored that as she rushed to Bug’s position. Several small explosions sounded, but only one within their lines. Lofting a grenade up a 180-meter cliff was no easy feat even for a skilled grenadier. The rounds had to travel well above the top of the mountain, then fall back to the target. The grenades were landing everywhere, including two that came back down almost among the Hands that fired them.
Given time, though, anyone could learn to walk the grenades in to hit on top. Esther had figured the RHG would try to hit them with grenades from the west, and this time, she’d foreseen correctly. And she wasn’t going to give them a free pass to do so.
Below the cliff was a steep slope interspaced with trees that had managed to poke through the centuries’ accumulation of fallen rocks. The talus provided excellent cover, which, when combined with the steep angle, made hitting them with rifles or their own grenade launchers problematic. But there was more than one way to shuck a goober, as her mother used to say, and the mountain top provided two weapons: rocks and gravity.
Esther had Bug and his team arrange as heavy rocks as they could handle along the edge of the cliff. While sitting there, the rocks provided cover from any long-range firing to the west. If pushed, the rocks became missiles: big, heavy missiles.
“Go ahead,” she told Bug.
“Gardner, Deng, Morales, on me,” Bug said.
Each soldier and Bug had evidently been already assigned a rock. They quickly got behind, and while one of them had a pry-bar, the rest simply put their shoulders to the rocks and pushed. Within moments, all four rocks were falling, and Esther stupidly leaned forward to watch. One rock shattered upon impact, sending out shrapnel 20 or 30 meters. The other three landed and bounded forwarded, snapping trees and glancing off boulders. Several bodies dove out of the way, fleeing for their lives.
Esther didn’t know if they’d actually hit anyone, but she knew they’d gotten their full and undivided attention.
“Good job. Don’t shoot your wad, but keep reminding them what’s up here. Don’t forget your hunters or your own dunker, though,” she added, pointing at three soldiers who were standing there, two with their hunting rifles at the ready, the other with a dunker attached to his Diedre.
More firing sounded from down the trail, towards the southeast. Esther could hear the steady pops of Bob’s Windy, but the rest was a cacophony of various weapons. She couldn’t tell who was doing the bulk of the firing. She switched feeds to Merl, and she could see he was firing at someone, but she couldn’t see a target.
Flipping to the Gnat feeds, she was surprised to see she only had five left. Gnat 2 was heading toward the trail where it looped around the east side of the mountain. She gave the AI instructions to bring three of the other four closer as well, leaving only one to cover the route to the east side of the island and the RHG anchorage.
“Lyle, what’s going on?” she asked.
“The lead element is coming around the corner. We’re keeping them occupied until more show up. We’ve got the slope mined, ready to bring down on them, but it’s one shot, so we want as many as possible.”
After Merl and Lyle had reached their lines, she had left them with the soldiers manning the southern approach. Bob was also to the southeast, but higher within their lines. That left Doc and Chris to the north with First Platoon, Bug to the west with the small Fourth Platoon, and Tim to the east with Second. The brigade had seven men and women making up Fourth with Bug to the west, and the rest were somewhat evenly split along the defensive lines, but a little heavier to the south. That was the easiest route up for the Hands, so she had more firepower facing that direction, to include five of her dunkers. She would have liked to have spread-loaded them more, but to the east and north, the distances were just too short to make much use of them.
If she’d left a small hunter-killer team out on the southeaster slope, they could be using the dunkers to hit the Hands on the mountainside. She’d even considered it, but while she could justify it from a tactical standpoint, it would have been a suicide mission. If she’d thought it would have a significant effect on the battle, she would have been ready to order it done, but while it would have killed Hands, she didn’t think it would have turned the tide of the battle. A suicide mission was sometimes necessary, but only if it would do the larger unit some good.
She headed for the top of the military crest to where it looked over to the south, where Erik Pusser was still on lookout duty and where Lachelle was prone, rifle in hand.
“Are our friends still there?” Esther asked the designated sniper as she crouched low.
“Yes, ma’am,” the lance corporal said. “I’ve fired each time they’ve poked their noses out, and I got one of the bastards.”
“Good job. If you get a glimpse of anyone else, shift to them.”
The little knoll on which they were perched did not offer much in the way of visibility of the trail until it bent back towards the west, so Esther doubted that the lance corporal would get a shot off at someone else—at least until the Hands overran the peak.
And, as usual, the Gods of Battle punished her complacency as a shot hit Esther high on her right shoulder. The round bounced off her as her bones hardened, ricocheting to spin around like a top on the ground a few meters in front of her. She ducked down to a knee.
“Did that hit you?” Constantine asked, his voice incredulous as he dropped beside her.
“Sure as hell did.”
“Sorry, ma’am! But I’m sure none of my targets just shot you!” Lachelle said, her voice rising in panic.
“Not your fault. My fault for just standing up here. But that means someone else has eyes on us.”
Get your head in the game, Esther, she admonished herself.
Getting hit was a wake-up call for her. Despite the fighting going on, despite the incoming, she was wandering around like a referee in a war game. She was getting so wrapped up in her plans that she somehow forgot that she was just as vulnerable, just as at risk, as anyone else. Luckily, she had better equipment, and she wasn’t hurt. If the unseen shooter had targeted Constantine instead, he’d be down for the count now.
“Erik, keep scanning for anyone else. But both of you, keep your heads down.”
She motioned to Constantine to follow her, and keeping low, backed off the rock until she could stand.
“Your armor really did work,” Constantine said, looking in awe at the torn fabric of her skins.
She reached up to finger the tear. The shot might not have been fatal even without her bones, but she’d be in a world of hurt.
“When all of this is over, we need to see about getting a milspec fabricator and the license for you to make your own STF armor,” she said.
A huge explosion reverberated through the air, the shock wave reaching from below and somehow bending around to take the breath away from her. She immediately bolted back to the trail M114 at the ready.
“Oo-fucking-rah!” Lyle said over the net.
Esther came to an abrupt halt, Constantine, who’d taken off after her, running into her back before he could stop. She switched to Lyle’s feed, back-tracked 15 seconds, and watched as 40 or 50 Hands were doing a credible job of bounding up the trail’s long straightaway. They were taking some light harassing fire, and Esther saw one of them drop to slide off the trail, when the entire side of the slope above them erupted in a flash of flames and smoke. Tons of rock descended, sweeping Hands over the side.
“Oo-fucking-rah is right!” Esther passed as Tim chimed in with, “Get some, Merl!”
The United Federation Marine Corps' Lysander Twins: The Complete Series: Books 1-5 Page 47
