Out of the Black (Odyssey One, Book 4) (60 page)

The gleaming silver shuttles were blazingly quick, appearing and vanishing in seconds at times, but behind them they left a legacy for those watching on the ground. At first it was easy to miss. A man-sized object at fifty thousand feet wasn’t something you spotted easily, but fifty of them flashing toward you at terminal velocity is something that’s easier to spot.

Colonel Reed led his team into the fight, coming down over the outskirts of Beijing, and the irony of his leading a group of soldiers to
save
that particular city wasn’t lost on him even slightly. There was an irony to the universe, he supposed.

They hit the brakes at under one thousand feet, using Priminae-enhanced counter-mass technology to swoop in like the airborne troops he had always wanted to be part of. Instead of merely caching part of the man’s mass from the universe, thus making him easier to maneuver in gravity wells, the Priminae version of the chutes actually warped space actively, turning his troops into supermen.

“Second Squad, take the right street. Stay low and stay fast. Watch out for Drasin bracketing fire!” he called, leading his squad down the left side street. They rushed through the tightly packed buildings of old Beijing, then exploded out into the massive skyrises of the new city center. Reed and his men led with their gravity rifles, tracking and firing almost before the Drasin realized they were there.

The high-velocity carbon crystal rounds slammed into the first line of drones, blowing them to shattered pieces as Reed’s team flashed by overhead. He couldn’t help grinning the whole damned time. Revenge was sweet, but revenge at Mach One, flying under your own power . . . or almost . . . that was just unbelievable.

“Colonel, a General Sian Hao is on the line.”

“General,” Reed said as he banked around and came in for a reasonably soft landing on the edge of an eighty-story building. He and his team settled there for a moment, getting their bearings and letting the tactical data catch up with them. “This is Colonel Reed, North American Confederacy Armed Forces. My team and I are here to help.”

“I am aware,” a gruff voice interjected, “and I thank you for the intervention. Even with you flyers from the Reagan, we were beginning to lose ground . . . and to lose ground now . . .”

Reed nodded unthinkingly. Losing ground now meant that your position was likely to be considered overly compromised and command would have to cut their losses. That meant nasty things for a city of nearly a billion people.

“We’re going to do what we can to make sure
that
doesn’t happen, General. Are your troops ready for a counteroffensive?”

The General snorted. “They are tired, hurt, and very, very,
angry,
colonel. What do you think?”

Reed grinned. “Alright. Then let’s push those bastards right off this rock!”

Squads from the Heroics touched down on every continent where there was fighting ongoing, small teams with heavy weapons lending force where it was needed and sometimes doing everything themselves if that was what it took.

They slammed into the Drasin wall at every juncture, sending the aliens reeling from the surprise and shock of their assault.

It was a moment that the beleaguered defenders of many cities had desperately needed, and when it came they rose up and met it with the last of their strength and ferocity.

Unfortunately, some cities were too far gone.

Eric pulled his mech back, firing everything he had as the wall of Drasin charged down on his position. They’d managed to awaken the beast in a big way when they began evacuating people from Dallas, and for the life of him he couldn’t figure out how or why. During the third hour of the evacuation a squad had been stumbled upon by a couple of Drasin, seemingly roving for whatever it was they needed for the next cycle of replication.

It wasn’t a big deal, or it shouldn’t have been. They’d seen dozens of similar patrols and generally dealt with them easily, but not this time. During the firefight that ensued, one of the Drasin let out a call that Eric had never heard before and rather hoped to never hear again. It reverberated through the remaining buildings of Dallas, the echoes seemingly going on forever.

The men on the ground had still been looking at each other in stunned confusion when the wave appeared—a literal wave of the drones, flooding down a side street and out onto the main drag where the fighting had been located. The team fired, but it was hopeless, and they were literally swept away and sucked under by the motion.

Eric arrived less than a minute later and all he could do was call for a retreat and
run
.

A fighting retreat is one of the hardest maneuvers to master in tactical combat, and though Eric
was
a master of it . . . he’d earned his mastery in a fighter plane and not on the ground. He did his best, but the wave was unending. It tore down on his backstop location, and, with fifteen more men inside, Eric ordered the retreat. He then stood right in the center of the street with everything firing on full automatic.

It was a fool’s errand, he knew that even as he did it, but he hoped to at least get those men back to the Cherokee. Now it seemed that was the only way any of them would survive.

The cannons on the left arm of his EXO-13 went dry first, so he stopped running backward and started running sideways while he fired the last of the rounds in the right. He’d expended his missiles some time earlier, which left him with the suit itself and very little else. Eric vaulted the big machine over a roadblock they’d been using as cover, for all the good it did. The vaporized section of concrete and steel was a testament to the power of the enemy weapons and the futility of trying to hide from them.

The only good thing he could imagine about the situation was the fact that he was going to go down fighting in a cockpit that at least slightly resembled the interior of his Archangel. It was a microscopically small comfort, but there it was.

“Cover!”

The order came in the clear over his tac channel, and Eric didn’t question it. He threw himself down just as a ripple of explosion tore through the enemy line and briefly put a hole in the wave of drones chasing him. His EXO suit hit the ground skidding and he could feel a pelting rain of debris striking down around him as he flipped end for end, winding up on his back, staring up at the shockingly blue sky.

The buildings that lined the street he was fighting on were mostly intact, and he spotted a familiar IFF code on his HUD, highlighting a figure standing atop one of them.

“Bermont?” he blurted, surprised to see a name he recognized, particularly flying very familiar colors.

“Someone down there taking my name in vain?” The vaguely French accented voice laughed over the comm. “Gonna have to do something about that.”

Eric considered his situation, noting that he was out of ammo and there were now red lights across half his hydraulics and most of his pneumatics. He sighed, but blew the bolts holding the cockpit on and pulled himself out of the stricken mechanized armor.

“Get down here and give me a hand, you cackling Frenchman,” he growled, pulling the hatch off the emergency compartment and drawing out the Priminae GWIZ.

“Cackling Fren . . .,” Bermont objected as he dropped to the street, landing with a thud despite the practiced flex in his legs.

Eric cut him off. “How many did you bring back with you?”

Bermont froze, and Eric noted that his IFF was being checked, twice.

“Captain? Mon Jesus, we thought you bit it when you dug the
Odyssey
in,” Bermont managed despite his shock.

“So did I,” Eric admitted, before asking again, “How many people came back?”

Bermont’s face appeared on his HUD as the other soldier initiated a point-to-point video link, and he was grinning ear to ear.

“How many? Come on, Cap, you know we didn’t leave
anyone
behind. The whole crew is here, plus the
Big E,
and almost twenty thousand Priminae.”

“Twenty thou . . .” Eric trailed off. “Damn, I never would have expected their Elder Council to offer up that many people.”

“I don’t think they planned it,” Bermont chuckled. “I saw some of them after they announced that volunteers could sign on with us. They weren’t happy. Most of them, at least.”

That didn’t surprise Eric in the slightest. Though he rather respected and liked many of the Priminae, he was also well aware that they were deeply conservative at their higher levels. That wasn’t a bad thing, but it wasn’t a trait that would lend itself to them putting themselves out on a limb without some serious thought.

Ultimately, he expected that they would decide to help, but Eric suspected that the more truculent members would try to use that natural conservatism to delay the decision until it was moot. It wouldn’t have taken long to do, after all. Just a few more weeks and the Earth’s formidable defense industry would collapse, and after that it was all over but for the last few shots.

The lower echelons, however, were far more willing to take chances, and they felt a strong sense of gratitude for the help the
Odyssey
offered. So the worst thing that the more conservative elders could have done would be to place the decision in the hands of the people actually doing
the fighting. Or perhaps it was the best thing they could have done. Eric supposed it depended very much on your point of view, but he doubted that the elders would be happy with the outcome if they ever realized just what they’d done and its full consequences.