The Siege of Earth (The Ember War Saga Book 7) (10 page)

Elias kept his back to the wall of the small, enclosed bunker. The other Iron Hearts were braced against the sides. A screen on the wall counted down to zero and the ground shook like someone had dropped a battleship on Mars a few miles away.

“I’m liking these macro cannons,” Kallen said. “Would be nice to see the end result.”

“I’m sure Garret will put together a highlight reel once it’s all said and done,” Bodel said. “The man loves his propaganda.”

“He sounds jealous. ‘Bodel’ didn’t have any lines in the movie,” Kallen said.

“You sound snippy. They didn’t make a limited-edition action figure of you,” Bodel said to her.

“Just because I’m a girl and they don’t make a little plastic me for the kids?” Kallen’s voice rose an octave. “I played with action figures when I was a little girl. I had to hack my family’s 3-D printer to make an Athena after I saw that
Olympus
movie. I find the Ibarra Corp douche that made that decision and I’ll crush his damn head.”

“At least you’re taking it well,” Elias said.

The screen on the wall beeped several times.

“Fire mission,” Elias said, reading from a message displayed inside his womb, “battle cruiser coming in from the southeast. Green platoon will fire with us. Displace to bunker Golf-19 after rounds complete. Follow me.”

Elias grabbed a thick metal handle bolted to the rock and heaved a sliding door aside. Red sand swept past the exit.

Elias ran through the door, his heavy footfalls crushing the jagged edges of black rocks as he went to a small mesa. He vaulted over the edge and found a patch of solid rock. He raised his right foot and dropped the anchor running up his lower leg into the rock.

His rail gun lifted up from his shoulder and locked down next to his helm. He turned to the southeast and easily found the incoming target. The Xaros construct burned through the Martian atmosphere like a comet, trailing fire miles behind it.

“Locked,” Bodel said from several yards away. Kallen flashed him a thumbs-up.

“Green, status report,” Elias said into the IR.

“Two locked,”
Caas said,
“third broke his anchor point and is—”

“We have thirty seconds until we fire and no time for excuses,” Elias said.

“Three locked,”
Caas sent back a moment later.

The vibration of his charging rail gun coursed through his womb. A target reticule appeared just in front of the Xaros ship and Elias lined up his shot. Firing a bullet that could reach orbit meant little in the way of adjusting for gravity and atmospheric effects to the trajectory, especially not when the target was coming right for them.

“Drones! Drones coming in low and fast,” said Zuli, the third member of the Dotok green platoon.

“Hold your anchor,” Elias said. Threat icons appeared over distant drones cresting over the top of a canyon. They’d be on the armor in seconds. “Fire in three…two…mark.”

Rail cannons fired in a ripple from the Iron Hearts and the Dotok armor. Elias didn’t bother to see if the shots connected as he swung his rail gun off his shoulder and brought his rotary cannon to bear. The multi-barreled weapon spun to life and spat white-hot tungsten bullets toward the dozens of drones bearing down on them, with more coming over the canyon walls every second.

Elias withdrew his anchor back into the leg housing and sidestepped toward a rocky outcrop that could provide some cover.

The combined fire of six rotary cannons ripped through the approaching drones, blunting their advance like a levy against a flash flood. He picked off any drones that made it through with his forearm cannons.

Elias’ shoulder cannon ceased firing, but kept spinning. Error icons flashed, alerting him to a broken belt in the ammo housing. He cursed, increased the rate of fire on his forearm cannon and ran toward Kallen.

The stream of drones over the ridge ceased, leaving more than fifty still heading for the armor. The drones veered up as one, flying straight into the sky. 

“I’m stuck!”
Zuli shouted.
“My anchor won’t release!”

The drones’ path curved into a dive then split into two paths, one heading toward each group of armor.

Elias took aimed shots at the drones flying straight for them as Kallen opened a panel on the back of Elias’ armor, tore away a kink in the ammo belt, and reloaded the weapon. She slapped him on the back once she closed the access panel.

Stalks lit up across the swarm of drones. The Iron Hearts deployed their shields and bunched together, their weapons firing through gaps in their wall. A beam struck Elias’ shield and slashed across Kallen’s. Black smoke rose from the impact, but the shield held.

Elias fired off two rounds and shattered a drone. Five drones were seconds away from hitting the wall.

“Ready…break!” Elias jumped aside from Kallen. He reached out and snagged a charging drone by its stalks and slammed it into the side of the bunker. The drone cracked the bunker wall and tugged at Elias’ grip. He swung the drone overhead and bashed it into the ground. He raised his right heel, released the tip of his anchor out of his heel and impaled the drone. 

Red and orange pyrite exploded out of the impact.

Elias looked to Bodel and saw the soldier’s cannons leveled right at him. Elias instantly ducked. Bodel’s cannons destroyed a drone that had been mere feet behind Elias.

“Clear,” Kallen said.

A roar filled the air. Elias looked up and saw the cruiser, dying, broken into burning fragments coming down on Mars. He quickly guessed as to the wreckage’s path, as it may or may not have fully disintegrated before it hit, and was sure it wouldn’t hit the Nerio macro cannon.

Gauss shells shot over the ridge between Green platoon and the Iron Hearts.

“Let’s go.” Elias took off running to the battle still raging between the Dotok armor and the drones. Fire subsided to nothing as he rounded the corner. A dozen broken drones lay in the Martian soil…and one suit of armor. Its chest had been ripped open, arms bent at the elbow to the sky, as if reaching for something.  One knee was bent, and Elias could see the anchor spike extending from the heel into the ground.

Caas and Ar’ri stood over the fallen armor.

Caas looked at Elias and waved her hand at Zuli. “He didn’t…didn’t blow his emergency release. Just was stuck there. We stayed…stayed with him.”

Elias went to the armor. Zuli’s womb was ripped open. He stared into the sky with still eyes, steam rising from the fluid that had been part of his womb. Elias popped up a shoulder panel on Zuli’s armor and removed an identity chip.

“Take his ammo, battery packs,” Elias said. He stepped back from the body and tried to connect to the local defense network. The lines were full of garbled transmissions and panicked updates.

“What? We can’t do that,” Ar’ri said. “The articles on his body at the moment of death—”

Bodel grabbed him by the chest.

“He’s dead. He can do nothing for you now but offer his gear. Take it and you might not end up like him.”

Caas lifted Zuli’s body and unsnapped an ammo canister. She tossed it to her brother. “They’re right, Ar’ri. We will atone at a shrine when this is over. Zuli will forgive us.” She stood up. One hand held Zuli’s rail gun clip, the other his spare battery stack.

“Red platoon is off-line,” Elias said. “Outrider companies in their sector are in contact.”

A distant macro cannon shell ripped through the atmosphere, leaving distended clouds and a line of fire in its wake. The flash of Xaros beams and exploding ships carried through the thin atmosphere high over their heads.

“Iron Hearts will go to Red sector,” Elias said. “You two get to bunker Golf-19. We go off-line, fall back to the Nerio cannon. Let’s move.”

Kallen waited for Elias and Bodel to run ahead of her. She fell back a few dozen yards and kept pace as they ran. A red icon pulsed against her vision, warning her of damage to her lower back. She hadn’t felt the drone stalk that pierced her armor and the womb beneath it. Her armor had resealed itself around the puncture and saved her from the Martian atmosphere, but the suit warned her of damage to her body.

Kallen opened her eyes. The fluids in her tank swam with red eddies. She was bleeding. Elias and Bodel wouldn’t know—she’d cut off her vital reading from her suit’s telemetry reports as soon as her heart rate spiked at the beginning of the battle. Kallen dosed herself with an adrenaline spike and kept running.

Beside them
, she thought.
It must be beside them.

****

Paar raised his forearm cannons and knocked two drones off an antiair turret before they could kill the crew inside. He looked up and brought his rotary cannon to bear on a half-dozen drones screaming down on him and the other two Dotok armor soldiers of Green platoon. Ale’ti joined her rotary cannon to his, destroying the drones in a vicious crossfire.

“Nik’to, you want to help?” Paar asked.

Nik’to backed toward his platoon mates, scanning the skies.

“I’m getting some weird interference on the IR,” Nik’to said.

“Atmo on this dust ball isn’t helping,” Paar said. “Every time the dust kicks up we have to link to a tower to get anything.”

“Dust storms aren’t as bad as what we had on Takeni, and at least we can see the whole sky,” Nik’to said. He cocked his head to the sky and saw a sliver of light burning through the pink haze of blowing dust.

“What’s that?”

The light impacted against the Martian soil like a lightning bolt. Paar backed away, trying to sort through his helm’s optics to see what was within the haze of dust and searing heat.

A blast of light shot out of the haze and hit Ale’ti in the chest. The beam pushed Ale’ti off-balance then ripped right through her.

Paar and Nik’to opened fire. When Nik’to’s cannons fell silent, Paar looked over and saw his friend’s mangled armor lying before the General.

Paar saw a horror described in Dotok religions, an ancient demon that came to collect the souls of the living. He shot the General twice, but both rounds bounced off an energy shield and whistled through the air as they tumbled away.

The General raised a hand over his head and flashed toward Paar, chopping his arm down on his cannons and slicing them to pieces. The General snatched Paar by the actuators and machinery just beneath his helm and raised him into the air.

Paar brought his rotary cannon down and fired as fast as the cannons would spin. Rounds bounced off the General’s shield and ricocheted off Paar’s armor. Bullets ripped through the shield and sparked off the red plates covering the General’s photonic body.

The General slammed Paar to the ground, rattling the Dotok against his womb. Damage icons went berserk across his vision as his helm, rotary cannon and limbs were ripped away before he could move.

Paar found himself trapped within his armor, darkness pressing all around him.

Five burning points of light came through his breastplate. The General ripped the front of Paar’s armor away, exposing the womb within. Paar couldn’t move. He could only stare in horror as the General cut through the womb with a clawed fingertip and flicked the severed portion aside.

The fluid around Paar bubbled as it boiled away in the thin Martian atmosphere. Paar struggled to move, but his link to his armor shunted all his commands to missing limbs.

The General reached for Paar, but hesitated. This wasn’t a human, not like the pilots he’d killed inside other armored suits elsewhere on the red planet. Still, the species was known to him, a space-faring race his drones had encountered between the stars and chased to a barely habitable world where he’d encountered the human armor soldiers.

The General ripped the Dotok out of the womb, its limbs twitching and mouth gasping in the thin atmosphere. He passed a scan field through Paar’s brain and shifted through recent memories…there. The human that had managed to hurt him was nearby and it had a name: Elias.

The General tossed Paar aside to die and shot into the sky.

****

Elias ran past a jeep crashed against a boulder, the driver and gunner dead in their seats.

Antiair turrets blazed around Nerio’s cannon’s opening. Packs of drones attempted to assault the towers, only to be knocked down by concentrated fire.

“Not like them,” Kallen said, her words clipped as if she was almost out of breath. “They usually mass together.”

The sound of metal on metal broke through the air. Elias looked to the sound. Several drones circled just over a draw in the mountains surrounding Nerio.

“That’s gate four,” Bodel said.

Elias took a running leap and climbed half the hillside with a single bound. He came over the crest and opened up with his rotary cannon, annihilating the circling drones.

A walker construct the size of a three-story house pounded against the aegis-reinforced doors to the gate. Both arms were fused into giant clubs that it bashed against the gate. One door was already bent against the hinges, the second badly dented. The blasted remains of Red platoon littered the roadway leading to the gate.