The Gates of Hell Read online

  The Tide kept coming.

  Renzo could see them, an endless, seething mass of courage and destruction, forming new lines in the trees ahead, fighting meter by meter up the treacherous slope as his own Alces poured hatred and fire down on them like the judgment of all the gods. He fired until his MAC clicked empty and his temperature indicator screamed at him that he was low on water and in a potential overheat situation. Not that he needed the CASPer to tell him that. He was wet from crown to toes, drenched in sweat and stinking with the fear he refused to let into his mind. Instead, he took aim with his laser and fired—

  —only to feel his suit kick him so hard in the side that he spun like a top as the rock-strewn ground tilted wildly to the side and rushed up to meet his face. His last thought before everything went dark was that he’d thought dying would hurt more.

  * * *

  “Colonel! Colonel! Renzo!”

  It was the anguish in Tom’s voice that finally penetrated the thick darkness that wreathed Renzo’s mind. He blinked his eyes open to see the interior displays of his CASPer lit up like a starport on a dark night. Half a dozen warnings blinked red and yellow at him, and a high, persistent buzzing rang in his ears.

  Again. Between the thunder and the battle sounds, tinnitus was starting to seem like an old, familiar friend.

  He groaned and toggled off the warnings, diverting the last of his water to the suit to act as an emergency coolant while he fought to get his hands and knees under him.

  “Oh, thank all the Gods!” Tom’s voice echoed overhead as Renzo pushed up and rolled himself over. The ringing in his ears got louder with the effort, swelling in volume and taking on a high, ululating tone that shivered down his spine—

  He looked up just in time to see a Red Tide CASPer bearing down on the clump of them, midway through a juice-burning leap. Without thinking, Renzo raised his laser and fired a burst that flashed out through the air and sliced through the midpoint of the suit. Lightning stabbed through the sky as well, proving the inadvisability of the CASPer’s usual big jumps as it wreathed the attacker in blue flame and brought it crashing to the forest floor. It landed about ten meters below Renzo and skidded down the slope, fetching up in a crumpled heap next to one of the big boulders that dotted the terrain.

  Renzo couldn’t do anything but breathe and stare. He’d come that close to death not once, but twice in a matter of minutes. The lid on the mental box that held his emotions shifted, and all the stuff he couldn’t afford to deal with threatened to spill out. He closed his eyes and breathed, shoving the lid down onto the box as hard as he could.

  “Let me help you up, Colonel,” Tom said, his voice barely penetrating Renzo’s fog. He felt himself being lifted and set back on his feet, and once he was steady, he opened his eyes.

  “Thank you, Tom,” he said, in control once more.

  “Looks like you took a ricochet,” Tom said, pointing to Renzo’s left leg. He used his external camera to sweep for damage and found that Tom was right. A seared crease in the outermost layer of armor just above the knee joint bore mute testimony to the round that had toppled him with its force. He didn’t want to think about what could have happened had it been a direct hit.

  “What did The Strong say?” Renzo asked, urgency flooding his tone as he remembered the errand he’d sent Tom on earlier.

  “They got nothing to spare, sir,” Tom said, his voice tightening up as he delivered the bad news. “They’ve got problems of their own with the Lone Star Company charging up the right. What’s worse, Colonel Vincent is hurt in a bad way, and the rest of the line is struggling to bring artillery up the slope. They’ve just barely beaten off the latest attack, thanks to a crazy arm-blade charge by a new company arriving under a guy named O’Roarke. Crazy brave sonofabitch. He didn’t make it, but the line held! The line sure enough held!”

  “We’re gonna need ammunition,” Renzo said, just as Lieutenant Aeryn Mata approached.

  “Sir,” she said. “Nicholas…Lieutenant Fauls is dead. I’ve taken command of his platoon, but more than half of them are badly wounded, maybe five dead. If the Reds come up that hill again in the same strength, I don’t know if we can hold them!”

  “Spread the word to take ammunition from the wounded and the dead,” he ordered her, as that chilling cry began to rise in the trees below them once more. “Go!”

  “Here they come again, sir!” SGM Spoljoric’s grim pronouncement wasn’t entirely necessary, but Renzo didn’t bother to tell him so. He contented himself with aiming his laser and firing into the first CASPer to come into clear view. The CASPer dropped and rolled away, but like before, another took its place.

  “Make your shots count, boys and girls!” the sergeant major called out as he raised his own weapon while his half-crippled CASPer leaked jumpjuice and hydraulic fluid onto the rock-strewn ground. “Just like the colonel! Make every one a kill shot!”

  Once more the Tide rolled up the slope. Once more the Alces opened fire with devastating effect. Renzo kept firing, dimly aware of his officers’ shouts of encouragement to the men and women in their charge. His fuel cell indicator blinked first yellow, and then orange as each shot depleted his precious fuel reserves. Overhead, more lightning crashed, casting the grim scene in a surreal, pulsating, strobing light.

  How many of these bastards did they bring to this shit planet?

  Beside him, SGM Spoljoric swore and jettisoned his laser rifle attachment. While Renzo kept firing to cover him, the sergeant major crawled forward in his damaged CASPer and hauled up the corpse of a fallen Tide trooper. With grim practicality, SGM Spoljoric ripped the dead trooper’s MAC out of its shoulder mount and braced it in his lap before somehow using the dangling wires to cause the thing to fire. It would have thrown him backwards from the recoil if he hadn’t been braced against a boulder. But its report was a welcome addition to the chaos of death and noise boiling up and down the slope in both directions.

  Renzo fired once more and noticed that the enemy was flowing left again. He dimly heard Aeryn calling out to her troopers.

  “Keep it tight boys and girls!” she screamed. “Keep it tight…FIRE!”

  On her command, a withering onslaught of reserved MAC rounds crashed through the trees, followed up immediately by a barrage of laser fire. The first two ranks of Red Tide CASPers faltered, but the following ranks answered with that eerie, ululating howl and charged up the slope, arm blades glinting in the web of lightning flashing overhead. Aeryn’s troopers met the attacking force with a resounding crash that reverberated through the forest floor as tungsten-steel blades sliced into CASPers. Defenders used everything from MACs to lasers to their own steel blades to hold their tenuous position.

  “Tom!” Renzo screamed as two of Aeryn’s troopers disappeared under the wave of oncoming Red Tide CASPers. “Fill that hole!”

  Tom bounded forward in a lightning-defying jump. He snapped open his arm blade and slashed down on the attackers as he landed in the midst of the fray. Aeryn and her top NCO charged over to join him, standing shoulder-to-shoulder and pushing back against the impossibly tenacious forces arrayed against them. All around, Alces troopers were running out of ammunition. Renzo watched as one young trooper—he wasn’t sure who exactly—picked up a boulder and used it to smash the chestplate of one of the attackers, crushing the Tide driver inside.

  Somehow, against all the odds, the Alces held as the Tide washed up against their line and then, once more, retreated back down the hill. As the enemy CASPers disappeared back into the trees and behind the stacked bodies of their fallen brothers and sisters, Renzo looked around in despair.

  They had held, but it was obvious they couldn’t do so one more time.

  “Sir!” Aeryn called out as he bounded over to her position. She stood with Tom supporting her, the right side of her CASPer a smoking ruin. “Half my troopers are down, most of the rest are wounded.”

  “And your ammo? Power?”

  “Mostly gone, sir. The left is too thin
to hold again.”

  “Sir!” the voice came from the other direction, back toward the right. Renzo turned to see Captain John Hooper approaching. “Sir, my troopers are out of ammunition, and our fuel cell reserves are dry! Some of my boys and girls have nothing at all!”

  “Sir,” Tom said quietly as the rest of the officers began to gather around, “Maybe we ought to pull out.”

  “No,” Renzo said, Vincent’s words ringing in his memory. “No, we can’t do that. Our orders were to hold this hill at all costs. If we pull out, the Red Tide comes sweeping up the slope and over the hill and the whole flank collapses. The Caroon civvies and all our comrades get slaughtered.”

  “Well,” SGM Spoljoric asked, somehow managing to sound laconic even now, “what do we do, sir?”

  Renzo looked around at the fallen Alces, at the survivors, all staring at him with terror and fatigue.

  “We can’t run away,” he said slowly, as sure of that fact as he was of his own name. “But if we stay here, we can’t shoot. So…let’s fix bayonets.”

  “What?”

  “Our arm blades. Fix them out, like bayonets.” He looked down the slope at the piles of dead and disabled CASPers littering the ground, victims of his troopers’ sustained fire. “They gotta be tired, the Reds. They gotta be nearly spent if we are. So fix your arm blades out rigid.”

  “You mean charge?” Captain Hooper asked, his voice cracking in surprise.

  “Yes, but listen, here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to charge down the hill, moving across the slope as we do. We’ll use Hooper’s point as the pivot and swing like a door, pushing them into the fire coming from the rest of The Strong over on our right. Just like we pulled back this left side of the company. Now we’re going to swing it down. We swing like a door, understand?” He looked around at his officers, at their dirt-smeared, smoke-stained CASPers. “Does everybody understand?”

  “Yes, sir,” they chorused, and in a tiny corner in the back of his mind, Renzo thought he could hear a thread of excitement and hope where moments before there had been none.

  “Good. Mata, you take the left wing, and I’ll take the right,” Renzo said. Maybe if he said it enough, it wouldn’t sound so crazy. “And when I give the command, I want the whole company to go forward, swinging down and to the right.”

  “All right, sir,” LT Aeryn Mata said.

  Renzo inhaled once, slowly, and focused on her CASPer.

  “Move,” he said quietly. She and all the other officers turned and raced back to their positions in the lines as more lightning crashed in the sky overhead. Renzo didn’t know if it was the still-building ionization or the prospect of action, but something tingled through the air, infecting them all.

  “Bayonets!” he shouted, and every speaker from every CASPer left in the company let loose with a full-throated roar, deep and savage; it drowned out the distant, ululating howl that had haunted them all day. All along the line, left and right, his officers echoed the command while troopers snapped their arm blades out and extended them to their furthest reach. Those who had rounds left for their MACs charged them. Others siphoned precious jumpjuice from downed friends and enemies alike.

  “Stay low,” Renzo ordered, listening as the command echoed down the line. He pushed back to the right, Sgt Maj Spoljoric moving in his wake. “Conserve your juice. Ready!”

  Left and right, the CASPers crouched, preparatory to their first real jump. Renzo settled himself in position at the head of the formation on the right and snapped his own arm blade out to its full length. On the far left, he could see Aeryn getting her troopers formed up and in position.

  “Fix bayonets!” she shouted, snapping her own arm blade out as she did. Her troopers followed suit, some of them cheering on her bravery as she stood between them and the inexorable approach of the Red Tide from below.

  “Mata! Left wing, right wheel!” he shouted, borrowing a term from the parade ground training maneuvers they’d all done before leaving Earth.

  “Right wheel!” Mata echoed at the top of her speaker’s volume. She turned to face the oncoming enemy and crouched, her blade out.

  “Charge!” Renzo called.

  “CHARGE!” Mata echoed and fired her jumpjets. Unlike the earlier attackers, however, she kept her trajectory low and used the power to push forward while staying below the line of the trees. Her troopers followed suit, swinging back toward Renzo’s position just as he’d envisioned. They cheered their gallant lieutenant as they drove, blades out, toward the mass of CASPers approaching up the hill.

  Renzo watched, heart in his throat, and waited for the line to swing just so—

  “CHARGE!” he shouted and hit his own jets. The men and women around him echoed his cry, and the roar from their throats and the massed jumpjets of their CASPers caused the onrushing Red Tide to falter.

  Once more CASPer collided with CASPer among the twisted steel and tangled thickets of trees and boulders. Metal crashed on metal, and cries turned to screams of rage and pain as the Alces hacked and stabbed their way through the front ranks of Red Tide attackers. Somewhere off to the left another throaty cry rose, and a massed volley of MAC fire ripped into the Red Tide’s right flank.

  Renzo ducked and punched his blade straight through the chest compartment of one of the Tide CASPers, then kicked the metal corpse off before firing his jets again. Below him, one of his troopers grappled in a death struggle with a Tide trooper, and he angled himself to land within reach. A swipe of his arm blade against the vulnerable back of the Tide trooper’s knee joints brought the enemy CASPer crashing to the ground.

  Another volley echoed from the left, and Renzo looked up to see his Bravo squad, long thought lost, entering the fray and rolling up the right side of the attacking Red Tide.

  The flankers had become the flanked.

  All around him Tide CASPers flinched back from their right. Then in ones and twos, and gradually in larger groups, they raised hands and retracted their weapons, signaling surrender. For just a moment, Renzo feared that his Alces troopers’ blood was up too high for them to accept, but he need not have feared. One minute they fought like demons, but the second surrender was offered, his men and women backed off and accepted.

  That ululating howl was his only warning.

  Renzo turned just in time to see a Tide CASPer with colonel’s insignia land next to him, MAC pointed dead at his chestplate. At this range, a MAC round would rip his armor to shreds of metal and pulverize him on contact. He froze and waited.

  Click.

  The enemy CASPer seemed to sag as its driver retracted the empty MAC and raised his hands. Renzo raised his arm blade and held it steady, its point centimeters from the crimson crest logo painted on the chestplate.

  “Shit. Your move, sir,” the CASPer’s driver said, voice echoing from the CASPer’s external speakers.

  “Come on out,” Renzo said.

  The Red Tide commander let out a sigh and popped the hatch on his CASPer. The chestplate slowly lifted, and for the first time, Renzo got a good look at the man who’d cost him so many lives.

  “Colonel Otis Calvin, commander of the Red Tide Company, at your service,” the man said. He looked as wrung out and haunted as Renzo himself felt, his haptic suit drenched in sweat and clinging to his body as he wearily climbed out of his CASPer. On impulse, Renzo popped his own canopy and let the man see his face.

  “Colonel Renzo Stewardson, Alcey’s Alces,” Renzo said. “I’m pleased to make your acquaintance.”

  Strange, perhaps, but it was true. The Red Tide had fought hard during charge upon charge, and Renzo would never say aught against their bravery or toughness. But he infinitely preferred speaking to their commander like this to further fighting.

  “Wish I could say the same, Colonel,” Calvin said, giving Renzo a half smile. Renzo snorted and found himself smiling as well.

  “Well, I understand that. It seems your men and women have largely surrendered. I’ll have your parole if you�
�ll give it, and we can gather up your wounded to take to our medics. Is there anything else you need right away?”

  “Could I please have some water?” Calvin asked.

  “Absolutely,” Renzo said, and turned to flag down one of his medics. The woman approached, her face worried.

  “Were you hurt, sir?” she asked.

  “No, I’m fine. But please give Colonel Calvin here some water and see to his men and women as well as our own. He’s given his parole.” Renzo looked over at the defeated colonel, who gave him that half-smile again and nodded.

  “Of course, sir. Colonel, if you’ll please come with me. We’ve water and food for you and your troopers just over here…”

  * * *

  That night Renzo found it hard to sleep, despite the grinding fatigue that pulled at his every thought and made him feel like he was swimming through an ocean of maple syrup. Minutes after their crazy charge, reinforcements had arrived from the center with water, ammunition, food, and nanites. Renzo had seen to it that his men and women, and the Red Tide prisoners, were properly cared for. Every one of them got a good meal, plenty of water, and whatever medical care they required. Battlefield custom held that the captured Tide CASPers were his to keep, so he sent his mechanics to ensure they salvaged as much as they could while under the watchful eye of the reinforcing MinSha company.

  But even after all that, he still couldn’t rest. So he found himself walking under a moonlit, lightning-webbed sky toward the medical facility and Colonel Calvin’s quarters.

  “Can’t sleep?” Calvin asked him as he stepped in through the tiny entrance to the underground cavern that led to the Caroon settlement.

  “No,” Renzo said. “I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Not at all, Colonel,” Calvin said. “Come on in, I was just having the single drink your medic allowed me. Join me?”