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Sample Chapter 1!

Chapter 1

Something must have caught Private Riddle’s eye from where he stood in the turret of the lead combat crawler. Either that, or Private Samson was extraordinarily observant, given how low to the ground he was in the driver’s compartment.

The eight-wheeled vehicle slowed, dust billowing out from beneath its stiffened weave tires, and Riddle pivoted
the combat laser toward the rise just off to the north. Some of the gray-green spatulate local growth clung to the rocky promontory, but like most of this stretch of empty country outside of Berinchi Konu, the hill was mostly barren. Still, Lieutenant Ulric Bannon had seen enough over the last two hundred days on Zhogalgan to know that the otuchans didn’t need a lot of vegetation to hide. The ground might look relatively flat, at least on this side of the Keptirilgin Mountains, but looks were deceiving.

The saurian bastards were very good at flattening themselves into the smallest cracks and crevices in the rocks and the dusty ground, waiting motionless for hours or days until their quarry walked into their sights.

Bannon was seated in the right-hand seat of his own crawler, two vehicles back from the lead, though the column was staggered so that he could see the movement of the point vehicle clearly through the armored vision slots in the front glacis. He touched the transmit control on his gauntlet. “Vehicle One. Status.”

Before Sergeant Munoz, in the vehicle commander’s seat of the lead, could answer, a rocket slammed out from the hill and struck the front glacis. The driver had already started to back up, fortunately. Otherwise, it would have hit the hull square and probably blown the vehicle to bits.

“Spread out, skirmish line.” Bannon was already prying himself out of his seat. If the phalanx had been in hardsuits, it would have been much harder to get out of the armored crawler. Corvanites didn’t like to sacrifice mobility for protection if they could help it, though. “All riflemen on the ground. Gunners provide covering fire. First Squad, set up a base of fire. Second and Third, on me. We’ll sweep out to the flank.” He switched channels with the tap of a key. “Operations Seven-Three, this is One Zero Two Three. Otuchan ambush at sector seven-three-five-eight. Requesting immediate support.”

He didn’t need to push the rest of the men out of the back of the infantry fighting vehicle. They’d drilled this hundreds of times, even before coming to Zhogalgan and facing more than a few otuchan ambushes out on the desolate badlands that surrounded the human settlements.

The Corvanite warriors spilled off the ramp, sprinting to either side of the vehicle before throwing themselves prone on the dusty ground, searching for targets. Bannon stayed on his feet for the moment, bracing his CR-196 rifle against the crawler’s hull, scanning the hill over the sights. The lead vehicle had backed up fast, nearly reaching his own Chariot 72. That had, apparently, taken them out of the rocket launcher’s kill zone, and now they were starting to see movement on the hillside.

Bannon touched the switch that increased the sights’ magnification and picked out one of the otuchans crawling underneath one of those spatulate bushes. The plants didn’t seem to have discrete leaves; their branches just flattened out into the closest analog to them. They didn’t provide enough concealment for the broad, bowlegged reptilian alien, either.

His finger tightened on the trigger, and the six-millimeter rifle bucked against his shoulder with a harsh crack. The otuchan jerked, but instead of retreating or taking cover, it pivoted its boxy rifle toward the Corvanite vehicles and fired. The muzzle blast kicked up dust in front of the otuchan fighter, and a heavy slug slammed into the armored flank of the Chariot 72, but then Bannon leaned into his own weapon and shot the otuchan four more times, as fast as he could reset the trigger.

Across the open ground, gunfire thundered and combat lasers hissed, that hiss turning into a roaring crackle as the directed energy blasted scorched trenches in the dirt and turned what little moisture was in the ground to steam. The answering fire was no less intense, though the otuchans never seemed to attempt to gain fire superiority. They hoarded every round, made every shot count as best they could. One of Third Squad took a bullet through the helmet as he sprinted for cover in a fold of the ground off the flank, near the foot of the hill, shattering his visor and blowing a spray of red out through the back of his neck. He tumbled limply to the dust even as the gunner in the nearest crawler turned his laser on the hill and set two more of the bushes on fire as he raked the otuchans’ position with millions of joules of concentrated energy.

Bannon was moving then, dashing toward a shallow draw that came down from the top of the hill, eroded by the wind and the occasional rains that swept the plateau at the onset of fall and spring. Another bullet snapped past his head as he moved, entirely too close for his comfort. The otuchans were good marksmen.

He refused to be cowed by the nearness of the shot, no matter how exposed he was for those few seconds as he crossed the open ground toward the ditch. He was a Corvanite, and the leader of a phalanx. Death comes. Let us go and meet it.

Chased by three more shots, he made it to the ditch, though he was pretty sure that he’d felt one tug at the top of his helmet as he’d run. The otuchans were not only good shots, they could get on target faster than most humans.

Throwing himself into cover, he found Sergeant Killian and most of Second Squad already forming into a wedge to push up the draw toward the otuchan positions. Bannon took a moment to assess the battlefield even as another otuchan bullet spat fragments off a rock at the lip of the draw.

First Squad was in cover behind the rough crescent that the vehicles had formed, the turret lasers continuing to rake the hillside with concentrated, high-intensity light, the pulses leaving traces of glowing superheated air behind them as they exploded rocks, plants, and reptilian flesh alike.

Sergeant Munoz was on his feet, identifiable by his short stature and massive, pugnacious build. Still behind the lead combat crawler, he was directing Private Usten, his squad’s autogunner, to shift fire when his torso exploded with a flash and a crack.

Bannon blinked. That had been a laser strike. Since when did the otuchans have
combat lasers?

In the middle of a firefight was not the time or the place to ponder the mystery. He had a fight to win.

“Corporal Summ! You have First Squad! Hold your position, get cover, and bring as much fire on that hilltop as you can!” He turned to where Sergeant Hern was bringing Third up alongside Second. “Sergeant Hern! Second and Third Squads, skirmishers right!”

The two squads of Corvanite warriors spread out, staggering their positions on the hillside, as they started to move up toward the aliens’ positions.

They had to move fast, and Bannon was soon out front, his rifle in his hands, his legs pumping as he drove himself up the hill. The otuchans were experts at using the
terrain to their advantage, as much as they were utterly savage in close combat. They were maneuvering even under fire, Bannon had no doubt about it.

Despite their speed, the Corvanites didn’t simply rush the top of the hill. They were warriors, not fools. Each man dashed from cover to cover, rushing a few yards before throwing himself down into a depression in the ground or behind a rock. The otuchans’ weapons were crude but accurate, and they could kill a man just as dead as any of the more advanced means of destruction in the galaxy.

As he neared the top, having drawn almost a full bound ahead of Second Squad, even while Private Beck tried hard to catch up—that was always a challenge in Lieutenant Bannon’s phalanx, one that most of the junior warriors eagerly took up—Bannon slowed, going down into more of a crouch as he worked his way up the remnant of the draw. They’d closed the distance, but now it became a much more dangerous game.

Movement stirred the bush that clung tenaciously to the rocky crest, and he snapped his CR-196 toward it, registering the flattened, green-gray scaled skull and the wide-set beady eyes behind a sleek, modern-looking rifle just before the muzzle spat flame.

Bannon threw himself flat before he even completely consciously registered what he was looking at. The bullet passed by his head so close that he actually felt it go by, the snap almost painful in its proximity despite his helmet’s built-in hearing protection. He hit hard, bruising his shoulder on a rock as he landed, and quickly rolled to his side, blasting three shots at the prone otuchan as fast as he could, just to try to get the alien’s head down.

Not that the otuchans had shown themselves particularly susceptible to suppressive fire over the last couple hundred days the Corvanites had been “peacekeeping” on Zhogalgan. They could be nearly as insensible to the threat of death as the Corvanites themselves.

He must have hit something, because his enhanced hearing picked up a rattling hiss of pain. He surged to his feet again, throwing himself forward, his rifle already tracking toward the otuchan’s hiding place. He raked the otuchan with half a dozen shots as the alien scrabbled backward, already leaving a streak of dark fluid on the rocks as it retreated.

More of the Corvanite assaulters were reaching the crest of the hill, and more gunfire stuttered along the ridgeline. Beck took a round through the throat and fell, but Killian avenged him, blowing out the otuchan’s eye where it had started to move from its cover. Nguyen moved up with Second Squad’s autogun, sweeping the hilltop with six-millimeter fire as he advanced, leaning into the gun, the muzzle spitting flame that seemed brighter than normal in the wan light of Zhogalgan’s distant sun.

Bannon pressed forward, his weapon held
high and ready, searching for targets. He dashed to the finger of rock where the otuchan he’d shot was shuddering out the last of its life, and dropped to a knee next to the saurian body after kicking its lightweight rifle away from a grasping claw.

Below, he could see more of the otuchans’ ambush position. They’d dug in ahead of time, and one of their angular, five-wheeled crawlers was parked in another draw, shielded from the Corvanite vehicles by a shoulder of the rocky hill. Two more of their boxy rocket launchers were set in along that same shoulder, partially dug in, protruding above the rocks just enough to have a shot at the column as it went by. If the gunner of the lead Chariot hadn’t spotted something, they might have lost their first two vehicles in the opening moments of the ambush.

Bannon dumped the rest of his magazine at the nearest rocket launcher. The otuchan behind it, a smaller reptilian than the one now lying still and dead within an arm’s length of him, was trying to pivot the launcher toward the top of the hill, realizing that they were being overrun. Bannon’s first shots hit the launcher itself, but his next shots tracked toward the otuchan’s flat skull behind it, one of them striking home just before Hunt’s first thirty-seven-millimeter grenade slammed into the rock just above the otuchan’s head. The projectile detonated with a flash, a puff of black smoke, and a heavy thud that was drowned out a moment later as the launcher’s magazine blew off, four warheads ripping the launcher and three nearby otuchans to pieces with a rippling, overlapping fireball.

The resulting black smoke and billowing dust momentarily obscured the second launcher—along with half the hillside—but the otuchans didn’t give Bannon or his men the opening that he was looking for. The crawler at the base of the hill pivoted its own boxy launcher and ripple-fired all nine rockets at the hilltop.

Bannon felt himself violently yanked to the ground behind the rock a moment before the hilltop and everything else seemed to disappear in a thunderous crash of sound, savage shock waves slamming him against the rocks as grit and bigger fragments swept over them, momentarily blacking out the sun.

Even with the helmet’s ear protection, Bannon found that he couldn’t hear. His head ached from the shock, and he groggily forced himself to his feet. He was pretty sure he’d blacked out.

Looking down, he saw that it was Sergeant Killian who had forced him down behind the rock. For a moment, he thought his Second Squad leader was dead, but then Killian rolled over onto his back with a groan, spitting gray dust as he moved.

Dragging himself back to the rock, Bannon retrieved his rifle. He was starting to be able to hear again. Gunfire still crackled and thundered through the smoke and the dust. The fight wasn’t over.

Another round smacked chips of rock into his face. The otuchans weren’t being quite as precise with their fire as they usually were.

Bannon reached up and touched the control for his helmet’s enhanced vision. The quad receptors above his visor turned on, and soon a highlighted version of the view before him was projected onto the inside of his visor. It still couldn’t make out that much, thanks to all the dust, but he could see several dead otuchans as well as a couple more of his Corvanites down, one of them in multiple pieces, his blood spilling out onto the dusty ground. The otuchans that were still alive were falling back toward the crawler.

Bannon knew he didn’t have to worry about more rocket fire from the crawler just yet, so he got up and started forward, already drawing a bead on the nearest otuchan. The aliens were falling back in good order, moving from cover to cover, searching for targets from behind their rifles as they retreated toward the canyons and badlands beyond. The hilltop where the Corvanites were positioned was so open—any cover or concealment that might once have been there had been swept away by the rocket barrage—that the smoke and the dust were the only advantages Third Phalanx had.

He still pushed on, dashing across the open hillside before throwing himself flat a few yards on and looking for more targets. He wasn’t going to let any more of these savages get away than he could help. He’d seen what they’d done across a dozen human settlements over the last half a year. Besides, they’d killed his men.

Three shots dropped another otuchan that had paused without quite enough cover to search the cloud for targets. The reptilian let its rifle fall as it grabbed for its throat, then staggered and fell onto its snout.

A growing, snarling howl reached Bannon’s ears, followed by a comms transmission a moment later. “One Zero Two Three, this is Goshawk Six. Call targets.”

Bannon’s voice was a harsh rasp as he dropped into a warhead crater and keyed his comms. “Primary target: single five-wheel crawler at the western base of the hill, approximately seven hundred yards from hilltop. Be advised, I do not currently have line of sight.”

“Good copy, Three.” Unlike a drop shuttle pilot, the gunship pilot’s voice was tight with anticipation. The Griffon pilots were warriors, and they were as eager to join a fight as the hardest ground-pounder.

Two of the chisel-nosed attack craft roared past overhead, low enough that their ducted fans blew the pall of dust and smoke into tattered whorls, exposing the top of the hill and the ragged line of Corvanite warriors still recovering from the impacts of the rockets. The smoke and dust rolled down toward the otuchans, shielding the Corvanites for a few more moments, then became a moot point as the two Griffon 80 gunships opened fire.

The lead ship strafed the crawler first, leading with the nose-mounted laser and the twin twenty-six-millimeter chain guns. Collimated light and heavy metal tore into the rough-looking vehicle, turning it into the pile of scrap it already resembled with only a couple of seconds of fiery, kinetic violence.

Then the lead Griffon was pulling away, banking to the south, while the follow gunship swooped in like the bird of prey it was named for. It slowed at the last moment, catching its momentum with its roaring fans and sliding to bring its weapons to bear along a line parallel with the Corvanite ground-pounders’ ragged line.

With a roaring crackle, the second ship raked the side of the hill just above where the wreckage of the crawler burned, turning half a dozen more otuchan raiders to bloody shreds and stinking mist in an eyeblink, the laser turning the ground molten while the heavy twenty-six-millimeter slugs blew deep pits in dirt and rock alike, sending black showers of debris skyward with every impact. The thunder was nearly as deafening as the rocket impacts had been.

Engines rumbled, and rock and scree crunched under synthetic weave tires as the combat crawlers came around the side of the hill, lasers picking off a few more retreating otuchans with harsh hiss-snaps.

Bannon stood, though he kept his CR-196 ready. He’d seen the otuchans hide in place under fire before. This looked like a clean sweep, though.

When he glanced below, he saw that there were more crawlers than just his phalanx’s. It looked like the rest of the 102nd Company had arrived.

Captain Haarot would want a report. It would have to wait until the ambush site was secure.

“Skirmishers right. On me.” Keeping his rifle
in his shoulder, he started down the hill, tracking his muzzle toward any piece of cover that might conceal one of their adversaries. Spreading out, still somewhat ragged due to the losses taken and the rough terrain, the rest of Third Phalanx followed.

***

Captain Haarot still had his helmet on. His visor hid his eyes, but the harsh set of his mouth, perpetually twisted into a sneer by the scar that slashed across his cheek, was unchanging. “Report, Lieutenant.” He didn’t turn toward Bannon as he continued to observe the final cleanup of the battlefield.

Bannon, his voice still hoarse, his fatigues and gear—and his face—still covered with a fine layer of gray dust, gave a concise account of the ambush and its response. When he mentioned the lasers, Haarot turned toward him, and while the captain’s visor was still darkened and nearly opaque from the outside, Bannon could feel the man’s eyes on him.

“The otuchans have not utilized lasers before this.”

“No, sir, they have not.” Bannon hefted the lightweight but boxy rifle that he’d taken from the claws of one of the dead otuchans on the hilltop. “They haven’t been using these, either.”

Haarot took the weapon and turned it over in his hands. “I don’t recognize the make.”

“I don’t either, sir. But it’s a human design, using quite a lot of synthetic, modified for otuchan claws.” Bannon had examined it carefully before bringing it down for the captain’s inspection. Captain Haarot considered guesswork and speculation to be a waste of his time. “The stampings identify the company as Wathelet. I’ve never heard of them. No otuchan made that weapon, though.”

Haarot shook his head in agreement. The otuchans, like most of their kind off their homeworlds, had been dropped on Zhogalgan with only the most basic tools and supplies. Their tech was all built from the ground up, and it looked like it. The otuchan rifles they’d captured prior to now had been basic, stamped-metal blowback designs, with all the aesthetics of a chunk of structural steel. This was different. Add in the combat lasers…

The captain handed the rifle back. “Collect all the examples you can. We’re not supplying them, and the local human colonists, even if they could get their hands on weapons like these, wouldn’t either. Bring them to your objective. Our ‘associates’ are on their way as we speak, and may have already reached the site of the incident.”

“You want me to confront them with this?” Bannon doubted that would go well. There were nearly two corps of Zolarian troops on Zhogalgan. They and the Corvanites were both ostensibly there to keep the fragile—some would say nonexistent—peace between the Kazakh human colonists and the otuchans. But the discovery of these weapons brought the Zolarians’ true intent into question. After all, they hadn’t been shy about stomping on the humans who had taken the fight to the otuchans so far, and it had been no secret that they’d resented the Corvanite deployment ever since planetfall.

“For whatever good it will do, yes.” Haarot had returned his gaze to the final sweep of the battlefield. “We’re here to press them, Lieutenant, so press them we will. They have no business on this planet, and we must confront them with that fact at every turn.” He spared one more glance at Bannon. “Load your wounded into the casevac crawler. We’ll take the dead back with us. Do you have enough men remaining to complete your mission?”

Bannon looked back over his shoulder, calculating in his head. Of his forty-four-man phalanx, he’d lost five men killed outright. Half a squad, though the losses were distributed mostly between Second and Third. And though he had plenty of injured, most of those were walking wounded who wouldn’t be left behind for anything, regardless of the captain’s orders.

“Yes, sir.”

“Good.” The captain was deeply respected by his men, with a history of brutal battles that read like some entire units’ honor roll. Yet he was also quietly resented, in no small part because he expected every man under his command to be every bit as driven, remorseless, and emotionlessly calculating as he was. “The Relentless just arrived in orbit,” he continued. “You’ll get combat replacements within a few days. Proceed in the meantime. Death comes, Lieutenant.”

“Let us go and meet it.” Bannon wouldn’t salute. They were in the field. Corvanites didn’t salute except under very strict circumstances.

Haarot nodded his acknowledgment, and Bannon turned on his heel, stalking back toward his crawler with the captured rifle in his fist.

They still had a long way to go.