Out of the Black (Odyssey One, Book 4) (65 page)

“Fire as they enter your range,” he ordered. “Hold the line until the civilians get clear, or everything we’ve done will be for nothing”

The heavy machine guns joined in a few moments later, the punctuated roars of the anti-matériel rifles already echoing across the defensive perimeter. Eric just kept his steady rate of fire, nudging the power a little higher as the alien swarm got closer.

The Drasin particle beams sizzled across the line, burning men down and tearing into the defensive fortifications with hellish effectiveness. Eric didn’t move, but he could hear
others fall back . . . some probably running . . . and a few people just fell over and began retching from the smell.

He was thankful for his environmental armor. At least
that
wasn’t going to be a problem for him, but he knew that he had to firm up the line or it was all over.

“Hold your ground!” he called over every speaker and PA in the place. “Don’t show those bastards your back. All they’ve got coming is from the muzzle of your rifles!”

Swenson, who was somehow still standing beside him, joined in quickly.

“If this is our Alamo, then so be it!” the ranger called. “This is
Texas,
and we ain’t running from no jumped-up bugs from fucking space! Get your sorry butts back in the line before you have
me
to worry about, ’cause I swear I’ll make you
wish
those buggers were the only thing after you!”

Eric snorted, but thankfully the computer didn’t send that along to the PA. The ranger had a way with words, he would give him that. The man would have made a fine drill sergeant, he’d have bet, maybe even a better master sergeant. It worked too, for the most part. Many of those who had begun to break were now sheepishly moving back into line, and the volume of fire was increasing.

That didn’t mean that the enemy wasn’t getting closer, however.

With a line that thick, and what seemed to be nearly infinite resources, there was just no stopping it.

Eric heard the whine of another lifter rising into the air, and risked a glance over his shoulder. The inner courtyard was thinned out now. Only a few hundred people were left and another lifter was packing them in as fast as it could. He hoped it was enough, but in the end it didn’t make much difference what he hoped.

The Cherokee screamed by overhead, arcing around and bringing its door gunner to bear on the Drasin line. The heavy gun roared, pelting the Drasin with a barrage of lethal slugs, but they just drove over their own dead in a rolling wave of motion. It would have been fascinating to watch were it not for the imminent threat of the situation, Eric thought idly as he kept up his fire.

Like something from a nature documentary, perhaps, or a natural disaster film.

The sizzling pops of the alien weapons filled the air now, forcing the defending line to hunker down low and fire over the top of the berm that was protecting them. Few things stopped a Drasin particle beam, Eric had learned, but a few thousand tons of bermed earth was thankfully one of them.

The beams scorched the far side and turned air to ozone overhead, but he and his people were mostly protected as they fired back in turn. It wasn’t perfect. Sometimes a beam would slide just high or low enough to scour the top of the berm and take a few, or a few dozen, men apart. Sometimes a big rock hidden in the berm would be overheated by the enemy beam weapon and explode violently, tearing troops limb from limb in the process.

“Last lifter is loaded! We’re taking off!”

Eric ducked down, looking back to see that the courtyard was now cleared for the most part, with only men running for smaller planes and choppers.

“Alright, Swenson, take your troops and start falling back!” he ordered. “Get them to the lift birds and the hell out of here!”

“What about you!?”

Eric turned the power on the Priminae weapon up, his face set grim. “Someone has to be the rear guard, Ranger.
I’ve got the tools for the job. You don’t. Get your ass moving.”

The ranger looked at him, clearly torn for a moment, then nodded curtly. He grabbed his radio. “Everyone . . . pull back! Pull back!”

The line broke then. Most of them had just been praying for such an order. Eric crawled up higher, pushing his gravity rifle ahead of him but not firing as he took in the scene for a second. The swarm of Drasin was effectively unchecked. If they’d been slowed, he couldn’t tell.

Eric thumbed the power settings on his rifle up, going well past the safe levels as he waited for the unarmored men to clear the blast zone.

“Cherokee One, Weston,” he said, eyes not leaving the approaching wall of enemy forces.

“Go for Cherokee, Weston.”

“Get some altitude,” he ordered. “You’re going to want a better view.”

There was a brief pause before the pilot came back. “Roger that, Weston. Pulling up to watch the show. Make it good.”

“You got it.” Weston grinned humorlessly as the Cherokee’s engines whined loud enough to crack glass, clawing for altitude.

He got up to one knee, aiming the GWIZ at the enemy line, leading it just slightly. They were getting close enough now that he knew that he was going to feel the blast wave himself, armor or not.

So be it
.

He stoked the firing stud. The rifle barely twitched in his arms even as it loosed a heavy depleted uranium round into the air. The blast wave of the round hitting air shook him
through his armor, though, and for a moment his vision was occluded by the condensation cloud it left behind.

Said cloud was blown away a few seconds later as the blast wave washed over him, slamming into his armor like the hammer of the gods, and Eric was able to see the enemy line again.

A mushroom cloud was rolling back over the ground, low and slow, with shaken and shattered Drasin on either side of the strike point. They regrouped quickly, and he watched the line begin to move again, coming straight at him now.

Eric fired again.

And then again, and again.

He fired the rifle dry, reloaded, and emptied it again. Each time the dust and smoke redoubled, then was blown away by the blast wave of the next shot. Dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of the Drasin soldier drones were left broken on the field.

Yet the wave kept coming.

A whining rush of an engine settled behind him, causing Eric to glance around in time to see the Cherokee settle into a hover just a few feet away.

“Time to go, Cap!” the gunner called. “We’ve got a Shiva Option Alert.”

Eric nodded, slinging his rifle as he turned. He jumped for it, landing inside the Cherokee as the pilot pulled the big craft up and away. Eric turned around, leaning back out the door as the battered Drasin forces took the berm, scuttling over it and into the base they were leaving behind. He could see them pulling down the towers, tearing apart the temporary command housing, and generally making a mess of the place as the Cherokee turned and poured on the speed.

They just broke Mach when a flash of light filled
everything,
like a million flashbulbs had just gone off.

Eric didn’t have to look behind to know that Dallas wasn’t there anymore.

He slumped into a seat and strapped in. He didn’t feel like talking to anyone just then.

“Breaker’s bane.”

Bermont didn’t know exactly what that meant, but he’d heard more than a few of his Priminae crew whisper it and it felt fitting. They were a hundred kilometers outside of Dallas, orbiting the city at a leisurely pace, and every one of them was glued to the image of the rolling nuclear mushroom cloud that had engulfed the city.

Some rear part of his mind filled in the blanks, noting that it seemed to be a weapon in the five-hundred-megaton range to judge by the diameter of the blast wave. Few things inside it would remain in one piece. The shock front was far too powerful for that. It would be like getting slapped upside the head by a tank moving at Mach One.

“Did . . . did the Drasin do
that?
”

Bermont looked over to where one of the younger Priminae soldiers was gaping and he dropped a hand on the man’s shoulder.

“No, Travor, we did,” he said. “Sometimes, you must cut out the poison before it spreads.”

“But . . . it was a city, with people, no?” Travor asked plaintively. “A small one, I know, but . . .”

Bermont closed his eyes, trying not to either laugh or cry. For Travor, Dallas was indeed a very small city, but that wasn’t the point.

“Yes, it was, but it was a Drasin city. They took it from us, and we would rather see it
burn
than see them turn its resources against us,” he said honestly and earnestly. It made him feel better as well, to be honest, straightening the point in his own head. “Better to die in a flash of glory than be slowly consumed by
those
.”

“Lieutenant!”

He turned away, moving toward the front of the craft. “Yes?”

“We have a hit on Captain Weston’s IFF,” the copilot said. “The
Odysseus
signals that he is in a small craft, heading due east.”

“Alright, lock in and track him,” Bermont ordered. “We have to run him down.”

“Yes sir.”

Eric looked out the side door of the Cherokee as they moved along, watching the flying nap of the Earth and heading toward the FOB operating on the Texas/Mississippi border. He was staring at but not really seeing the terrain as it flew past, his thoughts tied more to the fact that he’d just been part of deploying a nuclear weapon on Confederate territory.

It was the sort of thing that no man should ever do, or have to do. The kind of thing that military nightmares were made of. The worst of it was, he knew that he wasn’t the first and wouldn’t be the last. Not in this new war, not with this new enemy.

He was mentally falling into a tailspin, and he knew it but didn’t care. There were some things that deserved the depression that sort of thinking would eventually bring, but this time
it wasn’t to be. Before he could get too deep, a violent shake of the Cherokee startled him back to the moment and would have tossed him out the side door if he hadn’t strapped himself in already.

“Holy shit! Where the hell did that come from?”

Eric was about to ask what the pilot was talking about when he spotted the thing in question and recognized it.