“Not while we’ve been here, no. Why does that matter?”
“OPSTAT-5 is the same as our general quarters,” Michael said, “and that means all the Hammers not on watch have to get back to base to do whatever they do when they’re at general quarters. So when Juggernaut kicks off-”
“I get it, I get it!’ Shinoda said, cutting him off. “We’ll not only see Colonel Farrah, we’ll have every man and his fucking dog coming down the road at us. How could I have missed that?”
“Doesn’t matter. Question is what we do now.”
Shinoda went quiet for a moment. “I know what General Vaas said,” she said softly, “but I think we should do what we came to do.”
“But the road will be thick with truckloads of PGDF troopers,” he said. “I know what Vaas would say.”
“So do I, but we’re here to take out Farrah, and we can do that no matter how many trucks there are. What happens after that …” Shinoda’s voice slid into an uneasy silence.
“It’s suicide,” Michael said.
“Shit happens. But General Vaas isn’t here, so it’s your call. If you tell me to abort, we’ll abort.”
He took a deep breath. “No,” he said even though he knew he had almost certainly signed their death warrants. “We’ll stay. We can’t walk away from this, not now.”
“I agree,” Shinoda said. “Now, let me see … Yeah, we need to change things to give us a decent chance of getting away. I’m coming to you.”
A fleeting ripple shimmered its way toward him. Shinoda eased herself down beside him. “Right,” she said. “I’ll watch the holovids. When Farrah appears, I’ll take him from here. You get back to the base of the reef. See that boulder?”
“The one sticking out of the reef with the trees in front?”
“Yup. Dig in there. You’ll flank any PGDF brave enough to try and rush me. These are not frontline troops, so they’ll almost certainly fall back to the other side of the road when we hit them. The moment I’ve dealt with Farrah, we need to pull back along the reef. If we can do that before the Hammers get their shit together, we might just make it.”
“Not back to the bot?”
“No. The ground’s way too open, and more than likely there’ll be more truckbots coming up the road. And remember, when I move, you go too. No heroics; just run like hell. Clear?”
“Yes, sergeant.”
“Well, what are you waiting for? Go!”
Michael was dug in beneath the overhang of a massive boulder. He stared out down the road, a thin ribbon of silver-gray in the evening light that lanced down between towering thunderheads, harbingers of yet another storm.
“Stand by.” Shinoda’s voice came as a shock, so intense was his concentration. “One truck. Let it go.”
“Let it go, roger.”
The vehicle tore past, tires squealing and scrubbing as it hit the corner so fast that Michael thought it might roll over. Somehow it stayed upright. It left the corner and accelerated hard toward the base, giving Michael a clear view of the PGDF troopers packed into the back. They were all in combat gear and carried assault rifles.
His heart sank. What he’d seen wasn’t a bunch of seat polishers, people who spent their time tweaking missiles or buried in bunkers staring at tactical displays, punching buttons. No, they were security troops. They might not be marines, but they would know what they were doing.
“Vehicles inbound … stand by … okay,” Shinoda said. “I have a red mobibot … Yes, image scan confirms that’s our man. Oh, shit. He’s got two trucks right behind him. Okay, here’s the plan. Open fire when I do. Put a long burst into the target, then shift your fire to the lead truck. Don’t let it get too close to us.”
“One burst on the target, then shift to the lead truck, roger.”
Michael wiped the sweat from his hands, then tightened his grip on the battered assault rifle and peered down the road through the stabilized optical sight.
“Yes,” Michael hissed when Colonel Farrah’s red mobibot appeared. The man was clearly visible through the plasglass windshield. He was talking animatedly to the three other occupants of the bot. “Bad day to ask for a lift from the boss, boys,” he whispered.
The moment the mobibot slowed into the curve, Shinoda opened fire. Michael followed suit an instant later. The windshield disintegrated into a maelstrom of shattered plasglass, but the mobibot kept coming despite the hail of hypersonic rounds tearing it apart. Then its snout bobbed as the emergency brakes bit. It slid to a stop in a screech of tortured tires, a smoking, shredded shambles, the bodies of the men inside thrown forward in bloody ruins.
Michael shifted fire. He settled his optical sight on the cab of the oncoming truckbot. Its sole occupant stared open-mouthed at the carnage ahead. Michael squeezed the trigger and put two rounds into the man’s face, dropped his aim to put a long burst into the engine compartment, and emptied the last of his magazine into the camouflaged cover over the truck bed. The truckbot wobbled and swayed before it too shuddered to a halt, but not before its nose had rammed into the bullet-ridden wreck of Colonel Farrah’s mobibot and shunted it another 20 meters down the road.
Michael changed magazines and returned to the attack. A blizzard of fire flayed the truck and anyone stupid enough to try to get to his side of the road. But the Hammers were getting their act together. A significant amount of fire was already coming his way, and now the heavy chatter of machine gun fire joined the assault rifles. Rounds smashed at the rocks around him. Razor-sharp fragments of rock spalled off the rocks around him, stinging and burning when they hit his arms and face. The noise and confusion grew. Microgrenades arced across the road and exploded with ear-splitting cracks that filled the air with dust and the acrid smell of high explosive.
The mobibot’s microfusion plant blew, followed an instant later by the truck’s; the two blue-white balls of light and fire hurled debris in all directions. The concussion was so violent that it picked Michael up and threw him bodily backward; he was left stunned and deafened.
For a moment there was a silence. The respite did not last. The Hammers resumed their attack with full fury.
With an effort, Michael forced his brain back to work. He swore under his breath as he watched the second truck screech to a halt. Troopers spilled out of the back. Michael sent a hail of fire into them, chasing the men off the road into cover. But it was hopeless; there were simply too many of them, and they knew what they were doing. Under cover of heavy suppressing fire, Michael could see one group working its way left past the wreckage of the mobibot; a second was moving to his right.
Shinoda had been listening; she stopped firing. Michael put a single sustained burst into the Hammers, then squirmed and rolled away He scrambled to his feet and ran around the base of the reef to where Shinoda waited. He shot past her. “Go!” he shouted over the noise as he led the way along the path he had scouted earlier. The volume of fire thrown at them dropped off as they moved away from the road.
A Hammer drone arrived and settled into orbit overhead. Within seconds, hostile fire flayed the air around them and microgrenades ripped ground and vegetation apart. Michael flinched as a wayward round tore at his hair and a second seared an agonizing path across his left shoulder, the pain short-lived as his neuronics dumped neural blockers and painkillers into his system.
“Bastards saw us,” Shinoda yelled.
“No kidding,” Michael muttered. He forced his body to run harder. Now he jinked and swerved around rocks and trees. Shredded leaves and branches rained down on his head as the volume of fire intensified.
“Dumb fucks are letting that drone get way too low,” Shinoda shouted. “We can take it, but we’ll only get one chance, so make it count.”
“Got it,” Michael said. The drone was impossible to miss; its 4-meter wingspan and chunky body orbited barely 200 meters overhead.
