“They sure have us. Just keep firing in the tree line and keep their heads down.”
What was that? Did he say retreat?
While he was telling Jankowski to fire, the skipper had told the lieutenant something that sounded like the platoon should pull back if their position became untenable. Noah hadn’t caught all of it, but he couldn’t believe that was what he’d heard.
Noah was not comfortable with their position. All of his training had pounded into his head that tanks do not go up against infantry like this, yet here they were. The so-called high ground they occupied as a blocking force was barely a bump in the terrain, and even on the reverse slope, they were hardly in defilade. Out in front of them, the Pytor Velikiy infantry were probing, firing when they could while minimizing their exposure. One tank had been destroyed, and both the Anvil and Ball Shot were damaged. If they didn’t do anything to change the dynamic, attrition would knock out the entire platoon.
If the Peters would charge the platoon, Noah had no doubt that the four remaining tanks would wipe them out. But they weren’t stupid. He was sure their commander was more than happy to keep up the pressure, wearing the platoon down. He was also sure that this was the point of main effort, and the armor facing the rest of the company was the fixing force. This is what the Peters wanted to do—that is, get the infantry into the Novyy Ural’s AO. Then, and only then, if the Marines reacted to the disbursed infantry, they might advance their armor.
The fact that they launched this two days prior to the arrival of the mechanized infantry couldn’t be a coincidence—not that the arrival of the rest of the Marines had been announced, but it wouldn’t be too hard for Pytor Velikiy Intel to put two and two together.
Noah couldn’t imagine that they really wanted to clash with the Federation. But as the skipper had said, if they could show strength and the ability to take more Novyy Ural territory, then they’d be in that much of a stronger position with the negotiations.
Another clang of a mini-rocket filled the crew compartment, but with both front Hasher’s already out, it would take a one-in-a-million shot down the barrel of the M104 or the .50 cal to knock either one out.
Still, Noah couldn’t let that go. He fired two of his remaining HE rounds into the tree line. He might not have hit anyone, but the trees exploding into kindling made him feel good.
He was about ready to fire another two rounds when 30 meters to his right, the Night Witch was hit, the explosion momentarily reflecting off of his ports.
“They’re behind us!” the first sergeant passed.
Noah could see smoke rising from the rear of the tank, and he felt a rush of fear. He wanted to ask if they were OK, if Chili was OK, but he kept off the net. The Night Witch’s avatar was still blue, which was a good sign, but unlike an infantry display, his didn’t show individual Marines.
Noah rotated the .50 cal to the rear, searching for a target, but whoever had hit the Night Witch had already gone to ground.
“We’re a mobility kill,” the first sergeant passed.
“Can you fire?” the lieutenant asked.
“On manual.”
The lieutenant barely hesitated before giving her orders.
“Anvil, on me while we break these suckers. Ball Shot, stick with the Night Witch, and both of you, give us support.”
“You heard her, Ski. Stay with her.”
With an unknown number of infantry behind them, infantry that had to have been infiltrated in before this action, the platoon was in a very vulnerable position. And with the Night Witch a mobility kill, they couldn’t break out to the rear. The lieutenant had decided to take it to the Peters, to break their will. Noah didn’t know if this was the best course of action, but it was better than just sitting there and waiting to be taken out one-by-one. He felt a surge of his warrior spirit as the Anvil answered Jankowski’s call and sprang forward into battle.
The Anvil crushed whatever bushes and small trees were between the tree line and her as Noah peppered the wash with his .50 cal. An explosion in front of him made him flinch, but it was probably the Night Witch, firing her 90mm. She’d be much slower with Chili adjusting her aim by hand, but it was good to know the first sergeant had their back.
With the Kiss of Death to the left, the two tanks crashed through the tree line like avenging angels. They dipped down into the small depression, then shot up, going airborne. Noah thought he saw a Peter diving to get out of the way, but they were through so quickly that he wasn’t sure.
“Clear to the right,” Noah shouted.
Corporal Jankowski skewed the big tank into a right-hand turn, ready to run the tree line.
“Brush me off, Anvil!” the lieutenant passed.
Noah swung his .50 to the rear, his heart rising to his throat when he spotted a Peter clinging to the back of the Kiss of Death, hanging onto the exhaust pack handles. Lessa was pivoting the tank like a bull trying to throw its rider, but the Peter was like a leach.
Noah fired a burst, blowing the Peter off in a mist of pink as the big rounds tore him apart.
“Got him for you. You’re clear,” Noah passed, then, “Ski, bring her back to the lieutenant.”
They needed to root out every Peter from the tree line, but with only the two tanks, they had to support each other as well. This wasn’t gladiatorial combat, and he had to keep his head in the game.
“Thanks for the help,” Lieutenant Moore passed. “Let’s keep it tight.”
Jankowski spun the Anvil around again and headed for the Kiss of Death. They still had to keep moving, pressuring the Peters and giving them no opportunity to react other than to bug out, but they’d be doing it as a team.
Explosions tore apart the tree line, the small, 20-centimeter trunks no match for the Night Witch and Ball-Shot’s guns. Noah sensed that the Peters were about to break. Frankly, he was amazed that they’d held it together as well as they had. It was almost Marine-like—not what he’d have expected from a planetary naval infantry. But with just a little more pressure, they’d have to retreat or risk total annihilation.
“Back through the tree line,” the lieutenant orders. “I want it leveled.”
Jankowski maneuvered around a three-meter-tall boulder, and turned to orient back on the tree line when the Anvil suddenly lifted into the air, smashing Noah against his display. Before he could register what was happening, she smashed back down on her side, knocking Noah out of his seat and into the still foamed areas under the commander’s cupola. He slammed into the far wall of the tank, with the staff sergeant’s body cushioning him. Still, he was dazed and confused. The open hatch was right in front of him, and more on instinct that rational thought, he pulled himself over the staff sergeant’s body and out of the Anvil.
He stared stupidly up at his tank, which had somehow landed on its side. It took him a long moment to realize she was slowly tipping over—towards him. He scrambled back as gravity won the battle, and the Anvil flipped over onto its top, the left side just missing Noah as he pushed back out of the way.
It was surrealistic. One moment, they were fighting their tank, and the next, 40 tons of Marine armor was upside down in the middle of a battle. It just wasn’t registering.
Noah managed to get to his feet, rushing forward to check on Jankowski. The moment he cleared the front of the Anvil, he saw a Peter, half out of a spider hole, whose look of triumph immediately changed to surprise as he saw him. The soldier reached into his hole to try and pull out a rifle as Noah drew his Ruger. The Peter was quick, but Noah was quicker, and he put two darts into the man’s chest, dropping him back into the hole. Noah ran to the hole and looked in, ready to fire again, but the man was dead.
He felt a moment of victory. He didn’t know how the man had done it, but he was sure this was the guy who’d taken out the Anvil, and that pissed him off to no end. Then with a loud “Ski!” he turned and rushed back to his upside-down tank.
‘Ski, Ski, you OK? You in there?”
A Davis did not
have a bottom opening into the crew compartment. Marines entered and exited through the regular hatches or not at all. And with the Anvil upside-down, the hatches were blocked. What worried Noah was that the left tracks, which were next to the driver’s hole, were mangled with whatever had flipped the tank.
“Ski!”
Noah, who was regaining his equilibrium, flopped down at the left side of the tank, scooching himself into a small gap, trying to see into the driver’s blocks. He could barely see one of them—the forward blocks were buried in the dirt—and that one looked like there was blood coating it from the inside.
Rounds pinged against the side of the tank, right above his legs. Noah couldn’t scoot any farther underneath, so he pulled himself out and ran to the back of the tank. He did a quick inventory. His helmet was gone, and his combat knife had disappeared. All he had was his Ruger and one extra magazine. That gave him 200—198 now, he corrected himself—of the tiny darts. He flipped the Ruger over and saw he had enough power for ten magazines, so his limiting factor was the number of darts. His handgun was for self-defense, not long-distance engagements. The darts were so small that despite their velocity, they could be moved around by the wind, and they rapidly lost energy due to air friction. Beyond 50 meters, they were pretty useless.
Sergeant Noah Lysander, UFMC, was not in a good position.
He slowly edged his head around the back edge of the Anvil, trying to see what was happening.
The Kiss of Death was approaching. Noah started to call the lieutenant before realizing that without his helmet and outside the tank, he was deaf and dumb. He took a step forward, waving his arms. At least one of the Kiss of Death’s Hashers had been knocked out, but he didn’t want the other front Hasher, if it was even working, to take him out.
The moment Noah stepped forward, another spider hole flipped open, and a head popped out, a metallic sphere of some kind in the Peter’s hand. The soldier propped herself up, then brought her arm back as if on a bowling alley. Noah had no idea what the ball was, but he didn’t want it anywhere near the Kiss of Death, so he brought his Ruger up, took his best firing range combat stance, and fired a five-dart burst. The soldier dropped back into the spider hole, and the silver ball fell to the dirt before slowly starting to roll down the slight incline, right at the tank. Noah didn’t know if it would cover the five meters or so and reach her, but he didn’t want the think even close. He ran forward, waving his arms wildly to get the Kiss of Death to turn to her left.
“Come on, Lessa, turn her!”
Behind the Kiss of Death, two Peter’s appeared, rushing forward. He was pushing the range, but Noah fired off two more five-dart bursts, and one of the two fell, but that had alerted the other one who started to swing his rifle towards Noah, who dove to the ground.
The Peter had him dead to rights, but Noah brought up his Ruger just as the Kiss of Death’s right rear Hamster sent out a sheaf of darts and almost cut the man in two.
Noah flinched. He’d never seen a Hamster fire from this vantage. If the Kiss of Death turned, he was close enough that it would do so again, not caring if he was a Marine or not.
Grubbing hell, he thought as he realized his only course of action.
With an “ooh-rah,” Noah stood up and charged the Kiss of Death, expecting to be cut down at any second. The M104 fired, but not at him, and Noah angled slightly to the right to give his Ruger’s much bigger cousin a clear line of fire. Without pausing, he jumped, getting one foot over the lip of the sloped armor at the front, which he used to push himself up and on top. Almost immediately as he cleared the muzzle, the Kiss of Death’s 90mm fired, the blast almost making him lose his footing. He reached out to grab the edge of the MGS to steady himself, and from over the turret, his eyes locked onto another spider hole opening.
“How many grubbing holes do they have?” he wondered as he fired five more rounds at the shape that appeared, then disappeared from sight as the darts hit.
These holes had not just been dug. They spoke of preparation, preparation that had not been picked up by surveillance. Now, more than ever, Noah was sure that this was the point of main effort.
The Kiss of Death lurched into a depression, and Noah almost lost his footing again. He’d been standing up too tall, his legs straight. He bent them, using his legs as shock absorbers to keep standing.
With only one tank and a fair amount of ground cover, the Peters started swarming forward like wolves on a moose, trying to use numbers to simply overwhelm the Kiss of Death. On the other side of the tree line, the other two tanks were firing, and the Kiss of Death had all three weapons engaged, but still, some of the Peters were getting too close, and that’s where Noah came in. He stood on the top of the tank, a last line of defense—an extremely vulnerable last line of defense. If the Peters were not so focused on the tank herself, they could have easily brushed aside the Marine standing on top of her. Still, he wasn’t invisible, and he’d taken a round of some kind to the thigh. It hurt like hell, but his leg still held him upright, so he ignored it the best he could.
Most of the Peters were revealing themselves too early, falling to the Marine weaponry. Two Peters, however, had somehow kept their nerve through all the fighting, jumping up out of nowhere only 20 meters away, each holding one of those metallic spheres. Noah fired off 20 rounds before they fell, but the Kiss of Death kept moving forward, which would put them over the spheres. Noah didn’t know what would happen if the tank ran over them, but he did know he didn’t want to find out. He flopped to his belly, his leg screaming out at the abuse, and poked his head over the edge of Lessa’s ports. With his left hand, he signaled for her to do a right turn.
Lessa’s eyes only slightly widened as she jerked the Kiss of Death to the right, almost throwing Noah off the tank. Noah scrambled for purchase. If he slid off, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to get back on. The Kiss of Death hit a bump, and that actually helped him, almost throwing him back to where he could stand.
Noah snapped off five rounds at a Peter who was at least 100 meters away, well beyond his range—or at least he tried to. After three rounds, his mag ejected. He couldn’t remember going through 100 rounds. He inserted his last mag, telling himself to have some fire discipline-which he totally ignored when two more Peters rushed the tank. He fired off ten rounds, which were probably wasted as the coax fired as well, dropping both of them.
With Noah on top of the tank, he was cut off from everything else. For all he knew, the Pytor Velikiy armor could have started a full-out assault on the rest of the company. As a result of being off the net, his war had come down to him standing on the Kiss of Death and trying to drop anyone who came near. In a way, it was a much cleaner way to fight, something on which he could focus. And because of that, his gut was telling him that things were coming to a head.
If a Marine unit were in a defensive position and about to be overrun, the commander would order the FPF, or Final Protective Fire to be initiated. What that meant was that every Marine, whether within the defensive position or outside it with the supporting fires, would let loose a holy hell in an attempt to crush the assault. It was “Danger Close,” and Marines could take casualties from friendly fire. There was a certain mindset when the FPF was ordered, a sense of now or never.
This wasn’t a defense, at least from the Pytor Velikiy side. This was an assault against a lone Marine tank, but somehow, Noah sensed that same now-or-never mindset. There seemed to be a degree of desperation among the Peters. They weren’t waiting until the Kiss of Death came close to spring their little traps. They were assaulting from farther out, but they were coming one after the other, they were coming in concert with each other. Noah kept firing, dropping some, missing others, doing what he could to keep them away from the tank.
And then he was out of darts. There was nothing more that he could do. He wondered if he should get off, but whatever happened to the Kiss of Death, he was along for the ride. He slid to a sitting position, almost crying out at the pain in h
is leg, and settled in as a spectator, watching to see what happened.
He could see at least six Peters from his vantage point, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. The Kiss of Death’s .50 cal fired upon two of them, looking like it hit one. But if Noah could see six, there had to be more on other sides of the tank. They were closing in.
And then, right in front of Noah, the glorious sight of the Ball Shot filled his field of vision as it crashed through a few of the remaining trees in the wash, guns ablazing. Tellie swung her tank around, 30 meters off the Kiss of Death’s right rear, while Cliff turned the turret to the rear, covering the Kiss of Death’s six. Together, both tanks surged forward, right into the heart of the Pytor Velikiy assault.
“Get some!” Noah shouted before simply resorting to unintelligible woops.
With the Night Witch providing covering fire, both tanks opened up with everything they had—and it worked. Finally, the Peters broke. They’d done amazingly well, but there was only so much a fighting force could take, and they’d reached their limit. Either on their own or by order of a commander who’d taken a hard bite of reality and initiated a retreat to save what he or she could of their fighting force—and Noah was willing to bet it was the latter—there was an immediate, if haphazard, retreat.
The Kiss of Death and the Ball Shot pursued to make sure the retreat was real before the lieutenant slowed down and stopped, willing to let the infantry withdraw.
Noah let out a sigh of relief. Somehow, they’d pulled through—and he’d pulled through. That feeling was tempered by the loss of Staff Sergeant Crimineli and maybe Jankowski as well.
The commander’s hatch opened up, and a grimy-faced Lieutenant Moore popped out her head.
“You still hitching a ride there, Sergeant?” she said, a huge smile on her face.
“Yes, ma’m. I got a little dinged up here,” Noah said, pointing at his leg, “and I’m a tanker. I don’t walk when I can ride.”
“Well, we’re heading back to the first sergeant. I think the skipper will be pissed if we just leave her there. You want to maybe ride inside with us?”
The United Federation Marine Corps' Lysander Twins: The Complete Series: Books 1-5 Page 66
