Crimson Tempest

by Anthony James

  “Aye, sir,” she said, still not convinced.

  “You can fly it out if anything happens to me,” he said. McGlashan didn’t bother to reply. She knew he was taking a pointless risk, as did he. My decision to make, he thought. His suit informed him that his heart rate and blood pressure were slightly elevated. Not fear. Anticipation.

  There was movement behind him. The first of the soldiers arrived, dropping onto their stomachs and swarming along the ground towards the lip of the shelf, keeping their chests just high enough that their bandoliers of plasma grenades weren’t dislodged.

  “Spread out,” said Ortiz, waving her hand to the left and right to indicate where the infantry should go. Amongst the men, Duggan saw the ship’s medic, Corporal Blunt. He had a heavy pack of complicated healing kit fixed across his back that looked like it weighed seventy pounds.

  Turner emerged last from the rocks, fifty yards back from the ridge. He’d been given the unenviable task of carrying the amplifier unit that would let them take remote control of the tanks. He dropped low and dragged it the remainder of the way to the edge.

  The comms fizzed and hummed. “Captain Duggan, Sergeant Ortiz. This is Lieutenant Chainer. Something’s just destroyed the cavemouth beacon.”

  “Roger,” said Ortiz. “We’re almost in position. Setting up remote connection to the tanks now.” She was only ten yards from Duggan and flat on her stomach. Her helmeted head turned towards him and she raised her hand with first finger and thumb pressed together. “Shame we can’t see the cave mouth,” she said to him. The suit’s sensors could only detect movement up to eight hundred metres, which was unfortunate since the gauss rifles could kill at two klicks or more.

  “I’m taking command of this one, Sergeant,” said Duggan over a private channel.

  “Understood,” came the instant reply. There was no rancour in her voice – she knew Duggan had earned his right to command.

  “Stay down and keep your lights out,” said Duggan across the open channel to the squad. “Switch on movement and heat sensors. The Ghast suits will mask their signature, but we might get warning of any ordnance. We’ll try and surprise them with the tanks. I’ll take tank one, Diaz you’ve got two, West three, Nelson four.”

  “Roger,” came the responses almost at once.

  Duggan instructed his helmet to tap into the amplification unit, which then relayed him to the onboard micro-core of tank one. “Tank one sensors seeing heat and movement,” he said. The vehicles’ sensor arrays were more sensitive than the tiny helmet arrays and they’d be relying on them to detect where the Ghast forces where and what kit they had with them.

  “What do we have?” asked Ortiz.

  “Ghast compact tank and troop movement,” he said. “Tank one moving out. Tank two fall in behind. Three and four follow at three hundred metres. Activating weapons systems. Setting to auto detect and fire.”

  Under Duggan’s instruction, the front tank glided smoothly ahead for three hundred metres towards the cave entrance. Suddenly, the sensor feed began to shudder, which told Duggan that its main armament was firing. The tanks could propel fist-sized chunks of depleted uranium at an incredible velocity and with reasonable accuracy over long distances. It was a crude method of waging war, yet it continued to be a cheap and effective way of destroying the opposition. You could track and intercept inbound missiles. You could deflect beam weapons with the right kind of armour. It was difficult to do anything about a heavy slug of dense metal coming towards you at fifteen klicks per second.

  “What’s it firing at?” muttered Duggan.

  He accessed the tank’s targeting system. It looked like Sergeant Ortiz had patched herself in for a look and had got there ahead of him. “Knocked out their tank, sir. That’ll piss them off.”

  “Incoming,” said Diaz, his voice calm.

  “What is it?”

  “No information at the moment, sir.”

  The feed from the Duggan’s tank became an incandescent white, which faded quickly to static noise. In the distance, the floor and walls of the cave ahead of them glowed with the fierce light of the Ghast artillery attack. The white-hot burst vanished in a moment, leaving the first tank scorched, but apparently undamaged and still operational. The vehicles were made to absorb a lot of incoming fire, but Duggan knew that whatever had caused that blast, there’d be damage to the armour and probably to the equipment onboard. He checked and saw multiple failure reports from the onboard systems, including the forward sensors. Luckily, the engine hadn’t stalled and the tank continued onwards at seventy-five percent speed.

  “Computer-guided plasma launcher,” said Diaz. His tank was the closest and its sensors had read enough to be sure what had struck the first vehicle.

  “Tanks three and four under control,” said Ortiz. “Heading after the others.”

  “We need to destroy that launcher before the Ghasts find out we’re up here,” said Duggan grimly. The plasma launchers were nasty against armour and nasty against ground troops. The splash damage could engulf even the most dug in of troops. Given the time, they could smash through almost anything, including a warship’s heavy armour. The infantry was spread across a width of over one hundred metres, so they weren’t clustered. Still, they’d become easy prey if all of the tanks were destroyed before they’d knocked out the Ghast artillery.

  “Need me to take point, sir?” asked Diaz. Tank one was slowing the progress of the one behind.

  “All yours, Soldier,” said Duggan.

  “Any sign of the plasma launcher?” asked Ortiz.

  “Nothing yet, Sergeant,” said Diaz.

  There was another burst of light against the first tank. Its onboard warning alarms chimed urgently and fed through a number of deep red warning gauges showing that most of the onboard electronics had just burned out.

  “Tank one out of action,” said Duggan. “Tank two continue ahead. Three and four keep your distance.”

  With his tank going nowhere fast, Duggan spent a few seconds pulling up the details from the remaining functional array on the vehicle. He sent the data file through the suit’s communicator to the Crimson, hoping that it wouldn’t arrive corrupted.

  “I need an enhance on that file. Immediately,” he said. Even the Crimson’s old mainframe would have several hundred thousand times the processing power of the tank and it would be able to discern possibilities from the video that the tank’s computer would not. The line hummed for a few seconds before McGlashan spoke.

  “Captain Duggan, Sergeant Ortiz, I’ve got some bad news for you. There are two plasma launchers. One’s in the cave mouth between two rocks to the far left. The muzzle is pointing through and into the cave. The other one is almost two klicks away. I can’t get an exact location, only an approximation. They must have kept it with the dropship.”

  “Roger that. Diaz, West, Nelson. Target the rocks at the left-hand side of the cave entrance.”

  The soldiers in control of the tanks wasted no time. “Overriding auto targeting,” said Diaz.

  The short-barrelled gun of tank two clanked four times in succession, sending its ammunition at high velocity in the direction Duggan had indicated. The remaining two tanks followed suit, pumping out heavy metal slugs in short volleys. Their aim wasn’t exact since it was hard to aim precisely through the remote control.

  Before Duggan was able to confirm if the artillery piece at the entrance had been destroyed, another blast of plasma burst across the cave, the ferocity of it turning the exterior of tank two a molten orange. This time, Duggan’s helmet picked up the spitting sound of the superheated air as it expanded at an immense speed, washing outwards for a hundred metres all around. Before the echo of the light had faded from Duggan’s retinas, there was another plasma strike on the tank.

  “Tank two out of action,” said Diaz. “Two direct hits.”

  “Three and four taking evasive manoeuvres,” said West. “Still firing.”

  Duggan continued to watched through tank one�
�s remaining sensor and saw huge chunks of rock explode away from the boulders near the cave entrance over one thousand metres away. The barrage from tanks three and four continued, smashing the rock into pieces. Something metallic was hurled into the air, twisting and turning as its ruined mass arced fifty metres from where it had been positioned. There was other movement – shapes in powered armour scattered away, whilst others crept into the cave close to the side wall.

  “Got the bastard!” said Nelson in triumph.

  He’d spoken too soon. Another of the guided plasma strikes made a direct hit on tank four. Before the light of it had faded, Duggan was able to see a number of smaller explosions detonate against the vehicle’s hull as the Ghast soldiers threw their grenades against it. For a moment, it looked as if the tank’s armour might have shrugged off the attack, but then something else exploded against it in the muted colours of a conventional explosive launched in a low-oxygen atmosphere. Whatever it was, it stopped tank four immediately.

  “Looks like it’s down to me,” said West.

  “Ignore their soldiers and go straight for the second launcher,” said Duggan, with utter calm. “I’ll feed you the coordinates if I get anything exact,” he told her. “You’ve got shock troops coming to the left.”

  “Roger. I’ll hold fire until I see that plasma launcher,” West replied.

  “We can’t give ourselves away - keep your movement to a minimum,” Duggan told the squad. The suits were designed to give out hardly any heat and they could fool all but the most powerful infra-red sensors. It was all about the movement, which was easy to detect and hard to disguise. “I make it forty Ghast shock troops incoming. They’re still out of helmet viewing range.”

  Duggan watched the Ghast soldiers advance through the sensor from tank one. They wore the powered alloy battle armour that he’d seen them wear ever since the first time he’d engaged in direct combat with them. The Ghasts were already much bigger than humans – seven feet tall humanoids that seemed almost as broad as they were tall, with dense bones structures and heavy musculature that made them as strong as they looked. Even so, they had no more ability to survive in a near-vacuum than a human and they ensconced themselves in servo-powered armoured suits, which were angular and ugly in design. The Ghasts looked slow and clumsy inside their suits and Duggan had always felt that the lighter suits of the Corps soldiers were better-suited to ground combat.

  “Exiting the cave mouth now,” said West. “Taking small arms fire and a couple of grenade strikes. Nothing to worry about.”

  Duggan patched himself into tank three for a few seconds. The landscape outside the cave was littered with rocks and indentations. The Ghast dropship could have hidden almost anywhere. The plasma launchers didn’t need a perfect trajectory to score a hit, since their projectiles could veer through the air. Still, there were limitations to where the second artillery unit could be positioned in order to have scored a hit so deep within the cave. Wherever it was, random fire stood no chance of taking it out.

  “Any news on the second launcher’s position, sir?” asked Ortiz. “Those Ghast troops are going to realise we’re here soon.”

  “Commander? We need something on the second launcher and soon. Got anything new for us?”

  “Negative, sir. I’ve managed to connect to the tank through the amplifier but we’re not receiving a consistent high-resolution feed. I’m transmitting the best data we have through to the tank’s autofire systems.”

  “Keep at it,” said Duggan.

  “First Ghast squad coming to within eight hundred metres,” said Ortiz.

  “I’m taking fire, sir!” said Carter, with an edge of tension in his voice.

  “Shit, I think they’ve got a couple of heavy repeaters with them,” hissed Davis from his position nearby.

  It looked like the Ghasts had come prepared for some real action. Duggan took a deep breath and prepared to give the order to respond. Before he could open his mouth, all hell broke loose - the rocks of the shelf and the boulders behind him seemed to explode into a million shards. The sharp fragments flew into the air, before skittering in every direction and bouncing away from the suits and helmets of Duggan’s squad.

  “Return fire,” he said. “Kill those ugly bastards.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Returning fire was easier said than done. The Ghast heavy repeaters raked left and right along the edge of the shelf, keeping the soldiers pinned down. Duggan was able to see the weapons through tank one’s sensors – they were little more than a chain gun mounted behind an alloy shield. The repeaters had tiny engines that let a single Ghast move them around easily, whilst also providing power to cycle the weapon. The enemy had moved four of them inside the cave mouth and they’d set up overlapping fire to ensure that Duggan’s squad couldn’t even lift their heads without the risk of having them blown off. All along the ridge, the soldiers occasionally looked over but there was little they could do to put the advancing Ghasts under pressure.

  “Got one,” said Jackson grimly, as a shot from his rifle smashed through the suit of an approaching Ghast warrior from over seven hundred metres.

  “They’re advancing in fives,” said Ortiz. “Giving themselves plenty of cover.” She ducked back down, just as two of the repeaters shattered a chunk of the ledge away nearby.

  Duggan raised himself on his elbows and fired a couple of quick shots with his own rifle. The newest models had very little kickback, but he kept it braced against his shoulder out of habit. The gun hummed and whined, sending out its dense metal bullets towards the closest of the Ghast squads. One of the distant enemy was spun around and dropped to the floor. The Corps gauss rifles could punch through the Ghast armoured suits easily enough.

  “I’ve been hit, I’ve been hit!” screamed Henderson. A way to his left, Duggan’s suit magnified and enhanced a spray of blood as it was jettisoned from the soldier’s body.

  “Hold tight, I’m coming to get you,” said Blunt, dashing across in a low crouch, his medical kit bouncing wildly on his back.

  “How’s that tank doing?” Duggan asked. “We could do with it back in here.”

  “The Crimson’s sent through its best guesses, sir. No luck yet. It’s ridden one hit and there’s been nothing else. I might be under the plasma launcher’s firing arc,” said West.

  Duggan didn’t say anything else and hoped that the soldier was right about the tank being too close for the plasma launcher to get off another shot. The Ghasts had them pinned down pretty well and it wasn’t looking good. He fired off another three rounds in quick succession, unsure if he’d scored a hit.

  “Is this quiet enough for you, Sergeant?” he asked.

  Ortiz laughed in good humour as she fired a snap shot towards the enemy forces. “This is just perfect, sir,” she said.

  The heavy repeaters chewed up the rock face in front of him, forcing Duggan to stay low. He took advantage and connected with tank three’s sensors. He could tell at once that it was firing and the main turret burned hot from the friction. Three bursts of four rounds bludgeoned the distant rocks into splinters. The tank fired another volley, this time shattering an overhanging shelf into pieces and sending a hundred tonnes of rock onto the ground beneath.

  It appeared that West’s opinion that tank three was too close to the launcher was wrong. The tank took another hit, though its evasive pattern was enough to ensure this next plasma burst deflected partially away from the angular front armour.

  “Close,” muttered Duggan. It was down to luck if the tank would find the launcher quickly enough. “I hate relying on luck,” he growled.

  “Don’t we all, sir, don’t we all.” It was McGlashan, monitoring his comms output.

  Tank three continued with its bombardment. Duggan caught sight of something and the sensor readouts confirmed a flash of hardened alloy, hidden fifteen hundred metres away behind a two-hundred-metre-wide bank of irregular rock.

  “Got the dropship,” he said in triumph.

 
; “I’ve got the coordinates,” said West. “Let’s pray the launcher’s with it.”

  Four heavy projectiles collided with the rock, each connecting within a few feet of each other. Another four followed and then another four, as the tank continued to trace an irregular pattern of movement towards the dropship’s location. The final volley blew out an enormous chunk of the rock, leaving the Ghast dropship easily visible. It was an ugly design – blocky and functional.

  “Say goodbye,” said West. Duggan could picture her face as she directed the tank to fire.

  The dropship was struck by a volley of depleted uranium rounds. It wasn’t designed to withstand the punishment of high-calibre weaponry and its structure was crumpled and knocked over onto one side. Its hull split and the life-supporting gases of the interior were sucked out into the planet’s atmosphere.

  “There’s the launcher,” said Duggan.

  The Ghasts’ artillery piece had been placed to the rear of the dropship and was now fully visible. Its crew of four were gathered around it, their deaths assured. The tank took moments to reload and its projectiles took less than a second to cross the intervening space. The launcher and its crew were flung into the air, a mixture of metal and bodies thrown many metres by the unstoppable fusillade.

  Duggan had almost no chance to feel satisfaction. Before he could give the instruction for the tank to return to the cave and take out the heavy repeaters, an explosion tore into the surface – this one much, much bigger than anything from the plasma launcher. The feed from tank three ended at once.

  “The Cadaveron’s just taken out the tank,” Duggan said.

  “That’s not good news for us,” said Ortiz. She was as matter-of-fact as ever.

  Duggan took stock. The heavy repeaters continued their withering fire without cease. He didn’t know how much ammunition they could hold and it didn’t look as if they were going to run out before the advancing Ghast shock troops got close enough to do a suit-jump onto the ledge.