***
They were moving toward Charlie, when another green dot disappeared, Jules, and then another, Rin. Bri and Kat weaved through the field of thinning dust. Bri squeezed the pistols in her hand. This was not what she imagined. It wasn’t anything like she had thought it would be.
This was kill or be killed. There weren’t time for questions, only action.
The overlay showed her heartbeat touching against the red, but she didn’t care. She would run until she exploded. Tracer fire glowed against the dust as it flew toward them.
“Up,” Kat leapt into the air, arm and legs still running like she was on the ground.
Bri followed and glanced down to watch the stream of red tracers whiz off into nowhere.
Charlie was a small mark on the map, a little cutaway and it was wide open, an oasis in a sea of Earther marines and chaos. The second wave of crates had finished and hundreds of marines rushed toward the facility all around them.
Kat turned to cut a long arc around Charlie. Bri knew immediately what she was doing and circled around the east side of the waypoint.
They had learned the tactic during one of the early scrimmages. They were working through a unit of volunteers, the best and bravest from a bunch of different units. The goal was wide open on their overlays and Bri had rushed it like it was wide open, a haven, a table filled with dinner after a long march.
But three soldiers had used a transmitter sensor array to hide their position, even in proximity. Bri was standing in front of the weapons cache browsing for a gun, when two soldiers grabbed her ankle and pulled her to the ground.
From that point, she had learned to wary. What was too good to be true often was. As soon as Kat and Bri arrived, Arles and Pauly came running in.
“Good to see you,” Arles dropped to one knee breathing as hard as the rest of them.
“You too,” Bri huffed.
“What does it look like?” Arles looked at Pauly who was working his wristcall and reading information across his sensor at a seemingly impossible pace.
“We have three hundred seventy six soldiers on the ground. There are over a hundred behind us. One click north of waypoint Charlie are two defensive positions, heavy guns - southeast and southwest killing field.
Thelia and Little arrived at Charlie from different directions. Little’s face was covered in a deep red mud. He and Thelia were huffing and puffing but alive. As soon as Kat saw Little’s face, she reached into her belt and grabbed a repair disc.
Little’s brows furrowed. “It’s not mine,” there was anger in his voice and Bri wondered who he had watched go down. She tried to distract herself from the memory of Cooper and mapped out Pauly’s description on her overlay.
She wanted good ground, a little rise or obscure angle she could fit into and clear the guns from. The lakebed had a few shallow hills and grades, but there was nothing dramatic until you got to the shore – deeper into the Earther killing field Pauly had talked about. Not ideal.
She had to give it to them. The marines were clever. Two heavy weapons stationed along the facility’s southern wall, triangle killing field that covered any approach. She wondered what kind of guns they were using. Had to be assembly, right? Unless it fit in its own crate.
The chapters on auto fire weapons had been terrifying. Just the idea that a machine was going to try and find you and then kill you was enough to make your blood run cold, but Earther marines didn’t use anything small.
She looked around the open ground they were doing their best to hide in the middle of. Flat, brown dirt and dust as far as the eye could see. And there were still hordes of marines out there.
Arles looked around at the unit. There were seven left but no one said anything. There wasn’t time to think. Tracer fire from one of the bigger guns split the air not too far away. Everyone flinched. “Alright, that’s our objective, we get past those guns and we hit them on the inside, boys and girls.”
Bri picked her spot along the lakebed’s crescent rise. There was a shallow drainage that had caught a number of branches. It was as good a place as any to cover 37’s approach and clear the guns.
Ten seconds later, she was on her stomach, crawling toward the space between a branch and a stone the size of her head. She reached over her shoulder and pulled her rifle free. The moment her fingers wrapped around the grip, the barrel smoothly extended into place and a thread-thin data cable slid into the port along her wrist.
She took a breath and steadied herself.