"Go!" she barked, and twenty-six cadremen and women came out of the night-wrapped woods in the prodigious bounds of battle armor being pushed to its maximum capability.
Nobody even noticed them for a heartbeat or two. Then the first plasma bolts and calliope rounds began sizzling in their direction, but there weren't very many of them, and Alicia's heart twisted within her as she realized why.
"Two o'clock!" Astrid Nordbш said sharply.
"I see it," Obaseki Osayaba replied, and he did. Not that there was very much he could do about it at the moment.
He tracked steadily to his left, working his way along the line of dug-in terrorist infantry in front of Alicia and her charging troopers. He really ought to be withdrawing into the woods by now, according to Alicia's instructions, but he and Astrid had known they wouldn't be. They were the only fire team in position to cover Alicia's mad charge, and that meant that, orders or no, that was what they were going to do.
Return fire shrieked, sizzled, and howled around Osayaba's position. He and Astrid were bellied down behind the shallow earth berms they'd thrown up for cover, and a superheated fog of vaporized soil hung in the air around them. Someone down there was using his armor sensors to back-plot Osayaba's fire, but he wasn't as good at it as the bastards who'd set up the ambush at the LZ.
Even without his armor, it would have been impossible for Osayaba to sort any individual sound out of the insane bedlam screaming about him, but he knew Astrid was firing back with her calliope. She had less than five hundred rounds, and she was expending them in short, tight bursts as FALA infantry, unable to get clear shots at them, came charging in from either flank.
Osayaba saw them coming, knew they were hurtling through the night almost as rapidly as Alicia and her troopers on the hillside, even if the tick did make them seem to float slowly towards him. And he knew Astrid wasn't going to be able to stop them all. She simply didn't have enough ammunition, and neither did he. And since he couldn't stop them, he ignored them, continuing to pick off individual targets as battle armored terrorists around the base of the hill tried to bring their weapons to bear on Alicia's attack.
He fired one more time, and the digital display of rounds remaining dropped to zero in the corner of his HUD.
"I'm dry," he told Astrid in a voice which sounded impossibly calm to his own ears.
"Me … too," she said, as she fired the final burst from her calliope.
"Then I guess it's time," he replied, and used his synth-link to command his armor to jettison his useless plasma gun. It fell away, and he rose out of his improvised firing position, drawing his force blade with his right hand and bringing it alive while he drew his CHK with his left. The pistol couldn't penetrate battle armor anywhere except the visor, and even there only with a lucky hit, but he figured he was owed at least a little luck.
He "saw" Astrid beside him through his sensors. Saw her toss away the calliope, draw her own sidearm and force blade. She wasn't Shai Hau-zhi, the woman who'd been Osayaba's wing for over two standard years, but then, he wasn't Flannan O'Clery, the laughing Irishman who'd been Astrid's wing even longer. And that didn't matter, either. Not tonight.
"Let's kick some ass," he told her, and they charged to meet the oncoming terrorists.
Alicia saw Osayaba's and Nordbш's icons start to move-not away from the objective and into the woods, but towards it. She knew exactly what they were doing, and why, and there was nothing-nothing in the universe-she could do to stop them.
The two green icons leapt towards the wave of armored infantry sweeping down upon Osayaba's firing position. She saw one of the glaring orange enemy icons go down, then another. A third. And then Obaseki and Astrid were in among the orange icons, completely enveloped. Two more orange icons fell, and then Astrid's green dot turned suddenly crimson.
An instant later, there were only orange icons.
Corporal Alec Howard saw the same thing on his own HUD and swore viciously. But there was nothing he could do about it, and he clenched his jaw.
The southernmost antiair position, which had been his assigned target, was a wrecked, flaming ruin. He'd killed at least another thirty or forty FALA terrorists taking it out, but he'd exhausted his fusion pellets in the process. His assigned wing, Jackson Keller, had exactly eighteen rounds left for his calliope. They'd done everything they could possibly do, and he knew it, yet his instincts cried out for him to do something else. Something more.
Only there was nothing more, and a wave of orange icons was frothing up the slope towards his own position.
"Time to go, Jackson," he grated. Maybe they could at least suck a few of the bastards into chasing them instead of going after Alley, and the two of them went bounding back into the forest while the crescendo of battle roared behind them.
"Time to go, Serena!" Ingrid Chernienko said, squeezing off another short, sharp burst from her calliope.
"Roger that!" Serena DuPuy replied, giving her armor the jettison command as she fired her own last round. Like Osayaba and Howard, she'd turned her assigned target into a flaming torch, but someone on her side of the perimeter was obviously better at using his armor's sensors than the ones who'd tried to back-plot Osayaba's fire. Three plasma bolts had blasted smoking, fused-glass craters into the earth within less than five meters of her position, and it was definitely time to go.
She bounded up out of her firing position and turned towards the woods … just as a round from an enemy calliope slammed into the back of her right leg.
It was a direct hit, one not even Cadre battle armor could stop, and the impact smashed her back into the ground. Her right thigh shattered, and the tourniquet built into her armor locked down as her femoral artery began to spurt and agony roared through her. Her pharmacope sent its painkillers racing after the stormfront of pain and drove a burst of adrenaline into her system to combat shock, but nothing could blunt that moment of transcendent anguish.
"Hold on, Serena!" Chernienko shouted.
"No!" DuPuy screamed back, forcing herself up into a sitting position, pistol in both armored hands as the first battle armored terrorist vaulted up the last few meters of slope with his battle rifle already swinging towards her.
"Get the hell out of here!" she barked at Chernienko, and squeezed off the first pistol round. It struck the terrorist's visor, but at an angle, and whined off harmlessly. She fired again, and again, and the FALA infantryman flinched at each shot. But he kept coming, too-until a burst of calliope fire turned him into so much armored dead meat almost at her feet.
"Come on!" Chernienko barked, tossing away her now-empty calliope.
"I told you to get out of here!" DuPuy snarled.
"Shut the fuck up and give me your hand!" Chernienko snarled back, and bent over the other woman. Her armor's exoskeletal muscles whined as she snatched DuPuy up into a fireman's carry and turned back towards the woods.
She made one leap before the plasma bolt came shrieking in, struck DuPuy squarely in the back, and killed both of them instantly.
Alicia saw two more green icons turn crimson as she and her remaining troopers crossed the steaming, smoking wreckage which had been the FALA perimeter until Obaseki Osayaba turned it into a slaughter ground.