Beneath us was a plain of mud, bodies and the wreckage of various armoured vehicles, all ours. Even in the gunship I could feel a warm wind blowing across it. We debussed almost looking like a military unit as we rolled into the trench network. Training, common sense and experience pushed through a haze of drugs and fatigue, telling us where the best places to hide and point guns were as we found overlapping defensive positions.
I became vaguely aware of taking light fire from the moment we landed. I barely noticed the gunship take off, peripherally aware of vectored air pushing down on me as it climbed away from us. We leapfrogged from covering position to covering position. We did everything we could to avoid contact as we were right in the middle of Their push, and more importantly we really couldn’t be bothered to fight. Not that They were trying too hard to find us.
Their mechanised push was going on above our heads. Every time one of Their heavy troop-carrying tanks went over, the honeycombed energy matrices glowing blue, we would take cover, bury ourselves in mud or simply remain still. All we really had to worry about were Their Walkers and any loose Berserks. There were relatively few of both as this was mainly an artillery, air and armoured battle, or more accurately a rout.
The sky was infrequently lit by Their energy beams and black light. Our return fire – plasma, various HE rounds and missiles – was even further away and more infrequent. Every so often a flight of Their fighters would scream overhead, coming back from a distant massacre.
I was lying on my back all but submerged in the mud, watching the underside of one of Their heavy tanks float overhead, admiring, not for the first time, the beauty of the energy matrices. It seemed to take a while for me to register the events around me as dangerous and then quantify them further as incoming enemy fire, though it was probably a lot faster than it felt. Wired reflexes and nerves, along with slaughter, warred with near-total physical exhaustion to create this bizarre, twilight half-world in which I seemed to exist.
One of Their Walkers, ten feet of organic mech, had one foot in the trench we were living in for that moment. Power-assisted, liquid-looking tentacles reached out for David Brownsword, the quiet Scouser who was running point for us. Brownie made life difficult for everyone by dropping a multi-spectrum smoke and ECM charge from his pack before making a sprint straight for us.
Split-screen visual info from the rest of the squad told me that there were Berserks entering the trench, debussed from a heavy tank behind us. I didn’t bother with orders. They knew what they were doing. My shoulder laser tore through the easy-release clips on the inertial armour at my shoulder. The beam stabbed out superfluously at the Walker but acted along with my smartlink to form a lock for one of my pack missiles before Brownie’s grenade took full effect.
I turned away from the Walker in front of me and brought the HdK SAW up to fire through my squad at the enemy infantry coming from behind us. The light, high-explosive, anti-tank missile launched itself from one of the twin tubes on my pack. I was barely aware of the heat as its rocket engine kicked in ten feet above me.
Bone-like biological penetrator rounds filled the trench from the Walker’s shard cannons. Multiple hits against my solid-state breastplate and helmet flung me to the ground. One round even beat the hardening inertial armour undersuit and embedded itself in my cybernetic arm.
From prone I pushed myself into a firing position and continued firing through the squad using the SAW’s smartlink to target the enemy infantry flanking us in the trench. They were Berserks. Hunched, hulking, four-armed, vaguely humanoid forms made of chitin and black liquid. Each of the aliens’ four limbs ended in some kind of weapon attachment. With something approaching disinterest, I began placing bursts of armour-piercing, hydro-shock rounds into them, each burst getting a little push from the gauss booster on the end of the barrel, sending the bullets deeper into the supersonic.
Behind me the HEAT warhead’s explosion shook the ground and sprayed mud everywhere. I had no idea if my missile had hit, been confused by Brownie’s ECM or been taken out by the Walker’s black light anti-missile defence.
Overhead my audio dampeners compensated for one long hypersonic boom as both Gregor and Bibs began firing overlapping long bursts from their railguns, aiming by dead reckoning where they thought the Walker was, their optics confused by the multi-spectrum smoke.
Brownie slid into the mud next to me, sending a grenade perilously close to the railgunners to impact at the back of the advancing squad of Berserks. He swore as his grenade launcher jammed. As he tried to work the pump he was suddenly wrenched off the ground. I felt warm wetness rain down on me as the Walker’s tentacles tore Brownie apart in mid-air. Where was my adrenaline? Can you wear out the glands?
I rolled over, triggering the microwave emitter on top of my SAW, as the Walker bore down on me. It had the weird, warped, off-centre look to it They get when they’re injured. The minor millisecond pause the microwave emitter gave me was enough as I triggered the rest of the SAW’s magazine into it at point-blank range, probably not doing a great deal of harm. However, it was staggering as hypersonic round after hypersonic round impacted into it. Gregor advanced until he stood between it and me. The Walker finally toppled over, beginning its rapid sludge-like dissolution to join the local mud. I barely registered that there was a red mess from a shard round where Bib s face used to be. I walked past her as she slid to the ground. Now They would want us, now They knew we were here.
I ejected the spent cassette from my SAW and replaced it with another vacuum-packed two hundred rounds. It didn’t matter that Bibby Sterlinin was dead. It didn’t matter that the sum of the experiences that went to form her existence as a sentient being was over. It didn’t matter that the thrill-seeking corporate brat who could‘ve easily joined the Fortunate Sons or dodged the war altogether had been my friend and even on one very drunk occasion my lover. What mattered was we needed her ammunition.
‘Get her ammo.’ I said to no one in particular. If we’d had the time we would’ve stripped her of ware as per our standing orders. At least with the planet being evacuated the Carrion units wouldn‘t get to her and harvest her body for implants.
It hadn’t even felt like sleep. More like a broken machine running down, but the dreams had come anyway. I’d woken up alert, aware of the sled’s high-pitched whine. The internal clock in my head was at least working. I’d been asleep for just under eight hours. I couldn’t risk using my internal GPS in case its signal was traced, but that had to put us close to New York. I knew I was going to have to find a cyber doc.
I looked around the cargo hold. It smelt pretty ripe now. Especially as we hadn’t had time to clean up after the attack on the Avenues, and in my case I’d been dumped in what I could only assume by the smell was raw sewage.
Morag was asleep. Pagan was in a net trance, presumably working on his God program. I tried not to watch Morag sleep.
‘Rivid,’ I said quietly.
‘Yes, my friend?’ His amplified voice boomed out. Morag stirred.
‘I miss the Faroes?’ I asked.
‘Yes, we got fuel there, we didn’t stay long. You were very tired, I think.’ Even through the cheap Russian amplifier he sounded distracted. Morag was awake and bleary-eyed.
‘Everything okay?’ I asked him.
‘I am not sure,’ he said.
‘Whass going on?’ Morag asked sleepily.
‘I’ve been tracking something, a big signal currently twenty or so miles to our north. I detected it a while back and didn’t think anything of it, but it has changed its course to an intercept with us.’