CHOP Line Read online

  “Marking target, enemy machine gun position,” Sergeant Frankel, a squad leader who’d been riding in one of the other vehicles, announced. Mortas’s goggles picked up the location, a tiny glowing dot appearing in his vision that remained on the same spot even when he turned his head. It looked like any other part of the wooded rise, but then a sputtering light erupted around the marker. Its chatter lost in the explosions, the Sim machine gun winked at them from a perfectly camouflaged position.

  More roaring engines. Mortas popped his head up, looking back at the landing zone, seeing the approach of three more APCs. The grass here wasn’t flattened, and he knew that half his platoon was out there somewhere.

  “First Platoon, get to the high ground! Move move move!” He came to his feet, the ruck on his shoulder again, the heavy bag slowing him down. The ruck meant ammunition and batteries and water, and simply could not be left behind.

  Behind him now, both of the trapped APCs started firing at the ridge. The twin cannon gave off a double-bang whump, the concussion shoving him from behind, almost knocking him flat. Other vehicles were already firing, smoke rounds throwing up fireworks before blooming into dense clouds meant to blind the enemy gunners.

  Already exposed for too long, Mortas threw himself into the grass. Dry blades rasped against his cheeks as he fell, but he was already switching the goggle view. Overhead imagery showed the chaos on the landing zone, tracks driving every which way to get around the ones that had been knocked out, while more coasted down toward them. Inside the smoke shrouding the ridge, incoming and outgoing rounds erupted in flashes and flickers. Most important, small moving dots of light in the grass finally showed him the half of his platoon that had dismounted.

  Mortas struggled to fit an electronic glove onto his right hand, kicking himself for not having it on already. Instantly, a hologram menu appeared in his goggle view. Tapping and swiping at the air, he drew a box around his troops that would appear on the controls of every vehicle near them. Popping his head up, he saw that the marker had had no effect on the approaching tracks.

  Back down, tapping directly on the lead carrier’s image, creating a link to its commander.

  “Hey! You fuckin’ blind? Can’t you see my men in front of you?”

  “I’m seeing a lot of guns trying to kill me, Orphan!” a harried voice responded. In the background Mortas heard the clang as the turret cannon reloaded. “How about you get your people out of my way and do your job? Get up there and silence those guns!”

  “Kiss my ass!”

  “Terminate link!”

  The transmission ended. Turning back to the imagery, Mortas saw pulsing red markers on the forward slope where the Orphans had identified two anti-armor positions. The scattered pairs and trios of his men were almost at the base of the high ground, and he needed to catch up to them. Before moving, Mortas drew three lines running up the ridge that would appear in the goggles of every man in his platoon.

  “Frankel!” Carrying the ruck low, Mortas rushed through the grass.

  “I see your sector lines, El-tee! I’ve got the gun to the east!”

  “I’ll take the one to the west!” he shouted, the experience of numerous combat missions taking hold. The men knew what to do without being told, and now separated into two groups. The platoon’s normal squad organization had been badly scrambled by the cross-loading on different vehicles, so they were reconstituting on the fly.

  His helmet dampers protected his ears from the unrelenting blasts and explosions, but microphones all over the headpiece kept him from being rendered deaf. Rocket blasts shattered several tree trunks up the slope, the gaps pointing out the two gun positions. Mortas turned his head slightly, and a vertical blue line appeared in his goggles to show the sector boundary he had just created.

  Reaching the base of the high ground, he threw himself down again and let go of the ruck. Outgoing anti-armor fire boomed over his head, and the stutter of an enemy machine gun sounded from up the slope. He was just about to rush for the cover of a reasonably thick tree when a robot voice stopped him.

  “Inbound missiles! Inbound missiles! You are danger close! Seek cover!” The words continued, but he was already facedown. Somewhere in orbit, sophisticated fire control systems had logged the red flashing targets while also recognizing the presence of human troops. Every Orphan at the base of the ridge had received the warning, and were pressing themselves into the grass and dirt.

  Mortas flipped the image so he could watch the strike, and two drones swept into his vision a moment later. They discharged their rockets, breaking left and right as two black ovals raced for the markers. The bombs thumped into the ridge, right on target, primed to detonate a second after penetrating the ground. The explosions sent more trees crashing downward, and then he felt shovel-loads of dirt landing on his back.

  “Sim machine gun! Marking!” He had no idea who’d said that, but another target appeared in his goggles. Leaving his pack, Mortas rose and dashed for the base of the nearest tree. His goggles let him see through the smoke, but there was a drawback to that capability—he had no idea if the smoke was concealing him or not. His straining breaths pulled a lungful of the acrid mist into his lungs, and he decided it was still pretty thick.

  A quick peek around the bole of the tree earned him a volley of heavy slugs that kicked up dirt and bit off bark, but then a chonk sounded. The grenade sailed up the slope through the remaining branches, arcing beautifully before disappearing into the ground. Looking around the opposite side of the trunk, Mortas just made out the narrow slit where the machine gun was nestled before the grenade went off inside the position.

  Had to be Prevost. Only Prevost could have made that shot.

  Voices sounded in his ears, First Platoon Orphans urging each other on, and he jumped up in response. Camouflaged figures were rushing and diving all around him, exposing themselves for only a few seconds before disappearing again. Mortas reached one of the new-fallen trees, dropping behind it and raising his Scorpion. Wispy smoke rose from the blasted opening where one of the anti-armor guns had been sited, only twenty yards up the slope and fifty yards to his left. That was the gun in his sector, and the drone strike seemed to have knocked it out.

  A hundred yards to his right, in the sector claimed by Sergeant Frankel, a startling boom shook the ground. The missile attack on that emplacement hadn’t destroyed the gun. Looking toward it, he saw rushing figures as Frankel and the others raced uphill past the gaping hole with its felled trees and chewed-up dirt. An Orphan boomer team fired from down below, and one of their bunker busters sailed into the opening after an echoing crack. Its delayed fuse went off underground, and then Frankel and the others were back at the hole, heaving grenades into the gash from above.

  “Lieutenant! Lieutenant!” Dak’s voice, tense, muffled by heavy fire. Mortas slipped down behind the trunk and flipped the goggles again. The ridge was a narrow finger, and he’d sent Dak’s half of the platoon around its tip. To his horror, he now saw that the tracks which had been carrying them were far to the north, moving away, and that they’d deposited Dak and the others in open ground.

  “I see you!” he yelled.

  “Yeah, Sam sees us, too!” Dak answered, and on the imagery Mortas picked up the flashes of enemy fire. The Sims were dug in on both sides of the ridge, and half of his people were exposed to all of the fire coming from the opposite slope.

  A sack of mud landed next to him, and Mortas turned in surprise to see Prevost. The chonk gunner was covered in dirt and broken bits of wood, and he aimed the grenade launcher over the trunk. He loosed off a round at something near the top of the incline, reminding Mortas that the enemy didn’t care that he was concentrating on Dak’s predicament. Raising his rifle, he started swinging it back and forth to give Prevost protection.

  “Dak!” he yelled. “Mark targets and call in the drones!”

  “Already tried! They’re a little busy!”

  Looking back toward the landing zone, Mortas wa
tched as another serial of personnel carriers slid down the cofferdam. The energy tunnel stood out like a stationary blue tornado, but its base was a junkyard. Smoking vehicles seemed to be everywhere, and even at that distance he could see that several of the new arrivals had landed on some of the earlier ones.

  Enlarging the overhead imagery told a worse story. One of the two other cofferdams was likewise jammed with vehicles and under fire from numerous concealed guns. Gunships, manned and otherwise, were desperately pounding the sources of the enemy’s concentrated firepower. They zipped back and forth, but Sim antiaircraft guns on the hills were making it hot for them.

  “Come on!” he shouted at Prevost, slapping the chonk man’s armor while trying to rise. A hand yanked him back down.

  “Just a second, sir.” Prevost brought the grenade launcher up, and when Mortas looked he saw a quartet of bodies struggling toward the top of the ridge. They were carrying a heavy machine gun on a tripod, free arms swinging with their exertions. He saw the flanged helmets of Sim infantry, so different from the head-hugging protection worn by the Orphans, and then the chonk round erupted from Prevost’s weapon.

  The grenade sailed through the gaps in the trees, landing just ahead of the group. Set to explode a yard off the deck, it blew all four of them in different directions.

  “First Platoon! Up and over the top!” Mortas yelled, vaulting the wooden trunk and rushing uphill. Prevost did the same, weaving through the trees to his left. They ascended into a view of the entire battle, catching glimpses of the towering cofferdams, the pirouetting aircraft, and the blasts and smoke from the separate engagements.

  “Dak, this is Dassa!” B Company’s commander called to the First Platoon Orphans caught in the open. “I’ve got rockets for you. Mark me new targets.”

  The words didn’t register with Mortas as he crested the long hill. Needing to see what was happening to Dak and the others, he stayed on his feet behind a tall tree. The ground ahead and below was covered in grass, but a shorter variety that wasn’t as thick as what he’d passed through earlier. His goggles instantly picked up the ragged line of rucksacks several hundred yards away, tiny sticks pointing over them. The roar of the battle kept him from hearing the machine guns firing on the slope below, but he could see the fusillade chopping the grass.

  Next to a low rise roughly two hundred yards beyond Dak’s position, an APC spewed smoke and flame. Mortas spotted the silhouettes of other carriers beyond that, unable to reach his trapped men because of the Sim guns. The APCs fired smoke rounds at the enemy positions below him, and a gray cloud started to rise.

  Prevost was already heading down, rushing from tree to tree in a crouch. If the emplacements on that side were a mirror of the ones they’d already silenced, he’d be spotted in no time. Drifting smoke covered much of the area, a less effective blanket fired by the chonk gunners pinned down in the field.

  Dak hollered over the radio, answering the company commander. “I can’t identify them! Marking likely targets!”

  Frankel, somewhere to Mortas’s right, called out to Dak. “Got one! Spot my smoke!”

  Prevost had vanished, so Mortas left the tree and ran downhill. Chonks began coughing to his right, Frankel’s people firing colored smoke rounds at the enemy gun they’d located. The chatter of the Sim machine guns filled his ears now, and he followed the noise. A single bullet suddenly smacked into the tree closest to him, forcing him back down.

  “Orbital rockets on the way!” Dassa called, the words finally getting Mortas’s attention. Warships in space were firing guided missiles that would fly directly over Dak and slam into the ridge. Right where he and Prevost and Frankel’s people were searching for Sim positions. At most they had two minutes to clear out.

  “First Platoon! Rockets inbound! Pull back over the ridge!”

  Mortas raised his head, trying to see through the trees and the underbrush, looking for the chonk gunner who’d gone ahead. A giant’s finger flicked the tree inches from his helmet, biting bark off, before the ground below and ten yards to his right erupted in a red cloud. The explosion was inside the anti-armor emplacement, and he recognized the sound of the marking munition. A chonk smoke round. Fired from well below.

  “Prevost! Get back up here! They’re gonna blow this whole side to pieces!”

  With the rockets inbound, the waiting APCs broke from cover and headed for Dak. The concealed gun fired a round at them with a titanic roar, but it went high and sailed over them. A second chonk round burst just outside the firing aperture, more red cloud to blind the Sim gunners.

  To his left, a Sim machine gun started firing, a sustained growl. Knowing who they were shooting at, Mortas pushed off from the dirt and just managed to get behind another tree before his Sim shadow pumped another slug into it.

  “I’m pinned down, sir! Get outta here!” That came from Prevost, somewhere below, seeing Mortas and knowing what he was trying to do.

  “Where is it?”

  “Five yards to your left, ten yards down! No time, Lieutenant! Run for it!”

  The grenade was in his hand, and he was skittering down, juggling the rifle while yanking the safeties out of the explosive. Rounds hitting the nearby trees gave him speed, and then he was down again, hugging the dirt and peering around for the machine gun.

  “You’re right on top of it!”

  Squirming forward, feeling the tug as a bullet snatched at the fabric covering his torso armor, the churning roar of the machine gun filling his ears. Amazed when he found the horizontal slit below him, seeing just a sliver of the crossbeam’s wood, almost invisible, camouflaged with living sod, the vibrations of the machine gun rattling his chest through his armor.

  “El-tee! We killed your sniper! You’re clear!” Frankel calling.

  Mortas armed the grenade, surged forward, and heaved it into the darkness. His hand felt the heat and the trembling air of the slugs racing out of the concealed barrel, and then he was rolling away. His goggles strobed with red for half a second, and then the robot voice was back.

  “Rocket impact imminent! Take cover! Take cover!”

  Prevost was next to him, grabbing his armor, hauling him to his feet, adrenaline jetting through them both as they raced for the crest.

  Chapter 2

  In a specialized sleep tube on the research vessel Delphi, Ayliss Mortas dreamt. The ship hurtled through space, an unusually long Step voyage this time, while sophisticated sensors recorded the brainwaves of the craft’s unconscious complement. Though heavily sedated, Ayliss knew her dreams were being monitored and, in a quiet back room of her mind, wondered if that awareness was influencing them.

  Her Step dreams had always been based heavily in reality, often a reliving of especially intense events, and this one was no different. She felt the weight of the torso armor, the heat reflecting off of the black standing rocks so common to the planet known as Quad Seven, and the burning in her right cheek. The face looking up at Ayliss could have been her own at the time; the hair was cut close to the skull and the contorted features were blackened for concealment. Lola, leader of the colony’s Banshee contingent, had taken the full force of the explosion meant for Ayliss.

  “I will die for you, Ayliss.” Lola spoke through lips flecked with her own blood, and then subsided. The stench of high explosive stung Ayliss’s nostrils in the dream as she lowered the dead warrior to the dirt.

  “I will kill for you, Lola,” Ayliss heard herself saying, a fragment of the Banshees’ pre-battle ritual. “I will kill them all.”

  The dream diverted from reality at that point, so that Ayliss was looking down into Lola’s living and disapproving eyes. The face paint was gone, and a pale Lola raised herself on an elbow.

  “That’s not how it goes. When I say I’ll die for you, you say you’ll die for me.” Lola stood, now dressed in a flowing white dress that Ayliss had never seen before. The black spikes all over the plateau dissolved into nothing, and she was standing on an empty beach with the ocean crashing
in. Lola was far away, abandoning her, the gown blowing in the breeze.

  “Didn’t I try?” she called after the figure. “I stood up in front of McRaney’s ship, trying to fire a missile that didn’t even work!”

  Lola appeared directly in front of her, furious. “You aren’t supposed to die for me, dumbass. You’re supposed to live for me.”

  Ayliss blinked, and then she was alone. She looked around, knowing that this time Lola was gone. The wind took on an edge, chilling her, and the sun dimmed. Ayliss dragged a toe across the damp sand, drawing a line. In a child’s voice she whispered, “Dying would have been easier.”

  The line disappeared under the incoming tide, and a wave smashed into her with a roar. She started, realizing she was back on the plateau, choking in the smoke from the battle, the useless missile tube dropping from her hands as the saucer of McRaney’s ship blotted out the sky. Its ugly cannon barked, and stone chips flew up from the entrance to the tunnel under her feet where so many of the colonists had taken refuge.

  Not caring about them at all, Ayliss rushed to the edge and looked across at the wrecked Zone Quest mining complex and a brilliant white house that had briefly been her home. Blocker’s enormous figure was already there, holding a launcher that actually worked, while she shrieked a warning that the stricken ship would land on him.

  “Get your head down, darling!” the man she knew as Big Bear shouted, and then she felt his hands shoving her to the dirt even though that was impossible. He was hundreds of yards away, firing the missile that destroyed McRaney’s ship.

  They both fell flat, the engines on the smugglers’ craft screaming as it tried to stay aloft, and then it settled backward, destroying the white house, collapsing much of the embankment, and then exploding. She was crushed under debris, the right side of her face was on fire, but Ayliss fought madly just to turn over and see.

  She was trapped under Blocker, the man who had been her childhood bodyguard. He’d survived the explosion in real life, and promised never to leave her again when she’d found him pinned under the wreckage. Both his legs broken, but alive.