Books One to Three Omnibus (Armada Wars) Page 24

  The lander was tipped to one side, and he almost had to climb to reach the rear hatch. Others were breaking free of the foam and trying to retrieve equipment or help their squad mates, and he was forced to navigate around them. A simple jostle could have easily sent someone tumbling across the uneven surface, doubtless taking others down along the way.

  The inner hatch hissed open when he slapped the release, the outer hatch was already open. He plucked a re-breather from the bulkhead and pressed it over his mouth and nose.

  Outside was a gale, loud and angry. Standing amidst the raging wind was a lone figure, just at the limit of visibility.

  “Oh for fuck’s sake,” Throam said.

  He ducked back inside the rear compartment and closed the inner hatch.

  “Volkas,” he shouted. “Where is Lieutenant Volkas?”

  “Over here,” came the reply. Volkas waved to him from across the compartment.

  “Get your men combat-ready, Lieutenant. We’ll be moving out as soon as we are able. We can’t stay here.”

  “You’re not in charge of this unit, Counterpart.”

  “Yeah, we don’t have time for that crap. You: Lieutenant. Me: Captain. Either do as I say, or stay here and get killed.”

  “I’d prefer to not get killed.” The voice sounded like Daxon.

  “Of course you would,” Throam muttered. He pulled on his outer armour. It was remarkably difficult with the deck tipped to one side, and with hardened foam and moving bodies all around him. He felt as though it was taking forever to get kitted up.

  Thankfully Volkas seemed to have taken the hint, and he was giving his men utterly redundant commands, instructing them to perform tasks they had already carried out without needing to be told. Whatever he thought of Throam, and whether he intended to follow the order or not, right now he was doing what Throam needed him to do. That was enough.

  Finally Throam was done, and he shoved his helmet down over his head. As usual, he wished he had made the effort to clean it out properly the last time he had worn it: the sponge lining stank of musty old sweat.

  “Hey buddy,” he said. He rapped the private next to him with the back of a gloved hand. “Check my seals?”

  “All looks good,” the soldier told him. “Helmet seal too.”

  “Appreciate it.” Throam grabbed his rifle from the magnetic rack.

  He dived back out through the rear hatch, and into the hurricane.

  • • •

  Caden came to with a start, and felt as though he had drifted off in the middle of a concert. All around him was noise and motion, but it was as if he had only just become aware of it, as if he had been somewhere else.

  “I said, are you okay?”

  He vaguely remembered hearing the question already. In fact, the insistent and slightly annoyed tone suggested it had been repeated more than once.

  He turned around to see Throam, fully kitted up and armed to the teeth, stomping towards confidently him over the uneven ground. Caden raised a hand, a half-hearted gesture that was just enough to signal that he heard, he understood, and he was indeed okay.

  “What are you doing out here?” Throam was asking.

  I wish I knew, he thought.

  You do know.

  A high-pitched whine descended into a bone-trembling rumble, and a Viskr shuttle soared overhead. It was on a gentle descent towards a building in the distance, a structure as ruined as the others but possibly massive enough to still contain intact levels.

  He pointed at the receding shuttle, and raised his eyebrows. “Go that way?”

  “We both know there isn’t any other plan, so yeah. Guess so.”

  Two more craft swept over the crash site; one another Viskr shuttle, the second a small Imperial lander. Both were headed in the same direction as the first, clearly with the same destination in mind.

  “Better get Eilentes,” said Caden. “She won’t want to miss this.”

  “Not now I’ve crashed the car, anyway.”

  Throam stepped aside and turned back towards the lander, and Caden saw Eilentes was now standing behind him. She carried her favourite rifle in her arms. Like their armour, the rifle’s long barrel and precision scope had skinprinted to replicate the charred surroundings.

  “Sorry about the shitty landing,” she said.

  “You did fine, under the circumstances.”

  Throam jerked his head towards the rear hatch. “We waiting for our MAGA brothers?”

  “Did they look ready?”

  “More or less.”

  “Then we might as well.”

  You would only fail without them.

  “Those guns that took us down,” Eilentes said to Caden. “We’ll need to disable them before anyone can lift off again.”

  “Any idea how to find the control centre?”

  “They looked like auto-turrets. They’ll be autonomous.”

  “So each one needs to be taken out individually?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Oh great. How many did you count?”

  “Difficult to spot them with the cloud cover, but judging by the area they were covering I’d say there are a dozen or so.”

  “Okay, well we have a dozen squads between the other landers.”

  “No, we don’t. We lost a lander on the way down: Third Platoon is gone.”

  They’d still be alive if you hadn’t brought them here.

  “Shit. Shit! Okay, Second and Fourth can handle the batteries between them. We’ll make a search for the dead when we’re done with Morlum.”

  The dead you made.

  “Captain Pinsetti was with Third Platoon.”

  Caden looked towards the voice and saw that Volkas had now also left their lander. The MAGA troops he commanded were beginning to disembark, filing out of the rear hatch. Some lifted crates and equipment between them.

  Caden turned to Throam. “You’re the same rank Pinsetti was. You outrank all the other officers who came down with us.”

  “You know damned well I’m not going to take command of them,” Throam said. “I need to be where you are.”

  “Just giving you the option,” Caden said. He turned back to Volkas. “Tell Second and Fourth to sort out between themselves who is going to take the lead. Their objective is to knock out the batteries so we can leave the surface again.”

  “And what about me?” Volkas asked.

  “We’re going over there.” He pointed to the building the enemy’s shuttles had headed for. “You and First Platoon are going to clear a path for us.”

  More lambs to your slaughter.

  • • •

  “We can’t take much more of this, Captain.” COMOP was shouting, struggling to reconcile the information his various holos flashed at him so desperately. “I’m getting failures across all systems.”

  “She’s becoming difficult to control,” Helm added. Her hands skipped from one panel to the next.

  Santani batted away the loose hair that had slipped across her face, and wiped soot from her mouth. It was getting difficult to breathe the air on the command deck now, despite the best efforts of the emergency scrubbers. Deep inside, she knew Hammer was losing her battle with the inevitable.

  “Can we use another drone as a decoy?” She asked Klade.

  “It didn’t fool them for long before,” he said. “I don’t see why it would now. The drones just don’t have the power to fake our energy signature.”

  “Give me options.”

  “We could fire off all of our ship-to-surface missiles, and hope that they’re at least blinded.”

  “We can’t risk it. If we irradiate the surface, we finish off the people we have down there.”

  “Then I don’t think we can do anything but run, and hope they follow.”

  “No! We need to take them out. As soon as we stop being a threat, they’ll move on to Caden and his team.”

  “We just don’t have the weapons for this,” Klade said. She heard the defeat in his voice.


  “What if we could access the quarantine network?” Tactical asked.

  “Explain,” Santani said.

  “They deactivated it, so they clearly view it as a threat,” Tactical said. “But they weren’t expecting any interference. What’s to stop us turning it back on?”

  Klade and Santani looked at each other.

  “It might actually work.”

  “Do it,” Santani said. “Then scramble the codes.”

  Klade barked orders at COMOP. “Make it happen. Bring the orbital platforms back online, and randomise the access codes.”

  “Working,” COMOP said. “You do realise, Captain, that the platforms will fire on us as well? We’re well inside the red line.”

  “Understood,” Santani said. “Helm, try to find us a soft spot to put down. But don’t make it look like we’re going to descend, not yet.”

  “There are no facilities,” Helm said. “We’ll lose half the ship.”

  “We’ll lose it all if we stay up here.”

  Klade was already broadcasting across the ship’s comm. “Now hear this, all crew evacuate below decks. I repeat, evacuate below decks. Abandon all duty stations at once, and move immediately to deck one. Secure hatches and prepare for emergency grounding.”

  “Ready for go, Captain. Platforms will reactivate on your command.” COMOP’s hand hovered over his holo.

  Santani looked at him and realised he was hoping for her to change her mind, hoping that they would find some other way. But the dreadnought had followed them into the atmosphere, and despite its huge size it seemed perfectly capable of manoeuvring against the winds in its efforts to find them. It showed no sign whatsoever that it would give them up for lost, and every so often their hull was raked by a hail of slugs, or their over-burdened defences strained to take down the swarms of missiles that could so easily tear the ship wide open.

  There really was no other way.

  “Do it,” she said.

  • • •

  “Skulkers!”

  Caden dropped to the ground immediately and rolled behind a lump of masonry. In the dusty fog, which seemed to extend forever in all directions, he could not see who had shouted. He was not going to waste time finding out, not with skulkers on the prowl, but it had sounded like Bro.

  He heard the sharp rattle of them springing from their hiding places, the hiss and slash of their blade rings meshing past each other.

  A metallic whine came from somewhere up ahead, and a scream was cut off as soon as it began. Whoever had been on point had been the first to go.

  “Stay down,” Throam whispered.

  He glanced over to where the counterpart was hunkered down behind another block of charred masonry. Throam quietly removed a grenade from his webbing, and pulled the pin.

  Caden heard a grating sound; skulkers were already in the courtyard in front of them. Their drive rings skittered and rattled on the stone surface.

  Somewhere off to their left there was another short scream. He tried not to think about the spattering sound that followed, but it had already registered. He shuddered.

  In one smooth movement Throam was up, throwing his cooked grenade in a short, tight arc, then back down again in cover. The explosion hurled sharp metal pieces in all directions, some of them clanging against the backs of the stones that shielded him and Caden.

  The slash, hiss and rattle of more skulkers filled the air, growing louder. They were not clever machines by any measure, but they were smart enough to investigate when one of their own was destroyed.

  An anti-personnel rocket streaked across the space between the buildings, and another skulker was blown into razor-edged fragments. Its two companions whirled towards the threat.

  “Hoo-yah! Take that, motherfucker!”

  Caden looked up and saw a MAGA trooper in the upstairs window of a half-burned building. He did not know him by name, but recognised him from Chun’s squad.

  “I’ve got you covered up here,” the soldier shouted. He racked another rocket into his launcher. “They can’t reach me. Two more shots and you’re clear.”

  Another rocket fired, and another skulker was torn apart.

  “Ready—” Caden whispered.

  Shots. Rifle shots.

  Caden risked peering over the top of the stone block, and saw figures at the far end of the courtyard, stepping quietly between the stumps of broken columns. They came out of the thick mist in ones and twos, silent but not cautious, moving without any military precision. There was no discipline to their approach, no strategy. It was a basic skirmishing line: sweep and clear.

  He wondered why the last of the remaining skulkers had not yet gone up in flames, and looked towards the window. The trooper with the launcher was slumped against the broken sill, a hole through his face.

  So much for that. He looked at Throam.

  “How many?” The counterpart mouthed.

  Caden held up both hands, fingers splayed, then wobbled one from side to side. About ten.

  Plus, of course, one skulker.

  Throam nodded, but whatever he had been planning on doing about it suddenly became irrelevant.

  Spent casings flew from Bruiser’s machine gun in a steady stream, bouncing and skittering across the cracked flagstones of the courtyard as he came up behind Throam and Caden to walk calmly between them. He focused his fire on the skulker’s centre, taking advantage of the precious seconds it took the figures to hurl themselves into cover, and kept firing until the machine’s sounds were throaty and erratic. It tried to roll forwards and jammed up, with grinding noises coming from its core.

  Bruiser ducked into cover, and gurgled with delight. “Been aching to play hard for ages,” his link translated.

  Throam unclipped a density grenade. “Ever hear the human expression ‘like shooting fish in a barrel’?”

  “Never,” said Bruiser.

  “This should explain it.” He hurled the canister towards the far end of the courtyard, with a shout of “Hey fuckers!”

  Three of the figures at the far end of the courtyard emerged from their cover, and popped off a few inexpert shots in his direction. The grenade soared high overhead and burst just above them.

  They were engulfed in a cloud of fine vapour, which reacted instantly with the air, forming a mound of thick, smoky foam. The three were just visible as dark shapes suspended inside the foam, struggling feebly to work their way free.

  “Nice,” said Bruiser. He sprayed the foam with bullets.

  It did not take long to finish off the others.

  “Viskr, and humans.” Caden tapped one of the bodies with his boot. “They’re working together. This doesn’t bode well.”

  Throam slapped a fresh magazine into his rifle. “We’re nearly there. We’ll find out soon enough what their deal is.”

  “Let’s move on,” Caden said.

  They filed out of the courtyard, watchful for figures moving in the fog, listening for the tell-tale sounds of more skulkers whirring into life. In the distance he could hear staccato bursts of gunfire, the sounds of Second and Fourth securing their targets. But here, in the immediate vicinity, all was still and silent: as far as Caden could tell, there was nothing else out there for the moment.

  They found a road, seared clean of all markings, and moved to the building line. The road led almost directly towards their destination, curving slowly uphill. As they moved, the fog began to thin out.

  Caden’s link chirruped.

  “Caden, Eilentes. I’ve got you in my sights now. If you carry on along that road, I can cover you most of the way there.”

  “I think you missed most of the excitement, but thanks all the same.” He turned around to see if he could make out her position, but she was superbly well-hidden. If he had not known she was out there, he would never have guessed that he was being watched through a scope.

  Caden was about to resume when something made him stop. A noise that was just audible above the incessant wind, repeating somewhere high overh
ead. A boom-boom-boom that could have been accompanied by faint bursts of light, almost imperceptible in the tumultuous cloud cover. The lightning and swirling vapours could play tricks on the eyes, but he was sure he was not imagining those bursts.

  He was right.

  • • •

  Eilentes watched Caden through her scope with a smile on her lips, chuckling to herself as he peered back towards her.

  He’s trying to make my position, she thought. Good luck!

  She had ensconced herself carefully in the remains of a stone structure which had likely been built as a clock tower. A wide crack had split the stones across one wall, on the side facing towards the force which had devastated the entire continent, and she was using the stones beneath the crack as a hide. A scrim was draped over her rifle; smart fibres woven throughout the material adopted the colouration of the surroundings, in much the same way that her outer armour was mimicking the environment.

  All in all, she was pleased with this hide site. The only issue she had with it was the lack of a rear wall. Behind her, there was only a gaping hole framed by the ragged edges of the side walls. Still, there were a few hidden troops guarding her position on the ground below, and the skulkers would never be able to reach her up here.

  She adjusted her eyepiece minutely and refocused on Caden. What was he looking at now? He still seemed to be looking at her, but his expression had changed. Now, instead of a faintly quizzical look, he appeared concerned. He was beginning to point. His mouth was opening and closing silently, and others were turning around to follow his gaze.

  She strained to hear, as if his words might somehow cross the distance. Of course they did not, but she did hear a roar building steadily in the sky above her.

  She rolled onto her back, and sat up just in time to see the clouds forced apart.

  Above her, and far too close for comfort, the angry skies which had so recently battered her own craft were themselves ripped asunder by a much larger visitor. A vast, dark grey hulk breached the lower layers, trailing plumes of thick smoke, hurling pieces of smouldering debris towards the ground. Yellow and blue flames hissed aggressively and rippled back along its length, caught between the leaking fuels that fed them and the torrents of wet air that would snuff them out. Small explosions punctuated the roar of the de-orbiting starship.