Enemies on All Sides (Maraukian War Book 4) Page 3

  Even though he was panting and he was fighting with everything he had, Dominguez’s heart twisted in her chest. She had heard that too many times when people sacrificed themselves for others.

  Reese grabbed an ammunition box from Berryman’s corpse, firing with one hand as he worked to connect them. Dominguez and Phillips did what they could to cover the man as he did his best to multi-task.

  He got them hooked together, giving him another box of ammunition to run himself through before he needed to move again.

  Dominguez checked the atmosphere. The wind was still too fast for artillery to be accurate.

  The Defender Armor was another ten minutes away now.

  Reese was just fifteen feet away, but it felt as if he were on the other side of the planet.

  “Dominguez,” Phillips bit out.

  She knew that he hated even saying those words. He wasn’t just telling her to move; he was admitting that they had to leave Reese behind, that there was no way to save him.

  Reese threw out a grenade that landed among a group of Brass Jackals who were trying to advance through a building that smacked up against the wall of the factory district.

  They died in a hail of shrapnel but it was clear that the enemy would overrun him at some time. He had the wall and the alleyway beyond covered but the buildings on either side were all ways for people to get a bead on him.

  “Go! Damn you! I’m a fucking trooper and I’ll die a trooper!” Reese yelled.

  “Yes, you fucking are! Never give up!” Dominguez said.

  “Never surrender! Now get the fuck out of here, Warrant!” Reese had met Dominguez when she was Mark’s warrant officer for an entire regiment. Now, decades later, they found themselves on a battlefield once again.

  Dominguez picked herself up. “Moving!” she yelled, that yell trying to dull the pain she felt.

  Phillips moved with her.

  “Covering! Come on, you gang banger fucks!” Reese yelled out the last part through his speakers as he continued to fire on the gang members swarming toward him.

  His rounds punched through the walls but they were getting smart and hiding better, trying to find a way to kill him without dying. It wasn’t a matter of if but when.

  He fired on the roofs where exposed Faceless Ones moved on them.

  Dominguez and Phillips kept on running, neither of them talking as they felt self-hatred for leaving Reese behind. They got to the other side of the district and climbed storage containers and fell down the other side.

  They looked to each other. Not saying anything, they continued running.

  Then Reese’s signal died and his vitals flatlined as they heard an explosion behind them.

  Reese was dead.

  ***

  Voras kicked one of the troopers on the ground. They’d been peppered with shrapnel wounds and they lay slumped over their repulsor, right next to another big brute who looked to have caught a few rounds in the back.

  Voras had no more time to take out his anger on the corpse as he rushed forward with the rest of the group.

  There was still weapons fire as the people up at the front caught sight of Dominguez and the last remaining member of her protection detail, or they shot at anything that moved.

  They were all starting to feel some dread. They’d been chasing them for nearly an hour now and they had wanted to kill them off in just a few minutes.

  The red dust was getting lighter, which meant that the storm would stop in an hour or so.

  They didn’t have much longer.

  Voras rushed forward and his people moved with him. They had to climb up different industrial buildings or run through the crude homes that had been thrown together.

  They were reaching the dividing line between two neighborhoods, a dried-out riverbed that had been turned into a trading market. The area was large but it was mostly flat and hard to escape.

  He heard weapons fire. It seemed that someone had found them this time. He rushed over. The sooner this damn woman was dead, the better!

  ***

  Dominguez went down with a hiss. She’d been hit in the leg and the back. Her armor had stopped the round on her back from penetrating but it instead shot shards into her back.

  Her leg basically collapsed under the other shot; the round had gone through her bone.

  She slammed through a market stall. The materials of the stall went everywhere as Dominguez grunted.

  As she hit the ground, she fired with her rifle, taking out the lead three nearest her, but also the tracers of her rifle gave away her position. She shuffled and dragged herself forward on her good limbs.

  Phillips careened around the side of the building.

  “Roll!” Dominguez said, going straight.

  Phillips grunted and rolled into her. The impact made Dominguez let out a howl, but he had her over his shoulder as he stumbled forward a few steps and then pushed forward into a jog.

  Dominguez gnashed her teeth. Pain tells you’re alive. Come on—yeah, fucking live it!

  She used the pain as a way to focus as she aimed her grenade launcher, popping it off in the direction of a few Faceless and Jackals gaining access to the market area.

  They were thrown backward by the explosion. Dominguez felt her speed pick up as Phillips ran down one bank of the dried-up river, doing his best to try to stay on his feet.

  Dominguez continued to fire backward, without any real aim, but it kept the bastards’ heads down.

  “Shit!” Phillips lost his footing. He stumbled forward and tried to push for a building that might offer some cover.

  They landed heavily. Dominguez was one tough woman but even she let out a scream as her mangled leg was turned around, grinding the bones against one another.

  Phillips didn’t have the time to pick her up again. He grabbed her by her carry handle and dragged her backward into the market. The both of them fired at the gang members who started to appear on the banks.

  With them being on the banks, looking down, it was like shooting at fish in a barrel.

  Dominguez and Phillips were doing everything possible to make the others think about shooting, but there was two of them and nearly three hundred of the enemy.

  They finally made it into the coverings but rounds came down all around them as the enemy couldn’t see them.

  Just as the market was getting ripped apart, new, heavier weapons started to fire up. But they weren’t from the bank side that Dominguez had come from. Instead, it was from the opposite bank.

  “Move up there, right flank! Concentrate your fire, weapons det!” Dominguez’s communications switched, putting her on the same net as the Defender Armor-wearing Westerly Three Complex members who had been sent out to save their asses.

  Phillips kept on hauling Dominguez backward as heavy weaponry fired overhead. The three gangs had no choice but to fire back at the Defender Armor-wearing members of the Westerly Three Crew who were moving forward in sections.

  Dozens of the other three gangs were cut down with the heavy weaponry. The light of tracers and the cracking whizz of the rounds lit up the dust storm that turned the skies into chaos.

  The three gangs moved back to the buildings. The gang leaders weren’t able to push them forward. After all, they were humans: they had joined the gangs for protection and to scrape out a better living. They couldn’t get that if they were dead.

  Three sections moved under the support of the fourth section that only had the new repulsors.

  Their advance was coordinated and it seemed that there were no openings in their weapons fire, fully suppressing the three gangs that had nearly six times their number.

  ***

  Voras watched as his front lines crumbled. Those leading forces pulled back from the riverbank and moved into the different buildings as rounds cut across the river, riddling holes in the buildings on the other side and cutting down those who weren’t fast enough at retreating.

  “Who the hell are they?” Voras asked. The storm was starti
ng to lift and he could see the new combatants entering the battlefield. They wore powered armor but it wasn’t like anything he’d seen before. It bore similar resemblances to the armor that the legionnaires wore.

  The group moved with coordination and didn’t seem to fear anything as they moved from cover to cover, firing and suppressing the other three gangs completely.

  The leader of the Pistol Monkeys had been with the lead group; now he was nothing but a corpse.

  Voras kept an eye out for the other Pistol Monkeys who were fighting but still looking around wildly.

  They had expected to just cut down one woman and then it would be all over. Now their gang had been used as cannon fodder again and again; there was just a third of their number left and even their leader was dead.

  Voras turned to where the Faceless Ones leader was. People were all around him, acting as body shields. He was about to say something when one of the Faceless Ones human shields stumbled to the side with a surprised noise, a hole in their armor.

  In a split second, another round followed after, hitting the Faceless One. More rounds followed as the Faceless One ducked to the side, a hole in the side of their chest.

  Voras could see the innards of the person. They definitely weren’t some kind of god. The other Faceless Ones tried to protect their leader and started to recall their people.

  “Get your asses back out there!” Voras grabbed one of those Faceless Ones near him and yelled at him.

  “The holy one is wounded!” the person said in a panic.

  “What does that matter?” Voras yelled.

  “If he dies, we all die!” the Faceless One said, their fear clear.

  Voras felt his scalp go cold.

  The Faceless One slumped down. Then, a few seconds later, the other Faceless Ones started to collapse, following their leader into the afterlife.

  The helmet of the one Voras was holding exploded.

  Voras threw them away, wiping the blood off his face screen.

  “Use the screamers!” Voras yelled. Fear welled up in his stomach. If he didn’t carry out his orders, then a fate worse than death would be waiting for him.

  If the Westerly Three Crew or the Luyten Conglomerate got a hold of him, there would be nothing to do.

  He had to push his people to fight with all they had and hopefully get Dominguez.

  People grabbed the screamers they had left. They hadn’t been given much and Voras was wishing that they had ten times as many right now.

  Some were cut down before they could fire the missile while others shot off, landing among the stores in the riverbed near where Dominguez and her helper had disappeared into.

  The stalls were blown out, throwing up the different items that were kept in the stalls. More and more of the missiles fired.

  “Grab the dropped ones and fire them!” Voras yelled as he threw himself to the side. A repulsor ripped through a nearby wall, killing another Pistol Monkey.

  Voras tried to get up as a screamer from the other side hit a building near him, throwing him to the side and making his ears ring. He fought to remain conscious, his vision going from black to normal over and over again.

  He closed his eyes and took some deep breaths, trying to get himself back together.

  He looked to where the explosion had happened. The wall was gone and bodies were buried under the rubble. Tracers disappeared into a group of Jackals and Pistol Monkeys. The ground around them was torn up under the weapons fire as they fell to the ground, lifeless.

  He saw as Brass Jackals and Pistol Monkeys fired offhandedly, not even trying to aim as they ran away from the battle, their morale broken by this new, unrelenting force that was completely suppressing them.

  The battle had been lost: the three gangs had fallen apart and re-routed.

  Voras barely climbed to his feet when someone hit him, sending him staggering over to the side as if he were drunk.

  There was no way to win. He just had to hope that they got Dominguez with those screamers.

  He pulled himself together and started to run to the rear when searing hot pain tore through his lower body and the strength of his legs went out from under him.

  He heard the rounds and felt his body being torn apart before a round made it through his helmet.

  Like that, Voras Jakab of the Brass Jackals died.

  ***

  The screamers had been too close for comfort. The explosions had caught Dominguez and Phillips off guard. Dominguez could only cover her face and try to push with her one good leg faster until Phillips fell down, gurgling.

  Dominguez covered him with her body as shrapnel from a food stall peppered her side. She grunted but it was just a flesh wound.

  Phillips had caught chunks of metal speeding through the air and right into his side, piercing his lung. Right now, blood was flowing into his lungs, making it hard for him to breathe.

  Dominguez turned her body, using it as leverage, and tilted Phillips’s wounds down toward the ground so that the blood would drain out instead of entering his body.

  She checked for any other damage and found that the artery in his leg had also been nicked.

  With practiced hands, she dragged out his med-kit, and injected a few different needles around the area, with a final spray being applied directly on the leg armor and cloth to seal the wound.

  He stopped losing blood so fast as Dominguez found his injection port and hooked up an IV bag.

  The needle punched through Phillips’s skin and into his veins, the concoction in the IV entering his body.

  Someone crashed into a building nearby. Dominguez grabbed her rifle and twisted her body around to face where the noise came from.

  “General?” a man’s voice asked through the close communication channel.

  “Thunder,” Dominguez said.

  “Struck,” the man replied.

  “Get a move on! I’ve got one severely wounded—punctured lung and arterial bleed. We need to get him moving as soon as possible.” Dominguez lowered her rifle a fraction as three people wearing Defender Armor appeared. Only then did she lower her rifle completely.

  One went to work on Phillips right away, sending a message back to the higher-ups while the other checked over Dominguez and the third watched the area, ready to shoot on anything that wasn’t friendly.

  The troopers advanced through the riverbank, a section peeling off to help Phillips and Dominguez. They quickly grabbed them and pulled them back toward where the transport waited. The rest of the sections advanced, chasing down the other three gangs and then moving to reinforce the Greenhouse Emasia.

  Chapter Six

  Senator Rimateus’s Residence

  Roma, Hellenic System

  5/3556

  “We have reports from different sources around the Westerly Three Crew that Dominguez is dead. This has not been confirmed visually but it looks like the Westerly Three Crew is rattled by what is going on,” one of the representatives of the Luyten Conglomerate said, his voice filled with respect toward Rimateus as he reported to him.

  Rimateus smiled. This would tie Tertius to him closer now that he had already showed his willingness to work with the other.

  “Good. You’ve done well. The shipments will be with you shortly. How is the recruiting going?” Rimateus asked.

  “We have been telling the people on Luyten that we are making a military presence to fight off those who wish to carry out a terrorist attack on the system. Saying that they are a part of the Harmony Chosen who are hiding in a nearby system.

  “They’ve believed us and we’re working to build up their trust in us,” the conglomerate leader said, his face impassive.

  Lives weren’t much to the conglomerates or to the Roma Union. It was easy enough to manipulate them and turn people into their minions with the right propaganda and people seeded in the correct places. Then, even if they found out the truth, it might be possible that they would disagree with it, but their faith in these leaders was so great that it de
fied any information or truth that they were presented.

  It had happened with religions and regimes in the past—people blindly believing in promises and what people said instead of making decisions for themselves.

  They might not be well trained, but Luyten was one of the first systems to be colonized. Instead of being completely owned by a conglomerate, there were, in fact, other businesses that had appeared in the system, allowing it to be self-sufficient and one of the greatest exporters to Sol system.

  It had been around for billions of years and although the conglomerate ruling the system felt stifled as they didn’t have the same kind of control over the people living in their system, with this plan they would gain great economic power by having the only Alcubierre-capable ships from Earth and Her Colonies other than the Victor Corporation. This position could benefit the conglomerate greatly and their power might not be centered on the Luyten system anymore but rather in trading between systems.

  “Numbers-wise, we have some three million people who have joined up and are willing to crew the ships needed to hit the Emarl system,” the conglomerate representative said.

  “Very well,” Rimateus said.

  The conglomerate representative seemed hesitant for a moment. “We were wondering if there is any more information from the Emarl system?”

  Rimateus frowned. His information was vast and he could get information from nearly any planet or system under the Roma Union’s control. Even Earth and Her Colonies was largely open to him if he was willing to endorse a few of the corporations.

  The only place that he wasn’t able to gain any information from was the Emarl system.

  All information links to the system had been cut off abruptly after the Yard had arrived. It seemed that any and all intelligence networks that had started to be laid down there were removed.

  Rimateus had even brought this up with the other senators. A new planet was a good way to gain more power and most of them would try to start creating an intelligence network so they could figure out who to back and people to watch out for to increase their own strength in the system if it did well.