NIGHTFALL PREVIEW XIII

Pick Up Your Weapon, Trooper

BY PETER NEALEN

Pick Up Your Weapon, Trooper Part V

The support beamers were raking the oncoming mobs of battle thralls with crackling bursts of energy, cutting fanatical reptilians and humans down in great swathes, piling bodies and parts of bodies on the ravaged ground before the trench line. The rest of the troopers threw themselves up on the firing steps, adding the crackling thump of their pulse rifles to the support beamers.

Ulgar started to join them, but Jerigan pulled him back and shouldered in front of him. “You’re in command now!” The other man seemed to have calmed down, getting his fear under control, as he mounted the firing step and laid his pulse rifle on the shredded sandbags. “This is your plan! These men are listening to you, like it or not, and somebody has to do it!”

With a gulp, Ulgar realized that Jerigan was right. If there was no one in command, no one to coordinate what they were doing, the Charul would box them in and overrun them. He felt a shudder go through him at the thought, despite the immediacy of the physical danger as the oncoming battle thralls’ beam fire crackled overhead.

He still couldn’t stay where he was and just watch, as the assault wave came closer. They had too few weapons to afford that kind of leadership. He pushed to another firing step, where he hoped he could at least get a better view of the battlefield.

Not that he knew exactly what he was going to do. He was a regular phalanx trooper. He wasn’t a corporal like Aubrian. This was his first battle.

Laying his own pulse rifle down, he put a burst into one of the reptilian thralls that was getting closer, sending it sprawling with a splash of orange blood. They were close enough to see and smell the gore now. He shifted to another, just as it dropped to the dirt.

That was when he realized that something had changed. The first assault had been an overwhelming wave, thousands of screaming fanatics charging across the last hundred yards toward the Torremadan positions while they fired from the hip. It had worked, too, since as far as Ulgar knew, this little cluster of phalanx troopers were the only ones still holding their ground. Yet now, the thralls were taking cover.

He could just barely hear a faint buzz over the crackle and thunder of weapons fire, and looked toward the Charul in the armored palanquin, where it was gesturing and seemed to be the center of the buzzing sound.

Just as he shifted his pulse rifle to try an almost certainly futile shot at the thing, the thralls rose up again under a withering blizzard of beam fire, charging forward again, the sheer volume of their fire forcing the Torremadan survivors to duck down below the parapet. The wiry man who had found the second support weapon was still firing, his head down but his hands on the controls, raking the oncoming wave with blind pulses of beam fire.

Shielded from the torrent of destruction, Ulgar knew they were doomed. He knew they had to fight, or the thralls would be on them in moments. But he couldn’t bring himself to stick his head up over the parapet, and none of his comrades, from his unit or others, could either.

They were going to die.

He forced his eyes up, though he still couldn’t manage to make his head rise, flinching down again as the beam fire raked the parapet above him, showering him with superheated grit as more of the sandbags exploded under the onslaught. That movement of his eyes might have saved them all.

In the brief moment that he’d managed to shoot back and had seen the Charul master, he hadn’t realized that he had lost track of the lesser, armored Charul. But now that he looked up, squinting against the continuing battering he was taking as the parapet continued to be chewed away, he saw the bigger, hulking shapes moving through the trench line on their flank, coming up against the piles of bodies they had used to barricade their position.

“On the flank!” He dropped down from the firing step, leveling his pulse rifle, knowing it was probably not going to be enough. He fired the remaining rounds in his magazine at the chitinous thing that was pushing up over the stack of corpses. His pulse rounds smashed into its armor, battering it but failing to penetrate.

It lifted a limb, surmounted by a sleek, blade-shaped weapon, as Ulgar threw himself into the bloody mud at the bottom of the trench, ripping a new magazine out of his webbing to reload. A weird, ripping sound was nearly drowned out by the crash of weapons fire between the Imperial troopers and the Charul thralls, but the wiry man behind the support beamer exploded in the middle, his upper body and his legs falling in mangled segments to the bottom of the trench. One hand was still locked in a death grip on the support beamer’s control, dragging the emitter toward the smoke-laden sky before it slid entirely off the parapet and into the trench itself.

Ulgar fought his own weapon and himself, the magazine clashing against the well as his hand shook, his eyes still fixed on the inhuman, many-limbed shape pushing the dead out of the way, its black lenses turning toward him.

By some miracle, he got the magazine into the weapon, as two more of his new comrades realized the threat on their flank and started shooting wildly at the trench junction. Still shaking, his knees feeling like they were about to give way, he blazed away at the oncoming Charul, battering it with about half the rounds in the magazine, the others blasting into the bodies or the dirt walls of the trench.

Stumbling, he lunged toward the fallen support beamer, reaching it as his pulse rifle locked open empty. That strange ripping sound reverberated through the trench once more, and what was left of the two closest troopers that had been shooting at the armored Charul fell to the bottom of the trench in a slither of gore.

The beamer was heavy and unwieldy, and Ulgar could feel the shaking getting worse, as the thing turned those baleful black dots of its eyes on him. It seemed to stare through him as it fired its weapon again, turning the burly man who had first come from the adjacent trench into a tottering slab of meat that slumped against the wall of the trench, blood pouring in a great pool from severed blood vessels.

It was toying with him, confident that his pulse rifle couldn’t get through its protection before it killed him. The scars and pits in its armor—suddenly painfully clear as he watched death come closer to him—told him that eventually he would have gotten through, but there was no time.

Wrenching the beamer over, cranking the power higher, he thought that maybe he saw surprise in the Charul’s movement just before he raked it with the beam, catching it just below the mandibles and carving through the thinner armor near its neck. Tissue and armor plating exploded, blowing the insectoid slaver’s head off. It tottered like the recently killed trooper for a second before it fell atop the pile of bodies, adding its own mass to the Torremadans’ barricade.

To be continued…