On Silver Wings (31 page)

Come to think of it, Sorilla noted that she was really leaving a lot to other people lately.

Ah well, the wages of war and all that,
she thought, grinning under her helm.

The grey skinned types didn’t seem to be interested in attacking, but Sorilla didn’t lower her weapon as they stared at her with, frankly, rather creepy large dark eyes. As she was debating what to do, her armor chimed in with a warning that there was another harmonic spike occurring. Sorilla glanced at the holo of Hayden and noted flashing lights circling a point well above the world’s surface.

That didn’t look good to her, so Sorilla moved right to the GOTH plan.

Normally, detonating high explosives in an unknown weapon of mass destruction was pretty far from her idea of a good time, but with several ships in immediate danger and absolutely no time to try and figure out any of the equipment surrounding her, Sorilla decided that the situation definitely warranted ‘GOne To Hell’ level action.

The explosions from the next room were relatively sedate, Sorilla would have barely heard them if her armor hadn’t noted the sound and brought it to her attention as a potential threat. The reactions of the grey skinned folk, however, was anything but sedate.

Instead of standing there, staring at her in either shock or indifference… she honestly couldn’t tell which from their expressions, or lack thereof, said aliens were pointing at readings and all but waving their arms in the air in panic. Naturally, this brought mixed reactions to Sorilla.

It meant, of course, that she had probably achieved the effect she was aiming for… but, on the other hand, it also meant that she was probably sitting on something she’d really rather not be sitting on. When the smaller grey skinned aliens broke for a door on the upper terrace of the room, Sorilla had her answer as to what she should be doing next.

When it doubt, follow the guys who are most likely to know what the hell is going on. If they’re running, make it a foot race.

She vaulted from a standing position to the second floor terrace, crashing through a glass or similar barrier with ease and landed in their midst. The aliens were wearing what looked to be thick, possibly rubberized, uniforms that reminded her slightly of hazmat suits without the helmets. Their reaction to her arrival was to freeze in shock and stare.

Well that won’t do.

Sorilla drew her pistol again and put a heavy round into the ceiling, startling them out of the shock, then waved them toward the door.

Thankfully they got the idea in a hurry and bolted on ahead, while Sorilla took up the rear. She’d gladly leave them to whatever fate had reserved for the facility, but there was that little problem of not knowing where the hell she was going and all.

Well that and Sorilla had never much liked killing in cold blood. She’d taken out her share of unarmed people in the past, a few even in this very base just a few score minutes earlier, but those were mostly collateral kills. This group was obviously technical support for the most part, maybe an officer in the bunch, though she couldn’t see any insignia tabs on them to prove it. Not on her list of opportunistic kills, at any rate.

A new alarm was sounding through the facility, along with some pretty funky lighting going off in every corridor. Her armor and ocular HUD were informing her of deep slashes into the ultraviolet and infrared spectrum, with very little showing up in the human visual range. Sorilla shelved that little tidbit as she chased the aliens upward through another set of ramps than the ones she’d come down.

Her armor registered a rumble deep down in the facility, but it didn’t match any explosion harmonic so it only listed it as a secondary level warning. She flagged it anyway and asked her computer what it most closely matched.

Three Story building collapse.

Well, that’s just lovely,
she thought dryly, her attention diverted as she rounded a corridor in time to see the last of the aliens ahead of her dive into a room of some sort and seal the door.

“Oh FUCK!” She snarled aloud, striding forward with the intent of pulling the door clear from the wall.

She was within ten feet when an explosion went off in her face, lifting Sorilla, armor and all, clear off the ground and slamming her back into the far wall. It wasn’t enough to injure her, but she saw stars for a moment and when they’d cleared Sorilla found herself looking at a gaping hole where the ‘door’ had been.

She staggered to her feet, cursing some more under her breath, and made her way over to the hole. It was the entrance of a tunnel that went up at a forty five degree angle from where she was standing, and her armor quickly reported starlight at the far end.

Escape pod. Nice.
She thought idly before bracing herself and starting to sprint up the long tunnel.
Probably still should have shot the bastards before they blew that sucker in my face, though.

*****

Hayden Jungle

Jerry cursed as he threw himself to the ground, just evading a barrage of beam blasts from one of the enemy combatant units. They’d had their way most of the night, but he must have screwed up his movements because they’d managed to drop one of their close combat squads almost right on his position.

As far as ambushes went it wasn’t particularly good, but only because he and his team could hear the flyer coming. They managed to go to ground before the units were fully deployed, but shortly after they found that they weren’t capable of moving from cover without being bracketed by lethal fire.

He’d already lost three of his pathfinders, good people who deserved better, to the crossfire and had been pushed hard enough to risk calling for support from the automated units. He knew that the shift frequency military comms they’d gotten from the container were supposed to be untrackable, but the idea of calling down nuclear fire on his position just sent shivers down his spine.

Three miles away the Cougar element of the autonomous units paused as they received and acknowledged the priority tasking. The three Cougars in the element immediately dropped stabilizing braces into the soft jungle ground, the hydraulic arms planting themselves and lifting the front tires off the ground as the twenty millimeter accelerator on each climbed to near vertical positioning.

The trio consulted with one another for a moment before deciding on a fire plan which, once confirmed, was entered into the final targeting solutions.

The first three rounds fired within a millisecond of each other, fired almost vertically into Hayden’s atmosphere. Three cannons dropped several degrees and roared again, then another few degrees down and another sonic boom erupted as the shells were launched skyward. Each of the three Cougars repeated the same process ten times, launching a total of thirty twenty millimeter rounds in less than three seconds.

That complete, the Cougars again consulted with one another and decided that the fire response mission was complete and, that decided, they elected to move on with their original mission.

Back at the focus of their attentions, for as little time as it was, Jerry and his pathfinders were still hugging whatever cover they could find as the particle blasts from the approaching combat units torched the jungle around them. Above the hissing sound of the enemy fire, however, a rushing sound began to fill the air causing most of them to look up in wonder and not a little fear.

“What the hell is tha-?” Dean managed to ask just before the world exploded.

The TOT, or Time On Target, assault was pioneered in the second world war by artillery units who would carefully calculate the flight times of their shells and coordinate firing schedules to drop as many shells on the enemy as possible in as short a time as possible. The ideal being to drop the entire world on an enemy platoon or division before they had a chance to react to the first shell, thus catching them out in the open and inflicting massive casualties and damages.

Since that time, with computer aided systems, and then the advent of modulated electromagnetic accelerators, the concept had been perfected to the nth degree.

While not packing as much firepower as a full artillery brigade, the Cougars were programed to maximize what they had so when they received a request for fire support from Reed, the autonomous units responded with their best effort: A simultaneous barrage of thirty twenty millimeter high explosive rounds in a tight pattern around the closest confirmed enemy location.

The result? Over three acres of Hayden jungle were completely
flattened
, trees and brush toppled, and fully two thirds of the enemy forces were wiped out in less than the space of second.

The blast still ringing in his ears, Jerry lifted his head to stare in wondering shock at the devastation.

Beside him, Dean was saying something but he couldn’t hear a thing over the ringing in his ears so Jerry just let him go for a moment before some level of sense filtered back into his mind. It was then that Jerry realized that Aida would kick his ass if he let this moment completely slip by in the heat of battle.

“Come on!” He yelled, hefting his rifle high as he called out to his fellow pathfinders. “While they’re disoriented! Take them down!”

He leveled his weapon, firing as he emerged from cover, and kept waving to the others to get them moving as well. Slowly, one by one, the high powered crack of sonic booms filled the jungle as he and the others unloaded their weapons in an attempt to turn the ambush on the ambushers.

They had a few seconds all to themselves, in which the enemy was too stunned or disoriented to respond, and then it became an exchange again. The particle beams of the enemy combat units crossed paths with the heavy depleted uranium slugs coming from the pathfinder’s military issued rifles, turning their little corner of Hayden’s jungle into a slaughter house.

DPU slugs blew chunks off the alien units as particle beams fried the Hayden colonists, but neither side was remotely willing to give an inch of Hayden’s jungle floor in this moment. Jerry kept pushing his people on, trying to maintain the pressure while not losing too many more of his own people.

Or
anymore
of his own people.

An anger welled up in him then, thinking of those they’d lost, the homes that had been destroyed, and Jerry found that he had had enough. He rose up, firing his rifle dry, and swapped the magazines smoothly as he stepped forward out of the jungle.

“No more! Do you hear me! No MORE!” He roared over the sonic boom of his weapon firing, and the sizzles and snaps of the enemies return fire.

Behind him the other pathfinders found themselves echoing his statement, ghosting from their cover as their leader’s righteous fury infected them. They appeared from the jungle that was their home, weapons calling down the thunder as they moved as one against their enemy.

The exchange of fire was blindingly fast, enemy crawlers and shamblers falling to heavy concentrated fire even as pathfinders were cut down in turn.

And then, at its peak, the enemies return fire simply… stopped.

To be entirely honest, Reed and his pathfinders didn’t notice at first and went on firing. Then it slowly sunk in to their skulls that something was up and, one by one, they stopped firing in turn. A silence fell on the jungle, no man, nor alien, nor Hayden born making a sound as the pathfinders looked around themselves in confusion.

Then one of the enemy crawlers teetered for a moment, then simply toppled over and lay with its legs in the air, still unmoving.

“What the hell?” Jerry whispered as he moved forward, ironically more cautiously now than when they had been shooting.

“Jer, what’s going on?” Dean asked hesitantly, coming up behind him.

“I don’t know, I…”

Jerry was cut off by a low rumble from the north west, causing them all to turn. It took him, them, a moment to recognize that it came from the direction of the Colony site and just as that was filtering into their minds a great plume of dust, dirt, and smoke blew straight up thousands of meters into the sky.

“Vacuum sucking hell, what was that?”

“Something happened at the Colony site!”

“Sarge…” Jerry hissed, breaking into a run through the jungle.

The other followed suit quickly, threading through the jungle as quickly as they could until they burst clear out onto a rocky outcropping that loomed over the jungle and offered a clear view of the colony plateau. It was ironically, Jerry realized, the same rocky outcrop that he and Sorilla had stopped on months early, during her first visit to the colony.

A colony that now apparently no longer existed.

A great gaping hole was blown clear out of the plateau, splitting the immense slab of stone in half. From what he could see it must have blown three quarters of the colony back to Sol, and merely flattened what was left.

“Holy Stars, did Sarge do that?” Bethany asked softly from behind him.

“I don’t know,” Reed answered honestly, looking about him as the remains of the pathfinders were splayed out on the rocks, staring at the plume of dirt that rose above what had once been their home.

They looked tired. Hell, they looked exhausted. Most likely because they were, Jerry realized that he was at that point, and his legs wobbled enough for him to collapse on the rock beside him.

“What do you suppose happened to those things back there?” Dean asked, taking a seat nearby.

“Sarge must have been right,” Jerry shrugged tiredly. “They must have been drones. Not even autonomous, like the Cougars. She took out the central command, I’m guessing.”

Dean shook his head, “That’s one damned scary lady.”

Jerry chuckled, he couldn’t help it, he just didn’t have the strength anymore to keep a straight face. “Just be glad she’s on our side, Dean.”

Dean’s laughter proved contagious, and soon most of those assembled were laughing along with him. If any of them noted the hint of hysterical relief in its tone, none mentioned it aloud.

*****

USV Socrates

58 Grand, Over Hayden