Forged by Battle (WarVerse Book 1) (16 page)
Read Forged by Battle (WarVerse Book 1) Online
Authors: Patrick J. Loller
Part 4
Chapter 38
The Exile
The moment the Exile's vehicle passed through the portal she was assaulted by the unfiltered AMI transmissions of countless soldiers fighting for their lives. The cacophony threatened to overtake her, the pain of so many open channels spiking through her.
She redoubled the defenses in her mind, and casting out her Web as far as she could reach, she combed the battlefield for the consciousness of the Condemned platoon. Voices continued to wash over her, but her mental bulwarks held against the strain. As she searched, a picture of the battle formed in her mind. She picked up the views of dozens of soldiers, each snapshot pulling away the fog. In her mind's eye she pictured the Terran forces, and the Condemned lit up like beacons as she connected to their AMIs.
The Joint Fleet soldiers were set up in the dozen or so buildings that made up the research compound. They were built around the portal in a full three-sixty defense. The jungle beyond the buildings did not acknowledge the Terran claim to the land, and the foliage pressed in close, giving the enemy advantage of approach. An energy shield dome, just barely visible to the naked eye, ended only a few meters beyond the furthest building’s edge.
The Exile's battle map shuddered as a fireball slammed into the energy shield. Exile remained motionless, her attention focused beyond the vehicle she occupied and on those bright lights of consciousness that dotted the battlefield. The Condemned were the easiest to spot, their AMIs distinct compared to the average ground trooper, but the real difference came in the emotions they broadcast. Every soldier had some fear, no matter how veteran they were. The Condemned broadcast nothing—they were literally fearless.
Exile focused her Web onto one such light—the soldier repairing the shield generator. She spun her thoughts into a tendril and reached inside the soldier’s mind, attempting to see the battle from his perspective.
The soldier crouched low as a fireball smashed into the shield overhead. The unearthly roar shook his skull, and with that distraction, she was in and experiencing everything he did.
***
The wave of heat roared over Cowboy's exposed skin, and his nose was assaulted by the acrid wash of smoke and brimstone. As the worst of the heat dissipated, he pushed himself up and out of the mud, and reached out to wipe the monitor in front of him clean. He cursed as he cleared away the grime. Beneath the cracked glass, the numbers read too low, flashed too red to be accurate.
One fireball couldn't have been enough to take out a shield grid that large
, he thought.
Damn elves must have ripped up a relay
. He squinted down the field and tried to judge the distance from his position to the next emitter: a hundred meters between buildings over open ground. The pounding rain wasn't making anything easier.
Snarling, Cowboy ripped soot-covered goggles from his eyes and spat onto the lenses. While rubbing them on an even dirtier sleeve, he took a less obstructed view of the battlefield. His team was hunkered down in the crumpled husk of a biodome, their position directly beside a company of 101st regulars who occupied the adjacent building. Behind his team, at the center of the compound, was the distinct blurring of air that marked a portal. The elves outside his shield were pushing them up against it. Soon they would have nowhere to fall back to, and they would lose the beachhead they had fought so hard to gain.
The 101st Infantry Battalion entrenched with them had pitifully little tech, gnome or otherwise. Most were still wielding the weapons of the last Terran war. Their M-4's cracked loudly and filled the narrow passages with the smell of cordite, while their crew-served machine guns that belched off streams of lead in sequence as they talked back and forth. Cowboy had been with the Condemned for so long he had nearly forgotten the sound of pre-contact weaponry. Pinned down and facing steep odds was not the time he wanted to hear it.
Truth be told, his own platoon wasn't faring much better. Their mission had taken them so far from supply lines that most of their tech had broken down or run out of power. When the original incursion had been pushed back, his platoon was trapped behind enemy lines, and only with this latest beachhead were they able to link back up with Terran forces. At this point they might as well be ground pounders for all the good their unpowered gear was doing.
Through the distortion of his shield, Cowboy could see maybe a meter into the foliage around the compound. It was a truly terrible place to defend, lending cover to the enemy as they filtered through the trees. Enemy artillery, or their bastardized version of it, pounded down upon their position as Terran forces attempted to discern targets through the forest, and the beachhead was far too small to move their own guns.
It was only a matter of time before the overtaxed shield fell and the elves pushed forward, and to make things worse, they had found a way to launch small projectiles through what should have been an impenetrable wall. The tiny black spears managed to stay intact beyond the shield just long enough to pierce through soldiers’ bodies before the instability from their passing the energy barrier caused them to explode. At this point, the shield was actually giving them an advantage; Cowboy didn't think the projectiles would explode without it, but to lose the shield was to be overrun. They were outgunned, outmanned, and running out of time. Grimacing at the idea of close combat or being spiked down by one of the elves’ shots, Cowboy mentally keyed his holocammies to camouflage and hoped he had enough power for the dash. Grunting, he darted out from cover and across the open ground.
***Exile pulled back from Cowboy's mind as another light flared. The platoon sergeant, codename Killswitch, was calling out orders to cover Cowboy's sprint.
"Lift fire!" he shouted, the words barely audible over the noise.
He lowered his binoculars to observe the gun crew. They were thirty meters down the buildings, manning the last powered heavy weapon. Beast, the gunner, laid down the trigger and a series of eye-searing plasma bolts tore across the space between the buildings. They passed easily through the shield and splintered the line of trees beyond.
Killswitch swore as the line of fire passed dangerously close to Cowboy.
"Daredevil, take up the slack," Killswitch shouted to the other gunner.
Exile could see that the other gunner was positioned on the only remaining part of the second story of the biodome. With barely enough room for himself, he was operating an old M240B, a belt fed machine gun that spat 7.62 rounds. His assistant gunner, Snowball, was crouching on a ruined pillar beside him, his eyes glued to a pair of binoculars, and calling out targets as they moved between the trees.
Both minds shone in Exile's Web as they responded to their new orders. The gunner traversed his weapon to lay down covering fire for Cowboy, his advantage in height allowing him to clear the sprinting figure. With each burst of fire the gun slammed into his shoulder, his mind flared with excitement. A touch of surprise dampened his light in Exile's Web. He pressed himself low, and a heartbeat later a thick black spike whistled past where his head had been. It slammed into the building behind him, where it detonated, taking out piece of a wall.
The gunner leaned forward again and continued firing, and the Exile pulled herself back to view the field as a whole once again.
She had only discovered her platoon’s involvement in the beachhead a scarce half hour before she breached the portal. Once she had realized they were planetside, it was a simple affair to find a ride down to the colony. As a newly minted Special Forces lieutenant, she was afforded certain privileges, not the least of them the ability to commandeer a shuttle. Her Web ensured none of the other soldiers would remember her.
Though they were based on the
Inferno
,
the platoon had almost no record in any of the computers she had searched. The best she had found was a list of fifteen code names.
She would need to dive into their minds for more intel on their capabilities, but she had worked with Special Forces soldiers before. Each was an army unto himself. These were the best the humans had to offer.
Her Web trembled, alerting her that Cowboy was close to a source of the energy the human's called “magic.” He had not recognized the threat, so Exile dove her consciousness forward into his and flashed a warning in his mind.
***
Rounds peppered the ground as Cowboy sprinted across the last open space to the relay. He was unshielded, wearing no armor, and inches from the front line. A shadow of doubt touched him, though he shrugged off the feeling, knowing the barrier was still up, and his holocammies were keeping him somewhat hidden.
The relay itself was a scant meter from the shield; its disc-shaped antenna projected the energy barrier between him and the enemy. As he dropped down into the mud to check the diodes, he felt a sudden sense of foreboding, followed by a blood-thirsty roar.
Reacting on instinct, he threw himself to the side. He dropped his hand to his hip for his sidearm as the feral lashed out at him. Cowboy saw only a blur of white fur and savage claws before red sprayed into his eyes. Wiping the grime from his face, he scrambled to cover the wound.
It wasn't until he noticed the monster slumped on the ground in front of him, its side littered with bloodied holes, that he realized it wasn't his blood. The feral looked almost like an oversized wolf, with pitch-black claws and wicked-looking horns over its eyes. Along its spine was a row of spikes that extended down along a whip-like tail and came together at the tip. Tight muscles bulged beneath blood-matted fur as it heaved its death rattle from its chest.
Cowboy holstered his sidearm and vaulted over the dead elf. He reached with his other hand for the toolkit he kept on his belt, dropping it on his knee as he forced his shaking hand to hold steady. His heart screamed in his throat, vibrating his temples as he concentrated on the relay and not the adrenaline surging through him.
Too close a call
, he thought.
No way I could have gotten the shot off
.
***
Exile pushed down the anger that threatened to rise within her.
Distraction kills more than the sharpest knife
. Cowboy had ignored her first warning, and her second was too late to help him—only the swift reactions of his teammate had saved him. They were unaccustomed to her methods, too steeped in battle to heed her telepathic suggestions. She was unable to move forward while trapped in her vehicle, and so the battle would play out without her interference.
But the operators inside her vehicle had begun arguing, and Exile reluctantly listened in.
"The damned instant we passed through the portal we lost them, Sergeant" one yelled from the rear of the truck.
"How could we lose all the coms?" the driver called back. "They have damn near a thousand redundancies." A similar sentiment emanated from one of the Condemned.
***
"You fix the coms yet?" Killswitch called as he huddled low beside a soldier called Locksmith. He glanced over his shoulder at the platoon sergeant with a sneer and ducked as another spike whistled over them.
"I'm not a radio operator; I know how to turn them on and off," Locksmith spat. "That's all."
"I realize that, damn it, but I need coms and you're all we’ve got," the sergeant spat back. He shook his head and glanced down the field. "How could an entire battalion lose coms?"
"Magic," Locksmith muttered, rolling his eyes, then went back to his work on the radio. Of all the tech they had lost that day—blasters, motion trackers, thermals—it was the radios that hurt most. The device wasn't actually a radio, of course; radio waves hadn't been used since pre-contact. Honestly, Locksmith had no idea what the thing emitted, only that it could go through portals and get them reinforcements, and maybe some desperately needed counter battery.
Locksmith had no desire to be bent over the little unit in the middle of a firefight; he should have ben laying down rounds against the cursed ferals, but they needed to get heavy support, and soon. If only he could access the bionet like he was supposed to be able to, then his AMI could tell him exactly how to fix it, but no such luck. So he pulled the unit apart and gave himself a crash course in communications.
The gnome radio wasn't like anything he had tinkered with before. Locksmith was a breacher, not commo. He dealt with portals, doorways, and things with locks—physical or otherwise. He just didn't have enough experience to know how this blasted thing worked. Not for the first time, he bit back a curse rising to his lips. Another deep breath and he pulled another set of wires from the box. He would just push them together until something worked.
***
Despite her attention on her own platoon, Exile still sensed the general tide of emotions shifting across the entrenched soldiers. Despite the initial determination to establish a beachhead and push the enemy off their colony world, the troops had too little equipment to hold against the forces the elves had amassed. The dull thuds of detonating rockets had begun to wane as the 101st expended the last of its shoulder-carried launchers. The thunderous roars of machine guns had become the intermittent growls of a dying beast, and the cries of “Forward!” and “To victory!” had been drowned out by calls of “Medic!” and “Fall back!”
