Kowacs squeezed the trigger, leaning into the recoil. He watched through the faint haze of powder gas as his bullets spattered vainly.
The fat black cylinder of a RAG grenade sailed toward the target in a flat arc. Kowacs and Sienkiewicz ducked beneath the dugout’s rim. The hollow whoomp! of the armor-piercing charge rippled the ground and lifted the Marines a few millimeters.
Kowacs looked out. Wind had already torn to rags the black smoke of the explosion. There was a thumb-sized hole through the machine’s skin. The cavity widened as the creature’s snout collapsed inward like a time-lapse image of a rotting vegetable.
Bradley knelt beside the dugout, sliding another RAG grenade over his shotgun’s barrel to the launching plate. It was the last of his four rounds: the ammo cans dangled empty from his bandoliers.
“Have you raised Grant?” the field first demanded. “Do we got some help coming?”
“I’ll settle for an extraction,” Sienkiewicz muttered. She looked down at the grenade stick she’d plucked from her equipment belt to throw if necessary. The grenade was a bunker buster, devastating in enclosed spaces but probably useless against an armored opponent in the open air.
“The trucks won’t crank,” Bradley said flatly. “The power packs are still at seventy percent, but current won’t flow through the control switches to the fans.”
There was a moment of silence relieved only by the vibration of rock which spewed out of the pithead and hurtled across the sky. The stream cooled only to yellow-orange by the time it splashed on the tailing pile.
A plasma weapon began to thump single shots at a fresh target.
Fireballs flashed and lifted from Hill 224. Every time the residue of the bolt’s impact drifted away, something fresh and metallic lifted from the same glassy crater. After the sixth bolt, the gun ceased fire.
“I don’t know if I’m getting through,” Kowacs said. He picked up the communicator and stared at it for a moment. Then he turned and shouted over to the next dugout on the right, “All plasma weapons to the First Platoon sector! Pass it on.”
“All plasma weapons to First Platoon sector!” Sienkiewicz echoed toward their left-hand neighbors. “Pass it on!”
The dugouts were within voice range of one another. It was risky to strip the other sectors, but movement on Hill 224 proved there would be another attack here. The two plasma weapons which had not been engaged against the first attack were the only ones in the unit that still had sufficient ammo to blunt a second thrust.
Kowacs’ throat was swollen. He couldn’t smell the foul smoke drifting from the creatures smashed just in front of the dugout, but he felt the tissues of his nose and mouth cringe at further punishment.
He put his thumb on the shallow depression beneath the communicator’s voiceplate and said hoarsely, “Grant, this is Kowacs. Please respond. We need destroyer-class support soonest. We’re being attacked by machines.”
Part of Kowacs’ mind wondered whether the creatures had their own internal AI programs or if some Syndicate operator controlled them through telerobotics. What did the operation look like from that bastard’s point of view?
“We could use ammo resupply and a little extra firepower.”
His voice broke. He cleared it and continued, “For God’s sake, Grant, get Toby English and the Haig down here now!”
Kowacs lifted his thumb from the depression. Nothing moved when he squeezed down. No sound—from Grant, of static, nothing—came from the voiceplate when he released the ‘key’.
Maybe there wasn’t a key. Maybe there wasn’t even a communicator, just a plastic placebo that Grant had given Kowacs so the spook could be sure Headhunter Six would accept the mission that would mean the end of his whole company. . . .
“Bloody hell,” Top muttered as he stared toward what was taking shape on the furrowed side of Hill 224.
A gun crew staggered over from 2nd Platoon with their plasma weapon on its tripod, ready to fire. They grounded beside the command dugout. The gunner slid behind his sights, while the assistant gunner helped the team’s Number Three adjust the hundred-round belt of ammunition she carried while her fellows handled the gun.