Markov's Prize

by Mark Barber

  “Jai, Command, good job,” Tahl nodded. “Get your heads down, stay in cover, and wait for artillery support and covering fire from Squad Teal.”

  Van Noor checked the overhead view of the battlefield again and let out a curse. Another strong force of Ghar was moving toward Cian Company on the right flank.

  Chapter Nine

  “Got something,” Gant declared as he sent an image feed from the spotter drone to the rest of the squad. “Look at this – just up around that corner ahead.”

  Sessetti looked at the image which was transmitted to his screen. Three Ghar battlesuits stood in the center of the ravine; one with its weapons pointing down at the ground and no light emissions from its reactor exhausts. The second machine’s reactor blinked on and off whilst the lights from its sensor array flickered temperamentally. The last machine stood ahead of them, its weapons also pointing down the ravine.

  “Looks like they’re in trouble,” Gant said. “We should go get them before they realize how close we are.”

  “Don’t talk crap!” Jemmel snapped. “They know we’re here, and they’re just sat there waiting for us! Besides, we’re supposed to be ready to reinforce the line, not go leaving our positions because we feel like it!”

  Sessetti switched off the image feed from the spotter drone and looked at the ravine entrance ahead. It seemed taller, all of a sudden, more threatening. He considered voicing his opinion but decided against it.

  “Our guys are taking a beating, and for whatever reason, there’s three of these bastards sat there in the open, two with no power!” Gant urged. “We can get right on top of them and drop grenades in their reactors! Three of them, just waiting for it!”

  “He’s right,” Clythe nodded. “C’mon, let’s go finish them off before they call in help. No power. This will be easy.”

  The sound of battle to either side of the squad’s defensive position seemed to intensify.

  “No power?” Jemmel shook her head. “Simultaneously? Give your brains a chance, both of you! They don’t just break down!”

  “The intelligence brief said that if one reactor goes up, it can take out an entire squad of them!” Clythe said.

  “That’s an explosion, not a chained power failure, you idiot!” Jemmel scowled, a gauntleted finger pointing in accusation. “Look! We’ve got our orders! We sit tight and shoot anything that gets close!”

  “Grow a pair, Jem!” Gant snapped. “There’s three of them and seven of us! They’re sat there, just…”

  “Shut up!” Rhona finally interjected. “All of you, shut up! I’m thinking, just give me a second!”

  “We’ve got orders, Kat,” Jemmel said calmly, “we’re not supposed to just do our own thing!”

  “We’re selected and trained for our flexibility!” Gant exclaimed. “So let’s be flexible! Let’s go blow these sods up before it’s too late! The mandarin said they’d start breaking down if we left it long enough.”

  Rhona nodded slowly.

  “Gant, Rae – get up front. Jemmel, stick with me and be ready with the lance…”

  “Seriously?” Jemmel yelled.

  “Just do what I tell you!” Rhona shouted back. “C’mon! Let’s go get them!”

  “We telling Command?” Qan offered.

  “Don’t do that,” Gant said, “they’ll just tell us to wait here and it’ll be too late.”

  Sessetti looked across to Clythe as the seven strike troopers rose to their feet. Whatever was going on in his friend’s mind, it was hidden by the helmet’s face mask. The squad moved silently and rapidly into the ravine, their armor changing to a darker orange-brown to fit in with the colors of the shaded rocks. Up ahead, Gant held up a clenched fist. The squad stopped in place. Sessetti checked the feed from the spotter drone again. He could see it up at the edge of the ravine, silently looking down at the Ghar below. Nothing had changed – one was powered down, one was struggling through some sort of reboot procedure, whilst the last stood guard over its vulnerable comrades.

  “We hit the live one with everything we’ve got,” Rhona ordered. “Gant – take Rae and Sessetti around the right, the rest of you follow me to the left. Wait for the guard suit to turn and check the other end of the ravine… Wait…Go!”

  Sessetti followed Gant and Rae as the trio sprinted out of cover and ran into the open around the corner of the ravine. The lumbering suits were only a stone throw away, the live machine midway through a turn with its weapons pointed away. Halfway from the frantic dash to reach the enemy, the two apparently damaged Ghar effortlessly powered up. Sessetti felt bile rush into his throat. All three span around to face the approaching troopers and opened fire with the most intense barrage of destruction Sessetti had ever seen.

  Bolts of plasma smashed through Gant, tearing off one of his legs at the knee and spinning him around in place as his armor was punctured by the projectiles. Two shots cleaved straight through Rae’s torso; she tensed up and toppled over to the ground without a sound. The shard’s communication frequency filled with panicked shouts, screams of pain, curses, and confusion.

  Sessetti turned and ran. The cover of the ravine corner seemed to stay in place, refusing to draw closer no matter how fast he propelled his legs. A Concord trooper sprinted past him, plasma bolts chasing them down as they ran and flaring up their protective hyper-light shields. Sessetti had no memory of how or when he reached cover. He found himself collapsed on his knees, his carbine in the dust in front of him, panicked bodies crammed into cover all around him.

  “Stay down!” Jemmel yelled. “Stay put!”

  “Get back!” Clythe shouted. “We need to pull back before they catch us up!”

  “There’re Outcasts moving up the ravine behind us!” Qan exclaimed. “We’re boxed in! Get the Duke here to get us out!”

  “What about Rae?” Sessetti asked, picking up his carbine. “And Gant? We need to get them!”

  “They’re gone!” Jemmel risked a look back around the corner. “We need to fall back to the Duke, shoot our way through those Outcasts!”

  “No!” Rhona shouted. “I’m gonna go get our guys! In five seconds, you give me all the cover you can!”

  “Kat!” Jemmel grabbed Rhona forcefully by the forearm. “You go out there, you’re dead! They’re gone! We need to fall back!”

  Sessetti opened his mouth to speak. He wanted to say that he would go with Rhona. He wanted to offer to go and get Rae. No words came.

  “I’m not leaving them!” Rhona growled, throwing Jemmel’s hand away. “I can get to those rocks and then drag them into cover! You ready?”

  Jemmel grabbed Rhona by the neck.

  “Don’t!”

  Rhona pushed Jemmel off with both hands and then turned to look up the ravine.

  “Cover!” Rhona yelled, sprinting away and back toward the Ghar troopers.

  Sessetti flung himself to the dusty ground around the corner of the ravine and brought his weapon up to bare before spraying the nearest Ghar with plasma bolts. Clythe dropped to one knee next to him, firing his own carbine at the same target. Rhona hurtled along the ravine, enemy fire blasting the rocks around her and kicking up clouds of dust. Jemmel’s plasma lance impacted into the side of one of the Ghar war machines, pushing it forcefully back onto one bended leg but failing to damage it. By a miracle, Rhona dived to the ground and took cover behind a thick outcrop of orange rock. She was halfway.

  “Keep firing!” Jemmel shouted. “Don’t let up!”

  Rhona hauled herself back to her feet and ran headlong for the two prone bodies who lay broken ahead of her. As if it were another trap, as if they had been toying with her, all three Ghar battlesuits turned their guns on Rhona and cut her down with accurate fire. Plasma bolts smashing through her hip and abdomen, Rhona crumpled to the ground. She let out an agonizing cry of pain which filled Sessetti’s ears for a long moment before she fell deathly silent.

  An unseen hand grabbed Sessetti and dragged him back into cover behind the ravine corner.


  “Squad Wen, command override,” Jemmel breathed. “Strike leader down. I have command.”

  ***

  “Command, Denne!” Vias shouted above the roar of gunfire. “I’ve got two dead and two cat four! We’ve taken out two Ghar troopers, but I’ve got another three pinning me down from marker omega!”

  “Denne, hold position,” Tahl urged. “You’ve got multiple units from Alpha Company moving in to provide support, seconds away. Is your position defendable?”

  A few seconds of silence made Tahl fear the worst. He slid his facemask back and raised his armored fingers to touch his aching forehead. Finally, a response was issued.

  “Command, Denne, friendlies visual, we’re… we’re good.”

  No sooner had Vias finished speaking when the next voice cut across the command shard frequency, accompanied by a flashing light on the holographic display of the battlefield which was projected in front of Tahl.

  “Command, Xath,” Althern called, “I’ve got three troopers down and we’re falling back to… marker ghia.”

  Ignoring the hammering pain in his head, Tahl looked at the positions of all nearby units on the map.

  “Xath from Command,” he responded, “you’ve got hostiles approaching from the east; I’m re-routing three D1 drones to marker ghia to support you. Can you defend that position?”

  “Xath,” Althern said breathlessly, as the marker showing his position on the map moved rapidly toward their new marker, “affirmative.”

  Tahl looked up at Van Noor, Cane, and Kachi. Van Noor remained crouched next to him, providing a constant stream of corrective markers to the artillerymen who relentlessly bombarded the advancing Ghar. Cane looked across at Tahl.

  “Do we need to move up, Boss?” Cane asked. “Time we go get stuck in ourselves?”

  Tahl’s response was cut off by another communication across the shard.

  “Command, Squad Wen!” Tahl recognised Strike Trooper Jemmel’s voice. “We’re pinned down at the ravine immediately north of marker indigo! Readouts showing… one dead, two cat four! Request immediate assistance!”

  Tahl felt an immediate wave of nausea, replaced by calmness and clarity as his array warned him he was receiving external assistance to cope with what he had just heard. He reviewed Squad Wen’s situation – cut off in a narrow ravine with three Ghar troopers to the north and some twenty Outcasts advancing from the south, the four surviving strike troopers did not have long. The Ghar troopers were too close to engage with artillery; but perhaps not the Outcasts.

  “Cian Battery, Beta Command, engage targets at marker zion,” Tahl ordered before sending a mental command to a pair of C3D1 drones which were attached to Squad Chyne, moving them toward the ravine from the east.

  It still would not be enough.

  “Command Squad, on me,” Tahl ordered, hauling himself to his feet and sprinting off toward the ravine.

  ***

  “They’re nearly on top of us!” Qan yelled as he risked another shot, leaning around the corner of the ravine wall to fire another burst of plasma into the advancing three Ghar fighting machines. Jemmel yelled a stream of obscenities as she leaned over the top of the hole she had found in the rock face, firing another stream from her plasma lance toward the trio of immovable Ghar. Return fire from the enemy unit smashed against the rocks, chipping clunks of stone up which twirled into the air around the strike troopers amid a dense field of dust and sand.

  Sessetti peered over the lip of the rock and looked at the three prone bodies of his squadmates which lay motionless where they had fallen, now behind the advancing Ghar. He attempted a suit readout from all three casualties, but at this range and with his control of the shard all but destroyed by his rising panic, he could only detect that one of his friends was already dead and a second would die within the next few minutes.

  “Targets behind!” Clythe shouted, turning on the spot to fire a rapid burst back up the ravine. “Outcasts!”

  Sessetti raised his carbine and fired an aimed shot at one of the small horde of hunched over creatures which scrabbled their way over the rocks toward them. His shot hit a Ghar Outcast in the center of the torso, flinging the creature’s arms out to either side before it fell back, dead. The action felt futile to Sessetti. As he fired again and again, the realization crept to the fore of his mind that this was how he would die, surrounded in a dusty ravine on a planet he had never heard of, buried up to the waist in rock as psychotic panhuman-morphs in unstoppable battlesuits closed on him. He hoped that his clone would be activated, for his parents’ sake.

  With only the briefest of warnings in the form of a familiar, shrill shriek, the entire world to the south seemed to light up as artillery shells slammed down into the ravine entrance, shaking the earth and lifting clumps of blue sand and orange rock into the air. The next shells walked slowly forward, ripping into the advancing Outcasts and hurling them up into the air, slamming the creatures violently into the ravine walls and tearing them limb from limb.

  Simultaneously, a pair of disc shaped C3D1 drones appeared at the edge of the ravine above and to the right of Sessetti, their plasma light support weapons firing rapid pulses of energy projectiles down into the flanks of the three battlesuits. The Ghar fighting machines stopped in place and twisted to bring their weapons to bear on the Concord drones, returning fire with even greater ferocity.

  Amid the shouts, screams, explosions, and confusion of the battle, Sessetti saw three strike troopers suddenly appear on the opposite side of the ravine, firing down into the Ghar battlesuits. He watched incredulously as a fourth trooper climbed quickly down the ravine wall, threw his carbine aside and sprinted headlong out into the open toward the Ghar.

  ***

  The first attack needed to be perfect. With fire streaming down from both sides of the ravine, Tahl had one chance to take an enemy down before he had lost the advantage of surprise. The three Ghar troopers drew closer with each step, their attention still dominated by the pair of D1 drones which fired down into them from the top of the ravine. Caught in a hail of fire, one of the Concord drones exploded spectacularly and showered the ravine with parts and debris. But it had given Tahl what he needed.

  Running to engage the first battlesuit, Tahl stepped out into a long stance and brought one elbow forward, every muscle in his body concentrating on reinforcing the strength of the strike in the very tip of that elbow. Thirty years of martial arts training enhanced by the superhuman strength afforded to him by his battlesuit focused his elbow strike into the vulnerable side of one of the Ghar’s knee joints.

  The strike resounded with a loud clang, and the Ghar sank to one side as the knee buckled and bent. Tahl immediately followed up with a side kick to the exact same spot, letting out a shout as he again concentrated every ounce of strength at his disposal into that one point of impact. The knee joint gave way and parted as his armored foot slammed into its target, sending the lower half of the leg skidding across the sand as the Ghar fell pathetically down into the dirt. Van Noor, Cane, and Kachi were only a moment behind, diving forward onto the crippled Ghar war machine and packing plasma grenades into every joint and vent before running away as the Ghar suit exploded spectacularly.

  Stepping up to face the remaining two Ghar, Tahl stood before the wreckage of his vanquished foe as the two machines turned to face him. He ran and rolled to the right, anticipating their rapid fire and staying one step ahead of the deadly projectiles as they tracked their weapons toward him. The same principles applied to fighting multiple panhuman foes as deadly battle machines: Tahl positioned himself to face one opponent so that the second was in a line and behind his comrade, isolated and unable to attack. Tahl let out another cry and leapt up, bringing a fist straight into the chin of the Ghar suit and sending its sensor head snapping back to look up at the sky. A shower of bolts and parts fell down to the earth as he landed.

  Tahl quickly dropped to the left and rolled away from the machine’s deadly claw as it darted forward and
attempted to cut him in half at the waist. Tahl countered with a round kick to the knee, but he succeeded only in denting the armored metal of the fighting machine’s leg. The claw came down again and Tahl met it head on with a high block which came sweeping up from his hip to above his head. The claw smashed through his block with ease, hammering him down and sending him sprawling into the sand, his forearm plate mangled and half torn from his arm.

  Diving to the right, Tahl quickly repositioned himself to keep the two Ghar in a line and unable to attack him simultaneously. He ducked beneath another deadly attack from the machine’s claw and then leapt up to stand on the Ghar suit’s knee joint. Balancing precariously on the moving surface, Tahl swept his leg up into another round kick, which smashed straight into the machine’s face and tore through the metal and shattering the sensor lenses. Seeing the opportunity, Tahl thrust his clenched fist into the jagged hole he had made and fired off a salvo of delayed fuse grenades from his wrist-mounted x-sling. He jumped down from the battered machine and stepped quickly away as the grenades detonated, sending a chain reaction of explosives ripping through the suit and leaving it smoking and burning where it fell in the sand.

  The last Ghar turned to face Tahl, its sensor-head appearing to look almost frantically to the left and right as if seeking a way of escaping. Tahl stood his ground and brought his arms up to a guard position, his teeth gritted and a hatred of his foe that he had not felt in years surging back through his soul like an old, dark friend. Tahl rushed forward and avoided a claw attack, punching the elbow joint with enough force to send sparks rippling from severed cables and leaving the claw arm limp and useless at the Ghar’s side.

  He rolled straight from the strike into his next attacks, a front kick into the Ghar’s head followed by a spinning kick into the side of the same target. Two powerful attacks to the head succeeded in nearly severing it; the Ghar suit staggered back, swaying on its three legs as smoke began wafting up from its neck joints. Van Noor, Kachi, and Cane appeared by Tahl’s side as he advanced to send a volley of punches into the Ghar’s leg, crippling the knee joint and seizing it up. The suit access panel sprang open and the terrified looking Ghar warrior inside frantically clawed at the cables which connected it to the machine as it desperately attempted to extricate itself from its metal coffin.