Chapter 4: Ashlands

The lander decoupled from the carrier with a tangible clunk that reverberated through Evan’s seat, his stomach lurching as its engines pushed them out into space. He checked the tightness of his straps, glancing around the vehicle bay. The IFV was strapped to its sled, anchored to the floor, and the members of his squad were sitting around it in crash couches that were bolted to the walls. Hernandez was to his right and Jade was on his left, her two Jarilan companions sitting beside her, their four hands gripping their harnesses tightly. He heard Simmons’ voice crackle through on his helmet radio, rising above the rumble of the craft’s thrusters as its systems automatically dampened the ambient noise.

“This is gonna be a standard hot drop, with an emphasis on hot. The crew is gonna mount up to provide heavy support, then I want the rest of you to spread out and start securing the area with the rest of the company. We have to make sure that LZ is airtight before anyone follows us in. We have no idea what we’re going to face down there – could be an army of Bugs waiting for the ramp to open, could be nothing. The bombardment filled the upper atmosphere with enough debris that we can’t see shit from space.”

“What, so we’re just supposed to hope and pray?” Collins asked incredulously.

“We’re a Ghost Company!” McKay replied, giving him a nudge from the seat to his left. “We laugh in the face of death, and we ... chuckle quietly in the vicinity of potential danger.”

“One of the benefits of being first to drop is that there’s no chance of blue on blue,” Simmons replied, Evan gripping the edges of his seat as he felt atmospheric turbulence start to buffet the vessel. “There are no friendlies operating down there, so shoot anything that moves.”

They were squashed into the padding of their seats as the lander began to decelerate, and after a minute more, it touched down with a thud. Evan looked to the troop ramp as it began to descend, lifting his XMR from the rack beside him, rising from his seat. It was daytime, and he expected to see sunlight flooding through the growing gap, but all he saw was a dingy red glow. The ramp hit the ground, kicking up a cloud of ash, the IFV sliding down the rails on its trolley. The vehicle kicked up another puff of dust that filled the air as it skidded to a stop, the team thundering down the ramp to cover the crew as they mounted up.

Evan emerged into a vision of hell.

Where once there had been towering trees, their autumn leaves forming a dense canopy over their heads, there was now nothing but burnt stumps as far as the eye could see. Some of them had been torn right out of the ground by blast waves, and others had been snapped in half and stripped of their branches, leaving blackened trunks that jutted from the ground like giant fence posts. There was no underbrush anymore, not a blade of grass or a shrub in sight, like a giant plow had upturned the top layer of soil. No, not soil. As Evan trudged through it, he realized that it was ash, forming a layer that was almost high enough to reach his ankles. Even though it had been hours since the bombardment, much of the terrain still burned. Embers smoldered in some of the tree trunks like hot coals, and bright cinders sailed through the air high above them, carried on the wind from nearby fires. The sky was even more foreboding, Evan glancing up to see not a blue expanse filled with colorful auroras, but a black shroud of airborne dust like the pyroclastic cloud of a volcano.

“Are we bringin’ the ring back to fuckin’ Mordor?” Hernandez grumbled as he walked up beside Evan, his rifle sweeping the nearby trees.

“At least we can see further,” Jade grumbled, advancing to cover Evan’s right flank.

More landers were coming down, roaring through the smog above on plumes of hydrogen flame, throwing more billowing ash into the air as they neared the ground. The rumble of engines was joining the noise, the nearby IFV coming to life, the railgun on its blister rotating to cover the infantry. Kodiak MBTs were rolling down their ramps, six-wheeled Timberwolf scout vehicles bouncing on their suspension as they drove into the trees, smashing through the charred husks of fallen logs. Some of the landers were already lifting off again, heading back to orbit to collect their next payload of vehicles. In as little as fifteen minutes, all of the battalion’s 150 vehicles could be on the surface.

“Fan out!” Simmons barked, shouldering his rifle as he rallied the team. “Search the area! Fleetcom wants a five hundred meter perimeter!”

The squad formed a line, the IFV rumbling along behind them as they made their way into the ruined forest, Evan scanning the terrain ahead with his visor. Jade was right in that the lack of trees made it easier to see, but all the smoke in the air meant that they were limited to a couple of hundred meters before everything faded into a grey haze. He felt something crunch underfoot, glancing down to see a desiccated branch crumble to dust under his boot.

“How could anything survive down here?” Donovan asked, passing by a ruined stump that was jutting from the blasted earth like a broken tombstone.

“Why didn’t we just do this to the whole fucking moon?” Foster added, hopping over a charred log. “Seems like a waste of time to fight this war with guns and tanks.”

“Because people have to be able to live here when we’re done,” Garcia added. “If we didn’t want the planet, we’d just let the battleships peel open the mantle like a giant orange.”

“If we didn’t have these helmets, we wouldn’t even be able to breathe,” Evan said as he peered into the smog. His helmet was doing its best to highlight terrain features, trying to draw a line over the horizon, but it was jittery and imprecise without enough data. “Speaking of which – can you not use your antennae, Jade?”

“I’m not too eager to find out what nuclear fallout smells like,” she replied. “The nose stays in the helmet unless we get orders to do otherwise.”

“Got something!” Collins shouted, the team rushing to his side. He was aiming his rifle at the ground, where there was a black tangle of shapes. It took Evan a moment to recognize what he was looking at, mistaking it for a branch at first, but it was a Drone. The thing was completely blackened, its limbs stiff, raised into the air in rigor mortis like a dead spider lying on its back. Collins gave it a tentative kick, one of its four arms snapping off at the elbow joint with a puff of dust.

“Bug barbecue,” Hernandez muttered under his breath.

“What was it doing here?” Borzka asked, gripping his long rifle more tightly. It was strange to see the Borealans in full pressure suits, with little caps over their ears, and boots that looked like something an overly attached dog owner might buy for their pet. There was a sheath over his tail, too, segmented like a hose to allow it to move freely. “I see no others. Where are its kin?”

“They might have been burned to ash,” Brooks mused. “Who the hell knows.”

“Keep moving,” Simmons ordered, waving them on. “You can dig around for souvenirs later.”

“I didn’t know that the UNN was capable of this,” Jade said, opening a private channel with Evan. “I mean, physically. I didn’t know that they could bring this much firepower to bear.”

“They don’t do this often,” Evan replied, advancing alongside her. “This is the first time I’m seeing it myself. I’ve seen them do smaller scale barrages, but that’s usually just a precision strike to take out an entrenched position or something.”

“Before we officially joined the Coalition, there was a UNN fleet permanently stationed above Jarilo,” Jade continued. “They said that they were there for our protection, and while I’m sure that was partially true, we all knew that they were also there to contain us in the event that we turned feral. That never happened, obviously, but is this what they would have done to our valley if the admiralty had given the order? If they had turned down our application for a seat on the Security Council, would my home look like this?”

“I ... don’t know,” Evan replied, which was the only truthful answer that he could give.

“I know they didn’t do this lightly, but still,” she mumbled as she kicked through a knee-high mound of dust. “It’s hard to see yourself as the good guy when you’re wading through charred corpses.”

They walked for a few minutes more, the IFV trundling along at their backs. The vehicle was heavy enough to just crush whatever obstacles were in its way, the trees now so burnt that they simply crumbled when it plowed into them. They stopped at the top of a small hill, Evan looking out over the devastation. From here, he could see a little further, maybe half a klick. After that, the terrain faded into the ever-present haze, a few still-burning patches of land standing out in the gloom. It didn’t even feel like they were on the same planet anymore. To think that this continued for another two hundred kilometers...

“The company is on the ground,” Simmons announced, holding a gloved finger to the side of his helmet. “We have our perimeter, so we’re just waiting for the next assault carrier to land its payload, and we can get moving.”

“Maybe we really did kill everything,” Collins said with a shrug.

“Everything that was hanging out on the surface, probably,” Jade said. “Take it from me – as someone who grew up in a hive, some of those tunnels run deep. There’s no way we did enough damage to reach them all, not without digging craters you could lose a jump carrier in.”

“So, what?” Collins continued. “They’re gonna come popping out of the ground like gophers?”

“Just don’t write them off so quickly,” she replied, training her scope on the fields of ash ahead of them.

“Okay, we got recon data coming in,” Simmons announced as he consulted the touch panel on his wrist. “Doesn’t look like anyone has reported contacts yet, but the fleet is picking up radio signatures out in that shit. Someone is bouncing signals around.”

“They’re out there,” Evan muttered, scanning the hazy horizon. “Sarge, this is reminding me of our first landing, when my original company was ambushed.”

“Oh?” Simmons asked, turning to watch him through his opaque visor. “How so?”

“The Red King let us land without incident, then baited us into an ambush. He waited until we were in the most favorable position – an old Valbaran road where he could trap us by destroying the lead and rear vehicles – then he made his move.”

“You think he’s letting us land so he can ambush us?” Simmons asked.

“Maybe,” Evan replied. “It’s something to think about. We know he’s here, somewhere.”

They waited around for another fifteen minutes, watching the howling wind blow the ash into desert-like dunes in the absence of any trees to block it. Simmons kept them up to date on how the operation was progressing, informing them that the second battalion was starting to land. Both of the artillery companies would remain at the LZ, along with a couple of mechanized companies and some Kestrels, while the remaining ten companies would leapfrog their way towards the Ant Hill. One battalion would stop to cover the advance of the next, and so on, moving deeper into enemy territory as the scout companies roved ahead of the line. When they encountered an entrenched position like a bunker, they would clear it, then the jump carriers would land Marines to secure it and ensure that it wouldn’t be retaken. Marines from the carriers would also be reinforcing the LZ and moving along the flanks via dropship to ensure that the main formation didn’t get surrounded and cut off.

“Okay, we’re gonna start moving as soon as the rest of the battalion catches up,” Simmons announced. “We’re gonna be walking alongside the IFV, checking for any Bug activity. That means Bug holes, bunkers, trenches – wherever there might still be critters holding out. The Omaha’s battalion is going first, then the Karelia’s battalion is bringing up the rear. We walk and check for Bugs, they pass us, then we mount up and catch up to them when they get far enough ahead. Everybody know what they’re doing?”

There was a chorus of yes’s and nods from the team.

“Good,” he added, looking over his shoulder as the rumble of tanks rose above the howl of the wind. Evan turned to follow his gaze, seeing the rest of their armored company driving out of the fog, twelve tanks and another seven IFVs churning up the ash that coated the ground. They spread out into a line formation, rolling to a halt nearby, one of the battalion’s eight Kestrels scanning the skies with its camera dome. A Kodiak tank stopped just a few paces away, the seventy-ton, nine-meter vehicle shaking the ground as its engine idled. Its sloping hull was painted in autumn camouflage that seemed less than helpful in this new environment, overlaid with ceramic heat tiles in places to help protect it from plasma.

The main gun that jutted from the turret was a long, slightly flattened tube, covered by a housing that protected an oversized railgun. On the end was a round muzzle device, a larger version of the ones used on some XMR configurations, designed to prevent the heat from the barrel from ionizing the air. Without one, anything nearby might be struck by a deadly arc flash. Atop the turret was a smaller blister with supplementary weapons, and on each side was an attachment point for a modular weapon pod, this vehicle sporting a pair of rocket launchers.

The tank’s commander was currently sitting halfway out of the hatch on top of his Kodiak, his fingers to the side of his helmet, presumably using its magnification and its view modes to scan the terrain ahead of them. It felt pretty reassuring to have one of the giant vehicles so close.

The battalion’s other companies were no doubt doing the same beyond their field of vision. Curious, Evan tapped at the touch panel on his forearm, switching from a company view to a battalion view. More hovering icons joined those of his squad, showing a long line of vehicles and personnel that extended into the distance in both directions, all of the troops and vehicles communicating their positions over the ad-hoc network.

The tank commander waved them forward, Simmons relaying his orders.

“Move out, and keep your eyes peeled!”

The nearby Kodiak lurched forward, the team’s IFV beginning to trundle along slowly, Evan and his companions matching pace with it. The vehicles spread out a little further to cover more ground, Evan spotting a few more squads marching through the dust far off to his left. Delta was at the far right of the formation, as Foxtrot was hanging back to help defend the LZ.

“They realize that this hill is two hundred klicks away, right?” Hernandez grumbled. “Someone who’s good at math wanna tell me how long it’ll take us to walk there?”

“If we assume that walking speed is five kilometers per hour ... forty hours,” McKay replied.

“We’re going to be driving most of the way,” Garcia added as he waded through another pile of ash like he was pushing through a snowdrift. “We’re leapfrogging, remember?”

As they made their way through the smoke, burning embers dancing on the wind, a shape faded into view in the distance.

“We got something!” McKay warned. “Looks like a structure!”

As it came into focus, Evan saw that it was a bunker made from the same resin-coated, packed dirt as the other structures built by the Bugs. It was rounded like an igloo, with slats cut into its circular wall where the occupants could fire out. It was partially buried in the ash but still remarkably intact.

“That doesn’t bode well,” Jade muttered. “Whether by intention or accident, that domed roof must have protected it from being blown flat by the blast wave.”

“Think anyone could have survived?” Evan asked, but Simmons beat her to the punch before she could answer.

“Squad!” he barked. “Move in and clear that bunker!”

The IFV rolled to a stop, its railgun trained on the resin dome, the team making their way over to it. As they neared, Evan saw that it was connected to some kind of trench network, two furrows that had been filled in with debris trailing away from it to the left and right. The Bugs must have been expecting to mount some kind of defense here. That was the only way to get inside, apparently, and both entrances were buried.

“Are Jarilans good at diggin’?” Hernandez asked.

“We’re Drones, not Workers,” Jade grumbled in reply. “That means grab a shovel, meatbag.”

“I got a better idea,” he said, making his way around the circumference of the bunker towards one of the slatted windows.

“Don’t look inside!” Jade protested.

He leaned over to poke his rifle into the gap, using the in-camera scope view to get a look without exposing himself.

“Clear!” he declared. “Just some crispy Bugs in there.”

“The bunker must have protected them from the blast, but not the heat,” Jade mused as she leaned down to get a look. “They were probably cooked in their shells.”

“I dunno, introduce a little lemon and tartar sauce into the equation...” Hernandez began. He quickly shut up when Jade gave him a scowl through her visor.

“There will be more of these,” Simmons said, glancing out over the scorched fields. “This must have been how they expected to hold us off – kilometers of trenches and bunkers.”

“Bug fortifications are like icebergs,” Jade added, brushing some clinging dust off her carapace with her lower pair of hands as she stood again. “What you can see on the surface is only the tip, and there’s a lot more that you’re not seeing. I’d bet there are just as many tunnels as there are trenches, if not more. That’s probably how they linked them all together.”

“Could they survive down there?” Simmons asked, but Jade just shrugged in reply. “Alright, let’s keep moving.”

They left the bunker behind them, Evan hurrying a little to match pace with the sergeant.

“Did they find out where those radio emissions were coming from, sir?” he asked.

“No word yet,” Simmons replied, checking his display again. “They’re moving around all over the place, enough that we can’t get a lock on them. They have to be above ground to function, so they’re not traveling in tunnels. Maybe it’s interference from the magnetosphere or the debris from the bombing. The railguns will have kicked up all kinds of dust and particulates into the atmosphere.”

It didn’t feel right. Evan hefted the comforting weight of his XMR in his hands, pointing the barrel into the fog ahead. He’d fought on battlefields like this one before, and the vast expanses of empty space were misleading. Even on Kerguela, the Bugs still tried to close into stabbing range, and he wasn’t about to be caught without a close-quarters weapon. He was using a medium-length barrel, and beneath it was mounted a shotgun with a revolving drum magazine – enough firepower to ensure that any Bugs that got too close would regret it.

As they marched along at the rightmost end of the formation, Evan saw something move in the distance. He paused, using his visor to zoom in on the location, letting the nearby IFV advance a little to get a better look past its hull. Maybe twenty meters away, the ground was shifting. It wasn’t the wind – it almost looked like...

From beneath the black dust, a shape emerged, ash sloughing off it like water as it lifted itself higher. Four arms unfolded, their movements jerky and stiff, like a reanimated corpse shaking off its rigor mortis. The wind carried the dust away to reveal a set of vicious mandibles, along with a smattering of lenses that were spaced around the thing’s skull like the eyes of a spider, its spiky carapace patterned with autumn colors.

“Contact, right!” Evan yelled as he took a knee and leveled his rifle at the thing. More were emerging all around it, the Drones digging themselves out of the top layer of ash, brandishing chitin blades and plasma rifles. It wasn’t just on their right flank, either. Behind the formation, more of the aliens were revealing themselves, springing out of the ground as the wind carried away the displaced dust. There were dozens, hundreds – the battalion was being surrounded. The things had no heat signature when they stayed still for long enough, and without Jade’s antennae, there was no way to sniff them out.

His XMR kicked against his shoulder as he fired at the nearest Bug, the hypervelocity slugs lifting it off its feet, sending fragments of broken shell whizzing through the air. Even as it fell, another took its place, crawling out of the ash like a zombie clawing its way out of a grave. As he turned his sights on another target, Evan remembered what had been said during the briefing – Naval Intelligence is estimating opposition forces in the hundreds of thousands...

Hernandez skidded to a stop in the dust beside him, his rifle joining the chorus, the rest of the squad following behind him. They formed a firing line, picking off the Bugs as they climbed out of their holes, the glow of their molten projectiles joining the airborne embers.

“Keep the pressure on ‘em!” Simmons yelled into their helmets, bringing up the rear as their IFV turned to face the enemy. “Get behind the shields!”

The troop carrier ground to a halt, the deployable cover along its flanks swinging out on their hinges, planting themselves deep in the ash. Evan rose to his feet, backing up as he cut down another Drone, sending it tumbling to the blasted ground.

He hopped over the nearest barrier, taking refuge behind it, a bolt of plasma impacting the other side only moments later. The blister on the IFV’s roof was already firing, a barrage of grenades from its MGL creating an obscuring wall of dust as the projectiles landed in the enemy’s midst. They threw broken bodies like dolls, sending them tumbling through the air, fragments of shell raining over the battlefield.

“They’ve got us surrounded!” Simmons snarled, ducking back down behind the wall to swap out his magazine. “Fuckers must have been waiting just under the surface, biding their time until we passed them. We’re completely encircled – they cut us off from the Karelia’s battalion. They’re being hit just as hard as we are.”

“There’s almost no cover out there other than dead trees,” Jade added, popping up to loose a couple of slugs. “As long as we can stop them from getting close, they don’t stand a chance!”

The ground shook as a nearby Kodiak rolled up beside them, its long cannon pointed at a clump of nearby trees, where a couple of squads of Drones had taken refuge. They crouched behind the carbonized stumps, leaning out to let off bolts of glowing plasma, the bright projectiles advertising their positions in the haze. They splashed harmlessly against the tank’s front armor, and after a brief pause, it opened up with its cheek-mounted rocket pods. They sent a swarm of HE missiles sailing through the air, billowing plumes of flame erupting where they found their mark. A dozen of them wiped out the patch of scorched forest, along with all the Bugs that had been hiding there.

More were coming, hundreds of them emerging from the ground like a game of whack-a-mole, too numerous to keep track of. Evan’s HUD was lit up with red, his targeting systems automatically tagging them, creating a seething blob of crimson outlines.

“Keep your fire on the right side of the formation!” Simmons ordered, resting the barrel of his XMR on the lip of the wall as he popped off a few more shots into the advancing aliens. “If they think they can overwhelm our guns by attacking from every direction, they’ve seriously underestimated how many fucking guns we have!”

As if to punctuate his statement, the Kodiak fired its main cannon, the vehicle rocking back on its tracks like a Supermajor had just whacked it with a hammer. It had loaded a canister shell, the projectile splitting open to spray a formation of charging Drones with hypervelocity buckshot, turning them into a cloud of viscera.

“On your left!” McKay shouted, swinging his rifle around to cut down a Drone that had made it alarmingly close. It had approached from the left side of the IFV, exploiting a blind spot to close in. More of them were emerging on that side now, brandishing blades as they dropped low, dodging and weaving.

“Gunner, two-eighty!” Simmons barked. “Get some fire on those Bugs!”