The Final Battle (23 page)

A Hammer drone arrived and settled into orbit overhead. Within seconds, hostile fire flayed the air around them and microgrenades ripped ground and vegetation apart. Michael flinched as a wayward round tore at his hair and a second seared an agonizing path across his left shoulder, the pain short-lived as his neuronics dumped neural blockers and painkillers into his system.

“Bastards saw us,” Shinoda yelled.

“No kidding,” Michael muttered. He forced his body to run harder. Now he jinked and swerved around rocks and trees. Shredded leaves and branches rained down on his head as the volume of fire intensified.

“Dumb fucks are letting that drone get way too low,” Shinoda shouted. “We can take it, but we’ll only get one chance, so make it count.”

“Got it,” Michael said. The drone was impossible to miss; its 4-meter wingspan and chunky body orbited barely 200 meters overhead.

“On three … one, two, three!”

Michael skidded to a stop. He swung his rifle up, struggling to keep it steady with only one arm. His sight locked onto the drone, and he pulled the trigger the instant the red aiming point settled, his burst joining Shinoda’s. Their rounds smashed home even as the controller sent the drone rocketing skyward. “Fuck it,” Michael said. “We’ve miss—”

They hadn’t missed. With a sharp crack, the drone’s microfusion plant lost containment in an eye-searingly bright ball of blue-white light that bleached all the color and contrast out of the bush around him.

“Nice shooting,” Shinoda said. “Now go!”

Michael needed no encouragement. The Hammers would have more drones backed up by ground-attack landers on the way, and they’d almost certainly put a blocking force ahead of them. On he ran; his mouth gaped wide open as he fought to feed air to lungs that screamed in protest. All that mattered was to keep moving. If there were drones overhead, if the Hammers were getting close, if he was being shot at, he neither knew nor cared. Shinoda led the way now; her pace was relentless, and Michael knew he had to keep up with her. She was all that kept him moving. If he fell back, he was finished.

Without warning, the ground only meters ahead of them vanished beneath a hail of destruction that shattered everything in their path. Their headlong rush to safety came to an abrupt halt as they scrambled for cover.

“Lander—” Shinoda shouted before the howling roar of a light attack lander swamped the rest of her words. The blast from its main engines ripped the air apart over their heads. Its huge black bulk banked and climbed away under full power to clear the reef, its starboard wingtip so close that Michael felt he could almost reach out and touch it. “We’re trapped,” Shinoda went on once the lander had gone. “If we keep moving, they’ll spot us.”

“So what do we do?”

“Best we can do is go to ground,” Shinoda said. She turned to head for the tumbled mass of boulders that fringed the base of the rock reef. “Come on; this way.”

“That’ll work?” Michael asked with a frown.

“I doubt it, but I can’t think of anything better. Here,” she said. She squeezed herself into a narrow fissure between two huge rocks. “This will do.”

“So what’s the plan?” Michael said as he followed her in, wriggling and pushing. The crack was tight. He had to roll onto his side to keep his injured shoulder off the rock wall, praying as he went that none of the Hammers had seen them vanish.

“Hopefully they don’t know we’re here,” Shinoda said, gasping for air, “but if they do, then we’ll just have to take as many of them with us as we can.”

“That’s one hell of a plan,” Michael whispered. He lay facedown in the dust to let his legs and lungs recover. With an effort, he lifted his head to look around. Shinoda had picked well. A massive boulder protected them. It lay propped against the rock wall, leaving a clear space a couple of meters wide.

Shinoda had wormed her way over to a second split in the rock and worked her way into it. She pulled back. “Too small to get through,” she called over her shoulder, “but a great firing position.”

Which means
, Michael thought,
our only way out is the way we came in
.

They were trapped. This was the end. There had to be at least forty PGDF troopers in those first two trucks. Even allowing for casualties, he and Shinoda were badly outnumbered, and that was before reinforcements turned up. As they would. And when they did, it was only a matter of time before they were overwhelmed.

Shinoda rolled over and sat up. Her shoulders heaved. “Fuck me dead,” she muttered, “I never want to do that again.” She turned. “We’ll—oh, crap,” she whispered when she saw the blood-drenched mess that was Michael’s left shoulder. “When did that happen?” she asked.

“A while ago,” Michael said, “but it’s not as bad as it looks.”

“Let me see,” Shinoda said. She crouched down, knife in hand, and sliced the arm of his shirt open. “Hmm, you’re right; it’s nothing too serious. I’ll get foam and a field dressing on it,” she went on, rummaging through her pack.

“Shiiiit!” Michael hissed through clenched teeth as the woundfoam seared its way into the wound. “Hey, watch it! That stuff hurts.”

Shinoda took no notice of Michael’s protests. She secured the dressing and patted him on the cheek. “That’ll do for now,” she said. “Okay, pay attention. You cover left, I’ll cover right, and remember: Let your chromaflage and this baby—” She patted the rock. “—do the work. Move as little as possible and let me know if anyone looks like he’s going to cause us problems. And do not open fire until I tell you to, understood?”

“Got it.”

Michael ignored his shoulder. Thanks to the drugs his neuronics had dumped into his system, it no longer hurt, but it was stiffening fast; his arm was now all but useless. He dragged himself back to the lip of the narrow cleft they had used to get in. He adjusted his chromaflage cape until only a slit for his eyes remained open and raised his head one millimeter at a time to look outside. He scanned the ground for any signs of the Hammers. There were none visible through the scrappy mix of trees and stunted bushes that fell away down the shallow slope in front of their position. He shunted his neuronics vision processor down into the infrared to check the deepening shadows thrown by the last of the evening light. Still nothing.

He eased back a fraction. “All clear here,” he whispered.

“And this side. Keep watching.”

“Roger,’ Michael said, resuming his scan. Shinoda did not need to tell him what it all meant. Ether the Hammers had pulled back or they were leaving the lander to—

With no warning, Michael’s world exploded. He was galvanized back under cover as cannon shells pulverized the rock. The air turned into a maelstrom of noise and dust. Fragments of rock tore at the arms he had thrown over his head. And then it was quiet. The only sound was the ringing in his ears.

He turned. Shinoda was shouting; he struggled to make sense of her words. “… they’ll come for us now,” she was saying, “but only open fire when I tell you to. And switch your neuronics on. They know where we are now.”

“Yes, sergeant,” he croaked, his mouth and throat choked with dust.
This is not good
, he thought when he saw what was headed their way. The men were visible because their chromaflage discipline was so poor. Michael’s finger twitched on the trigger of his assault rifle in nervous anticipation. After a while, he stopped counting the number of Hammers working their way forward; all that mattered now was that there were a lot of them. And there’d be many more he couldn’t see.

“Stand by,” Shinoda said. “You take the group moving across to your left. Stand by—now!”

Michael opened fire. His first rounds hit a trooper in the head as he belly crawled forward; the man slumped facedown onto the ground. Michael shifted aim, dropped another shape, and was moving to his third when retribution arrived, a withering barrage of machine gun fire and microgrenades that forced him back, horribly aware of how bad their tactical situation was. They were pinned down, and it was only a matter of time before one of the Hammers got lucky and dropped a microgrenade down his throat. He tried not to think what that would do to him and Shinoda.

He failed.

But until then, he vowed, he’d take as many of the Hammers as he could. He pushed his rifle over the lip of the entrance and loosed a few rounds at random. That provoked another storm of bullets and microgrenades that forced him back again. “We have to move,” he shouted over the steady tap-tap of Shinoda’s rifle.

“No kidding, Einstein,” Shinoda shouted back. “But where the fuck to?”

“I was hoping you’d tell me,” Michael muttered. Since it was only a matter of time before the Hammers got lucky anyway, he decided to not to worry about all the crap they were sending his way. He ignored the incoming fire and pushed himself back up so he could work his rifle along the lines of advancing men. “You scumsuckers!” he shouted. He dropped a Hammer, then another. “We’re not dead yet!”

His abuse sparked off another furious response. The air in front of Michael’s position filled with bullets and the black shapes of microgrenades. One headed right for him, and time slowed to a crawl. He watched in horrified fascination as the grenade grew bigger, a gray blur against the evening sky.

Exactly what provoked Michael to do what he did, he would never know, but without a moment’s thought he burst out of cover. That was what he tried to do, but his left arm refused to play along. He ended up half rolling, half staggering down the short, dusty slope in front of the boulder only a heartbeat before the microgrenade flew over his head. It buried itself in the loose dirt and exploded with a shattering crack.

It was the dirt that saved him. It absorbed the microgrenade’s lethal gift of shrapnel. That and the blast; it blasted a ball of dust outward, forcing the Hammers to fire blind. Bullets plucked at Michael’s body as he wriggled and squirmed to get away in a frantic, floundering scramble toward a fragmentary image lodged in his memory, the image of an opening between two boulders somewhere in the confusion to his left.

His hand felt the hole before he saw it; without a second’s thought, he rammed his body into the opening, chased into safety by wayward bullets. One, its energy almost spent ricocheting off rock, slashed his forehead open. The cut sent blood curtaining down across his face, hot and sticky. He rolled into the back wall of the hole and lay there, wiping the blood out of his eyes.

Shinoda popped into his neuronics. “Where the fuck did you go?” she said, her voice overlaid by the methodical double tap of her rifle.

“Five meters to your right, I think,” Michael said. He wormed his way around to peer out of the hole. “Had to move; a Hammer grenade had my name on it.”

“I’m not sure what they’re up to,” Shinoda said. “They seem to have fallen back …”

Now that Shinoda mentioned it, Michael realized that nobody was shooting at him anymore.

“… which means they’re regrouping. I think they’ll bring the lander in to give us another dose of cannon fire.” Michael swore under his breath; for an instant he had allowed himself to think the Hammers might have had enough. “Then they’ll move in again.”

“Can we move?”

“No point. They’ll have us covered.”

“Shit.”

“Shit is right. Keep your head down until the lander’s gone, then just do the best you can.”

“Will do.” Michael checked Shinoda’s biostats. “You okay?” he asked. “Your blood pressure’s a bit low.”

“Losing a shitload of blood does that to you. Bastards got me in the right arm. But I’ll be fine. I’ve got woundfoam and a dressing on it. Brace yourself. I think I see the lander, and the son of a bitch is coming right for us.”

Michael slithered to the back of his hole and curled himself into a ball. He tried not to think what even a single 30-millleter hypersonic cannon shell would do to his body. Then the attack was on them, and Michael’s world dissolved into more noise and dust and pain as a rock splinters sliced into him. And when he thought it could get no worse, the air turned a blinding white. An instant later, the ground rammed him bodily upward—he swore the rock he was huddled up against moved as well—and then there was silence, a strange, flat quiet broken only by the skittering of pebbles falling around him. “Sergeant! What—”

Something hard, something unseen, something silent smashed into him and battered his body into unconsciousness.

• • •

“Colonel, come on. Wake up, Colonel! Hey! Come on.”

Colonel?
Michael wondered.
What colonel?

“Talk to me, you overpromoted asswipe.”

Overpromoted asswipe?
Michael thought.
That does it.
With an effort, he forced his blood-encrusted eyes open and looked up into Shinoda’s face. “I’m going to have you court-martialed for insolence,” he rasped.

Shinoda pulled Michael upright and pushed a water tube into his mouth. “Be my guest,” she said with a lopsided grin, “but what makes you think we’re going to live long enough?”

“How long was I out?”

“Couple of minutes.”

“What the hell just happened?”

“Juggernaut, that’s what. I think the good guys just took out Gwalia.”

“Gwalia?” Michael frowned. He shook his head to try to clear the mush from his brain. “But the missile base wasn’t on the target list. It’s too far north to be a priority.”

“Maybe Admiral Moussawi changed his mind about that. Anyway, I don’t give a rat’s ass. Whatever it was, it didn’t do the bad guys any favors.”

“They’re gone?”

“Not gone, dead. I don’t think they’ll bother us anymore. Anyway, it’s time we moved on. Can you stand?”

“Get me free of this damn hole and I will.”

Michael’s mouth dropped open when he saw the damage the blast had done. In every direction, the sparse vegetation had been stripped. The ground was littered with shattered trunks and shrubs piled in haphazard heaps along the foot of the reef wall. A body lay wrapped around a tree stump. More were scattered across the dirt. “What the hell,” he whispered, awestruck by the devastation.

“No time for sightseeing,” Shinoda said. She pulled Michael to his feet. He stood, swaying and unsteady. “The Hammers will be mighty pissed by all this, and I don’t want to be here when they arrive to see what the hell just happened.”