By the time they reached the outskirts of the spaceport, the mission timer was well into the amber. They’d had to deal with a much greater level of background LRIS saturation, given that they’d destroyed the Spider, but Akiya, the only member of the team who could speak some of the incredibly complex provari language, was confident Almeida was still alive.
The space port itself, designated sector epsilon, was crowded with enemies. The landing platforms and surrounding aprons, vast plains of concrete kilometres long and criss-crossed with bright markings, were chock full of Ascendancy landers, vehicles, and troops. Functional, prefabricated modules and command centres sat in clusters around the large terminal buildings and the bases of the orbital pylons and space elevators. Everywhere provari soldiers moved through pools of harsh blue light. Among them, universally reviled MOPs—Mobile Offensive Platforms, known as “dogs”—trotted faithfully like pets.
‘OCT is furious,’ Akiya said as they crawled into position in the storm drain of an empty spaceport hotel. ‘Since the Spider, Ascendancy positions have changed significantly. I think the NT5 was a key part of their strategy. Now it’s even more crowded with reds.’
Vasco shrugged. Holbourn was a senior officer, and it would not be appropriate for Vasco to bad-mouth him in front of the team—all of whom were enlisted. But he could always count on Kgosi.
‘Motherfucking Veigis bitch sitting twenty klicks behind the line getting blowjobs and coffee can go and fuck himself. They’ve got ten DSF-80s on the gun line, I’m sure they’ll live.’
Even Jarle, who was always quick to shut the corporal down, let him give voice to what they were all thinking.
‘All right,’ Vasco said, once his Mantix scanners had given him the all clear. The hatch to the underground access shaft that would take them to the south east terminal was on the other side of the road. A few hundred metres to the west, Connery Tower hab rose into the air. Vasco eyed it briefly. Burnett should have been in there, providing them with a running commentary on provari troop movements.
‘Shit,’ he muttered. The mission timer was ticking towards the red. In thirty minutes, 6th Battalion would be smashing through sector gamma in force, hunting down the shield generator. The moment Espa was unshielded, the spaceport would be a very bad place to be.
He highlighted the hatch on everyone’s HUD and placed a blue chevron marker over the top of it. ‘K, in you go,’ he said, and the corporal dutifully pressed himself out of the gutter and sprinted towards the hatch. He reached it in a few seconds, and used his Mantix electronic warfare suite to counter any security programs before yanking the metal grate free with his exo-powered gauntlets.
‘Clear,’ Kgosi hissed. Sev went next, ready with the magma pulse, followed by Jarle. Akiya covered Vasco with her assault plasma rifle as he made the run, praying, irrationally, that his refraction shielding and audio-dampers didn’t fail at that moment. The nearest provar forces were less than four hundred metres away.
He reached the hatch and dropped in. Ahead, a dark, unlit tunnel stretched for five hundred metres into the distance. It branched off at regular intervals, providing service access to the many dozens of landing platforms of Espa’s spaceport. The air throbbed with the sound of heavy machinery on emergency off-grid plasmastats.
Akiya dropped in behind him, rainwater cascading off her Mantix armour. Kgosi moved past her while Sev covered the tunnel, and he replaced the hatch.
‘Tracker?’ Vasco asked Kgosi.
‘Nothing yet,’ the corporal replied. Almeida had a subdermal emergency tracker, like everyone else in the UN service, but they were not impossible to overcome and it was likely the provar had neutralised it. As a result, they carried bio-scanners set to detect Almeida’s unique physiology, too.
‘All right, let’s—’
Vasco stopped. Something, a long, dull thump, shook the tunnel like a minor earthquake.
‘What was that?’ Kgosi asked.
They waited. There was another rumble, then another, followed by the telltale rattling of distant railguns.
‘Shit, they’re attacking,’ Sev said.
‘It’s too early!’ Kgosi snapped, looking at the ceiling.
Vasco checked the time. It was just under an hour before first light.
‘Goddamn it,’ he whispered to himself. ‘Akiya?’
They waited while she checked the UNAF frequencies. ‘Comms are locked up.’
‘They’ve gone dark?’ Jarle asked.
Akiya nodded. ‘They’re not jammed. The wideband is just silent.’
‘It’s comms discipline. They’ve moved in,’ Vasco sighed. ‘K, get moving, now!’
They covered the ground quickly and quietly—recklessly so, in Vasco’s opinion. It would have taken one refraction-shielded mine on a dumb pressure sensor to kill all of them. But they were out of time. The ground rumbled. Above, they could hear the sounds of vehicles grinding into action and the thumping of ALR-50 legs. The Ascendancy encampment was moving out to engage the UN forces moving into the city. In ten minutes’ time, VIPER would be directly beneath a hot warzone.
They reached the end of the tunnel and exited into a small, cube-shaped room filled with diagnostic consoles and a maze of cabling. To the right was a ladder, leading down to sublevel three. Vasco checked the orbital map to see that they had arrived at the very southern edge of the south-east terminal.
‘Let’s go, down to SL3,’ he said.
They climbed down, ending up in an identical room two levels further underground. By the time Vasco had joined the team and was pointing his railgun back up the ladder to cover Akiya’s descent, Kgosi had moved to the entrance and was scanning the other side using his weapon’s resonance mapper.
‘I’ve got cobs,’ he said quietly, gently pulling his gun away from the door. ‘Grunts. They’re not refrac’d. The DZ is surface only; I think we’re going to be able to see all of them from here on in.’
Vasco nodded. Deadzoning, especially over large areas, often only disrupted scanners at ground level and above. With a good ten or twenty metres of building and bedrock between them and the electronic warfare pods controlling the DZ, the provar in the sublevels were going to light up on their tactical overlays like naval-grade halogens.
‘How many?’ Vasco asked.
‘Two.’ Kgosi transmitted him the mapper’s findings. On Vasco’s HUD, the wall in front of him melted away until the twenty metres of sublevel in front of him was reduced to faint, skeletal components. Bright red wireframes of provar with ENEMY written above them appeared in the next room, one slouched by the door, the other sitting on a crate against the far wall. They were talking quietly to one another.
Vasco raised his railgun. The sensor cluster just behind the fore ironsight told him that if he fired now, the tungsten slug would penetrate the wall and the nearest provar’s helmet and skull comfortably. The gun was less confident about being able to penetrate the helmet of the provar further away. To guarantee that, they would need Akiya’s APR—but that would slice through the far wall of the next room as well before the plasma bolt fizzled to a stop.
‘We’re going to have to get that door open before we drop them,’ he said. Murmurs of asset. Kgosi positioned himself to kick the door open; Jarle and Vasco moved round to find the right angle, then lined up their railguns.
‘OK, do it,’ Vasco said.
Kgosi kicked and moved. Both provar turned. Vasco and Jarle fired one shot each. The nearest provar’s head exploded like a ripe watermelon. Jarle’s round passed straight through it, and, thanks to the angle he’d adopted, struck the far provar’s armour and crumpled instead of hammering against the far wall and alerting everyone on the sublevel to their presence. Vasco’s round hit the far provar square between the eyes, ricocheted off the inside back of its helmet, travelled down the alien’s spine and lodged somewhere in its left foot. Of the entire transaction, the only sound was that of the two bodies slumping to the floor.
‘Textbook,’ Vasco gru
nted, signalling for Kgosi to move into the next room, ‘but too goddamn long.’
They pushed through into the next room, another grilled tangle of crates, consoles and cabling, and then the next, and the next. Most of the rooms were empty; others were guarded desultorily, as if the provar had identified the maintenance sublevels as a weakness but they couldn’t be bothered to do much about it. Either that or they had sensed the impending UNAF assault and had pulled every available cob to the front line. By the time VIPER had cleared five hundred metres underground, they had only had to kill six of the aliens. Vasco wasn’t about to call in a mission success, however; every provar they killed was another dead comlink for their colleagues to discover.
‘Wait!’ Kgosi hissed across the wideband. They pulled up short ahead of a wide access corridor, an arterial route that led directly north west to the central terminal. Unlike the ancillary terminals, the hub was a hive of provar activity, one that was likely to be well-guarded and booby-trapped. It would also be pounded to dust by the UN DSF-80s within the next twenty minutes.
‘What?’ Vasco asked.
‘Getting a reading,’ Kgosi said.
A particularly violent thud rumbled through the floor high above, sending streamers of ancient dust cascading down from the ceiling. To the team’s credit, they ignored it.
‘Where?’ Vasco asked. Their briefing had put Almeida somewhere in these sublevels, but now they were entirely reliant on the biometric scanner. As a piece of equipment it was about as useful as a Ouija board.
‘Two hundred metres, east… if it’s not him it’s his fucking twin.’
‘Two hundred metres,’ Jarle murmured. ‘The range on that piece of shit is supposed to be half a klick.’
Vasco nodded. ‘All right,’ he said. He tuned in to Kgosi’s helmet optics via direct laser link and watched through the corporal’s eyes as the man peered round the corner. Despite the Granite suffusing his bloodstream, his heart sank at the sight of a pair of well-armed and armoured provar and an MOP loitering down the accessway. Another fifty metres beyond them, in a room on the north side of the arterial, a blue indicator pulsed slowly with TARGET written above it.
Vasco’s ears suddenly filled with a warbling noise, as if a cat were wailing in binary. Judging by the way the team bristled, everyone was getting it. Such signals interference indicated only one thing.
‘LRIS,’ Akiya said quietly.
Vasco watched via Kgosi’s optics again as the man performed a low-key counterscan of the area. Sure enough, a fat electronic warfare pod the size of a briefcase lit up on the tac-screen. It would probably take it a few minutes to break through their refraction shielding.
‘What do you want to do, Chief?’ Kgosi asked quietly, pulling back against the wall.
Vasco thought for a moment. The easiest thing to do would be to simply get Akiya to waste both the provar and the MOP with her assault plasma rifle, but he was again concerned that the plasma fire would cut through the surrounding walls and give them away—or worse, accidentally hit Almeida.
The mission timer clicked toward the red.
‘Akiya, could you get all three?’ he asked hurriedly.
‘I could definitely get two,’ she replied quickly, having evidently been considering it herself. ‘I’d hit the MOP first, and the cobs second. Depends on their reflexes. At this range I’m gonna put a few through the walls, though.’
‘I know. We’re out of time. Just don’t hit the target. Take the dog and the cob on the right. Jarle, K, we’ll take the cob on the left. Sev, keep that pulser stowed for now. Everyone get ready to move fast.’
‘Sir.’
They moved quickly and silently into the accessway, though not so quickly that the just-perceptible shimmer of their refraction shields gave them away. Vasco trained his railgun on the leftmost provar, his targetfinder, enhanced optics, and exoskeletal auto-compensation all working in concert to make him an infallible marksman.
‘On your mark, Akiya.’
‘Three, two, one, mark,’ she replied.
The MOP lurched to the side and exploded as a trill of plasma bolts drilled through its armoured chassis and annihilated it before its twin-linked quad-powered lasers could be brought to bear. Akiya was already gunning down the first provar when Vasco’s finger clamped down on the trigger and his railgun bucked and kicked as it discharged fifteen hollowpoint tungsten slugs in two seconds. Along with those from Jarle and Kgosi’s railguns, it was enough to overwhelm the second provar’s armour and nanogel shock dissipater layer, crack through its ballistic mask like an armoured egg, and blast its head to oblivion.
‘Target down,’ Jarle, Akiya, Kgosi and Vasco all said in unison. Kgosi was already moving forward down the arterial.
‘How long until that EWP fucks us?’ Vasco shouted, hot on the corporal’s heels. He reached the door just as Kgosi was resonance mapping the other side. They avoided the pool of blood; a trail of crimson footprints through the sublevels would utterly negate their refraction shielding.
‘Less than one minute, we need to destroy it or get out of range,’ Akiya replied.
‘He’s in there alone!’ Kgosi shouted.
‘Get it open!’ Vasco replied through gritted teeth.
Kgosi took a step back and exo-kicked the door open so hard it nearly came off its hinges. Ahead, tied against the far wall, was Vaughn Almeida, still in his Exigency Corps uniform. The man looked both terrified and utterly baffled.
‘I’ve got eyes on the target,’ Kgosi said, slotting his railgun into his exoskeleton rack and running for Almeida.
‘Jarle, watch the door!’ Vasco snapped, and activated his Mantix helmet speaker and cancelled the audio damper field. ‘Vaughn Almeida, I am Captain Adrian Vasco of the UN’s Very Important Person Recovery unit,’ he said as Kgosi reached him and cut his bonds with his combat knife. ‘You can’t see me because I’m refraction shielded. We’re here to get you out of here. I need you to put this on’—Kgosi slipped a tag reader over Almeida’s eyes, a pair of glasses that would reveal green outlines of VIPER team—‘and come with me as quickly and quietly as you can. Do you understand?’
Almeida looked around, terrified. ‘They injected me with something!’ he suddenly shouted. Immediately Kgosi clamped a hand over his mouth.
‘Quietly!’ Vasco hissed.
‘Chief, we need to bug out fast, that EWP is going to start singing in seconds,’ Akiya said.
‘They injected me with something,’ Almeida babbled, grabbing hold of invisible Kgosi. ‘The provar, they injected me with something, I don’t know what it was but they came in here this morning and injected it into my arm!’
‘Chief, we need to leave!’
‘Damn it—let’s go! Sev take point, back the way we came, read marker! K, find out what he’s talking about. Run a bioscan.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Kgosi replied.
‘Let’s move VIPER!’
They ran. The mission timer, a set of digital numerals ticking in the top right corner of Vasco’s HUD, turned red.
‘I can’t get anything on him,’ Kgosi said. ‘There’s nothing. He’s fine, just some superficial wounds.’
‘What’s going on?’ Almeida asked breathlessly.
‘We’ll explain everything in a little while,’ Vasco said briefly over his helmet speakers. ‘We’re here to take you somewhere safe.’
‘Shit, they’ve got us,’ Akiya said. Somewhere in the complex, an alarm began to drone.
‘Pick up the pace! Come on!’ Vasco shouted. Any minute now the 200mm rail cannons of the 1160th UN Artillery Regiment would begin flattening the entire space port. The second that shield went down, they needed to be a long, long way away.
‘Sev, the second we make ground level you call in our evac, understood?’
‘You got it, Chief,’ Sev replied.
They ran as fast as the twisting, winding subterranean corridors would allow. As well as the sounds of chaos above as UN and Ascendanc
y forces clashed in a crucible of high-tech, high-energy death, there were the far more disconcerting sounds of footsteps pounding on floor grilling and shouts in provari much closer to home. There was no avoiding it; they were being pursued.
‘They’re tracking us,’ Akiya said. ‘They can see Almeida on just about every scanning frequency going.’
Vasco cursed, but made a note; on future missions—if there were future missions—they would bring a spare set of refraction-capable Mantix. There was simply no use in them all being invisible to the electromagnetic spectrum when Almeida would be bleeding body heat and motion signals all over the place.
He reached into his webbing and pulled out a handful of peppercorn-sized mines, and dropped them on a patch of floor that wasn’t grilled. He also snapped a microclaymore from his belt and used its adhesive strip to jam it against a door frame. Behind him, Akiya covered the rear with her APR.
‘Two minutes and we’re out of here,’ Sev said. They were back in the low access shaft, the one that led directly to the hatch at street level. Behind them, an explosion tore through the corridor as one of the pursuing provar stepped on the antipersonnel mines and lost both legs.
‘That should slow them down a bit,’ Vasco said, a grin of savage triumph splitting his mouth.
‘Nope!’ Akiya shouted. Suddenly the tunnel was filled with stroboscopic blue light as she opened up with the plasma rifle. Vasco swore and turned, bringing his railgun up in one smooth movement.
‘Get Almeida out of here, now!’ he yelled, as armoured provar appeared a few hundred metres down the accessway. He clamped his finger down on the trigger and fired off a long burst, peppering the doorway and shredding its metal and carbon composite frame to pieces. Akiya pelted past him for another twenty metres, then turned and took a knee.
‘Covering!’ she shouted, opening up again with the plasma rifle. This time Vasco launched to his feet and sprinted another hundred metres, watching the barrel of Akiya’s APR begin to glow through the refraction shielding.
‘Covering!’ he shouted, once again firing with his railgun. He emptied one magazine and slapped another one in, and opened up again.
‘Chief, Almeida’s up top! The way is clear!’ Sev shouted.
‘Cover us! Get some mortars down range!’ Vasco shouted.
‘Firing now, get ready to move!’
Railgun slugs rattled off the ground and walls as Vasco and Akiya turned and ran for the ladder that would take them up to street level. Sev was hanging through the aperture, two micromortars in his hands. He fired them both, and suddenly the accessway was filled with skull-rattling explosions and a fireball approaching them with the speed of an Aldarian hypertrain. Vasco dived for the ladder as EXTERNAL CONDITIONS HOSTILE burst across his HUD in bright crimson letters and his Mantix suit was engulfed in boiling flames. Then he was being pulled up by Sev, out into the cold dawn light, his armour hissing and smoking in the rain like a freshly-forged sword.
He wanted to lie on the cold concrete, to collapse and rest and take stock, but there was no time. He reached back down the shaft and dragged Akiya up with Sev, while Kgosi unstrapped a handful of grenades the size of breathmints and tossed them down the shaft after them. A ripple of concussive blasts tore through the accessway, and a few seconds later the road was collapsing, trapping any pursing provar beneath tonnes of concrete.
‘Suck on that you fucking cob assholes!’
‘So much for stealth,’ Sev muttered.
Vasco followed him to the nearest alleyway and dived into cover. Almeida was standing there, already soaked from the monsoonal rain but too wired on adrenaline to shiver. To the north, Ascendancy tanks and troops were flocking south, and the sounds of gunfire and explosions tore through the air as the battle began to heat up. There was so much electronic warfare saturation that almost all of the scanning frequencies were jammed up.
‘Our ride is inbound on a blueline but it’s getting too hot. If he comes any further north than gamma sector he’s going to get caulked by drones,’ Sev said. ‘We’re gonna have to hoof it.’
‘What’s happening?’ Almeida asked, looking frantically around. Vasco realised then that Almeida couldn’t hear anything they were saying; to him it was as though the five of them had just stopped for no reason and were standing there in silence.
Vasco once again activated his speaker. ‘We were sent by EFFECT to recover you as a high-value target,’ he explained with a patience that only Granite could give him. ‘We’re going to get you out of here asap; just waiting on our ride.’
‘They injected me with something,’ Almeida said again, reaching out to clasp Sev with white, bony fingers.
But Vasco wasn’t paying attention. His HUD was lighting up with warnings. Overhead, a kilometre above, an Ascendancy rapid-intervention drone was heading straight for them.
‘Shit, get into cover!’ he shouted, opening up with his railgun. Kgosi was already smashing the thick, heat-treated glass of the ground floor next to them when the drone opened up with its own twin-linked rotary railguns, sending a galaxy of flak at them and shredding the asphalt for a dozen metres in every direction. Vasco took one round squarely in the chest and was punched to the ground; then the drone was screaming past, Kgosi was dragging him inside by his exoskeleton, and the comlink was full of the team asking him if he was all right.
‘I’m fine,’ he wheezed, probing the impact with gloved fingers. His armour, interlocking plates of diamond filament and nanofibre weave sandwiching a nanogel shock dissipater layer, had robbed the round of its force, and the only evidence of the hit was a silvery scar a few millimetres deep. He was lucky: the round had hit him in the strongest part of his armour.
‘It’s coming back,’ Akiya said, opening up with her APR. Thousands of blue pulses ripped through the air, hissing in the rain. A pair of quad-powered laser beams scythed back in response, forcing them all into cover as they gouged big, molten trenches into the façade.
‘Fucker,’ Sev snapped as one of the beams came within a few centimetres of him, leaving a glowing rut in the concrete next to his leg. He held the magma pulser over his shoulder, his body pressed into the wall, and using the targetfinder unleashed two, three shots into the rainy air. One of the molten globules connected with the boxy chassis of the drone, sending it careening off course.
Vasco pushed himself up, catching his breath. They had broken into the foyer of a residential hab and were using a low concrete wall as cover. Almeida was lying in an untidy pile beneath Kgosi, who had his railgun pointed at a forty-five degree angle back into the street.
‘Where are you?’ Jarle murmured over the comlink. He was pressed up against the wall to Vasco’s left, using his railgun camera feed to try and spot the drone. Vasco just hoped it wasn’t broadcasting their location to nearby Ascendancy forces. They would need to move very soon.
‘They injected me with something,’ Almeida wailed. ‘Why won’t you people listen to me?’
Vasco gritted his teeth. ‘K, check him again,’ he said.
‘I’m telling you Chief, there’s nothing wrong with him!’
‘What did they inject you with?’ Vasco asked.
‘I haven’t got a fucking clue, have I?’ Almeida snapped. The veins on his neck were bulging like tree roots, and perspiration ran in rivulets down his forehead. He looked sickly pale.
‘Well, was it a fluid, or a mite, or a nanobot?’ Vasco asked patiently. The Ascendancy drone was coming around for another pass.
‘Got him, three o’clock high, on the redline, read marker!’ Jarle shouted.
‘Akiya, get him!’ Sev shouted.
The APR pulsed again, filling the space with stroboscopic flashes of blue light.
‘Come on,’ Sev murmured. Vasco watched on Akiya’s helmet cam feed as her targetfinder and enhanced optics tried to line up a killing shot as the drone jinked left and right with its powerful attitudinal thrusters and battered her targeting software with electronic wa
rfare pulses.
‘I can’t get a line on it!’ she shouted in frustration as another twin blast of laser fire cut through the air and liquidated the entire glass façade of the building, creating a glowing pool of molten window three metres across. It spattered Jarle, Akiya and Sev, harmlessly sliding off their Mantix as they dived for cover.
‘Shit, Chief, we need to get out of here,’ Kgosi said, dragging Almeida even further back into the building to avoid him being scalded.
Vasco was about to respond when something happened. There was a subtle change in the air, a difference in the clarity of comms, a new sharpness to their scanners. Even the air tasted subtly different, wetter and clearer. A faint whine that had been playing over the comlink suddenly cut out.
The shield dome was down. The marines had destroyed the generator.
‘Shit!’ was all he managed to say, before the world was engulfed in thunder. The UN’s big DSF-80s immediately saturated the spaceport with high-explosive yields, flattening the Ascendancy positions there along with tens of kilometres of infrastructure. The ground shook like gigantic timpani drums and the team’s HUDs filled with all manner of blaring alarms and external conditions warnings.
‘Incoming!’ Jarle shouted, correctly and pointlessly, before being lifted off his feet as the hab next to them was blasted to rubble by a barely sub-nuclear charge. Fire raced through the streets, smashing glass and shattering walls. Concussive blasts halted the rain for seconds at a time as shockwaves cleared the streets of air. Almeida screamed as his lungs were dragged to the top of his chest from the overpressure, and blood speckled the concrete next to his mouth where his alveoli were turned to red slush.
‘Run! Run!’ was all Vasco could—needed to—say. Kgosi hauled Almeida off the floor by the scuff of his neck. Jarle shoved Sev and Akiya out into the street, then grabbed Vasco by the lip of his gorget and pulled him out. In seconds the whole team was running madly through the street, thrashing down roads and accessways, while hot, fast winds drove the rain into them and the bombardment threatened to tear apart the air itself. The floor rumbled as if in the throes of a world-ending earthquake, and without their audiodampers Vasco was sure the entire team would have been deafened by the god-percussion of the artillery bombardment. He could only imagine what Almeida was going through, being scorched by the boiling air, blinded by the searing flashes, and deafened by the concussive blasts.
‘There!’ Jarle shouted from the head of the team, sending a HUD marker to the team. They had reached the beginning of Espa’s industrial zone, dozens of kilometres of robotic manufacturing and waste-management plants which kept the city fed, watered and clothed, and large carbon-walled warehouses loomed in the gathering dawn, slashed with gaudy corporate and UN logos. The space above the accessways here was so thick with cable-choked I-bars that they were almost tunnels, dripping with rainwater mixed with effluvia.
They fell into a ragged column and carried on, falling into step parallel to a wide, concrete chemical outflow channel of iridescent water that ran for a few klicks due south. The sounds of warfare echoed through the city to the west, rattling gunfire, the crump of explosions and the buzzing of lasers and phase cannons; but the intervening warehouses and buildings robbed the noise of its violent clarity, and for the first time Vasco was beginning to feel confident that they would get Almeida out.
Then something cracked off the concrete in front of him, spraying him with chips of stone, and he span round to catch the briefest glimpse of a provar soldier sprinting to cover.
‘Contact!’ he shouted, scanning his HUD for any sign of enemies. It remained defiantly clear of any readings, and it took a moment of running diagnostics and working through the various tactical overlays that he realised they had strayed into another deadzone. Not only that, but they’d been hit but LRIS. They were lighting up on enemy tac screens like emergency flares.
‘Get drones up! Full LRIS!’
He chucked his recon drone into the air once more, trying to use invasive scanning to penetrate the electronic fog confusing his Mantix sensors. The rest of the team’s drones soon joined it, connecting via the Hypervect defence grid to enhance their abilities. It still didn’t do anything to alleviate the stream of bullets showering the air around them like horizontal tungsten rain.
‘Get Almeida into cover!’ Vasco shouted, ducking behind a carbon-concrete wall. Akiya was already laying down a haze of covering plasma fire. When her APR chimed it was ready for another plasmastat cell, and she paused to reload, she took a round directly to the face.
‘Shit! Akiya’s down!’ Sev shouted over the wideband, dragging her behind the warehouse wall. Without her covering fire, suddenly the incoming increased fivefold, ripping the floor and walls around them to shreds. A light assault laser beam soon followed, a thread-thin beam of pink light scoring deep, lacerating trenches into the concrete.
‘Ah shit, we’re pinned,’ Kgosi snapped. He was lying on top of Almeida, his railgun aimed haphazardly round the corner, his exoskeleton and IHD acting in concert to correct his hastily-fired shots.
‘Talk to me Akiya,’ Vasco said. First Range, now Akiya; were both of these lives worth less than Almeida’s?
‘I’m…’ Akiya mumbled. She was on her back fifty metres away, with Sev straddling her chest.
‘Sarge!’ Sev shouted, hurling the APR through the air. Jarle caught it heavily, slammed the plasmastat cell home, and ducked out from cover to unleash another galaxy of plasma at their pursuers.
‘Greased the one with the laser,’ he snarled happily, the APR bucking hard into his armoured shoulder.
‘Could use a hand here!’ Sev snapped.
‘K, watch the sergeant. I’m coming, Sev,’ Vasco said, running over to where Akiya lay. Painkillers had already automatically suffused her bloodstream, making her woozy but conscious. Sev was carefully inspecting the damage to her visor.
‘Did it go through?’ Vasco asked, falling to a crouch next to them.
‘Yeah,’ Sev said, sucking his teeth as he probed the shards of Akiya’s visor. With the integrity of her Mantix breached, she had lost refraction shielding. Vasco could hear her breath rattling and gurgling through her ruined cheek.
‘How bad is it?’ Vasco asked, but he already knew. Physiological data from Akiya’s suit was uploading to his command software. The bullet had been robbed of most of its force by her visor, but it had still been travelling fast enough to make a mess of her left cheek, smash her teeth to pieces, and blind her in one eye. Sev slowly, carefully extracted a sliver of visor from her left cornea, and tossed it to one side. Bloody vitreous humour spilled free from the wound.
‘She’ll live, but she’s CI.’
CI. Combat Ineffective. Vasco’s heart sank. Even leaving aside the fact that Akiya was a member of VIPER for whom he had personal responsibility, it was one more non-com for an already stretched team.
‘K, where’s our evac? Get on the net!’ he shouted angrily over the comlink. The Granite in his bloodstream was struggling to suppress his temper.
‘Lidded another!’ Jarle sang gleefully. The barrel of the APR was glowing solidly now, exposing Jarle’s position despite his refraction shielding. The volume of accurate incoming rail fire was increasing markedly.
‘Our ride is still four klicks away, too many drones,’ Kgosi shouted.
Vasco gritted his teeth. They were running out of options. Four kilometres across open terrain with an unknown quantity of provar on the verge of pinning them down was impossible. ‘Get a line to OCT,’ he said. ‘See if he’ll help us.’
He waited while Jarle traded fire with the provar. Their own recon drones were just beginning to penetrate the deadzone. LRIS scans were bringing up at least ten Ascendancy troops, probably more, with man-portable assault ordnance.
‘How the fuck are these cobs still standing?’ Sev growled, finishing his rudimentary medical work on Akiya. ‘That arty saturation was enough to flay a rat five klicks away.’
<
br /> ‘They must have come from the south,’ Vasco murmured as Sev stood up and jogged over to the opening of the alleyway where Jarle was.
‘OCT says “fuck off”,’ Kgosi said bitterly. ‘Goddamn asshole.’
Vasco knew that that would be the answer even before they’d asked. Their attack on the Spider tank had thrown Holbourn’s entire plan of attack into disarray. The colonel was hardly about to grant them any favours now.
He looked back to the habs dominating the skyline, from where they had run, where the sounds of battle were the most intense. He knew then that they had only one option.
‘All right; we’re going to have to cut back west,’ he said.
‘Back into the city?’ Sev asked.
‘You heard the captain,’ Jarle snapped. ‘Stop wasting bandwidth.’
‘Back into the city,’ Vasco confirmed. ‘We’ll try and link up with 6 Battalion in gamma sector.’
The comlink fell silent for a second. Vasco looked at Almeida, who looked like he was having trouble breathing, and then Akiya, who was slumped against the south wall of the factory, blood dribbling out of her helmet.
‘Fuck it, I’d rather take these cobs in CQC,’ Kgosi muttered, letting off a long burst of railgun fire. ‘Back west is suicide, Chief.’
‘Unless you just got breveted to major, Kgosi, I suggest you do what the fuck you’re ordered to,’ Jarle said.
Vasco took in a deep breath and let it back out. He was used to dealing with dangerous, dynamic situations, but not against so many enemies. He knew that he didn’t want to cut back west; Kgosi was right, it would be suicidal. But what else could he really hope to achieve?
‘K, try and raise Captain Milovan on the net, would you?’ Vasco asked. ‘Sev, get Akiya inside one of these warehouses. Here: read marker.’ He sent Sev a HUD marker directing him to the first floor of one of the buildings to the south.
‘You’re not listening to that punk, are you Chief?’ Jarle sent via a private IHD broadcast.
‘Akiya is CI, Range is dead and Almeida is baggage,’ Vasco replied. ‘K is right; if we cut back west now, we’ll be chopped up. Best bet is to get Cap Milovan to try and pick us up.’
Jarle sneered, but he cancelled the link nonetheless.
He turned to see Akiya’s legs disappearing into the ground floor of the warehouse, into the darkness beyond.
‘K, get inside, I’ll cover the Sergeant,’ he said, running back to where Jarle was still hosing the Ascendancy position with plasma fire. For once the corporal did as he was told without question. Vasco ran to the edge of the northern wall, which now bore a number of holes and burns, and slapped Jarle on the shoulder.
‘Inside,’ he said over the comlink; trying to be heard over the screaming of the APR would have been impossible. ‘I’ll cover you.’
‘Bullshit, I’ll cover you,’ Jarle retorted. The barrel of the plasma rifle was incandescent now. He was either going to have to replace it with one of the spares on Akiya’s belt, or stick it in the outflow racing past to the east. Either way, it was—
THUNK. The APR seized up, overheated. The barrel began to melt. Vasco should have kept a closer eye on Jarle; the sergeant was not trained to use it.
‘Shit!’ Jarle shouted.
‘Get to cover!’ Vasco roared, yanking the sergeant backwards into the alley and propelling him toward the warehouse. Both Sev and Kgosi were on the first floor now; he could see the snouts of their weapons protruding from what must have been an elevated gantry.
They ran, both secreting handfuls of microgrenades in their wake. It was only a hundred metres to the warehouse entrance, but the provar moved quickly. With ten metres to go, the door ahead of them sprouted dozens of fresh railgun-slug holes, but the enemy fire died away quickly and satisfyingly when their microgrenades detonated, engulfing the pursuing provar in a rippling wash of flame.
They achieved the entrance to the warehouse just as the enemy rallied. Above them, Sev’s magma pulse barked a few times to put their heads down, but it was out of effective range. Globules of liquid metal splattered against the carbon concrete of the opposite warehouse wall like magma rain.
The inside of the warehouse was a cavernous, gloomy space filled with stacks of crates and loading machinery. Vasco’s HUD immediately transformed the darkness into an approximation of early twilight, and he turned left and followed the trail of hot footprints on his thermal scanner up the stairs and onto a suspended catwalk, Jarle hot on his heels.
‘Captain Milovan says they are sixteen hundred metres south west and mopping in our direction,’ Kgosi said as Vasco aimed his railgun out the first-floor windows. ‘But there’re cobs to our west holding out hard. They’re gonna hit them with the DSF-80s in the next couple of minutes.’
More artillery. Vasco looked at the images Milovan’s 2ic had sent Kgosi. Their spotter drones had marked out a large section of territory to their west for saturation. If Vasco had stuck to his original plan and taken them back into the city, they’d have been obliterated. As it was, they were going to miss it—but only by a few hundred metres.
‘Good work, K,’ he breathed, searching for enemies through the sheets of rain. Their own drones had finally fully penetrated the enemy deadzone, and flickers of Ascendancy troop readings began populating his HUD. There were fifteen of them, two squads, one at the eastern corner of the street by the chemical outflow, the other moving round to the south east of the warehouse itself.
‘Fuckers are tryin’ to flank us,’ Jarle said, looking at the same images from the Hypervect defence grid.
‘Shit,’ Vasco muttered. He cursed himself. They should have kept moving, powered through the buildings. Now they were trapped.
Railgun slugs were hammering the walls around them now and putting small, neat holes in the window. The air filled with the sound of vaporised concrete and the tinkling of shattered glass. Over to his left, Akiya was lying on the floor next to Almeida. Almeida clutched a rail pistol in one hand and Akiya’s gauntlet in the other. His skin was crimson from artillery flash burns and his eyes were wide with terror.
‘That’s right motherfucker, come here,’ Sev was muttering over the wideband. A second later the magma pulse roared, and Vasco saw—via Sev’s HUD feed—an Ascendancy trooper take a full blast from twenty metres and disintegrate into a pile of smoking ash. ‘Won’t by trying a frontal any time soon!’ he shouted victoriously, before another assault laser beam scoured the ceiling above them and sent a glowing, bisected structural beam thumping into the machines below.
‘Keep your head down!’ Vasco shouted. He was already on his knees, keeping as much of his body behind cover as possible. He perched his railgun on the lip of the window and used its optical feed to pick out targets. His exoskeleton could easily compensate for his lousy angle and control, and soon another provar was lying on the floor, its neck smoking where one of Vasco’s rounds had sliced through the seal.
‘They’re gonna come through the back any minute now,’ Jarle said over the wideband. ‘They won’t hang around forever.’
‘I know,’ Vasco muttered irritably. He made a note to bring heavier weaponry on their next mission. If they had another mission. A nice heavy-assault laser would put paid to any enfilading manoeuvres.
‘Put some micromortars down range,’ he said, laying down another lengthy burst of covering fire from his railgun. He hit nothing, but it was making the provar opposite think twice about coming at them. That and the black, liquidated corpse left steaming in the rain from Sev’s magma pulse.
‘I don’t feel good… I told you they injected me with something! I don’t feel good!’ Almedia was suddenly shouting again. The man was verging on insensible. Vasco looked over grimly, flinching slightly as another shower of shattered glass coated his armour. The man looked like he was about twenty seconds from going completely insane.
‘K, you definitely checked him, right?’ he asked over a private channel to Kgosi.
‘I
told you Chief there’s nothing fucking wrong with him,’ Kgosi snapped in a way which, in other, less stressful circumstances, would have seen him reprimanded.
Vasco grimaced. ‘Where did he get a piece from?’
‘Akiya gave it to him,’ Kgosi said disinterestedly. Sev’s magma pulse hammered again, and another provar violently expired.
‘Scratch another one!’ he whooped, and again the assault laser carved into the walls in response, leaving glowing, smoking lines wherever it touched. Molten concrete and metal cascaded down into the main warehouse space, and flames licked the damp air. It wasn’t going to take long for the provar to the north to break cover and rush them; Sev could probably take out two or three, but with the pulser’s cool-down rate, that would be it. Against numerous mobile enemies, their railguns would probably only add another two to that tally. Then they’d be overwhelmed.
Vasco looked at the mission timer ticking away in the top corner of his vision. ‘K, where is that arty goddamn it, I’m not hearing anything heavy.’
Kgosi’s railgun clattered for a solid ten seconds before the man deigned to respond. ‘I’ve got requests for aid on a loop, Chief; they’ve got their priorities and we ain’t one of them.’
A triple explosion a hundred metres away at the end of the warehouse drew his attention. Jarle was now letting off his remaining micromortar ordnance at the back entrance. He was using high-ex, that much was obvious; entire pallets of goods were detonating in greasy orange/black fireballs, sending waves of shrapnel scything through the warehouse. Vasco checked their recon drone feeds to see that there were six provar trying to move up on them where Jarle was firing. At least one of them disappeared from the warm-body scanner.
‘We’ve got company round back!’ Jarle snapped, bringing his railgun up.
‘We’ve got company everywhere,’ Kgosi fired back. ‘Chief: Milovan’s 2ic says arty in ten seconds, then they’re gonna punch east with 6 Battalion and clear out to the edge of the sector. Ten minutes and we’re hot to trot.’
Vasco grimaced. Ten minutes and they’d be a collection of ugly corpses. ‘Keep up the pressure K.’
‘Aye aye,’ he replied sarcastically, but Vasco could barely hear it over the banging of his railgun slugs breaking the sound barrier ten times a second.
‘To the south, Captain, we’ve got to watch the rear or they’re gonna fuck us good,’ Jarle said.
‘Yeah,’ Vasco replied, his voice terse and strained from the Granite. He brought his railgun back round to bear on the rear entrance just as the sergeant suddenly screamed, ‘INCOMING!’ before there was a shattering blast that seemed to throw all his organs to his feet and a vast tongue of flame that briefly engulfed his entire suit. Then there was a groaning, tearing sound, and a giant’s fistful of roof pulled free of the I-beams above and crashed down below, allowing torrential rain to cascade through the new hole in the ceiling and set their armour to steaming.
Thanks to the cocktail of natural adrenaline and unnatural combat stimulants suffusing his bloodstream, it didn’t take Vasco long to process what had happened. The Ascendancy squad to the south had responded with their own ordnance, probably aiming for Jarle, and had hit the ceiling with high-ex. Vasco could see dark sky through the whole, occasionally punctuated with a flash from a recon drone.
‘Motherfucker,’ Jarle mumbled. He was alive, and his physiological indicators were amber at worst. Like Vasco’s, the sergeant’s Mantix nanogel shockwave dissipater had once again done its job.
‘Talk to me VIPER,’ Vasco shouted, recovering his wits enough to start laying down some fire on their flank. Railgun slugs zipped through the air like gold tracers and smashed into the far end of the warehouse, perforating the walls and pallets of goods and scarring the concrete on the floor. Jarle followed suit, but despite their hasty efforts the provar were in; Vasco could see them on his HUD, unwelcome markers on a half-dozen different scanner feeds, clustering into cover not a hundred metres away.
‘I’m out of mortars,’ the sergeant breathed. Vasco looked across the gangway to see Jarle propped up against a stack of pallets that lay against the back of the gantry rail. His physiological indicators were staying amber.
‘You okay, Jarle?’ Vasco asked, ordering their drones to stay close in case the provar tried to put up another deadzone.
‘I’m fine,’ Jarle replied, though his breath was laboured. The blast pressure had probably wrecked his lungs. Nothing that couldn’t be fixed in this day and age, but a severe pain in the ass. He wasn’t CI, but he wasn’t far off it either.
‘How’s Akiya?’ Vasco asked, turning to his left. She held up a shaky thumb. Almeida had given up trying to do anything and was curled up into a foetal ball. Another hit like that and he was in danger of being cooked to the bone.
‘Hang tight, VIPER. We’re nearly out of here,’ he soothed.
‘Incoming,’ Kgosi said distractedly. To the west the air split with a series of banshee shrieks as once again the big UN guns opened up from twenty kilometres away and saturated Espa with explosions. They were close enough to feel it, like a violent earthquake, but far enough—this time—to be spared the worst of its effects.
Once the rumbling had stopped, Vasco crawled forwards to the front of the warehouse and surveyed the scene. Sev and Kgosi had killed four of the provar, from the warm body scans, but of the two that remained, one had the assault laser. As long as that provar remained, then they were effectively trapped. The assault laser was a line-of-sight weapon, too specific to do any kind of area damage; but against Mantix-armoured troops running through open ground, it would carve them to mincemeat.
‘Jarle, watch our rear,’ he said, needlessly.
‘If any of these cob fuckers tries anything, they’re going to be in a world of pain,’ Jarle replied. Combat stimulants were making his voice clearer, but there was an undercurrent of pain there. They needed to conclude this mission fast.
He moved up to Sev. Rainwater cascaded off both of them. ‘We need to hit that laser if we want to get out of here in one piece,’ he said over a private channel.
The big man nodded. ‘You’re telling me,’ he replied, and indicated the magma pulser. ‘Trouble is, unless he’s dumb enough to run at me like the last four, then we’re shit out of luck. And K’s railgun may as well be a peashooter with all the cover they’ve got.’
Vasco tapped into the drone feeds and was afforded a bird’s eye view of the surrounding area. Big deadzones still hung like an electronic fog over much of the battlefield, but he could see 6th Battalion moving west now. They would arrive in the industrial sector inside of five minutes.
‘Shit,’ he muttered. ‘Shit!’ He thumped the gantry next to him. They were stuck. If the provar to the south made any kind of concerted effort, they would be overrun; but they couldn’t bug out with the assault laser to the north.
‘K, we might need to sweet talk OCT into giving us some guns. One hit, close-yield,’ he said eventually.
‘You want to hit the end of the warehouse? Smoke the cob squad where they stand?’ Kgosi replied.
Vasco worked it out in his head. ‘Those pallets would take enough of the overpressure before it reached us. Almeida might be a casevac, but we can stitch him up later. As long as his brain stem is running, he’s a win, as far as I’m concerned. They can vat-grow him a new body back at Xeno Division.’
‘You don’t want to wait for the 6th?’
‘I think we’re out of time,’ Vasco replied. He looked at his HUD again. The provar squad hadn’t moved from the south end of the warehouse.
‘Something doesn’t feel right,’ Jarle said, as if reading his mind. Vasco looked back over to see the sergeant scoping the access channels through the stacks of machinery and crates. ‘They know we’re short-staffed, and they’ve got that laser lighting us up from the north. Assuming they’re on comms… doesn’t make sense.’
Vasco had a sinking feeling in his guts. He tasked the recon drones to saturate th
e provar squad with LRIS, but the sudden explosion of incoming fire confirmed his worst fears. The provar had duped their drones. Electronic warfare. They’d been co-opted, and told to spit out a reading telling VIPER that the Ascendancy troops were staying put. Then they’d been free to move up close, until they were barely fifteen metres away, with good sight lines and good cover.
‘Cover Almeida!’ Vasco screamed as the air was ripped apart by a swarm of railgun fire. Kgosi immediately leapt over to where Almeida cowered and sandwiched the perennially unfortunate man between himself and Akiya. Vasco watched as the corporal took one, two, three hits in the torso, and the man’s physiology alarms lit up on his HUD command suite.
What happened next was a blur. The gantry began to sag as structural beams were severed. The laser to the north began to hit the wall beneath the window so hard that the concrete began to glow and melt. Jarle took at least five railgun hits, including one to his weapon, and the backup magazine of chemprop rounds exploded in his hands. Sev pumped so much magma pulse at the aliens that the thing’s barrel began to overheat. Vasco emptied three magazines of slugs, over a thousand caseless railgun rounds, on automatic. And all the while, Kgosi was yelling the same thing over and over again, two meaningless words that slowly became clearer and clearer until Vasco got it:
‘DANGER CLOSE!’
He pressed himself out of cover and ran. The laser redirected and hit him square in the right shoulder pad, melting everything it met until it hit the meat of his shoulder. Railgun rounds hit him from the right, a hail of them, too many to count, so many in fact that his nanofibre weave locked up to try and dissipate the kinetic energy. But the momentum was there. He toppled forward and landed on Almeida, directly on top of him. He felt bones crunch, but it didn’t matter. Now, he, Kgosi and Akiya completely covered their target’s body, in time for—
In time for the world to end. Kgosi had called in the strike, but seventy metres closer than Vasco had called it. Twenty kilometres away, the VI of a big DSF-80 aligned the directed charge fragmentation shell and fired so that the thing hit the warehouse at an almost vertical trajectory. It penetrated the roof as if it were tinfoil and airburst a metre above the provar, and liquidated them with a sleet of carbon travelling so fast the air ionised and exploded. Coupled with the overpressure from the arrival of the round itself, Vasco once more felt his organs scream and the air rupture his lungs, and all four of them were lifted off the ground and hurled against the north wall of the warehouse like roofs in a hurricane.
Vasco’s IHD, concerned for his continued existence and trying to battle a hundred different injuries, knocked him into a coma.