Guard at the Gates of Hell (Gladius Book 1) Read online

  And he wanted this battle, like no other he'd ever fought. The Predator was down there. A man who'd lost his family to a Predator, the Legate wanted to come to grips with this one with an almost sensual passion. He knew his men were feeling the same way, but his desire was more intense. He'd always been more emotional than everyone else, something his wife had forever teased him about, but there it was. Now, as he watched the reconnaissance battle on his visor screen with eyes that promised the fury of the Lord Above's own lightning, that same vital energy was about to be loosed. Three thousand of history's greatest killers were about to be launched - guided and directed by a man that had no mercy within him.

  The Legate watched the green icons of his scouts as they slid through the town, silently stalking Wareegans that had no idea the scouts were there. Every so often, a green icon would meet a yellow Wareegan icon, and the yellow icon would vanish with deadly finality. Rarely, the yellow icon would vanish and the green icon would turn red, indicating a scout's death. The Wareegans were being blinded and the Legate was sure they knew it, but not how it was happening. With any luck, the Wareegan commander would hurry his main force into Bayview to attempt to fix the problem. Fine. That was exactly what the Legate wanted. Urban areas were the most difficult and confusing terrain in which to fight. Confusion was where the Gladius fought best.

  The wind ruffled his beard beneath his helmet visor as the Legate stood next to his command sled, and waited with inbred frightening patience for just the right moment as the time dilation hormone produced by the extra lobe in his brain began to take effect. Things began to slow down, as his mental processes speeded up, one of the secrets that made the Gladius so deadly in combat.

  The last APCs were loaded and moving away from the assault shuttles. Now.

  Legate Corona came up on the all hands net. //"9-6, assault power."//

  All down the line, the eerily blank faces of helmet visors carefully watched power indicators climb as the sled drivers inched their throttles towards maximum, still holding their quivering sleds in check. Strapped in behind their drivers, grim faced men, expressions hidden by their own visors, tightened harnesses and settled themselves for the charge. Next to the three Cohort Commanders, fully trained Gladii that happened to be teenage boys opened their own visors and placed their brusharas to their lips. The coming of those that hunted the demons of Hell itself would be well and truly announced.

  The Legate was aboard the command sled, strapped securely in place when three triple tones sounded in his helmet. All three Cohorts were ready to go. He raised his right arm, hand open as though clawing at the sky. He could feel the energy of the Victrix, straining at the leash. His lower jaw jutting forward in the unconscious gesture of a Gladius about to attack, he closed his hand as though grasping the power of a sun to throw at his enemies and brought it down with a snap as he gave the old, old order.

  //"CATTAN NA BRUSHARA!"// Sound the battle shout.

  Two of the firing battery's six guns went into rapid fire mode with ten 16cm guided bolts on the way in less than a minute. The gun mounts used directed grab fields directed by recon nannies to bend the paths of the bolts to the desired impact point, the Wareegan landing zone. Assault shuttles, defensive screens down, started to erupt in explosions from the bolts' plasma fields. It took the standby crews on the shuttles precious seconds, seconds they didn't have, to get their own guns and defensive screens ready. By the time turrets were targeting the two legion guns, over thirty of the shuttles were destroyed. As return fire blew away the first two guns, the second pair of guns in the firing battery erupted, continuing the fire mission. Again, Wareegan assault shuttles fireballed. The third pair of guns started firing bolts on the traffic flow of Wareegan APCs. Raiders tumbled out, getting away from their now dangerous vehicles.

  Aboard the racing, jinking, bobbing sleds the brushara bearers sounded their horns, announcing the coming of the Victrix with a solid wall of sound. The electronically amplified blast of the horns was as much a weapon as a summoning of the Gladius to battle, and a Gladius always made best use of any weapon. Window plass was shattering in Bayview.

  #####

  The Wareegans flinched from the horns, loud enough even at this distance to be painful, and knew the return of an ancestral nightmare, a horror mentioned only softly at rare times. The Wareegans thought the Gladii were gone away, leaving the outer worlds of humanity defenseless and vulnerable. They weren't. The Gladii were here and they were coming. Run, hide, tremble, or fight. It was all the same to the coldly professional, terrible, terrible, kilted hunters with their axes.

  The Wareegan commander also heard the horns and everything that had happened on this raid suddenly fell into perspective. This planet was already proving expensive, but now it was going to be catastrophic. They were in the killing ground of an ambush such as they'd never known.

  He was an experienced veteran of profitable attacks on many worlds, seeking food and goods. Now he had to salvage as much as possible from this situation. His heavy weapons were back on the mother ship, left because they were unnecessary. Nothing on this planet was supposed to be well defended. Now that he needed his heavy firepower, he was forced back on individual and light crew served weapons.

  So be it. In clicks and hisses, his orders went out, changing deployments and fire plans. Once in the city, they stood a chance against the oncoming avengers. The remaining assault shuttles retargeted their guns, turning from counterbattery fire to attack the sleds. But the sleds weren't easy targets.

  A combat sled was mostly a motor, controls, a warhead, and passenger platform, but it did contain defensive screen and moved with incredible agility. The sleds were hard to hit, but, here and there, the Wareegan gunners were lucky.

  #####

  The Legate's visor HUD showed the position of his sleds and the losses he was taking on the charge into Bayview. He felt the loss of every man he'd taken out of the deadly confusion of Victrix Base, but the cold, professional part of his brain assessed his losses as minimal for an attack. They were taking hits, but the turn of the Gladius was coming.

  The yellow icons of the Wareegans were flowing into Bayview, and that was what he wanted. The strobing lights of the beacons deployed by the scouts were clear, marking essential objectives. First Cohort had the responsibility for protecting the shelters. A battalion of Third would continue on to the Wareegan landing zone, tasked to capture four carefully preserved assault shuttles. The Legate wanted the mother ship, and those shuttles were key to his plan. He wanted the Wareegan force away from the assault shuttles.

  Second and most of Third would be delivered in key positions among the raiders. Unlike earlier military forces, the Corps didn't seek linear battle. With their inbred coordination ability and psychic link, the Gladii knew where they were and what they were doing within the wholesale confusion of a melee. They made full use of it. The Corps came, not to oppose an enemy frontally, but to get among him, to kill from within his formations.

  //"Beacon minus fifteen,"// the driver's flat voice came over the com. Fifteen seconds.

  Drop.

  Like the other five men on his sled, the Legate hit his harness release and fell free on his no-weight belt. The sled continued on to explode in the Wareegan landing zone. Other sleds, now free of their passengers, rained down on the remaining shuttles, destroying almost the last vehicle mounted weapons supporting the Wareegan advance.

  The Legate expertly landed with a springy bounce at a street intersection, quickly joined by his staff and security guards. The Predator's eyes were gone, as well as his fire support. Now it was time to start fighting the battle. There were still far too many Wareegans left, but that was irrelevant. The Gladius was here to kill the Predator and protect citizens. That would be done.

  #####

  The Wareegans were veterans, experienced raiders. That meant they were accustomed to the fire and crashing confusion of combat, but only with forces less capable than theirs. They were predators who sought o
ut the weak and took what they wanted, including helpless victims for food. Now, hearing the sound of the horns, they were confronted with an ancestral nightmare. They were predators, but those that hunted predators were here. Fear coiled through the confusion in their forces wreaked by constant bolt fire, a fear out of their darkest dreams, now made real.

  Creatures over three measures tall, insectoid horrors to much of the galaxy, now clicked dry maniples in nervous fear and clutched weapons tighter in their long gangly arms as they loped to defensive positions. They were afraid. Afraid of barely seen deadly killers out of nightmare.

  #####

  Over eighteen hundred men of the Second and Third Cohorts hit the Wareegan formations like the pellets of an ancient shotgun blast. Hitting dirt in three man teams, the Gladii immediately started moving in a carefully drilled interlaced weave with speed and perfect coordination, killing as they went, cutting holes and furrows in Wareegan positions. The Gladius wasn't a linear fighter unless he had to be one. Instead, every legion tried to insert itself into the middle of an enemy then chew its way out through their guts. In Bayview, they succeeded.

  The Wareegans tried to form, tried to create lines and positions out of the howling chaos caused by the deadly hunters in their midst, but it wasn't working. The raiders were responding like the veterans they were, but they were shooting their own more often than they hit the indistinct figures forming the murderous teeth of the buzzsaws tearing away at them. Most of their fire was wasted. The Gladii teams flowed in and out, killing and vanishing, hitting who knew where next. Gradually, the Wareegans were being pushed back, broken up, herded into groups that had no ability to support each other. Once that happened, they were dead.

  Improvised command posts were thrown together by frantic effort and as quickly destroyed by whichever Gladius team was closest. A team would hit a Wareegan CP, only to vanish back into the howling chaos after seconds of high intensity firepower destroyed everything. Groups of Wareegans fell into positions with no time to set up lanes of fire or any kind of mutual support. Sometimes they would survive for minutes, pouring out bolt fire at fleeting targets, then the demon hunters would find a weakness and suddenly be down in those positions with them. Close engagement with a Gladius in full combat mode wasn't survivable by anyone or anything. Axes and short swords did for bolt guns in close, or plasma grenades would wipe a few more Wareegans from the face of Cauldwell. Battle dissolved into total confusion, confusion that was the home of the Gladius. The Wareegans were veterans, but not from this kind of battle. None of the Empire's enemies were. None that fought the Gladius were left alive.

  #####

  Each of the public shelters were surrounded with legion perimeters, small fixed nodes of a single three man team each, with other teams in constant motion on the outer edge of the shelter's defensive perimeter. Colonel Athan's command team was also moving fast, checking positions, marking approach areas, moving between shelter perimeters, killing the odd Wareegan, but still taking contact reports and coordinating actions.

  Colonel Karl Athan had his cohort well in hand, as much as Protac and Evns smoothly controlled their own cohorts in the chaos of the main battle. That meant Karl was aware of the incoming scout and his companions when they entered a shelter perimeter and was on the scene to meet them shortly thereafter.

  "Good work, Kamikal," he said at the general location of where he knew the scout was. He opened his visor for a few moments to look at the two refugees. One was a male citizen, but the other was the legion's newest recruit. He looked at the Wareegan bolt gun in Shana's hands.

  "Got it off a dead Wareegan she killed," Legionnaire Kamikal supplied. "Shana did good, Colonel." Athan nodded.

  "Well done, Recruit," he told Shana. "I thought you were coming along properly. Glad to see I was right."

  He started issuing orders. "Legionnaire, take the citizen to the shelter then get back out there where you belong. Ettranty, you may join the citizen or take up a guard position with the final security teams. Unless it all goes to shit, you've done your fighting but we take no chances with citizens' lives. Which is it?"

  Shana took a tighter grip on her weapon. "The Victrix is here, and I'm part of the Victrix." Jhom looked at her with wide eyes, seeing something he'd never imagined.

  Athan smiled. "Good enough. Move."

  Jhom was escorted down the long zig-zag passage below a large building and inside the shelter's heavy blast door, while Shana was given a combat headset for communications purposes and assigned an overwatch position at one of the building's upstairs windows. As she looked out the window, she settled herself and realized she was feeling contentment. She was a part of the Whole.

  #####

  The battalion detailed to capture four Wareegan assault shuttles already had three of them. The fourth blew when a crew member induced an engine overload, destroying the shuttle and the attackers on board. Spoof and implosion packages were quickly but carefully installed aboard the other three, then the teams got off fast. In the past, Wareegan ships quickly recovered a shuttle when its crew died, preventing its use by enemies. The spoof packages were to keep the mother ship from knowing what was on board and the implosion packages were the reason. The powerful black hole generators in the implosion packages would put paid to the mother ship if the plan worked.

  The assault shuttles lifted under data link control and soared skyward. As soon as their departure was reported to the Legate, he acknowledged, and turned his attention to controlling the overall battle. Third and Second were close to meshing. When that happened, the Wareegans were finished.

  PLANETARY CONTROL CENTER

  The mother ship was bringing back the surviving shuttles, but it also launched more help for the beleaguered force on the planet. Imin watched carefully as the icons of fighters and several more assault shuttles separated from the mother ship.

  "Force detached from the mother ship," the tracking rating announced. "Five assault shuttles and fifteen, say again one-five, fighters escorting. They're on track for Bayview."

  Imin nodded. Reinforcements or aerial support. It made no difference. Warning orders and deployment vectors went out to the depleted Guard squadrons between the Wareegans and the planet. No ambush this time. This one was going to be a straight up knife fight. He opened his channel to the Legate. //"They're bringing in air support. Fifteen fighters and five assault shuttles. We'll cut them down, but I'm not sure we can take them all. You're going to get leakers. Our fighters will follow them down into atmosphere, so be careful who you shoot."//

  //"Understood,"// Corona responded. //"My anti-air teams have your IFF. Wareegan assault shuttles are configured for air to ground, but not their fighters. I suggest you make shuttles the primary targets. If the mother ship takes in those implosion packages, the Wareegan fighters will be orphans. Good hunting."//

  //"Good hunting."// Imin passed on his targeting orders as he watched his squadrons orient to hit the Wareegans.

  CAULDWELL NEAR SPACE

  The remaining fighters in the six Guard squadrons outnumbered the Wareegans, but they had to get through the alien fighter screen to get to the assault shuttles. This was going to be an old fashioned fighter-to-fighter furball. That was perfectly all right with Bat. The Guard was ready. Bat already had six confirmed kills and he wanted more. So did his pilots.

  //"All squadrons,"// came the flat voice in his headset, //"this is Control. Designate hostile approach vector as zero incoming. Zulu One, Zulu Five, vector 4-0-0-0 mils relative to hostile approach. Zulu One at five o clock, Zulu Five at eleven o'clock. Zulu Four, Zulu Six, vector 2-8-0-0 mils. Zulu Four at eleven o'clock and Zulu Six at five o'clock. Zulu Two, Zulu Three, vector zero reciprocal with Zulu Two at eleven o'clock. Primary target is the assault shuttles. Good hunting, out."//

  Bat nodded. Okay, the Jawbreakers were hey-diddle-diddle, right up the middle. Fun. The Wareegan formation was in range and gunfire began crossing. No pretty formations this time, assholes, Bat thought. His people
were weaving and dancing, defensive shields maxed forward, grabbing snap shots when they could. Bat skidded to his right, depending on his new wingman to handle fighter interference, then targeted an assault shuttle and fired. The Wareegan blossomed with a momentary brilliance then Bat was locked on another. Third squadron nailed another, but two of the shuttles were past him, streaking for Bayview. Cursing, he hauled around to dive after them, calling for assistance.

  Behind him, the recovered assault shuttles docked on automatic and the mother ship suddenly became a gravity crumpled piece of space debris.

  BAYVIEW

  In Bayview, fleeing Wareegans blew their way into a chance-found shelter that wasn't on any of the Legate's maps. The raiders took a few moments to kill the screaming, terrified occupants - including MP Theodore - then turned to form a defense at the entrance. They were too late.

  The Gladii team closely following them went in at top speed behind the fire of their bolt guns then finished the job with axes. The team leader took a few seconds to survey the luxury of the shelter and the scattered bloody pieces of human bodies. Dead citizens. What he was here to prevent. Report it and move on. There were more raiders out there, if fewer and fewer. The Predator was dying hard, but dying. The Victrix was winning this one.

  #####

  Wareegan assault shuttles cut into the air above Bayview, marked by the flare of burning atmosphere on their shields and announced by the crash of sonic booms. Right behind them came Guard fighters, sideslipping and banking as they frantically tried to force an attack curve out of unforgiving physics. The Wareegan pilots only could only make one firing run before the fighters were on them and they knew it. All thought of careful targeting and the heavy weapons that were their cargo went out the airlock. There was no contact with forces on the ground. Do something else. They programmed maximum effect firing passes. Whatever they hit might be an enemy, after all. They were going to die and this was their only chance to kill the nightmare hunters described in choppy, frantic transmissions from the ground.