Alien Arcana (Starship's Mage Book 4) (9 page)

The first stages burned for twenty seconds, old-fashioned chemical rockets that lifted the missiles past five kilometers’ altitude, clearing a safety distance for the
second
stage.

The sky lit with brilliant fire as six
antimatter
engines lit off, the missiles seeking targets at hundreds of gravities of acceleration. There were countermeasures—and the flash of a dying missile told Damien that the attacking shuttles
had
them—but inside an atmosphere, there was almost no time to deploy them. Anti-missile lasers nailed
one
SAM.

The other five slammed head-on into their targets, wiping four shuttles and their cargo of ground troops from the air in flashes of antimatter annihilation.

As the Marines headed for the hole the assassin’s explosives had opened in the ground, Damien found Romanov standing next to him. It wasn’t possible to read the emotions of someone locked in a two-meter-tall suit of exosuit armor, but somehow the Lieutenant still managed to appear impatient.

“We need to get
you
underground, too,” he noted. “If we let
you
get killed, there’ll be hell to pay, no matter what.”

The Marine gestured toward where the shuttles were sweeping in. “Once they have those boots on the ground, they’re not going to nuke their own people. If we’re going to make a tunnel fight of this, I’d rather not leave the most important objective on the planet
outside
those tunnels.”

“Touché, Lieutenant,” Damien allowed. The runes they’d found in the lower levels were probably more important than he, but he doubted he’d be able to convince the man charged with keeping the Hand alive of that.

“Let’s go.”

Damien couldn’t see the rapidly approaching shuttles, but he could
hear
them by the time they’d reached the open wound the assassin had ripped open trying to kill him. It was a larger opening into the underground tunnels than any of the handful of ancient airlocks that had been forced open.

“Are we leaving this for them?” he asked the Marine as he dropped into the hole.

“For now,” Romanov replied. “If nothing else, we don’t want them going through the labs. Plus, I have a
plan
for this hole in the ground.”

They passed by a fire team of exosuited Marines just inside, clearly setting up whatever plan Romanov had. Deeper in, another set of Marines was ushering the last stragglers of the research team toward the hole Kurosawa had opened to start this whole mess.

“This is my stop,” Romanov told Damien. “I don’t expect you to go hide behind the civilians, my lord, but this kind of tunnel knife fight is our job. Leave us to it.”

Damien didn’t
like
it, but the Marine was right. With a nod and a sigh, the Hand left the Marines behind.

#

Denis waited for the Hand to pass through Kurosawa’s tunnel behind the rest of the civilians and then nodded to the Marines waiting there. They unfolded a portable blast shield covered with runes on the “safe” side to reinforce its flimsy frame, over the tunnel.

It wouldn’t stop anyone who actually
made
it to the tunnel, but it would stand off gunfire or even major explosions. Since Denis had sixteen Marines, including himself, to stand off six shuttles’ worth of attackers, explosions were a major part of his plan.

“Here they come,” Chan reported, feeding everyone the datastream from the camera drones they’d left all over the domes and alien ruins outside. “Those…yeah, those are our shuttles, boss.”

Denis flipped to the visual feed from the tactical map he’d set to update, and nodded his silent agreement. The paint job was different, pitch-black instead of the Marines’ dark gray, but it was recognizably the standard assault shuttle the RMMC had built for their own
exclusive
use.

The visual suddenly fizzled and grayed out.

“EMP sweep,” Chan reported.

“It’s
always nice to deal with professionals,” Denis said calmly. “Bring up the second wave of drones.”

The visual feed and the tactical map returned, showing him the assault shuttles sweeping back around, their scanners poking for any sign of defenders. Denis had enough time to recognize the flight pattern—the pilots, whoever they were, had been trained by
Marines
—before a
second
electromagnetic pulse swept the area, killing his second wave of eyes.

“
Paranoid
professionals,” Chan told him. “We’ve only got one more set of eyes, boss. What do we do?”

“Hold for sixty seconds,” he ordered. Once the enemy troops were on the ground, the shuttles couldn’t keep pulsing their EMP weapons, but his spy eyes were only truly hardened when turned off. When to bring up the last set was always a question of…timing.

The seconds of blindness ticked away with agonizing slowness, time Denis spent checking his links to the network of secondary nodes they’d carefully set up before going underground.

“Now,” he ordered. “Bring them back up.”

Everything flared back into existence on his helmet screens in the darkness. Four of the shuttles were grounded now, with two more orbiting about a hundred meters above them.

“Not quite where I hoped,” he observed, studying the shuttles as their landing ramps extended and soldiers in black exosuits started to pour out. “It’ll have to do.”

He glanced around at his men. All of his people were in exosuits now, which would shield them from just about anything that wasn’t right on top of them. The blast shield and the ancient alien concrete
should
shield the civilians…and that was really all he could give them.

“Fire in the hole,” he told his squad, then hit the prepared command.

The antimatter fuel cell in a Hyper-Interceptor missile was a marvel of engineering, built of permanently magnetized materials that held their payload of antiprotons suspended in a contained vacuum. Rated to withstand being dropped, crushed and even
shot
at, the fuel cells were extraordinarily hard to rupture.

With enough explosives, of course,
anything
was possible.

Six separate charges, crudely made from the missiles’ own warheads, went off where they’d been hastily concealed in the dirt. Six fuel cells ruptured, each containing a fraction of a gram of pure antimatter.

All told, twenty kilotons of fire swept the valley between the domes, incinerating the ancient ruins of the surface structures, two of the shuttles and dozens of the exosuited soldiers.

If Denis hadn’t already been certain his enemy had RMMC gear, the fact that two shuttles and easily a quarter of the exosuited troops
survived
the explosion would have confirmed it for him. Even buried underground, waiting for their enemy, his people were buffeted by the shockwave and covered in dust and loose rocks.

He’d lost over half of his eyes on the surface—less than he’d expected—but what was left was enough for him to confirm that one of the shuttles would never lift again.

The other
did
, sweeping for other threats as the last two hovered low enough to drop their own payloads of soldiers.

Of a hundred and twenty exosuited ground troops, his enemy was now down to sixty. It wasn’t
enough
, not when he had less than
one
squad against their three, but it was a start.

“Get ready,” he ordered. “Now when they get down here, they’re going to be
pissed
.”

#

The massive explosion had collapsed the portion of the tunnels that the earlier assassination attempt had opened up. It had also, Denis hoped, melted or collapsed shut any of the ancient airlocks the attackers may have wanted to use.

Sheltered by one of the ancient domes, the research camp had survived unscathed, but he was unsurprised when the strangers didn’t head that way. The prefabricated modules didn’t have great security, but with all of the airlocks double-locked, they’d slow the attackers down.

Instead, four of the exosuited soldiers dropped into the hole and placed charges before leaping back out with their augmented muscles. A moment after they were clear, the shaped explosives detonated, opening a new hole into the underground tunnels.

“Fire Team Alpha,” Denis said calmly. No further orders were needed. Corporal Kitcher knew what to do.

The first black-armored soldiers charged through the hole they’d opened, two full fire teams sweeping into the dark tunnels with heavy exosuit battle rifles in their gauntleted hands. Whoever these strangers were, they had access to the absolute latest in RMMC gear. Low-flying combat drones went ahead of them, sweeping for the traps and waiting soldiers their masters knew had to be there.

“Now!” Kitcher snapped to his fire team as Denis listened in. A preset EMP charge went off in the middle of the corridor, blinding their enemies’ extended eyes. A moment later, a salvo of grenades flew down the corridor, landing amidst the attacking soldiers in a flurry of smoke and explosions.

Denis’s squad hadn’t come prepared to fight exosuits. The armor-piercing grenades that would have had any effect on their enemy were still aboard TK-421—but the black-armored attackers didn’t know that. They paused as the grenades landed in their midst—taking the best position to survive the high powered, exosuit-threatening grenades they thought they were facing.

Corporal Kitcher’s men, however, knew the grenades were no threat to
their
exosuits and followed them far more closely than the enemy expected. The black-armored soldiers were
good
—but by the time they realized the grenades weren’t a threat, the Marines had opened fire.

Exosuit armor was tough, tough stuff, but both sides had heavy battle rifles designed to penetrate it at ranges of hundreds of meters. In a point-blank tunnel fight, three of the attackers went down in the first seconds.

Denis watched the fight through the helmet cameras relaying into the encrypted network of his squad, and for a moment, he thought Kitcher was going to take down the entire first wave without any losses.

The attackers reacted too fast for that. They were returning fire before the first bodies hit the ground, and helmet links died as the ancient tunnels turned into an abattoir of fire and death.

“Corporal Kitcher, respond,” he ordered. All four helmet links from Fire Team Alpha were gone. Silence answered him and a chill ran down his spine. “Chan, I need eyes on Alpha,” he snapped.

“On it.”

They’d expended most of their drone eyes outside, but they’d held a small reserve of flying drones for just this purpose. Chan sent it hovering back up the tunnel, sweeping for any evidence of their enemies or their own people.

Abattoir
turned out to be a good word. Against the kind of pirates or other half-trained-at-best opponents the Marines normally faced, Kitcher’s trick would have likely taken them all out with no casualties.

Against twice his numbers of equally equipped, equally trained soldiers, it had turned into a point-blank firefight where even exosuit armor had failed in the face of the high-powered weapons both sides carried. None of the attackers had lived through the ambush—but neither had any of Kitcher’s people.

“Damn,” Denis murmured. “Pull the drone back,” he ordered. “Pull back from behind the mines and secure the entrance. These people are way too damned good.”

#

The Marines watched through their aboveground robotic eyes as the second wave of black-armored soldiers moved into the hole the explosives had opened up. Two fire teams of scouts had been shot to hell, so whoever was in charge was now sending in two full squads, leaving the twelve remainders of the initial squad behind to cover their rear.

Forty exosuits moved into the tunnels, and they didn’t do it quietly or subtly. Explosives blasted open accesses to other tunnels, and in a matter of minutes, Denis Romanov and his people were looking at six fire teams advancing down six different corridors, with four more hanging back, still in the tunnels, and three left on the surface.

He only had three fire teams left.

“Blow the charges,” he ordered Chan. “Then get ready.”

With the enemy drones sweeping ahead of them, there was only a small chance of actually catching the attackers in the mines and charges they’d placed in the tunnels, but they might still knock out a few of the soldiers—and in any case, it would reduce the approaches to where they’d dug in to a single tunnel.

The ground trembled again, the explosives much closer though far less powerful than the antimatter bombs they’d set off on the surface.

Tunnels collapsed, taking the handful of scattered eyes Denis still had underground with them and leaving only one clean approach to his position and the civilians behind him.

The area outside the initial cave collapse had been a larger crossroads area of some kind, an open space large enough to let half a dozen of the Marines easily fire down the single remaining corridor leading in—and to allow all of the remaining Marines to fire on anyone who actually made it in.

It was as good a defensive position as Denis had found. If they were going to hold these strange soldiers anywhere, it was going to be there.

“Here they come,” Chan announced over the network, hefting his own battle rifle as the seconds continued to tick by with agonizing slowness.

And then the enemy was there. The Marines saw scouting drones first, but Denis saw no reason to give the attackers a good look at their position.

“Take them down,” he ordered, firing as he spoke.