A shimmering barrier of pure kinetic force, the energy field that science fiction had predicted and science had failed to deliver, snapped into existence, an invisible dome over people who were barely aware they were under attack.
The Runes inlaid in his flesh burned. He wondered if he’d have been able to smell his own flesh without the breather—his suit certainly didn’t appear to be surviving the process, as curls of smoke rose around him.
The first impactor drove him through the shattered concrete under his feet. The ancient artificial rock crumbled into dust as kinetic energy ran through him into the ground. Suddenly, he was several centimeters into the soil under the concrete.
The second and third impactors arrived simultaneously, driving him to his knees in agony, but he still held the shield.
The next three arrived in the same instant from different angles, lighting the sky up with fire as they hammered against Damien’s shield. His power, somehow, held as the infinitesimal fraction of surviving force ground his knees into the pulverized concrete and alien soil. He could feel blood dripping down his face, and he didn’t have the time or energy to wipe it away.
The last missile came directly down the middle, trailing the rest by a tenth of a second due to an overestimation of how long the rest would take to adjust their courses. It hammered into his shield from above, lighting up the next sky like an impossibly close sun, and Damien felt his shield crumple. Bend.
He crumpled and bent with it, his shield failing as his eyes wavered, unwilling to see as his entire body screamed against the strain of what he’d called on his power to do.
He let the shield go as he found himself face-first on the cracked alien concrete. Part of his mind wondered, almost idly, where all the blood had come from.
#
While Denis Romanov had never seen thaumic burnout in person, it had been covered in his training. Like the Navy it worked with, the Royal Martian Marine Corps was fundamentally a peacetime military—but it tried to be a well-trained, well-equipped one.
There was enough blood leaking from Montgomery’s face that the Marine really wasn’t quite sure what to do. The normal rule in this situation was to relieve the overwhelmed Mage and replace them with someone else, even if that person couldn’t do the job quite as well.
Denis himself was the only Mage available, and he couldn’t do what the Hand had done at all. He knelt by the collapsed, bleeding Hand and tried to check for a pulse.
“I’m alive,” Lord Montgomery told him, coughing behind his breather. “Where are our friends?”
Denis checked. His helmet was only showing a ghost icon now; the attacker had gone over the horizon.
“We’re out of line of sight—and probably fire,” he told the Hand. “The base’s sensors suck, but my comp is calling it thirty to seventy minutes before they complete their orbit.”
Montgomery slumped onto the shattered ground around him for a moment, then raised his bloodied eyes to look at Denis.
“Your people were laying out SAMs,” he noted. “Where did they end up?”
“I don’t know,” Denis admitted. “White was with them and I haven’t heard from them.”
“Find them,” the Hand ordered, his voice harsh. “Most likely, they’ll assume I can do that again, in which case the next step will be to send in ground troops.”
“I…only have sixteen Marines left, sir.”
“That’s why you need the SAMs.” A small click in Denis’s comm system announced that Montgomery had opened a wider channel.
“Dragic. I need you to coordinate with whoever the hell you can find in charge in there,” the Hand told the MIS Inspector. His voice was even harsher now, and Denis wondered just how much damage the other Mage had done to himself.
“We’ve got Dr. Kael out,” the Inspector replied. “What do you need?”
“You have twenty-five minutes to get every single person in that compound into the lower levels of the alien base,” the Hand ordered. “We’re under orbital attack and I expect to see ground landings shortly. The civilians will be safest at the bottom of a hole, and conveniently, the aliens left us a deep reinforced one.”
Silence.
“I’ll make it happen,” she said steadily. “Be in touch.”
Ignoring the brusqueness of the Inspector, Denis brought up his own links.
“Marines, come in,” he snapped. “We are under attack. Anyone in an exosuit needs to get out here and find Carmichael’s fire team and the surface-to-air missiles they were supposed to be caching.
“The rest of you, get in exosuits and come join me outside. We have work to do.”
Cutting the channel, he turned back to Montgomery.
“What happens if they do bombard us again?” he asked, eyeing the bloodied state of his boss.
“We die, Lieutenant,” the Hand told him. “So, we’ll plan for the alternative.”
#
Dragic was more efficient than he had any right to expect, Damien reflected. The time frame he’d given her was impossible, but she’d managed to get over a thousand people organized and streaming into the lower levels of the ancient base before it ran out.
He’d spent the same time trying to wipe blood off of his face with only moderate success. He couldn’t spare the energy to purify air for himself, so he’d had to leave the breather—and the dried nosebleed under it—in place.
“We found the rest of the SAMs,” Corporal Kitcher, leader of the exosuited Marine fire team sweeping for Corporal Carmichael and his people. They’d found three of the caches placed exactly as per plan, each containing two Hyper-Interceptor two-stage surface-to-air missiles.
“We’ve found Carmichael’s people,” Kitcher concluded. “White took them out with magic from behind. They would never have seen her coming.” The Marine paused. “She disabled the last six SAMs. Initiator stages are bled dry; they’re just antimatter bombs now.”
“Bring them back anyway,” Romanov ordered. “They may still come in handy.”
What was disturbing to Damien was that three caches had been placed as planned before White had turned on the Marines. It was like she’d been doing her job, perfectly efficiently, until someone else had told her to stop—and she’d immediately, without hesitation, turned on and murdered the Marines working with her.
Something stank to Damien and he didn’t like the implications.
The Marine Mage-Lieutenant was looking at Damien, his expression hidden behind his helmet. Romanov had been the last of his people to get into exosuit armor, but the palms of his suit had small runes inlaid into them, allowing him to still use his magic.
“Is there anything you can do, my lord?” he asked quietly.
“If I do, I definitely won’t be able to stop another bombardment,” Damien admitted. He didn’t think he could stop a bombardment either way—but he needed to conserve all of his energy for that possibility.
“We’ll do what we can,” Romanov replied. “We’re going to fall back underground pretty quickly in that case.”
“I have radar signatures,” Corporal Chan, leading one of the three fire teams that had joined Lieutenant Romanov out with Damien, interrupted. “Not the ship, not yet, but I’m reading ten shuttles.”
“Any kind of detail?” Damien demanded.
“Not with these sensors,” the Corporal said bitterly. “We got five minutes until they’re on top of us.”
“Lieutenant,” Damien said quietly, “you are authorized to shoot them down. No warning. No second chances.”
“They tried to nuke us, sir,” Chan demanded—and Damien could feel the Marine’s questioning glance through the man’s faceless armor.
“And that is why we are going to kill them all,” Damien told him. “But the responsibility remains mine.”
“Kitcher, you’ve got the birds,” Romanov ordered, ignoring the byplay between his superior and his noncom. “Fire at will.”
The Marines must have been setting up the remote-controlled weapons as
they found them, as a Hyper-Interceptor took two minutes to set up and needed a thirty-meter safety zone to launch…and all six missiles lifted off inside five seconds of the order.
The first stages burned for twenty seconds, old-fashioned chemical rockets that lifted the missiles past five kilometers’ altitude, clearing a safety distance for the second stage.
The sky lit with brilliant fire as six antimatter engines lit off, the missiles seeking targets at hundreds of gravities of acceleration. There were countermeasures—and the flash of a dying missile told Damien that the attacking shuttles had them—but inside an atmosphere, there was almost no time to deploy them. Anti-missile lasers nailed one SAM.
The other five slammed head-on into their targets, wiping four shuttles and their cargo of ground troops from the air in flashes of antimatter annihilation.
Chapter 11
As the Marines headed for the hole the assassin’s explosives had opened in the ground, Damien found Romanov standing next to him. It wasn’t possible to read the emotions of someone locked in a two-meter-tall suit of exosuit armor, but somehow the Lieutenant still managed to appear impatient.
“We need to get you underground, too,” he noted. “If we let you get killed, there’ll be hell to pay, no matter what.”
The Marine gestured toward where the shuttles were sweeping in. “Once they have those boots on the ground, they’re not going to nuke their own people. If we’re going to make a tunnel fight of this, I’d rather not leave the most important objective on the planet outside those tunnels.”
“Touché, Lieutenant,” Damien allowed. The runes they’d found in the lower levels were probably more important than he, but he doubted he’d be able to convince the man charged with keeping the Hand alive of that.
“Let’s go.”
Damien couldn’t see the rapidly approaching shuttles, but he could hear them by the time they’d reached the open wound the assassin had ripped open trying to kill him. It was a larger opening into the underground tunnels than any of the handful of ancient airlocks that had been forced open.
“Are we leaving this for them?” he asked the Marine as he dropped into the hole.
“For now,” Romanov replied. “If nothing else, we don’t want them going through the labs. Plus, I have a plan for this hole in the ground.”
They passed by a fire team of exosuited Marines just inside, clearly setting up whatever plan Romanov had. Deeper in, another set of Marines was ushering the last stragglers of the research team toward the hole Kurosawa had opened to start this whole mess.
“This is my stop,” Romanov told Damien. “I don’t expect you to go hide behind the civilians, my lord, but this kind of tunnel knife fight is our job. Leave us to it.”
Damien didn’t like it, but the Marine was right. With a nod and a sigh, the Hand left the Marines behind.
#
Denis waited for the Hand to pass through Kurosawa’s tunnel behind the rest of the civilians and then nodded to the Marines waiting there. They unfolded a portable blast shield covered with runes on the “safe” side to reinforce its flimsy frame, over the tunnel.
It wouldn’t stop anyone who actually made it to the tunnel, but it would stand off gunfire or even major explosions. Since Denis had sixteen Marines, including himself, to stand off six shuttles’ worth of attackers, explosions were a major part of his plan.
“Here they come,” Chan reported, feeding everyone the datastream from the camera drones they’d left all over the domes and alien ruins outside. “Those…yeah, those are our shuttles, boss.”
Denis flipped to the visual feed from the tactical map he’d set to update, and nodded his silent agreement. The paint job was different, pitch-black instead of the Marines’ dark gray, but it was recognizably the standard assault shuttle the RMMC had built for their own exclusive use.
The visual suddenly fizzled and grayed out.
“EMP sweep,” Chan reported.
“It’s always nice to deal with professionals,” Denis said calmly. “Bring up the second wave of drones.”
The visual feed and the tactical map returned, showing him the assault shuttles sweeping back around, their scanners poking for any sign of defenders. Denis had enough time to recognize the flight pattern—the pilots, whoever they were, had been trained by Marines—before a second electromagnetic pulse swept the area, killing his second wave of eyes.
“Paranoid professionals,” Chan told him. “We’ve only got one more set of eyes, boss. What do we do?”
“Hold for sixty seconds,” he ordered. Once the enemy troops were on the ground, the shuttles couldn’t keep pulsing their EMP weapons, but his spy eyes were only truly hardened when turned off. When to bring up the last set was always a question of…timing.
The seconds of blindness ticked away with agonizing slowness, time Denis spent checking his links to the network of secondary nodes they’d carefully set up before going underground.
“Now,” he ordered. “Bring them back up.”
Everything flared back into existence on his helmet screens in the darkness. Four of the shuttles were grounded now, with two more orbiting about a hundred meters above them.
“Not quite where I hoped,” he observed, studying the shuttles as their landing ramps extended and soldiers in black exosuits started to pour out. “It’ll have to do.”
He glanced around at his men. All of his people were in exosuits now, which would shield them from just about anything that wasn’t right on top of them. The blast shield and the ancient alien concrete should shield the civilians…and that was really all he could give them.
“Fire in the hole,” he told his squad, then hit the prepared command.
The antimatter fuel cell in a Hyper-Interceptor missile was a marvel of engineering, built of permanently magnetized materials that held their payload of antiprotons suspended in a contained vacuum. Rated to withstand being dropped, crushed and even shot at, the fuel cells were extraordinarily hard to rupture.
With enough explosives, of course, anything was possible.
Six separate charges, crudely made from the missiles’ own warheads, went off where they’d been hastily concealed in the dirt. Six fuel cells ruptured, each containing a fraction of a gram of pure antimatter.
All told, twenty kilotons of fire swept the valley between the domes, incinerating the ancient ruins of the surface structures, two of the shuttles and dozens of the exosuited soldiers.
If Denis hadn’t already been certain his enemy had RMMC gear, the fact that two shuttles and easily a quarter of the exosuited troops survived the explosion would have confirmed it for him. Even buried underground, waiting for their enemy, his people were buffeted by the shockwave and covered in dust and loose rocks.
He’d lost over half of his eyes on the surface—less than he’d expected—but what was left was enough for him to confirm that one of the shuttles would never lift again.
The other did, sweeping for other threats as the last two hovered low enough to drop their own payloads of soldiers.
Of a hundred and twenty exosuited ground troops, his enemy was now down to sixty. It wasn’t enough, not when he had less than one squad against their three, but it was a start.
“Get ready,” he ordered. “Now when they get down here, they’re going to be pissed.”
#
The massive explosion had collapsed the portion of the tunnels that the earlier assassination attempt had opened up. It had also, Denis hoped, melted or collapsed shut any of the ancient airlocks the attackers may have wanted to use.
Sheltered by one of the ancient domes, the research camp had survived unscathed, but he was unsurprised when the strangers didn’t head that way. The prefabricated modules didn’t have great security, but with all of the airlocks double-locked, they’d slow the attackers down.
Instead, four of the exosuited soldiers dropped into the hole and placed charges before leaping back out with their augmented muscles. A moment after they were clear, the shap
ed explosives detonated, opening a new hole into the underground tunnels.
“Fire Team Alpha,” Denis said calmly. No further orders were needed. Corporal Kitcher knew what to do.
The first black-armored soldiers charged through the hole they’d opened, two full fire teams sweeping into the dark tunnels with heavy exosuit battle rifles in their gauntleted hands. Whoever these strangers were, they had access to the absolute latest in RMMC gear. Low-flying combat drones went ahead of them, sweeping for the traps and waiting soldiers their masters knew had to be there.
“Now!” Kitcher snapped to his fire team as Denis listened in. A preset EMP charge went off in the middle of the corridor, blinding their enemies’ extended eyes. A moment later, a salvo of grenades flew down the corridor, landing amidst the attacking soldiers in a flurry of smoke and explosions.
Denis’s squad hadn’t come prepared to fight exosuits. The armor-piercing grenades that would have had any effect on their enemy were still aboard TK-421—but the black-armored attackers didn’t know that. They paused as the grenades landed in their midst—taking the best position to survive the high powered, exosuit-threatening grenades they thought they were facing.
Corporal Kitcher’s men, however, knew the grenades were no threat to their exosuits and followed them far more closely than the enemy expected. The black-armored soldiers were good—but by the time they realized the grenades weren’t a threat, the Marines had opened fire.
Exosuit armor was tough, tough stuff, but both sides had heavy battle rifles designed to penetrate it at ranges of hundreds of meters. In a point-blank tunnel fight, three of the attackers went down in the first seconds.
Denis watched the fight through the helmet cameras relaying into the encrypted network of his squad, and for a moment, he thought Kitcher was going to take down the entire first wave without any losses.
The attackers reacted too fast for that. They were returning fire before the first bodies hit the ground, and helmet links died as the ancient tunnels turned into an abattoir of fire and death.
Alien Arcana (Starship's Mage Book 4) Page 8
