Combat jack

  Capital probably had a name once. It would be New something or other. Named after a city in whichever nation had claimed this particular part of Sirius real estate. It wasn’t the planet’s capital, just the biggest city, with the biggest spaceport. People are lazy and they just started referring to it as Capital. Everyone knew what they meant. Regardless of its size and importance, Capital had fallen with Their initial invasion.

  We may well have abandoned the city, but it hadn’t been abandoned by Them. Now humanity wanted this dead city back. What this meant to me was that, for once, I wasn’t lying in mud. In fact, it had rained heavily and then frozen, covering the abandoned city in a sheet of ice. Sirius A was warming the other side of the planet, which left us with the pale glow of Sirius B lighting the ice-encrusted city during breaks in the cloud cover. It gave the city a sort of strange twilight glow. It was the closest I’d seen to beauty since I’d come to this cold, wet, muddy, miserable shithole of a planet.

  The cloud cover was heavily ionised. We watched lightning frequently flash across the sky, sometimes darting towards the ground. This was playing merry hell with orbital observation. And this was why we were running an OP in the overrun city, high up in one of the skyscrapers, close to the lightning. We were recce for the armoured push, and forward observation for the artillery.

  Edna Canavan, or Eddie, as everyone called the tough sergeant from Halifax, the head of the Wild Boys, had announced that the mission was bollocks. She told that to Rolleston to his face. I felt she’d been out of order. As COs went, Rolleston seemed okay. At least he was competent. He wasn’t going to get us killed because he’d fucked up – he was going to get us killed on purpose. Still, nobody gave a shit what I thought, least of all Eddie, because I was new. Everything I’d done in 5 Para meant shit here. Passing Special Forces selection and training meant shit here. My rank meant shit here. I was starting all over again, but the bar was set much higher this time.

  “Get out of my way,” Ashley Broadin snapped at me. She was the Wild Boys’ bullet headed, Afro-Caribbean, Combat Engineer. A Brummie, she’d grown up in the Coventry refugee camps. She elbowed me out of the way and crawled over to the edge of the building. We were forty-seven storeys up, looking down on a bank of freezing fog creeping into the city obscuring the wreckage-strewn street below us. Dorcas, the Kiwi sniper, and Eddie were both wearing urban ghillie suits. Dorcas was all right, not as stand-offish or downright hostile as the others, but, like the others, he didn’t want to become close to anyone. It was the same when I’d joined the Paras, only here it was more extreme, as what the Regiment did was more dangerous, and therefore the consequences for screwing up were that much more dire. Once upon a time we would have done integration training, run sense training simulations, but the demand for people was just too high. Now there was never enough time. Hence the sink or swim approach, and why I’d just been chucked in with this group.

  Dorcas and Eddie stood on the edge of the building, its windows long blown out, leaving the floor open to the freezing elements, looking down into the fog-shrouded streets. They were using their thermographic optics trying to find any telltale heat traces. The rest of us were providing security.

  “Waste of fucking time,” Eddie sub-vocalised over the tac net. “If they fire from orbit they’ll hit something. All our presence does is increase the chance of a blue-on-blue.” Blue-on-blue was what the British military called accidentally shooting people on the same side as you. I wasn’t convinced that Eddie was doing our morale much good, but I kept quiet, I just wanted to remain unnoticed. After all, Peter Farrow, the huge railgunner from the East End of London, had threatened to rape me if I fucked up. I don’t think he was into guys. He just seemed to think that rape was a valuable motivational tool.

  Suddenly Dorcas looked up.

  “There’s someone above us,” Dorcas sub-vocalised over the tacnet, his Kiwi accent noticeably strong.

  “Okay, Dorcas take Blame and the newbie and go and see. No unnecessary shooting, clear?” Eddie said.

  Dorcas nodded. Tracy Blamire, or ‘the Blame’ to the rest of us, the whip-thin, speed-freak signal woman, turned to glare at me, as if this was my fault.

  “Why the fuck have I got to go with green boy?” she snapped over the tacnet.

  Because everyone hates you, and Eddie wants you out of her hair, I thought.

  “What? Are you questioning …” Eddie started.

  “I’ll go,” Gregor said.

  Eddie glared at the Blame. This wasn’t finished. I suspected that Blame was going to get a bit of a kicking when we returned to the firebase. Blame turned to look at me is if that would be my fault as well. Shit rolls downhill, and I was definitely at the bottom of this hill.

  Dorcas led the way. We moved up through heavily damaged stairwells as quietly as we could, checking all around us as we went. Despite the refuse on the stairs, Dorcas moved silently. I followed him, but I felt like I was making a hell of a racket in comparison. Gregor brought up the rear. I worried that if he had to fire his railgun in the building it could cause enough structural damage to drop the whole thing on us.

  Gregor was the most approachable member of the Wild Boys. He was also one of the longest serving. Only Eddie had been in the squad longer. Initially, I’d thought he was being nice to me because we were both Scots – he’d grown up in Stirling, me Dundee – but he seemed to treat everyone the same. He was a quiet man with dark eyes and a surprisingly slight build for a railgunner. He’d been the only one who’d taken the time to explain how things were done.

  My musings were interrupted by Blame’s voice coming over the tacnet.

  “Be aware we have Heavy Battle Tanks with mounted infantry entering the central district. Both orbital and the artillery are requesting target references.” She still sounded angry. She always sounded angry. I couldn’t shake the feeling that, fitting with her name, she blamed me for something. Gregor, who had the rank here, acknowledged her message.

  “Guys,” Gregor’s voice came over the tacnet. Dorcas stopped, the barrel of his Steyr carbine still pointing up the stairs as he covered our front. To my right, the stairs were open to the outside world, forty-nine storeys up. I turned to cover the inside of the building.

  “You see that?” Gregor asked.

  We were very still now. I could hear ice cracking and the refuse in the building being blown around by the slight breeze. I increased the size of the feed window from Gregor’s guncam in my IVD. I was looking down at a wide street filled with fog, quiet, nothing going on. Then I saw it. At first it was a disturbance in the fog, eddies in the cold, white cloud. Then something black, organic and huge briefly broke the cloud cover. The glimpse I saw reminded me as much of an insect’s stinger as an enormous gun. I felt, rather than heard, the thing’s heavy step as a shiver ran through the steps on which we stood. Then tendrils whipped out of the fog. Where they impacted I saw the superstructure of a nearby building flex inward in an explosion of debris.

  “How did we not hear that?” I asked, almost involuntarily.

  “The fog does strange things to sound,” Gregor answered. “Eddie, you getting this?” he asked over the tacnet.

  The building shook again as the Hydra took another step nearer. I knew that Gregor would have already transmitted info from his guncam, GPS and smartlink to the hover-batteries of long-range missiles waiting out in the suburbs somewhere. This would provide them with the target acquisition information they needed. Expert and AI systems would then predict the movement of the Hydra based on the information.

  “Got it. Blame, send target solutions to orbital and artillery, and warn the HBTs that we have a Hydra in town.”

  Hearing Eddie confirm what I had guessed filled me with dread. I’d only ever heard of Hydras before, never
seen one. They were six-legged, monstrous, bio-mechanical mechs, armed with a number of different weapon systems. They had shard cannons, black light point defence, tumour-like organic missile batteries, but most significantly Their take on the particle beam weapon. Everyone called this the Entropy Cannon. And it was that I’d glimpsed breaking the cloud cover. My knowledge of Hydras was not restricted to their fearsome weapons complement. I also knew that they didn’t go out alone. Beneath us, in the freezing mist, would be Walkers, Berserks, their ground effects tank/APC hybrids, and their version of our fast-attack sleds. The only good news was that they didn’t seem to have air-support. Yet.

  “If orbital’s involved we need to get out of here, Eddie,” Gregor said. “They don’t care about us.” I agreed with that sentiment. I wanted to get back to the wagons we had parked in the garage beneath the building, and foxtrot oscar. I didn’t want to be anywhere near a Hydra.

  “Agreed. But I need to know if they’ve got an OP on the roof because that could fuck up everyone’s day. Sorry Gregor.”

  “Understood.”

  Gregor signalled for us to continue up the stairs. Ice crystals and concrete dust landed on us as the Hydra took another step. The stairway was so open to the elements that it made me feel a little like we were climbing into the sky.

  Once on the roof, we just stared. There was a guy stood on the edge of the roof, his back facing us. He had a pack with what looked like an antique rifle lying across it. One arm was visible. The other was obscured by his body but appeared to be moving rapidly. Gregor was covering behind us, but he could see what was going on through our guncam feeds.

  “What the fuck?” Dorcas muttered.

  “Go and see who he is,” Eddie ordered over the tacnet.

  “What if he’s one of their infiltrators?” Dorcas asked. “One of the Ninjas that look like us?” He sounded a little nervous.

  “That’s a combat myth,” Gregor said. “And if he is, I believe we have SOP for Them.” Meaning shoot Them. A lot.

  Still, Dorcas was right to be suspicious. The guy was wearing serviceable, old, battered-looking, and very civilian, outdoors gear. He did not look military and shouldn’t be out here. Unless, maybe, he was green slime – military intelligence, or something like that. He was not, however, watching his back, and hadn’t heard us because our conversations had all been sub-vocal over the tacnet.

  “Go and introduce yourselves then,” Gregor said over the tacnet. Dorcas looked at me uncertainly. I swallowed and nodded, and we both started moving quietly towards him, weapons at the ready.

  “You see this?” David Brownsword, the taciturn Scouse medic, cut across the net. I paused, increasing the size of the window showing his guncam feed in my IVD momentarily. I could see Their biomechanical Walkers pulling themselves up the side of the building we were in by their tendrils. There were a lot of Them. Shit, I thought.

  We continued edging towards the guy. Below us, beneath the fog bank, the Hydra continued moving, ponderously turning the corner. Dorcas reached him slightly ahead of me.

  “Incoming missile fire,” Blame announced over the tacnet. She’d included graphics of the missiles, fired from the hover batteries, trajectories. I could hear their approach now.

  “Are you alright, mate?” Dorcas asked out loud, ignoring this.

  “Don’t talk, I’m concentrating,” was the answer. English, from down south by the sound of it.

  “Mate, are you taking a piss?” Dorcas asked.

  The guy partially turned around, and smiled.

  “Oh fuck, he’s a lenshead,” I heard Dorcas say. A lenshead, a combat journalist who’d replaced their eyes with lenses; few soldiers liked them, Special Forces hated them.

  “What are you guys? 22 SAS?” He was right on the money.

  His arm was still obscured by his body and, if anything, was moving more rapidly. I saw a look of horror on Dorcas’ face.

  “Are you having a wank?!” he all but shouted. It hadn’t been a question I’d expected to hear today, particularly now.

  Black beams of light cut through the fog and stabbed the sky. Everything within view seemed to explodeas the Hydra’s point defence systems shot down incoming missiles. The building shook, and we were blown off our feet. The lenshead was laughing. He tried to stand up but was immediately knocked off his feet again. Fireballs were blossoming all around us. Beneath us, I heard the sound of missiles hitting home and detonating against or near the Hydra. The building felt like it was about to shake itself apart, it must have been near the point of collapse.

  “Yes!” the lenshead was screaming. He was trying to stand up; I was trying to hold him down. “Let me finish! Let me finish you bastard!” he shrieked this, even as he was still laughing. I let him go. What did I care? I climbed shakily to my feet. Dorcas was doing the same.

  “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Dorcas said. I agreed. Let this idiot lenshead die here. No loss.

  Below us in the fog I could see the Hydra’s shape outlined in plasma flame. It looked more nightmare than mech. There was something insectile about its enormous, hulking form, though I knew it was largely made up of the same liquid-like solid as the rest of Them.

  The air seemed to be sucked out of the world and I was overcome with a wave of nausea as the mech fired. The fog bank burned blue and then disappeared in a line in front of the Hydra, giving me another good look at the monstrous organic mech. Fear gripped me and I fought against freezing up. In the distance, the suburbs of Capital exploded in a line of powdered debris as buildings collapsed and the ground threw itself into the air.

  “The missile batteries are gone,” Blame reported. She sounded subdued.

  I went cold. The Hydra’s line-of-sight to the batteries should have been blocked by the curvature of Dog 4. The Entropy Cannon had shot through Dog 4 itself.

  “Yeeeessssss!” the lenshead shouted. I was pretty sure he’d just come. He was shaking himself off into the air above the Hydra.

  “Three minutes to orbital fire mission,” from Blame.

  “Eddie, it’s just a lenshead. We’re coming back to you,” Gregor said over the tacnet.

  “Negative, need a favour. Can you draw Them to you first? Hopefully that way They’ll go straight past us,” Eddie replied. Good plan, except for the drawing Them to us, part.

  “So, where are we going next?” the lenshead asked, turning towards me. He was putting himself away and zipping up. He had straw-like blond hair, a few days of sparse stubble and a long face with somehow off-kilter features.

  “You’re not going anywhere,” Dorcas told him.

  Gregor moved over to the three of us and glanced over the edge of the building. The lenshead did the same.

  “Walkers.” The lenshead sounded happy. I was beginning to suspect that he was on something. Who wasn’t? – We’d been doing military issue stims, and not so military issue speed, just to keep going. I just wished I’d had time to drop some Slaughter before this well and truly kicked off.

  The lenshead swung his pack onto his shoulders and grabbed his antique-looking weapon. He leant over the side of the building and fired his entire magazine down onto the Walkers. The three of us just stared at him in shock. The lenshead walked away from the edge of the building, changing magazines. Gregor, Dorcas and I dived away from the edge of the roof as it disintegrated in a hail of black light and shards from returning fire.

  “Let’s fucking slot him,” I suggested. It was heartfelt.

  “Why?” Gregor asked, climbing back to his feet.

  “Because we’re supposed to be fucking SF,” I retorted as I climbed back to my feet. I left unsaid that the lenshead was one big walking liability.

  “What would you know about being SF?” Gregor asked. He sounded pissed off. Brilliant. I’d managed to piss off the one guy in the Wild Boys who hadn’t hated me. Gregor changed the subject.

  “Let’s draw their fire.”

  The three of us walked to the new edge of the roof. The lenshead watched us,
probably filming. We each had time to fire a short burst from our weapons at the Walkers, who were using their tendrils to rapidly pull themselves up the side of the building.

  The hypersonic bangs from Gregor’s railgun caused a shower of ice crystals from buildings all around us. The Walker he hit was torn off the side of the building. Through magnified optics I could just about make out the ripples in their flesh as Dorcas and I hit our targets – our lighter weapons made significantly less impact. Then we quickly moved back from the edge as it disappeared in another hail of fire.

  The smartlink on my weapon had given me the lock I needed. I transmitted the target acquisition information to one of the two Laa-Laas in the vertical launch tubes strapped to my back. I knelt down and moved my neck forwards as a missile exploded out of the tube and its rocket motor carried it on its downward trajectory.

  “Wait!” Gregor called out far too late for me to abort the launch.

  I had no idea if the missile hit or it was taken out by one of the Walkers’ black light point defence weapons, but the explosion shook the building.

  “What are you trying to do? Kill us all?” Eddie hissed over the tacnet. Gregor was looking at me reproachfully.

  “I think they know we’re here now. Let’s go,” he said.

  Before, the edge was being eaten away, bit by bit. Now half the roof suddenly disappeared, fortunately not the section with access to the stairs. Shrapnel from the rubble was flung at us, showing we’d caught the Hydra’s attention. It hadn’t been the Entropy Cannon, we were an irritation that didn’t warrant that. I think it was fire from a heavy shard cannon. My unprotected face was bleeding badly and I’d been battered about, but my armour had withstood the rest.

  I was annoyed that the lenshead was still laughing. He definitely had better drugs than me.

  We made for the stairs and started running down them. The lenshead was still in tow. The building shook as the destruction of the roof and the upper storeys continued, and rubble rained down through the entire building. Views of the city flashed by beneath us as we ran and jumped down the stairs, abandoning tactical movement in favour of pant-shitting speed.