Riding the Red Horse (37 page)

“No shit,” Horvan said. “It’s all on the record–”

Soft booms rolled in from the distance. Horvan froze, his eyes widening.

“Is something wrong?” Anders asked.

A klaxon howled. Horvan exploded into motion, grabbing his rifle, bringing it to the ready and moving away from the bench. Soldiers on either side of them scrambled, sprinting in different directions.

“Get to cover!” Horvan yelled. “You too, lady!”

“What’s going on?” Anders asked, looking about uncertainly.

“Incoming! Move it!”

He grabbed her shoulder, yanking her to her feet. Horvan spun her around and pointed her at a reinforced bunker.

“Get in there! Go!”

“What about you?”

“I need to get on the wall. You–”

Loud cracks erupted. Petals of smoke unfolded in the sky nearby. Shockwaves rumbled through the camp.

“Dammit!” He shoved her towards the bunker. Spinning around, he sprinted for the wall at the far end of the courtyard. More soldiers ran for the wall, some in full armor, others in nothing more than thermal suits, all of them armed. Terran mortars erupted behind him, answering the enemy shells with repeated volleys of counter fire. Horvan clambered up the fortifications, resting his rifle against the parapet.

“So, where is the attack coming from?”

He glanced to his right. The idiot reporter had climbed up next to him.

“What the hell are you doing here?” he demanded.

“My job, Lieutenant,” she said, her voice calm, although her hands were shaking.

He sighed and shook his head. “Goddammit. Look, it's your funeral, understand?”

“Understood. I won’t get in your way.”

“Just stay put and keep your head down.” He turned his eyes to his rifle sight. The city of Confluence was a little over a kilometer away. He scanned the skyline, the streets, the empty plains between the base and the city, but found no targets. Around him, men yelled orders and observations, and moved to obtain better lines of sight. More CRACKs split the air.

The klaxons fell silent. Activity ceased. They waited. Snow fell. A faint, acrid odor descended. They waited. The mortars stopped firing. Men whispered. They waited.

“All clear,” a loudspeaker finally announced. “All clear. All personnel, resume duty positions.”

Men laughed and grumbled, taking their time dismounting. Horvan jumped off the wall. Anders was right behind him.

“Your first time under fire?” Horvan asked.

“Yeah.”

Horvan chuckled. “Hey, you kept your head straight and you didn't cry. That's more than some can say.”

She shrugged. “Not my first rodeo. I covered the Mexicali riots, the Poulson Station meltdown, the Indigo Revolution…”

“That’s quite the resumé.”

“Not as impressive as yours, I’m sure.”

“Actually, this is my first combat deployment.”

“Really? They told me you were in for six years. Sergeant for three before you became an officer.”

“Don’t mean nothing until you see the elephant, you know?”

“I see.” As they returned to the table, she said, “During my arrival brief, I was told the base is attacked frequently. Is this part of your daily routine?”

Sitting down, Horvan vigorously shook his head. “That’s Civil Affairs playing it up. Most of the ‘attacks’ are nickle-and-dime shit like this. They’re not going to go through our laser defenses, and anyhow, the GvH doesn’t even want them to try.”

“How come?”

“The GvH wants us to retaliate by rolling hard into Confluence and shooting up everything we see. Provocation’s a big part of their strategy. It won’t work. We're not that stupid. Mostly.”

“You’re referring to Gessen Plaza?”

“Yeah.”

“All right then. TransInt and the GvH claimed you killed a lot of unarmed civilians. But you said they were actually combatants.”

Horvan’s right eye twitched. “That’s right. But not combatants as we understand the term. See, during wartime, the Vash don’t distinguish between combatant and civilian the way we do. Their words are
rahaka
, meaning warrior, and
osham
, meaning supporter.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Rahaki
fight the enemy on the frontline.
Oshama
manufacture equipment, supply food, do all the backend stuff, up to and including paying taxes to fund the war effort. These roles are considered fluid and interchangeable. It's just a question of whether you directly engage the enemy or not.” He leaned in. “And you know what the real problem is?”

“No, what?”

“The GvH say that if you shield a
rahaka
with your body, you are an
osham
performing an honorable deed. And locals are buying into this shit.”

Anders clucked her tongue. “So the unarmed Vash were
oshama
?”

“That’s right.”

“I don’t see the difference between civilians and
oshama
.”

“We don’t. It's an alien concept. That’s the point. And that's the problem.”

The crowd was on edge. They weren’t here to shop. They were roaring at us, shrieking at us, insulting our ancestors. We were used to it. But they were doing more than that.

They were shutting their windows. Adults shooed hatchlings off the streets. Merchants closed up shop. The locals knew something was up, but they wouldn’t tell us anything. I was about to call in a warning when the bombs went off.

The shockwaves knocked me off my feet. As I got up, a cloud of dust rose in front of me. Smoke filled the plaza. Debris fell from the sky, rattling off the road and APCs. A small piece of something bounced off my helmet.

It was a Vashin claw. A young one's.

Then I heard the screaming. Vashin screaming. I don't know if you've ever heard it, but it's high-pitched and inhuman. It's awful.

I got on the net, told the medics to help the wounded and ordered the squad leaders to secure the perimeter. Then I told the guys in the Mastiffs to give us cover and suppression fire.

We were sitting ducks out in the open. As soon as the dust cleared, the enemy opened up. Machine guns, rocket launchers, rifles, they poured everything they got into the kill zone. Vash, humans, they didn’t care who they were shooting at.

I got behind my Mastiff. The APCs were powering up their defensive lasers and shooting rockets out of the sky. But lasers can't stop bullets.

One of my men got caught in the open. Dan Garrett. He was sprinting towards the next Mastiff over when a lizzy shredded him with a burst of .60 cal.

We returned fire, of course. You couldn’t see anything through the smoke, so we were mostly shooting at sounds. We spread out, got low, and found whatever cover we could. I tried coordinating fire with my squad leaders, but they didn’t know what the fuck was going on either.

Sergeant Koh ran right out into the kill zone to Garrett. Bullets were flying all around him, a couple grenades exploded, but it was like he didn’t even notice. He grabbed Garrett and dragged him back behind a Mastiff. And he wasn’t even scratched! I put him in for a medal.

But Garrett was already dead. Nothing the medic could do.

Right around then, the Mastiffs finally updated our datanet. The computers triangulated the incoming fire and ID'd it as coming from three buildings at my eleven, twelve and one o’clock. There were still dozens of civilians in the way, screaming and shrieking and scrambling to get out of the crossfire.

So I told the Mastiffs to use their heat rays on the three buildings.

Heat rays are what we call Area Denial Systems. They're microwave emitters. The ADS penetrates walls and excites water and fat molecules in biological targets. Completely non-lethal, but anyone caught in the wave will feel like he's been set on fire.

The firing all but stopped. The civilians were either down or they'd run away. As the smoke cleared, I ran over to a nearby stall. Sergeant Brown, the vehicle commander on my Mastiff, reported contact with shooters at 12 o'clock. I still couldn’t see anything myself, but I trusted his judgment.

“Light them up,” I told him. I remember I said that. “Light them up.”

The Mastiff opened up with its machine gun and twin mortars. And when the smoke settled, I saw bodies lying in front of a store.

Nash said they were civilians in his report. All I know is, when I moved up to look them over, they were all armed. Every single one.

And, yeah, there were more than a few dead and wounded Vash in between the Mastiff and the fighters Sergeant Brown was engaging. They were civilians, but I don’t remember if they were shot in the front or back. Didn’t have time to check. They could have been hit by either side, or both.

The heat rays broke the attack and drove them off. The enemy was retreating, so we moved in to finish them. Sergeant Gerhardt picked out a house on the northeast corner of the plaza and secured a position there. It was a four-story building that overlooked the plaza. I went with him to get a better look at the situation and maybe give base a sitrep.

That was when the Vash hit us again.

They had carried out their heavy machine gun with them in their initial retreat. When they saw us moving into the house, they set it up and opened up on us. Bullets blew through the walls and floors. One of them whizzed past my head. All of us kissed the floor.

Gerhardt actually made me laugh while we were pinned down. “I am getting so sick of this shit,” he said. It was funnier the way he said it. I guess you had to be there.

I told the men I needed a guncam at the window, so Jon Loke got up, stuck his rifle out the window and activated his rifle camera, cross-linking it to me. He swept it around until I saw the muzzle flashes. They had set up in a house across the street, at our ten o’clock, so I ordered thermos.

One of the gunners loaded up his rifle-mounted grenade launcher and fired a salvo of thermobaric grenades. Thermobarics disperse a cloud of fuel on impact, and ignite the fuel moments later. The thermos went off and the house collapsed. That shut them down and bought us a bit of breathing room. I signaled Gordon over and tried the radio, but reception was bad inside the building. We had to climb up to the roof to get a good signal.

The sitrep wasn’t pretty. We had three men down, and I knew there were at least five dozen Vash casualties and climbing. So I finally got through to tac-ops and called for casevac and the QRF.

The Quick Reaction Force was a company on standby for emergencies. They’d usually roll in with the ambulances on casualty evacuation duty.

The medics cross-linked the casualty reports over the platoon net, which I forwarded to Sheriff.

“Echo Two, CASREPs received. QRF will be there in eight minutes. Firehawk One and Firehawk Two are in the air; they can be there in two. Do you need them?”

“Affirmative,” I said. That was a relief. Nobody, and I mean nobody, messes with a Roc gunship and lives.

“Roger. Patching you through.”

As my men got organized, I guided the Rocs over. The intel guys joined me too; they needed good reception to monitor Latcasts. One of them, Smith, said, “Sir, we have a problem. Looks like they're organizing a smart mob. They’re mounting on vehicles and getting set to swarm us from all sides.”

I don’t recall the specifics of what I said next, but I got my squad leaders to set up defensive positions. I told the medics to move the casualties to the basement and had the Rocs orbit our position to get eyes on the enemy.

Firehawk One checked in a minute later.

“Echo Two, you've got a problem. Civilian trucks are coming in from all directions at speed. Lizzies are climbing on nearby rooftops with rifles, machine guns, and rockets. A mortar team is setting up in the park to the southwest, and shooters are infiltrating through alleyways from the east. How do you want to proceed?”

Thoomps dueled with CRACKs, the mortars pitting themselves against our Mastiffs. We were shaping up to lose, lose bad, and I knew it.

“Firehawk One, you are weapons free. Engage all targets, prioritize the enemy mortars, rooftop snipers, and heavy weapons.”

“Affirmative. Cover your ears. This is gonna get loud.”

The Rocs opened up. Autocannons roared. Guided missiles and rockets burst. For maybe six minutes, the gunships' fire tore up the city streets. Gray pillars of snow and soot rose all around the plaza. The incoming mortar fire stopped.

Neither Firehawk One nor Firehawk Two fired on the trucks.

Our ROEs said we could only fire on armed targets. The gunships could have destroyed the trucks, and that would have stopped the threat right there. But the trucks weren't shooting. Not yet.

The trucks stopped a couple of blocks away. Vash poured out. Most were
oshama
, trying to flood the plaza with their bodies.
Rahaki
were mixed in between them, firing from the crowd. Other groups of
rahaki
used the mob to screen their movements, heading to better positions. We were outnumbered twenty to one.

Once they started shooting, they were fair game. So the Rocs opened up on them. Flechettes for enemy clusters, inert metal explosives for vehicles and heavy weapons, smart shells to pick off gunmen within a crowd. And so did we, from our position inside the building they were assaulting.

And that’s what the GvH was counting on.

The Mastiffs moved up to hold the corners of the marketplace with ADS. But in order to keep them from cooking the crew, the heat rays are directional. Outside the hot zone of their spread, they don't do nothing.

The mobs were clambering on the Mastiffs, trying to open the hatches.
Rahaki
were mixed among them, carrying satchel charges and grenades. The ADS was barely slowing them down. One of the Mastiff commanders called us for help; we were shooting them right off the vehicle. But we couldn't do it fast enough, so he fired his machinegun into the middle of the crowd.

All he had was live ammo. No sub-lethals. He had no choice, it was him or them.

That broke them. Most of them. Some asshole managed to rally the Vash on one side. He brought a mob together and they surged forward past the Mastiffs.

At my position.

They were pounding at the doors and windows with axes and picks, trying to break in.
Rahaki
were right behind them. The Intel guys were firing back with their rifles. Hell, even Gordon was pitching in when he wasn’t working the radio. The Rocs couldn’t engage them; they were too close.