by J.J. Mainor
Chapter 11
On the far side of the complex, far removed from Remy’s position, Fortune’s army closed in on the first embankment on their landscape. They too spied the reflective objects peeking over the berms, but unlike with Remy, the shots rang out and pierced the armor of those men at the front of the column. Their inhibitors taking damage, two of the bodies were swept away in flashes of white light.
The troops behind took up their rifles and fired on the berms as they charged forward. Many were cut down at the front of the charge, many others saw their armor hold against the bullets. Still, many more were swept up as the inhibitors went offline.
For anyone on the Freedom who wondered how the miners planned to hold out against their army, they had their answers. The ridgeline was lined not with men, but armed drones firing indiscriminately at anything and everything moving ahead of them. Bullets sprayed from the drone positions toward the men. Tiny pieces of iron or lead or whatever other metal could be scrambled from the remaining ground were driven through the armor. Legs were destroyed. Arms were fractured. Yet even those nonfatal strikes proved fatal. Breaches in the suits exposed the men to the whisper thin air. While they lay on the ground in pain from the injuries, they shared the twin pleasures of feeling their blood boil without sufficient air pressure and their lungs convulsing for breath from the lack of oxygen. Those receiving headshots or chest wounds bringing death quickly were the lucky ones.
These enlisted men were nothing but cannon fodder. Each man took a bullet in order to buy another step forward for the man beside him. That man in turn took one for the next man. It went on and on with each death buying the army one more inch of ground. Every drop of blood spilt brought the army closer to that defensive line. The bodies were unimportant so long as someone overtook that ridge.
The first handful of men scrambled over the berm to tackle the mindless machines. One man shot a drone to pieces, another bashed one inoperative with the butt of his rifle. As the drones fell, their friends scrambled over the embankment and into the trench behind.
Back at the FOB, Colonel Fortune watched from his field desk within his sealed shelter. With each man’s helmet equipped with a camera like his own, his computer took the images and merged them into a single stream. His face showed no emotion over the small victory. He knew with enough numbers the trench could be taken, but another lie ahead. They would take it in much the same way, except now they had a defensible position from which to strike.
While the miners were busy scrambling up whatever casualties they could, Fortune had a man outside his own protective field with a Class 5 scrambler trying to do the same and keep the raw material out of enemy hands. It wasn’t simply that they didn’t want the bodies stolen. This faceless and nameless operator was reconstituting fresh troops for the line. Their own supply of material from the cargo pods was already exhausted. As long as they could capture those which fell on the battlefield, they could replenish their troops and prevent a loss through attrition. Of course that could only go on so long as the miners failed to detect the scrambler and its operator. With luck, the battle in the trenches would keep them too distracted to find one man speckled within the endless landscape.
In his shelter, Fortune studied the terrain ahead of his army. It seemed the miners had carved a number of trenches between the two sides. No doubt it was all the work of their own scrambler rearranging the landscape to give them an advantage. If he didn’t know any better, the Colonel would have believed these men were military themselves. Perhaps the data stores Freedom wanted would prove Imperium or Confederation interference. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time, and would be dealt with as it had been in the past. But for now, he had to focus on the next hill.
Holding the army at the first trench was impossible. There was not enough room inside for all the living bodies. Without a word among them, as if communication was psychic, certain suits braced against the forward wall providing cover fire while the rest scrambled over them and onto the field beginning the march forward to the next line. The bodies would fall ahead with greater frequency than those that had piled up behind. Far more gun placements met them ahead, and as if the opposing scrambler operator sensed the weakness in the lines, additional units materialized to bolster the line.
Onward they pushed, with no consideration for their safety or their lives. Knowing their patterns were in storage, that they could be resurrected after their life had been spent made this army more ferocious than any seen on the home world. These forms were expendable; the blood pouring from wounds was irrelevant. Their lives did not matter on this field, only the next steps, the next hill and the next gun placements.
The first men to overrun the next trench smiled with villainous glee behind the visors. They were the youngest members in the Space Force. As their job entailed nothing but shooting things up, they were also the least experienced and the least mature. This was everything they dreamed of when they signed their names to the enlistment papers. As children and teens they would play video games, running around and shooting bad guys or zombies. They could do what they wanted in the video game world like they did here on LX-925 because they would always respawn when their avatar died in the game. To these men fortifying the newest position and readying to take the next hill, this was the epitome of video game fun.
Eventually the last line would be breached and the miners themselves would have to don suits, take up arms, and face Fortune’s army themselves. It was unlikely they would respawn themselves as the soldiers did. To take a stand as they had, there was likely some moral code dictating their strategy and tactics. They were all civilians without the experience and comfort for turning their existence over to a machine. Before signing up for work in the extraterrestrial colonies, they had only known machines as something to make life easier. Some were used to save lives, but they had never encountered one that could bring back the dead. Two years in space with their outdated Earth way of thinking, it was unlikely they were prepared to take this fight as far as that scrambler could allow them.
Fortune gave his incoming video a glance of concern. He expected heavy casualties, and he didn’t expect to recycle many of the bodies, but those bodies were falling faster than he hoped. There was still another kilometer of this terrain to overtake before reaching the doors to the facility. If the resistance increased as they had already seen, it was unlikely there would be enough bodies left to take on the miners.
The Commander ordered the troops to hold at the next trench and fortify their positions. They would have to play this a little smarter from here on. The armed drones had to be picked off before charging. Some of the men had to fall back and deactivate any active inhibitors from the dead and wounded for scrambling. There was the risk the bodies would be scooped up by the enemy, but the chance had to be taken so that his own numbers could be shored up faster.
