Hammonds hardcases the c.., p.76
Hammond's Hardcases The Complete Series, page 76
part #1 of Hammond's Hardcases Series
In a matter of moments, the medic and the New Yorker had carried a moaning Buapeuak off to what Daniel hoped was safety. “The rest of us,” Daniel told his team, “will circle around and lead any Gresians off our guys’ trail, then make our way down by another route.”
“Good plan,” Kinsella agreed. At Daniel’s nod, she and he began to fire, covering the movements of the others as they slipped out. When they were the only two left, Daniel and Kinsella followed.
They had barely left when several Gresians rushed into the building and set off a claymore that Beswick had placed for them. Daniel heard the blast sound out behind him as he hurried through a hole in a wall and into a room full of strange, cylindrical furniture and tree branches. A Gresian soldier was just trying to come the other way, and got a deer slug in the face.
“Trap One from Greyhound,” Daniel called out to Lieutenant Torres over the comms as he moved and shot.
“Trap One here,” she responded. He could vaguely hear some complaining in the background, which sounded like a rather testy Doug Wilson and a persuasive Hope, and was glad the professor wasn’t able to wear an Exo-suit—so he couldn’t interrupt when Daniel spoke to his team over the suits’ comms. “Trap Two has rendezvoused with us,” Torres continued, “and will be taking Professor Wilson on ahead while we wait for you.”
“How is the ammunition situation?” Daniel asked.
“We’ve replenished the ammo for the turret cannon, and some railgun and fifty-caliber ammo. Sergeant Stewart says we’d need more raw materials to fully replenish the railgun bolts.”
“Noted.” Daniel gave Torres a set of coordinates. “That’s some woodland east of town. It’s not as dense as the forest we saw first, so you should be able to negotiate it and keep out of Gresian vision.”
“Roger that, sir,” Torres replied. “We’ll be waiting for you.”
Eighteen
Daniel kept low, scuttling behind piles of rubble with the Hardcases leapfrogging from broken pillar to burning vehicle, then on to small houses and back as they circled round the outskirts of town heading in the direction of the woodland where Torres, Stewart, and Wilson were waiting with the Super-Bradley.
The sounds of Gresian activity remained concentrated in the center of town, but Daniel wasn’t dumb enough to trust things to stay that way. They moved silently, in full stealth mode, their camouflage digies and Exo-suit fields leaving them as vague moving patches of shades of blue in the shadows.
After twenty minutes or so of cautious movement, constantly watching and listening for Gresian footfalls nearby, as well as expecting the searing blast of a plasma shot to land between their shoulder blades at any moment, they finally found their way into a shallow stream that led away from the river and towards the woods. Shallow, Daniel thought, was too mild a word; to keep below the edge of it, they now had to crawl through the red mud on their elbows, faces almost breathing it in with every inch they moved. Daniel thought it looked like offal and smelled like shit from a rotting dead animal.
Suddenly, startlingly, the whine of a Gresian hover-tank came rushing towards them, and it was all Daniel could do not to scramble to his feet and run. Then a huge and heavy, glowing weight was pressing down on his back like the boot of a giant, and he could feel his ribs starting to flex and bend–
It was gone in an instant, the hover-tank continuing into the distance after having crossed over the ditch. He heard a couple of the soldiers immediately behind him groan in pain, as they’d been under the shadow of the tank, too.
“Keep going,” he whispered.
A couple of minutes later, the stream reached the cover of the woods and the team was able to climb out in a crouch. They kept their weapons up, scanning the trees as Daniel checked their position on his tablet. He pointed the team in the direction of the APC’s position, which was about seven hundred meters away, and began to move.
They didn’t move far, however, as a familiar whine returned.
Daniel could think of better places to be than in a forest of dried-out, ancient hedges listening to two Gresian AFVs whirring towards him. There were huge splintering crashes deeper in the skeletal forest as the Gresian vehicles shattered hedges that they didn’t have room to go around. Even here, where the tanks—for want of a better word, anyway—were far enough away to still look tiny, dust was being shaken loose from the desiccated deadwood all around the team members. For about the hundredth time, Daniel calmly checked the status of his railgun.
He felt as if his lungs were simply too small for all the air he needed. In his head, he knew it was because of the slightly different gravity and atmosphere on this planet, but his heart wasn’t listening. It sped up, as if he was more afraid than he actually felt. He glanced across at the corpsman, Gregory, a few yards away. The medic looked sick with fear, but he was holding firm and being professional. Daniel had no doubts that he would do the unit proud. The reverse wasn’t true, judging by the man’s nervous appearance. As if to prove him right, Gregory glanced around, and seemed to draw strength from Daniel’s apparent calm. Daniel himself felt a little better for being able to boost Gregory’s confidence. “You ready?” he asked.
Gregory hesitated before answering. “No, sir,” he admitted finally. “But nobody ever is, so I guess I’m as ready as anyone else here. You?”
Daniel smiled. “Same.” It wasn’t really possible to feel ready for something like this. They exchanged another look, and Daniel knew that Gregory understood that, too. You just had to go for it anyway.
By now, the Gresians were close enough to hit with a thrown object as they churned through the fallen splinters. Daniel hefted a nanocharge grenade and thumbed the activator. He threw it at the lead Gresian tank, and heard it clang against the hull a moment before it exploded into a soot-like swarm of nanites. To one side of him, Kinsella leaned out from the side of a tree and fired a burst from her railgun. Daniel did likewise. He knew that the railgun bolts could punch through an M1 Abrams’ armor easily, but he wasn’t stupid enough to assume that the Gresians wouldn’t have developed a countermeasure back in the days when they’d fought live Mozari armed with them. With that in mind, he drew a bead on the patch of armor that was starting to pit and crumble from the nanocharge. The nanites didn’t seem to be eating all the way through the hull, but all Daniel needed them to do was thin it, just enough.
Railgun bolts buried themselves in with a metallic ‘chank’ sort of noise, and he saw a few go through. The other tank paused, its turret purring around. It was terrifying looking down the barrel of a huge plasma cannon, but Daniel hoped that the Gresian military training taught its tank crews not to waste the resources of an artillery piece on a couple of individual footsoldiers. A pair of smaller weapons set beside the cannon opened fire instead, but Daniel and Svoboda had already taken cover as the petrified hedges around them blackened and in some places burst into flames.
Worse still, a burning tree collapsed onto PFC Collins, who writhed and screamed as, Daniel knew, his suit kept him alive while he was burned. Daniel started forward, hoping to grab him and put the fire out, but before he got near, a plasma blast hit Wilkes directly, vaporizing him outright.
Marty Beswick grabbed Daniel’s shoulder and pulled him back. There was no more sound other than crackling and splintering for a moment, and Daniel began to wonder if maybe the tank crews had decided that a couple of men weren’t worth bothering with at all. Then he heard the sounds of more railgun bolts spiking into vehicle armor, and knew that Kinsella and Pipsqueak had regained their attention.
He turned, pausing long enough to fire off a few rounds at the tank but not long enough to let them get a bead on him. It didn’t matter how inaccurate his own shooting was—he wasn’t sure how much damage the railguns could do to the tanks anyway; he just needed to get their attention. And then the Gresian vehicles’ engines whined and howled, and he knew he had them. The trick now was to stay just out of killing range, but close enough to lead the Gresians away from the APC’s position. It shouldn’t be too difficult, Daniel reasoned, since the rough ground and petrified tangle was hampering the vehicles. There was, he thought, little danger of them catching up.
The Hardcases ran back to where they’d emerged from the stream’s channel, but this time kept going a short distance before stopping and taking cover behind some of the petrified trees.
The tank moved forward, and Daniel aimed for where the driver’s position would be on a human-made tank, under the plasma cannon. He didn’t expect the railgun bolts to make it through the deflective, sloping front armor. He did, however, expect them to kept the Gresians’ attention and piss them off. In this, he was not disappointed.
Which was unfortunate for the Gresians.
The tank continued towards them, gliding over the channel that was too shallow for its crew to even notice it. The nanocharge and claymores went off right when the center of its underside—the vulnerable power system for their anti-gravity hovering ability—was a couple of feet above them. The tank hit the ground before the echo of the explosions died.
As the top of the turret irised open to allow the crew to escape, Daniel sprang up, firing short, controlled bursts at a couple of Gresian troopers who were first out. They fell, with bolts through their breastplates, but then a burst of plasma fire made him duck back. Another mirror-helmeted Gresian leapt from the tank, having swept the surroundings with blind fire, and he was followed by two more.
Collins and Gregory opened fire from opposite flanks, together putting down one of the Gresians, but the two others returned fire. Gregory ducked just in time, but a plasma blast took Collins’ head clean off.
Suddenly, an explosive shell hit the knocked-out tank, the explosion hurling both Gresians into the trees. Daniel let out a “Yes!” at the sight of the now re-armed Super-Bradley smashing its way towards them. Kinsella shot one of the Gresians as it staggered to its feet, but the other leapt atop the APC with a snarl and started blasting at the turret’s hatch from behind it. Whoever was in the turret swung the cannon around, but couldn’t shake the creature off.
Daniel ran up the knocked-out tank, planted a foot on the roof, and launched himself across the gap between vehicles. It wasn’t easy at the speed of the approaching transport, but the Exo-suit carried him over. He slammed into the rear deck and damn near slid right back off. He whipped out an arm to wrap around one of the exterior handgrips. All the same, he lost his momentum as well as his railgun, and the Gresian trying to break into the turret turned. Daniel pulled his Desert Eagle and fired blind as the Gresian leaned out to bring his own plasma weapon to bear. The shot caught the Gresian in the shoulder, denting its armor and causing it to lose its balance so that it went tumbling from the transport with a hiss.
He heard a couple of shotgun blasts as the Hardcases made sure the fallen Gresian was out of the picture, and then the only sound remaining was the engine of the Super-Bradley. It stopped, and Bella Torres popped the hatches open. “Need a ride, folks?” she asked. They all chuckled with tired relief.
“Are we glad to see you,” Pipsqueak said.
Nineteen
Bella Torres floored the Super-Bradley’s accelerator and swung the vehicle northwards. “Think they’re following us?” she asked.
Daniel, watching from the APC’s turret, shook his head. “No, but then, they don’t need to.”
“Yeah,” Kinsella said. “Logically, they can communicate with any and every other settlement we might run into and alert them to be ready for us.” She pondered for a moment, and then said, “The martial skills of their military must have—”
“This wasn’t just their military,” Daniel thought aloud. “The gear of the ones who originally ambushed us was too varied. This was the whole local community.”
“If that’s true, then the whole damn community must have turned out to defend itself. I guess you have to admire that,” Kinsella pointed out, and Daniel glared at her. “Oh, come on, L-T, military folks have always been able to admire the skills of their opponents without implying support or sympathy for them.”
Daniel had to admit that was true.
“That’s hardly surprising, you know,” Lizzie said over the APC’s speakers. “Every Gresian joins the military for a whole decade upon reaching maturity.”
“They have a draft?” Daniel asked.
“Is that so surprising?”
“I guess it shouldn’t be...”
Lizzie sniffed, or at least made the sound. “It’s more than the sort of draft you have, Daniel. Gresian service is more like compulsory high schooling for the Gresians. It’s the most vital part of their education: to learn to defend themselves and their society and species, no exceptions or exemptions. They’re all trained as infantry. And when I say all, you know I mean all.”
“For ten years,” Kinsella murmured. “I dread to think what they give out at their version of juvie hall.”
“It’s part of what makes their society so glued together,” Lizzie continued. “The Gresians shooting at you may be out of practice, but they are well trained soldiers.”
“Even though they’re civilians.”
“There are no real Gresian civilians. They’re effectively all reservists. Well, aside from the kits and cubs, anyway.”
Daniel cleared his throat. “And you didn’t think this was worth mentioning before, Lizzie?”
“You never asked. Which you should have. It’s the best way to learn things, asking.”
Daniel ground his teeth. “OK,” he said as he forced himself to relax a little. “They definitely know we’re around.”
“And there are no civilians,” Kinsella added.
“That makes things morally easier, I guess,” Daniel said, more to himself than to anyone else. Or so he told himself anyway.
Lizzie appeared in his vision with a tired-looking chuckle. “You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But I reckon you’ll actually find morality’s a bit more complicated than that. Well, confusing anyway. One of those two. Maybe both—”
“Are you going to ask me how we define civilian now?” Daniel interrupted.
“Pfft,” Lizzie began. “That’s an easy one. Civilian, like civilization, derives from the old French for civil, which in turn derives from the Latin civilis, which is simply the word for a townsman. One who lives in a city, so an urban dweller.”
That wasn’t the sort of lecture Daniel had been expecting. “That’s how you define it?”
“Certainly not. The meanings of words evolve, like everything else.”
Daniel wasn’t interested in that, not at this particular time, though when he’d been at Yale, he’d have been willing to sit up all night discussing something like this so long as the discussion was fueled by beer and involved a pretty girl. “Bailey, I want to check our bearings.”
“Right, sir.” He looked at the monitor on his panel. “We’re on the right side of the river, and if the imagery we do have from the orbital drones is correct, there are no other topographic barriers en route to the Firebird objective.”
“Good. All we have to do now is catch up to Trap Two.”
“Ah, one SNAFU, sir,” Bailey said hesitantly. Daniel raised an eyebrow. “Trap Two doesn’t show up. At all.”
Daniel momentarily started, but then realized that if it had been destroyed and its crew killed, he would have felt the loss of Hope. He could still feel her, and sense her calmness, so he knew she was alive and not in any immediate trouble. That meant the rest of Trap Two’s crew weren’t likely in difficulty either. “Trap Two from Greyhound. Sit-rep, over?”
Only static replied.
Bailey tried, as well. “No response. Their radio must be dicked up. This is some stock that’s not going into a portfolio for Sam’s college fund.”
Daniel switched to his Exo-suit comms, calling out to Erik Palmer directly, suit to suit. “Greyhound calling Trap Two. Sergeant Palmer, report.”
Unusually, there was no response. Daniel was momentarily confused; suit comms had never failed before, although they did have a more limited range. He couldn’t see how Palmer and his team could have suddenly gotten out of range, though, not without having been scooped up by a shuttle and flown a couple of hundred kilometers.
“Lizzie, the Gresians don’t have teleportation like in Star Trek, do they?”
“No, which is actually pretty much a good thing.”
“That’s putting it mildly.” Daniel thought for a moment, and then it struck him. “When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains—”
“However improbable...”
“The Gresians have learned to jam suit comms,” Daniel said flatly. ‘Hope, are you there?’
‘I’m here. Where are you?’
‘About twenty miles north of that fucking town. We couldn’t raise you on radio or suit comms. The Gresians are jamming both.’
‘That could be a big problem.’
‘Do you know where you are?’
‘Not really,’ Hope admitted. ‘We got turned around in the fighting and along the curves of the river.’
‘Damn.’
‘Our GPS read is down. We’re heading north as best we can. Can you spot our locator tag?’
Daniel turned to Bailey. “Do we have a read on Trap Two’s lo-jack transponder?”
“Nothing.”
“Could it be damaged? Without the transport being destroyed, I mean.”
“Maybe, or it could be de-powered if something went wrong with its battery pack. Or it could be jammed,” Cole suggested.
“They’re not just jamming the radio, but they are jamming suit comms too…. Could go either way.”
Daniel passed this along to Hope, who thought back, ‘They know those of us wearing Mozari suits are the more dangerous, and the more able to sneak around.’
‘You make too much sense,’ he opined.
‘Is it even possible to make too much sense?’
