“Breakthrough on the left!” Duncan called, scrambling out of his fighting position and lowering his rifle to fire. The group of centaurs had forced their way through to the remnants of Charlie company and broken the center by the simple expedient of swarming the suits with their boma blades.
The Posleen in the front rank weren’t even firing anymore, just hurtling forward, their blades raised. The monomolecular edge could not penetrate the Indowy-forged armor with one strike, but as chop after chop descended on it the armor eventually gave way and the human within was hacked to death.
With the sundering of the line the beleaguered suits seemed to give up hope. Trooper after trooper lifted himself out of his hole, stepping to the rear, those with remaining ammunition firing to try to keep the Posleen at arm’s length.
“NO!” O’Neal cried, scrambling out of his own position as the suits in front of him obscured his line of fire. “INTO THEM!” He charged forward through the line of troopers and threw himself on the front rank of centaurs, his own blades out, chopping and whirling in place.
“Captain’s down!” a trooper from Charlie called out and was cut off in mid cry.
“Bloody hell, boss!” Stewart cursed, sprinting forward to the side of the commander while laying down blasts from his grav-rifle. “GET BACK!”
“I Am Not Going To Let Them Have This Pass!” O’Neal snarled, chopping sideways. But the tide was irresistible and even he could finally see that. Bravo and Charlie were either falling back or just gone. The Posleen had the line and nobody was left to defend it. The suits still in the line were going yellow then red and dropping off the screen.
“Fall back!” he called, glancing at his readouts. Graphs and charts meant nothing to him now, as indicator after indicator went from green to red. “Fall back on the Reapers!”
Sunday was firing from the hip, flipping out magazines one handed and reloading as each expended mag dropped from his rifle. But nothing seemed to help. The remaining suits were running from the oncoming tide of yellow bodies and no firepower in the world was going to stop them.
“Reapers, prepare for short-ranged volley fire,” he called as the Posleen passed the line of holes that had once been filled with ACS troopers. He didn’t even bother to try to figure out who was left. It was him and his troopers and that was more or less that.
“Gots to die someplace,” he muttered, glad he’d had one last time with Wendy. He flipped another magazine in as Stewart slithered over the side of the hole followed by the major.
“Fall back on the Reapers!” O’Neal called again, flipping around and starting to lay down fire.
“Ammo! I’m out!” One of the Marauder suits scrambled into the supply cache, tearing open boxes, and then cursed. “Reaper ammo!”
“Reapers, open fire!” Tommy called as the front of the Posleen assault came within thirty meters.
The four Reaper suits were each mounted with four flechette cannons, and the hail of metal slivers opened a huge rent in the Posleen mass, even checking it for a moment. But the pressure from the rear pushed the front ranks forward against the tide of fire and the down side to the horrendous amount of fire the cannons could put out was that they ran dry fast.
“Clocking!” McEvoy called. “I’m clocking out!”
“Gotcha,” the Marauder said, popping open the ammunition container and opening the Reapers’ reload bin. “Ammo coming up!” he said, tipping the container up and dumping the contents into the bin.
“Feed me!” another Reaper called, laying down a wall of fire to the north.
But as the Reapers went through bin after bin, and the remaining suits, most of them commanders, laid down their fire, the ammunition ran lower and lower and the wall of Posleen closed in on the surrounded hole.
“I’m cold!” McEvoy called, then looked around at the person behind him. “Hi, Major.”
“Pick up a rock!” O’Neal snarled as his magazine dropped into the hole.
“Boxes are empty!”
“I’m out!” Sunday called as his last magazine dropped free. He reversed his rifle and swung it into the first Posleen to the hole. The heavy duty stock smashed at the impact, leaving him holding only the iridium barrel. Which he then used to smash the next skull in line.
“Fuck this,” O’Neal muttered. “FUCK THIS! I am not going to die in a stinking HOLE!”
“FUCKERS!” Sunday shouted, as the major climbed back out of the hole, slashing and blasting at the centaurs. “Get back here, Major!”
Sunday smashed two more of the centaurs before the first boma blade caught him on the shoulder. He hardly noticed it but then another descended and then another and he could feel himself tiring, trying to slash and crush in all directions, but it was no use, the Reapers were backed up to the rear of the position, trying to beat the Posleen back with their fists and Stewart and McEvoy were down under a tide of bodies and the major was gone and…
The sky lit in fire. For just a moment he could see the pupils of the Posleen’s yellow eyes tighten down to a pinpoint and the reflection of the Lightbulb of God in their irises. And he hit the ground just in time.
He dug his hands into the ground and focused all his effort onto holding on as, again, the hammerblows descended on his back, lifting him up and slamming him down over and over again. He felt himself lifted up and slammed against the wall of the fighting position and his arm cracked backwards, painfully. He could feel that it was broken, but the suit integrity held. If it hadn’t, the fire would have surely killed him. He waited and waited, for a moment, for an eternity, but finally the last echoes of the fire died away and he could look around.
For a time, it seemed like hours, none of his systems could determine anything in his surroundings. But then the sensors slowly came back on-line and he could get some sense of what was around him. Telemetry from suits was coming back first and there wasn’t much. A suit here. A suit there.
He looked for the karat that indicated his commander, but it was nowhere to be seen.
Unlike Sunday, Mike had been out of the hole in the Posleen mass when the SheVa antimatter went off and there wasn’t much he could do. So for the second time in his life he ended up in the path of a nuclear explosion. This time, at least, he had a moment’s warning and instead of trying to grab dirt, which was probably futile, he hopped upward and tucked into a ball wondering where he’d land.
The blast-front picked him up and lofted him south and upward. He felt a brief glance off of something very hard; it bruised him despite the undergel and hard-driven inertial compensators. But after that there was, as such, nothing but air.
His sensors were still off-line but he eventually sensed that the blast-front was reducing and he tracked out into what would have been a free-fall position if he was, in fact, free-falling. He got some control over the inertials and used it to stabilize his flight. But since his externals were still reading over a thousand degrees centigrade, getting any coherent data on his location was quite impossible.
Finally the immense power of the nuclear explosion began to dissipate and the return wave came in, catching him and tossing him back, but not as far.
In all he was airborne, or nuke-borne as the case might be, for less than fifteen seconds. It only felt like an eternity. And then he saw open air.
He looked down and broke out in hysterical laughter. He was in a perfect delta track, two thousand feet up and headed down for the ruins of his old high school. Which was swarming with still-live Posleen.