“Everyone loaded up?” Darren asked, flipping a cartridge repeatedly with one idle hand like a coin. Growing bored of the diversion, he caught the round and inserted it into one of the many magazines sitting beside him. He laid prone on a small stone outcropping overlooking the valley.
“I’ve enough.” Simmons said, zeroing the sights on her rifle.
“Ready.” Sparrow and his spotter said simultaneously as Sparrow flipped out his coilgun’s bipod.
“Locked and loaded; let’s give ‘em a show.” Pavlov mused as he loaded shell after shell into his rotary grenade launcher. One after another, the rest of the platoon spoke their assent. Darren looked over the canyon to the other side, where the rest of the force was positioned. Staring directly back at him was Staff Sergeant Walker. Darren made a gun-loading gesture, then gave a thumbs-up. Walker repeated it back.
The next few minutes were quiet; the only noise was the soft whistle of the breeze. The trees in the valley swayed, their palm-like leaves reflecting the light in a scintillating display. The center of the valley was a small creek, which babbled and burbled as it passed over the smooth rocks of its riverbed. It would be a serene sight, if not for the piles of ammunition cases, spent munitions, and other various knicknacks littering the ground below, detritus of a desperate retreat.
“Contact,” Pavlov whispered harshly, pointing west. Darren turned his head to see that the Broodmatron hadn’t been as stupid as they hoped. Yes, a column of troops was beginning its trek through the pass, but so were the dozen or so soldiers on top of their side of the divide, wearing the crests of the Judicial Guard and bearing their trademark bayoneted rifles. Judging by the fact that Darren hadn’t already been shot, they hadn’t seen his group yet.
Darren waved to the men on the other side of the canyon, then pointed down at the approaching formation. The three sergeants nodded in unison. Then, he whispered, “Pavlov, get your launcher ready. Everyone pops up when he opens fire.”
Pavlov slowly rolled over onto his side, the launcher coming to rest pointed straight at the squad of Guardsmen. For a moment, there was silence, quiet like no other as the world faded away and only Darren, his men, and the enemy were real.
Then, all hell broke loose.
The launcher clunked once as it blasted a 40-millimeter high-explosive round into the center of the Guardsmen formation. They hadn’t the time to react before the shell slammed into them, sending three broken bodies flying into the air. At this signal, the platoon collectively sprang from their places and opened fire. At the same time, the rapid-fire pops of gunshots echoed from the other side of the canyon.
“Charge!” Darren shouted, running forth, his rifle chattering out a stream of bullets. Two more Guardsmen fell, spurting white blood from chinks in their exosuits. However, they shrugged off their disorientation from the explosion and began to fire back while shielding themselves with their heavily-armored offhand arms. Two of Darren’s men hit the ground, their bodies bursting into flames, before Darren and the rest engaged in a brutal melee, where the enemy would be marginally less dangerous.
Darren singled out his target, the gold-pauldroned squad leader, and rushed him, drawing his combat knife. The Poslushi tried to bring his firearm to bear on Darren, but he was faster, driving his blade into the soldier’s dominant wrist. He howled in pain, yanking his hand back and consequently pulling the knife free for Darren to finish him off with a powerful stab through the gap in Poslushi power armor between the neck and head. He pulled the knife back out and looked for his next enemy, only to hear a terrible, blood-curdling scream.
Snapping to the source of the noise, Darren watched as another Judicial Guard, closer to the canyon, pulled his bloodied rifle from the heart of Simmons’ still form. His gut turned with the sight of his comrade dead so suddenly, and so with an enraged roar, he tackled her killer back and the two grappled with one another on the very edge. Darren tried to stab at the Poslushi, but he blocked the blade with his bracer and shoved Darren out from under him so that he was hanging halfway off the cliff. Darren tensed his legs and forced himself to effectively sit up on thin air using the weight of the armored soldier as a counterweight. Then, he grabbed his assailant by the back of his armor and flipped him over himself, throwing him off the cliff. This destabilized Darren and he tipped backwards, but managed to catch himself on the rough stone and pull himself back off the precipice as he heard the crack of the Poslushi impacting the ground below. Looking up, he saw as the last Judicial Guardsmen had his throat slit by Pavlov, but not without cost; three more lay strewn about alongside the enemy. It was an eye-wateringly ruinous engagement, but from what he heard about the Judicial Guard, they were even deadlier at range.
“Shoot them down!” Darren barked, pointing down at the Poslushi below. The shots continued to rain down upon them from the Raiders and SAS troops on the cliffside, but while many were dead, Darren was quickly learning that one of the best descriptions of a Poslushi infantry division was “inexhaustible.”
Darren quickly changed out his rifle’s magazine and joined the fusillade, sending down hell on those below. However, one by one, the Poslushi infantrymen turned tail and scurried back out of their line of fire. For a moment, Darren believed their assault to be repelled, but then, with a terrible warhorn, the first of the quadrupeds emerged, sallying forth with a speed that simply shouldn’t have been possible with legs so thin and spindly.
“Give ‘em the Grozny special, Sparrow!”
“On it!” Sparrow acknowledged, taking aim with the coilgun as the quadrupeds began strafing the opposing side with their railguns. Nary a moment later, the first quadruped fell, one of its legs severed cleanly by a sabot round. Then, another lost its balance, the wreckage piling on top of that of the previous and forming a barrier obstructing the path. The third walker couldn’t stop in time and smashed into the obstacle, further reinforcing it. The quadrupeds wasted no time in reversing their course and trying to find an alternate path, but that was accounted for as well, as the last few in their column fell, hemming them in. Volley after volley of coilgun fire from each side cut the rest down one after another. For a moment, Darren deluded himself into believing this engagement could be won.
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And then the world exploded.
Darren was thrown back by the immense force of the blast, his left arm suddenly stinging like never before. He hit the dusty ground hard and curled into a ball by instinct, his hands shielding his head from the shells suddenly raining down from the skies as his ears played a deafening tone. The bombardment lasted only for a few moments, but it felt like an eternity, and when it finally subsided, Darren risked a glance out to see a scene of horror.
The only reason he had survived was because Sparrow was between him and the blast. He had been totally eviscerated, with nothing recognizable remaining of his body in the slightest. Looking around through the carnage, blood, and severed limbs, Darren saw only Pavlov and two others still standing.
“Hardwell! Come on, we need to go; they’re going to kill us all!” Pavlov yelled as his hearing returned.
“Walker, what’s your status!?” Darren called over the radio.
“There’s ten of us left!” Walker replied frantically.
“Of your squad!?”
“Total!”
“Shit! Pavlov, get on the line with McCullough and tell him we need to bug the fuck out!”
“Sir, yes, sir!”
—
The bridge of the Bunker Hill was manic with activity, as sorties were flown, battles were tracked, and the course of an entire war was quite possibly decided. The air above was dark with troop transports making one final fuel stop before departing for the two hundred or so craft in low orbit. The occasional distant blast emphasized the dire situation as distant missile batteries slowly depleted their stocks ensuring that nothing could get close enough to turn this evacuation into a massacre.
The Royal Marines, the USMC, the French Foreign Legion, the VDV, and a dozen other elite forces were fighting desperately to cover the escape of their brothers-in-arms. Their jobs were performed admirably and almost without fail, but not all of them could be exfiltrated. They knew the risk, but continued on anyway; all saved an extra bullet for themselves so that they wouldn’t be captured and turned against their friends.
Captain McCullough sat in silent contemplation. On the flight deck, a pair of F/A-40C Super Torch fighter-bombers sat fully-fueled, each armed with two megaton-scale thermonuclear cruise missiles. Standing orders were not to launch unless nuclear detonations were detected on the ground, but McCullough was somewhat tempted to disregard the order. At his command, the entire USSAC fleet in orbit could fire over a gigaton TNT equivalent in atomics, raining down hell on a scale from the nightmares of ancient Cold War strategists. The only thing stopping him was the idea of what the Poslushi would retaliate with. Would they unleash an even more horrifying volley back, or did they have some other superweapon with which they could surprise CAST?
His radio set bleeped once, displaying the name of one Darren Hardwell with a priority dispatch. McCullough wrinkled his nose in disdain. Of course, that little error in his file attracted attention every once in a while, but judging by how many times his unit had accessed his file, they were more persistent than most. He had a solution to the issue, however.
Gently, gingerly, he picked up the radio receiver, flipped the speaker switch off, and laid it down to play its message silently.
Sometimes, that was the cost of asking questions.
—
“Captain McCullough, do you read me? We’re being torn apart out here, we need exfil now!” Pavlov yelled into the radio, the fear evident in his voice.
“What’s going on?” Darren asked.
“He’s not picking up,” Pavlov said haltingly, then continued, “McCullough, there’s only fourteen of us left; we can’t hold any longer!”
The radio remained silent.
“Walker, get your men out of here; we’ll cover you!” Darren barked into his mic.
“Negatory; we’re not leaving until you do!” the response came immediately.
“Walker, I don’t care how heroic you want to be; your men have families to come home to, so get your asses up and run!”
A short pause. Then, “Sir, yes, sir. It’s been an honor.”
Darren didn’t like the reminder of how slim his chances were, since he was already on the verge of pissing himself, but he mustered the courage to say, “Same here, sir. See you on the other side,” and click off his mic. Then, he got to watch as the last of the Marines and SAS wasted no time with the gift Darren and what little remained of his platoon had given them and ran for their lives. Not one man looked back, to Darren’s surprise. As they left, Darren got a look at how devastated they truly were. A few were being dragged by their comrades, missing limbs, missing faces, all but dead but not left behind. Littering the ground around them were the bodies of thirty of their comrades, perforated by railgun slugs and torn apart by artillery. Infantry was queen of the battlefield, but artillery was king, and everyone knew what the king did to the queen behind closed doors.
“McCullough, this is the 14th Ranger Platoon, pick up! We can’t last much longer!” Pavlov continued his desperate plea. Still, the voice of the Captain did not sound.
A flash of metal caught Darren’s eye and he looked up to see a curved, almost swallow-shaped Poslushi dropship coming in hot from the west. Two three-barreled energy repeaters dangled from the sides of the aircraft, each manned by a soldier in bone-white armor.
“We’ve got a bogey in the air! You two, get Sparrow’s coilgun and take it down! It’s our only chance!” Darren yelled, pointing to the two men. Meanwhile, Pavlov repeatedly switched his radio on and off, sending message after message.
“It’s shredded; it won’t turn on!” one of the soldiers reported.
“Make it work!” Darren said, panic beginning to overtake him.
“McCullough, we’re going to die if we stay! GET US THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!”
“It’s still not working, sir!” the soldier yelled, the fear taking him too, as tears ran down his face.
“Shitshitshitshitshit! Do something!”
“MCCULLOUGH, ANSWER ME!”
But it was too late, as the dropship screeched overhead, its left-hand door gunner unloading his weapon as he passed by. The duo were both shredded, their bodies hitting the ground blackened and twitching. Darren howled in agony as a heat of an intensity he had never even dreamed of sizzled through the flesh of his right leg, baking through it entirely. Still, it was better than what happened to Pavlov, as the high-energy microwave beam struck him in the head and the back of his skull blasted out from the gas pressure of his boiling brain matter.
What little remained of Darren’s morale shattered then, and with it went any semblance of composure. Hyperventilating, he picked himself up, ignoring the searing pain of his leg as every part of his brain screamed at him to run and he obeyed. When the dropship came back for another pass, it found nothing and its pilots assumed the last soldier had crawled off to die. But the last soldier was not dying, at least not physically, as he ran and ran without end, without direction, and without thought of anything or anyone else.