The Tenth Awakens (Maraukian War Book 1) Read online

  Michales nodded, leaving the two of them behind and talking to the remainder of his centuria.

  Dodger entered into a private chat with now Optio Jarek.

  “So, Jarek, where the hell’s this Mark Victor fella?”

  ***

  “There is no way we could merge again if you’re in this condition,” Sarah said calmly, laying out the facts in a no-nonsense tone.

  Over the course of their battle, Sarah had become much more AI and less of a computer-answering program. Mark, on the other hand, now found it easier to think to communicate with her than talk. He was even getting faster at it, much faster.

  “So then how am I going to do this?”

  “I have a feeling you’re a stubborn bastard.”

  “You got that right.”

  “All right. Have a doctor give you something. At least then I’d say you’re okay for a little bit of running around madness.”

  “Woo-hoo, my own personal babysitter.”

  “And secretary and informant and...”

  “Yes, yes, I get the idea. Could you call a medico for me then?”

  “Sent it while you were bickering,” she said sweetly.

  Ava came around the side of the Bellona with Mark leaning against it.

  “So what’s the problem?” She read her HUD as Mark’s NIAI sent it to her. “How can you walk?”

  “Not too well right now,” Mark answered truthfully.

  “You need to go to the med bay. The damage to your soft tissues, even your bones and joints, is catastrophic.”

  “It’s not that bad.”

  “I haven’t seen anything this bad with someone staying together before.”

  “Well, you got anything for it?”

  Ava sent some commands to the suit to inject different drugs and painkillers into his system.

  “Much better, Doc.” Mark got to his feet.

  “All right, well, we need to get you to a med bay. There’s no way I’m having the person I owe a damned life debt to falling over because their muscles just gave up and their tendons snapped.”

  “Life de—? Doc, don’t worry about me. I’ll get fixed up afterward,” Mark said. Pullo had asked him for a favor; he wouldn’t stop until he’d completed it.

  “You need to go to the med bay right now.”

  “I can look after myself and sit on the tank, picking off anything that comes close. No running or anything too stressful that my body’s going to fall apart from.”

  “That’s no reason…”

  “I feel so much better already. I’ve got to meet up with my tank. I’ll go to the med bay as soon as we’re done,” Mark promised, pushing off of the tank and jogging away.

  “I’m not…done.”

  He was already turning the corner of the Bellona.

  “Stubborn jackass. Kela, keep a med bay spot open for him; we’re going to have to put him in for a regeneration cycle.”

  “Understood,” her NIAI replied.

  ***

  “Welcome to Bellona protection detail. Today we’ll be taking a nice romp around the base. The forecast is sunny, with a high of fifty-eight centigrade, with more Maraukians than you can spit at. I will be your fearless leader. For you who don’t know me, call me Dodger. And that concludes our Bellona pre-trip brief.”

  Mark grinned inside of his helmet as he linked two heavy rail gun cans together, each holding twenty-five thousand rounds. He put them on his back and attached the two feed belts to the heavy rail guns, which fired an 8mm bolt over the M19’s 3mm.

  They reminded him of the Chosen heavy machine guns he’d used as a trooper.

  He checked everything again, hitting the charge button on the guns as the bolts slid into place. Finally, he put his M19 along the small of his back before he scurried up the side of the tank faster than any man his size ought to.

  “Damn, who is this guy? There’s no way to fire both of those,” Dodger said to Jarek, both of them with their helmets off.

  “Ten denarii he can,” Jarek said.

  “You’re the one who said he’s unbelievable. If he can, it’d be very interesting,” Dodger said, happily changing nets as Mark clambered up the Bellona with seeming ease and holding both rail guns under one arm.

  The Bellona was large and squat, with barricades that created what looked like a series of trenches through the tank. Those gave the troopers more protection from the Maraukian fire and allowed the Bellona to carry legionnaires into battle. If it wasn’t for the barricades, then the legionnaires would be torn apart under the Maraukian fire.

  “All right, spread out and cover a sector. We’re here as a quick reaction force and as extra eyes. Let’s get this done and come back for dinner.”

  The suits spread out. Four clambered onto the turret and clamped themselves down, checking their arcs as the rest spread out from the first quarter of the tracks in a U-shape around the rear of the tank. Dodger clamped himself to the left rear of the tank with Mark beside him but lower due to the curve of the tank. Dodger looked over at the mountain of a man; his massive frame made the heavy rail guns look like the M19 he held. Grinning, he looked ahead as falling artillery and its impacts clearing the space around the hangar door around the base could be heard over the rumbling of the Bellona’s power plants.

  Just as the last shell landed, the Bellona lurched forward. The hangar doors opening was signaled by the first Bellona’s gun firing. The Bellona tank’s main tribarrel turrets each accelerated four-ton shells to a meter per second, which made their thirty-two-thousand-ton bodies quiver with each shot. They were capable of firing a shell every ten seconds but a Bellona needed thirty while moving or else they could break apart. But that wasn’t its only weapon. The first tank erupted in fire as it cleared the hangar; hatches opened, revealing auto-launchers. The mounted close support domes came alive, heavy rail guns like the scythes of death itself as they left blue gore in their wake. Lasers engaged incoming plasma bolts, creating inverted mushroom clouds of plasma as they ripped the plasma’s atomic structure apart.

  The Maraukians replied in kind with plasma, flechettes, and coilguns. The Maraukian Herd followed their commanders fire. Against the seven hundred thousand Maraukians, the first tank’s fire was drowned out, its reflective armor sparking and bubbling under the repeated hits.

  It fired again, this time with the discarding flechette rounds from the rectangular barrels. For a kilometer in front of the tank, everything died.

  The second tank emerged, firing its rectangular barrel as well, adding to the toll. The tanks moved their barrels to cover set arcs with their secondaries taking over the same arcs.

  Mark and Dodger, on the third tank, rolled out. The main gun firing rattled Mark to the bone as he peered around the side of the tank. The barrel turned to cover the rear, now right above his and Dodger’s heads.

  Sarah checked his grav clamp as he settled both of the heavy rail guns in his biceps. Sarah locked his arms up, leaving only his trigger fingers free and making it so he had to move his upper body to aim the guns.

  Mark closed his eyes, remembering the anger he’d felt as his Bellona rolled to the open door. He felt the cold clarity that merging brought. As he opened his eyes, he knew what to do. He leaned over the side, Sarah highlighting red carets as he faithfully fired. Each target was a herd commander. 8mm bolts ripped them apart in seconds, leaving their herd momentarily stumped and looking around, confused, as if they’d woken up from a deep sleep into the middle of a war.

  Panic set in and they started to shoot wildly, hitting the tanks, the legionnaires, and their own. It would continue until they were killed or another commander could wrestle them into their own herd.

  As commanders paused to take over a new herd, Sarah would caret their power supplies hidden underneath their limbs. The 8mm bolts ripped through the power cores, disrupting their normal pathways and adding the power of the rounds’ kinetic energy, turning them and anything within two hundred meters into dust, leaving only a crater behind.<
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  Bellona armor shrugged off the heaviest plasma and coilgun rounds on its frontal armor; the side’s weaker, more maneuverable armor for the tracks got damaged in places, leaving the outer tracks and wheels exposed. The two-story wheels underneath weren’t easily destroyed but the Bellona designers had made sure the tank kept rolling, with the four internal tracks taking up the slack if the outer tracks where too damaged to continue.

  “Damn, I love firepower.” Dodger ducked behind the curve of the tank’s hull. His NIAI was interlinked with the other suit wearers on the hull, each taking out carets assigned to them as they came up.

  “Especially our firepower,” Mark said, his tone cold. He leaned over the barricade as the commander put an alert out; the suit wearers turned their weapons on a group of unlucky Maraukians that had made it through the tanks’ defenses, meeting the rifles and heavy rail guns of the close protection force.

  Evocatus Poole grunted as one of the Maraukian normal’s flechette launchers found its mark, catching the evocatus’s leg and sending him tumbling off the hull toward the advancing Maraukians.

  Mark and Sarah’s anger flared as they saw herd commanders already changing their aim toward Evocatus Poole. Sarah careted the nearest ones as Mark fired on them before he dropped the rail guns. Sarah disengaged the magnetic clamps on the ammunition boxes, dropping them as Mark ran down the trench, behind the barricades. Mark jumped on one side of the trench to get the height he needed to get over the barricade.

  He pushed off the tank; Sarah used the powered armor’s systems to shorten his travel time between the tanks. Rounds and explosions followed his path. Mark hit the ground, not pausing for a moment as rounds sparked around him.

  A missile buried itself into the ground, exploding and peppering Mark with shrapnel. He grunted as some of it made its way through. Medical needles injected drugs into his system.

  “Evasion pattern.” Mark’s legs blurred as he ran erratically, headed for Poole, as he pulled his M19 from the small of his back. Carets lit his HUD as he killed the commanders firing closest to Poole but there were too many of them.

  “Taking control.” Mark slapped his rifle across his back as his legs blurred. Sarah removed the limiters on the suit, pushing past the maximum speed. Mark could feel the muscle and the bones giving way in his legs but he pushed on. Sarah injected him with painkillers and anything to keep him moving.

  A herd commander slower than the rest now began firing in a line toward Poole; his herd followed his aim. Poole grunted as he used his rifle to try to raise himself but fell back to the ground.

  “Faster,” Mark demanded. A timer in his HUD counted down his power supply within thirty seconds of failure. He dismissed it. Anger rose in him at his inability as he and Sarah pushed even harder. They pulled everything they could from the suit—shutting down sensors and cutting off power to the arms and neck; they put it all into the legs, accelerating faster and faster. The servos let off the acrid smell of burning power relays and polymers. They crossed a hundred meters in the blink of an eye. Sarah controlled it so they stayed on their feet as Mark grabbed Poole. He slung him over his back and jumped, driving all of the remaining power into the leg servos and anti-gravity, hurling him and Poole over the curve of the turret. Sarah linked with the other suits on the hull, using their anti-grav systems to make his fall easier as Mark’s strained.

  Poole and Mark slammed into the barricade and dropped to the ground, both of them groaning in pain.

  “Fucking crazy bastard. What’s yours and Poole’s sitrep?” Dodger asked, now using one of Mark’s heavy rail guns.

  “Poole’s lost his left leg below the knee, and his right foot. Currently, I have quite a bit of damage to my legs, arms, and abdominals. I need to recharge and have you got my rail guns there?”

  “Yeah. You sure you’re fine to keep fighting?”

  “Nope, but what the fuck else am I going to do?”

  “All right, power on the way with your rail gun. I’m going to shift people around.”

  “Understood.” Mark lay on the tank. Someone checked him over before hooking his suit up to a heavily shielded anti-matter battery to fill his power reserves as he checked the heavy rail gun they brought with them.

  They moved to help, the medico working on Poole. His suit had compressed around the wounds, creating a tourniquet that stopped him from bleeding out. However, he was in a lot of pain and he still needed aid for secondary injuries.

  Mark cocked the rail gun. He crouched and moved up to the barricade.

  “All right, get me some targets, Sarah.”

  “You idiot. Your body’s shot to hell and you want to keep on fighting?”

  “As I told Dodger, what the hell else am I going to do?”

  “It’s a goddamned miracle you aren’t dead right know. I’m using the drugs of your powered armor, your combat pumps and augments to deal with the damage.”

  “Are we going to keep fighting or do you want to give me those targets?”

  “Sending targets.”

  The Bellona and their turrets had seemed to go into overdrive. Mark hadn’t noticed the fire, he’d been so focused on his run, but this fire had saved his own life as the Bellona, the camp’s artillery, and the protection force killed thousands of Maraukians in a matter of seconds.

  Mark saw the targets. He took a deep breath, rising and aiming over the barricade, firing onto the Maraukians. After a few long bursts, he’d duck back down, move position, check Sarah’s targets and do it all over again.

  Five minutes later, there was another close call. One tank had been gutted when a herd commander had used their herd to soak up the artillery as they charged in with heavy plasma cannons and coilguns. Inside the killing zone of the turrets, they’d opened fire at knife-fighting range, destroying the armor covering the rear area of the Bellona. The close protection force killed them all as the tank commander had revved the engines up fully. He’d ordered his crew and the close protection force to move to the nearest tank as he turned it toward the mass of Maraukians and ejected himself.

  The commanders kept on firing at the Bellona, its weapons on automatic as it spent all of the ammunition it could. The Maraukians finally penetrated the rear they’d been shooting at, getting through honeycombed armor underneath and finding the ammunition compartment.

  The normal loadout for a Bellona was eighty flechette rounds, twelve anti-ship rounds, a sensor round, twenty-five shrapnel artillery shells, and two anti-matter area denial weapons. Altogether, it was about a ton and a half of anti-matter or twenty-three megatons of TNT. The crew had flushed the fusion power plants before sending it toward the Maraukians, which, if they hadn’t, would’ve put the explosion closer to three times the ammunitions’ explosive power. As the Maraukians found the shells, the blow-out panels worked as best as possible but the honeycomb armored structure had already been compromised. Most of the explosion’s power was soaked up by having to work its way out of super-reflective armor and armorite plating but it was still too little to stop the explosion. The Bellona erupted in a mushroom cloud, vaporizing everything in five kilometers and incinerating anything up to ten kilometers away. Sections of Camp Epsilon had to be evacuated as the searing heat turned the armorite walls to red-hot slag. The crew was safely behind defenses and the two other Bellona with it shook it off. The close protection detail were less lucky, being thrown around by the blast.

  The rest of the Bellonas made short work of the surviving Maraukians, as shook up as they were. Two suits with the Death Dealers and Ape Killers were killed, with over half of the eighty-man close protection force sporting some kind of injury as they were thrown all over the place.

  “Damn and the tracks are still left,” Mark said as Sarah brought up a view of the Bellona which had exploded. The tank tracks were still there with most of the frontal armor, and sections of the sides.

  “They did make them to survive a lot.”

  “I’d say. Too bad they couldn’t rebuild it.”

>   “It’s going to take a week tops before they can have it operational.”

  Mark whistled as the view changed on his HUD, showing him robots already rushing to pick up parts of the Bellona spit over the base and desert.

  “We’re returning to the hangar. You’re booked for a nanite tank. I’ve got a painkiller injection ready. If you have it, you will not be combat effective.”

  “All right, get me Dodger.”

  “Optio, I’m just taking a painkiller injection. My NIAI informs me I might become combat ineffective for a short period.”

  “All right, inject up. The cleanup’s going to be rather simple. Then we’re going nest hunting.”

  “Yes, Optio. Mark out.”

  “Nests?” Mark felt a prick on his arm and then a soothing cool feeling running through his body.

  “Maraukians can drop a brood of twelve every month. The caretakers look after them and prepare them for battle as the Maraukian herd moves. It takes three months for a brood to reach maturity.”

  Mark was only half listening; the drugs were taking effect as his body became warm and tingly. He started spacing out as people dragged him off the tank.

  Medicos put him on a grav sled, which added to the line of medical sleds drifting down the corridor to the med bay.

  He looked up at a female medico; she had deep-brown hair tied back in a ponytail that fell over her shoulder. She had exotic almond-shaped eyes; her mouth and forehead were creased in concentration. He had never seen anyone as beautiful, though he was on drugs and was waiting for a sober opinion.

  “I should have guessed. Hello in there, Mark.” She rapped on his helmet. A mono-blade dagger appeared in her hand as she slashed both of the legs. Mark knew he should be alarmed but he was too high off happy juice to care why she had a mono-blade dagger and was using it with blinding speed in regions he couldn’t see.

  “Tryna get my pants off already?” He grinned, trying to keep his eyes open.

  “Seems you burnt out the servos and all the electronics in your legs,” she said with an air of frustration, smacking the suit’s solar plexus. It opened but the mechanisms inside were so busted up she had to pull it open the rest of the way.