Off World- Ragnarok

by J. F. Holmes

  ****

  Greg Papadatos lay there, stunned, his head ringing from a blow that had knocked his helmet off even as he’d stabbed his attacker deep in its gut and pulled the spear back out. Trying to clear his senses, he struggled to his feet. In front of him stood a wall of Gvit, tons of armored, hardened flesh and massive bone. They waited, maybe forty meters from him, in ordered ranks. One was in front, bigger, staring with his small eyes at the American soldier. Blood ran down the human’s face from a cut in his scalp, and the point of a sword was broken off in his leg. Every bone in his left hand was shattered, crushed, and he leaned, exhausted, on the spear.

  He took a deep breath and said, “Come at me, bro.” The Gvit held up his arm, and several of them who’d raised their bows lowered them. Their leader nodded at the human and barked a loud call. Then, with a roar, they all charged.

  ****

  Joe Johnson felt despair. He knew he’d hit the explosives, but nothing had happened. He fumbled with the carbineer that held him to the safety rope, but his weight kept him from opening it. He heard someone yell a hoarse challenge, and then a roar and a shaking. The M-34 blasting machine swung idly on the two wires he’d attached to it, and with a start, he saw something he’d completely missed. A wire safety, mangled when he’d squeezed down on it, prevented the circuit from closing. He reached over, grabbed it, said, “Huh!” and flicked the safety off, then squeezed the detonator.

  Chapter 34

  “You know you’re going to be sent to Leavenworth if we make it through here alive, right?” PFC Hemmings stood directly across from Cadet Walters as the Chinook dove toward the battlefield. They were speaking through the internal suit comms.

  “Shhh, I’m busy.” He was, too, reading everything he could from the technical manual as it flashed across his helmet screen.

  “I’m just saying, impersonating an officer, stealing this here equipment, hijacking an aircraft…” Apparently when Hemmings was stressed, her Jamaican accent got worse.

  “Better to beg forgiveness than ask permission,” muttered Walters, who was realizing just how deep a shithole he might have gotten them into.

  “We didn’t hijack it, dude,” said Kimber. “We just caught a ride!” She was watching the ground speed by through one of the portholes, looking at the green grass like a wave.

  “Like that’s gonna make a difference to a court-martial,” her friend shot back.

  Kimber turned to her and said, “Then why are you here?”

  “Because, Sue, you got your head shoved so far up a VR set thinking you’re surfing, you frigging walked into a wall at the DFAC.”

  “I was watching Billy Waz trying to hit that gnarly wave out by the oil platforms. He almost did it, too.”

  “He got eaten is what he got. You need me to watch your ass.”

  Walters interrupted them, asking each to turn on their joint targeting subroutine. “I’ve programed it to hit anything massing more than four hundred kilos that’s showing a heat signature. The targeting should clear us a space when we hit the LZ and allow me time to figure out who their head honcho is.”

  “I bet you don’t get laid much, do you?” said Hemmings. Kimber laughed, which made it sting even more, because Walters thought the blonde surfer girl was really kinda hot.

  “I do fine, thanks. Now can we get down to business?”

  “Yessir, Major Walters, Sir!” The cadet was glad all this was taking place over the suit’s quantum communications net and not over the helicopter intercom system.

  “Good, now you need to pay attention. We each have ten thousand rounds of saboted 4mm railgun ammunition, and one each subatomic antipersonnel rocket.”

  “We got fucking nukes?” exclaimed Kimber.

  Walters paused and said, “Well, yes and no. It’s really hard to explain, but basically it’s a tiny, tiny drop of antimatter in a small containment field. Perfectly safe, no radiation. Yield is less than, say, twenty JDAMS, like forty thousand pounds of dynamite.”

  “Oh, that makes me feel so much better. I bet that pilot lady would throw our asses out the back if she knew we were carrying nukes.”

  “You know, Hemmings, you’re a bit of a pain in the ass,” said Walters, almost regretting bringing her along.

  “Thank you!” she said politely, and Kimber laughed again. The cadet was also beginning to suspect that there really wasn’t much going on between the surfer’s ears. Which was, to him, too damned bad, because dumb women were a huge turnoff.

  “Well, just be really careful when you’re firing off the rockets. Any disruption to the magnetic containment field is likely to set it off.”

  “The what?” asked Kimber, and Walters answered with a quick, “Never mind.”

  “So, Patton, what’s your plan?”

  Walters took the time to explain it as simply as he could. He started to recite the five paragraphs of an operations order, but stopped. “Listen,” he said, “usually in medieval type armies, when the leadership bites it, the rest of the army panics and flees the battle. That’s what Alexander did at the Battle of Issus, personally attacking King Darius and causing him to flee the battlefield, and his army crumbled after that. Same with Harald in 1066, took an arrow through the eye and the Normans kicked English asses.”

  “So you want us to just walk in there and say, ‘Hey, Gvit, who’s your boss man?’ You really think they gonna just up and tell us?”

  “Well, no, but I should be able to identify his bodyguards; they’ll be the biggest and most heavily armored.”

  “I swear to God, you get me killed, I’m a gonna come back and haunt your ass, white boy,” said Hemmings.

  “I’ll do my best,” he answered, and meant it. “Just watch my back. If things get too hot, or one of them gets too close, the knife in the holster on your leg has a blade made of titanium and is sharp enough to carve up a Gvit like roast beef.” He gestured to the roughly two-foot-long machete-shaped blade strapped to the leg of the suit.

  “If they get that close, I’m gonna run like a scared rabbit.”

  “Please, um, Mary. This isn’t about me or us. There are women,” and she interrupted him with a snort, “women and children in the city. You know what the Gvit will do to them.”

  That left her quiet, and the conversation stopped when a vibration started in the rear of the helo. Walters told the suit to chop into the helo comms system.

  “…put these boneheads down on the ground, the extra weight is too much for this jury-rigged piece of shit!”

  “Yeah,” came the pilot’s reply. “Tell them to get ready to jump!”

  The crew chief made a whirling motion over the top of his head and pointed to the rear ramp, which was starting to lower. Walters looked out and saw that they’d passed the hasty defensive lines. Below them, firing arrows up into the air at the helo, were thousands and thousands of Gvit.

  With a stomach-dropping sensation, the Chinook plunged downward, the crew chief leaning out and firing indiscriminately with his M-240. They stalled into a hover, and they heard him yell, “GO! GO! GO!” interrupted by a scream as an arrow flew into the crew compartment and lodged in his arm.

  Shorty Walters, not looking to see if the two PFCs were following, stepped out into thin air.

  ****

  Honestly, he’d hoped to land like Thor or Iron Man, hammering the ground on one knee. Instead, Walters forgot that the helo was probably moving at least a hundred knots forward, so when he did impact, he pretty much rolled like an out of control rag doll. The suit protected him from injury, except to his dignity. Lying on his face, staring at the ground, he tried to stand, and the words SYSTEM REBOOT flashed across his screen, with a little hourglass symbol and a countdown from twenty. Walters tried to move, but without the servo assist, the suit was dead weight.

  “Oh, shit,” he said out loud, as he felt the ground vibrating around him and the dim sounds of combat coming through his suit. He managed to slightly turn his head, looking out to the right. He could see trampled
grass and the bottom half of a dead Gvit. Then a crushing weight fell across his legs, pinning him even more. The timer continued to count down, sixteen, fifteen, and that stupid hourglass. Outside the confines of the suit, an incredibly loud, but muted, roar of gunfire erupted, something that sounded like a spastic chainsaw.

  COMMS GREEN flashed across his screen at eleven seconds, and immediately he heard Hemmings yelling, “….ON’T KNOW IF HE’S FUCKING DEAD OR NOT!”

  Kimber’s only response was a sobbing sound over the open channel, then she said, “Let’s just leave him! I can’t do this, Mary!”

  “I’M NOT DEAD!” Walters shouted into the interface, but apparently it wasn’t working just yet. Kimber continued sobbing, Hemmings trying to calm her. It was interrupted by an “OH SHIT!” from Hemmings, and a ripping sound, followed by a detonation that shook the ground.

  Five, four, three, two, one, and the words SYSTEM GREEN, POWER 98% followed by SENSORS GREEN, and then WEAPONS GREEN. The cadet felt power surging through the suit, and pushed himself upright. He kicked the dead Gvit across his legs away as he clambered up, and then he looked around him.

  Cadet Walters and PFC Hemmings, along with a sitting PFC Kimber, were surrounded by a circle of death extending outward for about two hundred meters. Every single Gvit within that range had been gunned down, more than a hundred. Hemmings had her knife out, and it was bloody to the hilt. The decapitated body of a warrior lay between them.

  “My God…” said Walters.

  “You got us into this shit, and you gonna get us out of this shit, Cadet! We ain’t no combat troops, and Sue’s losing her shit. You come up with some kinda plan or we’s leaving your ass here!”

  He ignored the rant and knelt down in front of Kimber, touching his helmet to her faceless visor. “Hey, Sue. Listen to me. I’m just as scared as you are, but I know you’re brave. What’s the biggest curl you ever rode?”

  There was a moment of silence, then she said, “I…I did…the North Shore of Oahu once. Held a forty-foot wave and rode it all the way back to shore.”

  “That took more guts than I’m ever gonna have,” he said simply. “Sometimes you just gotta face it. We have our suits, we have our weapons, and we’re Americans, and we never quit. Got it?”

  She didn’t answer him, and he despaired, sighing to himself. Walters stood and looked around. They seemed to have landed in the middle of one of the rearmost Gvit infantry companies and practically wiped it out. The next nearest group was shoving to get toward the front, and didn’t seem to have noticed them. “Mary,” he said, “we can do this. Watch my back while I get some intel. Flyer, one hundred meters, 360, burst transmission,” he said, and a small electrically-powered drone popped off his shoulder, buzzing into the air and climbing rapidly. On his display a long, compressed strip appeared, showing the view as the drone spun around, along with a compass bearing. There seemed to be something on the order of thirty thousand warriors attacking the defensive line, and the Gvit right wing was pouring through a hole in the human positions.

  “Give me a run down on largest concentration of above average mass of Gvit, groups of under one hundred or fewer.” Three different groups started to flash in amber, just as Hemmings opened up on an approaching group. To his surprise, there was the sound of two weapons systems firing, and he took a quick glance to see Kimber on the other side of him. The women were laying down ragged bursts of fire, probably wasting more shots than not, but the computer-assisted aiming was killing scores of Gvit.

  “You better hurry the hell up!” was all Hemmings said. He did, noting that the three groups were almost equidistantly spaced, except that the right one seemed to be farther forward, following the break in the human lines. He took a second to designate that as target AA1000, and prepared to fire one of the rockets at the group. Then he saw that the blast radius would envelop the human lines that still fought on.

  “We’re going to have to do this the hard way,” he muttered, then said loudly over the intercom, “I’m designating a target on your screen. It’ll appear as a green mark. We need to head to it and kill anything that gets in our way. Got it?”

  “And how the hell do we get out once we get there?”

  “Well, it’s the fastest way back to our lines, too. So I guess there’s that,” said Kimber, surprising Walters.

  “OK then, let’s do this. Remember to watch your ammo count. I want rockets fired at designated targets,” he said, and pips showed on their screens.

  “That’s only like five hundred meters away, you trying to get us killed?”

  Walters was about to reply when a shower of arrows rained down on their position. They were each hit multiple times, but it only felt like light taps. Kimber actually laughed and yelled, “IS THAT ALL YOU GOT?” while firing off a long burst at the enemy.

  “Come on, let’s go,” said Walters. He was amazed that it had taken the Gvit so long to react to them, but that was changing. He thought back to the lecture he’d attended, the one by Doctor Fitzsimmons. Maybe they needed their overlords to provide tactical guidance. Whatever. Time for some motivation. He set his suit speakers to full blast, and started to run to the opening wails of Led Zeppelin. As he fired at his first target, he started to sing, “We come from the land of the ice and snow…”

  “You know, he does have a pretty nice voice,” said Hemmings. “You OK now?”

  Kimber’s voice was confident. “Time to catch the break, sis. I’ll take right, you take left.”

  “Somebody’s gotta watch over this crazy fool.” They slapped hands, overcompensating with their suits, and cracked the palms together. Then they, too, started to run.

  ****

  The CH-47 was shaking like a washing machine, and her pilot swore. “There’s no fucking way we’re going to make that bridge!” she cursed.

  “Let’s take her away from the river,” replied Pavoni, looking for a place to set down. The entire plain was covered with Gvit, living and dead.

  “How far is the firebase?” Ramirez asked, fighting the controls. Her voice was strained, and that worried him.

  He looked toward where he knew the base lay and said, “About eight klicks.”

  “Dammit!” she swore and pivoted the giant helo to the southwest.

  The engineer squad leader, a captain, stuck his head into the cockpit and yelled, “Where the hell are you going?”

  “We can’t make the bird—” Pavoni started to say, and then there was a loud BANG from the replacement engine. The helo bucked wildly as smoke poured out of the turbine. The engineer officer knew well enough that his mission had just gone to shit, and he struggled back to the cargo bay, telling his men to strap in.

  Chapter 35

  He was done, with no strength to lift the spear he carried in his hand. Instead, Greg Papadatos reached down to his leg and pulled his 9mm M-17 pistol from its holster. He lined up a shaky hand and started firing, steady shots at the legs of the behemoths charging at him, not hearing the dull thud under his feet over the charge. Two actually fell, causing several others to trip over them, but the giant in the front was only twenty-five meters away when the slide locked back. He dropped the gun and pulled out his K-bar, and the bridge in front of him fell out from under the feet of the rushing Gvit.

  One of the spans of the roadway disappeared, about forty feet just vanishing, and the entire group of Gvit charged over the edge, unable to stop. He broke out in peals of laughter as they skidded on the blood and guts, the very last one slipping and grabbing at the edge, then falling with a deep bellow to splash in the water. Captain Greg Papadatos sat and laughed so hard his stomach hurt, even as the rest of the Gvit army rolled slowly forward to the break in the bridge. He stood up, gave them the finger with both hands, and walked slowly backward, holding it and smiling. The whole time he waited to be skewered with arrows, but they just stood there, until suddenly a horn blew. The warriors started shuffling and turning until they assumed ranks once more, and marched way. Papadatos just stood there
in amazement.

  That’s when a human stepped through the ranks and stood facing Papadatos. He was clad in the camouflage of a Chinese People’s Liberation Army soldier and wore the three stars rank of a full colonel, and two other soldiers stood about twenty meters behind him, obviously bodyguards. Papadatos limped forward, his leg stiff and dripping blood. They stood and faced each other across the gap.

  “This isn’t over, you know. They’ll be back, with better training and bridging equipment, in their millions,” said the man, in perfect midwestern American. Papadatos didn’t reply, just stared at him. “Now is the time,” the colonel continued, “when you say something typically American, like ‘Nuts!’”

  “I think the actual expression is ‘Suck my nuts!’ I prefer my ancestors’, ‘If you men think that I rely on numbers, then all Greece is not sufficient, for it is but a small fraction of their numbers; but if on men's valor, then this number will do’."

  “Indeed,” said his opposite, looking at the bridge site. “Thermopylae. How appropriate. But the three divisions we got across already will probably beat you anyway. There were plenty of other plans in place, also. Tell your Governor Conklin and General Halstead to meet me here, tomorrow, to discuss terms of surrender. If they can.”