"Jax, I'm a little worried about what might be hiding out in these buildings. I'm going to keep your team back for an extra 15 minutes. If anything we don't know about shows itself, it's your responsibility."
"Sir!" Damn, Jax always sounded so cool and under control. I wondered for a minute if he'd ever thought that about me, and if Jax's calm were as fake as my own.
I had 8 troopers lined up along the edge of the complex and another 3 positioned to provide supporting fire. I coordinated with the squad leaders on each of my flanks, and we synchronized our actions. We each had our heavy auto-guns positioned to put the ridge under fire, and we'd give the order to open fire 30 seconds before we jumped off with the assaulting troops.
I counted the last few seconds and gave Jax the order to commence firing. I could hear the distant high pitched whine of the auto-gun and see the stream of fire as it raked all along the ridge line. The auto-gun projectiles became superheated by the atmosphere and glowed a reddish yellow. I knew the fire was a stream of tiny iridium and depleted uranium darts fired at enormous velocity, but it looked like some sort of death ray from a space opera vid, especially in the darkness.
My AI gave me a five second warning and I braced myself. Four, three, two, one. "Squad…attack!" We all leapt to the top of the trench and ran toward the ridgeline as quickly as we could without jumping too high and offering the enemy a tempting target.
I could hear the auto-gun fire as it passed over my head moving to the right. I resisted the urge to scrunch my head down away from the deadly stream of projectiles. But I needn't have been worried. Our unit was well trained, and the gun operator knew perfectly well we were advancing below his field of fire. Still, it's an unpleasant feeling.
But the support fire was doing us a world of good. With three auto-guns firing full out, whatever enemy troops were on that ridgeline were more worried about grabbing cover than shooting at us. My troops made it almost to the top before we took a casualty, and I think the other squads had similar luck.
That luck changed just as soon as we reached the top. The enemy fire was still sporadic, but I had one trooper wounded. Wells. Her armor was holed and she had a pretty serious leg wound, but the suit had patched her up enough to stabilize things. She wasn't going to walk out of here, though, so I told her to find cover and wait for evac.
Then the command coms went crazy. First it was Major Greene, who had taken charge of the entire assault brigade. Her voice was calm and firm, but I could hear the exhaustion in it. "Enemy activity south of the complex. Infantry with armor support advancing. Cain, Warren, Stanton - I'm commandeering your support elements in the town."
Great. So I'd lost Jax's team and my fire support. I had seven troops left, including myself.
Next on the com was Lieutenant Gianni, who was now in command of our company. "Activity on the right. Large numbers of infantry advancing from the wooded areas."
I looked over, and at first I couldn't see anything. But then I could make out the figures moving forward in the darkness. I cranked up my visor to amp 20 and told my AI to clean up the blurry image as much as possible.
It was infantry, all right. Not powered infantry, just troops wearing simple body armor. Probably militia. Hundreds of them. Charging the ridgeline off to the right of my position.
And dying. Dying in huge swaths as our troops raked their lines with fire. Their armor, weight constrained by the need to carry the load under their own power, was no match for the high velocity fire of our nuclear-powered mag-rifles. Our shots tore them to pieces. I even saw a couple who virtually disintegrated as they walked into multiple fields of fire.
They returned fire, of course, but their guns didn't have the atomic power source ours did, and they needed pretty much a perfect shot to penetrate our armor. Still, I suspected some of their shots were finding their mark.
I had my six troopers deployed to receive an attack, and we were just waiting for the enemy to reach our fire zone when I got the fallback order from Sergeant Barrick. So whatever damage the enemy had managed to do, they must have taken out Lieutenant Gianni.
"Alright, let's move. We're pulling out. Odds fall back 500 meters, evens cover." I was the second in line, so I stood fast and took some very long range potshots at the approaching militia while the odds followed my order and scrambled down the ridge.
"Ok, evens. Let's go. One thousand meters. Now!" The other two evens and I raced down the ridge, stopping when we reached the edge of the town and turning to give cover to the odds.
I wanted us back in the town as quickly as possible, so we wouldn't be withdrawing under serious fire from the militia. But the squads on each flank were lagging us, so once I got everyone back to the edge of the complex I formed a firing line so we could provide support as they pulled back.
The squad on our left made it back just after we did, but it was clear that the troops on our right had been heavily engaged along the ridgeline and were having a tough time breaking off. I was just about the request permission to move back up and try to flank the militia attacking them when the recall signal came.
It was code white recall, which was a directive to withdraw immediately to the extraction area. I knew what to do from training, but I'd never actually experienced a code white command. It wasn't a rout. Not quite. But it was close enough.
"Alright troops, we've got a priority withdrawal order. Code white. We're going to move back through the town, using those buildings as cover just like we did on the way up."
We snaked our way through the town, single file at ten meter intervals. We lost Tonnelle, who got hit by an enemy sniper just as we passed the main section of the refinery. My readouts said he was dead, but I sent the rest of the troops on ahead and crawled back to check. Yeah. Dead.
I knew that sniper was still active, so I stayed low and hugged the buildings as I worked my way back to the outskirts of the town and into the trench line we'd assaulted just a few hours before. Jax was there along with one of his men, Russell. The two of them were the only ones who made it back from team two, and they'd had to abandon the auto-gun.
The battle computers running command and control continually adjusted the communications echelons to account for casualties and automatically routed messages accordingly. Apparently we'd lost enough officers to bump me onto the main command channel.
"Attention all command personnel, this is Colonel Wight provisionally commanding Strike Force Achilles. This is a priority one evacuation. We have hostile naval forces inbound from the Vesta warp gate. The fleet is bugging out before it can be engaged by superior enemy forces. You have 30, that's three zero, minutes to get your troops back to the staging area. Command control will download specific location to your AIs. Get your troops there on time, because in 60 minutes the last shuttle is launching, and anyone left here is SOL."
Colonel Wight? She must have been six places down on the command chart. Seven, my AI reminded me without my asking. So things hadn't been any easier on the high command than they'd been on the rest of us. Actually, I found out later it was mostly communications failures that put her in temporary command. General Everest was killed, and Brigadier Simonsen was wounded, but most of the rest of the top echelons made it through.
The colonel's voice continued, firm but strained. "Reports indicate that the enemy is putting pressure on us at all points. It looks like the hostile ground forces knew the relief was coming. We hurt them pretty badly, and it doesn't look like they have a lot of strength left, but it's probably going to be a fighting withdrawal for us. If we left rear guards they'd never make it back in time to evac, so we're just going to fall back as quickly as we can, fighting the whole way. Do the best you can, and let's get home."