Empire of the Fallen, page 22
The Cyclone deposited three hundred tonnes of materiel to other UNAF bases on Cicero before she was taken down by Manticore, along with twelve other marines on Casualty Replacement Orders, almost as an afterthought. All of them had wanted to undertake an ROI drop—Gia especially, who considered her Purgatory training a fluke—but they were going in S&S, ‘slow and steady’, and had to suck it up.
‘So, anybody know anything about this place?’ one of the marines asked over the narrowband as the Manticore bucked on the strong equatorial convection currents. His IHD tag identified him as Corporal Daniels from 890 Commando Battalion. Like the rest of them, he was a long way from home.
‘Nope.’
‘Nada.’
‘Zilch.’
Daniels nodded. He was head to toe in Mantix, but despite the mirror visor and semi-active camouflage, Gia could tell that he was irritated.
‘I got nothing too,’ he said. ‘That’s gotta be bad news. Static installation, out here in the middle of the Graveyard? Every kag fuck in the galaxy going crazy for a piece of human? Is anyone here not on a CRO?’
Gia said nothing. At two klicks’ altitude, both port and starboard hold doors whirred open. A sea of jungle-smothered hills and valleys interspersed with wide bands of flat plain greeted them. The sky above was a dirty white, while below huge streamers of mist coiled off the carpet of emerald. It was a hot, wet morning on Cicero’s equator.
‘Four minutes. It’s going to be a hard landing,’ came the pilot’s voice over the narrowband. ‘They’ve been contacted twice already this morning.’
‘Outstanding,’ Daniels growled, and Gia could hear the grin in his voice. He was the most senior marine there; the rest were troopers. Gia had the feeling that had it been one of them chattering away, they’d have been told to shut up by now.
The Manticore swooped through the hot, moist atmosphere. Huge promontories loomed all about them, valley cliffs covered in rainforest sandwiching billiard-table flat plains of rock below. Some of them were filled with fat channels of creepers like organic pipelines, while others snaked with silvery rivers. Gia searched for any sign of civilisation, but there was nothing to be discerned through the rainy haze.
‘Two minutes,’ announced the pilot. The air of cool that each marine was emanating was slowly succumbing to their curiosity. Necks craned out of the hold to try and catch a glimpse of Hermit. It was aptly named: even on enhanced optics, Gia couldn’t find it. She also realised that such excellent jungle cover could be well utilised by an enemy. It was no wonder the marine garrison was taking casualties.
After another minute of flight, they finally saw it—or rather, Hermit’s force shielding, a pellucid dome of hexagons shimmering against the forest canopy. Below its protective bubble was a large, circular installation of dark-grey rockcrete anchored to a relatively flat area on one of the massive promontories sticking up from the rock flats below. Two hundred metres to the west of the main structure was a small landing platform not much bigger than a Manticore airframe, connected to the main base by a metalled accessway and flat, concrete apron. The installation was walled and gated, and Gia could see marines moving around the perimeter behind diamond hard points and between SPHINX autosentry turrets. The usual smorgasbord of equipment littered the installation, too: canvas tents, prefabricated modules and command centres, and crates of weaponry and ammunition.
‘Prepare to debark!’ the pilot said. The moment he said it, the Manticore started taking fire. It was as if someone had flicked a switch. Gia flinched as the fuselage rattled with solid shot. It was like being inside a cake tin in a hailstorm.
‘Hold on!’ the pilot shouted. The Manticore’s underslung turrets opened up, filling the dense air with the thick chop of fat tungsten slugs. Gia snatched her railgun from the overhead clamp and jammed the butt into her shoulder, watching as a tracer lanced away from the troop carrier into the jungle. The engines ramped up a few tones, and the ground rushed up to meet them so quickly that for a second she thought they’d been hit; then she was crushed into her seat as the Manticore activated its downjets on full reheat to stop them all-out smashing into the landing platform.
‘Troops out!’ Daniels shouted. Fire, both solid and energy, zipped through the air above them from the southern wall of Hermit ahead, slicing through the light haze of morning rain. Gia leapt out of the side of the Manticore, snapped her duffel into her exoskeleton rack, and sprinted to the gates ahead. Behind her, the other marines did the same, availing themselves of the covering fire from the massed guns of 421 Commando. It was only at that point that Gia noticed the concrete apron was a moonscape, a cratered and pocked no man’s land. The walls ahead, no more than three metres high, were in a similar condition, streaked black with phase burn.
‘Come on, come on, move it people! Inside, inside!’ a new voice shouted over the comlink. From the IHD tag, it was Lieutenant Rolan Hachiro, OC 1st Platoon.
Ahead, the gates cracked open with a yammer of klaxons. Gia was the first through, and immediately whirled around, sank to one knee and brought her weapon up. Two hundred metres away, the newly ventilated Manticore tore away from the ground with a shriek of engines, giving her a clear shot of the jungle beyond. Whoever or whatever was firing at them may as well have been—and probably was—invisible, but she picked out a line of tracer nonetheless and blasted away with her railgun as the last of the marines powered through the open gate. Then a fat, solid shot thumped into her left shoulder pad, just as the gates began to close, spinning her around and sending her railgun flying from her grip. She lay for a few seconds, flat on her back, giving her tac screen and advanced optics nothing more to go on than the blank white sky.
‘Aw shit, already? Medic!’ someone shouted as the gates closed. Mantix-clad marines clustered around her.
‘I’m fine,’ she said, pressing herself up, but one of the marines put a hand on her sternum plate and forced her back down. His left Mantix shoulder pad had a white circle on it quadrisected by a red cross.
‘I’ll tell you when you’re fine,’ the medic snapped. Diagnostic holos sprang into life around the impact site. After thirty seconds of inspection, the medic produced a very unmedical pair of pliers from his webbing, pincered them about the round lodged in Gia’s shoulder pad, and prised it free with a whir of exoskeleton servos.
‘She’s fine,’ the medic’s companion said.
‘Agreed,’ the medic said. He held the pincered slug in front of her. It was tiny, a few millimetres in length, shaped like a three-dimensional ‘H’. ‘Armour piercing. You got lucky,’ he growled and flicked it away. Around them, the sounds of the firefight melted away slowly.
A marine thrust Gia’s railgun to her, and she pressed herself up and took it. It took a moment for her to see the trooper’s IHD tag: Warrant Officer First Class Elizabeth Aker.
‘Hey, kiddo,’ she said. ‘Welcome to hell.’
Aker led her across the concrete courtyard towards one of the olive-green command modules that had sprouted up around Hermit in the past few weeks like a shanty town. The rain worsened to torrential. Inside, there was no-one, just stacks of crates and deactivated holo generators. Aker shut the door before removing her helmet; tactical doctrine mandated Mantix helmets had to be worn at all times on combat operations unless within a secure building. Even then, it had to be within arm’s reach at all times.
Aker rested her railgun on the table, pulled up a chair, and sat down heavily. ‘How’d it go?’ she asked.
‘Fine. Good,’ Gia said, removing her own helmet. ‘Pissed off I didn’t get to ROI here.’
Aker smiled. ‘I like your attitude, but trust me, it’s a good job you didn’t. You land anywhere in that jungle more than a hundred metres from Hermit, you’re dead. The kags here aren’t fucking around.’
Gia nodded, fiddling with her shoulder pad where she had been shot. A few centimetres to the right and the round would have hit the Mantix joint and probably penetrated, tearing arteries to shreds. Though her recent marine training meant that the thought of such a serious wound didn’t particularly faze her, the thought of losing an arm and being rendered combat ineffective mere minutes after her arrival had given her pause. The medic was right; she’d got lucky.
‘What’s the story here?’ Gia asked after a few moments.
Aker shrugged. Her face was grim, marked with perspiration and red lines where the Mantix helmet had been. ‘2 Company’s been here for ten days. Had twelve casevacs already, shipped them out two days ago, all out in crates. Ten tech deaths and two totalled.’ She ran a hand through her hair. ‘We’re losing a goddamn man a day.’
Adrenaline soured Gia’s guts. Ten per cent of the company’s strength lost in just over a week. To kaygryn.
‘Why are they hitting us so hard? What’s Hermit?’ Gia asked.
‘Some kind of research installation. Important enough to garrison it with a company of marines, not important enough for dedicated orbital assets. Everyone’s tied up. Competing priorities, yadda yadda. Usual UNAF logistics bullshit. Bottom line: whatever it is, we’re protecting it until we’re told to stop or we’re all TKIA. Word on the street is they’re pumping and dumping inside.’
Gia considered this for a moment, different emotions competing for priority. The fact that no-one knew what happened in Hermit gave it a dark, mythical and sexy quality, the kind of mission they made action holodramas out of; it also meant she would probably die. So, good and bad…
‘Are there people inside it?’ Gia asked.
Aker nodded. ‘Yeah. They don’t come out much. Too busy working and shitting themselves in equal measure. They’ve got a month to lock it down, and then we’re bugging out.’
One month in a static military installation with an attrition rate of one a day. Without CROs, they’d be down to nearly half strength—and that was assuming the enemy didn’t try and storm the compound. Gia was beginning to regret Aker’s promise to personally look out for her. Surely there must have been a staff headquarters somewhere in the galaxy that needed an adjutant?
‘A month is a long time…’ she said eventually.
‘A month is the official line. Two days is what we’ve told them. With all that shit going on up there, OC wants to get out of here and fast.’ She jerked her head towards the installation. ‘Precious cargo. War-winning stuff. Et cetera. How are you doing, anyway? All squared away up here?’ She tapped her temple with a gauntleted hand.
‘Yeah, all good,’ Gia said, and meant it. Although the marines, the actual marines, and live combat operations were still new to her, there was an order to the chaos, a structure which her short-lived UN civilian life had lacked. She could see why, despite the technological wonders the UN had to offer, so many of its citizens rejected the high-tech ‘Always On’ lifestyle for low-tech enclaves and even Tier Two worlds. There was a good, solid honesty to soldiering which didn’t require anything but a willingness to follow orders and pull a trigger.
‘I’m proud of you, Raman,’ Aker said, standing and slapping Gia on the shoulder. She nodded to the door. ‘You’d better go and speak to the CO. He’ll want to brief you.’
Gia nodded, affixed her helmet and recovered her railgun from the table. ‘Thanks, Liz,’ she said as Aker yanked open the module door. ‘For everything.’
Aker paused for a moment, turning to face her. ‘No need to thank me, kiddo. Just survive. For God’s sake, just survive.’
Rolan Hachiro was waiting in a canvas tent that had been fission-bolted to the exterior of the main installation building itself. A sheer wall of grey, rain-skinned rockcrete rose above them, lacking any kind of ornament or branding save a few tiny external sensors that would be feeding back to internal holos as windows.
Gia saluted as she approached, and Hachiro returned it casually. The holo he was studying vanished. He was flanked by two more people; their IHD tags identified them as Captain Sigurd, OC 2 Company, and Lieutenant Theutrich, OC 3 Platoon.
‘How’s the arm, trooper?’ Sigurd asked.
‘Fine, thank you, sir,’ Gia replied. ‘It didn’t penetrate.’
‘Good. We saw you on the ops room perimeter feed. That was textbook T n’ C. How long have you been out of basic?’
Gia felt her chest swell with pride. ‘Completed Purg three days ago, sir.’
‘Well, outstanding work, trooper. LT Hachiro is lucky to have you. Carry on.’
Gia suppressed a smile as the captain left with Theutrich.
‘All right,’ Hachiro said wearily. ‘You’re taking over from Trooper Zenon’s shoes. He was our number two APR, but we’ve given that to Bull.’
Gia had to conceal her disappointment. A marine platoon’s manned heavy weapon support team consisted of two magma pulsers and two assault plasma rifles. After firing off a few rounds of either, the SIR—Standard-Issue Railgun—felt like a peashooter.
‘You know Aker, our senior NCO on deck—go to her if you have any problems before you come to me. We have a pretty loose org here. The system is one platoon on the walls at all times on a six-hour rotation, but if we get contacted, all bets are off. You’ll answer to Corporal Christen, he’s at Dog One.’ Hachiro summoned a holo that Gia quickly saw was a schematic of Hermit. The installation was surrounded by a circular perimeter wall four hundred metres in diameter. There were eight points marked on the map, and Hachiro indicated each of them with his index finger. ‘Dog One, Dog Two, Spider One, Spider Two, Blue One, Blue Two, Hell One, Hell Two.’ The last two he indicated flanked the main entrance gate, the base’s only point of access.
No, Gia corrected herself, the base’s only visible point of access. This place probably has secret tunnels leading down to the foot of the cliffs.
‘We keep a squad at each point for maximum coverage, six men. The other platoon acts as QRA. They hit us from everywhere every couple of hours, so stay frosty and get used to riding stims.’ He cancelled the holo, and Gia’s IHD informed her that he’d uploaded it to her mission logs. ‘Any questions?’
‘What’s the enemy like? What kind of force?’
‘They’re well equipped. They’re running full refrac and they stick to the treeline. Even firing LRIS at saturation point, they don’t linger, so we’re having a hard time building up a decent picture. Every drone we send out gets knocked out, and they’ve deadzoned about three square klicks outside our shield dome. We know they’re kaygryn, but they’ve got some pretty fucking decent hardware.’
‘Ain’t that the truth,’ a passing marine muttered.
‘We’re holding this place down for a month while the eggheads in there shut everything down and purge the servers. Then we’re dead or bugging out. We’ve no orbital. Every time we’re resupplied, we call in a few pot shots down on the cliffs, but they scatter; they’re too smart to hang around.’
‘What about the force shielding? How are they getting through it?’
‘What, the dome?’ Hachiro said, pointing upwards. ‘That’s for LOAS, naval-grade orbital wetwork. It’s not sensitive enough for small arms. Might stop some of the bigger stuff but they haven’t hit us with anything but RGs yet. Oh, last thing. We’re not allowed to know what goes on in Hermit, so don’t ask. Understood?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Gia replied.
‘Good. I—’
‘Possible contact at Spider One,’ came a voice over the wideband. ‘Standby.’
‘God fucking damn it,’ Hachiro muttered to himself. ‘Get to Dog One, now,’ he said to Gia, just as the distant rattling pop of incoming small arms fire echoed through the forest.
She did as she was bade, dodging through dozens of marines as they scrambled out of billets and up to the walls and crouched behind diamond hard points. The sound of small arms fire was intensifying; she could hear it impacting against the perimeter, like a team of men were attacking it with sledgehammers.
She reached the foot of the wall and climbed the steps that led up to Dog One. At the top, crouching behind a twin-linked RRG SPHINX turret, was Corporal Christen and two other marines: Fletcher and Tan.
‘Raman, where the fuck have you been?’ Christen growled. A beam of light scythed over their heads and scorched the installation wall beyond.
‘Speaking to the LT,’ Gia replied. They were on a raised walkway two metres wide. Cover was provided by the lip of the wall itself, made from armoured rockcrete and a parapet of nanofibre boards and diamond cover points. Empty magazines, ammunition crates and discarded micromortars littered the firing step.
‘Well, keep your fucking head down,’ Christen said as Tan chucked a small personal drone vertically into the air. After a few seconds, Gia’s HUD populated with a view of the treeline, no more than fifty metres from the wall. Two blue lines were superimposed over the view, demarcating Dog One’s AO. Blurry, half-visible shapes moved between the trunks and were quickly marked out in red outline and tagged as ENEMY.
‘Get on comms, Fletch,’ Christen said.
‘We’ve got six kilos at Dog One,’ Fletcher said over the platoon wideband. ‘Small arms and man-portable phase.’
Gia didn’t envy Sigurd sitting in the command module, having to listen to hundreds of such messages every minute and build them into a workable plan of defence. Most combat situations were fluid things, where circumstances changed by the second. Here, at a static installation, effective strategic oversight would make all the difference.
More marines were clattering up the steps and falling into cover behind the wall. The rest of her squad—Caradoc, Koios and Waterman—were further down the firing step, sitting or lying down almost casually while incoming rattled over their heads. Some of 3 Platoon on QRA were still powering across the compound to their designated firing points, but most of the garrison were at the wall now, waiting for a target to present itself.
It didn’t take long.
‘Shit, kilos in the open!’ someone shouted, seconds before the world-ending scream of magma pulse smashed into the wall at Dog Two. Globules of molten metal peppered the wall like grapeshot lava, punching neat holes in the concrete and cracking the diamond hard points in a hundred places. One marine staggered backwards, a glowing, smoking trench gouged into the side of his helmet, and he was immediately dragged off the firing step by a waiting medic.
