To my right, about two klicks from where I was crouched in the ash and hidden from view by a low, blackened ridge, a projectile battery of some kind was pounding away, firing in our general direction, but the shots were all passing high over my head with furious buzzing whines and I figured the aliens had panicked and started firing at the column of smoke ascending lazily from our pod.
Raising my right arm, I launched a micro-probe from one of the magazines concealed in my forearm plate. The tiny ‘bot drifted up into the trembling air on a mini a-grav floater, twitching as it activated it’s guidance fans and I switched my main viewscreen over to its tiny cameras. For a half second my head spun as I tried to orient myself to the new vantage point—my body felt like I was suddenly ten meters in the air and rising. The ‘bots cameras gave me a sweeping view of the battlefield: a tumbled land of black, symmetrical ridges and tall needle-thin towers that looked like something you’d find in an oil refinery. A thin sheet of ice and snow dusted everything and stirred fitfully in the stiff breeze, obscuring the ground surface.
To the west another volley of missiles were rising from some sort of industrial complex—the arching vapor trails were graceful enough, but the launch site looked like it had been abandoned fifty years back. Maybe twenty klicks away on the northern horizon—the planet was a small one, much smaller than its gravity suggested, and from the ‘bots vantage point the horizon looked unnaturally close—crouched a higher mass of oddly angular hills. Those hills were our target.
The area between our position and the hills was lousy with fighting and half-obscured by rapidly spreading banks and columns of smoke and flame. From fifty meters up I counted another twenty battery positions like the one I’d just spotted and a few scattered sniper nests—well hidden, but the ‘bots infrared cam picked their locations out as nicely as coal on fresh snow. A dozen primitive flyers were rushing in from the launch area, helicopters of some sort that were hugging close to the ground. But not close enough. Some of our gang who’d landed closer to the launching zone opened up as the choppers passed overhead. Two of the birds just shattered in midair, spitting flame and metal in all directions and their comrades scattered in all directions like a flock of pigeons—but not fast enough. Three more blew apart before they’d slipped out of range.
This was barely gonna merit the term “battle”.
Switching the ‘bot to autonomous mode, I ducked low and cupped a hand over my ear—a useless gesture, encased as I was in armor, but old habits are hard to break. “Boots, do you copy?”
“What’s the sitch, DA? Rogers is already moving.”
I relayed what I’d seen, all the while scanning the flashing air above my head and trying to ignore the rapid chatter of the nearby emplacement and the whine of the bullets. That damn battery would not shut up!
When I was finished, Boots began rattling off orders. “I’m joining Rogers and we’ll pave the way north clean so Westover and Tiang can follow us in with the zero-two-zero for support-and-cover—though why the hell Cent-Ops sent us down with the ‘Peater I’ll never know. Vlad will follow us in about two klicks behind—he’s got the Sabers and Apaches on the phone, but the other squads and the Gambler are giving him fits. Some type of cachanga jamming. You’ll cover our back sides, following behind Vlad; but first I want you to go serve that battery crew their huevos for lunch. Read me?”
“Loud and clear, sir.”
“That’s Boots to you, mierda, and don’t forget it. And remember DA, minimal casualties. We’re here to win hearts, minds and information, not lay this alien crap-shooters out in body bags.”
“Copy that, Boots.”
“Good hunting then. Chime in when you’re finished.”
The line went dead and I sank lower, hunkering down in my suit. This was it then. A thousand lightyears of travel and five months of training and it all came down to this one moment. I wasn’t ready. I still wasn’t ready, even after all the drills and practice and endless hours of work. Somehow, deep down in the center of my gut, I knew that I would never be ready. Oh hell. I am not a soldier.
It wasn’t that I was afraid to die. Not right then. My armor was too good, my weapons too powerful, and all this freaks could throw at us were metal bullets and a few nukes. It’d be a cake-walk. No, what I was afraid of was what I could do to them. I’d seen a lot of accidents during the first few weeks of training, bones broken, limbs torn off, heads stoved in—all because we hadn’t learned yet how to control the armor. I still had nightmares about those first hundred hours, when not a day passed without someone I knew dying.
I didn’t want to do that to anyone, alien or human. What’s worse, I wasn’t sure if I could do anything like that. I’d never been a violent person, even back on Earth. What if, when it all came down to it and one of my mates’ lives was on the line, I didn’t—couldn’t—do what needed doing? How could I live with that?
Thankfully, my orders right then and there were crystal clear—put the battery out of commission fast, and do it without killing. That much, I could do. Taking three slow breaths, I switched the VMR over to non-lethal rounds and breathed one last prayer before vaulting straight up into the pale sky.
My armor-enhanced jump rocketed me up and past the steady stream of projectile fire—despite my suit’s constantly adjusting chameleon skin, whatever was manning the gun battery must have spotted something as I raced skyward, because the tracer-illuminated firing line spasmed unsteadily towards me for a half-second before settling back to continue shooting uselessly over the smoking ‘pod.
Fifty meters above the ground the suit’s thrusters kicked in, kicking me higher still. Despite the shifting veil of snow obscuring the ground below, the air around me was perfectly calm, a frostbiting -40° C according to my suit’s thermometer. Higher still, the sky above me was a roiling mass of flaming clouds and expanding explosions—all that the Gambler had left of the second volley of enemy rockets.
Scanning the ground between my dangling feet, I quickly spotted the gunnery nest. Wedged tightly into a crater that had blown a hole into the crest of one of the strange, symmetrical ridges that all seemed to radiate out from the compound Boot’s and the others were heading towards. My HUD highlighted the squad—little more than red-shaded dots at this altitude—leapfrogging down a deep defile between two of the ridges.
The gun-battery was a joke. From where I was—still rising higher—it looked like we’d definitely managed to catch the aliens with their pants down. Besides the crater itself, a thin wall of rubble piled around the crater rim was the only visible concession to defense. Focusing on the crater I mentally locked the suit onto the nest and then let the nav-computer take over. The armor’s internal gyros spun me over so I was suddenly falling face-first towards the ground. For a moment everything was silent, except for the soft sound of the thin air whistling past my external microphones. Then my thrusters roared back to life and I was suddenly a one-man meteor shower streaking towards a cruise-controlled collision with the gun-battery.
Two hundred meters above the gun nest my HUD started identifying targets—four smaller blips clambering over the gun emplacement and a fifth hostile that seemed to be directing the operation from the opposite wall of the crater. A smaller side-screen was projecting the course of my flightpath, and if things held steady for 0.2 seconds longer I’d bull’s-eye the crater dead center, landing right in the middle of the targets.
One tenth of a second later the internal gyros kicked in again, flipping me right-side-up just as the thrusters gave a final blast, slowing my spine-shattering descent to a merely led-breaking fall—nothing the armor couldn’t handle.
I landed in a crouch, legs splayed wide and balanced on one palm, VMR held high, dust and grit and snow kicked up from the thruster-fire swirling around me in a raging maelstrom so thick I should have been blind. Should being the operative word here.
Snapping the VMR down into an active firing stance I whirled around towards the larger, final target my HUD had identified. The crater was still too choked with flying sand and snow to see anything on my own, but my suit’s infrared viewers painted the chaos with more than enough detail. My target was a weird gecko-like creature, glowing orange and yellow in the infrared and frantically trying to claw its way up the rubble embankment of the crater rim with at least eight pairs of limbs, shrieking in a piercing wail almost too high to hear. I snapped off a single round—a varient of rubber bullet designed for maximum non-lethal stopping power—and nailed the lizard what I guessed was it’s torso. The thing dropped immediately and rolled back down the slope towards me.
Something slammed into me from behind, pitching me forward. My legs tangled in the lizard-thing’s mess of arms and legs and I went down hard. Something beneath me gave way with an audible SNAP and I bit off a hoarse curse. The last thing I wanted was to crush the lizard I’d already managed to drop.
Using my own momentum, I turned my fall into a roll, the suit’s powerful steel muscles actually pushing me up the hill. The weight on my head and shoulders suddenly released and something—whatever had slammed into me—gave a strangled scream. I whipped my head around just in time to see my attacker slam spread-eagle into the crater wall and stay there, unconscious or dead. At the moment, I couldn’t find the energy to even care which it was.
Lurching upright I jerked back around towards the gun, bringing my VMR up just in time. The final three targets were charging directly towards my, screeching with weirdly child-like voices. They were identical to the alien that had jumped me—some kind of weird bugs that looked something like what you’d get if you threw a shrimp, a praying mantis and a centipede into a blender. The smoke and dust had cleared enough for me to see them in the visible light—slug white bugs with translucent carapaces wearing some kind of primitive armor, almost like the Kevlar stuff old Earth SWAT teams used to wear. They were short, none of them standing any more than a meter tall, and I would have laughed at their attack if they hadn’t all been so obviously bent on killing me.
I managed to pull off two quick shots before the bugs were on top of me. The first slug took the nearest alien clean in the chest from only two meters away, blowing it back against the gun battery with a sickening crunch. The second shot actually blew one of the second bug’s arms right off, but the thing just kept coming, barreling into me like a hammer; but this time, I was ready.
By the time the third and final bug had slammed into my chest, I’d activated my suit’s electrostatic defense skin. A thousand volts arced across the surface of the armor, and neon-blue bolts of electricity curled around the two bugs, both of which went stiff as boards, jerking and twitching like puppets on a string until I finally powered the defense field down. Groaning and still twitching, but thankfully very much alive, the two aliens went limp and fell to the ground.
My lungs burned like I’d just ran a marathon and my pulse was a thunderstorm in my ears. Sweat stung my eyes and more than anything I just wanted to lay down and sleep the next couple hours away.
Instead I called in.
“Boots, this is DA calling in.”
A few seconds later the sergeant responded, voice crackling and skipping with static. “Copy that DA. What’s the word?” Questions:
- How was the action in this scene?
- Any problems with blocking, or was the environment pretty clear?
- I'm trying to reveal the nature of the planet slowly. Is it working, or do you feel like you still haven't scene enough?
- The dialogue is my lame attempt at sounding 'military-ish'. How is it? Any suggestions?
- Anything else?
