she suspected that Mosasa
The navigation unit beeped at her, letting her know that Samhain was just coming over the horizon. The forward LOS sensors started retrieving data, overlaying it on her heads-up display and several secondary monitors. Out the window, a green wire-frame holo mapped onto her view, picking out the spot on the horizon that marked the abandoned commune.
Within two seconds, the green blossomed outward, separating into multiple dots marking the man-made structures in and around the abandoned village. The dots grew into boxy forms outlining walls, roofs, doors, and windows that would have otherwise been invisible at this speed and distance.
Just as the holo display resolved enough detail to pick out individual openings on the buildings still over a dozen klicks away, her heads-up peppered the whole village with red dots.
Samhain wasn’t abandoned today.
Parvi flipped a switch to allow the ship to use active sensors. She was two seconds from contact. The hostiles wouldn’t have time to react if they detected her spying on them, and after contact, they’d know she was here anyway.
In response, all the secondary screens began scrolling with an extraordinary level of detail, most of which would only be of use in an after-action analysis. The important thing for Parvi were the icons that suddenly overlaid the red dots. These red dots wore powered armor, these red dots had highly charged energy weapons, these red dots were contragrav vehicles, and these red dots, moving across a clearing on the west side of the village, matched biometric data for Fitzpatrick and Wahid.
Half a dozen hostiles in powered armor hid inside the building those last two dots were moving toward. Parvi sent a missile through one of its windows. She had just enough time in the first pass to send another missile into the building housing one of the contragravs. She pulled the fighter up, just ahead of the shock wave from the first explosion.
Mallory was a good fifty meters away from the building when its walls evaporated in a roll of ink-black smoke and bloodred flame. The shock wave knocked him backward and he felt something tear into his leg and his left shoulder.
As he fell into the burning black sand blanketing the courtyard, he mentally chanted the rosary as his implants kicked in. The pain from the shrapnel in his shoulder and his leg faded in his awareness, and he became calmer than anyone in his situation had a right to be. His sense of time telescoped as he rolled around onto his stomach to face the remnants of the building.
Behind the smoke and fire, fifty meters away, another explosion erupted on the other side of the village. Above the new rolling smoke cloud, something flew by at hypersonic speeds, a rocket-fast heat-shimmer slicing the bloody sky in two. It shot past, turning up toward the sky as the shock wave from the second explosion and the sonic blast of the aircraft blowing through the atmosphere slammed into Mallory simultaneously.
In the split second that he took in the presence of the aircraft, the commune of Samhain had ceased being empty. Soldiers were suddenly everywhere. He could see the distortion caused by several active camo projectors by one of the Tudor houses deeper in the village. Closer, by the smoke-shrouded crater that used to be the building in front of him, he saw silhouettes of soldiers in powered armor trying to pull themselves out of the wreckage. They stood out clear as day and moved with halting jerks showing their suits’ power was failing or completely fried.
The only cover immediately available was by the Trinity statue, a bowl-like depression that might have once been a fountain. He ran crouched to lower his cross section and dived in. The impact ignited pain in his shoulder and leg that blasted through into his awareness despite the best efforts of his implants.
He braced himself by the lip of the bowl, holding the gamma laser in a shuddering grip. He risked a peek back at the soldiers by the wreckage. By God’s grace, and air support, the soldiers weren’t paying attention to him.
He saw the fading afterimage of a heavy plasma weapon sending a pulse upward, toward the aircraft, which had looped above the village and was diving down toward them. The pulse was a futile discharge. Even if it unloaded all its power in one burst, forming a microscopic sun that could vaporize a large portion of the attacking craft, it was still akin to throwing a sponge at a bullet.
He looked around, trying to pinpoint where Wahid was. He couldn’t see any sign of him. Around him, the village was lit by flashes of other weapons discharging, and two actual missiles shot up toward the blur diving down toward the village. The missiles hit some sort of countermeasure, blowing up short of the target as the blurred craft broke its dive to shoot over Mallory. Four contrails split off to continue the descent in its wake.
He dove for the lowest part of the bowl as the sonic boom hit. Mallory covered his head as the thunderously low passage of the aircraft blew sand over him.
Then four explosions tore through Samhain, shaking the ground and burning the back of his neck and his hands with their heat. Something that felt like burning gravel pelted him a second later.
The explosions still echoed off the mountains as he shook off the debris that covered his back. Ears ringing, he rolled to the side.
Facing him, less than a meter away, Mallory saw a helmet with a cracked and blackened faceplate. It rested on its side, blown free of whomever it was attached to. The neck was angled away from Mallory, so he couldn’t tell if a head was still inside.
