“Stupid donks,” grumbled the contractor. “We’ve been saying for months that they shouldn’t be pulling security on places like this. So what’s up? Are they trying to take the shield generator?”
“They’ve already activated it remotely,” Vix said, his voice grim. “We’re here to shut it down the old-fashioned way so ships in orbit can send relief.”
“Guys,” Keystroke said, “I know it’ll mean becoming unemployed, but can you help a few leejes blow this sket up?”
The contractors looked at each other, grinned, then turned back to face the legionnaires. One of them pulled out a security key card. “Yeah. We can help you out.”
***
Vix sat with his back against a low wall, Keystroke by his side. “You think we used enough?”
They’d used the entire satchel of det-cord, wrapping it around everything in the shield generator’s housing that a technician aboard the Mercutio advised them might be worth blowing up.
“Yeah,” Keystroke answered, turning the remote switch in his hands. “So… do we blow it up now?”
Vix shook his head. “I dunno.” He hailed Lieutenant Po. “Sir, are we ready to blow this thing? My team is all outside, all accounted for.”
The lieutenant was with the sleds and tanks, keeping the surging horde of the Ankalor City slums at bay. They’d already killed a lot of zhee, yet the donks kept coming for more. “How big will the blast be?”
Vix and Keystroke exchanged a look, then Keystroke shrugged.
“Don’t know, sir.”
Vix heard the Republic Armorworks MBTs send what was probably a coordinated fire on something—probably a few zhee tactical trucks. The booms were followed by a massive secondary explosion. Vix gritted his teeth. The zhee had been loading up trucks with explosives in the hopes of getting close enough to the leej lines to blow them and cause mass casualties. “Everybody okay?” he asked.
“We’re good,” Po answered. “Donks are hurting themselves more than us. I think they were expecting us to follow the usual rules of engagement. They’re getting KTF’d instead.”
“Copy,” Vix answered. “We’ve taken cover behind a low wall, about fifteen hundred meters from the target building. Can you call it in to Mercutio? Get an explosives guy to tell us if we need to move further?”
Vix had blown up no shortage of weapons caches and vehicles. But he and his team had never blown an entire facility. That was Dark Ops work.
“I can try,” Po answered, his voice betraying a less than stellar confidence at the idea. “Response time isn’t the greatest. Fleet’s engaged in some heavy fighting.”
“Dude,” Keystroke urged. “Let’s blow it. We’ll be fine.”
“How can you possibly be sure?”
“I’ve watched holos. We’re good, dude.”
Vix looked up. He could see flashes and streaks of light from the battle overhead. The distant rumble and roar of combat at Fortress Gibraltaar echoed in his bucket’s audio receptors. They wouldn’t be able to keep the zhee at bay forever. That was the unspoken reality that had settled over all the leejes. The whole city was out for them, and eventually they’d run black on charge packs.
The mission is what saves lives. Vix recalled the advice of his first platoon sergeant. Maybe not yours, sure, but I promise you: more legionnaires stay breathing because of a successful mission than in spite of one.
“Lieutenant,” Po said, his mind made up. “We’re gonna blow it. The shield has to come down.”
After a weighty pause, Po gave his reply. “Okay.”
“You do the honors,” Vix said to Keystroke.
He could hear the enthusiasm in the young leej’s voice. “My pleasure, sir.”
Keystroke faced the building and held down the detonation button.
The explosion felt like it was liquefying Vix’s insides. The low wall they were covering behind rattled as though in an earthquake, and an instant later the building housing the shield array’s primary components collapsed—likely aided by shoddy construction done by cut-rate zhee labor. A cloud of dirt and dust rushed past Vix and Keystroke, engulfing them like some cat-5 storm raging through a desert.
So much dust was in the air that Vix could feel his mouth and nostrils getting coated with it. He blinked his eyes inside his bucket, hoping its fans would draw the irritating particles away. It was like being buried head first in a mound of silt.
The cloud passed, and a relative silence settled over the area. The sounds of the fight at Gibraltaar could still be heard, but the blast and the subsequent building collapse seemed to have halted the local fighting.
A moment later the tanks, combat sleds, and blasters started up again.
Vix looked at Keystroke. “You okay?” He reached out and dusted a patina of grime from the legionnaire’s visor.
“I think I found my calling,” Keystroke answered.
Vix looked up. The shield was down.
***
Legion Destroyer Intrepid
Ankalor System
The quick reaction force was getting hammered by the enraged zhee. The donks were rabid, mouths literally frothing as they sent in wave after wave toward their position, and the big guns on the main battle tanks had been firing incessantly—so much so that one of them had actually super-heated its cannon, warping the barrel and making it ineffective. It now sat idle, providing only physical cover for the legionnaires to fire at the mass of hostile aliens seeking to swallow them whole.
Attrition was taking a toll. There were only so many near misses, so many fraggers, rocket explosions, and blaster bolts that could be dodged or absorbed. Only so many times the leejes could get knocked down before something failed and they physically couldn’t get back up. It had reached a point where there were as many legionnaires lying down on the blood-slicked floors of the combat sleds as there were men still in the fight. And the zhee… they just kept coming.
Chhun studied the battle from the Intrepid’s war room. The battle was raging at Gibraltaar, but the leejes on the ground over there would carry the day. Of that Chhun had no doubt. The QRF, on the other hand… These were men who had left the safety of the wire and Camp Rex in an attempt to save the lives of his Dark Ops brothers. Men who re-routed and successfully destroyed the planetary shield. Men who were heroes, worthy of honors and commendations. Those men were stuck there, about to die for a lack of support.
With the zhee fleet engaging the Legion, every laser battery was needed for ship-to-ship combat. The fighters, such as Dax Danns’s Reaper Squadron, were out mixing it up with Republic tech. True, it was Republic tech that was manned by an inferior class of pilots—the zhee were no featherheads—but it was Republic tech all the same, and disabling it was taking time. Time the QRF didn’t have. General Hannubal’s main element had to win the day and send relief down to the planet, quickly. That was Task Force Grinder’s only hope.
Unless.
Unless…
“Major Owens, I’m going down there.”
Owens had been monitoring the status of numerous Dark Ops teams that were staged to hit the House of Reason where they slept. The time was drawing near. Things were tense.
“Where?” asked Owens. “Utopion?”
“No, sir,” Chhun said, giving a look to the rest of his team to let them know he spoke only for himself. “Down there. Ankalor. That QRF needs someone to regain control of the rooftops. The zhee are close to pinning them down. Once those guns stop… that’s it. Total team kill.”
Owens examined the holos that showed the raging firefight in the zhee slums. He frowned. “Too hot down there. The air defense towers are still at it, and we don’t have the bombers available to stop them until the admirals can whip the donks enough to get them running.”
“The shields are down,” offered Masters. “So we can get in a drop pod and assault that way.”
“We’d crash through a roof or land in the middle of the zhee,” Bear mumbled. “Gotta be another way down, though. We’re all with
you, Captain Chhun.”
Chhun nodded. He thought of the assets aboard the ship. Of who was feeling the sting of the lost shuttle and crew as much as Dark Ops. The shuttle pilots. They’d lost two of their own, just like Dark Ops had lost their brothers.
“How ’bout the Serpents?” he said.
Owens arched an eyebrow. “They’re certainly crazy enough to try. See if you can find a volunteer.”
***
Chhun sat with his legs dangling out the side of the stealth shuttle as it soared over the Grodan Wastes toward the zhee slums. An explosion lit up his sensors, not five hundred meters away from him. An unmanned drone, flying in formation with the near-invisible—to instruments, at least—shuttle, went up in a ball of flames and littered itself all over the dry wastes below.
The plan, hastily put together by the Gothic Serpents on board Intrepid, was to haul ions down to the planet with a wing of unmanned hunter-killer flight drones. The anti-air defenses would pick up the drones, hopefully shooting them down slowly enough that the shuttle had time to deliver its cargo before the zhee in the towers could manually sight and fire on them.
Anti-air bursts and blaster fire streaked all around the shuttle. Not close enough to hit, but close enough to cause everyone on board to continually pucker and flinch.
“I feel like our legs are gonna get shot off hanging over the sides like this,” complained Masters over the comm.
The pilot reminded the legionnaire why this was necessary. “You boys are gonna have to get off my ship real quick once we reach a clean building. No time for quick ropes. Sure as hell no time to give you a soft touch.”
“We’re jumping out and hoping it doesn’t suck,” said Chhun as he watched the target building approach. A heavy deluge of blaster fire was being exchanged between the QRF and the zhee. It reminded him of Kublar.
“I guess we’ll just bill the Legion for our knee replacement surgeries,” said Masters.
“Spoiler alert,” Fish joked. “We aren’t going to live long enough to need ’em.”
“The thing I like about you, Fish,” Masters said, his tone thoughtful, “is how upbeat you are.”
Two more drones exploded in a flash. The shuttle reduced speed for its final approach.
“Here we go,” muttered Bear, probably to himself, but it was still discernible over L-comm. Jumps and falls were always harder on the big guys.
The shuttle streaked toward a three-story building at the very edge of the QRF’s defensive perimeter. A handful of zhee were sending plunging fire from the rooftop down onto the legionnaires. The shuttle pilot sent a lancing stream of laser blasts down at them, sending the zhee diving for cover or right off the edge.
“Jump time!” the pilot called.
The legionnaires hopped off without hesitation. They crashed onto the roof, rolling and bouncing like spent beer cans tossed from a speeding sled. Chhun watched as his N-18 sniper rifle skidded across the deck. He wasn’t worried about the weapon becoming non-functional—they were tough rifles, built by an arms manufacturer that actually cared about the men who would use them in combat—but at the speed it was moving, Chhun was concerned that it might clatter over the edge and down into the mob of zhee pressing the streets.
“Bear!” Chhun called out.
The burly legionnaire, who was just now regathering his senses after bouncing into the low parapet wall at the roof’s edge, threw out a palm and grabbed the rifle in mid-flight.
“Thanks.” Chhun looked around. Masters was already putting his old koob sword to use by finishing off the wounded zhee still on the roof even as they struggled against their wounds in an attempt to fight their new arrivals. Fish was limping badly as he moved to set up his SAB.
“Captain,” Masters called. “My bucket’s telling me that these zhee are all hopped up on stim-cot. Gonna be tough to kill.”
This wasn’t unusual for zhee. They often loaded themselves up with enough of the narcotic that it seemed they almost became impervious to pain. Chhun moved to a dead zhee, and his bucket showed the parts-per-million readings in the air around the donk’s mouth, which hung open in a grotesque death mask. They were stimmed up, all right. That was probably how they’d been able to even try to keep fighting after the way the shuttle’s front guns ate up their legs and abdomens.
Chhun motioned for each man to take a position, and then gave a two-word order, more of a reminder, to his men in the event any zhee was able to surge past the quick reaction force and get back into the building. “Head shots.”
The four Dark Ops men spread to the four corners of the square roof. As Chhun set up his N-18, Fish sent plunging fire into the vanguard of the mobbing zhee, halting their progress. Masters and Bear engaged the zhee on other nearby rooftops, dropping the surprised aliens and keeping them pinned down.
Chhun hailed the QRF over the L-comm. “Thought you guys could use a little help.”
“Damn straight,” replied a voice, “even if it does mean that Dark Ops is gonna take all the credit.”
Chhun smiled to himself. “Who’s this?”
“Sergeant Vix—Grinder Ten.”
“Captain Chhun, Victory Squad. You’re in charge?”
“Lieutenant Po went down so… yeah.”
“You’re doing a great job,” Chhun said, adjusting his scope. “We’re going to start demoralizing this mob of donks. I need you to keep up the KTF, but also to have a man on the twins who can make sure that no zhee gets the chance to come up and pay us a visit.”
“Copy, Victory. And… thanks.”
“Time to make ’em pay, Grinder.”
Chhun searched the crowd for a target. He didn’t bother with the front lines sending their ineffective return fire up at the building or toward the QRF. Fish, Masters, and Bear would keep them at bay. The captain looked farther back, amid the crowd, seeking out a particular type of enemy. He spotted what he was looking for.
A male donk stood right in the middle of the sea of aliens, surrounded by women and children. He was armed with a PK-9A blaster rifle, but the weapon wasn’t being used; it wasn’t even pointed at the Legion. Instead it looked like a prop, slung over a shoulder and pointing into the air. The donk waved his arm to accentuate his shouts, urging other armed zhee—all of them clearly younger by the coloration of their fur—to the front.
This was how it worked. How it always worked.
Chhun lined up the donk’s head in his sights, held his breath, and squeezed the trigger. The zhee’s head blew apart in a mix of cooked meat from the heat of the blaster bolt and gore from the kinetic force of the super-heated particle striking the target. Three more zhee, standing behind the target, dropped as well, as the shot continued through them. Twenties would have been proud.
The zhee in that section of the mob, their feeling of safety and security violently ripped away, began to surge and panic, pushing and shoving to get clear of the newfound danger. The donks who had been urged forward hesitated. Chhun searched for another target, and repeated the process until the crowd was a boiling mix of rage—as it had already been—and fearful panic.
18
Thirty-Third Legion Recon, Shadow Company, First Platoon
Air Defense Tower Four
Captain Besson and Corporal Davies took Battery Six at the top of the air defense tower. Once they’d scaled to the top of the first concrete protected battery, they’d found the rest of First Squad covering all the entrances onto the gun platform. The donk crew that had been operating and guarding the weapon lay blasted and dead on the deck. The noise of the blaster fire that had taken them down had been drowned out by the steady, thunderous backbeat of all the guns working across all the other platforms.
“Shadow Actual, this is Pit Fiend,” announced an incoming transmission over L-comm. Pit Fiend was the identifier for the Recon Operations commander. “We need your battery offline in the next two minutes. They’re firing straight into the Sirocco.”
“Stand by,” said Besson, and sent his men to sec
ure the guns between the platform and the fire control. In the event he failed to knock out the command and control center, he hoped the other teams would at least disable some of the guns currently firing into the nearest assault carrier beached out there on the desert floor.
“I’ll hit the fire control room now,” he replied. “Davies, you’re on me.”
He and Davies took the ladders up onto the tower, climbing away from the cacophony of the working guns. As they ascended, he wondered why the donks weren’t watching the closed-circuit feeds. If they were, then they’d see they were under direct attack. Because they’re donks, he reminded himself.
He didn’t like that he was having to gamble the whole operation on how stupid and lazy the donks were when it came to any task besides actual front line combat. They did excel at that—to the point of being noted as “capable” in any Legion intel assessment—but when it came to secondary tasks, the zhee merely could not be bothered to put in much effort. Still, everything Besson had learned in Legion OCS had told him never to bet on any opponent’s weakness. Never hope to get lucky because the other guy has decided to put in half effort. Expect as good as you give.
But he had no choice. He had to take that gamble, because it was the only way to shut down all the active air defense turrets currently engaging at range with the carrier assault group. He had to bet the zhee were too lazy to bother monitoring their perimeter security feeds.
The two legionnaires gained the uppermost catwalk that surrounded the fire control center that ran the entire battery. Above the wide windows of the control center, the targeting and acquisition geodesic dome was the highest point on the tower.
Blaster fire erupted from the control room. The zhee were shooting through the glass at them. Besson ducked; he had no time to see if Davies had done so as well.
“On your six, sir,” whispered Davies over L-comm.
“Bangers,” replied Besson, using an alternate identifier for ear-poppers popular within his Legion. “On three, then I’ll pop up and fire. You go for the access hatch. If I get killed, there’s a drive located in my intel pouch. Get that in their system and execute run.”
Turning Point (Galaxy's Edge Book 7) Page 19
