her helmet’s HUD. The reticle flashed yellow as the launcher detected the trees between it and its intended target, but she waited, knowing the APCs would clear the obstructions in a few seconds.
Her finger was tightening slightly on the trigger when both armored vehicles stopped in the middle of the road four hundred meters away, their turbines mosquito whines in the distance. She froze, certain they’d been seen, watching the 25mm cannon on the upper turret of both APCs traversing back and forth and waiting for the inevitable flash of fire and the explosion of shells…
What she got instead was the thump of the rear ramps on both vehicles opening and the faint clatter of armored boots as each APC disgorged a squad of a dozen of the biomech troopers.
“We have dismounts from the scout vehicles,” Diehl’s calm pronouncement sounded in her helmet speakers. “We’re going to need some support up here.” He seemed so calm about it, as if this was something that happened every day. She felt awe when she heard him or Sgt. Crossman react that way; she was sure of her own courage, but nowhere near as sure of her unflappability.
“I’m sending what we can spare,” Tom Crossman told him, a shrug in his voice. “Hold them off until we get these charges planted.”
“Roger that, boss. Manning,” Diehl directed her, “come get this other launcher from me.”
Without questioning it, she slung her own launcher and quickly high-crawled across the road to Sgt. Diehl’s position, taking the jagged pavement on the padded knees and elbows of her armor to minimize the noise. Reaching Diehl’s side, she rose to a crouch and accepted the proffered missile launcher from him.
“Cut through the trees,” he instructed, “and get into a position where you have a clear shot at both those APCs. We’ll hold off the dismounts, but we need those vehicles gone.”
“Got it, Sergeant,” she acknowledged, slinging the second launcher over her shoulder, then pulling her carbine loose against its chest straps. “I’ll take care of it.”
She felt the strain in her quads as she pushed up the steep hill on that side of the road, weaving between the trees. Loamy soil shifted under her boots and she shifted her weight forward to keep from sliding back down the hill, trying to make as little noise as possible. She fervently hoped that the crew of the APC was focused on the road ahead, because if they opened up on her right now, she had no cover and no clear shot back at them.
She hadn’t gone more than fifty meters through the woods, struggling to keep her balance on the steep hillside, when she heard gunfire erupt behind her. She risked a quick check on her HUD and saw six friendly icons on the road, engaging at least twenty of the enemy, who weren’t accommodating enough to provide IFF transponders to let her know where they were.
She forced herself not to think about the danger her friends faced, concentrating instead on the square icons glowing a faint red on the thermal sensors in her helmet, still over 200 meters away. She’d intended to skirt the edge of the road and come out behind the vehicles, giving them less time to react after the first shot, but with the dismounted biomechs already engaging the Special Ops troops on the road…
Manning dashed straight down the hillside, grunting in pain as she bounced off one tree after another, using the impacts to keep herself upright despite the steep grade. Coming to the bottom, she took the last meter in a leap to the pavement, absorbing the landing on flexed knees and still having to slap a hand on the hard ground in front of her to keep from toppling over.
Her head tilted up and she could see the two armored vehicles looming a hundred meters away, the muzzles of their cannons and assault guns seeming to be pointing directly at her. She let her carbine fall free of her grasp, allowing its sling to pull it tight against her chest armor as she unslung the first of the missile launchers, activating its targeting system even before she brought it up to her shoulder.
The APC to her left was closer by about 50 meters, and she instinctively made it her first target, squeezing the trigger the second the reticle flashed red, then throwing the spent launcher aside and flattening on the ground. The missile hit before she was fully down and the concussion tossed her backwards, sending her tumbling along the broken pavement, her weapons and equipment jabbing into her painfully despite her armor, adding to the bruises she’d already collected and crushing the breath from her lungs. Heat washed over her as the APC was consumed in a fireball of hyperexplosives and she felt a chunk of debris smack painfully against her helmet, leaving her ears ringing, her vision filled with stars and her faceplate starred and cracked.
Manning desperately forced her brain to work, forced her limbs to respond. She brought her knees beneath her and scrambled to her feet, running to the left to put the burning vehicle between her and the intact APC. She thought she heard the deep drumbeat of an assault gun opening up at her, but she didn’t dare turn to make sure; instead she kept running, pushing into a sprint that made her heart pound like a triphammer and her breath rasp in her throat.
She had almost cleared the edge of the burning wreckage of the left-hand APC and reached cover when she felt something tug at the back of her right calf and she stumbled but refused to go down, not even bothering to look to see how badly she was hit: there just wasn’t time. Her calf was numb and her foot didn’t seem to want to work right so she dragged it and limped-ran, cutting closer to the flames of the burning hulk than she’d wanted to. Her armor was fire-resistant but the wash of raw heat that washed over her made her light-headed and stole the breath from her lungs.
Tears filled her eyes and she blinked them away angrily, compartmentalizing the pain, shutting it away. There was one job left to do,
“Fuck it,” she snarled aloud to herself. “I’ll shove the damned thing up their ass.”
She giggled a bit deliriously at the thought that her father would have been horrified to hear her use that sort of language. Captain Alfred Manning had been a pillar of moral rectitude, first in his class at the Republic Military Academy and the model officer and gentleman… right up until Republic Spacefleet Headquarters had vanished in a sphere of fusion fire five years ago, killing off over half the Fleet’s officers in one shot. Her mother had screamed at her, then cried, then pleaded when she had told her that she was enlisting after the invasion, but none of her mom’s words could speak louder than her father’s silent example.
The external audio pickup in her helmet was dead, and besides the ragged rasp of her own breathing, all she could hear was the muted roar of the fire that was consuming the enemy APC. So when she rounded the end of the destroyed vehicle, she felt a dull surprise at the sight of the second APC backing up at high speed away from her, trying to bring its guns to bear on her position.
She fell to one knee, brought the launcher up to her shoulder and used the secondary sights mounted on the weapon itself to target the vehicle only 50 meters away. There was a flash from the APC’s main gun just as she pulled the trigger and the world disappeared in a sunburst of white fire…
Tom Crossman cursed and hugged the pavement as a grenade went off way too close to him and the five kilos of hyperexplosives beside him. The biomechs had pushed through the fire team he’d sent to stop them through the simple tactic of ignoring what would have been fatal wounds on a human and a liberal use of rifle grenades. Four of the six men and women he’d sent were dead, the other two were wounded and he and the four troops who’d been helping him set the charges to crater the road were pinned down by heavy fire.
He pushed his carbine out in front of him, using the weapon’s sight’s connection to his helmet targeting system to aim at the biomech who’d fired the grenade. It was nearly 50 meters away and he was firing from an awkward position, but he managed to walk a burst up from the thing’s leg to its chest. It stumbled backwards, but kept its feet and tried to return fire… only to find that its weapon wouldn’t function, having been hit by Crossman’s barrage. The thing dropped the useless rifle and began to walk forward, pulling a combat knife from a sheath on its belt.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Tom muttered. He shifted aim and managed to put a burst into the thing’s helmet, sending it crashing to the ground, motionless.
Tom came up to his elbows and pulled the cratering charge in front of him, ignoring the gunfire all around him as he punched a pair of detonators into the spongy block of hyperexplosives.
“Colonel Stark,” he transmitted as he worked, “we have at least four KIA, two WIA and Manning is MIA-her transponder is inactive. We’re being overrun but I’m setting the last cratering charge right now.” He tapped a code into the detonator’s control panel and was in the process of synching the device with his helmet controls when a massive concussion threw him three meters sideways, tumbling off the jagged edge of the road and into the
