NIGHTFALL Preview XI

Pick Up Your Weapon, Trooper

BY PETER NEALEN

Pick Up Your Weapon, Trooper Part III

Ulgar grabbed the nearest trooper and roughly stopped him, wrenching him around to face the way he’d come. “Why are you running this way, then? Do you want to get shot in the back before we all get killed?” He shoved him back, making the man stumble and fall into the bottom of the trench, tripping up one of his fellows just before the others all stopped in shock and fear. “Stand and fight, or we’re all dead!”

One of the troopers, behind the man that Ulgar had halted, a hulking ogre of a man, glared at him. “The line has collapsed, fool! You would have us cut off and slaughtered!”

Ulgar found that he was more calm than he’d ever been, his mind working in ways he’d never imagined. He stared at the big man, who was ready to push past him, looking for a way out of the trench, back toward the rear. There was a wild look in the man’s eyes, fear driving him to something close to a berserk fury.

So Ulgar leveled his pulse rifle at the man’s throat. “We fight together, or we die alone. Turn and fight, or I’ll kill you myself.”

He couldn’t say where this determination was coming from. He had been ready to do his time in the Phalanxes, hope and pray that he survived, and go home. But no one else was taking charge in the absence of Corporal Aubrian, and he found he wasn’t going to join in the general panic and get killed.

He realized that he didn’t want to see Jerigan, Daskand, Marrhus, or Fohrand get killed, either.

The big man stared at him for a moment, searching his face as more fire crackled around them, Marrhus letting loose with another long burst of the support beamer, cutting a trio of thralls in half as they came out of the smoke and murk. In response to the challenge, Ulgar simply tightened his finger on the trigger.

And the big man saw it. His eyes flicked down toward the weapon, as another burst of fire thundered around the dogleg in the trench. Then, with a glare, the man snatched up his own weapon and turned toward the enemy, just before Ulgar was about to fire.

There was no time to feel relief. He shifted his aim and fired just past the big man’s shoulder, taking another of the reptilian thralls in the face, blowing out the side of its jaw and sending it crashing to the side of the trench, just as the big man he’d faced down sent a burst of pulse rifle fire through another human thrall’s chest and throat, sending the creature that had once been a man spinning away with a shower of blood.

The Torremaddans held their ground, though a few still cowered in the dirt at the feet of those who fought. For a brief few moments, the trench was a deafening hell of close range fire, pulse rifles cutting down the thralls as they tried to push the corner. Bodies and gore piled up on both sides of the narrow space they fought over, merely a couple of yards of dusty trench turned muddy by human and alien blood. The big man took multiple beam wounds to the body, but kept firing, staggering forward as his life ebbed, finally thrusting his bayonet up under a battle thrall’s chin, slamming the point up through its skull. Together, thrall and Torremaddan Phalanx trooper slumped to the bottom of the trench in death, the big man doubtless cursing Ulgar with his dying breath.

Ulgar pushed forward, standing over the dead Phalanx trooper, continuing to fire into the mass of bodies trying to push into their section of the trench. So far, none of the thralls had thrown grenades, but it was only a matter of time.

He decided to get ahead of them. He still had one grenade, and as he stepped back to let one of the troopers who had turned to fight take his place, he quickly prepped the little cylinder and lobbed it past the unnamed trooper’s shoulder, just before another alien beam weapon transfixed the man’s skull, dropping him on his face in the trench.

The grenade bounced off a skull and landed short. “Get down!” Ulgar’s throat was raw, not only from shouting but from the smoke and dust hanging in the air, and he feared for a second, even as he dragged the troopers next to him toward the ground, that he was too hoarse to be heard. Yet all but one, a fresh-faced youngster who looked like he’d graduated the basic training field that day, dropped to the ground, most still firing toward the mob that was now pushing harder as their fire slackened.

The grenade detonated, blotting out the entire world for a moment.

Ulgar blinked, shoving the suddenly limp body off that had been thrown against him. His head ached, and it took a moment to get the grit—sticky with blood and gore—out of his vision.

The trench was an abattoir. The thralls had overtaken the short grenade and borne the brunt of the blast, many of them being completely blown to pieces in the process. Part of the trench wall had sagged in the aftermath, half-burying several of them in gore-clotted mud.

Smoke clung low in the trench as the groans began to make their way through his battered hearing. Only when he realized that they were screams did he come to understand just how deafened he had been by the explosion.

The young man he had seen just before the grenade had gone off was gone. The mangled corpse lying half-buried nearby might have been him. Of the three others who had been at the front line of the resistance with him, one was clearly dead and the others were wounded.

But the enemy had fared much worse.

He hauled himself to his feet, dragging his pulse rifle with him. There was movement in the smoke ahead.

“On your feet. They’re coming.” His voice was a harsh croak. “I’ll not die at the hands of these alien puppets, not on my knees.”

He hauled the man next to him up. Drenched in blood, the trooper was clearly wounded, dazed. “Jerigan!”

The man who, not long before, had been huddled in the bottom of the trench, too afraid to move, dragged the wounded man back and took his place. “I am with you, Ulgar.”

He started to push toward the bend in the trench, Jerigan at his side, Fohrand joining them. Every part of him hurt abominably, but he understood, on an instinctual level, that they had to continue to attack, continue to hurt the enemy as much as possible, if they had any hope of survival.

Yet as they squinted through the stinging smoke, pulse rifles leveled, waiting for the howling mob of thralls to burst upon them again, the ones behind clambering over the bodies of those shredded by the grenade blast, they found only corpses.

Then an eerie, keening cry went up, loud enough to be heard even over the thunder and crackle of small arms elsewhere in the trench system. The sporadic stutters of pulse rifle and support beamer fire were quickly answered with the sizzling crackle of Charul beam weapons, and through the ache and the haze in his head, Ulgar realized that the front rank of trenches must have fallen. They were one of the few pockets left, and the Charul and their thralls were still clearing out the others.

He kept moving, though not without a backward glance to see if they were getting too far from the rest of their tiny, ad hoc unit. They had not yet faced any more resistance, and he wondered why, if the aliens and their slaves had overwhelmed the rest of the 2nd Regiment of the Torremaddan 5th.

The next dogleg was not far ahead now, and the smoke had cleared enough that he could see it. There were figures back there, but as he leveled his pulse rifle, they fired at him, driving him back behind the curve of the trench line, their fire spitting grit and fragments into his face. Then the keening cry went up again, this time seemingly closer.

He realized, despite his ringing ears, that the sound was coming from outside the trench. Stepping back as Fohrand held cover on the bend in the trench, he carefully lifted his head to peer with one eye over the top.

Through the drifting smoke and dust, a line of thralls knelt behind the stacked bodies, their beam weapons leveled but so far holding their fire.

They were not alone, though. For the first time, Ulgar looked upon the Charul, the alien masters who would be masters of this world, and all worlds.

Several were behind the lines of thralls, stalking back and forth on long, spindly legs that bent the wrong way. They were armored, though it was hard to tell whether that strange, almost spongy-looking material was any form of armor that he would recognize, or some bony protrusion grown from the Charul’s own bodies. Their long, narrow skulls swiveled back and forth as they supervised their cannon fodder.

Those Charul towered over the thralls, easily a head taller than the tallest human, let alone the reptilians. Even they were small, however, compared to the one that loomed behind them, the figure from which the keening cry came once again.

It took a moment to realize that the shape was not a Charul itself, or at least not all such a one. The Charul was larger than its fellows, but it sat with its limbs crossed strangely in a mechanized, armored and armed palanquin, the armor plating looking almost like amber as it slowly and majestically stalked up to a position just behind the line of thralls facing the trench line.

We must have done enough damage to catch the masters’ attention.

A hand tugged at his sleeve, pulling his attention down to the trench. Jerigan pointed to the rear, dread in his voice and his eyes.

“They are behind us now, too, Ulgar. We are surrounded.”

To be continued…