Unknown - The_Growing_589064

“Ma’am.” The two sitting on the case drop to their knees and set about threading the ammo belts into the guns’ feeders. Maggie slaps a couple shoulders as she rises and moves down the barricade, checking her troops. Except for a couple burns and a few more bruises, the soldier killed by the shell’s concussion is the only casualty so far. The rest hold their posts, guarding their flanks where the barrier curves to the rear. Advantage, good guys. She does not expect it to last.

It does not. From behind the barrier come the sound of shots, fired in single volleys as M-16 shells begin to rain down on troops and vehicles alike. “Shit!” she yells. “Get to cover! They’re firing high!”

Around her soldiers scramble to flatten themselves against the barricade, a few diving under trucks. Behind her the M-60’s open up, and she darts for the command truck, reaching up to grab Manny’s arm as the door flies open and he pulls her up and in. Shells strike the truck’s roof and bounce off, clattering harmlessly against the armor plating. “Sounds like a hailstorm out there,” Manny observes.

“Nah.” A wry grin quirks up one side of Kirsten’s mouth. “That’s freakin’ Santa Claus and eight tiny reindeer.” Then, to Maggie, “Tacoma’s drawing fire. Nothing’s headed Koda’s way. The guys in the back want to know if they should move up.”

“Woman, you pick the damnedest time to develop a sense of humor.” Maggie shakes her head at Kirsten. “Tell ‘em come on. All hell’s about to break loose out there.”

*

The battle comes to him as sound. Even through the night-scope, the fog and trees obscure the enemy advance. Tacoma knows when the tanks leave the highway by the suddenly shriller whine of their engines, knows when another of them dies before it can make the descent to the field by the shock of the explosion. He holds his forces ready, waiting silently, their engines cold. Neither noise nor heat will betray their position.

From his vantage point to the side, he hears the grinding of metal treads in the soil, the timbre changing as they begin to crush the woody undergrowth covering the open space between the field and the treeline where the ranks of armor lie hidden from both sight and heat sensors. The enemy rides without lights, relying, like the Ellsworth force, on night scopes and the sensors feeding data to mechanical brains. The first of the droid tanks pitches into one of the camouflaged trenches with a crash, landing squarely on the clutch of mines awaiting it. The double blast, mines and fuel, shudders through the ground, and a fireball blooms upward into the dark, briefly burning away the fog to illuminate the long barrel of a cannon here, the low curve of a turret there. “Got one,” Jackson observes in the momentary silence. His hands lie slack on the Jeep’s wheel, waiting the order to move.

The roar of the explosion drowns the last of his words, and Tacoma can only give a brief thumbs-up signal in reply. In the instant before the fog closes in again and obscures the advancing armor, he counts four more tanks and a pair of Bradleys. About half the enemy cavalry, judging by the noise. A second fireball goes up as one of the two fighting vehicles tips into another deadfall, and Tacoma speaks into his com. ” Wana,” he says, “Now.”

In response, the engines of half a dozen armored units growl to life, and flame bursts from the long muzzles of the two M-1’s in the center of the line. A pair of anti-tank missiles streak upward from their hidden launchers in a steep trajectory, their white contrails pale against the swirling mist. The M-1’s and Bradleys on the flanks, though, skulk silently, holding their fire, hidden in darkness.

An enemy tank shell lands on one of the fighting vehicles, its fuel going up in a torrent of flame, fragments of its steel sheathing clanging against the turret of an M-1 half a hundred yards away. The fire illuminates the tank’s cannon for the instant of its recoil as it returns fire, striking, too, off the taut knuckles of Jackson’s fist as he pounds it in soundless rage against the rim of the steering wheel, his lips moving in curses Tacoma cannot hear above the roar. The concussion from the blast shivers through his bones.

There is no hope that the Bradley’s crew has survived; armored vehicles are death traps under a direct hit.

A shell bursts overhead, its white phosphorus glare burning through the fog to show Tacoma the grinding advance of the enemy armor. One tank, bizarrely, craws over the remnants of another to bridge a deadfall; others batter their way through the woods, crushing trees, root and branch, under their metal hulks. Tacoma shouts into his com, “Willie Peter! They’ve seen us! All units fire!”

The thunder of the cannon rolls over him like a shockwave. An enemy shell gouges out a crater less than fifty feet away from Tacoma’s position, and the Jeep rocks beneath him. A second volley uproots a thirty-foot larch pine, to bring it crashing down on one of the enemy’s Bradleys. The tree, its pitch taking fire from the burning diesel, flames through the fog like a candle.

Another enemy tank succumbs to a deadfall and to the anti-tank missiles from the snipers hidden on the flank. The others go wide to skirt it, swinging back to reform and drive snarling toward Tacoma’s center. He watches them come, gauging their approach to the last second. He can feel Jackson’s eyes on him, taking their own measure. It is an unsettling feeling, one he has no time to analyze. He lets the enemy come on until he can almost make out their shapes, hulking in the mist. “Hektakiyanapepi!” he yells into his mike, then hangs on for his life as Jackson turns the Jeep on its own footprint and falls in behind the armor, now retreating at full speed along the trails already blazed over the rough ground. “Goddam!” Darius yells as they bounce over an axle-shattering outcrop of limestone, a grin splitting the grease paint streaking his face. “This is fun!”

*

A thunder of bootsoles on pavement announces the arrival of the troops from behind the second barricade. Maggie flings the door wide and jumps down among them, heedless of the hail of bullets pelting down on their position, running with them for relative safety of the wall. “Grenade launchers!” she yells. Get up on the wall and let ‘em have it! Get as many as you can before they hit the mines! We want to save those for the heavy models!”

A dozen soldiers scramble up the irregular pile of metal, finding holds among the dents and the protruding door handles and axles. Maggie gestures toward the top with a sweep of her hand. “Some of you rifles get up there, too! Snipe off any humans you see. Don’t waste your ammo on the metalheads!”

“Ma’am!” a Sergeant salutes and hits the wall, swinging with a gymnast’s skill to a position where she can fire over the top, her platoon swarming up after her to spread out between the grenade launchers. Maggie watches them go, strange green shadows in the light of her night scope, a hand here, a helmet rim there, lit to white glare by the muzzle flashes of their weapons.

“The rest of you, reinforce the flanks! Once they get to the wall they’ll try to go around!”

As they split and sprint for the sides of the highway, Maggie grabs hold of a protruding wheel and levers herself up to a slit in the wall. The mist still swirls thickly along the ground, but overhead she can make out a faint gleam that she is almost sure is a star, Siurius, maybe, well toward its zenith, and another glint, reddish, that may be Betelgeuse. Dawn is perhaps two hours away, and the fog will thicken again as the temperature drops just before sunrise.

The good news is that it should cover Koda’s advance. The bad new is that she won’t be able to see where she’s going. She will have to find her way to the line by sound.