Chapter 10
So it went. Pauly kept the unit patched into Earther comms so they knew every move on the ground. Kat and a small sentry cannon, one of 62’s specialists was able to get going, manned the door until it ran empty. And the rest worked whichever side the marines tried to move on.
It was exhausting. There wasn’t time to discuss tactics or orders, it was raw survival. The truest nature of what they were, soldiers, fell away at the top of Tower One. There, isolated, alone, and facing the onslaught of Earther forces, the NewTs became more than the sum of their training.
It seemed impossible. Everything they had learned, every exercise Anderson had drilled them through, every lesson they had learned in the cramped little rooms – now it was who they were.
Bri looked around. A thick haze of dirt and smoke hung over the huddled crowd. Everyone one looked like they had been painted with dust and blood. No one was untouched. She stared at the faces. She had never seen such stark, naked fear. Every face wore the same question: Is this where we die?
They moved like a machine. As soon as Pauly heard orders on the ground, the unit moved to defend. If the marines tried get an autocannon in range, Biloxi and Bri would shift to eliminate the weapon. If the marines tried to coordinate an attack on the tower, mobilizing a unit to rush the tower under cover fire, the NewTs would help Kat cover the stairway or lay down blanket fire from their perches around the room.
They littered the streets with crumpled marines.
An hour passed. Then two.
Biloxi wiped the back of his hand across his forehead. A long black streak of dirt and grim appeared over his eyes. “Another down,” he tossed a steaming energy cell into a pile and loaded a fresh one.
The team had stockpiled everything they had toward the front of the room. To the worried, huddled workers in the center of the room, it looked like they had enough to last forever, but the soldiers knew better. The pile was disappointing if not disheartening, cartridges, clips, and energy cells barely knee high. But it was all that stood between them and marines on the ground.
A drone popped into view, Bri pulled her pistol as her visor locked onto the spinning sensor array that was, undoubtedly counting them, their weapons, ammo, and how many had heartbeats. As soon as she swinger her arm around, the exo fine-tuned her aim, and the bot flew into a thousand individual pieces.
“Anything?” Bri looked over at Pauly.
“Nothing.” He shook his head.
It wasn’t good news. The pile of ammunition on the floor might hold out for a couple more hours, but once the Earthers started dropping artillery, it wouldn’t matter anyway. They might be able to take down a few, but not many and not for long.
There was a sharp cry that broke off suddenly when Hess was hit in the head with a Burster round. Her headless body leaned forward slowly before it tumbled and out the window with all of her weapons.
“I lost them, I lost the comms,” Pauly shouted, his voice almost hysterical. He looked around the room like a madman. You could see his brain was trying to work it out, understand what losing the comms meant, but instead of panic, he set to work. He picked up the receiver he had hacked and got to work.
Every eye moved from Pauly back to Bri.
“Hinks!” Bri pointed to the place Hess had fallen from. “Man that corner.”
Hinks jumped up from where he was tending to a woman who had to be eighty. He handed her the bloody cloth in his hand. “Try to keep pressure on it.” He looked at the man sitting beside his patient. “Help her if you can.”
Thunder rolled across the sky and everything shook. Bri closed her eyes. She remembered the gentle smile on her mother’s face when she said goodbye. It was like she had known that it was forever, that they would never see each other again.
The crate whistled through the sky before it slammed into the earth. It was bigger than the crates the marines used, more the size of a domicile, you could raise a small family in a crate the Earther tanks dropped in. She looked out over Kilter Field just as the dust plume was mushrooming at the top.
A frigate could carry a thousand if it could carry one.
Biloxi swung the railgun toward the tanks eventual approach; the drop had been well over five miles away.
“They’re under orders not to destroy the facility,” Bri said the words out loud.
“How do you know?” Kat didn’t turn from her weapon’s optics. She was a NewT version of an autocannon, her weapon ready to end any marine that tried.
“Because we’re still alive,” Pauly pulled his pistol and hit a drone no one else had noticed.
Dust from the first assault had thinned to thin fog, but the tank cut a new cloud along the horizon. Bri opened a menu set on her visor and adjusted her rifle’s energy coefficients. At max she could stop a tank if the shields were down, the Broadrail could too, but both weapons would start burning through energy cells much faster than they had been. Tanks shields were heavy.
Her visor zoomed in on the beast of metal that plowed across the dry lake bed. It was a smaller tank, heavy explosive projectile type, not one of the latest models they had learned about. But it was deadly, easily capable of tearing the top off of Tower One at range.
Biloxi opened up on it and cooked through one energy cell. Every hit splashed blue across the tanks energy shielding, softening it up.
The expired cell sizzled when Biloxi tossed it out the window and reloaded. “You want another one?” His big face was full of worry.
Bri dropped to her belly and steadied her rifle. To disable the tank she needed to sever it from its power source. Her visor highlighted the tanks weaknesses. She locked onto one and fired.
The gun jolted in her hands but she held tight and watched the shot splash against the tank’s shield, not blue but yellow. She locked back onto the same spot and fired again.
This time there was no splash of light. The tank shook for a moment and stopped.
They all watched in silence. Waiting. But that was it. There was no explosion, no smoke; no soldiers stumbled away from the machine on fire.
Biloxi smiled.
It took a few moments for news to reach the marines on the ground, but when it did, they fired up at Tower One. Everyone moved back into the room as rounds tore into the already mangled ceiling.
The sky thundered again and there were two impacts, close together and near the tank. The Earthers had no intention of giving up. But Bri and the rest didn’t care. They would hold out until they had nothing but rocks to throw.
“Their orders are to fire when in range.” Pauly had found a way back into the marine’s comms.
“Tell us something we don’t know,” Kat grinned madly.
Burster fire cut into the eastern wall like a noisy reminder that there were still a hundred marines on the ground ready to kill them.
“I wish I could get into the frigate,” Pauly muttered to himself.
Bri stared up at the sky. Night would be on them soon.
The Broadrail burned through another energy cell before Bri put two rounds through the first tank. It stopped and she moved to the second one, just in time to see the main gun fire.
A plume of orange and red fire exploded out of the barrel.
“Down!” Bri screamed and jumped at Biloxi, knocking him to the ground.
The projectile hit just above the windows on the western side. The air in the room was sucked out to feed the explosion. It felt like they were being shaken by the shoulders, whipped back and forth. Bri wondered if the tower would collapse. If this was their end.
Everyone civilian in the room had broken ear drums. The children were screaming. Smoke and dust filled the air. Bri glanced at her visor’s readout. Everyone was still alive. She got to one knee, aimed and emptied a cell into the tank’s shield.
It took a moment, but Biloxi shook off the pain and started with the Broadrail. They couldn’t take another hit. Bri clenched her jaw. She wanted them dead, every Earther, all of
them. She pulled the energy cell out of her exo and loaded it into her rifle.
She fired on the tank until it stopped moving.
Three more tanks fell. Bri looked at Biloxi who looked back at the last few energy cells. They had enough for two, maybe, but they couldn’t stop three. She looked back at the stairs. The Earthers wouldn’t destroy the entire tower. Maybe they could get downstairs, find another place to defend.
Biloxi sited the Broadrail and began to pepper the first the tank’s shield.
Thunder shook the planet and a blue explosion erased the evening sky. Every eye watched as debris burned through the atmosphere. A hundred bright streaks of burning, smoking wreckage.
No one fired a shot.
“Members of units 37 and 62, this is the ALC Surprise. Just wanted to let you know we’re on our way.”
Biloxi and Pauly both let out a cheer. Bri stared out over the lakebed. The tank was still approaching, but out of nowhere, two Daedric fighters appeared, and opened up on the beast with their pulse weapons. The tank disappeared in a cloud of fire and smoke.
The fighters then flew over Kilter Field, past Tower One. “Hang on kids,” an unknown voice chuckled over the comms, “we’re on our way.”
Bri looked around the room. They were alive and today that was all that mattered.
***
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