Sacremon (Harmony War Series Book 1) (46 page)

           
“Well fuck,” Jerome muttered as he pulled out the person’s medic pack.

           
“Hey, calm down there fuck head!” Jerome said batting the persons flaunting arms out of the way. He added himself to their channel, getting panicked moaning.

           
“Calm the fuck down you!” Jerome said in his command voice, getting them to quiet down.

           
“I’m going to…” Garcia started.

           
“Oh shut up, no angel is going to want to be singing your damn name tonight, Garcia.” Jerome looked to the trooper’s nametape and pulled the needles he needed from their pack. He stabbed one into the shoulder through his armpit where there wasn’t armor.

           
The moans and noises made Jerome think his rousing speech hadn’t penetrated their skull.

           
“Fucking die on a colony world! Oh, please help me. Make it stop.” They started crying, their words broken by the pain of their wounds and their pleas for help.

           
Jerome grabbed his hand and squeezed it.

           
“None of that fucking quitting talk trooper, you a trooper or you some fucking slum wannabe?” He barked, he couldn’t see into Garcia’s helmet but he felt his eyes on him.

           
“I’m a trooper,” Garcia said, biting back the pain.

           
“Now that’s what I wanna hear trooper!” Jerome said, putting two more needles in Garcia’s neck.

           
“Fuck!” Garcia said in a mix between anger and pain.

           
Anger was good, anger was fighting back the shock and focusing on getting healed instead of dying.

           
 “How are they?” Medic Qi asked, getting on scene.

           
“Got clotters and pain meds going. His helmets regulating his oxygen,” Jerome said.

           
“I’ve got it from here,” Qi said, pulling open his larger medic kit and getting to work.

           
“Good luck doc,” Jerome said, turning and heading back to Ortiz and Li.

           
The doc’s stretcher runners got Garcia rushing back to the medical area, Qi headed off to find more wounded, a new stretcher team followed him.

           
Jerome settled behind his gun and for a bit he was a trooper again, nothing but a man with a gun an order to kill anything that was trying to kill him.

           
God I wish the world was always this simple.
His thoughts were interrupted by word to pull back to the third line.

           
They followed the orders as expected. The mortars, rifles, grenade launchers and repulsors covering the pullback. Two were hit with debris, one was unlucky enough to have a reinforced pole of some kind go through their knee, the other got a pile of mud.

           
The warehouse looked less like a building and more like an open-plan piece of crap someone might call art, metal roofs were holed and flared outwards with explosives.

           
Windows no longer existed and most machines were covered with holes, or physically melted from hits.

           
The colonists were hot on their asses, until a brutal barrage served to level the dead ground behind them, and a large section of the warehouse.

           
 “Looks like all the cave people are out today!” Ortiz growled as more ammunition packs were dropped and people filled up on ammunition once again. Jerome didn’t need any ammo after dealing with Garcia and giving others ammunition.

           
Colonists were coming out of all the buildings in the dozens. They were met by tracers, grenade launchers, and mortars.

           
Some smart colonists had grabbed the EMF weapons that had been dropped in panic or in the hands of the dead and were using them against the troopers.

Red tracers raged between the two groups, as the colonists tried to advance, running and jumping over obstacles, only to be cut down in mid-air and thrown back.

           
Explosions tossed them out of the way like they’d been slapped away by the hand of god.

           
Mortars kept up their fire as did the troopers. Colonists weapons caused explosions along the defenses and in the troopers positions.

            It was chaos as colonists rushed forward, being cut down, but taking a toll on the troopers.

           
Magazines and spent casings littered the entrenched positions. Ammunition packs were ripped apart as the troopers tried to keep the colonists at bay.

           
Bodies covered the ground, piling on top of one another. Medics rushed behind the troopers doing what they could to get them back into action and fighting.

           
“Combat Shuttle run!’ Ortiz said over the company channel.

           
Someone nestled up between Jerome and Ortiz, Company Sergeant Major Quan. His rifle was up and firing shifting from target to target.

           
Jerome got back to the task at hand, following Quan’s actions.

           
“Thought you be dealing with the wounded,” Ortiz asked.

           
“Medics don’t need me over their shoulder, and you need all the guns you can get,” Quan said.

           
Ortiz didn’t disagree.

***

           
“Got the call,” Young said.

           
Yu looked back into the hold, they’d carried three loads of broken troopers to Reclaimer already.

           
Now the cots were replaced with containers bolted to the floor with belt feeds disappearing into the floor and walls of the Combat shuttle.

           
“Weapons good to go,” Bobbie said, anticipating his question as Yu pushed power into the engines and they floated off from behind the Troopers defenses, shuttles were still going low and fast to get away from the city, once clear they drive up towards Reclaimer, a shiny sliver light in the sky.

           
“Weapons fire from the lift towers,” Young reported.

           
Combat shuttles rose from their positions and their auto turrets fired, walls of the towers disintegrated under their barrage, any anti-air weapons were taken out with prejudice.

           
The shuttles rose, one gun looking to the lift towers, the other sent plunging fire into the colonists crossing between warehouses.

           
“Getting shot,” Young reported, focused on her console. She moved her toggle stick, finding a target. She depressed her trigger a violent thread of tracers following her aim. Dull thumps twangs and odd turbulence of the colonist’s grenade rounds exploding agreed with her assessment. The colonists were shooting at them.

            Bobbie did the same with the other auto-turret, both of them aiming and firing on anything that wasn’t friendly, leaving nothing but bodies and spent casings behind.

           
“Bravo flight, you are clear for gun run,” Flight control said.

           
Yu didn’t have to be told twice, he powered the engines and banked high and right, the tilting engines allowed him to be nose-down while pushing forward.

           
His auto cannons barked, leaving twin trenches of destruction. He ripple fired a bank of five missiles nose to ass.

           
As soon as one left its launcher another was firing.

           
The colonists didn’t have a chance, anything cut out in the open was shredded or blown into oblivion.

           
Missiles hit the warehouses, ripping walls apart and turning machinery into burning piles of slag.

           
Auto turrets continued to focus on colonists shooting at the shuttle, raking their position with hundreds of rounds, turning the shooter and those around them into rusty smudges.

           
All over the city combat shuttles plied their trade and their trade was to bring pain down on those below.

           
They brought troopers, they brought ammunition, they brought techs, medics and weapons. Anything to hurt the enemy.

           
When it was their turn to engage, it made even troopers watch in horror as they swooped past, rounds sending colonists reeling and explosions throwing them back.

***

           
The combat shuttles gave the troopers the breathing room they needed to get organized.

           
Ammunition was pulled up, positions checked and reserves deployed, it was too much for the colonists.

           
They broke and ran.

           
The troopers didn’t cheer and dance, they shot the colonists in the back. It wasn’t honorable, it wasn’t nice.

           
It just meant the bastard wouldn’t be able to come back and attack them later.

           
“Alright, I want everyone to secure their positions. Be ready to counter-attack and for another wave of colonists. I want all wounded pulled back to the casualty area,” Nerva said to the Platoon and a half left under his command.

           
There wasn’t just colonist bodies’ littering the floor.

***

           
General Orlav looked up from the last report that had been passed to his hands, gloved and sealed hands.

           
He, like every other surviving person in the Army of Sacremon was sealed up in a suit with a rebreather firmly mounted to his face.

           
It was no way to leave, having to go through decontamination every time someone had to go to the bathroom, or they wanted to drink and eat. Hell most of the food was gone because it was so covered in that damned gas!

           
He had lost four hundred thousand people when the gas had first dropped. Another two hundred thousand had been claimed by not having the right gear, either it had a hole in their gear or they just became too overwhelmed by the deaths of so many so they gave up. It was a hellish experience wearing the suits.

           
The result of the vote was already sealed.
He thought, wishing that he had thrown his troops at Earth’s Military Forces four months ago after their bombs had dropped. Instead he had harassed them, trying to wear them down while pushing some large attacks at them, ready to back up any attack if they looked to be showing fruit. He had been too timid and lost another hundred thousand or so troops with that.

           
He had five hundred thousand people left and their minds, by the majority were made up. They were going to attack the Troopers in their defenses. They had only improved their defenses with time. Wire with sharp points on it littered the corridors and the areas between factories. They were damned hard to get rid of and tore at his own forces’ suits. Usually troops could just continue on, it was a slog but they’d have only a few cuts to show for them getting past it all. The gas changed everything, a small tear in a person’s suit was catastrophic.

           
The chemists and the medical personnel had got together and made something that gave people more time before they would die from the gas. The medical personnel on Sacremon had never needed to be the best, everything was distributed by robo-doctors so there had been little to no movement on making some kind of inoculation.

           
Hell the chemists didn’t really know how the stuff worked. They had sounded so confident, now they sounded like the Army’s whipping boys, and they were. There had been more than one chemist found with their suit ripped open.

           
If I wait much longer I’m going to lose that army anyway.

           
“Alright Sylvia, it looks like we’ll be putting our plan to work within the week,” he said, his voice grave, now resigned to whatever would happen. He’d either see the Army free of Processing City, or dead inside it.

***

           
General Orlav stepped from the tunnel ladder onto the floor of the factory. His guards surrounded him and Sylvia was making noises about how he should be back in the command centre.

           
“Look, the controllers know what they need to do and this is our last play. I’m not going to hide in the command centre while the men and women that followed me into this rebellion are laying down their lives in order to see that we get free of the CEOs,” Orlav said, Sylvia couldn’t see the General’s jaw jutting out in defiance, but he could see the stubbornness in those eyes.

           
Sylvia seemed to recognize he wasn’t going to win the fight so he stepped down.