Out of the Black (Odyssey One, Book 4) (64 page)

“Pardon me?” Susan scowled, both irritated that he still hadn’t acknowledged the order and now puzzled. “What captain?”

“There’s only one for us, love,” he grinned. “Found him down here kicking ass and taking names . . . Alright, almost getting his own ass kicked too, but he was doing alright for a flyboy.”

“Captain?
The
captain?” Susan leaned in, her face growing larger. “Sean, he burnt up with the
Odyssey
. . .”

“If so then he left one pissed-off and ass-kicking ghost,” Bermont said. “I’ll find him and begin falling back. We are doing that anyway. I’ll contact you for new orders once we’re clear of Dallas.”

Susan blinked, shook her head, and managed to stammer out the appropriate response.

“Roger that, Lieutenant,” she said, her voice dropping to a whisper. “Be careful.”

“Never careful, love, just damned good at what I do.” He grinned. “Bermont clear and out. Ciao.”

The signal went off and he brought the tactical network back to the front. “Alright everyone, fall back by the numbers. Get any civilians you see out of the city and meet at the Gamma point. We’ve got new orders coming down the pipeline.”

His team acknowledged as he swept the street he was on, then refocused on his HUD. “Does anyone have the captain’s location? I don’t see his IFF on my screens.”

Dallas was officially a worse hole than any Middle Eastern burg he’d ever fought in or over. Eric hung out of the side door of the Cherokee as he lifted off, a strap keeping him from plunging to the ground below. The Priminae GWIZ was in his hands and he was firing judiciously placed rounds with the power set higher than he’d normally prefer to use given his proximity to the targets.

Fifty or so of the drones were rushing over fallen debris and their own dead as they charged toward the Cherokee, scrambling up the side of a nearby building as they threw themselves at the flying machine with suicidal ferocity. Eric shifted and fired a round into the far corner of the building, the kinetic round causing an explosion of dust and debris as it tore right through and slammed into the ground beyond.

Damn it
. He fired again, cursing the engineers who’d apparently decided to make the damn building as indestructible as possible and succeeded far better than he would have preferred.

“Watch it, sir! They’re on the roof!”

“Take them out! I’m trying to take the building down!” he roared over the sound of the heavy machine gun firing beside him.

The door gunner didn’t need that order. As soon as he saw the damn things literally crawling over each other in order to get a few meters closer to the Cherokee, he’d opened fire. The
heavy automatic rail cannon roared. The noise blended into one single sound as he tore into their ranks, killing dozens.

It didn’t matter to them, however. They just used their dead as a bridge to get that one step closer. Eric watched it, fascinated, from the corner of his focus. He’d seen ants do that before, climbing over their dead and living to form bridges, buildings, even weapons with which to assault their enemies. He’d never thought to see it in a species this size before, and the imagery was enough to give him nightmares.

He had something to focus on to keep those thoughts at bay, however, and he re-aimed his GWIZ, firing again. This time it went into the building higher up but angled deeper down, and he watched with satisfaction as the entire lower section blew out in a massive explosion of dust. The structure began to creak, shifting visibly, and he watched even more avidly as he worried about just what direction it was going to fall.

“Holy shit!”

The pilot’s scream was understandable, but a little disappointing to Eric really. He liked to imagine that back in his day there was a little higher standard of professionalism. He was probably delusional, he knew, but so be it.

The building had elected to fall north of their position, but part of it crumbled off in the process and came toppling down close enough to give them all a bit of a heart condition. He dropped the power on the GWIZ and joined the door gunner as they kept hammering the drones that continued to throw themselves at the Cherokee, even as the building collapsed under them.

Then captain and crew were clear, pulling up and above the top of the next building before dropping down into the manmade canyon of the streets beyond.

“That was
too
damn close, sir.” The pilot swore at him.

Eric just shrugged. “Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, son. We’re alive, we’ve got our civvies. Get us back to the evac point.”

There was a quiet for a time, but finally the pilot grudgingly acknowledged him.

Eric grinned. The fight was over. The war would continue, obviously, to the final end, but for now the fight was over and he could enjoy the satisfaction of the moment. It was one of the few pleasures that existed in combat.

The evacuation point was an armed camp.

Thrown up in just a few short hours, it had been mined for over two kilometers around the perimeter and had guard towers armed with heavy rail cannons along the primary line. Inside there was a flood of humanity, most armed to the teeth, dirty, and tired . . . but they were alive, and they were angry as hell for the most part.

Eric pushed through the throng of people, his armor giving him near immunity to whatever beef they thought they might have with him or the world in general. He watched as a heavy lifter took off, another one landing, and he knew that a few hundred more would be on their way to a safe zone.

If there is such a place
.

Dallas had mostly been cleared out weeks earlier, of course. What was here were the most stubborn and the most stupid, with a liberal mixing of the most brave. Some days it was hard to tell which was which, but that wasn’t exactly unusual in Eric’s experience. You needed a good mix of all three to stay in a war zone of one’s own volition, especially
one like this when you only had older military and civilian weapons at your disposal.

He’d heard of, and seen, some of the damage the Dallasites managed with old chem-fired weapons and was dutifully impressed. Granted, it required anti-matériel guns to penetrate the Drasin hide, but that barely slowed the defenders of Dallas down. Rigging improvised explosives from anything and everything they could find in the nearly abandoned city had become a game, a challenge, and a point of pride to them, and they had proved to be good at it.

It was over now.

No more games, no more fighting the enemy on their terms. The Drasin may
be
weapons of self-destruction, but they weren’t the only ones kicking around. Not on
this
planet.

“What’s the status on the evacuation, Swenson?” he asked, pushing the flap of the tent aside as he stepped in.

“Everyone we can find is out of the city,” the ranger grumbled, still far from happy with the current situation.

It wasn’t that Eric blamed him, of course, but there was a time to be pissy about things and a time to just get down and get them done regardless. He just nodded, however, and ignored the other man’s mood.

“Good. How long until the last of them are lifted out then?”

“Last I checked we were almost there. Another couple heavy lifters should take the bulk of them.” Swenson said. “But . . .”

Eric didn’t get a chance to hear what the man was going to say because at that point a young Guardsman stormed into the tent, panting. “Sir! They’re coming!”

It didn’t take a genius to work out who “they” were, and both Eric and Swenson were on the move instantly.

They burst out of the tent, glanced around briefly, and headed for the biggest and loudest grouping along the perimeter on the Dallas side of the camp. Eric paused, grabbing the Guardsman by the shoulder, and twisted him around. “Keep the crowds moving and get everyone in the lifters. Pack them in, if you have to. Just get
everyone
out of here!”

“Sir! Yes sir!”

He left the young soldier to those duties and rushed through the crowd to catch up with Swenson, who was already well ahead of him. They reached the perimeter about the same time. Eric had the advantage of a much more imposing armored form and was able to travel through the ranger’s wake as Swenson parted the crowd, then climbed up on the embankment the earth movers had put into place.

“Well shit,” Swenson said simply, eyes glued to his binoculars.

Eric didn’t need them. His armor was more than able to enhance the sight before him, but then he almost wished that it hadn’t. The aliens had burst from Dallas in a swarm, like an explosion of army ants now intent on moving onward to their next conquest. He couldn’t count the numbers, not in a roiling, packed grouping like that. Eric knew enough to know that the answer to how many there were was simply “too many.”

He brought up the tactical channel. “This is Weston. Get everyone on the lifters. I want all pilots sitting in their birds
now
. If it can fly, I want it ready to be airborne in five minutes. If it can’t, leave it. Rifle teams to the northern perimeter. I say again, rifle teams to the northern perimeter.”

Most of them were already leaning in that direction, but his orders set everyone moving with a vengeance. Eric climbed up to the top of the bank, taking a knee as he unlimbered the
Priminae gravity rifle he carried, judging the range both by eye and by the suit’s range finder.

The key weakness of the Priminae weapon, in his experience, was that on the higher power settings
everything
you could put into it as a projectile would inevitably ablate in atmosphere. That meant that it had a stupidly low effective range for when you
really
needed the power. So he kept the power under two-thirds, not wanting to kill anyone standing beside him from the shock wave of the round alone, and took aim.

It also fired relatively slowly. He put out about one round a second, and honestly it couldn’t do a lot better than that even if he hadn’t wanted to pick his shots. The depleted uranium rounds he was firing now were far more massive than the diamond ones the Priminae favored, but also far softer and more prone to ablation, and they kicked up a rooster tail behind them with every shot. The ablated metal slammed into the front line of the charging aliens, blowing one to hell and back. Others were thrown across the line with enough force, he hoped, to break some of what passed for bones in the alien beasts.