Blood of Heroes (The Ember War Saga Book 3) (19 page)

Un’qu tucked the photo back into his uniform. He nodded slowly and turned away.

“Hey, you know the lieutenant, right?” Orozco asked. “If there’s a way to get them out, he’ll find it. We’re Marines, we don’t leave anyone behind if there’s a chance they’re still alive.”

Un’qu glanced over his shoulder, then left.

“Pilot!” Cortaro yelled. “Turn and burn, you need to get back there ASAP.”

Jorgen came around from the cockpit, his flight gloves off and the zipper of his suit half way down his chest.

“Gunney, no one’s going anywhere in that soup,” Jorgen said. He pointed behind Cortaro.

A wall of sand stretched across the horizon, rolling towards them like a tidal wave.

Bells clanged throughout the city, warning of more than just an impending sand storm.

The refugees from Usonvi took shelter in the shadow of a small hill. A dry riverbed, nothing but a wide swath of sand and silt, cut into the side of the hill. Millennia of erosion from when the riverbed carried water had worn into the side of the rock, cutting a path through and creating an overhang in the rock, like a cave with only one side.

The adults sat in tight circles, letting their children loose to play within the makeshift corrals. What little food and water they had, they shared with each other.

Hale, standing guard at one end of the overhang, checked the timer on his gauntlet. The nuclear demolition of Ghostwind Pass was two minutes away. He turned his attention back to the route they’d come from, eyes scanning for any sign of the tide of banshees headed in their direction.

“Sir,” Torni said, trotting up to him, “the civilians know the nuke’s coming. It’s still the end of the world, but the quake we’re about to feel isn’t it.”

“Good work, how’re they doing?”

“Better. I told them to eat the food they were carrying for the highers. It should give them more strength to get the last couple miles,” she said.

“Any trouble?”

“No, Nil’jo’s decided to stop bitching and start brooding, which is fine by me.”

A cold mass of air blew into their shelter. Children cried and went running for their parents. Dotok wrapped their robes around the children and sat them between their legs. The sky darkened as a roiling mass of snow and dust blew across the top of the canyon. A thick fog descended into the canyon, like a cloud was charging straight for them.

A whistle blew twice. “Storm!” Nil’jo shouted. He repeated the whistle and the warning once more before Standish yanked the whistle from the Chosen’s mouth and proceeded to lecture him on noise discipline. The banshees could’ve heard that whistle.

The storm cloud hit the ground and enveloped them all like fog. Fine dust and particulate snow and ice struck Hale’s armor with the sound of a rain shower against glass.

“Great…a mud storm,” Standish said over the IR as his next words washed out in the interference.

Hale called out to Bailey, Yarrow and Standish; the three marines emerged from the blowing dust seconds later.

“Try to form a line at the edge of the overhang,” Hale said. “I don’t want anyone wandering off in this mess.”

“Don’t think that’ll be a problem, look,” Bailey said.

The Dotok were still in their circles, hunkered against one another. Children poked at the robes covering them, but none tried to get free.

“I don’t think this is their first rodeo,” Standish said. A windblown pebble bounced off his helmet.

The ground quaked and Hale had to grab on to Torni to keep his balance. A clash of thunder announced the detonation of the nuclear device. A constant tremor kept up for almost a minute as the sound of a distant avalanche rumbled through their shelter.

“I think it worked,” Standish said.

“We’re all kinds of screwed if the birds don’t come back for us,” Yarrow said. “There’ll be radiation from that nuke. Not much for us in our suits, but all of them are unprotected.”

“And the civvies are down to almost nothing for food or water,” Torni said. “Not as much of a concern. I figure the banshees will kill us all before we starve, or die of rad poisoning.”

“We can treat radiation exposure on the
Breit
,” Hale said. “This mission’s a bit of a Hail Mary. Thank you all for being with me.”

“No place I’d rather be,” Torni said. “This is something I can feel proud of—better than sitting back on Earth for the next fourteen years, waiting around for the Xaros to show up again.”

“Sir,” Standish raised a hand, “do you think we’ll ever get to go someplace nice? Anthalas was this big swamp full of corpses and giant lizards trying to eat us. This place is about as pleasant as taking a shower with a sand blaster, plus monsters. Just once I want the Corps to send us to someplace pleasant…maybe with a bunch of Polynesian women that want to rub our feet and feed us grapes.”

“Don’t tell me you believe the legend,” Bailey said with a shake of her head.

“What legend?” Yarrow asked.

“It’s not a legend. The Island of Fiki-Fiki is a real place,” Standish said. “My father heard about it from a cellmate whose uncle was best friends with someone who was there.”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” Yarrow said.

“Listen up, new guy. Not every Marine gets to hear about the island of Fiki-Fiki. When the Chinese blew that big EMP over the Pacific and knocked out every ship in the fleet, an American torpedo boat went adrift and ended up on an uncharted island in the South Pacific. The natives hadn’t seen a Westerner since the Second World War and thought the crew of that torpedo boat were gods come to walk the Earth. Those sailors sat out the rest of the war, had like a dozen wives each and their own little island kingdom…until they were ‘rescued.’ Then they had a party with the five years of back pay.”

“No way,” Yarrow said, awe in his voice.

“It’s a myth to get stupid Marines to re-enlist for float assignments,” Torni said. “Don’t believe it.”

“We don’t have to go to the island of Fiki-Fiki, sir,” Standish said. “Maybe we drop on someplace that has a forecast of partly cloudy instead of mud storms and a ninety-five percent chance of genocide. I’d like to believe that there are some nice places in the galaxy, that not everything is horror and murder.”

“Maybe once the Xaros are gone,” Hale said, “we can use the Crucible to find someplace reasonably nice.” Wind buffeted the Marines. Hale turned around and looked into the storm. “But not today.”

****

Orozco tested his anchors hold against the deck plates for the umpteenth time. His boots were locked tight, still. Same as they’d been for the past two hours. He brushed sand away from his Gustav and stared at the blank bulkhead in front of him.

Waiting. He hated waiting.

“So, I said to the guy ‘How do
you
know there’s no teeth in there?’” Lance Corporal Rock said. Another Marine, Sergeant Holt, chuckled at the punchline. Each heavy gunner Marine was anchored to the deck, their Gustav’s primed and ready for a fight that could start at any moment. Each hated waiting a little more than the next.

A text message came across Orozco’s gauntlet.

“All right, stow it,” Orozco said. “Sentries report movement out beyond the wall.”

“They going to tell us when this fight starts?” Rock asked.

“Just wait to hear the shooting, that’s a pretty good clue,” Holt said.

“What part of ‘stow it’ wasn’t in English?” Orozco snapped. “Remember the plan. We provide covering fire for the front lines as they fall back. Soon as the first hostile gets to the road in front of us, we un-ass this position and fall back to the next one. Got it?”

“Sure, Sarge. Who came up with this plan? Gunney, or that big ugly you’ve been palling around with?” Holt asked.

“Which one do you want to look in the eye and say ‘your plan sucks’?”

“I didn’t say it sucked,” Holt said sheepishly. “Just curious is all.”

“Devastators, this is Gunney. You ready?”
Cortaro asked over the IR.

“Hey, IR’s back up,” Rock said.

“Don’t worry, it’ll go down soon as we really need it,” Holt said with a chuckle.

“Devastators ready,” Orozco said.

“Who picked ‘devastators’? I like havocs better,” Rock said.

“I swear, if I wasn’t bolted to this deck I’d come over there and jam my fist right down your throat,” Orozco said. He powered up his Gustav, twin electric whines joined his as the other Marines followed suit.

The snap of gauss rifle fire tapped against the bulkhead like driven rain.

“Case of beer says I get more kills,” Holt said.

“Deal,” Rock said.

“Deal,” Orozco said. His mind wandered to the can of sardines he’d carried around for months. But he’d finally eaten them. He could die with one less regret.

Tiny explosive bolts rippled across the bulkhead. The heavy metal plating groaned and fell away. The three heavy gunners, drawn from the surviving Marine squads, now had a commanding over watch of the final battle for New Abhaile city. Their firing position was in the upper deck of a landed star ship, with direct line of sight to the eastern walls.

Banshees scaled the outer wall like a horde of locusts coming for the harvest. Banshees struggled through the electrified wires strung between the welded cross-bars, creating a bottleneck behind them. The Devastators had a massed infantry target, every machine gunner’s dream since the Western Front stalled out in France almost two hundred years ago.

“Light ‘em up!” Orozco let loose a peel of heavy cannon blasts that tore through the packed banshees like a scythe through wheat. Combined with Rock and Holt’s fire, they made short work of the first banshee push over the wall.

“Cover your sectors of fire,” Orozco ordered. The other gunners shifted their attention to the flanks, hitting banshees that came over the walls in ones and twos. His Gustave barked with short bursts, sending a small swarm of high-velocity slugs at each target. Orozco blew a leg off a banshee as it crested the wall and felt a smile cross his face as it tumbled back.

He scanned to his left, then right. No targets.

“Clear,” Holt said.

“Same,” Rock added.

“Gunney, it’s gone quiet on the wall. Doesn’t make me feel better, for some reason,” Orozco transmitted.

A banshee’s howl wilted over the battlements.

“Maybe they’re retreating,” Holt said.

Howls rose from the dusty fog beyond the walls. Shrieks combined to a fever pitch, so loud that the sonic dampeners in Orozco’s helmet kicked on to tamp down the aural assault.

“Gunney, I think we’re about to have a problem out here,” Orozco said. The screams fell away and the sound of thousands of tree branches breaking filled the air.

Banshees swarmed over the wall, so numerous and densely packed that they looked like a black tide.

The gunner’s opened up, but they had about as much chance of stemming the swarm as a torch had of beating back a blizzard. Banshees threw themselves into the obstacles, using their bodies to breach the defenses for those behind them.

“Gunney! Phase two! Phase two!” Orozco slapped a new belt of ammunition into his Gustav and kept firing.

Unseen explosions sent quakes through their firing position. Pulverized rock and dust blew up the front and back of the outer wall. The tide of banshees relented. The snap of gauss rifles from the defenders mixed with the banshee howls.

“Wasn’t the wall supposed to do something?” Holt asked as he reloaded.

The outer wall dropped several feet as damaged stones crumpled beneath the weight of the wall above it. The wall groaned and tipped away from the city, like a great tree finally felled by an axe’s bite.

Orozco wasn’t sure how many banshees died in the fall or beneath the tons of rocks, he concentrated on whittling down the hundreds that made it to the raised roadways leading to the next line of defenses.

Banshees charged over the fallen wall…and into the muddy hot springs between the honeycombed sections of the city. The banshee advance faltered as they sank up to their knees in the muck. Many, too many, made it to the side of the connecting roadways and clambered up to the road.

Orozco leaned forward and raised his weapon to fire over the edge of the deck at the enemy warriors running into defilade. They’d made it to the next line of defenses.

A steady thump-thump-thump of the Gremlin launchers sounded from behind Orozco.

“That’s our cue,” Orozco took his hand off his weapon’s grip and slapped it against his control gauntlet. He twisted fore and back, and the spikes anchoring him to the deck snapped back against his boots.

A beam of light the color of fresh blood stabbed into the firing position. Orozco’s reflexes drove him to the floor.

Orozco watched as Rock dropped his weapon and slumped to the side. Orozco reached up and grabbed the other gunner by the arm, the Rock’s armor plates collapsed against each other beneath his grip. Rock flopped back, red smoke poured from a gash in his chest plate out of his empty armor.

Another bolt of searing light cut into the firing position.

Holt grabbed Orozco by his shoulder armor and hauled him deeper into the ship. Banshees pounded at the sealed door of the ship’s cargo bay.

“I don’t think we can take the stairs,” Holt said. The crump of exploding mortars echoed across the battlefield, sending a constant tremor through the deck as the explosions came in faster and faster. The Gremlins pounded the banshees slowed by the mud flats and those still struggling over the ruined walls. The banshees pounding against the doors didn’t seem to notice.

“Then we go the hard way,” Orozco got to his feet and ran to the opposite side of the cargo bay from their former firing positions. He grabbed a lever bolted to the wall and pulled it down. A section of the hull fall away. The remnants of the passing storm mixed with smoke and dust from the fallen walls into a haze that drowned out the roadways leading back to the
Canticle of Reason
. Bright flashes from gauss rifles lit up the haze.