Echo of Tomorrow: Book Two (The Drake Chronicles) (55 page)

As they neared the entrance to the building, they all heard an explosion to the northwest. The sun seemed to be a little brighter, and the squad leader knew the shield generator was gone. Not that it slowed the troops down. The squad leader ordered a squad of young warriors forward to breach the door, and saw several of them go down under a barrage of weapons fire. At last it stopped, and together with several others, he charged through the door. For a moment he was disoriented, since instead of a building full of terrified hewmans, the building was empty save for one lone hewman standing by a large metal ring. He blinked at the hewman as it bared its blunt teeth and waved its hand at them with the middle digit of its five-digit hand raised as it stepped backward through the ring. What the creature hoped to accomplish by stepping through a steel ring, he didn’t know, nor why the hewman didn’t appear on the other side. To add to his confusion, the moment the hewman stepped through he heard a grating sound, and the ring slowly descended into the floor and vanished. Someone screamed at him on his communicator, but before he could understand what was said the world turned ever so hot and bright.

* * * * * *

“Ring three reporting. All personnel have cleared through the ring to safety.”

“Ring four reporting. All personnel have cleared through the ring to safety.”

“That’s almost the last of them, sir.”

“Tell the rear guard to get their asses through the rings, damn it, and stop fucking around.”

“Why would they do that, Brock
-san
?” Hiro asked softly.

Brock snorted. “Be just like one of those cocky marines to wait and wave a middle finger at the fucking lizards before he stepped through, that’s why.”

Hiro smiled slightly, knowing it was just the sort of thing one of the old marines would do. He still shook his head sometimes over how undisciplined they were. However, there was no denying their bravery. Hiro had watched, understanding at last the term “Chinese fire drill.” He still wasn’t sure how effective it was, until he saw the way the lizards just kept running toward the screaming humans, who ran around in what seemed like total confusion. Seeing that, the lizards didn’t stop to take up defensive position as attackers should, and other than the first few yards, didn’t do leap frog “scoot and shoot” maneuvers either. They simply charged en masse after the humans, as if to see who could get to them first.

All twenty thousand troops were now within the confines of the town, where Brock’s “bug bomb,” as he called it, could do its work. Hiro wasn’t sure exactly what a bug bomb was, never having seen or heard of one before, and the only thing any of the marines would say was, wait and see, and give him an enigmatic smile. By now the human population of Pendleton and New Plymouth were gone, and the only ones remaining were the people running the Chinese fire drill. Now they were gone as well, and as the lizards were finding out, they’d captured an empty city. Hiro’s thoughts were interrupted when he saw the shield generator explode, and the strange black dot lifted into the sky, spewing liquid in all directions.

“Watch it,” Brock called, and everyone turned away from his or her screens.

A moment later, the room was lit by an enormous flash of light, as if God had taken a flash picture of the battle. When the black dot reached five hundred feet it detonated, and Hiro looked back in time to see a giant fireball envelope the town and Camp Pendleton, reaching out miles from its epicenter. Everything within that radius was instantly incinerated when the fuel/air bomb exploded. If that wasn’t sufficient to kill every lizard in range, the resulting firestorm killed the rest outside while hurricane-force winds sucked everything into hell. What looked like a nuclear mushroom cloud lifted over the epicenter, and Brock could see the look on Hiro’s face.

“It’s not a nuke, Hiro,” Brock said. “Remember, we want to live there again after we rebuild it.”

“Your pardon, Colonel Brock
-san
. It was unkind of me to think such a thing.”

“Don’t sweat it. We might have to use a few before this is over.”

“I understand, Brock
-san
. This enemy is unworthy of anything less than complete extermination, by whatever means.” Brock nodded in agreement.

“Air wing has launched, sir.”

“Good. Now let’s take out those troopships.”

Radar showed hundreds of blips as a swarm of Terran Defense Force fighters lifted over the horizon to engage the lizard air elements. Within moments, a snarling dogfight erupted, and for a while it was impossible to tell friend from foe. Not that it mattered. Months of air-combat training had paid off, and Earth’s air defense tore through the lizards like the proverbial hot knife through warm butter.

Behind them came a blizzard of ship-killing missiles. Not just a few dozen that the troopships’ point defense systems might be able to handle, but hundreds of them. Wave after wave, overwhelming any possibility of stopping them all. The first wave lifted skyward, then curved over and plunged down onto the ships’ shield, weakening it at ground level. The second wave came in hugging the ground, easily penetrating the weakened edge. They didn’t simply detonate against the hull, but plunged through before exploding inside. Gouts of flame, hull, and debris vomited outward, while the inside turned into a charnel house. In desperation, the second ship tried to lift, partly to escape the onslaught and partly to try to strengthen the shield by getting away from the energy-draining ground effect, but it was too late.

* * * * * *

Ground Force Leader Lecar gritted his teeth in agony. Every square inch of exposed scales felt as if it were on fire, and at first he thanked the spirits that he was alive, until he staggered out from behind the protecting concrete of the firing range butts and saw the destruction of his landing ships. He watched in horror as first one, and then the other slowly succumbed to the blizzard of missiles. It was like watching some giant beast be slowly torn apart from the inside out. Behind him, his security guards, what was left of them, gathered around him, but his driver lay on the ground withering in agony. The commander moved around the end of the shooting butts so he could see the hewman town they’d come to take. It was gone, as were his troops, and stumbling to a block of concrete he sat down, his legs no longer able to support him. This couldn’t, shouldn’t be happening. These hewmans were herd animals, not warriors. Yet in all his years in combat, he’d never seen this much carnage in so short a time. He looked at the sky, doubting he’d ever see the cool swamps of his home again. Somehow these animals had unleashed the demons from the deepest pit of hell.

* * * * * *

“Well, that takes care of New Zealand, now let’s take care of the rest of the world,” Brock muttered, his eyes flicking from screen to screen.

Each showed a different city, and there was no way he could defend them all with his limited troops, at least in comparison to the number of boots the lizards were putting on the ground. Sadly, most would have to fend for themselves until such time as they’d defeated a major part of this landing force. That wasn’t going to be easy. New Zealand was a fluke. A carefully planned fluke, but a fluke nonetheless, based on the way the lizards attacked last time. He’d suckered them into a killing zone, and there was no guarantee he’d be able to do the same thing again. The main thrust of the landing seemed aimed at the capital city, with one or two troopships landing near each major city. England and Japan came in for their share of attention, with eight troopships heading for a landing somewhere on each island. In a way he pitied the poor lizards when they tried. Even as he watched, an incredible amount of anti-lander ordnance exploded skyward. Instead of sitting around crying into the hankies like the rest of the world, England had dug in and produced an incredible array of weapons.

Like the one King of England had said to his people, “
This is a fight to the death, and we don’t intend on dying
.” This wasn’t the first time in her long history England had suffered an enemy invasion, and no one had successfully done it since 1066.
Except American tourists,
he thought with dry humor. Japan, on the other hand, had opted for a different approach. They offered no resistance to the troopship landing, preferring their enemy on the ground where their forces could get at them. In Japan’s case, the weather helped them by providing a typhoon. This was seen as an omen; the “kamikaze,” or sacred wind, had come to their aid again, effectively shutting down air support or even orbital observation and support. The next twenty-four hours would give the Japanese troops a critical advantage, which they intended to use to its fullest.

“We have tanks or something similar on the ground, sir.” Brock’s eyes flicked to the screen over the operation consult, seeing row after row of huge, butt-ugly tanks rumbling off the loading ramp of the enemy troopship.

“I see it. Comm. Give armor a heads up. They have traffic coming their way.”

“Aye-aye sir, on it.”

* * * * * *

The enemy commander landed his ships on a broad plain outside New Mecca so he could use his tank to its fullest potential. The wide savanna offered the perfect place where they could advance on the city and destroy any strong point his troops encountered. The trouble was it worked both ways, as he was about to find out. There were no real strong points as such, just fallback positions for the hewman troops to use as needed. Brock wasn’t about to make the fatal mistake of being forced into a defensive battle. The new MBT was a far cry from anything he’d used in the Middle East deserts. Each was powered by a fusion reactor that supplied power to the shield and twin plasma cannons. They also carried twin “Vulcan”-style needle cannons mounted on swivels on each side of the turret, to handle ground pounders. Over open ground they could reach speeds of over seventy miles per hour with multi-targeting lock and shoot ability. Add to that an independently targeting antiaircraft rack on the rear of the turret, and you had one lethal machine. Brock wasn’t sure why, but instead of using a combined ground/armor attack as Earth forces did, the alien commander sent his tanks off by themselves in a flanking attack. That was all right with Brock, since it gave his tanks even more freedom of movement without having to worry about friendly fire accidents with his own men and women.

The armor commander had the same information as Brock, so he didn’t need someone looking over his shoulder micromanaging his battle. Brock left it up to him how he’d use his forces, nodding to himself while one hundred and twenty tanks broke off from the main force and wheeled out to take on the lizard tank force. You could see daylight under the hundred-ton monsters as they came over a slight rise at better than sixty miles per hour, the anti-grav cushioning setting them down soft enough to avoid loss of speed or control. The twin plasma cannons belched white lightning, and the fight was on. Both formations quickly dissolved into a swirling mass of armored titans hammering away at each other, gradually vanishing into a swirling cloud of dust and smoke. Win or lose, it was out of Brock’s hands. Either the months of intense training would pay off and they’d win, or superior enemy tanks would carry the day.

* * * * * *

The lizard tank commander almost smiled when he saw the hewman tanks come flying over the rise. They were half the size of his MBTs, and he assessed them more of a nuisance than anything else. He zoomed in for a closer look, surprised to discover they didn’t have tracks or wheels as his did, but floated on an anti-grav cushion. He didn’t know what advantage that would be until he saw one of them get hit. Instead of exploding in flame, the tank skidded sideways, then turned, flying backward, and fired both its main armaments. One of his tanks exploded, while another became bogged down in some swampy ground that the hewman tanks just flew across as if it wasn’t there. The smile slipped when his formation dissolved into a swirling mass of fighting machines. Dust, mud, water, and smoke obscured his vision, and even switching to infrared didn’t help. He found he couldn’t fire without hitting one of his own units. The human tanks didn’t have any such limitations, since centuries of tank warfare had taught them the necessity of being able to see the enemy under the worst conditions. The ground forces commander watched in disbelief, then shock, while first his tanks were neutralized, and then his ground forces came under attack.

He wasn’t sure what or where it was coming from, but the ground around his troops erupted in columns of flame and destruction while his men ran into a minefield. Added to that, the hewmans launched a barrage of artillery and rockets at them from long range. This exploded in air bursts and devastated entire sections of his advancing troops. Thankfully, more troops were arriving from the second and third wave of landing ship to fill in the gaps, and keep the advance moving forward. He tried targeting the hewman artillery with his own, but found it difficult, since they kept moving from place to place in unpredictable jumps, stopping just long enough to shoot before moving again. This was frustrating. These hewmans didn’t fight like any species he’d run into before. Their approach showed a deep understanding of warfare that should be beyond their primitive capabilities. A short time ago, they didn’t even have weapons, and now they were fighting like veteran troops, blooded in combat. Thankfully, the Horde had troops in overwhelming numbers, and they would soon overpower this limited defense. Once the hewman fleet was annihilated, he would be able to call on orbital bombardment to take care of any strong points or stubborn resistance. Yet this was something he was loath to do. Needing assistance from the fleet would reflect badly on his abilities as a commander.