by Dan Davis
One day, maybe. Not today.
The floor of the cargo compartment was covered with omniroller conveyors and crate stack after crate stack was moved from a stowed position and rolled down the ramp to the surface. Gunny Wu and a team of Marines were working like a swarm of ants to get the disembarked cargo out of the way so that the rest of it could be conveyed down the ramp. They had the unloading part covered.
But as she made her way to the rear it became obvious the gear was piling up just to the side of the ramp.
“Come on, Rama Seti,” she shouted over her shoulder. “Let’s go.”
He came with her, like a monster’s shadow, as she picked her way between the boxes and crates to the rear and jogged down to the ground. Kat jumped the last half meter, her boots crunching on the fine, shining black rock of the alien world. The sun was high, casting short shadows on the floor, black on black.
“Where’s Sergeant Wu?” she called on the comms and a suited hand shot up by a pile of cargo still sitting netted tight on a transport crate. She pushed her way through to him. The Gunny was directing the men that he had in between checking items off on a large screen in his hands, scrolling through the manifest.
“I know, Lieutenant, I know,” the Sergeant said before Kat could open her mouth. “The Captain ordered me to keep the cargo here while they establish a perimeter and a secure route to the outpost for the evacuees.”
He gestured northward and she looked through the piles of equipment, beyond the massive wheels of the landing gear, to where groups of Marines were heading toward the outpost, two klicks away.
It seemed further away on the ground than it had in the air. Still, her enhanced vision could make it out well enough. The reddish-brown steel walls, squared off and human-made in an alien landscape. Above the wall, she could make out the top of the transparent dome that roofed over the center courtyard of the square outpost. In the far-left corner jutted the antenna, sticking straight up over it all.
“Cassidy ordered you to dump it all here?” Kat asked Wu. He nodded, looking nervous. “Did he tell you to obstruct my engines and block the landing strip?”
“Sorry, Lieutenant,” Gunny Wu said. “It won’t be long, I’m sure. We just need to make sure the supplies aren’t destroyed or captured before we can—”
“You can pile this gear up fifty meters that way, Sergeant and you can do it right now.” She pointed toward the outpost. “Get the wheels turning on the cargo crates. Unpack the ETAT-24s, use them to help you. And use our hero here.” She jerked her thumb at the man looming over them both.
“We’re on it, Lieutenant,” Sergeant Wu said, nodding at the vehicles.
Marines wrestled with the ETATs, the big combat dune buggies, ripping off the protective layers and extending the roll bars over the top. Those vehicles were made of the lightest, strongest materials available.
“I got this, sir,” Gunnery Sergeant Wu said. “Mr. Seti, sir, would you mind giving us a hand?” The small Sergeant jogged over with the giant marching behind. “And I’ll move everything fifty meters north, right away, Lieutenant. Right away.”
“Carry on, Gunny,” she said and left the Marines and Rama Seti.
Kat made her way along the side of her shuttle, looking up for damage on the hull plating or any cracks in the engines or wings.
Her hull was charred from the reentry shock heating but that was normal. It was Sheila the AI’s job to assess damage and say whether the plates were too damaged to fly but you could only trust a computer so much.
The side door of the Lepus was thrown wide open and a steady stream of Marines flowed up and down it, in and out of the shuttle. On her AugHud she located Captain Cassidy about seventy meters away with his command team around him, directing them to various points. Kat had no desire to get that far away from her shuttle, not with the enemy coming out of the hills, so she climbed up the stairs into the side door, shouting at a couple of dawdling Marines to move out of the way, which they did, smartly and promptly.
Back in the cockpit, she swung herself onto the ladder and scrambled up, through the open double hatches-looking up at the azure disc of sky directly above her head-and out onto the roof of the shuttle.
“What do you see, Mehdi?”
He was laying stretched out on his belly, telescope on its tripod up to his visor. The rest of his sensors and gear arrayed around him. Above, his microdrones buzzed in a small swarm.
“They’re out there, the bastards,” he said, not taking his eyes from the sights.
“You can see them?”
“Not directly, no. I’ve got a drone at a thousand meters up but they’re still out of sight. They’re in the hills to the northeast. They’re kicking up dust and I keep getting flashes of heat above the valley sides. And that’s where all the electromagnetic shit is spilling out from. Are you seeing this? What are they pumping it all out with?”
She looked down at the swarming Marines on the surface. Four teams, Cassidy’s at 70 meters and three others beyond, spaced out but heading for the northern side of the outpost. “You’re relaying it all to Cassidy?”
Mehdi scoffed. “Course. Check the tactical channel.”
On her AugHud she saw the thermal and electromagnetic signatures beeping, out beyond the walls of the outpost, in and amongst the boulders at the edge of the foothills. “So, those wheeler pricks are going to attack the outpost from the same direction they did last time, huh?”
“Looks like it. Where are the Marines that Cassidy was sending up here with you?”
“Flores and Fury? They were up here but they said it was pointless while the enemy was so far away and they went down again. Heading for the rear.”
Kat shook her head. “Right. I bumped into them downstairs. They’re Spaz Squad, right?”
“That’s an offensive term.”
“Shut up, Mehdi,” Kat said. “Come on, mate, you’ve had your fun. Let’s focus on getting the old girl turned around, right? At this rate, looks like we might have to evacuate the wounded under fire. You’re reading the meteorological data?”
“Satellites are all operational but that interference is disrupting the signal between us and them. Same as us and the outpost. The wheelers are just flooding the spectrum, just flooding it. Never seen anything like it. Look at all the pulses, Kat. Our personal comms are going to be down. We’ll be blind. Can our shielding even cope with that? Are they going to roll up here with all that and hit us with—”
She cut him off. “What’s the weather data?”
“Not getting much but yeah, looks okay. Still, blue skies, wind gusty but stable enough for—”
An explosion.
Two hundred meters away, between the shuttle and the outpost, a chunk of rocky ground erupted in a shower of gravel and dust. The sound of the blast was a crack that she felt in the body of her flight suit. An incoming alien weapon had exploded amongst the advancing human soldiers.
The world slowed as her enhanced reactions cranked up a gear, responding to her spike in adrenaline and cortisol.
Most Marines had hit the dirt, throwing themselves prone onto the rough black bedrock. A few of them, like Captain Cassidy and Sergeant Gruger, stood tall and issued orders, arms pointing.
More explosions followed the first, like a series of grenades creeping closer to her shuttle. One detonation every second or two.
Mehdi scooped up his gear, throwing armfuls of it down the hatch before cradling his telescope and scurrying after the equipment.
Sheila pinged Kat’s ear. “Danger. Threat detected. Recommend immediate prep for takeoff.”
“You’re not wrong, Sheila,” Kat said, peering through the clouds of debris, watching them bloom and die away in slow motion. “But we can’t leave until we evacuate the wounded.”
Mehdi grabbed armfuls of his gear as he struggled to his feet and headed for the hatch. “No one will come out into that. We need to be gone before them or the shuttle will be hit.”
She did not look at him,
instead studying the pattern of explosions. It was like a mortar attack. Explosive shelling. The plumes bursting like flowers.
The detonations were not hitting the outpost. They were not hitting the Lepus. Just the open ground in between, where the Marines ran for cover.
“Let’s get out of here,” Mehdi said, pausing by the open hatch down to the cockpit. “No way will the wounded walk through all that.”
Explosions threw up debris but she could see movement at the outpost. Kat gestured at a group of EVA-suited civilians hurrying from the walls.
“They must really want off this planet.”
“There they are,” Mehdi shouted. For a moment, she thought he meant the civilians but his tone was all wrong. Then she saw his outstretched arm pointing over her shoulder at the jagged hills.
Oh shit. Here we go.
The wheelers were coming.
CHAPTER THREE
Ram knew to keep low to reduce the chance of being hit by shrapnel or blast damage but he was 2.5 meters tall and even crouching he was still the biggest target around.
“Hit the deck, sir,” Gunnery Sergeant Wu shouted, crouching behind a half-unpacked crate.
The sergeant and the six Marines with him at the rear of the Lepus all hugged what cover they could to protect themselves from the alien mortar fire.
From the rear of the shuttle, Ram watched the pattern of explosions detonating at intervals between his position and the distant walls of the outpost. Warning lights flashing on his AugHud. The blasts were surely random, fired without a spotter. Lobbed high from the cover of the dark hills beyond the outpost to explode on impact with whatever they hit.
“They’re not hitting the outpost,” Ram called out.
“Very interesting, sir,” Gunny Wu shouted back.
“Not hitting the shuttle, either,” Ram replied.
“I guess we’ll see about that, sir,” Wu said.
It was pretty clear to Ram that all they were hitting was bare rock, sending up plumes of pulverized stuff after shattering the ground beneath.
Ram had a view clear across the open rectangle of land between the shuttle, the outpost and where the plateau rose into a jumble of ancient shattered and eroded stone. There was a lot of surface area in that open space. An explosion hit every second or two, seemingly at a random location, the plumes dissipating in the gusting wind, the tops of the debris clouds curling over as they reached the prevailing currents a few meters up.
A quick, rough calculation happened somewhere just below Ram’s full consciousness.
“There’s less than a five percent chance of getting hit,” Ram said to the Sergeant, straightening up. “We can continue to unpack the ETATs. In fact, we should probably hustle, Gunny.”
“They’re not aiming for us,” Wu said, standing up, looking out at the other Marines who were advancing through the incoming fire, running from cover to cover, such as it was.
“They’re trying to stop us from reinforcing the outpost,” Ram said to Wu. “The wheelers don’t want to damage the shuttle or the outpost, maybe? Capture the materiel, not destroy it?”
Before the Sergeant could respond, orders came in from Captain Cassidy on a directional broadcast to the group of Marines the rear of the shuttle.
“I want F Team to unload those ETATs and get them moving. Mr. Seti, you are formally attached to F Team. Ensign Tseng, you are in command of Mr. Seti. He’s your problem. Watch out he doesn’t get you killed. And Ensign, make… because… don’t…”
The signal fragmented into nothing.
The wheelhunters are able to flood the electromagnetic spectrum so thoroughly that our comms equipment is unable to compensate.
He knew that was a fact, somehow, but couldn’t recall when he had been told it. Probably on the shuttle.
“Where’s F Team?” Ram asked Wu.
On his AugHud, the icons for four Marines, one NCO, and one officer lit up around him, overlaying the individuals taking cover behind crates, vehicles and inside the rear of the shuttle.
The data showing the members of F Team scrolled over his eyes. His AugHud had quickly adjusted itself to Ram’s data-processing speed and the text flicked through his vision. As a leader of a highly-competitive online Avar cooperative, Ram had spent years processing huge amounts of information in seconds and he drank it all in.
Ensign Tseng, Male, Macanese, Age 28
Sergeant Stirling, Male, Scottish, Age 26
Corporal Fury, Female, English, Age 36
Private Cooper, Male, American, Age 26
Private Flores, Female, Argentinian, Age 22
Private Harris, Male, American, Age 25
All team members were armed with standard issue gear but each of them was tagged on the AugHud as NON-COMBAT.
What the hell? Who are these idiots?
“Order confirmed, sir. Seti, get over here,” Ensign Tseng said, standing up from cover and waving Rama over to him. The frequency of the incoming rounds remained consistent and one exploded nearby, between two unpacked crates. The blast wave, such as it was, blew past him, showering Ram with stones that pinged off his armor and helmet. Ram did not slow down as he jogged over to Ensign Tseng, his own breathing in his ears as he did so. The Ensign had ducked behind his crate again when Rama crouched down beside him.
“Ensign Tseng. I’m Rama Seti, pleased to meet you.”
“I know who you are,” the Ensign said, scowling. He was tall and thin but folded up in his black armor like an insect. Like Ram, he had no assault rifle in hand. Unlike Ram, he had a combat knife in a hip holster that was half a meter long and a huge pistol in a chest holster, red-tipped magazines all around the webbing at his waist.
HK-15mm with AP rounds and a T-R Longblade. Officer’s loadout.
The knowledge was there, in his memory but he had no idea how he knew it.
“What are your orders, Ensign?”
The officer ignored him. “Stirling, get up and carry on. I want these vehicles on their way to the forward fire teams inside of five minutes.”
“Sir,” the AugHud showed it was Sergeant Stirling speaking, from out by the furthest ETAT vehicle, standing up with his arm out, gesturing. “What about this incoming fire, Ensign?” The sergeant was a huge man, maybe the biggest Marine Ram had seen. He towered over the others near him and the breadth of his chest and shoulders was obvious even in the armor. From within the visor, a brutish and malevolent face glared out, as if Sergeant Stirling wanted nothing more than to tear the Ensign’s head off.
Ensign Tseng scoffed. “It’s nuisance fire. Ignore it. That’s an order.”
Before the comms clicked off, Sergeant Stirling—in a strong Scottish accent—muttered, “No shit.”
A blast a few meters away threw fragments of stone over them, pinging off the underside of the shuttle and the huge engine bells.
From the cargo ramp, the pilot Lieutenant Kat Xenakis shouted at them on the directional band. “Gunny Wu? I thought you were getting this shit away from my shuttle? I need to turn about. And get those vehicles to the outpost immediately. The civilian evacuees are heading this way.”
Ram had barely ever spoken to the pilot before but she seemed like someone with a lot of energy. Even hidden in her heavy flight suit, he could tell she was slim, tall, strong. She glared out of her visor with big dark eyes and her top lip seemed to be always drawn back halfway between a smile and a snarl. Xenakis spoke so quickly and with such forcefulness that the Marines seemed to wilt a little in the face of it, despite the fact that she had no official authority over any of them.
“Lieutenant Xenakis,” Ensign Tseng said before the Gunnery Sergeant could reply. “I am in command of F Team. My orders are to arm the ETATs and proceed to the outpost so they can provide fire support.”
“Arm the ETATs?” Lieutenant Xenakis shouted as she changed direction, marching down the ramp right toward Ensign Tseng. “There’s no time for all that, those civilians need help right now or they’re going to eat this incoming fire
. They’re walking wounded. Where’s Captain Cassidy? Tell him the evacuees need a pickup. We had a clear view from the top of the shuttle but I can’t send him the visual feed from the drone.”
The Ensign hesitated. “He’s still out there. The wheelers are jamming our comms again, only short range comms is working now.”
“Well, Ensign, in that case, you’re going to have to show a little initiative, aren’t you. I’ve just given you additional tactical information and I believe the standing orders for this phase of your operation is to unload the equipment and facilitate evacuation of the wounded.”
Ram looked back and forth between the UNOP Navy Lieutenant and the UNOP Marine Corps Ensign.
Ensign Tseng “Yes but—”
“They’ll get torn apart before they ever get here unless you get those vehicles rolling, immediately,” Xenakis said. “And I need to get the shuttle away from all this before she gets hit.”
The Ensign looked around, scanning left and right.
“I think we should do it,” Ram said, glancing at the pilot and wondering if it was the best thing to do or if he only thought that because he was attracted to her. “Get the wounded on the shuttle with the vehicles, then take them to the front with the mounted weapons.”
“I’m in command,” Ensign Tseng said. An alien shell exploded a few meters away. “I am in command. You do what I say, do you understand?”
“Fine, fine,” Ram said, holding out his hands. “Wouldn’t want it any other way.”
Ensign Tseng glared at Ram but spoke to the others. “Gunnery Sergeant Wu?” The sergeant was busy pushing a crate stack around a blast crater a few meters to the north. “Please carry on unloading and my team will take the vehicles to collect the injured from the outpost.”
Lieutenant Xenakis, nodded once at the Ensign, winked at Ram, then jogged away back up the cargo ramp into her shuttle.
Ram helped the other Marines tear the protective layers off the big vehicles while the explosions continued to smash into the ground between them and the outpost. Captain Cassidy’s fire teams advanced obliquely across the plain toward the enemy and took up positions to provide cover.
