UM-3/Avalon
Kray cried out involuntarily as Harley dodged an incoming, incandescent energy stream and slipped in the mud, a by-product of the rain from the storm that had come in fast on the wind rolling down from the Northern Sea. Harley dropped him onto his left side, where the exposed meat of an open wound overwhelmed the synthetic endorphins Kray had injected, a reminder of the same bombardment that had pulped Rosie and scrapped her HISS gun, cut Lt. Swift in half, and buried the 1st Sergeant in fallen rubble. All they found of Sigis, the 1st Sergeant’s nodie, was his damaged node-pack.
Kray rolled onto his stomach and looked as Harley trained his weapon toward the base of the hill and squeezed off shots that dropped several shadows less than 12 meters away. “There's so feking many of them,” He called and swapped a fresh magazine of 5mm hypersonics into his rifle. As an afterthought he added, “If I ever meet any of those engineers, I’m going to pour C-seventy (: A liquid/gel explosive compound) down his throat and blow his ass into high orbit!”
The engineers had crossed the bridge to safety before the demolishing charges they set had taken it down. With some effort Kray raised his helmet mike to his lips and said, “Charlie company... this is two actual… fall back by squad to the hill top. Give them some covering fire. We’ll try to hold them here.”
Kinetic artillery, firing guided munitions from far to the north, had gotten some hits, destroying several of the alien grav-vehicles gathering around the base of the hill they seemed unable to climb. In the light of the burning vehicle shells, he watched 40 men moving out towards the rendezvous point he’d designated, muzzles flashed behind the retreat as the wounded, too critically injured to move, engaged the things, buying their friends time to escape. Resistance broke down as the small pockets of maimed and dying men were overrun.
Their ground troops worked in close coordination with their anti-grav vehicles, as if on electronic leashes, when the GV’s got knocked out, they fell under command of the next nearest vehicle or scattered. Kray scraped off the mud caked over the face of his Krono-Tek and checked the time that had elapsed since the mission began. “Five hours, my ass! We’ve been here for almost twelve. Where the hell is that support?”
“Hey, Alvin, check it out,” Harley said and used his compact rifle as a pointer. The sky on the western horizon was glowing mother-of-pearl pink behind clouds that still lingered from the evening storm. A spark of fire appeared as the sun touched the dark horizon. Dawn had come and the long night was over. “We made it.”
“I guess I owe you fifty. You can collect when we both get to Hell.”
Harley snorted and said, “I think we’re already there.” He pulled a red-striped Vortex grenade off his belt and set the timer, then shouted, “Fire in the hole!” Five seconds after he tossed it away, the earth beneath them shook as the powerful charge exploded, a reminder of how close the alien assaulters were to their tenuous position. Kray could hear several nearly-ultrasonic screams from close by. At least the things could die.
40 rounds left. He thought and jammed the carbon-fiber magazine back into his M-32. I’ll have to wait till they get close so I don’t miss. He’d decided that he would save the last round for himself when there was another blast and a GV broke open, spewing an orange fireball into the sky.
There was a momentary lapse in the firing as the things stopped and turned to watch the armored hulk burn. The ones standing upright were immediately cut down by high energy HISS bursts that easily burned through the resin armor that the more numerous of the two species mounted as a natural defense. The smaller ones were man-sized but less evolved looking, each with a loping gait
“Got about a half dozen of ‘em looking when that GV blew,” Harley shouted over his shoulder. “They’re pulling back to the bottom of the hill. It looks like they’re waiting for orders or something.” He snapped his rifle to his shoulder and squeezed off several shots.
“What the hell? We don’t have any missiles left,” Kray thought out loud. The directed energy weapons the alien vehicles mounted had destroyed the few that had been fired at them while in flight. “Our HISS guns aren’t enough to knock one of those vehicles down.”
Just as welcome but more perplexing was a second explosion. Another GV crashed to earth as the anti-gravity field it generated flickered out. Kray dropped his data visor and engaged the Starlight setting, then he swept the battlefield from horizon to horizon, he found what he was looking for on the third pass.
“Harley, have a look to the southwest and tell me what you see,” Kray said and pointed at what he’d found. The corporal lowered his own visor and looked off in that direction.
"Sweet Mary," Harley said. A thin platter rested on top of a narrow pole, thee type of telescoping scanner array mounted on the backs of AS-3 Arapaho attack skimmers, raised to give the pilot and weapons control computer an electronic look at the battlefield while still keeping the ship itself concealed. It had had taken the technicians 12 hours to get them unpacked and in the air. “It’s about goddamn time they got here.”
The rise of the hill the gunship hovered behind was backlit by the signature of a rocket motor firing. After launch it initiated a steep climb and disappeared. Seconds later another GV exploded, the flash momentarily overloaded his helmet sensors, causing his display to flare, when it returned there were still dozens of GV’s left untouched.
“There’s got to be more of them around,” Kray said as from behind them came a high-pitched, mechanical whine, the sound of a large turbine engine gathering rpm’s. “If there is, it’s the first piece of good news I’ve heard since this whole disaster started. Is there anything coming in through the node?”
Harley shook his head and said, “Negative, it’s all quiet, but I think our visitors are regrouping. I think they’re gonna make a rush. I only got eighty rounds left.”
Kray pulled the magazine from his own weapon and tossed it toward Harley. “Make them count.”
They had no way to communicate with the gunships… the tactical nodepack that Harley had dragged along was damaged, hit in the attack that killed nodie Sigis. It could receive traffic but not send it. Each NorCom soldier was tagged with an IFF transponder that the gunship pilot could use to sort friend from foe. Something crested the hill behind them, bathing them in the intense beam of a powerful searchlight, like the glory of salvation.
“Yeah, bay-bee!” Harley screamed at it and thrust out a clenched fist.
Kray clenched his teeth and turned over, the effort causing the pain in his side to flare, but he did not care. Instead, he laughed with relief at the sight of an Arapaho gunship adorned with the livery of the 2nd Aviation Battalion, one of the three units that made up 4th Brigade of the NorCom 10 Division. The cavalry had arrived to collect its own.
The weapons pylons on the ship were loaded down with anti-personnel weapons: twin 20mm auto-cannons on each inboard store and pods carrying eighteen 5-inch self-guided rockets on each outboard. The pilot gave him a thumbs-up as the pilot increased power and set the skimmer to its grisly work. The four auto-cannons poured a combined 2400 rounds per minute into the things clustered around the hill. The ones hit directly by 20-mm shells exploded into wet chunks.
“Pinkish green mist! Awoo!” Harley shouted and ducked as a stream of plasma from a GV scorched the rocks beside his head. The skimmer made four passes over the hillside, cannon-shells and rockets sending up fountains of mud and rock, leaving reams of ruptured and still forms.
“Charlie two actual, this is Pegasus lead, come in.” The sound from the node-pack startled Harley as he was taking aim. He hefted it close to where Kray laid prone. “Charlie two actual, please respond.”
Kray nearly screamed at the thing in frustration that he could not.
“Charlie two actual, if you cannot respond then be advised we are inbound with twelve birds. ETA, seven minutes. Pull back and find a suitable LZ, pop smoke on terminal approach, out.”
“Charlie company. This is two actual,” Kray said as he pulled his boom mike closer. The pain in his side was momentarily forgotten. “Fall back to the top of the hill in stages for ex-fill.”
There was a small clearing among the rocks that, at first glance, could accommodate something the size of a troop skimmer, maybe even two, it would suffice for their purposes. Leaning heavily on Harley as they moved toward it, Kray counted few more than twenty in the group that had once been two hundred.
“Charlie two actual, this is Pegasus lead, on terminal approach.”
Rucksacks were dumped on end. All eyes were on the last man as he shook out his load; there was a small clank as a smoke grenade fell out onto the rocks, and after a brief scramble to retrieve it, the grenade was released into the middle of the clearing. Dampened by the wet haze from a night of rain, the thick red smoke it produced hung lazily at waist level.
Harley put on the Mk. 5 visor and scanned the area, pointing off down the length of the mist-shrouded canyon, when the node alerted him to contacts. The sound of approaching engines was obscured by the resonance of battle and by the wind pushing along the thunderheads.
"ADF fighters inbound!" He shouted as new information came in through the node-pack. Kray's eyes, drawn to movement, found aircraft coming at them framed by the smoking remnants of the demolished bridge, a brace of F/A-300's plowing through haze, weapons-pylons heavy with clusters of ordinance.
