Out of the Black (Odyssey One, Book 4) (12 page)

He kept them moving as fast as he could, but the chute wasn’t designed for high speed, and carrying an extra person who wasn’t locked in necessitated that he take at least a modicum of care. So he stayed low, skimming the ground in order to avoid being an easy target. The trees skimmed by, whipping at them sharply in passing, close enough that Eric had to shield Lyssa’s face as they moved.

Eric dropped suddenly, a couple hundred meters into the park, and the hit the ground in a controlled tumble.

“What is it?” Lyssa demanded as she rolled to her knees and scrambled behind a rock.

Eric cut the chute loose and let it fly clear as he hit the power on his GWIZ and leveled it to the south. “They’re coming back up this way and we were about to lose our cover.”

Lyssa looked around and nodded.

They had been following the walking path that curled south along the reservoir. He’d thought about going north, but it would have put them in the open longer. Now he wished that he’d gone with his first instinct.

“Get ready to run for it,” Eric advised as he primed the GWIZ.

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to kill a few of them,” he told her simply. “You’re not remotely armed for this, so run.”

Lyssa scowled, but nodded. She’d never liked running, not since she was very young, and her time in the Corps had hammered that character trait home all the stronger. At the moment, however, he was right. Her pistol was a peashooter against the enemy here, and she was unarmored.

Though, honestly, she wasn’t certain that the MilSpec armor the captain was wearing would do him all that much better than her Kevlar and ceramic vest.

“Good luck,” she hissed, then bolted away, keeping as low as she could.

Eric didn’t bother responding. He just popped up from behind the cover and leveled the alien gravity weapon, stroking the trigger lightly as it fell even with the Drasin soldier drones.

The crack of the diamond projectile making a mockery of the speed of sound shook the world around him, but because of the weapon’s design and his own armor insulation, Eric didn’t feel or hear a thing. He did see the shock wave expand out behind the shot, however, kicking up dust and debris in a rooster tail straight into the soldier drone.

The projectile slammed into its target with power comparable to the heavy explosives dropped by the Stryker teams, delivering its kinetic payload almost perfectly as the diamond
shattered and tore through the target with vicious force. The heavy alien drone was picked off the ground and thrown back, molten silicon splattering the park.

Eric jumped from cover immediately, ignoring the part of his stomach that wanted to hurl at the sudden motion.

He knew that it was the concussion at play, but he couldn’t do anything about it other than ignore it as best he could and suppress it when he couldn’t. He’d fought through worse in his time. He could do it again.

The alien particle beams glowed an evil red as they swept after him, Eric staying on the bounce and a half inch ahead of burning death with each leap. As a Marine aviator, hell just as a Marine, Eric was an infantryman first and anything else a distant second . . . but that didn’t mean he was fully trained on the armor he wore.

It was relatively new issue, and his job since it had come out was more behind the lines than on them until he’d been assigned to the
Odyssey
. Since then he’d taken his spare time to qualify on the armor, but he knew that he was nowhere near the skill level of the SOCOM troopers he’d commanded. Eric wished a few of them had ridden down with him, actually, but that hadn’t seemed like a good idea at the time.

He landed in a skid, sliding behind a large cement memorial statue to something or someone he didn’t have time to identify and rolled over into a prone position as he lined up his next shot.

The Priminae weapon blasted the environment around him again, and again Eric saw a rooster tail of dust kick up between him and the enemy. The sheer power the Priminae had packed into the form factor of a slightly beefy yet surprisingly light assault rifle left him in utter awe.

I don’t even have it turned all the way up
.

It was set roughly in the middle of the power slide, and he knew that he could conceivably eliminate the lot of the bastards with one properly aimed shot on full power. But the sheer level of collateral damage it would incur terrified Eric to no end.

A kiloton-level weapon, or close enough as to make no real difference, was not something he ever wanted to unleash in a Confederate city.

When he spotted a grouping of the aliens emerging from the tree line south of him, however, he decided to up the ante just a little. Eric slid the power control up a few more degrees and kept his aim lower so he wouldn’t take out a building or something with a miss. He then squeezed down on the trigger and unloaded a burst into the enemy position that seemed to shake the
world
.

CHAPTER THREE

National Guard Command Post,
Intrepid
Sea, Air, & Space Museum

“WHAT THE EVER loving
fuck
was that?”

The mushroom cloud floating over the city to the north of them gave a pretty good answer to that question, honestly, but it just felt like something Brigadier Potts needed to ask.

“Was that one of ours?”

“Negative sir,” Lieutenant Keiths could confidently answer. “Nothing of ours was cleared to drop that kind of payload, sir.”

“Do we have anyone in the area?” Potts asked, sick to his stomach.
Or maybe I should ask if we
did
have anyone in the area
. . .

“No one close enough, sir. No one too close, either.”

“Thank God for the second.”

“Yes sir. General, sir, I’m not reading any significant EM spike, no beta spike, no gamma spike. I don’t think that was a nuke, sir.”

“Well, that’s just peachy,” Potts growled. “It was still one big ever living
fuck
of an explosion.”

“Yes sir.”

Potts sighed, shaking his head. His boys just weren’t equipped for this kind of dirty fighting. They were old-school open battlefield trained, and this was urban street-to-street combat well beyond anything anyone had ever seen. The tanks and armor they had packed more than enough power for the job, but a hundred-ton tank wasn’t intended for driving through a damned city.

“Get me eyes on the area,” he ordered. “I don’t care if it’s from the ground, the sky, or orbit. Just get me something.”

“Yes sir.”

Eric would have been spitting dirt out of his mouth if he weren’t wearing powered armor with a full environmental seal. Assuming, that is, that he’d survived the concussion of the kinetic strike. As it was, he wiped said dirt off the face plate and double checked the setting on his GWIZ.

Only three-quarters to the top. Holy hell, are the Prims really
that
fucking crazy?

Central Park was flattened.

Or at least it was in the immediate area. Eric could see some trees still standing a few blocks down from his position, and behind him they were still intact to be sure. But where he’d taken his show was now an oblong crater beyond which a ring of trees were laid down like toppled dominoes. He examined the scene for a long moment, stunned by every detail he spotted, particularly when he happened to focus in on a building several blocks beyond the blast zone and spotted an immobile Drasin soldier drone embedded in the eighth floor.

Jesus. Crazy bastards
.

Eric slowly and deliberately turned the dial back down to the halfway mark before he turned and leapt off to the east where Lyssa had run ahead of him.

Lyssa was spitting out dirt as she picked herself up off the ground, looking over her shoulder with wide eyes and a horror-filled expression. She didn’t know what had just happened, but a mushroom cloud was pretty much a universal sign of an atrocity. She felt a wave of relief when she spotted Weston’s black-green armor bounding over in her direction, and got to her feet to greet him as he landed.