Fighting

Heart aching from the footage of Klaus-21's death, struggling to keep her mind on the task at hand, Fawzia-11 Watched as her team made history. After sixty-five years of passively observing events from afar, this day the Watchers assisted their defenders in battle. Peng had already disabled six vehicles by triggering grenades or munitions, and he'd destroyed three drones and four missiles by ripping at internal circuitry. By focusing on his rage against the people trying to kill him, he could interact with physical objects more powerfully than his real body ever could have. Niko had disabled eight vehicles by projecting himself aboard while carrying EMP grenades, though his biometrics warned he was starting to show the strain of pushing his powers hard. Astoundingly, Duri reported that he'd just successfully created a short-range gateway between his chamber and his apartment, and he'd soon try something more aggressive. Even Anya had a plan for teaming up with Niko to try something more ambitious than all the rest put together. Most important of all, Charlotte would soon move against the horrifying Lamia seventy lightyears away.

And here I am… all but useless. For fifty-one years, she'd served humanity, suspecting that it might never be possible for a Watcher to do more than observe. And now, with new and wondrous powers finally being unlocked, she was too old to employ them. Stop that! she chided herself. You did all you could for half a century, and you deserve at least some of the credit for the skill and drive of your team. And while the others were using newer and flashier powers, she could still contribute the old-fashioned way.

Sending her awareness to the next vehicle matching Duri's description, she surged with elation. This'll do! Noting the support personnel and communication equipment within the unarmed transport, she sent the coordinates to Niko.

"Alright, 29… Let's do this!"

Anya-28 stretched, flexed, and readied her tasers. Niko reached up to place a hand on her shoulder, and she felt his mind project into her brain. She sensed just a fraction of his pain as he ran the torturous simulation that emulated his CPN-Ω, and the barely-controlled distress he felt over the deaths of so many hostiles. She knew he'd be sensing her emotions, and he'd have to revel in them, embrace them, if he were to make this work. So she tried to stoke emotions he could easily embrace. She reflected on her deep respect for the soldiers on the front line, her hope that this battle could be won without any of their protectors dying, and her eagerness to use her strength for something important.

Then, with a mental sensation much like rocketing through space… she stood within an enemy vehicle.

The tracked transport rumbled across the ice. Three communications officers struggled to coordinate and rally the leaderless enemy forces, and two armed guards peered out narrow viewports.

Before any of them even noticed the arrival of a skinny preteen boy and a heavily-muscled young woman, Anya moved.

The closest guard and one of the comm officers went down, the brutal electrical jolts stopping their hearts. Niko dropped to his knees to inject them both with adrenaline to save their lives and muscle paralytics to prevent that mercy from getting anyone killed.

The other soldier turned, bewildered, then he reached for his pistol. He was on the far side of a comm station, so Anya threw both of her tasers. One struck him with the business end, and Niko scurried over to him with another pair of injector pens.

The remaining two comm officers jumped to their feet and attacked, but they were unarmed. Anya's brutal kick shattered the kneecap of the larger man, and she blocked a punch aimed at her face. A follow-up hit caught her in the side, but her solid frame endured it without any trouble. She smashed both fists into the man's face, and Niko stuck him with his last paralytic dose when he hit the floor. The man with the shattered knee got a grip on Anya's ankle and heaved, but she spun and kicked out as she fell. The man's jaw broke, and she sprang back to her feet when his grip slipped. She pivoted, dealt one final kick to the side of his head, and he fell still.

Footsteps pounded toward her. The vehicle must now be on autopilot, because the driver charged toward Anya brandishing a combat knife. 28 hesitated, having never actually faced a knife before. She'd gotten into some nasty fights as a child back in Vladivostok, but no one had ever been crazy enough to bring a weapon…

Niko lunged into the driver's path, dropping to his hands and knees and bracing for the hit. The woman struck his left side hard, knocking the boy sprawling, and she pitched forward, the knife flying from her hands. Anya's kick took the driver in the face as she fell.

Unable to spare the time to check on Niko, Anya sprinted to the driver's seat. Despite the somewhat baffling array of controls, she was able to pick out the emergency stop option. She managed to keep her balance through the violent deceleration, and she turned in time to stop Niko from sliding into her. "You alright, little man?"

He groaned. "Yup..."

"Thanks for the help back there."

He made no attempt to rise. "Yer welcome..."

The transport slowed to a stop, and Anya sprinted back to the communications console. Numerous requests for instructions had cued up on the screen, and desperate voices reported steady losses. Good. Hasina was still pounding these creeps. And if this plan worked, Anya might just turn the tide.

With her implants helping her to make sense of the complex mess of controls, Anya accessed a command channel that should reach all enemy forces. "Mission accomplished! Mission accomplished! Fall back! We've flooded the target with Theragen gas, and the Watchers are doomed! Return to the coast for extraction!"

Anya felt pretty good about her performance. Just the right level of elation, without compromising the overall tone of authority and command.

But only a few of the recipients signaled acknowledgement before an override code came from a transport on the far side of the battlefield.

Then that transport commed her. "Fall back? Under fire? Those massive guns will be able to keep hitting us as we retreat! And even if we reach the coast, what good'll that do? The driller transports had to jettison their aquatic propulsion systems when we reached the ice sheet! You should know this was a one-way trip!"

Anya's bravado deserted her as that objection came through. Her board suggested the speaker was a fairly high-ranking officer, and she addressed Anya alone. Apparently, the rank and file of this attack didn't realize they had no exit strategy, and Anya had no answer…

But Duri did. The metal floor shimmered, and 22 rose into view. He quickly moved Anya aside, hit a series of commands, and said, "All units! The retreat order stands! The enemy is out of long-range missiles, and our best commando teams are taking out their rooftop guns even now! We'll have to abandon our vehicles at the coast, but we have numerous small submersibles waiting to get everyone to safety! The Watchers are as good as dead! Let's go home!"

Duri cut the channel, hit two more keys, and turned to give Anya a cocky smile. "I've isolated and jammed the comm signal from the officer that tried to argue with you. With any luck, he'll be ignored."

"Dude…" Niko said. "That was one impressive Deception roll."

"Not to mention the Computers skill-check," Duri said. "I was Watching that screen prior to opening my gateway, but it was still some tricky business. All told, that encounter went perfectly, and I deserve a mountain of XP."

"What are you blathering about?" Anya demanded, a bit dizzy as the adrenaline from the fight wore off.

"Sorry," Duri said. "I just really miss 21's RPG. The next session was gonna be so good…"

"Oh." Anya tried to be polite. "Am I supposed to say something about a Nat 20 or rolling with advantage?"

Niko smiled. "Good guess, but Klaus used a different system."

"Nerds…" Anya sighed, giving up. "Still, I think we just saved the day. If your performance actually convinces–"

Her words cut off as a vicious kick threw her to the deck. The man whose knee she'd shattered earlier snatched up the driver's fallen knife and pulled Anya's head back to expose her throat. So certain that the danger had passed, her mind locked up at the sight of the blade…

Niko rushed the man, and his little fists pounded away, but he couldn't do more than serve as a distraction. The man released Anya, who turned just in time to see the knife slash across Niko's face. The boy stumbled back, blood running from his eyes, holding up his arms in an attempt to protect his head.

Before the man could finish 29 off, Duri's tranq dart found his neck.

It had all happened so fast, Anya couldn't quite believe it. "Niko! Niko I'm so sorry!" She tried to get a good look at his eyes, and she had to order him to let her. Stoically, he complied, forcing his eyelids open.

Anya's blood ran cold.

Duri knelt, injecting the unconscious man with the antidote that would stop the powerful tranquilizer from killing him.

"I wish you hadn't saved that man," Anya said bitterly.

Duri hurried over, and he saw what she saw. "Oh.. oh Niko…"

"It's alright," the boy said, though he couldn't completely stop his voice from quivering. "We're Watchers. We don't need eyes to see."

Wilma Taibei sighed with relief. Her patient had stabilized. His shock was under control, and he responded well to the medication. She turned from the table, taking in the frantic motion in the crowded Infirmary, trying to determine who needed her attention the most.

Then she froze, slack-jawed, as Anya-28 stepped out of the wall.

Wilma blinked, certain she must be wrong. But on closer inspection, there was no door there. It really was just a wall.

Reaching back through the solid metal, Anya led Niko-29 through by the hand. Blood ran from the boy's eyes.

Wilma rushed forward, checking the boy's vitals, as Duri-22 emerged from the wall as well.

"Don't," Niko insisted. "My life's not in danger. Only give me treatment if nobody's in worse condition."

"But your eyes!" Doctor Sharma said, rushing over and leading the boy to a bed. "How can I ignore this?"

"I can still see!" Niko said sternly. "I'm Watching this room right now, and a lot of people need your help." His voice softened, and just a bit of the child's fear and loss showed through. "Thanks for caring… but it's too late anyway. Help them."

Duri took the boy's hand, Anya squeezed his shoulder, and Supriya gave him a hug.

Then the little doctor returned to her earlier patient, and the other two Watchers stepped through a different wall and vanished.

Wilma spared just a moment to approach Niko. "I'm proud of you," she said simply. "I only wish I could be so brave."

The boy managed a weak smile, then he closed his mangled eyes. "Thanks. Now go help somebody who's got it worse. I'm gonna keep Watching."

Hope and dread warred within Security Chief Hasina Rakoto. Despite the unprecedented number of attackers, HQ's long range and remote defenses had finally brought down the last of the airborne threats. Further, Duri, Anya, and Niko's takeover of the enemy communication vehicle had triggered a general retreat among most enemy battalions. There was no need to attempt pursuit on those fronts: more than a hundred nations had air and naval forces en route, and they'd easily capture or destroy the scattering hostiles.

But more than a hundred hostile vehicles had refused to retreat. By far the largest concentration of enemy ground forces, it must have an officer of sufficient rank to overrule Duri's false orders. Tanks, light artillery, missile systems, troop carriers, assault bikes, and support vehicles continued to advance on Squad 4's position. Two of Blanchet's soldiers had already suffered injuries from long-range bombardment, and the multi-missile platform attached to the squad had already expended its full arsenal. The gunships from Squad's 3 and 5 were en route, but they'd arrive after the enemy battalion.

With the skies clear, Hasina gave the order.

Accelerating to Mach 9, Captain Martins' transport blasted toward the beleaguered squad.

Another shell smashed into the ice just short of Eléa Blanchet's position, and a section of the ridgetop broke away. Private Anderson managed to scramble back in time to avoid a long tumble down the slope. His armor would've protected him from the fall, but he'd have been horribly exposed while trying to climb back toward cover.

The enemy battalion finally came into view on the horizon, and they approached at a threatening rate. Now that their heaviest artillery had fired off what appeared to be their entire ammo supply, all of the incoming vehicles advanced at their individual top speeds. With the last of the enemy drones destroyed, and global satellite access temporarily restricted to the Watchers and their allies' militaries, enemy targeting remained poor. But more and more enemy weapon systems were coming within range.

A storm of missiles launched from a dozen hostile vehicles, and Blanchet gritted her teeth. With Squad 4's missile platform out of munitions, her squad's remaining countermeasures might not be able to handle so much. "Staggered interception!" she ordered. "Gunship standby!"

The tank at the bottom of the hill behind her fired the last of its rocket pods, which split between the incoming missiles. Next, all three of her heavy weapons troops fired shoulder mounted swarm missiles, intercepting still more threats. Then, two of the squad's defense specialists went to work. Nelson fired streams of flares, while Aldave directed his HPM emitter toward the heaviest concentration of missiles that remained.

At Chief Rakoto's orders, Blanchet's one and only air asset rose up from behind the ridge.

The Kratos-4 heavy assault gunship opened up with its two secondary weapons. Light gauss chainguns with fast tracking and extreme rates of fire, they could annihilate infantry… or tear through incoming missiles. The gunship's striking design, a sharp narrow wedge of heavy armor, resembled an axe blade. It was optimized against head-on gauss fire, but could withstand small missiles as well. Blanchet's riflemen opened up with full auto, adding their own gauss rounds to the storm of metal stabbing out toward the deadly cloud of incoming ordnance. Dozens of missiles fell to the layered defense… but not all.

"Take cover!" Blanchet ordered, when the missiles were almost on top of them. Her troops scrambled back down the rear slope, and the gunship dropped altitude. Then the salvo hit home.

Ice smashed and shattered under the force of multiple hits, some of which packed incredible punch. The ridgeline splintered, triggering small-scale avalanches that sent two of her men tumbling backward all the way to the base of the slope. Their armor prevented serious injury, but it'd be a while before either could get back into firing positions. The crews of the missile platform and the APC had been climbing toward the ridge to join the firing line, but they'd now need far longer to get into position.

One missile struck the gunship, blowing off one of its chainguns, but its heavy armor endured, diverting the worst of the blast along the left plane of its forward wedge.

"Back to the ridge!" Blanchet commanded, struggling up the broken and uneven slope. "They'll be in range soon!"

Anderson reached the new ridgeline first, and he started firing. The sharp cracks of tiny sonic booms had grown commonplace during recent training sessions, and were easy to tune out. HQ's infantry rifles launched slugs at Mach 10, allowing the potential to hit targets at a tremendous distance if the marksman had a very steady hand. Heart pounding, legs screaming, Eléa crawled up beside him and took aim. Shells from the Sunflash-3 and Lonna-9 shattered one target after another. At this range, the targeting data supplied by the infantry's optics made the two vehicles' attacks murderously accurate. Eléa fired an armor-piercing round, and an assault bike crashed. The light, armed bikes in the enemy army had mechano-adaptive synthetic rubber tires with excellent traction, allowing them to reach tremendous speeds on the ice. But while moving nearly three hundred KPH, the wipeout from Eléa's shot was extreme. At Eléa's order, Anderson and three other soldiers joined her in peppering five incoming tanks with acid rounds. The Sunflash-3 then fired an EMP shell, which exploited the small gaps the acid had burned into those tanks' armor. Two of the machines completely shut down, while two others could no longer aim their main guns.

Most of her squad's infantry were now back in position, along with the crews of the APC and mobile missile system. Exhaling, blocking out everything except her target, Eléa put half a dozen acid rounds down the barrel of a light artillery cannon that was lining up a shot. When the massive gun fired, the projectile fell far short, as many of the magnetic coils had been ruined. The merculite shell detonated in a particularly satisfying friendly fire event. Two assault bikes wiped out, one completely vanished, and a tank lost propulsion. The artillery piece broke off, giving up on the attack.

Six cluster shells from HQ's heaviest guns rained devastation among the attackers, and the sixty or so remaining enemy vehicles began to spread out. Faster units moved to bypass the ridge and flank Blanchet's position, while APC's began coming to a stop and unloading troops.

"Expect sniper fire!" Blanchet warned. "Power up the DMS!"

Corporal Allistair, the largest soldier in the squad, activated his equipment. It was so bulky Eléa never could have so much as budged it, let alone haul it up an icy slope. It generated an extremely powerful magnetic field in a cone directed toward the enemy. By necessity, all gauss projectiles react very strongly to magnetic fields. As infantry started to open fire on Blanchet's squad, their gauss rounds were drawn in, veering toward Allistair. The front half of his huge device was an ultra dense armor plate consisting of crisscrossing layers of titanium alloys, synthetic nanotubes, and advanced ceramics. A storm of fire soon pinged and thudded into that shield, sparing the squad from hundreds of shots that might have been too much for their armor.

And better still, this defense didn't cause trouble for the return fire Squad 4 poured into the advancing enemy. Allistair's device communicated with all of their HUDs, allowing them to see a projection of the magnetic field and how it would bend the trajectory of their shots. Integrating that data into their targeting scopes, the squad maintained their accuracy.

Eléa put a shot through the forehead of an enemy sniper, while two soldiers taking aim with rocket launchers fell to Anderson and Prestes.

A shell from an enemy tank missed Allistair by less than a meter, its trajectory having been distorted by the magnetic field, but not enough to directly strike his position.

Damocles missiles shot out from her squad's heaviest infantry weapons, climbing into the air before descending on their targets from above. Each launched a flurry of small concussive rounds designed to trigger reactive armor systems, as well as reflective chaff to confuse anti-missile lasers. A tenth of a second later, the main warhead smashed home. Only the latest generation of tanks could shrug off such missiles, and soon numerous armored vehicles were burning.

An APC's chaingun unloaded on the ridge, and the impacts started to drive Allistair back. At Blanchet's order, Myers stopped firing and added his strength to keeping that vital equipment in position.

Blanchet might have panicked if not for the vicious training they'd all endured ever since Klaus-21's death. The weight of this enemy attack threatened to crush them, every shot they fired needed to inflict decisive damage, and one misstep could bring it all crashing down. But no one panicked. No one retreated, no one failed to remain cold and efficient in the face of all that deadly hate.

At Chief Rakoto's command, their Sunflash-3 tank abandoned its role providing heavy support against the main enemy column. It instead raced off to the right to intercept the flanking force coming around from that direction.

At the next signal, their gunship climbed rapidly, unloading with its primary weapon, an M990 Ancalagon rotary cannon. Unlike its far lighter chainguns for point defense or shredding infantry, this multi-barrel gauss autocannon fired hypersonic rounds heavy enough to buckle armor. Two seconds of concentrated fire from that monstrous gun chewed through a tank's forward glacis plate, then the ruinous stream of metal ripped three APC's apart. Heavy enemy guns rose to track it, but the gunship now pitched left, moving rapidly to the side while keeping its wedged front toward the enemy. Infantry-grade gauss rounds glanced uselessly off that armor, and a heavier chaingun did no more than dimple the angled surface. Even a direct hit from a tank deflected away, though it left a worrying gouge near the pilot's narrow view slit. One of the gunship's VTOL thrusters failed, but the other three kept it aloft. Five more enemy vehicles were disabled or destroyed by the gunship's murderous barrage before the aircraft again dropped below the ridgeline. It would now be responsible for fending off the vehicles trying to flank them from the opposite direction as their tank.

An artillery shell detonated close enough to throw three of her squad backwards, and as they tumbled down the hill their biometrics warned of broken bones. A sniper round from the extreme right of the main enemy column managed to bypass Allistair's magnetic cone. Gunter dropped his rifle and took cover, his right arm disabled. A second shot hit Anderson's shoulder at a shallow angle and glanced off, then Eléa silenced the sniper.

Chaff and smoke rounds blasted down toward the enemy, briefly giving the better-equipped defenders the advantage in visibility, but Blanchet doubted they could hold much longer…

An enemy light artillery piece aimed high, lobbing a large projectile into the air above Blanchet's position. Her instincts warned that this couldn't be bad aim, not at this range. "From above!" she shouted, curling into a ball to present a smaller target to the overhead threat. She hoped all the others would react as quickly.

The shell detonated, its shaped charge hurling heavy shrapnel rods down on the squad, completely bypassing the protection of Allistair's DMS.

Eléa flinched as a supersonic rod smashed her rifle's stock, and she saw that another had stabbed into the ice where her leg would have been if she hadn't curled up. Briefly transfixed by the sight, she saw that a small pool of greenish liquid seeped out of the rod, which had cracked open after impact. Is that… Varon-T neurotoxin?

Then her HUD warned of extreme fluctuations in Private Anderson's biometrics. She turned, seeing that he hadn't understood the significance of her last-second warning. He still lay stretched out, fully prone in a firing position. She noted the young man starting to quiver, even as he continued shooting down at the advancing enemy.

Two of the shrapnel rods had punched through his armor.