Chapter 5: Charlie

They arrived at Charlie as the sun was setting. A twelve-foot wall ringed the outpost, the comms center and guard towers rising above them. They had put up Hesco bastions around the base of the wall to protect it from explosives, mesh and fabric containers that could be filled with dirt and gravel to act as sandbags. They did a pretty good job of stopping projectile weapons and shrapnel. The group approached the fortified entrance, concrete barriers shielding the two guards who were on duty, and they waved them through the open door. It was a forward operating base, with the Thermopylae acting as the main operating base for all of the outposts on the planet’s surface, supplying and reinforcing them as necessary. For the moment at least, the carrier was untouchable, but they still needed boots on the ground if they were going to drive the Bugs off Jarilo.

Walker stepped through into the courtyard, his boots clanking on the metal grates that served as a floor and would stop the enemy from tunneling under their defenses. There were a series of prefab structures that had been dropped from cargo landers to serve as field hospitals, armories and the like, with the barracks and mess hall being comprised mostly of rigid tents. There was a guard tower on each of the four corners of the walls and raised platforms that would allow the soldiers inside to fire over it in the event that the Bugs attacked them. There were more bastions spaced at intervals between the buildings, separating them and diminishing the effects of any mortars or explosives that might make it over the wall.

The first line of defense against incoming mortars was the C-RAM system, an automatic turret with an onboard radar that could be deployed as a single contained unit, dropped into the middle of the compound. The gun itself was mounted atop a beige cube that contained all of its sensors and computers, about three by three meters, the turret on top able to rotate and pivot in order to track incoming projectiles. Once it detected a threat, it would use its gatling gun to fire a stream of twenty-millimeter, high explosive rounds that would hopefully destroy the target before it did any damage.

There were two landing pads, one of which was occupied by a dropship that was currently unloading its cargo of nondescript crates, and all around them were UNN personnel going about their business.

“Go get yourselves a hot meal and a bunk,” Andrews said, “I’ll report to Fleetcom and tell them about the flying Bug.”

“I’m the ranking officer, I should file the report,” Walker said. Andrews shook his head.

“All due respect Sergeant, you look like you’re ready to keel over. You’re no good to anyone if you’re exhausted.”

“He’s right,” Kaz added, taking him by the upper arm and steering him towards the mess hall. “Let’s get some food in us.”

Walker conceded, letting Kaz lead him over to one of the tents. She couldn’t have know the layout of the base, as these structures had been erected only after they had set off on their mission, but she no doubt smelled the food. They stepped through the door, the interior fairly spacious with a ceiling high enough that Kaz didn’t need to crouch, green fabric suspended on a metal frame making up the roof and walls. There were two rows of tables along the length of the mess hall, some of them occupied by soldiers, and a counter at the far end where a couple of cooks were serving food. They collected metal trays and waited in a short line, one of the cooks spooning bean soup into one of the recesses along with mashed potatoes and gravy, a couple of dinner rolls and what might have been turkey or chicken. To his surprise, Kaz didn’t get very much more than he did. The fleet must be rationing until they could secure a supply line back to UNN space.

They shrugged off their packs and took a seat at one of the tables, the benches reinforced to handle the weight of a Borealan or a Krell, but not especially comfortable. The exhausted scouts ate in silence, too ravenous to waste valuable chewing time on conversation. Hunger was a spice that could make even the most basic meal taste like gourmet food, and so they didn’t complain about its bland taste. The bustle and chatter around them was comforting. As much as Walker liked being out in the wild, the safety of the walls was a welcome reprieve after their unnerving run-in with the winged Bug. He was looking forward to a soft bunk, although at this point he could have slept like an angel on a bed of rocks.

Their meal was interrupted by a siren, the Marines around them dropping their cutlery and jumping to their feet, Walker pausing with a spoonful of mashed potato an inch from his mouth. He looked to Kaz, shaking his head in exasperation, then dropped it unceremoniously into his soup.

“No rest for the wicked,” he grumbled.

They joined the soldiers as they flooded out of the tent, leaving their packs behind but keeping their weapons handy, what must have been a hundred Marines along with a couple of dozen Krell and Borealans filling the courtyard. The troops manning the guard towers were scanning the terrain beyond the walls with searchlights. Night had fallen, and all that illuminated the base were floodlights mounted on the interior walls and the glow from the buildings. The entrance that they had come in through was now sealed tight with a reinforced door that looked as if it could have withstood a damned nuke.

The noise of the siren and the speculation of the soldiers around them fell silent as Colonel Fischer stood on a crate to get their attention, waving for them to be quiet. The base commander wore UNN-blue fatigues and sported a bushy mustache that was greying with age, his breast adorned with his rank and insignia.

“Two of the sensors in the valley have been tripped,” he announced, with a subtle German accent that betrayed his country of origin. “The delay between the sensors being disturbed and the timing indicates that the enemy is moving towards the base at a rapid pace. We expect them to arrive within two hours.”

“Two hours?” Walker whispered to Kaz. “It took us the better part of a day to march back here through that terrain.”

She shrugged, turning her attention back to the Colonel.

“I want men on the walls,” he ordered, his hands clasped behind his back. “There are flashlight attachments for your XMRs in the armory for those who don’t have one already, don’t let them use the darkness to their advantage. With any luck, you’ll blind them too. You’ve all fought Bugs before, you don’t need me to tell you how to do your jobs. One more thing. We’ve had reports from one of our scout teams that Betelgeusian units capable of flight have been sighted, and while we’ve not been able to verify these claims, you should make no assumptions. Keep an eye on the sky, don’t let them take you by surprise. Dismissed.”

The crowd of soldiers fanned out, some climbing ladders and taking up their positions on the raised platforms that let them fire over the wall, others jogging off to the armory to retrieve their weapons and gear. It was easy to see the aliens, standing head and shoulders above their human counterparts. The Borealans leaped up onto the platforms with their long rifles, clearing the distance easily on their powerful legs, their bodies adapted to far higher gravity than that of Jarilo. The Krell were hefting their enormous shields, half a dozen of them taking up positions behind the sealed door. If the Bugs managed to breach it, then they would face an impenetrable wall of giant lizards armed with light machine guns.

Walker found himself wondering where the other scout teams were, and if any of them had made it back yet. If the encroaching Bug army came across them in the forest, then they’d have no chance of escaping.

He and Kaz were already locked and loaded, and so they took up positions on the forward wall, Walker trying to blink away his fatigue as he closed his visor and checked his rifle. In the field Kaz worked as his spotter, but there would be no carefully calculated shots taken at extreme range during a siege, and so she joined the line beside him. She rested her long rifle on the wall, dropping to her knees due to her exaggerated height, as standing upright would make the eight-foot Borealan an easy target. The searchlights from the guard towers played across the treeline, white circles sliding slowly across the terrain, perhaps fifty feet of blasted soil between the walls and the forest left over from the carrier’s bombardment. It reminded Walker of the Somme, an ancient battle fought by now defunct empires that had left a landscape of ruined trees and cratered earth in its wake.

The soldiers to either side of them settled in, clad in black armor that contrasted with the scout’s forest camouflage. Their XMRs were painted tactical black, while those of Walker and Kaz were colored to match their clothing. Now the wait would begin.

Recordings of battles and the outlandish movies that were shown to boost morale and improve public relations told of heroic engagements, Marines striding through enemy fire like actions stars, designed to capture the imagination and the attention of the audience. What you didn’t see in the movies was the waiting, hours and hours of sitting around, twiddling your thumbs as you waited for an attack that could come at any moment. You could never relax, never let your guard down, and it could take days of tension and anxiety before it all came to a head in a short and brutal engagement that might only last minutes.

“Should have gotten a coffee when I had the chance,” Walker grumbled, the man beside him chuckling beneath his protective visor.

“I wouldn’t be so disappointed sir, the coffee here tastes like ass.”

“Figures, that’s how it was on Kruger too. The instant coffee packets that came with the MREs tasted better than the gritty shit they gave us, so we’d save them. I tell you, the guys who didn’t like coffee were drowning in junk food and cigarettes.”

“There’s a battleship in orbit that can destroy planets,” the faceless Marine mused, “but the Navy can’t design an espresso machine that makes a decent cup of joe.”

“Another glorious day in the Corps,” Walker replied sarcastically.

Walker wasn’t sure how much time had passed, the minutes felt like hours, and his tired eyes played tricks on him to form shadows that lurked between the giant trees. His leg was starting to cramp, he had been standing in the same position for too long, and he needed a piss. He shook his head violently, slapping his cheek with a gloved hand, trying to keep himself awake. He needed to be alert, but the trials and tribulations of the last couple of days had drained him, he felt as if he was about to collapse. He wouldn’t of course, he had trained for this, and he remembered an engagement on Kruger III that had seen him go for seventy-two hours without rest. They had pills in the survival kits that could keep you operating for long periods of time without sleep or food, but the Marines were heavily discouraged from taking them unless they were in a life or death situation. You’d have to weigh if staying active was worth destroying your kidneys, and the UNN preferred that you didn’t get transplants on their dime if they could avoid it.

Kaz yawned widely, exposing her sharp teeth, shifting position and trying to get comfortable. Crouching for that long must be playing merry hell with her legs. The boredom was palpable, many of these Marines would have much preferred to go out into the forest and hunt down the enemy, but the most satisfying solution was rarely the wisest.

“Incoming!”

A Borealan voice rang out through the compound, the alien’s finely tuned senses alerting him to something that the humans had not yet noticed. Along the line, many of the personnel pulled down their visors. The Borealans had them too, though they preferred not to use them unless necessary, and the Krell had hoods on their armored ponchos that they could pull over their elongated heads to protect them from environmental hazards. Some Bug fleets had been known to employ chemical weapons when plasma proved ineffective, and so all UNN ground troops were equipped with rebreathers of some kind.

You could have cut the anxiety in the air with a knife, Walker glancing to his right to watch Kaz affix her helmet and drop the full-faced visor. There were two slots for her round ears that let them protrude from the top, with caps that could be fastened to create a seal in a vacuum.

The whir of the C-RAM echoed through the compound, the turret spinning on its axis to track an unseen projectile, and then it began to fire. The barrel spun, spitting out so many tracer rounds that it looked like someone was drawing lines in the dark sky with a celestial pencil, so fast that it sounded more like an angry insect than a cannon.

Walker watched as it found its target, the trail of orange points impacting a mortar shell and causing it to explode in mid-air with a bright flash. The rest of the rounds continued on over the horizon, the line slowly fading. It was far from done, however. Almost as soon as it had destroyed its first target, the computer locked onto a second, another line of orange dots streaming up into the sky. This was a full on mortar attack, and Walker worried that it might not be up to the task of stopping them all.

His fears were confirmed when he heard a whistling sound coming from somewhere above them, and something exploded far behind them with a force that shook his teeth. He turned to glance back, seeing a cloud of dust and smoke rising from the trees beyond the far wall of the base. A mortar round had gotten past the C-RAM, the first shot had gone wide, but they had probably been range finding. They would no doubt try to soften the defenses before starting their main assault.

The automatic turret was going wild, twisting this way and that as it frantically tried to defend the base, loosing a short burst of gunfire and then switching targets again. The sky was a patchwork of tracer rounds, like the scribbles of a toddler with a crayon, slowly fading from view as they arced through the air. They must be throwing a lot of shells at the base if the C-RAM was having so much trouble. Just how many mortar teams were out there?

After a few moments, there was another high pitched whistle, this shell exploding violently inside the base towards the rear. It landed by one of the many Hesco bastion walls that had been erected to minimize damage in just such a scenario, much of the debris and shrapnel embedding itself in the tightly packed dirt.

Two more whistles pierced the night, shortly followed by two more explosions, one landing just beyond the forward wall. Walker felt the shock wave, the line of soldiers that manned the defenses ducking behind the fortifications in alarm and covering their heads as red-hot fragments of metal peppered the wall below, soil that had been thrown up by the blast raining down on them from above. The second scored another hit, this time landing right on top of the mess hall tent, tearing it to shreds and throwing shrapnel about the compound. The bastions didn’t stop all of it, and Walker heard somebody cry out as they were tagged by debris.

He turned his attention forward, but the smoke from the mortar rounds was already forming an obscuring cloud, making it hard to see. He cursed and tapped at the side of his helmet, cycling through his visor’s view modes until he reached infrared. It let him see through the smoke to an extent, and he watched the cooling crater where the round had landed below, hot metal scattered about to look like flecks of red paint through his thermal filter.

They wouldn’t keep this up for long, they had to know that mortars weren’t much use against fortified positions and their ammunition would be limited to what they could carry with them through this rough terrain.

There was another whistle, but no explosion this time. Instead, an ominous canister embedded itself in the soil towards the far end of the courtyard with a dull thud. Noxious, yellow-green gas began to pour from it, quickly forming an expanding cloud. It was probably phosgene. It was colorless under normal circumstances, but the Bugs used chlorine to help spread the denser and more lethal compound. It was no danger to anybody wearing a suit and using a rebreather, as it reacted with the mucous membranes to cause irritation and suffocation, but it was commonly employed as an area denial weapon to force the enemy to abandon their cover. The whole damned base would be contaminated, they would have to thoroughly clean everything and everyone that had come into contact with the substance. What a pain in the ass...

Another canister landed wide, the yellow cloud wafting between the trees to his left.

“Airstrike, get down!” Walker heard someone shout. He ducked below the lip of the wall and covered his head, bracing himself against the metal. No way had they dispatched fighter-bombers already, the Thermopylae must be gearing up for a precision strike with her railgun batteries. He hoped to God that whoever had called in the coordinates knew what they were doing.

There was a flash of light that lit up the sky like a sun, fading slowly. Walker violently pulled down the Marine beside him who had foolishly raised his head to peek over the wall. Almost immediately a blast wave hit them, the wall shaking in its foundations, soon followed by a hail of debris that hammered them so hard that it rang against the metal like machine gun fire.

“Stay down!” he shouted over the din, the Marine scrambling to get lower. Those railguns hit with the force of a small meteorite, releasing the equivalent of several tons of TNT in kinetic energy. That strike had been dangerously close.

He waited, the Marine looking to him in confusion, and then there was another rain of dirt and small rocks that had been thrown up into the atmosphere from the force of the blast. They came down hard, showering the base, dinging off helmets and clattering on the roofs of the prefab buildings.

Walker let the Marine up, joining him as he glanced over the wall, a pillar of smoke rising from the forest a few miles away. If the mortar position had been anywhere near that blast, then they were toast. They would have set up far from the main force, however. The defenders could not rely on the carrier for more support.

“You gotta give the shit that the railgun impact throws up time to fall back down,” he explained, the Marine nodding his head vigorously. “Don’t get up until then, or you might get clocked by a rock.”

“Y-Yes sir, thank you.”

He couldn’t really be blamed, there weren’t many scenarios where orbital railguns were used as close fire support. Walker had half a mind to go find whoever had suggested it and shove their transmitter down their throat.

“Get ready, they’re coming,” Kaz hissed.

Dozens of flashlights joined the larger searchlights from the guard towers, illuminating the treeline in a white glare, casting dark shadows between the trunks that effectively did little to improve visibility. The Bugs had tested them with the mortar fire, probing for weaknesses in their defenses, so where was the main force? Why were they delaying their attack?

There was a flash of green light from somewhere in the adjacent treetops, one of the soldiers down the line to Walker’s right tumbling backwards off the platform, his head snapping back violently with the force of the impact as a plasma bolt hit him square in the face. It must have broken his neck, as he didn’t scream when the bubbling plasma melted through his visor and seared his flesh, his limp body falling to the metal grates below with a thud.

There was a moment of silence, the calm before the storm, and then a chorus of weapons fire and battle cries rang out.

“They’re in the trees!” Walker heard someone shout. “Aim for the trees!”

The chatter of automatic railguns was deafening, his helmet dampening the sound and attempting to filter through those that the algorithm deemed more important, perhaps thirty soldiers opening up on the forest.

They were answered by more sniper fire, flashes of green light betraying the enemy positions amongst the branches, more of the winged Betelgeusians no doubt. Railgun slugs impacted the tree trunks to send splintered wood flying through the foliage like shrapnel, glimpses of iridescent shells visible where the light of their torches caught them, the Bugs firing back with their long rifles. The aliens favored plasma over solid projectiles, their guns accelerating a magnetically-contained bolt of plasma to comparable velocities, with the added benefit of transferring the heat from that ionized gas to the target. The plasma burned at thousands of degrees centigrade and would melt ceramic armor like it was made of paper. Their suits actually did a pretty good job of dispersing the heat, all things considered, but a direct hit was never going to be pretty.

A few of the Marines were using plasma too, the XMRs had interchangeable receivers that could be swapped out to handle different munitions, as both methods could make use of the same barrel and underlying components. Railgun slugs were accelerated magnetically, while plasma was contained using magnetic fields and then fired through those same means, which meant that a trained Marine could switch receivers in a few seconds and be ready to fire whatever ammunition the situation called for. Everyone carried a spare receiver and two kinds of ammunition on them at all times as the Bugs were fond of using handheld shields that could stop a solid projectile, but could be overloaded by concentrated plasma fire.

The blue bolts of plasma from the UNN side splashed against the trees, quickly starting fires, the high oxygen content in Jarilo’s atmosphere fanning the spreading blaze. The two guard posts on the forward wall fired their belt-fed grenade launchers, thirty-millimeter shells hammering the treetops in short bursts, knocking down branches and impacting the thick trunks in puffs of white smoke that were quickly carried away by the wind. Some of the thinner trunks were split in two, falling to the ground and bringing the fronds of green pine needles with them, Walker spying a couple of broken Bugs hitting the dirt as the branches came down around them.

A bolt hit the wall in front of the Marine to his left and made it ring like a bell, the metal sagging inward and glowing molten orange. Fortunately, the material was thick enough to prevent the plasma from melting all the way through. The Bugs were good shots, but they had lost the element of surprise, and the return fire was shredding them.

Walker rested his rifle on the wall, one hand on the trigger and the other on the buttstock, giving him a lot of stability as he closed his left eye and his computer switched his view to the sight. He searched for activity and spied something orange and shiny between two trunks, then fired, the slug hitting the target dead center and spraying green ichor along with fragments of its shattered carapace. It tumbled out of the tree, a Bug with a striking, orange shell and two horns protruding from its head that reminded him of a stag.

Unlike with humans, a headshot might not kill a Bug outright, their brain stem extended into their torso. The best way to drop one was to aim for the solar plexus, right between the two sets of arms.

Some of the Bugs were changing positions, they were indeed capable of flight like the one that had followed Walker and Kaz through the forest for so many miles. Walker pumped a few more rounds into the trees for good measure. His scout rifle was semi-automatic, suppressing the winged snipers as they tried to fall back. It was to no avail, however. The concentrated firepower had sealed their fate, licking flames spreading from tree to tree as they were pounded by grenades and hypersonic projectiles.

They were in full retreat, and cries of victory rang out through the compound, but Walker knew that the Bugs wouldn’t just send a handful of snipers to assault a UNN stronghold. As the cheering died down, a new sound came from deep within the forest, a chittering that grew louder and louder until it became a cacophony. It sounded like rain on sheet metal, beads in a maraca, a sound that Walker was all too familiar with.