He looked around, trying to pinpoint where Wahid was. He couldn’t see any sign of him. Around him, the village was lit by flashes of other weapons discharging, and two actual missiles shot up toward the blur diving down toward the village. The missiles hit some sort of countermeasure, blowing up short of the target as the blurred craft broke its dive to shoot over Mallory. Four contrails split off to continue the descent in its wake.
He dove for the lowest part of the bowl as the sonic boom hit. Mallory covered his head as the thunderously low passage of the aircraft blew sand over him.
Then four explosions tore through Samhain, shaking the ground and burning the back of his neck and his hands with their heat. Something that felt like burning gravel pelted him a second later.
The explosions still echoed off the mountains as he shook off the debris that covered his back. Ears ringing, he rolled to the side.
Facing him, less than a meter away, Mallory saw a helmet with a cracked and blackened faceplate. It rested on its side, blown free of whomever it was attached to. The neck was angled away from Mallory, so he couldn’t tell if a head was still inside.
“Wahid! What’s your status?” he yelled out. His own voice seemed far away and muffled under the ringing.
Wahid’s voice was even farther away. “I’m fine!”
Mallory turned away from the helmet and pulled himself up to the edge of the bowl so he could look out at the village.
God have mercy . . .
The half of the buildings that still stood, burned. Even the dead trees were on fire. The sky had turned gray-black with smoke, and ash fell like damned snow. On the ground, bits of armor and burned human remains mixed with broken wood and stone. Within the wreckage of the town before him, the only movement he saw came from the licking of flames.
The Maiden statue had been blown into several fragments, and her two sisters had fallen over into a two-meter pile of debris. Despite his leg’s protests, he ran for the pile of broken statuary which offered at least the illusion of cover. He fell against the Crone’s breast and braced his gamma laser against the Mother’s broken left thigh.
He peered over the mound of debris, looking down what had once been the main street of Samhain. The town was fogged by smoke, and a massive fifteen-meter crater, flanked by burning buildings, dominated Main Street. He saw several intact suits of armor scattered on the ground, but none moved.
The heat from the fires burned Mallory’s cheeks, and it now seemed that every single structure in the village was completely engulfed.
As long as these buildings had been drying out in the desert air, this whole place was a tinderbox. If there was anyone alive in the town proper, they had other concerns right now. A powered suit might isolate someone from the flames, but the onboard life support could only moderate the temperature for so long.
Mallory slid down to the ground at the base of the rubble.
Back across the courtyard, he saw Wahid in a similar position at the base of a half-blasted statue. Smoldering debris covered the sand between them. He waved, and Wahid waved back, apparently unhurt.
Mallory looked down at his leg. An ugly black length of metal, about as thick as his little finger, stuck out of his thigh about fifteen centimeters or so. Mallory winced as he thought of how his movements must have jammed the shrapnel even deeper.
The implants gave their host an edge, but came with a pretty big downside. Pain might be inconvenient in combat, but it had a purpose. He put a shaking hand on the wound to keep pressure on it. He wasn’t going to pull the shrapnel out until he had a medkit handy to deal with any torn blood vessels.
He felt pressure in his left shoulder, and looked down to see blood drenching his sleeve from his shoulder down. Not good.
He set down the laser to move his right hand to put pressure on that injury. Nothing stuck out of it, and the hole was relatively small, but the amount of blood and his light-headedness made him think that the wound might have clipped an artery.
In a strangely detached way he thought, I’m going into shock.
The world around him was silent except for the distant crackle of flames he barely heard over the ringing in his ears. Above him, the sky churned, a swirling cauldron of smoke, ash, and embers.
He wondered what had happened to the aircraft.
He blinked and saw Wahid standing over him. After a moment of disorientation Mallory realized he was flat on his back. I must have blacked out. Wahid cut away the fabric of his shirt, exposing Mallory’s shoulder. He said something, but Mallory couldn’t understand him.
Wahid took a canister and sprayed a bandage on Mallory’s shoulder. The bandage wrapped his skin in a tight frigid embrace as it compressed the wound and sealed it against blood loss. Mallory felt him inject something in his arm, and he closed his eyes again.
Parvi flew the fighter around the perimeter of the smoldering remains of Samhain, watching her sensors for any potential backup for the hostiles. But no new contacts appeared on any of her screens, and as she orbited the burning commune, the contacts she had already acquired slowly began graying out.
Poor bastards, she thought. The two squads that had died down there were almost certainly fellow mercs. It was possible that she could have recruited them herself.
When she was certain the area was secured, she sent an encrypted burst message to Mosasa and slowed the fighter to come in for a landing near the two remaining live contacts.
The fighter slowed until it was stationary, hovering above the smoke on neutral buoyancy contragrav. She lowered the power to the contragrav, and the ship began slowly sinking through the smoke.
It settled softly on its landing gear about a hundred meters from Wahid and Fitzpatrick. They were together in the one clearing free of burning wreckage, but she could see they hadn’t escaped unscathed. Fitzpatrick lay on his back, Wahid bent over him, the contents of an emergency medkit scattered around them.
“Damn,” she muttered through clenched teeth. She didn’t know if she was more pissed at herself or at Mosasa.
She popped the canopy as the fighter powered itself down. When she jumped down into the sand, Wahid had turned toward her. He leveled a gamma laser at her.
“You?” he sputtered.
“Is Fitzpatrick all right?”
“What the fuck were you and Mosasa doing?” he yelled across at her.
“Is he all right?”
“Yeah, a building exploded in his face. He’s fucking wonderful!”
“There was a squad of—”
“You think I’m blind?” Wahid kicked something in the sand at his feet. A half-melted gauntlet arced toward her, landing palm-up between them. A blackened splinter of bone still poked from the wrist. “I saw a whole fucking army waiting for us. I want to know why the fuck they were here, and why the fuck your AI-loving boss decided it was such a fucking great idea to send us here.”
Parvi didn’t know what to do to defuse the situation. She tried to change the subject. “How’s he injured?”
“Just a little shrapnel from some friendly fire.” Wahid started walking toward her, the laser aimed squarely at her midsection. “Good old Fitz had you all figured out, too.”
“What do you mean?”
“The shits that you blew to hell. They knew the hangar, they took it out, right?”
“Yes.”
“Why the fuck weren’t we in it when they blew it up?” He shook his head. “Hell, why the fuck didn’t a sniper with a missile take out the aircar when I drove all so trusting into Mosasa’s little rendezvous?”