Chapter 8

DAY 16 – HADES – RUZA

The group of men moved through the narrow tunnel, the sound of their boots and heavy breathing punctuating the silence, their rigs and clothing rustling. These passages had been excavated with humans in mind, and Ruza found that he had to duck low in some places to avoid hitting his head. It was cramped – claustrophobic, but his time serving on carriers had somewhat acclimated him to being confined. At least the mines were large enough for heavy machinery and cargo to pass unhindered. He was walking at the head of the pack, as his long rifle with its sharp bayonet had to be held at a dangerous angle to fit through the tight bends.

When they reached their destination, he moved aside to let Reed pass, the human climbing a short ladder that led to a hatch on the tunnel ceiling. He pushed it open, poking his head out for a moment, then gave the all-clear. Ruza scaled the gap in a single leap, emerging into an old storeroom. It was a little like the warehouse, but far smaller, the structure filled with dusty old shelves that were mostly empty. There wasn’t room enough for all of the men, so they began to file outside, finding themselves in a narrow street between the prefabs. The hypergiant sun had set, plunging the colony into darkness, the glow from Hades’ icy moon overpowering the twinkling stars.

A few of the miners were using PDF helmets or those captured from fallen operatives, able to make use of their night vision modes, but Ruza had no need of such things. He saw almost as well at night as he did in the day with his feline eyes, his pupils dilating into dark circles to capture more light.

The danger of friendly fire was significant under such conditions, so the men were all wearing armbands made from strips of high-vis vest – another of Reed’s ideas. They caught the moonlight, making them shine, but it was probably the safer option.

“This way,” Reed said, leading the procession of fifty men between the raised prefabs. They weren’t more than a hundred meters from the garrison, its tall wall rising above the surrounding buildings, its top lined with razor wire.

Ruza’s ears twitched, picking up the distant report of gunfire carrying from somewhere outside the colony. Gradually, it grew more intense, until it became the unmistakable sound of a gunfight. The snipers were in position, and they were firing on the ASAT sites. It didn’t take long before he heard the growl of an engine, lifting his head to see a pair of dropships pass over his head. Another rose up from behind the wall of the garrison, its engines painting its surroundings blue as they flared, sending it swooping away over the city.

“I think it’s working!” Omar hissed as he crouched beside Ruza. He was wearing PDF body armor and a helmet, identifiable as a friendly by his bright armband. “The dropships are all moving away!”

“I hear activity inside the garrison,” Ruza replied, his sensitive ears swiveling. “Movement – raised voices.”

The minutes ticked by, Ruza’s heart beating ever faster. They couldn’t move until they were signaled by the snipers at the ASAT sites. If they didn’t wait until the dropships had landed, the craft could turn straight around and come back in a far shorter amount of time.

“It’s been fifteen minutes!” Reed grumbled. “Shouldn’t the signal have come in by now?”

“Give it time,” Omar replied. “If we don’t get the signal in another ten, we withdraw.”

It took another couple of minutes, but Omar finally heard from Astrid over the radio, and he relayed her message to the team.

“Okay, we have the green light,” he began. “Astrid says that multiple dropships have landed to reinforce the ASAT bases. The snipers have eyes on dozens of Borgs and three of those giant suits.”

“That’s as good as it’s gonna get,” Reed said. He gestured for some of the men to move ahead, and two of them knelt at the base of the wall, pulling long blasting charges from their packs. They began to place them against the barrier, one of the miners wiring them to a spool of cable, retreating back to the group when the job was done.

The miners took up position with their rifles to cover the street as they had been trained, Reed pulling a detonator from his chest rig. The man with the spool handed it over, and Reed sliced through the wire with his knife, winding it around the electrical contacts.

“We’re wired,” he whispered. “Everyone at a safe distance? If you’re not wearing a helmet, cover your ears...”

He hit the switch, and there was a blast that shook the ground and echoed across the city, the carbcrete wall crumbling inward. Great chunks of material were sent crashing to the ground, a flood of dust rushing between the outriggers of the prefabs and washing over the team like a wave.

“Move, move!” Reed ordered as he rose to his feet and shouldered his rifle. “Ruza – keep Omar safe. We can’t get inside without him. Clock is ticking, people.”

The group crossed the distance between the breach in the wall and the prefabs, the dust still billowing, marching through the rubble that littered the ground. Some of the men stacked up beside the jagged hole, shooting from cover – laying down the suppressive fire that would allow the rest to make it through.

They began to fan out as they made it through the obscuring dust, the miners separating into fireteams of six. They had been trained with UNN tactics, and some had PDF experience, but these were not the hardened Marines that Ruza had served alongside in the Navy. Many were green, as the humans used to say, and this was their first encounter with the enemy. Some had little more than a week or two of training. Still, Reed had selected his best, and they were all they had.

As he cleared the swirling smoke, Ruza emerged into the courtyard. Just like the city outside, many of the structures were made up of prefabs, but there were several carbcrete buildings where munitions were stored. Everything was lit by bright spotlights, casting the garrison in a pale glow, the shadows deep and dark. He remembered the layout from the map that Omar had shown during the briefing, and he quickly picked out the shelter rising above the dusty ground.

The activity must have roused many of the PDF from their sleep, and they had been outside their barracks when the explosives had detonated. Some of those who had been nearer the wall were lying on the ground amidst the wreckage. Others might have been felled by gunfire – it was impossible to say at a glance.

Those who remained were scrambling for cover as molten slugs streaked across the compound, darting behind buildings and throwing themselves under the raised prefabs in a state of panic. Some were already armed – probably on alert after the alarm had been raised by the sniper attacks – sending some sporadic return fire towards the breach. The attackers had to take full advantage of the confusion and surprise before the enemy rallied and leveraged their superior numbers.

In the moments that it had taken Ruza to assess the situation, he felt his heart slow, his boiling blood cooling, and his hands steadying as he raised his rifle. This fight was not about revenge or honor – it was cold and clinical, no different from treating a wound. If he must kill, he would do it with efficiency and detachment. Letting himself fall back into that all too familiar state of mind, he sighted a PDF trooper who was firing on the breach from the cover of a prefab.

Ruza pulled the trigger, feeling his rifle lurch into his shoulder, the round punching through the corner of the building. The metal provided little resistance, the slug passing through and forming a molten hole, the target behind it crumpling.

He strode forward, finding his next target, a trooper who was rushing across the compound knocked off his feet by a shot to center mass. Another was lifted off the ground as a slug hit his chest, the hypervelocity projectile shattering his ceramic chest armor and blowing a fist-sized hole in his torso, blood and bone fragments spraying.

More resistance fighters were moving up, taking refuge wherever they could, covering one another with overlapping fields of fire as they dashed to safety. The noise was constant and overwhelming, each crack echoing within the walls, the sound of shouted orders mingling with yells of alarm and cries of pain.

The otherwise open courtyard was broken up by barriers made from large, square sandbags that formed walls intended to lessen the effects of explosives that landed inside the compound. They were tall enough that not even Ruza could see over them, and he made for the closest wall, putting his shoulder to it. Omar and a handful of other fighters followed, more pouring in through the breach behind them. Ruza could see Reed taking up position opposite him, leaning out from behind the sandbags to loose off a few shots, his barrel glowing red beneath its shroud.

“We have to reach the shelter!” Omar said, his helmet speakers carrying above the gunfire. “Every minute we let them pin us down is another minute the Borgs have to make it back here!”

“We shall flank around these barriers,” Ruza replied. “Keep close, and watch your fire! These rounds will punch straight through the prefabs as though they were not there!”

They skirted around the wall of sandbags, Ruza leaning out of the nearest opening, spotting two PDF troopers who were taking cover on the other side. He brought them down with a few shots, moving past their limp bodies, his eyes scanning the barriers and prefabs for more targets. His heart skipped a beat as he saw what looked like a trooper emerge from behind a building ahead of him, but his eye caught the glimmer from their armband. Perhaps Reed had been right after all.

He watched as a fighter moved around one of the prefabs that served as a barracks, mounting the metal steps and hitting the door panel. The man tossed a grenade inside once the gap was wide enough, then leapt back down the short flight of stairs, an explosion sending more dust and debris billowing out of the opening. A stumbling PDF trooper emerged, his body badly burned and his tattered clothes hanging off him, his arms outstretched as he fumbled blindly. One of the fighters put him down with two shots to the chest, sending him slumping over the guard rail before tumbling down the steps.

Some of the PDF had rallied behind the landing pad, which was elevated a foot off the ground, providing some cover for the shooters. They concentrated their fire, Ruza watching as the slugs caught a fireteam that was out in the open. Three of their number were knocked to the ground by the force of the impacts, stray rounds splashing in the dirt all around them. One of the fighters turned and tried to drag an injured comrade to safety, gripping a strap on his chest rig, but Ruza could only watch as his head was turned to a red smear by a well-placed shot.

“Focus fire on the landing pad!” Ruza bellowed, moving along the wall of a prefab and turning his sights on the troopers. Omar and the five miners who were following him did as he ordered, leaning out around the corner of the building or dropping to their bellies to fire beneath it.

Ruza decapitated one of the shooters with his first shot, the helmet doing little to stave off the slug, two more dropping out of view as his squad peppered them with rounds. Those who were uninjured were forced into cover all the same, allowing a closer fireteam to move on them, circling around the landing pad and dumping their magazines into the cowering troopers.

The landing pad was close to the center of the compound, and it appeared that the fighters had taken roughly half of it, pushing the defenders to the opposite side of the courtyard. There was so much chaos, the continuous gunfire coming from every direction, echoing off the walls such that Ruza could scarcely pinpoint the direction of the shooters. All he could do was keep moving and keep his wards safe. The shelter was in sight – surrounded by a few more carbcrete buildings that were likely armories. They were clustered behind the landing pad relative to him, and he saw that some of the troopers had taken up position there, the reinforced structures providing far surer cover than the flimsy prefabs.

As Ruza led his team past another wall of sandbags, he came face to face with a trio of troopers who were taking refuge behind it. They were without their helmets, likely having only recently been roused from their sleep, XMRs clutched in their hands.

He had no time to think – he could only react, the first human’s wide eyes peering up at the towering Rask as Ruza lunged at him. Using his strength and weight as a weapon, Ruza barreled into the nearest man, driving his bayonet through the human’s stomach beneath his chest piece. The blade cut through his uniform and punched into his gut, the XMR falling from the trooper’s hands as he reached down to grip the heat shroud reflexively. Ruza pulled the trigger, putting half a dozen rounds through the skewered human, the slugs passing through his body and hitting the men standing behind him.

One of them took a tumbling round to the shoulder, the energy that it conveyed severing his arm, fragments of bone from his impaled comrade peppering him like shrapnel from a grenade. He was thrown to the ground, the man behind him suffering a similar fate as the projectiles tore through him, flesh and muscle providing no more resistance than the thin metal of the buildings did.

Ruza drove his first victim to the ground, then yanked the bayonet free, the blade and the first inch of the shroud soaked with dark blood. Some of it had seeped through the ventilation holes, dripping onto the burning magnetic coils beneath and boiling, the scent of it making the Rask’s feline nose wrinkle.

The armless man was not yet dead, so Ruza put one more round into his chest, slamming in a fresh magazine as the human went limp.

“God damn,” one of his companions muttered, staring at the ruined bodies as he stepped around them.

They continued on, nearing the far wall of the compound where the remaining PDF were staging their final stand. It seemed that their numbers had been greatly diminished in the first minutes of the attack, but they were rallying now – putting up more resistance.

His rifle loaded, Ruza followed his team between two prefabs, and they found themselves in the narrow alley between them. As the lead fighter reached its end, a dark figure darted into view, Ruza’s stomach twisting into a knot.

Before Ruza could call out a warning, the figure gripped the barrel of the lead miner’s XMR, yanking it from his hands. The swift tug must have broken some fingers, the miner letting out a yell of pain and surprise, but he was quickly silenced by the crack of a sidearm. As his body slumped to the ground, Ruza saw the unmistakable profile of a SWAR operative, the dark polymer of their skeletal limbs matching their black body armor. On their helmet was a design that Ruza didn’t recognize – some beast of human mythology, like a snarling reptile with a forked tongue and sharp teeth.