Marine Cadet (The Human Legion Book 1) (49 page)

Didn’t they realize that the Marines would have hopped and rolled away to new positions the instant they’d fired?

“The rebels don’t stand a chance,” said Springer. “They’re strictly amateur.”

Arun was beginning to agree, but then they saw movement from the enemy positions facing them. Rebels moving through the trench system to reinforce the defenses around the mass driver.

Arun laughed at his enemy. They looked so ludicrous. They’d dug these trenches but the idiots were in such a hurry that they were bouncing in the low-g, making their torsos pop into sight and then disappear as if they were on trampolines. It looked like some kind of virtual game for kids. Arun wanted to play. Doubly so because he could see the aliens were Hardits, and he had a score to settle. He itched to bring his carbine to bear and try out this new pulse laser setting on the bouncing monkeys.

But the order never came.

Arun estimated 40 rebels had moved off to tackle Force Alpha. How many remained to face the 50-odd cadets of Blue and Gold Squads?

“Go!” ordered Madge.

Time to find out.

Arun scrambled over the lip of crumbling moondust and charged the enemy trenches.

——

Miniature explosions of dust erupted all along the enemy trenches. This was the suppressive fire from the even-numbered cadet fire teams, and it was doing its job of keeping the enemy’s head down because Arun didn’t see any return fire.

Arun’s team had to charge forward as fast as he could for two hundred meters before taking cover and providing rapid suppressive fire to shield the even-numbered fire teams as they caught up.

He wasn’t scared. He hadn’t time to be because all his concentration was spent on making progress without bouncing high into the sky.

One thing he did notice, though, was a missile corkscrewing from Force Alpha’s position toward the mining complex.

It didn’t get far.

Anti-missile defenses sprang into action from three points around the mass driver. Scores of ultra-fast missiles lifted from the ground to take out the invader. The Marine missile was nimble but not enough to evade this level of defense. It was blasted from the sky.

Arun hadn’t time to mourn its loss. He’d reached his first objective. He spotted a small crater and dived into it. At half a meter deep, it wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing.

As he readied to fire, Arun checked his tac-display. Madge, Osman, and Springer had all taken up positions a short distance away. Barney wasn’t reporting any other casualties, but he hadn’t time to check beyond his comrades in Blue-5. He was zooming his visor display onto the enemy trench, about two hundred and fifty meters away, when Madge gave the order: “Shardshot. Rapid fire!”

He couldn’t see any rebels, so Arun picked a segment of trench opposite him and opened up.

Frakk! The gun had given him a slap of recoil like a nuclear explosion.

He’d intended to rake the enemy position, with fire but had squeezed off one aimed shot and a handful so high they were probably heading up into orbit.

If he hadn’t been in armor, the damned thing would have broken his collar bone.

He braced himself more firmly and set to work. He couldn’t call it rapid fire, but it was as fast as the recoil would allow without sacrificing accuracy entirely.

“Overwatch,” ordered Madge. Arun ceased firing and kept a close watch on the enemy trench, ready to shoot at any rebel brave enough to present themselves as a target.

But Madge’s order confirmed what he’d already guessed. The enemy had either abandoned their trench, or were luring them into a trap.

If this were a trap, they were headed right into its jaws because the cadet fire teams made their leapfrogging advance until they reached a stopline fifteen meters from the enemy trench.

The enemy had not returned fire.

From the far side of the mining complex, Force Alpha’s battle against the rebels continued its noisy progress.

The veteran Marines yelled into Wide Battle Net for backup. They fired more missiles at the mining buildings, only to see them shot down, and they gave orders to imaginary units to make flanking maneuvers. For all their efforts to pretend they were more of a threat than they actually were, Barney estimated there were only five Marines in Force Alpha. Six tops.

Then Madge gave the order to close the distance to the enemy trench and Arun forgot Force Alpha. All he could think of was what he would find waiting for him.

Blue Squad would use a boost from their suits to leap over the trench, while Gold Squad would assault inside the trench.

He sailed over, covering the trench line with his SA-71, but it really had been abandoned.

Trench warfare was the opposite of the flexibility of zero-g space combat that was the focus of Tactical Marine training. Even with his limited training on the matter, the trench looked to Arun like a hastily constructed channel. Crude cover and recently built. A far cry from the defensive warren an attacker would be faced with if they tried to assault the Detroit base from the ground.

Arun advanced, making for his next target: a cuboid segment of the mining complex that looked grafted on to the main building. This was to be their route inside.

Behind him, Gold Squad reported that they had secured the trench. There weren’t any booby traps — at least no explosions — but perhaps there had been motion sensors or watching cameras because moments later a volley of rockets streaked into the trench

“Remain on LBNet,” ordered Belville. “They know we’re here now, but not how many of us are here. And once we’re inside they will lose us. Blue Squad, hurry up and get me a breach.”

Arun didn’t hear Belville’s orders for Gold Squad, but his tac-display showed them abandoning the trench, crawling a short distance toward the building to take up a defensive line near Blue Squad. Marines instinctively distrusted static defenses. Hiding behind a trench or rampart wall robbed you of maneuver options and surrendered initiative to the enemy. Marines won their battles by attacking, and no one launched an attack while cowering in the bottom of a ditch.

With rocket explosions raining down rock fragments behind them, Blue Squad got to work.

——

Brandt marked out a flat section away from any bulges or exterior features, and ordered Corporal Hecht’s Alpha Section to break through. Alpha tried using assault teeth, but the monofilament spikes extending from their carbine muzzles were optimized to cut through flesh and bone, the modern equivalent of the ancient bayonet. The rotating spikes skidded against the wall, scarring it, but snapping and blunting the assault teeth.

Next they tried melting their way through using their carbines on the new pulse laser setting. New to them, anyway.

Brandt assigned each section in his squad a portion of a diamond shape large enough for an armored cadet to pass through.

If Arun were in charge he would have concentrated the lasers on a single spot. Not a hole large enough to pass through but maybe after a breach the pressure escape would rip away a large chunk of wall. At least they would know how much laser power was needed to push through.

But Brandt wanted an entry point from the get go. They burned deep scores into the fabric of the building but they were burning deeper into their carbine power packs. Barney reported power had depleted by 80% already and falling rapidly.

Belville brought over a section from Gold Squad

The mining building had shielded them somewhat from the enemy rocket volleys. But the rebels must have moved to a better position, because a fresh volley of explosions rocked the ground behind him. Their fire was increasingly accurate.

Barney marked two red crosses to show Gold Squad casualties.

It got worse. The dust thrown up was already causing laser bloom — scattering the beams aimed at the outer wall, robbing them of power.

“Move closer,” ordered Brandt. “Get those lasers within ten paces of the wall.”

Arun moved to obey, very conscious of what would happen if he were standing too close to the section of wall when it blew out.

“I know it’s dangerous,” said Brandt, “but every second we are delayed out here imperils our mission.”

But they were spared that horror. Without any warning, the diamond they’d already cut through the wall flew out, landing on the moon’s surface and skidding for twenty meters. Luckily no one was in its path.

Blue Squad blasted the far side of the breach with a volley of shardshot.

Arun couldn’t see what was inside, because first the air, and then anything in the room that wasn’t tied down, exploded out through the breach. Blue Squad was engulfed in a rain of softscreens, hats, empty plastic bottles and other detritus of what Arun guessed was a store room. The water vapor in the air flash-froze and began to fall as snow.

To anyone inside this bridgehead room, the vacuum sucking remorselessly at the air would sound like a howling gale. Outside in his suit, the violent depressurization was eerily silent.

Cutting holes into enemy warboats was fundamental to tactical Marine doctrine, so the cadets knew plenty about depressurization. Through a Marine-sized breach the air would be escaping at about 200 mph. That was plenty to incapacitate any opponents not strapped down and braced for a breach. After about 25 seconds, the wind would have died down to around 80 mph. That was when Brandt gave the order to go in.

The cadets lowered their heads and pushed against the wind. Getting through the hole was the worst part. As the cadets partially plugged the breach, the air pushed at them even harder as it tried to escape. Once they’d popped through the hole there was still enough air to hear alarm sirens above the banshee screech of the wind.

Cadet Caccamo from Alpha Section was first in. At the far side of the bridgehead room the door to an internal corridor was still open. He raced for the door but it shut before he could reach it. The wind dropped abruptly, making the cadets who’d struggled in topple flat on their faces.

Under the illumination of flashing blue lights mounted in the ceiling, Blue Squad began to form up inside the bridgehead. Even before the rest of squad had made it inside, Hecht was by the door control with Alpha Section ready to advance up the corridor on the far side.

“Brace for depressurization,” he warned. “Opening door in 3 - 2 - 1 - now!”

Nothing happened. The door ignored him.

“Could be security lockdown,” Del said, “but probably refusing to open into vacuum. Let me see if I can hack it.”

“Very good, Lance Corporal Sandure,” replied Brandt. Hearing his comrades refer to each other by their rank still felt freaky to Arun.

Del hadn’t even reached the control panel when the door suddenly opened and another blast of air rushed out to flash freeze as it entered the depressurized room.

Arun covered the doorway with his carbine but no one emerged. With the swirling mist it was difficult to see, difficult to even stand up against the wind. Then he saw two dark cylinders rolling his way along the floor.

“Grenades!”

Arun dove for the floor. In the low gravity, the maneuver was agonizingly slow. In fact, the wind trying to blow him out of the crude hole in the wall was stronger than gravity. He didn’t even make it to the ground before the grenades exploded. The blast smacked him down and skidded him along the floor before slamming him into an equipment cupboard. Gleaming pairs of boots fell off the shelves, showering down upon him in slow motion.

The wind, he realized, had stopped.

As Arun got to his feet, Barney reported that his armor had not been compromised. Idiot monkeys! They’d used high explosive grenades — mining charges, probably. In the near-vacuum, there was hardly any medium for their shockwave to travel through. Someone standing a meter behind Arun wouldn’t have felt a thing. He laughed as he got to his feet and immediately found himself in a raging firefight.

He took a moment to read his tac-display. Beta and Delta sections had rolled, knelt or gone prone to take up firing positions to maximize fire on the door without shooting comrades in the back.

Hardit miners — about a half dozen so far — were racing into the room, spraying fire wildly. They were shooting slug-throwers: kinetic weapons that shot metal bullets powered by a chemical explosive.

A hammer blow hit Arun on his chest, which was already bruised from his drop to the moon’s surface. He’d been shot by a bullet, but Barney reported his suit’s integrity had been degraded but not compromised. A suit unable to cope with a few high energy impacts from small objects was little use in a real space battlefield.

Arun wanted height. Barney read his intentions, lifting his master gently off the ground and then, with a kick of brutal power, threw him to the ceiling, coming to a shuddering halt, but not so rapid that Arun blacked out. Barney had been Arun’s most intimate companion for so many years that the AI knew how far he could fling Arun without breaking him. In a crowded room in the midst of a firefight, speed was vital. Gaining height was a big risk, but so too was staying in the same place when he’d already been hit once.

Arun willed Barney to reorient his visor display so that the ceiling was ‘down’ and the floor ‘up’. Gravity might insist that it knew the correct direction of down, but it was weak enough on the moon that the motive system on Arun’s suit could compensate if it operated at maximum power. He shut his eyes, reframed in his mind, and opened them at the same time as bringing his gun to bear on… Osman. His firing solution was blocked by his friend who was attempting the same maneuver. Arun crab-walked out of Osman’s way. Osman was cartwheeling through the air, firing as he went. Osman was always flashy like that. Then Osman’s aerial dance missed a beat. He was jerked backward, making him fling out his hands in a primitive instinct that made no sense here, upside down on a low-g moon.

Arun watched helplessly as Osman’s helmet shattered. In the low-pressure environment of the nearly airless room, the higher pressure in Osman’s suit forced out a plume of blood, flesh, and faceplate splinters.

Osman was dead!

Arun braced and fired. Brandt had ordered them to conserve ammo. The pellet supply was limited without reloading but Arun didn’t give a damn as he sprayed the rebel miners. If he needed to reload, there were plenty of spare SA-71s that no one was in a state to use any longer.