War Against the White Knights (29 page)

“He’s on our side, arsehole!” Janna shouted. She brandished her fist and looked eager to punch him again.

Remus scrambled back inside the force shield, limping a little.

Little Janna didn’t even come up to the collarbone of a modern Marine such as Remus, but she didn’t need physical stature to stare him down, draining enough of his hatred that he looked away, ashamed.

The Wolf berserker was right. If anything, the Hardit volunteers from Klin-Tula hated Tawfiq and the New Order more than anyone. And although the Legion commanders born on Tranquility had been reluctant to admit Hardit soldiers, they couldn’t subvert their claim that the Human Legion represented all dispossessed and downtrodden people. They had grudgingly accepted that the Hardit survivors of the New Order’s conquest of Klin-Tula had every right to join the Legion.

And so it had fallen to the Hardits to put the ‘armored’ into the 7th Armored Claw. No one could doubt their talent for engineering, and cobbling together spare parts into what was officially designated the A-132 mini-tank, but was known universally as the Lynx. A tracked all-terrain vehicle with limited hover capability, the Lynx’s dimensions were no longer than a Marine’s outstretched arms, and less than half that in width. Yet the single crewmember packed an enormous punch with his heavy machine guns that could fire through the force shield which would momentarily switch off as each round passed through.

No one else had ever heard of a weapon synchronized to a force shield in this way, but the female Hardits who designed and maintained the mini-tanks had quietly upgraded the Lynxes with force shields without bothering to tell anyone their intentions, certainly not the male Hardits that crewed the tanks. That was hardly surprising as, outside of their brief mating season, male and female Hardits barely tolerated each other; the tank crews deploying that same professional contempt for the non-Hardits in the unit.

When Remus had tried to strike up a conversation with a Hardit tanker, to express his admiration for the synchronized force shield, the male was adamant that the female engineers had done nothing praiseworthy. As the Hardit put it: “Even you humans didn’t take long to develop synchronized machine guns in your aircraft capable of firing through propellers. The indolent females should have done this long ago. And if you think this is impressive, it’s only because humans are so stupid they didn’t think to remember their own history.”

Remus gripped the barrel of his mini-gun, and waited for the order to go, grateful to be fighting alongside the Hardit volunteers, no matter how impossible it was to like them.

At last, the aggressively amplified voice of Sub-Leader Matias sliced through Remus’s contemplation.

“Go for glory!” he screamed. “Go for blood! Kill!”

From the depths of their souls, an answering cry erupted from the minds of every Wolf soldier. They made no attempt to form words, the declaration of violent intent stemming from a more primitive instinct that long predated language. Remus, too, channeled his every frustration and fear to a high-pitched scream. Even the Hardit in his Lynx stirred from his studied indifference and flung his mini-tank into motion.

The vehicle’s tracks skidded, fighting for traction on the road surface covered with debris, and flinging a hail of detritus on Remus and the half-dozen Wolves behind. Then it was away at such a breakneck speed that even the charging Wolves couldn’t keep up.

Missiles streaked in both directions around the bend in the road. Explosions shook the ground and flung up plumes of shattered road surface that dropped as a hail onto the 7th Armored Claw, sliding harmlessly along the sides of the Lynx shield cones.

Remus stumbled, but kept running.

The air hummed with a new sound. He looked up and saw discs flying overhead, beginning to collect behind the advancing Wolves like a cloud of insects.

These enemy drones opened fire on the unshielded rear of the Wolf teams. A moment later and Remus let rip with his mini-gun. The SA-75 was an old weapon – largely replaced by the heavier GX-cannon – that had been designed to provide infantry squads with heavy fire support. Even without powered armor, Remus was strong enough to wield this heavy weapon and zigzagged a firing pattern through the cloud of drones. Remus only had to aim in the vicinity of his target, and the semi-intelligent munitions did the rest, blasting the drones out of the air in fiery explosions that lit the ceiling far overhead.

Alerted to the danger, the Lynx gunners traversed their turrets through 180 degrees and finished off the rest of the drones. The distraction slowed the mini-tanks enough for the Wolves to catch up and regain their protection just before they turned the bend and took on the enemy face-to-face.

The Wolves kept just enough discipline to remain shielded by the Lynxes as they were met by a hail of small arms fire, and then they were off. Screaming in berserker rage, the Wolves sprinted at the defenders, the two tips of their double-crescent combat knives glinting in the light of explosions.

The defenders were Kurlei: tall, lightly armed troops accomplished at scouting and infiltration. Remus could see in an instant that he faced an expendable position, intended to take the sting out of the 1st Marine Division’s attack. The Kurlei must know that their senior commanders had already given them up for dead, and faced with the terror of the charging Wolves – the harbingers of their deaths – they faltered.

Fire discipline fell apart. A few individuals began to look behind, but there was no escape for them.

Their hastily prepared barricades were blasted away by the Lynxes, and with Remus’s mini-gun laying down a lethal wall of fire that punished any nearby Kurlei moving out of cover, the defenders’ forward position was doomed.

Remus ceased his suppressive fire as the leading Wolves leapt barricades and slashed down on the defenders with their blades. The Wolves were meant to be a terror weapon, and the sight of their deadly work tore Remus between horror, and a dark temptation to join them in their berserker craze.

It was never enough for a Wolf to merely kill their opponents. They decapitated the enemies, sliced open their guts and wrapped their enemies’ entrails around their necks as war trophies. Janna drop kicked a severed head into the next defensive line, dripping blood as it sailed through the air. The head exploded in a mess of blood, skull fragments, and brain matter as it was caught in the suppressive fire laid down by the Lynxes against deeper lines of defense.

In contrast to the berserker rage of the Wolves, the Hardits’ demeanor was calm bordering on nonchalant. Even Remus had to admit that the two attitudes complemented perfectly. The rears of the Lynxes were vulnerable without support from the Wolves. For the mini-tanks to advance alone would be suicide. So the Hardits had backed away just before the Wolves crashed into the defensive line and harassed the deeper lines of Kurlei defense, preventing them from supporting their comrades, who were being butchered before their eyes.

Weighed down by his SA-75, Remus struggled to keep up. By the time he reached the dismembered flesh where Janna and their group had encountered the enemy, the others were already screaming towards the next defensive barrier, the Hardits racing to overtake them.

Remus checked for any dangers still lurking, knowing that the Wolves were not exactly known for their thoroughness. He saw a wounded Kurlei lifting her rifle to shoot the Wolves in the back, and eradicated the threat with an accurate burst from his mini-gun.

Instantly, he was assailed with doubts.

Why do you fight? There is no need to fight, we are not your enemy.

“Yes, you are. Get out of my head!”

The Hardits, Remus. They murdered your parents. They are your true enemy.

Remus had no answer. It was all he could do to stumble forward after Janna. He knew what was happening, but that was no help. Kurleis were empaths, able to reach into minds and distract their opponents. That’s what made them so good at infiltration.

Shoot the Hardits!

“No!” But Remus glared at the Hardit tanker in the Lynx roaring past him. He saw a murderer, not a comrade. He picked up his pace. He couldn’t let that murdering Hardit bastard take Janna too.

Kill the Hardit and then go back, Remus. To advance is certain death, and there’s no shame in running.

Remus bit down on his tongue, and nearly choked as the blood bubbled up, filling his mouth. Pain and the taste of blood gave his mind the breathing room to rationalize this attack on his resolve.

The mental attack was bouncing off the berserkers harmlessly – empaths had no leverage against sociopaths, and that was what the Wolves were when their bodies glowed with bloodlust. The Hardits in their mini-tanks were too bloody-minded, and too fixated on the idea of an ultimate confrontation with the New Order to notice the Kurlei attack.

We’re your friends, not your enemies.

But Remus felt the vulnerability in his mind as doubts clawed their way into his resolve and raised their own questions.
Who was he fighting for? Had the Legion betrayed Romulus? Was his brother dead?
Knowing who was seeding these ideas made no difference.

You have failed your family.

A hard slap twisted him around, as a bullet skimmed off his shoulder. It was a wake-up call – a sign from the Fates that Remus had failed his brother, failed Janna too, and deserved his inevitable destiny to die here in this charnel house. All the doubts and worries about himself and his brother – the constant struggle against the enemies in war – all of that sloughed away like dead skin for him to emerge new and purified, ready to embrace his imminent demise. The mini-gun became a crushing burden. His flesh could shoulder its heavy weight, but his spirit no longer could. He had no need of weapons in the afterlife. Remus unstrapped the mini-gun, letting it fall to the floor.

Bullets finally found him, tearing bloody chunk after chunk from his armored fresh. Remus staggered under the flailing, but he held his arms out wide, welcoming the end.

He took a last, lingering look at Janna who was only a few paces away, surrounded by defenders. To her front, a pair of them kept her at bay with their bayonets, while two behind clubbed at her with their weapon stocks. The deep layers of Janna’s armored skin were nearly bulletproof, but she staggered under these blows.

An incongruous stink of rotting vegetation worked its way through Remus’s nose, causing him to blink in confusion.

The source of the stench was a Hardit who had dismounted from his mini-tank and was blowing over him from behind the cover of a portable ceramalloy shield.

“Hey, worthless human vulley-veck. You wake up and fight. Not leave Hardit to do all the hard work, eh?”

Janna was on her knees. She snarled at the two Kurlei in front of her, threatening them with her combat blades. They backed away, but only to give space to a defender behind her who had drawn a sword.

The Hardit spat on him.

The Kurlei raised the sword.

“Janna!” screamed Remus, and he was away sprinting into action, drawing the combat blades from behind his hip, the way Momma had taught him and Romulus, back when they were boys adopted by Wolves.

The Kurlei’s sword blade came down, but Janna was ready, catching her would-be killer’s wrist in the space between the two deadly crescents of her blade and twisting…

The sword was wrenched out of the Kurlei’s grip – and then the wrist was ripped from the forearm.

Remus screamed a battle cry that wrenched the attention of every nearby Kurlei onto him. He leapt high in the air and sliced with both arms. By the time he landed, the group of Kurlei were all dead, the two heads he’d separated from shoulders dropping at his feet.

Up ahead the Kurlei unit had broken, fleeing in a headlong rout away from these terrifying human monsters.

Janna had gotten to her feet, after gutting her two assailants, and stared into Remus’s face. Her eyes were wild with the fight. He knew the same berserker rage stared back at her. He snarled, “For Romulus!”

“For Romulus!” she shouted back.

Combat blades in each hand they turned and raced together toward the dwindling sound of the melee. The SA-75 mini-gun lay abandoned on the battlefield, forgotten.

“Don’t resist,” ordered Xin. “Don’t give her the satisfaction of wounding you too.”

“No, sir,” chorused her staff officers, getting to their feet and snapping a crisp salute.

Xin saluted back, and then allowed the arresting party to lead her away. They were Marines, Littoranes. She had fought alongside the amphibians many times and held them in great respect, but she couldn’t resist a last jibe as she left her command station. “I notice Admiral Indiya couldn’t find anyone human to arrest me.”

Her words were no more than an instinctive gesture of defiance – or so she had intended – but they resonated with unexpected force. The Navy was loyal to Indiya, but there was more to the Legion than the Navy, and fully half of the Marines were human.

Would Indiya have dared to order human Marines to arrest the commander of Army Group Sky Strike, and the most senior human Marine?

Now, that was a very interesting question…

Lieutenant-General Aelingir snarled with satisfaction as the reports came in of her armies’ rapid progress against a demoralized and beaten enemy, echeloning through the tired forces of Army Group Sky Strike who had opened up the way to the habitat’s interior. Lieutenant-General Lee’s troops had done well, fighting with skill and vigor. Aelingir would have liked to add ‘honor’ to that list of attributes, but she could not apply that quality to all of the units in the first wave of attack.

She wrinkled her nose in disgust at the scene of carnage surrounding her hardened command post. The unit that had routed the defenders of this particular arterial route down to the next level was resting nearby, the 7
th
Armored Claw. It was an appropriately martial name for a fighting unit, but these disease-ridden human irregulars, with their miniature Hardit tanks, possessed not the merest hint of martial bearing. Even now they were toying with dismembered parts of their fallen enemies. Was that a necklace of ears one was threading? She wanted none of these irregulars in her command. The skin parasite that these irregulars paraded, as if disease were something to be proud of, was changing their DNA. How could a commander possibly trust subordinates who were changing genetically? Changing into what?