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  Another grenade exploded against a wall which sent the blast and dirt and rock outward. Huge gobs of stinking lobster the explosive killed rained down on my helm. As I wiped away the muck from my visor, another of the creatures reared up, like it was going for a claw attack rather than with the powerful laser mounted on its back. Someone else shot the thing.

  Okinado. She fired into it while she walked forward.

  I gave her a thumbs up. I didn’t try to speak. I was panting, worn out. Comms were sparse in my ears. Even through the din and the smoke and blood, it was slowing. The battle was slowing.

  ‘Fired advance to position twelve,’ I said, not forgetting for a moment what we were there for; to meet up with Bear and drive the nails home so we could dissect the damn drop ship like a frog on a lab table.

  I hoped some happy-triggered pilot hadn’t already blown it all to shit.

  I slung my LMG on my back. I had no drums left for it. My Fin-S was all I had left.

  Dust was in my mouth. I spat but I was dry. I fired wild as I moved and missed, but someone else caught the nephropid I’d half-aimed at with a bolt from a long rifle.

  The sweat was so thick on me I felt faint. A blast high up tore the avenue we were in wider still and rained debris ahead of us.

  I recognised the cadence of the munitions they’d used.

  Armoured.

  For us, armoured were angels in dog-shaped suits.

  Rear guard KES held in reserve from whatever carnage waited ahead ran to our position and lay into the nephropids fast and hard with their long fist blades and punch guns.

  I shot one nephropid, but at that point, I can honestly say my heart wasn’t in it. I was happier than I’ve ever been to see armoured, and I was always happy to see armoured.

  ‘Captain?’ said one of the KES troopers, squinting through the gore on my DTC’s to make out my rank. I nodded, grinned. Must have been a sight. We were all soaked in everything imaginable. ‘Patriot?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Got a beer?’

  ‘Have to owe you, captain,’ said the man, a sergeant. ‘We’re moving now. You’re late,’ he said and turned to move on.

  Fuck you then, I thought, but we were. We were three hours late and you don’t get to moan when you’re the captain.

  ‘Fuck,’ said Cartwright, flicking some Zoan flesh from his helmet, which held cupped upside down in his hand. His hair was the only thing the same colour about him.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Count ‘em up and move ‘em on. Time’s a ticking.’

  Cartwright hawked out a gob of something hideous, but he didn’t complain either.

  I was bleeding, I couldn’t see straight from dehydration. But what did that matter? This wasn’t about me. This was about humanity making it through the war.

  I thought the battle was just about to begin. For once, I was joyously, gloriously wrong.

  28.

  The Streets of San Diego

  Alante Brockner

  Alante Brockner’s suit buzzed, overheating because her temperature control systems were unable to compensate.

  Really? Now?

  Working her way through a field of fire with air support hammering the burned out, smashed up city, with more and more monsters rising from the water and the sea and running toward them, and the heaviest non-nuclear strikes raining down in a broad avenue covering the 245th, the 312th and the 79th cavalry in the biggest action against the alien aggressors to date...and her suit was giving out?

  ‘Sergeant,’ she told Ohakim, ‘I’m going to have to bail in a minute. Damn suit’s fucked. I’ll round back and join up with Patriot at twelve.’

  ‘I’ve got your back.’

  ‘No, stay on mission. Drive them on. Clock’s ticking. Kick ass for me, okay?’

  ‘Understood,’ said Ohakim.

  The fizzing turned to a burning stink from someplace in the back end of Alante’s D-Guard, where the servos and her Po84 power cell were. High time to get the fuck out. A faulty overstressed power core wasn’t something to fuck around with. Brockner swore.

  Left on the bench in the big game.

  She chided herself. It wasn’t about her, was it?

  The ship’s the only thing that matters.

  Alante switched off all power with her fingers inside her oversized arm units, and with her eyes flicking across displays, until all that was left was an amber stripe in the right hand bottom corner of her visor.

  She hit the emergency release, the front of the suit opening so she could jump down, like a centaur suddenly decided it wanted to be a human and didn’t want the horse parts of itself anymore.

  She didn’t wear DTC, just a jump suit. She was drenched in sweat from the San Diego heat and the wind-fire on the air and an overheating D-Guard.

  Alante took a single anti-personnel mine from the guts of her D-Guard. The unit had been her faithful, reliable dog. It’d been patched more times than she had which spoke volumes for just how awesome a D-Guard had proven, even against the overwhelming might of the invader.

  She took the dog’s heavy machine gun from its right shoulder and put it on a rig on her own right shoulder. It was meant to be detachable, but she hadn’t had to do it since training, way back from before the war.

  Damn, it was heavy. She felt herself listing and leaning to that side and tensed her core to take some of the brunt of the weight. Even thought the rig she wore from shoulder to chest was designed for this moment it couldn’t entirely negate the weight of a thirty pound cannon on her shoulders.

  She had no small arms, no back up. Just the cannon on her shoulder firing .63 calibre bullets that would have knocked her on her from her feet without the shoulder rig. Even so, if she needed to fire, she wouldn’t be able to standing and would have to take a knee.

  The city felt different without her trusted suit. Not just the air, smoggy with smoke that her suit could no longer filter. She felt almost naked. She wasn’t afraid. It was a sense of loneliness, almost. The constant input from her visor and suit comms gone, the city felt bigger.

  Behind her Patriot and the KES units were mopping up and moving to her position. Ahead, her D-Guard troops were doing their thing. Airborne and the air force were laying in a constant corridor of fire either side of them, and the LAWS and the multi-cannons were pounding the sea as they fired and advanced ahead, laying down a wall of fire no Zoan could breach.

  Choppers were still dropping more troops in behind. If there had been 100,000 Zoan she’d be surprised. It’d been hard, but it felt like the battle was winding down just like her suit had.

  Did the Cephal masters understand how important this mission was for humanity? Did they understand anything of their enemy at all? Did they have something akin to StratInt, or an overriding intelligence? Still, no one knew.

  Does it matter?

  It was kill or die, and that was all she needed to know.

  She hefted her huge cannon and tried to make herself more comfortable as she began her hike through the barren landscape toward position twelve to rally on Patriot.

  There were near 100,000 thousand troops on the ground, air support from fifty heavy armed fighter jets. Hovering anti-grav gunships, like old D-120s with enough firepower to level a whole city...though the Zoan and Cephal had already largely already destroyed San Diego before humans could even get started on it.

  Alante had an ear bud and throat mike outside of her suit, but was used to the wider array of sensors and comms she didn’t just feel naked, but blind and deaf, too.

  She arrived at twelve, the rally point, ahead of Patriot. She heard a cat meow somewhere in the rubble. She thought about looking for it. Pets were rare, now. The Zoan stripped anything with meat on it for food, even the human dead.

  She took a knee while she waited on Patriot and the KES rearguard to make her position. Alante was aware she was breathing harder than she should be. She watched everything, eyes almost spasmodic, flicking left, right, up down. Using senses she hadn’t had to rely on for yea
rs.

  The place was as near to hell as any battle she’d seen and order of magnitude beyond her worst nightmare.

  It wasn’t a rout for humanity, though, but for the Zoan.

  We’re actually pushing them back.

  She didn’t have long to relax or take pleasure in it, though. Her cannon whirred as she saw some nightmare creature lumbering toward a group of seven or ten infantry fighting their way through crumbled, stinking street, over the skeletons of the people who’d died here, and been stripped of flesh for food for the invaders. Her cannon was hot against her cheek. The noise was deafening. Something hit her D-Guard, sixty or seventy yards away - or at least that something smacked into the hulking corpse of it. An errant acid shell, from a chelon maybe. It tore the old D-Guard to pieces.

  If it wasn’t done before, she thought, it is now.

  She mourned the loss even as her heavy gun raked holes and tore up brick dust from her surrounds. The cannon shuddered on her shoulder, the heat scarred and charred the right side of her face, and she thought she’d be deaf in one ear if she was lucky.

  Chunks for alien flesh splattered out across the dust and rubble and she didn’t see what she’d killed. It was a mess, torn apart utterly.

  Then, relative quiet. Her right ear sang, and the sound of bombs and gunfire playing in the distance was like kids yelling in a playground was blown to her by the wind.

  A voice came over comms.

  ‘General order three to all units. Phase one complete. Proceed to phase two.’

  We have the ship?

  She wondered if her posture changed like she saw in the battered infantry of Patriot tramping toward her position. If her shoulders dropped, too. Alante slid the heavy cannon from her shoulder and dropped it to the floor beside it.

  ‘Clear,’ she said.

  ‘Clear,’ said a grunt in blood-soaked combats.

  Alante sat on the ground right where she was and she cried. Nobody even mentioned it. She wasn’t the only one with tears on her cheeks that day.

  *

  The battle lasted seven hours. Even then, there were still pockets in the outskirts, in around a three to five mile radius around the downed ship there was a huge cordon around the iridescent ship that might eventually mean humanity could breach the great divides between the stars.

  Alante never for a moment imagined that she’d be on one of the new ships going to the world in another part of the galaxy.

  She sat in the med tent later on that day having staples jacked into a cut in her back she must have gotten when she’d left her D-Guard, but didn’t remember. Her minor wounds were disinfected. The water she drank might have well have been cold beer.

  Being in the med tent let her see the true cost of the battle. It wasn’t only the dead on the field, was it? All around her were the dying soldiers who’d survived long enough to meet the aftermath. A battle didn’t end when a fight was done, did it?

  When she left the field tent, walking heavily under a fog of pain meds and exhaustion, Alalnte began ferry supplies back and forth to the doctors and medics and corpsmen to help where she could, or just getting them fresh water if there was nothing else to do.

  She was tired, but she was the lucky one. They’d paid near everything they had to win the giant, fat slug of a ship shading her now as the sun set out over the ocean.

  When she finally slept it was in a pile of rubble with a green, scratchy blanket beneath her. She slept for fourteen hours and didn’t hear the distant sounds of gunfire and explosions, or the sound of soldiers dying.

  29.

  Space Marines

  Vidar Dawes

  A lieutenant colonel approached me when I finally got to sit down. It was all I could do to not groan at the sight of him and the put-together man who came with him. He was the first man I’d seen wearing a suit for months. It was basically the same as wearing a StratInt uniform at this point in the war. Who else wore a suit and had a shunt more serious than Sergeant Pain in their tidy haircuts?

  ‘Captain Dawes? Don’t stand.’

  I was grateful for that. I hadn’t bled quite this much in some time and the patches on the small wounds and staples on the bigger were sore and itching like mad. We had beer that Cartwright nearly put away but the lieutenant colonel, who we all saluted from sitting anyway, waved that infraction away. It was the end of the world and we were Patriot. Nobody really expected us to behave. Plus, we were soldiers, and we’d just seen our friends die...felt them die, all over us in some cases.

  ‘Sir,’ I said, and put my hand back down.

  ‘We’re setting up a best of the best, Dawes, for a little surprise for our Zoan company. You want to go home?’

  ‘Got no home, sir.’

  ‘Well, Patriot’s been kicking ass. This is the Superbowl. How do you all fancy a free pass to space?’

  ‘The fuck?’ said Bell, from over a spurted mouthful of warm beer.

  ‘We need men and women – infantry – on the ground. We’re taking the war to them. Dawes, we’d like you to lead your men and women to war on alien soil.’

  I wasn’t sure if he wasn’t joking. I must have raised my eyebrows or something, because he said he didn’t joke, and I wasn’t laughing, either.

  The man from StratInt stepped forward. Perfect. Clean. Here in the aftermath of the battle, clean. I hated him, and StratInt, and Global Net passionately right there in that moment. To come to this place scrubbed and tidy felt like some kind of sacrilege to me, like spitting in the church of war.

  ‘If I may,’ said the man in a cadence as annoying as his outfit. The lieutenant colonel took a step back, and I got the sense he only did so the man from StratInt wouldn’t touch him. I didn’t mind an lt. colonel at all. They weren’t so high up they had someone else to polish their boots. StratInt? I could happily have punched the guy on the top of his head and broke my hand with a smile, just to mess up his parting.

  ‘This isn’t a snap decision, and it’s not new. StratInt and Global Net have been working toward obtaining an intact drop ship since the earliest days of this war. We have failed over thirty times in cities across the globe. You should be proud. This is our first, our only, success.’

  So that’s why we all fought for the ship.

  ‘So you’re sending me and my soldiers to space in their ship?’ Perhaps I didn’t sound overly happy about it. Perhaps I was standing up and didn’t realise. I must have been, because the lt. colonel ordered me to sit down.

  I was the cool one, but I felt my heart pounding for the first time in a long time.

  ‘No. Our ships,’ said the lt. colonel. ‘We’ve been working toward this moment. This is the last piece in a big, big puzzle. You want in?’

  Cartwright was at my shoulder. He nudged me.

  They were all looking to me, I realised. To me?

  It wasn’t until that moment, looking around that I understood I, among very few of them, had been in the war since the start. I was one of the oldest, if not the oldest survivor of the first iteration of Patriot Company. I was a veteran. I was a captain.

  They’re all looking to me to decide this.

  Now, not with anger but with pressure, my heart rate began to slow, and things in the cooler core of me seemed infinitely clearer just like a Cephal in my sights. Everything was simple, wasn’t it? Did it matter that Global Net pulled our trigger, or a general somewhere? A face we’d never seen among us with the blood of friends in their nostrils and their ears?

  No. It didn’t.

  I knew something had to change, because they knew it. Patriot might be looking at me over their bottled beers, but I had to look to someone didn’t I?

  I nodded. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I do.’

  ‘Your Company?’

  There was a chorus from them. No one dissented. No bullshit. It was a beautiful thing.

  ‘Well, then...done deal Lieutenant Colonel Dawes.’

  ‘Sir. I don’t want to command, sir, I want to fight.’

  ‘Well, the
y’re your company now, Lieutenant Colonel Dawes. Any other time I’d be giving you over to officer school and you’d have your own battalion, but these are not normal times, are they?’

  ‘Shit,’ I said. I didn’t realise I’d spoke out loud.

  ‘Don’t thank me.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to,’ I said. He laughed. We were suddenly the same rank. How did that happen? How does anything happen? People keep dying except me. That’s how.

  ‘Get their fucking address, man. I want a word with their parents,’ said Hermana Cortana.

  Cartwright was my shoulder man by then. His beer hadn’t moved.

  ‘We’re going to space? To be marines?’

  ‘An Americas Unity Astro-Marine Corps, yes.’

  ‘Marines, in space.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Space marines.’

  ‘More an expeditionary marine space force...’ said the StratInt man.

  The lieutenant colonel – the one who wasn’t me – was smarter in the right places than the StratInt guy would ever be. He put a hand on the StratInt man’s shoulder with apparent distaste and the man allowed himself to be turned toward the exit.

  ‘Space marines!’ yelled Patriot when they turned and left. ‘Fuck yeah!’

  The Lieutenant Colonel paused, shook his head, and walked on.

  We laughed, of course we did. You had to laugh when you could.

  *

  It was 2296 A.D. when we took San Diego, and the huge, undamaged Cephal drop ship. In early 2297 A.D. we were moving, getting ready, because we had six months of training ahead of us. Six months didn’t seem a lot when it came to space travel. But enough. Really, all we had to do was drop out of a ship that might or might not make it, down the gravity well of an alien planet we might or might not find, and fight. The bits before the fighting weren’t really down to us. The fighting? We were about as good at that as anyone was going to get.

  Part Five

  On Blackest Seas

  To Zoa – 2297 A.D.