Empire of the Fallen, page 31
Gia contemplated for a moment. ‘We’re fucked, aren’t we?’
Aker sighed. ‘I won’t lie to you, Gia: it’s not looking good.’
Anger suddenly surged through Gia’s body, so strong and sharp that it brought with it a brief spell of vertigo. ‘You brought me here,’ she snapped, biting off each word. ‘You told me to join the Marines and you brought me to this—’ The words died in her throat. Immediately she felt guilty. It was exactly the kind of obnoxious, petulant behaviour that the marines had bred out of her. And Aker—Aker had never stopped looking out for her. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said quietly.
‘It’s okay,’ Aker said, sounding genuinely unoffended. ‘Hell, I’d be pissed at me too. But I’ve got your back, kiddo. Always. Nothing’s going to happen to you here while I’m around.’
Gia was about to voice further apologies when the wideband crackled and Captain Sigurd’s voice, strained with fatigue, interjected. ‘All right, folks, listen in. Lieutenant Theutrich and Lieutenant Hachiro have told you all by now, but it bears repeating. We are expecting the Fleet Bulletin later this morning from sector patrol. Some of you are hearing rumours of an Imperial incursion into Ascendancy space. Please, let’s keep a lid on it until we know the official picture from FID. Trust me, there’s thirty million people in three UN colonies in the northern hemisphere waiting for the news too. It’s coming.
‘Second order of business: we have a resupply coming in at eleven hundred from the UNS Kohaku. I’ve requisitioned more incendiaries and better energy defences as well as the usual. We’ll see what Logs turned up but don’t hold your breath. We’re going to need the whole company on the walls for overwatch, so 3rd Platoon, get some kip now while you can. There’ll be some fireworks too, you’ll all be pleased to hear, so we’ll see if we can clear some of these surrounding hills.
‘Lastly: change in tactical doctrine. As most of you will know from yesterday, the kilos now have personal force shields. It is something we’ve heard plenty about but not seen until now, and unfortunately it’s something we’re going to have to get used to. Conventional arms will not penetrate; I’ll say that again: your SIRs will not penetrate those shields, nor will phase or any other energy-based weapon. This means two things: for personal loadouts, we will now be utilising red stripe—that goes for everyone—and secondly, we are on the hunt for charged blades. Many of you will have seen the kilos wielding swords. These are charged; they have a current running through them that allows them to cut through just about everything going. They also cut through their PFSs because we can’t swing them fast enough to activate them. I’ve got two at Dog keeping an eye on our breach. The rest of you, be in no doubt: there will be plenty of CQC over the next few days, so it is in everyone’s interest to get themselves one.
‘Any questions, speak to your LT. Let’s get that ammo swapped out now, double time. Good luck everyone. Next update at eleven hundred.’
The wideband cut out. Without being directly asked, 3rd Platoon were already running through the compound, popping open ammo crates and pulling out the ‘red stripe’ ammunition—the SIR airburst incendiary rounds—and handing it up to the squads manning the walls. Gia gratefully accepted a handful of blocky magazines and switched out her tungsten rounds. The sound of racking bolts—usually a terrifying noise indicative of widespread EMP neutralising the electromagnets of their railguns—echoed through Hermit.
‘Let’s light it up,’ Waterman growled.
‘Let’s hope we don’t have to,’ Gia retorted, reaching down and accepting a pair of huge drums of ammunition for the SPHINX at Dog One. Tan was already pulling out the RRG hoppers, and he replaced them with the incendiary rounds. The autosentry chimed once the loading was complete.
They spent the next few hours in tense silence. Marines ambled up and down the firing shelf, watching the forest or CODOR holo displays as they tried futilely to penetrate the deadzone engulfing the forest beyond. Others poked and prodded at turret weapons in need of repair and ran diagnostics through nerve-thin cables. A few of the marines from 3rd Platoon watched a hypersled broadcast from one of the UN colonies in the northern hemisphere, juxtaposing a sense of normalcy to the morning. At Dog Two, one of Hermit’s only working loader mechs fussed over the breach in the wall.
At 10:30, 3rd Platoon were pulled from their chemically induced sleep to stand-to on the walls ahead of their resupply. Gia gripped her railgun tightly, her pulse up, her Mantix HUD trying to discern enemies in the treeline ahead. An eerie silence fell over the installation, broken only by the distant sound of Captain Sigurd’s comms officer as he liaised with the UNS Kohaku.
‘Prepare for incoming,’ a voice sounded briefly, impassively, over the wideband. Ten seconds later, the familiar percussion of ripped atmosphere sounded as the Kohaku hit the surrounding hills with LOAS, sending shockwaves of overpressure tearing through the trees and gouging deep craters into the soil, and leaving exposed, pulverised rock to smoke in the hot morning air. The marines shrieked and whooped as trees and branches cartwheeled through the air or were smashed to kindling against the perimeter wall, and Gia took savage glee in the thought of smug, refraction-shielded kaygryn suddenly being obliterated, their personal force shields no match for UN Fleet railguns.
‘UN!’ she heard herself shouting, exulting in the awesome firepower on display. There was a primal, almost sexual joy in seeing one’s enemies utterly annihilated, and she was reminded immediately of Zasha’s celebrations as the UNS Tigris pulverised the provar on Reya Vasar. Even that implacable, emotionless alien had broken his composure to voice his delight and punch the air.
‘Standby for resupply; ready on the gates, Hell,’ the wideband pipped.
‘Standing by.’
‘Eyes on the treeline, folks.’
As the sound of clattering, smashed rainforest died away, the still was quickly taken up by the drone of distant engines.
‘Eyes on at Spider Two.’
Gia resisted the natural urge to turn, and instead tapped into Spider Two’s VL feed. A small holo popped up in the top right corner of her HUD, displaying a hot, white sky and a tiny speck of black. A green circle surrounded it, and an IHD tag identified it as LDS-5.
‘One minute. Hell, the gates.’
SPHINX autosentries scanned as the gates to the installation opened a crack. The air above the base buzzed with drones. Pulses thumped; railguns twitched.
‘Thirty seconds.’
Gia could clearly see the resupply ship now, a chunky, olive-green light lander with a fat, square belly. A trajectory marker put it half a kilometre away from the external landing pad.
‘Ten seconds.’
The lander’s downjets flicked sheets of spray off the landing pad. Turbofans sucked in tonnes of hot, moisture-laden air. Gia could see the pilot inside, her neck craned despite the surfeit of guidance equipment available to her, manually judging the touchdown. After interminable seconds, the landing struts recoiled into the hydraulic recess and the whole craft sagged under the weight of a hold pregnant with materiel.
‘They’re down. Gates open to full. Landing team, move!’
For the briefest of seconds, Gia thought they might complete the resupply without incident, that the rail strikes had actually pulverised the kaygryn to oblivion. As the marines of the landing detail sprinted on full exo-power across the concrete and the lander’s automated hold ejected its high-incendiary cargo in neat lines of crates, she actually allowed herself to think, to hope, that the mission would be a success. And for all of five seconds, it was, an unimpeachable, textbook resupply of a static military installation.
Then a lance of phase speared the lander, and a megatonne of high-yield incendiary ammunition detonated like a close-range shaped nuclear charge.
When Gia came to—no more than a few seconds later—the base’s unofficial ‘Welcome to Hell’ motto could not have been more apt. Flames a hundred metres high boiled through the air like an orange thunderstorm, engulfing Hell One and Two and the perimeter wall. The compound had been cleared as if by a giant’s broom, and crates, tents and modules—those that hadn’t been destroyed by the blast—were in a charred pile at the foot of the Hermit installation proper, a tangled, smoking mass of bodies and hardware.
Gia’s vision was a mess of alarms; EXTERNAL CONDITIONS HOSTILE blared in a heartbeat of red and orange, as well as Mantix damage alarms, heat alarms, and squad flatline alarms. Koios, Christen, Fletcher and Caradoc were all TKIA. Her own physiological indicators were green.
She sucked in lungfuls of painfully hot air through her Mantix rebreather, as if her mouth was wrapped around a freshly boiled kettle. The flames leapt higher, and a thick black column of smoke churned the atmosphere, blocking out Cicero’s cloudy white light. If she stayed where she was for much longer, her rebreather would begin to melt.
She pressed herself to her feet, trying to make sense of the confused mass of comms chatter jamming up the wideband. Next to her, Waterman was walking along the firing shelf in a daze. He didn’t react when the SPHINX autosentry opened up next to him, adding a galaxy of incendiary rounds to the scorching air. Most of them exploded the second they left the barrel, and the SPHINX touched off from the backdraft seconds later. Waterman’s head from the mouth up was torn off in a burned black slew of tar-coloured innards, and his body collapsed over the side of the firing step.
Gia’s scream stuck in her mouth. Other marines around her rolled off the shelf, each dazed as if they had been smacked across the head with a baseball bat. Garbled, nonsensical calls for assistance occasionally penetrated the tortured comms channels, but the blast had addled them all.
‘Medic,’ she breathed, and mumbled it again. She searched for her weapon, running stimulant programs to try and banish her confusion. It was a few metres away, and she recovered it with trembling, shaking hands.
‘OC 2 Company on a priority channel, if you are receiving this, make your way to Blue One ASAP; I repeat, this is OC 2 Company on a priority channel, base breach, base breach; if you are receiving this, make your way to Blue One ASAP, rally at Blue One. I say again—’
Gia sat down and ejected her incendiary ammunition magazine. A few marines were sluggishly moving across the compound like dehydrated men lost in the desert. The fire was expanding, engulfing crates of ammunition and autosentries. Each secondary explosion seemed to speed up the spread of flames incrementally.
She searched for railgun ammunition for a few seconds, then remembered the charged blade. It was lying a few metres away on the firing step, and she snatched it up. It didn’t look damaged in any way, and when she thumbed the charge activation button, it hummed alive, crackling briefly a few times. The smell of ozone filled her nostrils.
Regaining some semblance of her wits, she climbed down off the firing shelf, picked her way through the row of scorched marine casualties, and broke into a lumbering jog across the compound. The air was like fire in her lungs, and despite the Mantix suit, she could feel the heat of the flames away to her left, churning the atmosphere.
She rounded the corner of the installation proper and saw Blue One ahead.
‘Oh shit,’ she murmured. The wall had been breached there, too, like Dog Two had the day before, and a scrum of marines and kaygryn were battling on top of the collapsed rubble wall. Plasma fire from the company’s heavy weapons team scythed through the air stroboscopically, blue against the orange flames, and the air was filled with the snap and pop of railguns and the occasional banshee shriek of magma pulse. Judging by the number of aliens, it was a battle they were sure to lose.
She charged forward, holding the blade like a samurai holding a katana, and swung it inexpertly at the nearest alien. There was the briefest hint of resistance as the sword met the alien’s personal force shield, before it cut through armour, flesh and bone, and the kaygryn collapsed to the floor without a face.
‘Gia!’ someone shouted. It was Aker.
‘What?’ Gia shouted. A marine went down next to her, Mantix smoking in a dozen places. More kaygryn were pouring into the breach, and behind, Imperial troops with four arms were directing them, unfazed by the return fire from the marines. One staggered after being hit five times by a SPHINX RRG which had had its red stripe replaced with solid tungsten, but none of the shots penetrated, and the autosentry was sliced in half by a beam of phase a second later.
‘Get back here and help!’
Gia chanced a look around. Aker was fifty metres away, in the lee of the installation proper, at the base of the large wedge of grey concrete protruding into the air. Next to her was Captain Sigurd and his comms officer, and a couple of other marines standing guard behind a pair of diamond hard points hastily dragged into place.
‘Look out!’ someone shouted. Gia turned back to see a kaygryn tumbling down the wall breach among a cascade of rubble, swinging wildly with a halberd-like weapon that doubtless had a charged edge. One marine lost an arm, and another a leg, before Gia shouldered her way forward and parried the third blow. The halberd bit into the concrete below, and the kaygryn, not an Imperial trooper, roared its frustration, before two marines piled on top of it with combat knives and began stabbing. Five seconds later, all three were dead as a magma pulse detonated among them, shredding their Mantix and sending long streamers of blood vapour into the air.
‘Gia, get that fucking blade over here now and protect the CO!’
Gia looked around her at the humans and aliens dying left and right. Snarling her frustration, she picked up the dropped halberd and thrust it into the hands of a nearby marine. ‘This is the only thing that will cut through their shields!’ she shouted, before exiting the melee and running over to where Sigurd was.
‘This is Hermit broadcasting on all ECA channels, requesting immediate assistance from any UNAF forces in the area, how copy?’ the comms officer shouted over the din. The firestorm was encroaching further and further into the compound, chewing up boxes of ammunition, canvas tents, and weapons with unexpended rounds. Tongues of flame crawled across the floor, seeking out new flammable objects to latch on to and ignite. Overhead, ordnance stitched through the air, pocking the walls of the installation and carving glowing trenches of phase burn into the concrete.
‘Where’s the Fleet?’ Gia asked. She span round as a violent explosion tore through the wall at Blue Two, and more kaygryn scrambled over the breach. They were running out of time.
‘All comms are down,’ Aker said absently, shouldering her railgun and unleashing a long stream of fire at the kaygryn. Gia saw that Aker had not swapped out her red stripe, and the air around the second breach was filled with a miniature firework display of airburst incendiaries. Pink, flammable gel spattered the aliens and ignited, travelling too slowly for their force shields to fend off. Within seconds, three of the aliens were down, tearing at their armour as it melted under the thousand-degree heat and set fire to their fur.
‘Goddamn it,’ Aker snarled. It was sickeningly frustrating to see a tactic that worked so effectively against the personal force shields. Without the destruction of their resupply, they could have easily fended off the alien horde. Now, anyone who kept a red stripe magazine in their railgun risked the thing exploding in their hands.
‘This is Hermit broadcasting on all ECA channels, requesting immediate assistance from any UNAF forces in the area, how copy? Anybody! Come on!’
‘What’s going on?’ Gia asked Aker again, clutching the sword in her gauntlets.
‘We’ve lost contact with everyone. It’s planetwide.’ Gia turned. It was Sigurd who had answered. ‘The Fleet Bulletin arrived just before the kilo attack. The rumours were true. Folhourt is under attack. Indigos are pushing through cob space and eating up Ascendancy worlds. Sector patrol has picked up indigo ships here, too, in the Gull Crest.’
‘And now our fucking comms are down!’ the comms officer shouted, kicking the powerful orbital-gain set.
‘We’re fucked,’ Gia said.
‘No,’ Sigurd replied calmly. ‘Our mission is to protect the scientists inside the installation. Aker, take troopers Raman and Sears inside and start evacuating them into the valleys below. Sears, keep trying to reach orbit for evac. Whatever’s in Hermit, it doesn’t fall into indigo hands, got it?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Aker replied.
Another explosion tore through the air. The marines crammed into the breach were thinning out; another few minutes and the kaygryn would break through into the compound and massacre anyone who was left.
‘What will you do, sir?’ Aker asked Sigurd.
There was a pause, and though the captain’s face was concealed, like the rest of theirs, by his mirrored visor, Gia fancied that a sad smile played across his lips.
‘Once more unto the breach,’ he said softly, and hoisting up his railgun, he charged into the mass of marines desperately trying to buy Hermit a few more minutes of time.
‘All right,’ Aker said, slapping Gia on the shoulder pad. ‘Let’s go.’
THE BATTLE OF FOLHOURT
‘I see children playing war everywhere in the UN. They play war sims in the VR sync or they run around outside playing soldiers and aliens. I want to sit them all down and show them what it’s like. What it’s really like. The screams, the blood, the shit and the death—the real, full death. The crying mothers and fathers, the loss, the void left behind, the lives wasted. I wonder if they would still play those games. Or do we just not care any more?’
EFFECT Commander Peter Ryan (ret.)
‘Exiting hyperspace in one minute, Fleet Marshal,’ his executive officer, Devaraja, called from her console in the command sphere.
Scarcroft nodded and swallowed. He read through the APB from sector patrol for the fifth time. The wording could not have been clearer: Folhourt was under attack. He’d started a mission timer the second Minad had given him the news, and forty-two minutes had subsequently elapsed. It was an appallingly long delay in the scale of modern fleet operations. They had been in transit for twice the length of the entire battle for New Port Louis.
