“Sucker figured he had you bagged, sir,” said Duncan, holstering the pistol borrowed for the sweep, “so he finally stopped flying all over the sky.”
“Thanks, Duncan,” said Mike, rolling to his feet. “Little too close, that one.”
“Just a little walk in the mornin’, sir.”
“Airborne. Anybody see where the other God Kings or our shuttles went?”
“Negatory, sir,” said Sergeant Green. “Nothin’ in sight.”
Two remaining shuttles suddenly popped up to the west, still relentlessly pursued by the God Kings. The personnel with pistols or captured Posleen weapons, having recovered from the shock of the attack, opened up on them. One more shuttle crashed after taking plasma fire but the God Kings were both dead moments later. The last shuttle banked towards the platoon’s location and nosed up to a landing in the center of their perimeter. Its back door dropped immediately.
“Okay, first squad, inside, grab what you need and then back out! Move it! Sergeant Green, handle the distribution, the shuttle should have an inventory.”
“Roger, sir,” the NCO headed for the drop-door as the first squad lined up for weapons.
“Posleen!” called one of the troopers on the perimeter. Sun bright nicks of ricochets began skipping off the shuttle’s armored skin. Mike looked seaward towards the source of the fire. A group of Posleen normals had gotten up onto the roof of the far building and were firing toward the shuttle and the platoon grouped around it.
“Spread it out!” He noted that first squad had hardly ducked getting to the shuttle. “Fire dammit!” He slapped a fresh magazine into his pistol and demonstrated, tumbling several of the distant horse-figures. The personnel with captured Posleen weapons began firing.
“I’m hit!” screamed one of the troops, followed by a bemused, “I thought I was hit.” He sat on the roof looking at his thigh. “Am I hit?”
“You’re hit,” said Mike, belatedly falling to a prone position. “Everybody get down, dammit. Don’t sweat it, your suit will take care of it.”
“Second squad!” bellowed Sergeant Green.
“Fire from the west!”
“God Kings from inland!”
“Expedite this, Sergeant Green! First squad, concentrate on the God Kings!” Suddenly one of the second squad suits headed towards the shuttle began doing its death dance. As the suit tumbled it knocked aside others in the squad. They started to try to catch the suit, but it suddenly stopped and was still.
As they began to open the suit, Mike snapped, “Do not pop his suit! In case some of you have never seen that, Private Laski is not recoverable. Sergeant Green?!” Mike opened fire on the approaching God Kings.
“Third squad!” Sergeant Green bellowed, by way of answer.
Wiznowski suddenly bounded out of the shuttle and off to the west; Mike had hardly noticed him fall back to it. The lighter and faster scout began firing at the approaching God Kings with an HVM launcher. He moved around the rooftop like a hyperactive flea. The fire of the four new God Kings angled in on him as he ran, stopped, jumped and dodged to avoid it. From time to time he would stop just long enough to fire off a hypervelocity missile.
“Wiz! Dammit, quit trying to be a hero!” Mike shouted, triggering another burst while bounding forward in support. “Get your ass back here!”
“If you wanna dance, sir…” the scout panted and was washed away by a God King HVM.
“Wizzz!” Mike screamed and leaped to his feet.
“Fuckers!” He reloaded and started running towards the God Kings. “Michelle, evade pattern Gamma, maximum run, broken field automatic, execute!” Now all he had to do was reload and fire and he slammed in magazine after magazine as he closed on first four and then three and then two saucers. The God Kings’ fire flailed around him uselessly as they closed the distance.
The suit dodged in a random zigzag pattern as he maintained constant positive traction through the suit boots, the occasional hit by a railgun round shedding like water. A hundred meters out a laser briefly washed his suit, but with the exception of frying a set of sensors, it was not in contact long enough to do more than raise his temperature.
He closed the final distance to the last God Kings at an oblique as their saucers slewed, trying to track the frenetically dodging combat suit. Like a weasel Mike leapt on the offside saucer and, taking the God King’s head in his gauntlet while planting his boot on its shoulder, ripped the sauroid head off clean. At that the other God King swung his saucer around to run but Mike flipped the palmate blade off his back and hurled it entirely through its thorax with all the rage in the world.
Then he bounced over and whacked the other God King’s head off. He stepped down off the faltering saucer and collected both heads. Tossing them a distance away, he drew his pistol.
A burst of fire into the energy pack of the nearest saucer devoured the vehicle in a shattering explosion. He rode out the explosion as if it were an epiphany, staring into the fire like a soul in hell. There was no danger; the suits could shrug off any explosion short of the sort of cataclysm that struck Qualtren. And even then they could give it a run for its money.
He next turned his scorched pistol on the far God King’s vehicle, devouring it as well. Then he kicked the vehicles over one by one, pulling all the pieces of the God Kings he could find out of the wreckage. He made a pile, hopped up and down on it until it was flat, piled it back up and put an antimatter grenade in the resulting mass.
He set the timer, stepped back and watched the last remnants of the two God Kings blown sky high. Then he picked up the nearest saucer and hammered it into the roof until the roof was massively holed and the saucer was junk. His rage sated, he picked up the two heads by their crests and flew his suit back to the platoon.
By the time he returned the other fire had slackened. Those had been the only God Kings so far in contact and the normals were ineffective except in overwhelming numbers. He thrust the fresh heads at the first trooper he encountered.
“Go put these on Sergeant Wiznowski’s smear,” Mike snarled. The paratrooper hurried to obey.
“I swear before all the gods,” he said to himself, but Michelle faithfully broadcast it, “that samadh will grow beyond all measure.”
He stared off toward the ocean, without thoughts, avoiding recent memories. Immured in his armor, he had killed soldiers under his command in numbers beyond count, but every one of those was a mere electronic chimera. For the first time he had lost actual human beings, living breathing entities with whom he had established a bond.
The sudden intrusion of reality into his highly developed notional world of bloodless combat was momentarily stupefying. He shuddered in his armor, conscious for perhaps the first time that these were not shadows on the wall of some electronic cave, but people who had hopes and dreams. These were people whose mothers carried them for nine long months, the trail of their lives leading to a barren rooftop under a sun not their own.
As the platoon consolidated and checked equipment, he stared off into the distance in a moment snatched from eternity, infinite and finite. Unnoticed, one of the engineers connected new auto-grenade launchers and filled his magazines. Finally Sergeant Green broke into his reverie.
“Sir?”
“Yes, Sergeant Green.”
“We’re ready to move out.”
“Thank you.” Duncan handed him a rifle. Mike checked the magazine then checked that his store was still in place. He noticed he was still staring off into the distance. He was loath to move.
“Sir?”
“Yes, Sergeant Duncan.”
“We need to move out.”