“Stand by with the chaff rounds,” Drakon said. “Colonel Safir, get ready to go.”
“The snakes haven’t brought the prisoner in yet, General,” Malin protested.
“They’re not going to,” Drakon said. “I just realized what they’re doing. They’re going to do a remote interrogation using comm circuits, then kill him to avoid the risk that he is loaded with some kind of physical weapon.” He felt sick at the thought that he had ordered the prisoner to his death that way, but until this moment had not imagined that even the snakes would be that paranoid. “They’re snakes. Why the hell didn’t I expect them to act like snakes?”
Malin’s hands hovered over the firing commands for the chaff rounds. “General, none of us—”
“General, the microburst just came in!” the comm specialist reported.
“Fire,” Drakon said to Malin. “Colonel Safir, we’re launching chaff.”
The chaff rounds were being fired before he finished the sentence.
The freed prisoner stumbled backward, then fell.
“They shot him just before we launched,” Malin said.
“He’ll be the last victim of those snakes,” Drakon growled. “Safir, go when you’re ready.”
The chaff rounds were blooming in front of the Syndicate positions, throwing out every manner of decoy. Safir shouted “At them! For Colonel Gaiene!” then, with an ululating cry, led her assault force against the Syndicate positions.
A barrage of fire met them, the defenders firing blindly into the chaff and scoring few hits. Drakon had called up a view from Safir’s armor, seeing the smoke and assorted decoys from the chaff clouds looming ahead, then Safir plunged into the chaff, and he lost the link. The only information he still had was an estimated position on her based on her last-known rate of progress.
“What’s going on elsewhere, Bran?” Drakon asked, not wanting to take his attention away from Safir’s assault.
“It’s quiet in the sectors facing Executive Gozen’s forces,” Colonel Malin replied. “We haven’t picked up any artillery coming in yet against Colonel Safir’s attack.”
“The Midway did a lot of damage to the Syndicate artillery,” Drakon said. “Our assault should be clearing the chaff any second now.”
His display flickered, updated, flickered again, then steadied. Once again, he had a clear view from Safir’s battle armor in the seconds before the attack hit the Syndicate positions.
The weapons of the defenders had been ineffective while firing blindly into the chaff. With the attack clearing the chaff, the defenders had a short period in which they could use their targeting systems to fire with extreme accuracy against Safir’s troops. It was the moment Drakon had dreaded. Even though the Syndicate defenders were covering more ground with fewer people, and even though the defenders were exhausted from launching attacks for days, Safir’s soldiers could take a lot of casualties before reaching the Syndicate positions.
But in those few seconds, Drakon could see that most of the defenders’ fire was still badly aimed. Only a small percentage of the shots hit the attackers with the accuracy expected of targeting systems, most of the rest of the enemy fire going wide. They’re not trying to hit us, Drakon saw with relief. Had Gozen gotten word to the Syndicate soldiers that they could surrender and count on being taken prisoner? Or had the Syndicate soldiers been so badly used that they simply didn’t care anymore?
Scarcely impeded by the mostly ineffectual defensive fire, Safir’s soldiers crashed into the Syndicate line, in many cases literally smashing through what was left of ground-floor walls or into Syndicate soldiers who did not manage to dodge in time. To the naked eye, nothing distinguished the battle armor of regular ground forces from that of the snakes, but on the displays of Drakon’s soldiers, some of the enemy symbols glowed a poisonous green instead of the usual red. The green symbols vanished so rapidly they seemed to dissolve as the attackers pressed into the Syndicate positions, wiping out the snakes in this area.
As the last snake fell, weapons swung to bear on Syndicate soldiers, who themselves aimed at Drakon’s troops. For a long moment that lasted only a second or two, both sides held their fire, looking at each other.
Then Safir opened her helmet visor and yelled at the Syndicate soldiers. “We came here to kill snakes! Not you! Drop your weapons, and we’ll go finish off the snakes left on this side!”
Several Syndicate soldiers threw down their weapons, then others followed in a rush. “Third Company, guard our new friends!” Safir ordered, resealing her helmet. “First and Third Battalions, wheel right and hit them! Second and Fourth Battalions, follow me to the left!”
On both sides of the breach in the Syndicate lines, the attackers ran into disorder. The snakes had ordered the troops under their control to simultaneously shift fronts and counterattack toward the breach, which in theory would have been good tactics for hitting Drakon’s assault from both sides. But in practice, tired, reluctant Syndicate soldiers did not move quickly and surely, and the soldiers nearest the edges of the penetration had already begun falling back in disarray as the snakes nearest them were killed by the leading elements of the attackers. What should have been a fast change of facing and reinforcement turned into a tangled mass of soldiers who blocked each other and milled about in confusion. Snakes screamed new orders or demands to follow previous orders, adding to the chaos. Some of the snakes began firing at their own soldiers, the traditional Syndicate method to force compliance when all else failed, and many of the overwrought Syndicate troops began firing back, targeting not only the snakes but also any executives or other supervisors within reach.
Safir’s attacks ran into masses of Syndicate soldiers too busy fighting each other to pay much attention to Drakon’s forces. “Get the snakes!” Safir ordered, her soldiers taking up positions wherever they could get clean lines of sight and nailing snakes as fast as they could. “Split and go around this mess. Keep moving until you reach the lines held by Gozen’s people and don’t leave any snakes alive behind you!”
The attack split and split again, Safir’s soldiers breaking into smaller groups as they pressed through the broken buildings and dodged piles of rubble or strong points of resistance. Drakon felt pride as he watched them, knowing that regular Syndicate troops could not have operated that way, using initiative, speed, and adaptability to continue their assault while overrunning or isolating the defenders they encountered. But he had trained his soldiers to think for themselves, and it paid off in fights like this.
And everywhere Safir’s soldiers went, the poisonous green markers on their helmet displays that marked snakes went out like blown candles.
When the Third Battalion reached the line of defenders facing Gozen’s rebellious troops and wiped out the snakes there, the defenders simply dropped their weapons and ran toward their former comrades under Gozen’s command, hands held out and arms wide.
“Colonel?” a lieutenant asked. “Is it all right if they surrender to the other Syndicate ground forces?”
“The others aren’t Syndicate anymore,” Safir replied, her breath short from following her soldiers through the maze of shattered buildings. “Make sure they leave their weapons, though. And make sure none of them bolt into the city.”
By that time, Second Battalion had reached the other side of what had been the remaining Syndicate positions, where most of the Syndicate soldiers turned on the last snakes and helped wipe them out before putting down their weapons and standing with open hands.
The soldiers of Safir’s Second Battalion came to a halt, looking across a gap in the ruins at Gozen’s soldiers on the other side. Drakon waited to see if anyone would do something stupid, but after sizing each other up, the two sides backed slowly out of contact.