Turning Point (Galaxy's Edge Book 7)

by Jason Anspach

More zhee ran past him—several this time. He felt a painful burning blast in his arm, accompanied by a flash of blaster fire and the report of a zhee-fired rifle. His arm disobeyed him, dropping helplessly to the earth like the shuttle had before it. The blaster rifle clattered to the dirt.

  Cassius watched as the two legionnaires became aware of the new threat to their rear. Aware that Cassius had failed them.

  The Dark Ops men sent their fire into the zhee who had gotten by Cassius. They dropped them left and right. But the zhee continued to swarm, getting closer and closer to the armored black knights on the field.

  Trident was the first to fall. While he was occupied with a trio of zhee to his rear, another zhee appeared from the opposite side of the wreckage and sent a charge pack’s worth of automatic blaster fire into Trident’s head and back. Armor works, but too close is too close.

  Trident pitched forward and fell hard onto the ground.

  Revo brought vengeance, killing the zhee who’d killed his squadmate. Repaying blood for blood. But he was just one man. He fired and killed until his blaster rifle was empty, and then he pulled his service pistol. He fired that too, until it had killed its last zhee.

  They shot him down before he could unsheathe his knife.

  Cassius waited, slumped half-over with a broken leg and a useless arm. He waited for them to kill him, now that he’d witnessed their victory over the kill team. Everywhere the zhee screeched and celebrated, climbing all over the shuttle and firing their blasters into the night sky. They began to pull the broken bodies from the wreckage. One of them appeared to be taking bites from Hot Plate’s legs.

  And then a zhee stood above Cassius, its face wrapped in a merlot hood, but its dead eyes visible, staring down. A hoofed foot struck Cassius in the temple, and darkness came again.

  13

  Thirty-Third Legion Recon, Shadow Company, First Platoon

  Grodan Wastes, Ankalor

  Legionnaire Captain Jul Besson watched the burning red sun of Ankalor drop into distant western sands. Ahead rose Gibraltaar Rock, towering above a sea of dunes and the broken wastes of the deep desert beyond Ankalor City.

  The rock in which the fortress was built was so huge, and so alien to the low broken mountains of heat-beaten granite and the huge expanse of drifting sands, that many wondered whether the massive rock had once been a piece of some greater stellar body that had fallen onto Ankalor long ago.

  The small column of legionnaires, leading shuffa beasts and dressed in the flowing black robes of the Guzim Haxadi, maintained a slow but steady crawl toward the westernmost air defense tower beyond the base’s invisible deflector shield. The air defense tower was built on a jagged lone spire of rock, high above the burning sands, but much lower than the four-thousand-foot Gibraltaar Rock.

  It was just before twilight when the column stopped, a few thousand meters short of the tower, and went through the motions of building a cook fire and settling their beasts for the night. As any band of Guzim Haxadi would. No doubt the zhee had snipers in the tower watching them, but from this distance none of their optics would see anything beyond dark shapes in robes.

  That was, if the zhee were even interested. Though fierce warriors, and constant advantage seekers, the average male zhee was quite lazy. When not ululating their bloody war cry and coming at you with gnashing buckteeth and a flashing kankari knife shining and ready, they liked to smoke and do nothing but argue. Or plan some new horror to get up to.

  L-comm sat and weather told the captain of Shadow Company that the local evening windstorm, known as the centauro, was picking up. It would turn quite fierce once the sun went down. Which was all the better to cover their infiltration after they’d jocked up in their scout armor.

  The massive bloody sun sank, and sure enough the wind began to skirl, sending sweeping waves of sand across the desert floor. The men of First Platoon, Shadow Company, began to shrug into their armor and assemble their weapons, which they had pulled from the large dirty bundles atop the cantankerous shuff beasts. The beasts paid them no mind; they were content to spit and howl forlornly at the night and the wind.

  Though the men would be carrying the scout version of the N-4, they also carried asymmetrical weapons unique to their line of work. This was one of the few units authorized to use silenced slug-throwing pistols; each man carried one in a shoulder holster. You could silence a blaster, but you couldn’t make the blast invisible. Slug throwers did both. In addition, the two platoon snipers carried old-school large-caliber sniper rifles.

  Captain Besson, in armor now, pulled his silenced pistol with the customized sights and grip—the grip was embossed with a winking cartoon Tennarian beauty and the letters “KTF Baby!”—and made sure he had one round in the pipe.

  The platoon sergeant and the platoon leader approached their company commander.

  “We’re up, sir,” whispered the lieutenant, call sign Mustang. The platoon sergeant, Sergeant First Class Jayzo, call sign Warpig, nodded wordlessly.

  Captain Besson scanned the night. Drifting sand was beginning to obscure the crescent moon as the storm picked up. They’d been over the ops briefing, and every man had a breakdown of the mission, step-by-step, running on his HUD. They’d done this before—but never with the stakes so high. If that air defense artillery tower wasn’t down and hacked by dawn, then a lot of leejes were going to get shot up on the beachhead during the landing in less than twelve hours.

  “Time to move then,” said Besson.

  “Copy that,” replied the LT. Warpig was already off and getting the men ready.

  For the next hour they ran at the double, crossing the sands in a wide circular pattern as quickly as possible. The howling wind pushed against them, and the sand raking the old-school armor they’d been issued for the job. No more of the cheap shiny silver. This was the good stuff, made back when the Legion had the budget to make armor that protected a leej in a firefight.

  The sniper teams, spotter and shooter, were dropped back along the ridges of some of the higher dunes that lay away from the air defense tower. Even though the sand obscured tangos on the watch balconies that climbed along the tower’s face, their imaging gear allowed them to see through the storm, tagging as many of the zhee on perimeter watch as they could spot.

  “Eyes on targets,” reported one of the snipers as the rest of the platoon continued on, using the storm’s cover to get as close to the base of the tower as possible. “Got donks on levels two, four, and six. Two apiece, and they don’t seem happy about being out here tonight.”

  Besson tried to listen over his own gasping breath as he pushed himself to continue on through the drifting sand and driving wind. The sand scraped wickedly across his armor.

  Check your pistol, he reminded himself, before you go live. The sand is probably everywhere. And, like the good officer he was, he reminded himself to remind his men to do the same. But not now. Even for legionnaires, pushing through all this at the double, in full armor and pack, was a feat of extreme strength and endurance. And since the standards for acceptance into the Legion had been relaxed—at the insistence of the House of Reason—many of the younger, newer legionnaires were struggling to keep up. Warpig stayed behind them, encouraging them—negatively—to keep up. None of the NCOs had any problem, of course, but most were old school. As was the platoon leader, who’d been an NCO before taking a commission.

  They came to a wide dirt road that had been grated around the tower. Intel indicated there would be sensors along its outer side, but there was an open question as to whether the donks had mined it. Donks loved explosives of all kinds.

  “First Team, go,” whispered the captain over L-comm.

  Two leejes dashed forward at a crouch, gear out without weapons, knowing the rest of the platoon, and the distant snipers, were covering their approach. They quickly set up the gear to disable the nano-sensors embedded in the road. When they had a green light on the data feedback loop, they hustled across the narrow sensor-free lane. They wait
ed to see if any alarms were triggered, but none were. Intermittent light poles along the roads in front of the base and the tower, seen now like waiting gallows in the shifting sandstorm, would have sprung to life if the sensors had been tripped.

  “All clear, sir.”

  The rest of First Platoon, Shadow Company, crossed the road in teams and went to their positions, with the platoon leader moving quickly between the various elements to get them set up for the next objective. Four teams of two would scale the sides of the rock tower and come in just under the balconies. Timed takedowns would happen quickly, and then the platoon as a whole would infiltrate the facility.

  That was step one.

  Step two was everybody inside got cleaned.

  Captain Besson checked his gear one last time, handed his rifle off to the man following him, and checked his sidearm. It was his favorite weapon, and he enjoyed any opportunity he had to employ it. The high-tech pistol had been designed based on the old 1911 platform, though no one in the modern era had any idea what that meant. It had a built-in silencer for “soft work,” and it was bored for 9mm so it fired like a child’s first air-powered hunting blaster. It was perfect for near-silent cleaning.

  He holstered the weapon, then checked his climbing gauntlets and the prevailing conditions. The wind was beginning to die down across the desert floor. The centauro hadn’t lasted long this evening. That was not good, but it couldn’t be helped. Finally, he checked in with the seven other leejes going up with him. They were all pros—as were most of the men in his company. Scout work required a promotion out of the line units.

  When all seven were good to go, they set out up the side of the rock.

  The climbing gauntlets adhered to any surface, even industrial zero-tension diamond glass. So scaling the rock face was no problem. The only problem might come if the zhee guards decided to have a look over the side of the tower. Then there’d be a problem. But that’s why they’d brought sniper teams. The first zhee to look over the side of the tower got his head blown off.

  Normally the platoon would have been running drones instead of, or in addition to, the human snipers. But the fortress had a high-tech detection network, and if the zhee hadn’t fiddled with much, the base AI was keyed up to look for drones specifically. The mission decision had therefore been to ditch the drone packages. The two sniper teams would be the eyes of the assault team.

  The watch balconies were all at different levels and on different faces of the rock, away from the main ground level blast door that faced the road. The door had never been an option; no doubt security feeds were watching that. As it was, the donks would see little beyond the swirling sand, unless they cycled through some of the more advanced imaging modes.

  Halfway up to the targets, the sand striking at their armor and visors faded to the flute-like notes of a fading whisper. The storm had passed.

  Twenty minutes later, all teams were in place and ready to go up over the sides of their assigned balconies. The move was a one handed pull-up, gyro-assisted by the armor, anchor the boots and eliminate the tangos with a minimum of fire.

  Real time feedback on the donks came in from the snipers.

  “Balcony four…” said the lead sniper. That was the balcony Besson and Davies hung beneath. “Your tangos are huddled inside the porch. Seem to be yakkin’ intently about something. Suggest you come from opposite angles. Take out your facing targets. Signal when in position. Cowboy out.”

  Besson and Davies, hand over hand, pulled themselves in opposite directions until they’d reached the ends of the guard balcony. Besson gave a two-click ready signal, then waited. The platoon sergeant was running all teams from the snipers’ position. Once they were in place they’d get a whispered, “Go!”

  When the signal came, Besson heaved himself over the ledge, ignoring the “kill confirmed” tags appearing in his HUD. The other teams were pro and moving fast.

  With his boots anchored on the ledge, Besson aimed and fired at the donk facing him. The first and second bullets smashed into the long skull of the jihadi in near-synch with Davies’s shots on his donk from across the balcony. Both donks dropped, bodies twitching.

  Besson crossed the balcony, covering the small blast door that led into the facility, while Davies put two more slugs into each donk’s heart. The suppressed weapons made definite metallic clacks, but nothing more. Across all four balconies, Besson could hear the insurance shots being doled out by the second man in each team.

  “All teams reporting access points clear,” reported Warpig.

  “Send ’em up. Move to position two.”

  Now the rest of the platoon began the climb to the secured balconies. The next ten minutes were tense. There was no time for over-cautious stealth; the men climbed fast like their lives depended on it. Because no one knew how the zhee—notorious for their lack of organization and commitment to chaos in all aspects of their lives, including military operations—ran their guard watch. The men who had taken the balconies waited with fresh mags in and barrels aimed at the door. If some zhee watch commander or replacement guard shift opened any one of those blast door, the leejes would alternate shots until everyone was dead, or they were out of ammo.

  It was at these moments that Captain Besson missed his scout N-4. The standard combat load of charge packs gave the option for a near endless supply of fire. The ancient slug throwers, relics from humanity’s deep past, though beautiful on levels that approached artisan craftsmanship, still gave you only seven shots. Then it was mag out, and there were only so many mags one could carry amid all the other gear one carried when heading into a combat zone.

  First Squad was just coming over the lip of the balcony when everything went to hell. Alarms sounded throughout the base, and in the distance, smoke could be seen rising from the shuttle crash site in the Ankalor City slums.

  ***

  The battle that followed was a series of brutal engagements along the hallways and upper floors of Air Defense Tower Four. Besson and the Shadows found themselves quickly switching from battlefield assassins and intel gatherers to shock troops.

  But every legionnaire started out a killer. So they adapted quickly, falling into something that felt as natural as walking to them. In moments they were moving by fire teams, taking key intersections within the complex, and setting up brutal fields of crossfire against the near psychotic zhee. They lobbed fraggers through forced blast doors, or used the breaching charges they’d brought along in the event they would need to crack reinforced blast doors. Massive explosions rocked the lower levels of the tower, and beyond its walls, the cry of energy displacement guns could be heard across the night.

  Explosions in the tight corridors, and in the zhee’s densely packed firing positions, combined with the coordinated fire from the teams, decimated the zhee on the lower levels quickly. Second Squad breached the blast doors that guarded the access to the fire control nexus above. That would provide access to the main batteries that ringed the upper level.

  Within moments it became clear that the zhee were determined to hold the line at the top of a wide set of stairs that led up to the control nexus. Except the zhee as a whole had no idea how to actually “hold a line.” They excelled in other strategies—strategies that made them something to be feared by all other races in the galaxy. The zhee were definitely a “handle with care” fighting force. They were so unhinged in battle that fear turned quickly to frenzy.

  The zhee idea of holding was to charge.

  Just as Third Squad was preparing to go up the wide, dimly lit stairs in wedge formation, covered by an overwatch from the remaining squads, the zhee attacked like a torrent of wild zathabulls. In seconds they were in and among the advancing legionnaires, who were firing back at them at point-blank range. N-4 blasters spat out hot wicked blasts of fire that illuminated and strobed the darkness of the rising stairwell.

  Second Squad tried to put fire into the advancing wave of zhee, but as quickly as the front rank had been punctured and ve
ntilated by searing bolts of blaster fire, the next rank of zhee were pushing the fallen aside and swooping down into Third Squad with their bright kankari knives flashing. Behind these, another rank of zhee carrying heavy blasters fired into anyone in front of them, including their own if they managed to get in the way.

  This sudden and devastating zhee counteroffensive was only the second-most jaw-dropping aspect of the assault.

  “Donks got armor!” screamed some kid from one of the overmatched squads. And it was true. And that surprised everyone. From within the melee along the stairs, Captain Besson could see that the zhee warriors were wearing a type of armor, similar to Legion armor, across their massive chests. Blaster shots that struck the plate were reflected off and away. But the zhee’s limbs and their braying donkey heads were uncovered, and well-placed shots cut them off in mid-bucktoothed battle cry.

  It was clear to Besson almost immediately that they were not going forward this way. The zhee were raining down hot fire into the attackers.

  “Warpig!” shouted Besson over comm as he pinned himself behind a control panel at the bottom of the stairs.

  The platoon sergeant came back over L-comm. “Pig here, sir!”

  “Set up both N-42 gunners. Interlink fire for the bottom of the stairs. We’re pulling back behind that line!”

  Fall back, thought Besson to himself. I never thought I’d order a Legion unit to fall back.

  “Second and Third fall back behind the intersection Fourth is set up on!” he shouted over the comm. He didn’t need to tell his leejes to pull the wounded back with them. No legionnaire would ever leave a brother behind.

  Besson stepped out into a corridor and filled it with blaster fire, meeting the return fire of the zhee. He laid down as much covering fire as his N-4 would put out. Two legionnaires ran past him, dragging another legionnaire who was bleeding out from a slash that managed to get in under the bucket.

  Legionnaires were getting shot down as they tried to pull back.