“Make your shots count!” I yelled at the nearest gunner. Then, to Dwyer, “How many missiles do we have left?”

  “Eleven, sir.”

  Even if we managed one kill per missile, we could only take out half of them with what we had left. That still left us with thirteen of these monsters to fight off. Would the walls of Camp Jericho hold? The fortified castle that the Repub had reclaimed was old. It had been built in a more primitive time, when the weapons weren’t as powerful. We were about to find out how good these ancient engineers were, and it was going to get bloody.

  “Be ready for more wounded leejes,” I warned Doc Tran over the L-comm.

  “You think?” the doc spat back.

  It was clear that this second volley wasn’t meant for casualties, though. They were aiming for the dome of doom and took out our portable anti-missile defense system. I didn’t know if we could salvage it, but even if it could be saved, we lacked the technical expertise to do the job.

  More rounds came at us, easily taking out one of the main gates into Camp Jericho. The one on my section of the wall. If we couldn’t keep the enemy outside the camp, we’d die. The rebels outnumbered us, and now they outgunned us.

  “Looking grim, Virgil.”

  “We’re not dead yet,” he growled.

  The crawling devils continued to advance, despite the best efforts of our gunners. We took out nine more of them—half, but not enough. They threw rounds at us with wild abandon, without a care for fire discipline. The tanks adjusted their angle to lob shells into the camp itself. One of which slammed through one of the barracks, sending rock and debris everywhere.

  Baboom.

  Dust and dirt floated in the breeze, obscuring our vision, and still they kept firing. Our missile mules were spent.

  “I want someone scouring the camp for more A-P missiles!” Captain Archer yelled over comm.

  A squad of marines peeled away from the wall for the search.

  “Status on Fleet, sir?” I shouted into L-comm.

  “They’re back. Hold position at all costs.” The grave tone of Archer’s voice made me wonder if he had gotten word and just didn’t have the heart to share the answer—that help wasn’t coming from the Navy.

  “Sir, there are still fifteen of them,” I told Captain Archer. “We did the best we could but couldn’t get them all. Sir, they’ve already taken out the gates. It might be time to consider a danger close—”

  “No! We won’t call fire on our own position, understand me, Ocampo? We aren’t there yet. I’ve kept our superiors updated, they’re working out a strike package now. Hold what you’ve got, and KTF.”

  “How?” I asked in frustration. “How do we kill them when we’re out of missiles? Our blasters won’t even singe these tanks. If we had more missiles, we’d be good to go. Sir, how do we continue the fight?”

  “You’re an officer in the Legion! Find a way.”

  24

  Stern was the first of my men to snap. “We gotta fall back! Call in the ALTO!”

  “Hold your ground, Stern!” I shouted over the open comm, hoping the rage I let fly would cow him and stop anyone else from joining his call for retreat. “Don’t give an inch, there’s nowhere to pull back to.”

  The besieged walls rumbled beneath our feet, but we stood our ground. The rebel tanks were turning our covered firing positions into craters, thinning out my already understrength unit. Yet the leejes of Rage Company leaned over the parapets and sent bolts downrange.

  The wall before me boomed and sent a spray of splintered stone and dust falling down on top of me, covering me in grit.

  “How many shells do those kelhorns have?” I yelled to myself as the little bits of rock tinked down on my LARK.

  We’d fire bolts at any troops in the open, knowing that it would be them who would overwhelm and kill us if they started to pour through the holes the tanks would make. That would draw more fire from the tanks, causing us to drop back down behind the wall. Initially, the MCR infantry were sparse. But once it was clear that we’d fired the last of our missiles, the fuzzies became emboldened. They flooded out of the woods and into our camp. The krankers waltzed right in through the destroyed gates.

  “Sket!” I shouted, turning to find Corporal Pool. I stopped short.

  He was dead. In so many pieces it would take a bio-recovery team days’ worth of DNA scanning to find all of him. Now Padagas was again leading a squad of legionnaires. Our numbers were getting dangerously low.

  Kaboom.

  I reached for the nearest leej only to be thrown down onto the rocky walkway of the parapet I’d been standing on over the gates—it’d taken another direct hit. The structure shook as another round followed the last. I struggled to regain my feet, despite the swaying movement from the castle walls. For a moment I thought the entire wall was going to come down, ending me and the rest of the defenders in one cataclysmic avalanche of stone.

  The rebel tanks hit the walkway over the crumpled gates a third time. And now I could tell this section above the gate was definitely going to topple.

  “Move!” I shouted at other nearby leejes. “Off the walkway!”

  Modern weapons proved to be too much for the structure—the arched walkway crashed to the ground. I scrambled, desperately trying to reach for something to hold onto, but I fell to the rocks below.

  I hit the ground with a thud, my bucket smashing onto the castle rubble. My ears rang. My vision blurred. I struggled to remember where I was. I wasn’t even sure who I was for a few moments, but my bucket kept feeding me data. A howling horde of additional MCR swarmed past me in even greater numbers than we’d previously seen, completely oblivious to those of us on the ground.

  I’m sure we all looked dead. A frightful sight, dozens of broken and mangled bodies.

  I’d landed badly and twisted my leg. It wasn’t broken, but it hurt. What concerned me more was the pain in my left arm. My HUD lit up a red icon, warning me that my arm was fractured, but I could already tell. Fortune was on my side again, because I hadn’t broken my suit integrity. With the fight going on all around me, I knew I’d have to deal with my injuries later. The synthprene suit underneath helped stabilize my arm, buying me time until death or Fleet ended my pain.

  Momentarily safe between waves of MCR, I hopped onto the L-comm and sent a message.

  “LR-01, the archway over the gates is compromised,” I managed. “Rebels pouring in… my HUD estimates over five hundred of them. That can’t be right, but my bucket hit the rocks pretty hard when I fell. I’ll KTF, sir. Do my best.”

  Despite my best efforts, I still slurred my words. Moments of brilliant white pain temporarily obscured everything else.

  “Roger,” Archer acknowledged. “Commander’s report indicates you’ve fractured your arm and sprained your leg. We’ll get a medic to you as soon as the situation allows. Hold tight, and don’t do anything stupid. We’re pulling some of Red Company over to relieve your men. The 9th is finally freed up and is dropping an HK-PP behind those monsters, one of those tank-hunting mechs. Just hold on. We’ll turn the tide and pull you back, Lieutenant. LR-01, out.”

  Holy muck buckers. That wasn’t fleet support but an HK-PP mech was more than welcome!

  The pain was getting worse. My limbs throbbed and white specs of light danced across my vision. I felt nauseous, even though I knew my LARK had issued meds. They weren’t helping. I must’ve looked dead, because the rebels continued to stream past me into Camp Jericho.

  “Oba,” I groaned.

  I couldn’t wait for rescue, not while my men were still fighting for their lives. I knew that I couldn’t trust the updates from my damaged bucket, so I shut them off. Until I could affect the outcome, I didn’t want to know whether my boys lived or died. I needed to focus on the here and now, on what was immediately in front of my blaster.

  The stream of rebels had slowed to a trickle. They were probably all in the camp. Then I was alone with the tanks in front of me. Those crawling devils continued to blast away at the walls of the Camp Jericho, not satisfied with the damage they’d already wrought.

  Nothing I could do about that.

  I took stock, pushing them from my mind. I evaluated the enemy ground forces. They appeared unarmored, but they carried a wide variety of weapons—blasters, flamers, rockets, slug throwers.

  I could put in some work against those guys.

  I ignored those armed with pistols and blasters. They were deadly, but our leejes could handle them in a stand-up fight. The rockets and flamers, those were a serious threat. And I was in position to take them out.

  The flamers and rocket wielding fuzzies had to die. I targeted them, immediately excluding all other targets. All I needed were a few uninterrupted shots. I’d go down fighting, take a few of them out before they killed me. If I was lucky, their flamers and rockets would explode, killing even more of them. If not, I’d still be buying my men some time.

  Oba help me, but I was ready for the pain to end. I was ready to walk among my ancestors, to tell them that I’d honored my family. I’d returned their name unstained. I lay broken at the gates of Camp Jericho, with one simple request. I prayed that every bolt flew true, that what I sacrificed mattered. I wanted my unborn baby to know that his daddy had done something important. To know my suffering had merit, that it was worth the blood debt I was about to pay.

  Biting my lip against the pain, I rose up to an awkward kneeling position with my bum leg off to the side. I used my injured left arm to create a stable firing platform for my blaster and scanned for targets. I took one last calming breath and brought my face down to the scope of my blaster.

  “Where are you?” I whispered.

  My HUD and scope quickly synced. I was ready for action. I panned the confines of Camp Jericho for the right targets. Then I saw it, the telltale bulk of a flamer. If I could hit the fuel container, it would end badly for the enemy. It was as good of a first target as I could think of. I got to work.

  “Oba guide me…” I prayed.

  The first bolt went into the tanker’s pack and ignited it and the wearer into a ball of flames.

  “… that I might do thy bidding.”

  A rocket clattered to the ground next to its dead owner.

  “Make me the swift and deadly instrument of your will.”

  Two more dead.

  “Let my aim be true…” I recited by rote, entranced by the battle around me. I was dropping targets in rapid succession.

  “… and my cause righteous.”

  More.

  “Make my hand faster than those who seek to do me harm.”

  Please, just a few more.

  “Grant me victory over my foes, that I might protect your people.”

  Them. Stop them.

  “And Oba, if today is truly the day you call me home…”

  That one.

  “… then let me die…”

  Him, too.

  “… with my foe prostrate at my feet.”

  I wasn’t sure that Oba would truly approve of a prayer like that. It was likely a conceit of the warrior seeking to understand his war. But it brought me solace as I prepared to meet my end. I was afraid, and I might’ve pissed myself, but I wanted to go out on my terms. I needed to know that my family name remained unstained by cowardice.

  I fired bolt after bolt, depleting several blaster battery packs. Changing batteries was difficult with a fractured arm, but adrenaline let me ignore the pain. The enemy had finally recognized that I was there, that I was a threat, but I ignored their shots. I fired through it all, letting my HUD prompt me where to shoot as my muzzle swept Camp Jericho.

  I watched rocketeers and flamers die, some of them exploding gloriously at my hand. I screamed my fury, I cried, but I kept shooting. Bolt after bloody bolt. Eventually, some of the other wounded leejes near me regained consciousness and joined my hunt. There were eight of us against the entire Bar Kokhba Revolt and their MCR allies.

  That’s how it felt, anyway.

  Our war was focused on the few meters around us, on the compound swarming with rebels.

  “Target the flamers and the rocketeers,” I screamed over the L-comm. “When you can’t find those, go for the teams on the crew-served platforms. KTF, and I’ll see you in Paradise.”

  The snarling Arthava returned fire at an increasing rate, but I wasn’t afraid. If anything, this helped us. It prevented the tanks mobilizing in our rear from firing on us without also inflicting friendly casualties. Bolts slapped the rubble around me. One lucky rebel shot me in the chest, but the bolt deflected off my armor. It was painful, but my armor held. It didn’t help my fuzzy vision, though, so I let the computer in my helmet do its job.

  I’d found my peace, and I continued reciting my prayer. I begged Oba to let each bolt save my brothers, and zeroed in on the enemy. A hand grabbed my shoulder. I swung around wildly, blaster waving, arm searing in pain, and came face-to-face with Corporal Faulkner. I almost panicked, afraid a fuzzy had gotten in that close, but it was just one of my leejes.

  “Follow me, LT!”

  The large Corporal Faulkner had led a fire team to pull us out. There were only three of us left, still firing, as we were dragged toward Rage Company’s line.

  “I can’t walk.”

  “Stern and Kowalski!” Faulkner bellowed, motioning his men to some of the broken leejes near my side. “Grab the carry handles on the back of their LARKs. I’ll grab the LT.”

  We didn’t stop firing. We couldn’t, we were lost in our own personal wars. I didn’t count how many lives I ended, and I’ve never checked the data from my bucket. I never want to know.

  “We’re coming in hot,” Faulkner called out as he ran.

  We were among our lines, clinging to the shadow of Camp Jericho’s walls as the legionnaires above us sent suppressing fire into the MCR ranks that had poured inside the base. I turned on my alerts to assess the situation. My ears suddenly hurt; I’d gotten used to the silence during my solitary battle at the gates. Now I could hear all of the chaos going on around me. Without the isolation, I had to fight to maintain my objectivity. I wasn’t just a leej with a blaster, I was an officer leading whatever was left of Rage Company.

  “LR-01, I’m back with an isolated pocket of Rage Company. What’s the situation where you’re at, sir? Your HUD beacon went offline,” I asked Archer.

  There was only static over the direct comms line. I switched to the open command channel and repeated the message. This time I received an answer, though it wasn’t from my commander.

  “Sir, First Sergeant Rodney Bonner here. Captain Archer is down. Medics are working on him, but he’s out of the fight for now. He’s unconscious, so it’s all you now. Red Company’s officers are all dead. I think I’m the senior non-com left, and I’ve assumed command, until properly relieved.”

  “Roger, Gunny. Consolidate your troops into a defensible perimeter. Get them off the walls, we can’t hold them.”

  “Aye, sir. They’re already pulling back.”

  “Good, focus on repelling the fuzzies, Marine. Last word from Archer was that an HK was dropped behind the tanks. When they’re out of the picture, we’ll coordinate a counterattack with the mech pilot and reclaim Jericho. LR-24, out.”

  With a clearer view of the situation on the ground, I assessed what was going on around me. The rebels were attacking from the roofs of the buildings around us. Our only surviving mortar team was making that approach costly. They had been firing almost nonstop through multiple engagements with the enemy. Thankfully we found Jericho well stocked with mortars. If only the same had been true of A-P missiles.

  Still, we could hold for a while longer if those mortars kept the enemy at bay.

  “Shift your fire to the dining facility—priority mission. They’re attacking the med station!”

  “Aye, sir,” replied the marine mortarmen.

  Krump.

  The brassy boom reverberated off the stone buildings.

  “Good hit—fire for effect!”

  After giving the order, I left the mortar team to man their guns. I had a more pressing concern. My biggest fear was the unknown. We were cut off from the marines of Red Company and all my men seemed to be fighting in isolated groups, making last stands as best we could. I could see them on my HUD and speak to their leaders, but we couldn’t physically link up. The area between us might as well have been a million miles apart. And every second, more KIA icons appeared where leejes once stood. Our company would be lucky to man a section if this continued.

  “Dwyer, report.”

  “I’m alive, LT. Pinned down by the support buildings. How ’bout you? HUD says your arm is broken.”

  I grimaced from the reminder. “I’ll be fine. Who’s with you? There’re so many fuzzies, my HUD can’t find you in any of the groupings.”

  “I’m by myself. I’ll link back up with the main element with all possible speed.”

  I continued firing while I analyzed the situation. My training hadn’t prepared me for this. If I didn’t adapt and overcome, we’d all die. I fired again, my bolt slicing through the thin uniform of a nearby rebel grabbing for one of the flamers from his fallen comrade. The bolt punctured the fuel tank of the flamer. Soon the Arthavan was fully engulfed in flames and running among the other rebel troops, a yelping brushfire on two legs.

  “Great shot, LT!”

  “Look at him run,” Stern cheered.

  The chaos created by the flaming fuzzy allowed the leejes to score a few more kills. Howling their dismay, the rebels pulled back behind cover.