CHAPTER 22
Major Perrin swung his Gatling cannon from side to side, testing the balance servos in his Cataphract’s knees and shoulders. As the battalion’s operations officer, he didn’t need this equipment to do his job of managing the commander’s plan to win the battle. As the commanding officer, he needed to lead from the front.
The sun had nearly set, casting golden light through the sparse jungle this close to the void port.
“All companies on the ready line,” Roux reported from a few steps away. The communications soldier wore the second Cataphract suit acquired from the squad now inside the Wolverine tank. The suit that smelled like someone had lost control of their bowels in it.
Rank had to have some privileges.
“Open a battalion-wide channel,” Perrin said. There was a click in his ear and a blinking cursor on his visor once Roux had done as ordered.
“Men of Bretton . . . this attack is a no-fail mission. Our Hegemony has fallen and Dahrien rejects our presence. While we are not guilty of the crimes they accuse us of . . . our innocence proves nothing. Many will use this time of crisis to seize what they can, to spill blood in revenge when there is no authority to punish such evil. But we are of Bretton, our actions are our honor and our honor comes from God’s grace. We will honor Him through our bravery and skill of arms. I am not the man Colonel Jematé was, God receive him and comfort him, but his final order to me—to all of us—was to return home. Our home needs us. They need us there, to protect them from the chaos let loose on what is left of the Hegemony. As such, we either seize Fort Triumph or we die here, on Dahrien. To remain here gives us the choice of dying on our feet or being executed on our knees. I will not give up. Neither have any of you, my soldiers. My brothers. We left Bretton beneath the Hero’s Boughs with our families and our people calling on us to return with honor. They have prayed for our return, and it would dishonor their pleas to God for us to do anything less than our utmost to wear their prayers upon our souls . . . and honor God’s promise to them that we will return someday. We win here, now, and our families will see us march beneath the Boughs once again. The only way for us is forward. Forward through the fires of hell until we reach home.
“We must seize the airfield and the TEU fuel reserves intact,” he continued. “Nothing else matters. We will receive no mercy from the Flags. Cry havoc, men of Bretton. Forward unto the breach. Let’s go home.”
Perrin looked back to Roux and the other Cataphracts in his assault element. Most crossed themselves, while others banged fists against heavy breastplates in agreement with him. He slammed his visor down and signaled the advance. His Cataphract broke into a steady jog, automatically calculating footsteps and short hops across the uneven terrain. He let the suit pilot itself as he monitored the rest of the battalion.
Individual Cataphract icons moved toward the void port on his visor map. The Flankers followed behind them, ready to assault the buildings once the more heavily armored soldiers had established fire control over the void port.
Anything not from Bretton moving around the target area wouldn’t last long.
“Roux, contact the Izmir. Order her forward,” Perrin said.
“Sir, wasn’t the plan to wait until we had the void port secured?” Roux asked.
“We’ll either have won the day or lost it by the time the ship can arrive,” Perrin said. “I don’t want to stay down here a minute more than needed. Call her forward.”
“Roger, sir,” the comms soldier said, and another channel opened on Perrin’s visor.
The major waited until the leading Cataphract from Alpha Company crossed a dotted line on the map. Drones mounted on the Cataphracts shot off the heavy suits and flew towards the void port. If the Flag commander had any doubts as toward Perrin’s intentions, the mass of scout and attack drones would make the Brettons’ intentions clear.
Hostile drone tracks appeared on his map and were quickly eliminated by friendly Shrikes. The counter-drone wave was less than Perrin had feared it would be, which meant the Flags had few drones to protect the void base with—or they were suckering him into a kill zone.
Either option was plausible. The second-guessing of the enemy leader knowing just how desperate Perrin’s situation was versus the commander not knowing the Izmir was en route to evacuate them once he could seize the fuel reserves made calculations more difficult.
The Flag leader could simply fade back into the populace and live another day. Fighting to hold the fuel depot that wasn’t going anywhere—so far as he knew—should be a losing proposition on its face. No one wanted to be the last soldier to die in a war, not when victory had been declared.
While Perrin could wargame the best possible scenario for the enemy commander based on what he assumed the enemy commander knew, assumptions had a bad habit of not conforming to reality. And while he assumed the other commander was not an idiot or a fanatic unwilling to do the smart thing, that assumption would be tested within the first few minutes of battle.
A sharp crack broke through the jungle. A wave of overpressure passed over him as a lightning-fast cloud in the humid air. His ears stung from the blast, but he kept moving.
“Thermobaric drones in the trees,” a platoon leader reported up. “Permission for full Shrike employment.”
“Granted.” Perrin double-blinked at a pulsing box and his suit shuddered as the Shrike magazine on his back emptied. The small drones fanned out above him, slicing through leaves and branches as they formed a protective dome over his front line.
“All units, all units,” Perrin sent on the command channel, “there’s no efficiency rating on this mission. Expend all munitions and drones as you see fit.”
The Shrikes would detect and home in on anything inorganic moving through the jungle that wasn’t a Flanker or a Cataphract and, unless the Flags had found a way to make their popper drones out of wood, his men would have significantly better protection.
A slew of Shrikes veered off ahead of him. A drone exploded high in the canopy, collapsing trees all around it and swatting most of Perrin’s Shrikes out of the air. A giant groaned as hunks of bark and sap-thick wood cracked apart. A shadow grew over Perrin as thousands of branches and leathery fronds crashed down on him.
The impact knocked him aside and into a tight green cell of branches and wood pulp. Perrin cursed as he struggled to move his arms and shoulders. He spun up his Gatling cannon and blasted away towards the trunk, sending tree limbs flying about.
He stopped shooting and bashed through a log the width of his arm and stomped a path out of the emerald prison. The thermobaric grenade had cleared a decent gap through the jungle for him. His suit reconnected to the rest of the assault force and more data flowed into his visor.
Bravo Company had taken casualties during their advance, but were online and laying down fire across the void port.
Perrin negotiated his way through the smoldering debris and hurried up a slight ridge. Fort Triumph was already aflame. Bretton drones flashed in the firelight as they smashed through barracks windows and exploded. Tracer rounds spat through smaller hangars on the other side of the landing pads the size of baseball fields.
His visor’s target finder put a spinning reticule on a vehicle as it raced up the other side of the mesa and turned sharply down the road ringing the port.
“Rocket, proximity fuse,” he said. The launcher on his back snapped away from his armor and hinged over his shoulder. The warhead spun to the configuration he ordered and there was a pleasant ding in his ear.
“Fire!” he shouted.
Nothing.
The insurgents in the back of the truck leveled a high-caliber machine gun and shot wildly at the tree line where the Bretton Cataphracts were.
“Wait . . . Loose!” Perrin spat.
The rocket screamed out of the launcher and corkscrewed across the landing zones. It ignited a few yards away from the truck, spraying it with white-hot shrapnel that tore the vehicle and the fighters in it to pieces.
Perrin made a mental note that he wasn’t a Flanker anymore and that Cataphracts had their own particular set of voice commands.
“Armor! Incoming armor!” Roux shouted in his earpiece.
More vehicles drove onto the mesa. Four Sabrah armored personnel carriers formed a firing line with practiced ease and advanced across the landing zones slowly, their turrets working methodically from one side towards Perrin.
“Ta’essa, get up here now!” Perrin said as he glanced at his empty rocket launcher. “Timeline’s moved up. Get over here—”
He didn’t see the shell that landed a few feet from him. He had a brief sensation of weightlessness, then he was on his back, staring up at a smoke-filled sky through a cracked visor. A mosquito buzz roared in his ears and for a moment, he had no idea where he was or what he was doing.
Perrin raised his left arm to brush a burning branch off his chest, but something sprayed out from the broken crablike plating over his forearm. Blood gushed out of a stump where his hand used to be, hissing and sizzling against the fire and overheated metal of his chest plate.
“Ah . . . there’s a wrinkle.” Perrin tried to focus on the white, bony stumps jutting from his ballistic sleeve.
“Sir? Sir!” He heard Roux chirp through his earpiece.
“The Izmir . . . tell her to . . . get you all out of here,” Perrin slurred. His Cataphract systems activated tourniquet lines just below his elbow and a pinch against his neck heralded a drug-induced escape from the growing pain.
Perrin fought to stay conscious for a few more moments and failed.
“Advancing!” Tessa shouted through the rest of the crew’s earbuds. The Wolverine lurched hard and accelerated up the road.
“Whoa whoa whoa!” Corre waved at her to stop from his firing cradle next to the main gun, which made sense if they were fighting as an infantry squad. As she was in her chamber, she couldn’t see his hand gesture. “What’s going on?”
“Uh, Major Perrin was just on the channel,” Mason said. “Only got a fragment of the transmission but—”
“He accelerated the timetable,” Tessa said. “We do not need to understand our orders to follow them.”
“Tanks?” Mason leaned closer to a holo screen, squinting. “There are enemy tanks on the other side of the void port. Data’s coming in fragmented with all the fires.”
“What kind of tank?” Tessa demanded.
“How should I—”
“You double-tap the icon and it’ll tell us! We have certain munitions for certain targets. How do you all not know this?” Tessa’s words were laced with fury and consternation.
“We’re infantry. Either the bullet kills what we shoot at or we don’t shoot at it . . . Sabrahs!” Mason’s fingers flitted in and out of the holo screen.
“I’ve got a DPAT loaded in the big gun.” Noah put a hand to the ammo rack release. “Do we need a green one instead?”
“It is the main gun and the DPAT is sufficient for Sabrahs but not ideal. There’s a higher chance of you fiddle-dicking the swap and killing us all should there be a hull breach,” she said.
“‘Fiddle-dicking’? Boyle leaned over and glanced into the lower part of the turret.
“I heard Felix say it while he was playing with the infrared disruption drones,” Tessa said. “We will crest the mesa in the next forty-five seconds. The front battery will be briefly exposed to a lethal shot. I am accelerating to mitigate the risk.”
“Felix, watch your mou-owth!” Mason rocked back in his chair as the Wolverine jerked ahead. The tank angled up and the lower compartment crew flailed about for something to hold onto. The tank slammed back to level.
“Acquire a target!” Tessa shouted.
“Action front, armor fifteen hundred meters,” Corre said. “Loose!”
The cannon shot back as the shell fired.
Corre found the four Sabrahs again—all had their turrets and hulls oriented towards the Cataphracts firing at them from the other side of the void port.
“Missed? I think I missed,” Corre said. “One’s turning towards us!”
“You have to target-lock with the double triggers,” Tessa said. “Main gunner, give the command to—why must I do everything?—loader, sabot round. Now!”
“Sabot?” Noah lifted the blast door. “Green one?”
“White! Load a white one! Machine gunner, are you waiting for an invitation to be productive?” Tessa shouted.
Noah pulled a sabot round halfway from the ammo rack when a round struck the forward armor, rattling the tank. The sabot round tipped out of Noah’s hands and bounced off Terra’s chamber.
“Ah! Get it, get it!” Felix pushed the round away from him and it rolled back to Noah.
“I hate you all so much,” Tessa said.
The machine gun chattered on the topside of the turret. Boyle turned the weapon from side to side, shooting quick bursts that sparked off the Sabrah armor.
Noah hefted the sabot round up and shoved it into the breech. He slammed it home and ducked back down.
“Double triggers? Ah ha!” Corre slewed the turret to one side. “Target lock, loose!”
The tank rocked again.
One of the Sabrahs to the left of the pack burst apart. The turret rode the flames into the air and smashed to the ground between the Wolverine and the rest of the APCs. The cannon on a Sabrah spat out brief flames as it chugged out smaller shells.
The road in front of the Wolverine erupted into broken concrete and dust.
“Loader, dazzler shell,” Tessa said as the tank turned to the left and rolled into an unkempt field. “Neon. The neon-colored one.”
“Thought I wasn’t supposed to touch—anyway.” Noah slid one of the rounds from the rack. The entire munition was one long canister, no bullet tip of a DPAT round or the enclosed spike of a sabot. He slammed it into the main gun breech.
“Ready a DPAT,” Tessa said. “Main gunner, aim for the ground just ahead of the targets. The Dazzler will disrupt their targeting sys—”
A shell struck the flank of the Wolverine. The inner hull bulged inwards, sending tiny slivers of metal bouncing around the crew.
“Son of a bitch, that stings!” Felix rubbed a shoulder; his fingers came away bloody.
“Loose!” Corre shouted. The dazzler let off a trail of spinning sparks that arced into the air and bounced off the tarmac of the landing zones before it thumped into the turret of a Sabrah. The tank lit up like a bonfire and veered hard to its right and crashed into another tank, throwing off its aim and sending cannon shells flying across the void port.
“Not ideal but acceptable,” Tessa said.
“My auto-targeters are offline,” Corre said.
“Acceptable! The firing solutions for the last target are in the system buffers, just manually aim and take out that Sabrah driving towards the burning hangar,” Tessa said.
“Didn’t know I could do that. Noah?” Corre slewed the turret toward the Sabrah darting towards the cover of a hangar, the side walls collapsing from the inferno inside of it. Corre led the target just a tad and fired. The shell followed a slight ballistic arc and glanced off the rear armor.
The Sabrah tilted up like it had been stepped on and veered straight into the burning hangar.
“That’s bad for them, right?” Boyle asked.
“Do you want to drive in there?” Tessa asked.
“Do . . . we? I mean, no.” Boyle nodded hard, then shook his head emphatically.
“DPAT loaded.” Noah closed the breech.
Boyle fired the machine gun at the two burning Sabrahs as the crews jumped out. Bullets tore up the ground around the tanks and blew the insurgents to pieces.
“I prefer my Gau,” Boyle said, “but at least I don’t have to carry this honey.” He gave the hydraulic base inside the turret a pat.
“Do you want to lose fingers?” Tessa asked. “Because that’s how you lose fingers.”
“Hey, we’ve got a big target coming up onto the mesa,” Mason said. “I think Felix launched some drones while we were busy.”
“No point in saving them for later.” Felix tilted his palm away from his shoulder. “And the bleeding’s not stopping, just so everyone knows.”
Noah picked up a first aid kit and slid across the hull to Felix. He rummaged through the pack and found a metal tube with an angled head.
“What sort of target?” Tessa asked. “Do not keep secrets from the rest of us!”
“I’ve got a couple sensor dumps from the pigeon drones,” Mason said. “But all the drones went to shit after the Dazzler shell.”
“Hold on, getting comms from Perrin.” Corre slapped his thigh twice for attention and pressed his other hand against his headset. “Not Perrin . . . the fuel dump’s been secured but there’s still enemy in the surrounding buildings. Flankers are clearing them—”
“That is an incoming Wolverine!” Tessa shouted as Mason shared images from the drones. “The DPAT round loaded up will barely scratch its paint.”
“Noah!” Corre shouted at the loader.
“I can’t stop the bleeding,” Noah said as blood spurted out from Felix’s shoulder and onto Tessa’s chamber. “Give me a minute or we’ll lose him.”
“I’ll get the round.” Mason scrambled out of his seat and promptly slipped on Felix’s blood. He landed hard over Tessa’s chamber, knocking the wind out of him.
“You all are a fucking circus!” Tessa spun the tank, orienting the front towards the road leading up from the insurgent-controlled village where the other Wolverine was approaching from.
“Boyle, unloading procedure for the main gun is as follows . . .” she said.
“Dismounts!” Boyle spun the machine gun to the left and opened fire on a building. “Got more coming up from the village.”
“Tank. Tank!” Corre shouted as Wolverine’s prow came up the steep incline. He fired the DPAT round and watched the humid air heavy with burning motes from the Dazzler shell swirl in its wake. The round struck the underside of the tank and ricocheted into the ground where it exploded into a cloud of dust and smoke.
“Not a kill shot.” Tessa spun the body of the tank towards the main hangar, keeping the turret locked on the other Wolverine, and drove forward. “It would’ve been a kill shot but someone’s still screwing around and not loading the target specific munition!”
Mason drew in a ragged breath, left arm clutching his ribs. He lifted the blast door and blinked hard at the ammo rack.
“I unloaded the gun for you!” Corre shouted and craned his head forward. “Where are we going? Don’t we want our front towards the enemy?”
“The fuel depot is highly combustible,” Tessa said. “I’m putting it between us and the other tank.”
“You’re what?” Corre asked.
“Felix! That drone I told you not to play with? Launch the extermination blossom at the tank and do it now,” Tessa said.
“I was about to do that anyway.” Felix’s words slurred but he dragged and dropped an icon on the holo screen. His entire right arm was a red sleeve of blood. “Not going to die without a little . . . fun.”
The pneumatic tube to Felix’s left coughed hard, cracking one of the tubes. The tank rolled behind the fuel depot and came to a jerking halt.
“White one?” Mason asked.
“Yes. Yes!” Tessa shouted.
“If that other tank hits the fuel depot, we’re all going up in a big white flash of light,” Boyle said. “Do we have literally any other options for cover?”
“Felix, Shrike launch now now now,” Tessa commanded.
Felix wobbled from side to side, then collapsed back into Noah’s arms.
“He’s lost too much blood,” Noah said.
“Launch the Shrikes before the other Wolverine’s drones can get us!” Tessa shouted. “It’s the only way he can attack us without blowing the entire mesa to hell.”
Noah’s hand hesitated over the screen for a moment and then quickly snapped from side to side.
“Did you just fire everything?” Tessa asked.
“I have to stop the bleeding!” Noah pulled Felix from his seat and laid him out next to Tessa’s chamber.
“Time of flight for the exterminator is closing to zero. Gunner, ready on manual, the dazzler’s affecting them just as much as us,” she said.
“Set,” Corre said.
The tank reversed, exposing itself to the other Wolverine as the extermination shell opened high over the battlefield and spun rapidly. Tiny submunitions rained out, blanketing the opposite side of the void port with small explosive rounds that burst at head level among the insurgent infantry swarming up from the village.
The cluster munitions bounced off the other Wolverine’s hull and exploded inches off the armor, shattering sensor blisters and tearing away camera blocks.
“Fire. Fire!” Tessa shouted as the tank kept rolling backwards.
The turret rocked the tank from side to side as the sabot round crossed the battlefield . . . and went right over the other Wolverine.
The enemy tank’s turret turned to track them.
“Mason. Mason?” Corre slapped his thigh.
“Another white one.” Mason rammed the shell into the breech with one arm and fell to his knees, groaning in pain.
Corre watched as the other turret froze. Tessa reversed the gears on the treads and their tank spun in place. angling the right flank towards the enemy. She kicked the tank forward just as the other Wolverine fired.
Corre watched the blur scream towards him. The shell careened off the front hull and exploded in the jungle behind them.
“I am out of miracles. Kill it!” Tessa shouted.
Corre aimed center mass on the other Wolverine and pressed the triggers. The sabot round pierced the turret ring and tore into the open ammo rack. The Wolverine erupted into fire, killing more insurgents as its hull fragments became gruesome shrapnel all around it.
The turret flipped end over end in the air. The broken main gun plunged into the ground, propping up the rest of the smoking turret into a grisly battlefield totem.
“Target destroyed,” Tessa said. “Machine gunner, there are still crunchies out there.”
“Holy shit, we’re alive,” Boyle said.
“Machine gunner, why aren’t you killing them?” Tessa asked. A brief electric shock jolted Boyle back into action.
“I stopped the bleeding.” Noah held up a pair of red clamps. “He needs IVs and an actual medic.”
“Is there one aboard that ship?” Tessa asked.
“Ship?” Boyle looked up, his face full of pain but a glimmer of hope in his eyes.
The Izmir roared overhead.