Off World- Ragnarok

by J. F. Holmes

  Now, she thought, time for the counterattack. “CHAK PLATOON, TO ME!” she yelled, and blew on a whistle she had hanging off her body armor. They came at a dead run just as the mass of Gvit crashed into the human spears. A dozen died, but the soldiers were pushed slowly uphill, and they started to break. Now or never. She unslung a pump shotgun from her back loaded with sabot slugs, flicked off the safety, and started running, with the weapon to her shoulder, aiming for the center of the attacking force. Behind her, the Chak roared all their hatred for their former masters and followed Anna Worthy into battle.

  Chapter 38

  They pulled up in a line abreast, each of the six gun trucks turning left to present the howitzers at the southernmost ranks of the Gvit two thousand meters away. “FIRE MISSION! HIP SHOOT!” screamed SPC Shin’s chief, and he was instantly launched from deep sleep to wide awake.

  The ammo handler yelled at the heavily burdened infantrymen who were trying to get off the truck, screaming at them to get the fuck out of his way. As the rest of the crew scrambled get the howitzer in position, snipers opened up at long distance, trying to draw the enemy’s attention. The intent was to relieve pressure on the defensive lines. LTC McClellan had seen it immediately when the signal came through, divining General Halstead’s intent, but realizing they had to divert the Gvit that were in the way of the road to the bridge.

  Shin, his hands raw from all the missions he’d shot earlier, grabbed a round from the ready rack and a can of time fuses. He quickly worked to set the round up as his teammates shackled the gun to its baseplate, listening for the gun chief to call out the fuse time setting.

  “CHARGE SEVEN!” echoed across all six guns, the powder men holding up the white bags and then stuffing them back into their canisters. Shin placed the round on top of the brass and handed it to the loader, who rammed it home and closed the breech. The gunner stood up and out of the way; at charge seven, the gun would jump like a bronco, breaking a leg or anything that got in the way.

  With an ear-splitting CRACK! each of the guns fired. Shin had lost his ear protection long ago, and didn’t have time to put his fingers in his ears as he worked the next round. The shouted words of his teammates slowly gained a tinny, vibrating quality. He only noticed the command to reload the trucks when a hand fell on his shoulder and Staff Sergeant Higgs yelled in his ear. Shin looked and saw his team already moving the baseplate up onto the trails. Further past that, a large number of Gvit were starting to close the distance to their position.

  “What about the infantry?” he yelled across to the woman helping him lift the trial onto the tow hook. The guys who had been riding with them were nowhere in evidence, almost two companies of hardcore grunts, all McClellan had thought he could spare from defending the firebase

  “They popped smoke, gonna do a rolling ambush. We get their attention,” and together they heaved the trail up and onto the hook, made easier with the gun barrel extended out, “and they blow the hell outta them when they head past. Then we go around, pick ’em up, and do it again.”

  Shin didn’t care; he was far past the point of exhaustion, but he asked anyway, “What happens if we can’t get back to pick them up?”

  “Well, that’s why they joined the poor bloody infantry, isn’t it?” she answered, giving him a hand up into the truck. “Once we distract them away from the bridge, it’s a thunder run to get there and blow it.”

  ****

  Halstead stood on the roof of his Humvee, watching the battle from a small hill a hundred meters behind the center of the defensive line. He waited patiently for his plan to come together. It was one of the things that had made him a good combat commander; the ability to wait to act until the time was right, and the forbearance to do so calmly. He saw the disaster of Alpha Company’s desertion and had made the call to employ the jury-rigged tankers that had turned into a primitive fuel air explosive. The drivers, who’d steered them and bailed out AFTER leaving the human lines, despite direct orders to the contrary, would get a medal for their actions. He’d been about the give the order for Bravo to shift forces left to cover the gap, even as the Gvit renewed their attack on that side, but the battalion commander had beat him to the punch. No, he had to focus on the big picture, let his subordinates do their jobs, and as he heard the sound of cannons firing far off, he smiled.

  Then the sole CH-47 that had managed to get back into service clattered overhead, carrying the demolition squad. He’d assumed McClellan would hammer the hell out of their southern edge, even though he didn’t expect them to get to the bridge. It was enough to distract the enemy from the engineers going in. Even as he watched, though, the helo dipped as it passed over the mass of enemies, slowed, went even lower, within arrow range, and then pulled up. What the hell had that all been about? He was tempted to use the radio to ask, but they’d soon be out of range of even the most powerful set. That and the last thing he needed was to get swarmed by the carrion birds that wheeled over the battlefield. It disappeared into the haze, popped up for a second, then vanished behind a ridge.

  “Think we’re going to be able to kill them all?” asked Colonel Elmhoff, standing next to him. He had constantly been on the field phones that stretched to the battalion HQ of 1-9 Infantry, defending below them, to an assembly area where 2-9 was waiting to attack, and back to the Fort, monitoring all the troop movements.

  “No, I don’t think we can,” answered his boss. “The idea is to break them. Large armies like this, the slaughter starts when they lose momentum, get checked, and then something unexpected happens. Hopefully the firebase attack on the bridge, the tough defense here, and an unexpected attack on their flank by 2-9 with our mobile column will do it.”

  “That’s pretty risky. There’s a lot of things that can go wrong, but I like it.”

  They were distracted by a sudden charge in front of them, the Gvit commander seeing the men moving away from the center of Bravo’s positions and ordering a full-scale assault. “Shit!” said Elmhoff, and he started grabbing HQ soldiers to reinforce the line. They’d been playing it close, with no reserves to spare, and most of the people in Bravo’s position were the reinforcing militia.

  Though he could barely see the bridge through the dust raised on the battlefield, Halstead kept sweeping his binoculars back there. The lead elements of the rest of the Gvit host were starting to cross, a barely discernable dark mass kilometers away, and he despaired. If they got there before the demolition team, there’d be no option but retreat to the Fort, and that would be the end without reinforcements from Earth.

  Then he saw it, a brief, almost tiny flash, right up by the western shore. Teeny tiny and far away, but even as he watched, a section of the bridge fell slowly downward to make a huge splash in the river. “YES!” he said and punched the air, having no way of knowing that the artillery column hadn’t even been able to come close, the helo had crashed, and the destruction was caused by the actions of one junior sergeant.

  The center, though, was breaking right now, and the remaining Gvit were poised, like a huge arrow, to break his lines. Then he saw the movement back toward the weakened left flank, and his heart sank. It was going to be too late.

  “SIGNAL! HOIST FLAGS, TASK FORCE LIBERTY TO ATTACK!” Behind him on the temporary fifty-meter-high antenna, a flag rain up the hoist, yellow field with a black snake, and underneath it the words “DON’T TREAD ON ME”. It unfurled in the wind, and ten miles away, Lieutenant Colonel Ibson saw the signal.

  He turned to his own color sergeant, who had no need for the command. The woman already had the red flag out and was waving it with all her might as engines started rumbling. Ibson sat down in his own Humvee, all armor stripped off of it, and told the .50 caliber gunner standing behind him, “You need ammo, just yell and keep firing.” The kid said nothing back, just grinned at him. In one of the Jeeps with the windows knocked out, someone turned up the volume full blast on a song, the bass thumping out of the speakers.

  “What is that godawful noise?�
� asked Ibson’s driver, and he just smiled.

  The gunner leaned over and said, “That’s some real old school shit, yo. Beastie Boys, am I right, Sir?”

  “Sabotage, from back when I was in high school. Can’t think of anything better to fight to.” The Humvee started bouncing over what had been, up until that moment, a cultivated field, the wheat waist high. They felt like they were plowing through a golden sea, and when the .50 opened up, it was the jarring dissolution to a dream.

  ****

  Cadet Walters looked at Hemmings as she fought, and knew of no way to solve this impossible situation. To turn away meant sentencing both to death, but to go to their rescue would mean the failure of their mission. This was, in essence, his very own Kobayashi Maru, the no-win situation.

  He chose. Having come this far, they had to do what they were going to do, or it was all for nothing, and there might not be a way out even if they won. He chose the only option he really had. Whipping out his own sword, he charged straight at the Gvit commander, screaming his rage at the unfairness of it all. His first swing caught the human just as the man turned, and the blade sliced through his abdomen, spilling the Chinese officer’s guts on the ground. With his return swing, he struck the armored shoulder of the giant alien, expecting little resistance to the molecular thin edge. Instead, the blade skipped across the steel; he’d hit the armor with the back edge, which wasn’t sharp at all. Billy Walters was no sword fighter, in fact knew nothing of hand-to-hand combat, but his opponent had risen to command the three divisions of Gvit by being the toughest of a brutal society.

  The backhanded fist that caught Walters had all the weight of a thousand-pound monster behind it. The mecha suit he was wearing was designed to stop the point impact of bullets and shrapnel, but this was like being hit by a slow-motion battering ram. The cadet was knocked off his feet and stunned as the first slammed into his chest. Then a giant foot came down on his faceplate, gradually pushing down harder and harder. His display went first, flickering on and off, as he heard the helmet start to bend under the immense weight. Another foot smashed down on his sword arm, not penetrating the armor, but breaking his arm. He actually heard the alien laughing at his scream of pain, and the foot on his head pressed even harder.

  Now’s a good time for someone to save the day! his mind screamed over the pain, but no one came. As his helmet slowly buckled and deformed, his head was turned sideways, and he saw Hemmings stabbing at another Gvit as it tried to drag Kimber away from her.

  A rage boiled up in William ‘Shorty’ Walters, a rage that would’ve satisfied all his ancestors, from the wild Irish swordsmen who fought the Norse, to the German tanker who’d killed his relatives for his new home in America. With his left hand he reached over, grabbed the knee of the giant creature, and squeezed, the biofeedback from his anger driving servo-powered fingers to sink deep into the flesh. With a crunching sound, the kneecap shattered, and the weight fell off him.

  Billy rolled, screaming in agony as he put weight on his broken arm, and stood. The sword lay on the ground, and he picked it up awkwardly. The Gvit commander bellowed for his bodyguards, who looked up from their torment of Hemmings.

  “Time to cheat,” he whispered, then said louder, “Weapons system two, this position, arm, thirty second delay, on my mark.”

  “CONFIRM, THIS POSITION, THIRTY SECONDS. Do you want a net warning?”

  “Huh? Uh, yeah!”

  He stepped slowly back from the Gvit, who was still bellowing and trying to stand. Walters said, “MARK!” and a countdown started in his fuzzy display. The quick-release dropped the weapons pack and disconnected the electronics, and he turned and ran.

  His sword thrust hit the Gvit messing with Hemmings low in the back, and he made sure to use the sharp edge on the backswing, cutting off the arm of the one pulling at Kimber. “RUN!” he yelled through the speakers on the suit, dropping the sword and grabbing Kimber’s suit by the deadman’s strap on the back. Hemmings shoved him aside and slung her friend over her shoulders.

  They’d gone about five hundred meters, running flat out as fast as their suits could go, when the countdown reached five. He looked around frantically and saw the concrete foundation of a house that had been blasted by artillery. Hemming saw it just as he did, and he didn’t need to say anything. Both dove over the wreckage of the wall and fell through the floor into the basement. Then the world disappeared.

  Chapter 39

  Captain Linda Yi slowly stalked her way through the brush, her ghillie suit enhanced with microfibers that blended her in almost perfectly with the native vegetation. She had desperately wanted one of the mecha armored suits; she’d have made short work of the ACECOM forward command post with one, and still been able to get away. Yi cursed herself for a fool, to be taken unaware by that fat supply officer.

  Still, this should be easy enough. The suit and the weapon she’d recovered from the cache would work fine, though she might be a little rusty. It was hard to get practice at long-distance shooting while being an undercover operative.

  The rifle in her hands was one she was intimately familiar with. The QBU-88 was a homegrown Chinese rifle, less a sniper weapon than a designated marksman one, but it was deadly in her hands out to more than a thousand meters. The spot she’d chosen was eight hundred meters to the rear of the battlefield, and the command Humvees and trucks were easily identifiable on the top of the hill. The 6-24×44 scope quickly brought individuals into view, and she sat watching for a while, knowing that this wasn’t a battle of maneuver.

  She was concerned, somewhat, at her inability to raise her contacts over the radio, and she’d had a scare a few minutes before when a CH-47 had passed over her position. Out of spite and irritation, she’d fired a suppressed round at the helo’s engine, but didn’t think it would have any effect. Now she watched each figure to see who was who, and waited for the optimum time to take out the ACECOM leadership.

  When a large group of Gvit came streaming past her, the first attackers who’d broken through Alpha Company’s position, she thought the moment might have come, but they were shredded by cannon fire from behind her. No, not yet. She shifted the crosshairs to Colonel Elmhoff, hoping to get a shot in. He annoyed the shit out of her, patronizing stick-up-the-ass staff officer. Her main target, and the most important one, was General Halstead. She gauged the wind off the sea and the heat distortion; the thousands of rounds she’d fired in training and at live prisoners set loose on the range stood her in good stead. Two clicks to the right for the breeze; three clicks up for the range and the hotter air, which would provide less lift to the bullet.

  Gently she breathed in and out, calming herself and regulating her heartbeat. From the battlefield rang out a massive blast of horns and drums, high over the gunfire, and she knew it was time. Halstead first; she could see the back of his head, dark skin glistening with sweat, and settled the crosshairs.

  The weight that landed on her drove all the air from her body, causing her to squeeze the trigger and send the round off to nowhere. She felt cold steel press to her throat, and Karl Olsen’s gravelly voice hissed in her ear, “Make me!” Then an arm snaked around her neck, and it seemed to be made of steel. Despite the knife at her jugular, she started to struggle, trying to throw the veteran infantryman off of her, but he just squeezed harder. Her face turned red and vision faded until it shrank down to a point, then went out.

  ****

  Halstead was watching for 1-9’s attack when the quiet radios ticking over in the truck on standby blared at full volume, “NUCLEAR WEAPON DETONATION IN TWENTY-SEVEN SECONDS.” The voice was mechanical, computer-generated, and echoed across the battlefield, though many didn’t hear it over the gunfire and fighting. He dove down behind a rock, curling up into a ball, and yelled for everyone to seek cover.

  The weapon was about the equivalent of twenty tons of dynamite and killed very Gvit within five hundred meters outright. Beyond that, flash burns and hard radiation left thousands more dying. A thous
and meters away, where Bravo company was fighting for its life, second degree burns appeared on exposed skin, and many who were further up the slope took a dosage of radiation that would eventually kill them. The ones lower were protected by a slight rise in the ground between the detonation point and the trenches they were fighting in. The radiation, mostly gamma rays, sheeted over the landscape and was gone.

  Everyone on the battlefield saw the flash; many were temporarily blinded by it. The blast wave rolled over the fighting at the human lines, and a kilometer away a mushroom cloud rose over the battlefield. It was the equivalent of several dozen two thousand pounders going off all at once, and the ground trembled.

  Halstead stood as soon as the wind swept back over him and said calmly, “Give the order, Pete. General attack, all units. Hit them hard.” It was said quietly even as the echoes of the blast died away through the valley. He wondered how much hard radiation they’d just taken, though there was nothing they could do about it now. A problem for later.