Using the equipment in my helmet, I measured the distance between us and the enemy. Six hundred feet. In another kind of fight, this would have been the moment to fire or to retreat. We could not hit them with HURL rockets at that range. They could hit us, though. A few of them fired in our direction, the bolts flying wild into the sky.
I yelled for my men to drop, but a couple of morons remained on their feet. “Get down!” I repeated, as the Avatari picked them off. Natural selection works among military clones nearly the same way it does in nature. Sadly, the rest of us were every bit as sterile as the idiots whom the Avatari had just shot dead.
Perched on my knees, I measured the range again. The aliens were 575 feet away. An Avatari bolt struck a Marine a few feet to my right. A lucky shot. It bored through the ground at the front of the slope, then through ten feet of earth and into the Marine before sailing off through the air. Tiny flames burned around the three-inch hole in his helmet. I knew without looking that the armor around the hole would melt and dribble into the wound.
The man was lucky that the bolt hit him in the head, he died instantly. It did not matter if these bolts hit you in the head or the foot; they killed you either way. A shot through the head was more merciful because it killed you instantly. Anyone shot in the leg, hand, or arm went into shock and died in a fit of convulsions.
To this point, not a one of my Marines had fired a shot. They waited for the order to shoot. With the Avatari 480 feet away, I gave the order to return fire.
“Two shots and retreat. Two shots and withdraw!” I bellowed. Over the interLink, I could hear my squad leaders repeating the command. You hear things without thinking about them during battle. Once the shooting begins, all the loose talk becomes chatter, something no more distinct than static.
I pulled a handheld rocket, aimed, and fired at the first phalanx of aliens as it reached the bottom of the slope. Handheld rocket launchers were a foot long and about the same diameter as the handle of a mop. You pointed the launcher like a flashlight to fire it, then threw away the empty tube. The Avatari spotted me and returned fire. I fell back as dozens of bolts came soaring toward me.
“Head for the jeeps,” I yelled, my voice so loud in my helmet that it caused a ringing in my ears. Three stray bolts shot up through the dirt near my feet. More flew through the air above me.
I had made a mistake telling my men to fire two shots, even a single shot was dicey. A living enemy would have run for cover or charged our position, these bastards kept marching forward, returning fire as they went. They were avatars, not living beings. They had nothing to fear.
I turned to run and stumbled. In the brief moment I was down on my ass, I saw three of my men die. Looking up and down the slope, I saw that I had lost eleven men in all. I repeated the order to fall back, then pulled out a second rocket launcher, sprang to my feet, and fired.
Dropping low as light bolts flew through the air and ground around me, I turned and sprinted to the jeeps, no more than twenty feet behind the last of my men. It was early in the fight, but we’d already lost eleven men and one Jackal, a bad omen.
“Want me to risk a drive-by?” the Jackal leader asked.
“Hit them when they reach the top of the hill,” I said. “One pass and get the hell out. Don’t push your luck, you saw what happens.”
“Pushing your luck—you mean, like staying to fire a second rocket after telling your men to retreat?”
“Get specked,” I said. He was right, though. I shouldn’t have piped off that second rocket. This was combat, the first action I had seen in two years, and I was having a combat reflex.
It was part of my Liberator architecture. When the battle got hot, the glands that made me a Liberator pumped testosterone and adrenaline into my veins.
“You coming, Captain?” the Marine driving the last jeep asked.
“Yeah, on my way,” I said. I took one last look back in time to see a lone Jackal slice its way across the hill. The gunner swayed back and forth, and the muzzle of his machine gun flashed nonstop.
I sprinted to the jeep and jumped in. We bounced and jostled over the deeply scarred ground, easily outpacing the aliens. Once we were far enough away, I ordered the drivers to slow down. We needed the Avatari to follow us.
“How are you doing with the explosives?” I asked Hollingsworth on a direct Link.
“O’Doul is a prick,” he said.
“Is that opinion professional or personal?”
“Personal,” Hollingsworth said. “My professional opinion is that the bastard knows his way around a charge.”
“How long before the area is ready for visitors?” I asked.
“He’s got several teams working. The team I’m with is just putting on the finishing touches. We’re about to evacuate the area.
“I’d hate to be around when this place goes up, not with all the shit they have wired. These boys aren’t taking any chances.
“How’s it going on the front?”
“Peachy, Sergeant, just peachy.”
The Avatari behaved more like security men than soldiers, but they were not stupid. If they saw us driving at fifteen miles an hour, they would know we were baiting them. We had to make them believe that we thought we could win this thing. We’d take casualties, but everyone who signed up for this show knew the score.
I had my driver step on the gas so we could get to the head of our all-jeep convoy. The target zone was ten miles south-east of us. We could stick to a fairly clean road if we veered north, but that would have taken us in the wrong direction.
The area around us was little more than dunes of rubble and the burned-out skeletons of small buildings. It looked like a fire had swept through. I saw nothing that would give us a strategic advantage, so I called in a Jackal strike. “Make it look like you mean it,” I told the Jackal leader.
“Like I mean it?” he asked.
“Make it look like you came to fight, not to lead them into a trap.”
“We’ll take casualties,” the Jackal leader warned.
I sighed, and said, “Understood.”
When I looked back, I saw groups of Jackals heading toward the Avatari from two different directions. More waves might have moved in from other directions as well.
I had hoped for hills or at least a stretch of buildings, but the best I could find was a small neighborhood seven miles south. Everything else was beaten so flat that the small ring of houses stood out like an island in a sea of debris. “Pull in there,” I said, pointing to the burb.
“We lost three more vehicles on that last strike,” the Jackal leader radioed in. “I’m down to twenty-eight cars.”
“Should I send some jeeps to pick up survivors?” I asked.
“No,” he said, his voice devoid of emotion. “Like you said back at the armory, ‘Jackals and body bags.’”
“I found a spot where my men can make another stand, but we’ll need time to set up. Can you buy me another minute or two?” I asked.
“I can do that.”
“And, Jackal leader, kick in the shins, not the balls,” I said. “Just slow them down, don’t even think about trying to win this.”
“No problem,” he said.
We drove over a slight rise, and I glimpsed two squads of Jackals heading back toward the aliens. Moments later, I heard the chatter of distant machine guns.
We entered the remains of what must have once been an upscale bedroom community. We had maybe a mile lead on the aliens, giving us a ten-minute head start.
“Pull over,” I told my driver.
The other jeeps followed.
I gave the order for my riflemen and grenadiers to fall out, and they leaped from the jeeps, rocket launchers ready. “Here’s the drill, stay out of the houses. Do not get yourselves trapped in a yard or a building. The name of the game is shoot and run …shoot and run. You got that? Shoot and run. If you get a chance to fire off a second HURL, you do it; but the drill here is to fire off a shot and head for the jeeps.”