Out of the Black (Odyssey One, Book 4) (27 page)

“GENERAL! I THINK you need to see this, sir.”

Potts cursed under his breath. Those words boded nothing but ill if he were to judge from the way things had been going so far. He headed over to the center of the tactical communications and command setup, leaning over the man’s shoulder.

“What is it, son?”

The young enlisted man gestured at the screens. “Sir, we’ve got forty-three new IFF signals that just lit off in South Bronx. They’re moving north in a hurry. Lead elements will hit the expressway anytime now.”

“Ours?”

“No sir. I’ve got no hits on their ID, just Confederate signals. It’s over my security clearance, General.”

“What the hell is going on?” Potts grumbled under his breath, reaching over to scan his biometrics into the system. It took a moment to register, but nothing changed. “Oh, who the hell are these people?”

“No idea sir, but they’ll reach Seventh Platoon in less than three minutes at their current rate.”

“Great. Curtz!”

“Yes sir!” A lieutenant appeared behind him.

“Get on the link to Command. I want those codes.”

“Yes sir.”

The best Potts could say about this was that at least they weren’t more of the enemy, but he wasn’t terribly happy about having a bunch of unknowns about to join into one of his combat zones. The sooner he learned just who the hell they were the happier a man he’d be.

Eric Weston skidded as he landed on the Cross Bronx Expressway, planting a foot on the concrete edge to brace himself as he paused to wait for the others to catch up. They weren’t a smoothly operating machine by any means, but they were better than some boot squads he’d run with in the past.

That’s not saying a lot, but I suppose it’ll have to do
.

He looked northwest, eyes and HUD locking in on the IFF signals coming from the Guards’ Seventh Platoon. The armored regiment had managed to tear their way through the city enough to finally find a few of the enemy to engage, and he rather suspected that they were in the process of regretting it.

The heavy tanks were more than powerful enough to take out the alien invaders, of that there was no question. The twitching bodies of three he could see proved that right up front and beyond any shadow of a doubt. The problem was that the platoon was stuck on a street between two lines of wrecked cars and rows of buildings. Without any way to evade, they were getting sliced to ribbons by the alien particle
weapons, while the Drasin were using every ounce of their mobility against the tankers.

Harsh red icons filled his HUD as he settled in against the cement edge of the elevated section of the expressway, resting the Priminae weapon to steady it better. It wasn’t designed as a marksman’s weapon, but Eric knew that the device could effectively ignore the force of gravity over some extremely long ranges. Similarly, other factors like windage weren’t factors he had to be concerned with. The energy imparted to the projectile was enough to make the range he was working at practically point blank.

One of the Drasin had gotten about the tankers, obviously intent on cutting them down from above, where their cannons couldn’t elevate to. Eric haloed it in his HUD, getting range and motion figures, but couldn’t send that data across to the alien weapon he was using. So he began to count off the math in his head as he looked down the enhanced sights of the GWIZ.

The Priminae weapon didn’t buck as he stroked the firing stud, the gravity control preventing recoil from being a significant problem. The DPU round he’d loaded earlier exploded into the atmosphere, throwing up a brief cloud of condensation as the pressure wave changed the air in front of him, and lanced across the intervening distance at several times the speed of sound.

The trail of ablated material left a laser-like beam in the air between him and the Drasin, visible for a few moments after the alien exploded into shards and splattered remains across Zerega Avenue.

Eric felt another person land beside him and his eyes flicked to check the IFF, but he didn’t look away from the
target zone. “Guardies need a hand, Commander. Think they’re up to it?”

Granger was silent for a moment, looking over the scene ahead of him. He wasn’t fully comfortable with the armor yet himself, so he had a sinking feeling just what the answer really was. “No” wasn’t an option, however, so he let out a deep breath before answering.

“My men can shoot. Let’s keep this out of knife range, if it’s all the same to you.”

Eric nodded. It was a good idea. “Fair enough. Deploy to the rooftops between Newbold and Waterbury. We’ll catch them in a crossfire and try to end this fast.”

“Roger that.”

The commander jumped away, heading to round up his men, and Eric glanced over to where four others were standing.

“You have a real plan, Cap?” Janet asked him as she knelt behind an abandoned car, looking over the hood and the cement carrier to the city beyond.

“We’re not going to try mixing it up in close with these things, not until I know just how good a shot our new friends really are,” Eric said, getting a chuckle out of his four comrades. “But I think we’ll over jump the fight and come back at them.”

“Double pincer,” Ronald nodded. “Not bad, jarhead. Not bad.”

“Shall we stop talking about it,” Alexander suggested, “and just make it happen then?”

“Right,” Eric nodded. “On the bounce. Go.”

The five armored soldiers leapt clear from the expressway, landing on a nearby building before they hopped off again, splitting the battleground and circling around. Behind them the larger armored force began to get into action themselves,
hopping in slower and less flamboyant moves as they headed north to their assigned positions.

Major Curran, Seventh Platoon, was in a bit of a bind.

Actually, that was probably the understatement of the century. He’d stupidly led his platoon into an ambush, more focused on clearing the damned cars from the road so they could get to their assigned positions than in keeping an eye peeled for enemy movement. The first hint they had of trouble was when the rear tank went up like a fireball, closing the door behind them, and three enemy stalkers appeared from an alley ahead of them.

He didn’t know what else to call the spider-like things. They were utterly alien enough to send chills down his spine as they stalked toward his team. He’d ordered the lead tank to open fire as the next two split the difference and pulled up on either side so they could get a clean shot apiece.

The first round of return fire had bolstered morale, sending one of the stalkers to the ground, where it twitched but didn’t show any sign of getting back into the action. Return fire scorched the street, slicing the offending tank in two, right down the middle, lengthwise. Curran watched it slump inward on itself before the munitions blew, rocking the armor he was riding.

“Keep firing!”

The two heavy main battle tanks rocked with every shot, rolling back on their suspensions as their cannons roared. The alien spiders were fast movers, however, and the devil itself to track in the tight confines of the city. Curran knew that out in the open they’d have hit every round dead on, but in the city
he’d swear that his tanks were causing more damage than the damned enemy!

“Major! Up on the building!”

Curran looked up and swore. One of them had somehow
climbed
up the side of the building, tearing it all to hell in the process, and was menacingly looking down on them.

“Elevate the barrel! Get it locked up!” he ordered.

“It’s too tight, Major! We can’t aim that high!”

Curran felt his stomach twist as he recognized the crackle of energy on the front of the alien even as he opened his mouth to give a futile order.

The explosion of the beast left him stunned for a moment, as much because of the incredible shock wave that followed it, blowing out windows all down the street even as pieces of the alien rained down around them.

Curran pivoted his scanners around. “What the hell was that!?”

“Two more, dead ahead, sir!”

He refocused his attention where it needed to be. “Continue firing!”

Eric leapfrogged the battle, staying low and hugging the side streets as he jumped forward. He could feel the burn in his legs, unaccustomed as they were to the kind of work he was putting them to in just the past few hours. He’d trained as a rifleman, like all Marines, but it had been a long time since those days and he knew that he was going to feel it come morning.