EDEN (The Union Series) (32 page)

Although they hadn’t
expected an assault from the roof, the Loyalists had still prepared their
position so that the staircase couldn’t be used properly to reach the ground
floor.

Myers aimed his rifle
into the hatch, whilst I tried to pull the body out of the way. He was stuck
fast onto the wire, every one of the wicked blades along its length digging
into his combats and ripped skin. It was like something out of a horror hologram.

Suddenly Myers opened
fire, staggering backward in surprise at a sudden threat. Skelton and Yulia
responded instantly, firing their weapons wildly into the sandbag platform.

I chucked a smoke
grenade into the hole, and we threw ourselves backward just before it detonated
in a plume of smoke that shot up the staircase.

‘Fuck!’ I swore as
the fire team resumed firing into the platform. The body was stuck fast, making
it impossible to enter - not without being shot.

I looked up at Puppy,
whose fire team waited halfway up the stairwell, shrouded in smoke. Mr Barkley
watched anxiously from behind him.

‘Mouse hole,’ I
whispered, despite the noise of gunfire next to me.

He responded instantly,
sending Dutch down with his charge. I crept with him, off the sandbag platform
and back onto the solid staircase landing, standing directly above where the
Loyalist defenders were firing. We set the charge, and then stepped away, just
far enough not to be hurt when it was fired.

‘Fire!’ I shouted.

The charge thumped,
and as one my fire team stopped what they were doing and bolted toward the
fresh opening, I tossed another grenade into the hole, waiting for it to
explode, before throwing myself through the hole, not thinking about the
landing.

I crashed into the
room, landing awkwardly on my feet before crumpling to the ground. Excruciating
pain shot across my chest.

I held out my arms,
just managing to catch Myers as he landed on top of me. He sprayed the smoking
room with automatic, almost toppling over after his fall.

Yulia and Skelton
landed around me as I struggled to return to my feet, checking my respirator
seal with my free hand. Their weapons unleashed fury into the smoking room,
cutting down any Loyalist survivors as they fanned out into cover.

The ground floor was
an office just like the floors above, except that it had been virtually cleared
out and its windows lined with sandbags. Apart from the tens of Loyalists who
had either died by my grenade, or been cut down by my fire team, the massive
room was empty.

I staggered slightly
as I looked around me, trying to see what made the building so important that
it needed so many defenders. There was nothing there except for some old office
furniture and stack of sandbags at the far end of the room. For a second my
vision began to blur, until I focused again with a shake of my head. The pain was
making me queasy.

‘Is he alright?’
Skelton asked from nearby.

Suddenly I looked
back at the stack of sandbags, noticing something odd in the way that they were
laid out in a circular shape on the floor. That wasn’t just a stack of unused
sandbags, I realised, it was a burrow entrance! The command centre was
underground, and the building above it was being used merely as additional
defence against bombardment!

‘There!’ I pointed,
and we swept across the room toward the entrance.

Skelton opened fire
on my right, his mammoth hacking down two Loyalists as they broke cover from
behind an upturned table. Yulia joined in, firing two darts into one of them as
he tried to crawl away. Behind us, the remainder of the section dropped into
the room, followed shortly after by the platoon commander and Corporal Abdi.

Out of the corner of
my eye I saw part of the sandbag wall fall away, allowing light to burst into
the room as it was ripped down by a massive metallic arm.

‘Suit!’ Corporal Abdi
yelled, and as one the multiple opened fire in a single devastating volley that
caused the massive machine to stagger backward. Troopers bounded across toward
the hole, one of them ripping his launcher from his daysack.

My fire team remained
focused onto the burrow entrance, and just as well we had. As we approached the
sandbags, one of them moved slightly, and then they fell away as a Loyalist
emerged from the ground.

Yulia shot him dead
before he even made it halfway out of the hole, without even breaking her
stride. Another Loyalist squeezed through the gap, meeting the same fate before
he managed to throw his grenade. Instead of landing on the floor, the grenade
fell back into the burrow, and someone below him screamed in horror.

The bodies of the two
Loyalists jolted as the grenade detonated below them, splattering blood up onto
the ceiling.

We reached the
tunnel, just as another soldier attempted to break out from the smouldering
hole, his visor shattered and blood pouring from his eyes and ears. Myers
stabbed him in the chest, and then fired into the hole below.

A sudden burst of
darts ripped through the bodies, striking the ceiling in a shower of sparks and
causing us to topple backwards. I struck my helmet on the ground as I fell, and
for a second I thought I would lose consciousness.

‘Fucking hell,’ Myers
exclaimed, picking himself up from the ground. ‘They won’t take no for an answer!’

I got up onto my
hands and knees, my mind spinning. It was as though the last of my strength had
suddenly left me.

They won’t take no
for an answer
. My vision becoming
blurred again as I struggled to understand something I knew to be important.

They won’t take no
for an answer.
They weren’t fighting
with such ferocity because they were bloodthirsty - they were desperate. That
was their only way out!

‘Sm-mart m-missile!’
I blurted, my words becoming muddled. Myers blinked at me, concerned that I was
on my hands and knees, and alarmed at the Loyalists struggling to emerge from
the burrow. ‘Only way out …’

Yulia’s eyes widened
as she suddenly understood what I was saying. ‘The burrow only has one
entrance! A smart missile will kill them all!’

Myers snapped into
action, grasping his launcher and preparing it to fire. Yulia and Skelton
sprayed their weapons into the hole, stepping back as the Loyalists returned
fire.

The command bunker
had clearly been built at short notice, its burrow dug out with only one
entrance. It wasn’t supposed to be a fighting position after all - its staff
would withdraw long before the FEA arrived. They hadn’t expected for us to
attack from above, though. Now, trapped inside their underground lair, they
were fighting with everything they had to escape. A single smart missile, with
its powerful charge, would make the same mess inside the burrow as it had
before, except this time there were even less entrances for the pressure to
escape. We could kill them all in an instant.

Myers ran with his
launcher back toward the hole.

‘Make it count,
mate!’ Skelton shouted, as the young trooper stuck the weapon into the hole and
fired.

The missile leapt
into the tunnel, and the fire team had less than a second to dive out of the
way before it detonated inside the chamber below with a mighty thump.

I collapsed onto the
ground, my arms no longer able to hold my body up.

‘Man down!’

Once again those
words.  Once again it was me who was the casualty. Hands grasped at my datapad
as somebody went to check my vital readings.

‘He’s got an internal
bleed!’ I heard Myers shout.

The world appeared to
move in slow motion, and as I watched, Puppy’s fire team stormed into the
burrow, their weapons roaring as they fired into the belching smoke. Nearby,
the platoon commander orchestrated the defence of the building, which was now
under attack from a suit and several Loyalists across the street. Darts whizzed
through the air and explosions rocked the ground beneath me as the battle raged
on.

‘Can you help him?’ Yulia
sounded genuinely concerned as she leant over to look at me.

Skelton ignored her.
‘Shit, I don’t even know what to do with this. Who’s the section medic?’

Myers thought for a
second, and then shook his head in dismay. ‘Wildgoose …’

‘Jesus … who’s fucking
idea was that? Medic! Man down!’

My eyes fluttered for
a moment, as I felt the life draining from my body. My war on Eden was over. Finally
I would have peace.

‘Corporal Abdi, give
us your medic! Andy’s down!’

‘I’m busy, deal with
it yourself for now!’

‘I FUCKING CAN’T!’

I lost consciousness.

Back to the contents page

Evacuation

I heard a familiar
voice as I opened my eyes again, although it wasn’t one I wanted to hear.

'You fought well,
Andy,' Yulia said approvingly.

I opened my eyes to
see her kneeling beside where I lay. She wasn’t wearing her helmet or
respirator, and her long, dark hair flowed freely over her shoulders. She
stared down at me with the same cold, blank expression that I had grown used
to, and again I found myself wondering what went on in her mind. Suddenly my
eyes flicked to her rifle, which she cradled across her lap, and noticed that
her bayonet was still fixed and stained red with blood.

She noticed my eye
movements. 'The battle continued in the command centre after you went down. The
fight was bloody.'

I realised that my
body was strapped into a stretcher, and I was rendered virtually immobile. We
were in a square, windowless room - presumably somewhere in Dakar.

I had survived, and
to make it worse I was still in the presence of my Guard liaison officer. I
sighed deeply as the information sunk in.

'You wish you had
died,' Yulia said sadly.

I said nothing for a
moment, deciding to ignore her statement, then asked, 'Where’s the platoon?'

She flicked her head
toward the doorway. ‘Outside. They are using this building to rest. I thought
that I would come to see how you are.’

I would have been
flattered by her concern, if she wasn’t part of an army guilty of mass murder.

‘I’m fine,’ I said
curtly. I flexed my fingers and toes, testing that everything was still
working.  So the platoon had survived the battle, or at least some of them had.
If anything, that was a relief - I couldn't bear knowing that more of my
comrades had died. ‘So the FEA were successful?’ I asked.

She considered the
question, and then nodded. ‘Yes. The Loyalists withdrew when their command
centre fell. The FEA killed many of them as they ran, but did not kill as many
as we wanted. Many Loyalists escaped, and now they flee to the north.’

‘Well, at least you
have what you want. Another few kilometres and the border will be restored, and
then perhaps we can negotiate a cease fire. That’s what you want, right?
Peace?’

She studied me, as
though she were searching for a hidden meaning in my words.
She must know
what the Guard were plotting -
how could she not? We thought that we
were helping them to save their people, but really they didn’t care about them
any more than the Union did. They merely wanted power.

‘I have never experienced
peace,’ she said finally. ‘I doubt that it will ever return to Eden. Too much
blood has already been spilt.’

She was silent for a
while, as though trying to work out what to say next. Finally her eyes flicked
down to her datapad and she rose to her feet, pulling her respirator back over
her face.

‘I must go now, Andy.
The other liaison officer has already left. You have completed your mission,
but my work is not yet finished. I hope that you return to your family one day.
Maybe then you will find your peace.’

Before I could
respond, Myers appeared from behind my head, fixing Yulia with a glare, before
stooping over to look down at me. He grinned. 'How you doing down there?'

Yulia raised a hand
in goodbye, before leaving the room. I watched her go, thinking about the last
few words she had said:
‘You have completed your mission, but my work is not
finished’ … what did she mean by that?

Myers followed my
eyes and blinked. ‘No! You’re not falling in love with the psycho mass
murderer, are you? Your injuries are worse than I thought!’

I frowned. ‘Shut up,
you belter, don’t be ridiculous!’

He ignored my rebuke.
‘Well? How do you feel?’

I thought about it …
'I hurt all over.'

He laughed then. 'Well,
you did take a grenade to the face, and then fought for several hours with your
blood sloshing round inside you!'

I remembered
collapsing beside the command centre entrance. I wondered what damage had been
done to my body by my refusal to be extracted from the battle.

'How bad am I?'

'A few bleeds where
you reopened a couple of external injuries,’ he responded. ‘You’ve probably
given yourself some pretty nasty scars, I’m afraid.’

‘I don’t give a shit
about scars.’

‘The main injury is a
piece of shrapnel that punched into your guts. A team medic injected you with
internal clot. It’s some pretty nasty shit, apparently, so you can’t move. It’s
slowed down the bleeding, but the Boss wants you out quick. We’re extracting
soon anyway.’

‘I’m fine!’ I argued.
‘Let me up and I’ll walk out of the city.’

Myers shook his head.
‘No, I’m not falling for that again. You’re crazy, mate. You could have died!’

‘I’m not a prisoner,
Myers!’ I argued, losing my patience rapidly. ‘Undo the bastard straps!’

Myers lowered his
voice, leaning down close to me. He blinked as he spoke in a whisper, ‘I know what
you were doing when you were in that alleyway after the fight in that bar, and
I know what you said in the burrow when you took the grenade.’

I cast my mind back,
remembering in fuzzy detail what had happened in the smoke-filled chamber.
Let
me go
, I had said. My lips tightened.

‘I haven’t told
anyone,’ he added, after a long pause.

Myers knew that I’d
wanted to die, and he had clearly decided that he wasn’t going to let me out of
the stretcher.

I spoke slowly. ‘I’d
never do anything that unnecessarily endangered the lives of my men.’

‘I know,’ he said,
‘we’ve all seen you fight.’

‘And I wouldn’t do
anything stupid.’

He sighed, checking
behind him to make sure nobody was around to hear. ‘You don’t care about your
own life. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not the brightest trooper in the
galaxy, but even I know that’s pretty stupid.’

I blinked in surprise
at the young trooper’s speech. First I had been lectured by the sergeant major,
then Yulia, and now the youngest trooper in my section was having a go too - even
though he was barely twenty-years-old. Myers spoke to me like an old veteran,
wise beyond his years.
That’s what being close to death did to you
.

‘Where are we?’ I
asked, after a long, drawn-out silence.

‘A building on the
southern end of Dakar,’ he replied, apparently glad to change the subject.

I looked down and
inspected my body. My combats were stained red with blood, and were coated in
mud and soot.

I laughed bitterly.
‘Look at the state of me!’

‘At least we didn’t
need to plug your arse like Gritt,’ Myers chuckled mischievously.

I glared at him for a
second, but there was no malice in his remark. ‘Well, thank God for that.’

There was a commotion
just out of my vision then, and Myers looked up in alarm as the section crowded
into the room, hurriedly pulling their respirators back over their heads.

‘Good to see you’re
awake, Andy,’ Puppy said, as several troopers grasped my stretcher, grunting as
they lifted me, and one pulled my respirator back over my face. ‘We’re
extracting out of the city. Let’s go!’

I was carried out of
the room at speed, onto a landing and then down a staircase. It echoed with the
sound of urgent shouting, and I recognised the voice of the sergeant major as I
was carried onto the ground floor.

‘Let’s move, men!’ he
hollered, stalking along a corridor, as troopers frantically grabbed their kit.
‘Respirators on, weapons powered! Form-up outside!’

I was carried toward
a glass airlock, and we waited while Puppy found the button to open the
internal door.

I looked around at the
panicked platoon. ‘What’s going on?’

Puppy opened his
mouth to speak, but was cut short as the sergeant major stepped in and smashed
the glass through with his rifle butt.

‘Don’t piss around,
Puppy,’ he raged, ‘no one’s sending you a bill! Get him outside now!’

The section hurried
me through the airlock, ignoring the alarm that wailed as Puppy kicked the
outer door open.

Dakar had taken a
beating. Fires raged across the city - black smoke poured from smashed out
windows and holes blown through buildings. Masonry lay strewn across the
street, as well as the bodies of fallen soldiers, FEA and Loyalists alike.
Panicked shouts carried across the city, and somewhere a woman screamed.

Several civilians ran
past us, clutching at random household items. One of them spotted us, dropping
an item of clothing in his surprise. He gaped at us for a second, shocked by
the sight of Union troops, before a woman grabbed his arm and dragged him away.

‘The FEA have been
ordered to withdraw,’ Puppy explained to me as they set me down, waiting for
the remainder of the platoon to get outside. The sergeant major’s bellowing
voice echoed though the building, terrorising the remaining troopers.

‘Get out you fucking
weasels! You have ten seconds, or I’m leaving you behind! That means you too, Boss!’

I frowned. ‘Withdraw?
Why?’

‘We think the Guard
are coming.’

I turned to look at
the sky as the revelation sunk in. We had succeeded in enabling the FEA to take
Dakar, but our efforts had all been in vain - they had beaten the Loyalists,
but not the political will of the Guard, who had ordered them to leave so that
they could do their work. Now it was a race against time before we met the same
fate as the people of Dakar.

‘Go, go!’ I heard the
sergeant major yell, whipping one of the sections into a frenzy as they burst
from the glass airlock and onto the street. ‘You know where you’re doing,
Corporal Stanton! Get a grip of these men and get them to the city entrance
now!’

Boots pounded as the
section ran off down the street, hurrying toward the city entrance. I presumed
that they had been tasked to hold it open at all costs, so that the platoon
could extract through it.

The platoon commander
and his team followed them out, still adjusting his helmet. Clearly the platoon
had been resting, expecting an easy extraction. No such luck. Now that the
Guard were coming, there was no way EJOC would allow a squadron of dropships
into Dakar. We had to escape, or we would all die in the city.

More casualties came
out of the building, one on a stretcher and two more walking wounded. The
sergeant major checked each of us off - counting to make sure we were all out.

Another stretcher
emerged from the building, and the sergeant major’s head shot around to stare
in alarm at the last section as they brought it out onto the street.

‘He doesn’t come!’ he
shouted, and the section hesitated. ‘Put him down! We don’t have the luxury to
bring our dead! Jesus Christ, men, wake up!’ The section placed down the
stretcher as the sergeant major stormed up to them. ‘Strip his kit,’ he ordered,
his voice returning to normal. ‘Datapad, ammo - definitely take that. Good.
Give me one of his grenades.’

He lifted the dead
trooper slightly, and then placed the grenade under it, activating it once his
body rested against the fly-off lever. He tugged at the troopers’ combats,
making sure that the grenade couldn’t be seen.

‘Now leave him,’ he
said, his beady eyes darting across the platoon. ‘He’ll forgive us all when we
all get to hell. Prepare to move!’

The platoon repeated
the command, and I was lifted back into the air.

‘Boss,’ he said,
turning to the platoon commander. ‘I’m off!’

The platoon commander
nodded. ‘Roger!’

‘Right, let’s go! Get
these stretchers moving!’

My stretcher rocked
as my section broke into a run, following on behind the sergeant major. His
protection group split off either side of the street, scanning the buildings as
the train of casualties limped or were carried south toward the city entrance.
Somewhere behind, Mr Barkley brought up the rear with Corporal Abdi’s section.