'Me, neither. I intend to try and get us out of this alive and one way is to do the minimum that won't get us shot as deserters.'
'So?'
'So when the lizards hit, we fall back to the second position. Be ready.'
'Just give the word, I'm always ready to retreat.'
A bomb went off somewhere inside the city.
'Nulites?' the Minstrel Boy wondered.
Reave shook his head. 'I doubt it. Not unless they're working for the enemy.'
Two militiamen in bronze armor fled from the fortifications with five neoprimitives in hot pursuit. A pair of powerspears were thrown as one, and the fancy armor offered no protection. One blade stood out a good twelve inches in front of the first man's chest, and the look of horror on his face as it continued to hum at pain vibration inside him was something that Reave did not think he would be able to forget for a long time.
The first lizard came over the barricades. Its rider wore black samurai-style armor and wielded a pair of long pistols similar to Reave's. He seemed to be in the throes of a suicidal frenzy, wheeling his mount from side to side and firing into the fighting pack around the fortifications. He shot four defenders before he was dragged from his saddle by their comrades to be hacked and beaten to death.
Reave gestured to his squad. 'Okay, fall back. Fall back to the second position.'
The squad needed no further urging. They ran back down the tunnel, away from the fighting. Barstow and another merc called Natch were the first out into the open, and they were immediately cut down by a burst of fire from a nearby walkway. The others stopped dead in their tracks.
The Minstrel Boy looked around anxiously. 'Now what?'
Reave edged up to the mouth of the tunnel and peered around the stonework. The wall beside him was spattered by more fire. He quickly pulled his head back. 'There's a bunch of fifth columnists. They've set up a fire point by the big support pillar over on the left.'
At that moment two lizard soldiers clattered into the other end of the tunnel. The Minstrel Boy dropped into a crouch, the AK chattering in his hand.
Reave gestured to the three remaining mercs. 'Shaef, Nosmo, Stazio, back him up!' He turned to Billy. 'Can you fix that fire point?'
Bill was already jacking a small cigar-sized smartbomb into the multiplex's launcher. 'If my aura holds.' The weird voices in his head had stopped once the shooting had begun.
Reave scowled. 'Don't get mystic on me.'
Two lizards were twitching on the floor of the tunnel. One of the riders had staggered to his feet, determined to keep coming on foot. He took only four paces before Nosmo blew his head off. No more lizards came into the tunnel. For the moment the militia seemed to be holding the line. Billy craned around the corner of the tunnel mouth, and it was once again blasted with fire. Holding the multiplex at arm's length, he loosed the missile. For Billy, a firefight was the easy part. There was a
'Okay, the way's clear. Let's go!'
They sprinted for the cover of the big support pillar and took stock of the situation. The smoke of the explosion still lingered, and the broken bodies of a half dozen fifth columnists were scattered all around the base of the pillar. Reave looked at Billy as he turned one over with his foot. Half the man's face had been blown away.
'You really did a job on these guys.'
'What was I supposed to do, slap them on the wrist?'
There was no sign of any other enemy units, and they started moving toward their first fallback position. Other squads of militia were being moved up to the platforms. For the moment the first line seemed to be holding, although Reave did not want to think about the cost. A few officers gave them strange looks as Reave's squad retreated when everyone else was advancing, but once again a look of self-assurance stood them in good stead, and nobody stopped to question them. Their fallback point was up one level, in a sandbagged fire position set up on the steps of the city's central registry building. It afforded an elevated view of the access roads leading to the platform tunnels. Themoment the first line gave way, they would find themselves in the thick of the fighting.
When they arrived there, they found that the position was already manned by a team of skittish civilian volunteers under the command of a regular militia officer, who only just managed to stop his men from shooting Reave's squad as fifth columnists. The arrival of Reave and his people seemed to add to an already confused situation. The officer paced up and down, shaking his head, while his men looked ready to jump at their own shadows.
'I don't understand why you were sent back here. Half the brigade's been moved forward to the platforms.'
Reave just shrugged, relying totally on the military's God-given talent for fouling up.
'Hell, I don't know. I just follow orders, I don't cut them. All I know is that we were in the tunnels, up to our ass in fifth columnists and neoprimitives, and then a runner comes and tells us that we're to fall back to our second position. I wasn't about to complain. It's only a matter of time before the platforms are overrun.'
The officer decided to get a second opinion. The fire position had one of the Krystaleit militia's cumbersome communication sets. In the Damaged World, where no signal could penetrate the nothings and even stabilized reality was awash with energy fog, electronic communication was something of a dying art.
The officer looked at the volunteer operator. 'Are you getting anything on that?'
The operator shook his head. 'Not a damned thing. The whole net seems to be down.'
The officer cursed under his breath and faced Reave. 'I don't know what to tell you.'
There was a series of explosions out on the platforms, and the volunteers looked nervously at each other.
Reave checked the charges on his pistols. 'I figure that at any minute, the question of where we're supposed to be at is going to be pretty damned academic.'
Almost on cue, groups of figures started coming up the access road. First it was medics carrying stretchers and the walking wounded helping each other up the ramp, looking for a secure spot where they could get medical attention. Initially, the retreat was fairly dignified. Clearly, the defenders on the barricades were desperately buying time so the wounded could get out, butin a situation like that time had a nasty habit of running out all too quickly. In a matter of minutes large numbers of defenders were streaming out of the tunnels and back into the city. Some tried to fight an orderly rearguard action, falling back from one position of cover to another, firing back into the tunnels as they withdrew. Others, however, were simply fleeing for their lives in an unseemly rout, even abandoning their weapons in panic as they sought the apparent safety of the interior of the city.
A militiaman was caught in the periphery of a heat blast, and his armor blazed like a Roman candle. Amazingly, he was not killed outright but staggered forward for a few steps, screaming, with his armor streaming green and yellow flames. Reave's face was grim. The moment he had first seen that armor he had known it was no good. Whoever had issued the damn stuff deserved to be taken out and shot.
The first attackers came out of the tunnels, a howling knot of neoprimitives with blood up to their elbows, plus a handful of the green template monsters. It was Reave's first look at the things. Menlo had not exaggerated. They were ugly as sin. Long, purposeless, saberlike fangs extended down from their upper jaws, and the thick, horny claws at the ends of their fingers must have seriously impaired the use of their hands. They were more the product of some fevered nightmare fantasy than custom-tailored fighting machines. It appeared that the only weapons the monsters were capable of using were wide-bladed scimitars and rudimentary slug guns. They did not even move well. They were ungainly and uncoordinated, and they seemed too stupid to avoid exposing themselves as clear, easy targets. A platoon of militiamen formed ranks across the road and loosed volleys of bolts into the raiders emerging from the tunnels. There was even something weird about the way the template monsters died. When they were hit, they first spasmed crazily as though some elementary electrical nervous system was shorting out, and then they collapsed in on themselves like soft containers that suddenly had been drained of their contents.
While the only attackers were the neoprimitives and the green monsters, the platoon on the access road held its own. Then the mounted men started to come out of the tunnels. As Reave knew all too well, they were the real strength of Baptiste and the other warlords. With their speed, firepower, and mobility, they would be more than a match for anything Krystaleit could put up against them.
