Rick Partlow - Honor Bound

Then the first KE weapon struck like the hammer of a god, a streak of ionized air trailing behind it like a lightning bolt, a sonic boom echoing through the sky but drowned out by the explosion of liberated energy that uprooted trees and sent bits of wood and rock flying like shrapnel. The next tungsten rod followed only seconds later, then another, then another, until the whole wood line on the other side of the dirt road erupted in a constant drumbeat of rolling thunder and flashes of lightning that left afterimages in Dominguez’s vision even after he looked away.

It was a glorious, awe-inspiring display of power and it was in his hands… he should have felt god-like. But all he could think was that he hoped that none of them had got away. He waited until the last KE rod had impacted, then turned to Sergeant McElroy, the mercenary who was controlling the biomechs.

“Send them in and make sure they’re all dead,” he ordered her. “We don’t need any more surprises.”

“Yes, sir,” she said with a nod, typing commands into the control pad strapped to her left arm.

“Sir!” Dominguez turned and saw Captain Romero, the senior officer of the mercenaries trotting up to him, urgency in his tone and the look on his face. “I can’t raise the men we left with Senator O’Keefe-Mulrooney!”

“This was a fucking distraction!” Dominguez snarled in irritation, turning back to the cabin. “Get in there now!” He turned to McElroy. “Get me a dozen troops around the back of the cabin, block off the rear entrance! The rest get on line right here and back up Captain Romero.”

“How the hell did they get behind us?” McElroy muttered, not looking up from her control pad.

“Doesn’t matter,” Dominguez said, shaking his head. “They won’t be getting out.” He brought up his tablet. “Our hostages have outlived their usefulness.”

Jason McKay scrambled up from the cabin floor before the last sonic boom had ceased to echo, a cold, dead feeling in the pit of his stomach. Dominguez had done the unexpected: he’d gone outside to meet the attack instead of staying under cover… and taken the defense satellite controller with him.

“Lieutenant Bryant!” He radioed, trying to reach the Marine platoon leader. “Lt. Bryant, report!” Silence. “Any Marine personnel report!”

“No way they could have made it through that, sir,” Vinnie said from where he was crouching by the back door.

“Sean,” McKay said to the NCO, “they’re going to know we’re here. Get them out of here before…”

“Contact left!” Vinnie shouted, immediately opening fire.

McKay spun around and caught a glimpse of grey-armored biomechs coming around the corner of the house before incoming fire began cutting through the ruined door and windows, forcing him back. Vinnie emptied a magazine at the biomechs but then fell backwards heavily as a pair of rounds smacked into his chest armor. Jock surged forward, firing his carbine with one hand to suppress the enemy as he ducked in and grabbed his friend by the handle built into the back of his body armor, dragging him back behind the relative cover of an exterior wall.

McKay didn’t see any blood and Vinnie seemed to be moving, if gingerly. He moved to check on him when the front windows exploded inward with a withering barrage of gunfire that sent everyone flat to the floor. McKay cursed as he tried to watch the front and back simultaneously, swinging his carbine back and forth.

“Commander Villanueva,” he transmitted to the lander’s pilot. “This is General McKay, do you read?”

“Got you, sir,” he barely heard her voice in his earphones over the enemy gunfire. “What’s your situation?”

“Dominguez didn’t stay in the cabin,” he told her. “He went outside and took out the Marines with the KE satellites. We’re trapped inside the cabin with the Senator and her daughter.” He hesitated for a breath. “Launch the Bunker Buster, Commander.”

He waited for a reply, but none came. “Commander?” He called. “Commander Villanueva, do you read me?”

Nothing.

“Goddammit!” He hissed. He’d just have to hope she’d received the transmission. He switched to the general frequency. “Everyone load up a grenade,” he ordered. “We’re making a break out the back, making for the lake. Vinnie, are you okay?”

“I’ll be fine, sir,” he heard the man’s strained voice. “Armor stopped the shots… mostly.”

“I want you to take Val and Natalia and run for the lake while we provide suppressive fire,” he told the man, pulling a grenade from his vest pouches and loading into the launcher beneath his rifle barrel. “Once you get them to the water, grab a life jacket out of the boat and a line off the dock… you tow them across the lake and get them out of here.”

“Let Jock do it,” Vinnie argued. “He’s got muscle where his brains oughta’ be, he can get them across faster than me.”

“This isn’t a democracy, Major Mahoney,” McKay said with finality in his tone. “Follow your orders.” He turned to Valerie and keyed his external helmet speaker, turning the volume up to be heard over the gunfire. “Valerie, get ready to make a run for it! Vinnie’s going to take you and Natalia across the lake.”

She didn’t say anything, but McKay could see the terror in her eyes when she nodded to him in acknowledgement.

McKay raised his carbine and took the safety off the grenade launcher, trying to ignore the bullets tearing through the air all around them, smacking angrily into the furniture and the interior walls. He looked back at the other five in his squad and saw that Sean Watanabe was bleeding from a wound in his left arm, trying to bring up his grenade launcher one-handed, while one of the other two men in Sean’s team-he couldn’t tell if it was Brent or Timmons-was face-down and motionless, a pool of blood spreading beneath his shattered faceplate.

He tried to put that image and everything else aside as he aimed through the rear windows at the advancing biomechs.

“Fire…” he began to exclaim, but before the word was entirely out of his mouth, a burst of 8mm slugs tracked upward across his chest, not penetrating the hard armor there but slamming into his clavicle like a sledgehammer and snapping it, then slicing a line of fire across his neck before chewing a gouge in the side of his helmet and nearly ripping it off his head. His finger squeezed the trigger of the grenade launcher convulsively and the round actually fired true, hitting in the ground only a meter in front of a group of three biomechs and bursting with a brilliant fireball. McKay barely noticed it as he fell flat on his back, agony coursing through his right shoulder and stars flashing across his vision.

“Get them out!” He tried to yell the command, but it came out as a strained whisper instead. He still couldn’t see anything but the ceiling and the flashes from the blow to his head, but he heard the explosions and felt the concussion through the floor. For a moment, he thought that it was the others launching their rifle grenades, but then he felt the whole cabin shake and saw pieces of the front door flying over his head, blown out by a powerful shockwave that sent tongues of flame licking through the doorway and windows into the living room.

Gritting his teeth against the pain in his chest, neck and head, McKay rolled to his left and yanked aside his broken faceplate, trying to see what was happening. Smoke was drifting across the lake from over the cabin, where… whatever it was had happened, but through the smoke he could still see four of the biomechs moving, their rifle barrels swinging to and fro in confusion.

He heard the whine of turbines first, then saw the exhaust spraying ripples across the surface of the lake, and then the sleekly angular grey bulk of the assault lander swung into view from overhead, bristling with weapons’ hardpoints, and a chin cannon swung around towards the surviving biomechs. The burst of fire was brief, just a “chuff” of smoke and a spark of muzzle blast that lasted an eyeblink, but the biomechs just… disappeared. There was an explosion of dirt and smoke and blood and the four artificial soldiers were gone, leaving in their place scattered armor and body parts.