The mechs marched away from their forces, heading single-file back toward the George Washington bridge, a handful of their injured soldiers including Abe traveling with them. He sighed and turned back. Barely an hour in, and their carefully scripted battle plan was already in tatters.
The Viceroy was in range to provide air support, but other than its drones and the handful of armored vehicles, the last of their heavy weapons were leaving. As much as it pained Dan to see them go, the last battle had proved the wisdom of sending them back. Even the multilane roads they were trying to use weren’t big or sturdy enough for the mechs.
Each step was like a game of Russian Roulette. Only after the mech’s weight was fully on a leg would they discover if the blacktop was sufficient to bear the war machine. After the initial ambush, Dan had Tatiana pull up a map of tunnels and utilities traveling under their projected route. It looked like a spiderweb. There was no way that they’d be able to bring all of the mechs with them to the Orakh landing site.
It would only be a matter of time before another mech became trapped, and the Orakh sprang another ambush. The first one had cost them almost a hundred people, between the dead and those too injured to continue. They couldn’t afford any more traps like that, if they wanted to have enough troops left over to raid the Orakh landing craft once they reached it.
“Close up ranks, and keep your eyes skyward.” William’s voice boomed from the speakers built into his suit as he walked up to Dan. “The Orakh have gotten the drop on us once, and we don’t want to let it happen again. Remember, at least one person per squad with an open line back to the Viceroy. If you see anything moving, it’s an Orakh. The people are all gone or food. If you can’t shoot it, call in an airstrike. The logistics people can reload the reapers, and we have plenty of missiles. No need to save ‘em for later when there might not be a later.”
“How are things going?” Dan nodded at William as the battle suit stopped next to him.
“The good news is that Abe is stable,” William responded, watching on as the first of the infantry fighting vehicles rolled down the thoroughfare. “He’s got heat exhaustion and a fair number of burns, but once we get enough hydration in him, his System will be able to handle it. The bad news is that the Viceroy got pretty roughed up. It can still fly, but Jennifer doesn’t want to risk it on another bombing run. It sounds like she’s going to have her hands full running the staging area anyway, now that Abe is down, and I’m out here.”
“No.” Dan began walking along with the rest of his forces, William trailing slightly behind him. “Jennifer’s priority should be to keep herself and the Viceroy safe. If all she can do is coordinate air strikes, that’ll have to be enough. I’m not all that thrilled to have office buildings potentially full of Orakh all around us as we push our way into the city, but I don’t think we have an alternative, unless you have a nuke stuffed up your sleeve.”
“Do you?” He cocked his head at William. “Seriously, New York City is absolutely a lost cause at this point. Nuking it and sending in clean-up crews in hazmat suits is probably the better option at this point.”
William chuckled. “Sorry. We set Tatiana on cracking the codes a while ago. Someone apparently suspected that their internet connections were compromised, and disconnected them from the outside world. I don’t know if they caught some hint of Tatiana, or if they just watched War Games one too many times. Either way, we aren’t taking those silos over without at least a couple days’ worth of detours.”
“Crap,” Dan bit out, his eyes tracking from rooftop to rooftop, looking for the telltale silhouette of Orakh. “If we took the time, they’d spill out of Manhattan. There’s no way we’d be able to control their spread.”
“Can’t be sure that a nuke would actually get them. Sure, the Russians managed to knock their landing craft around enough to burn them up on entry, but now that they’re on the planet we can’t know how much they’ve dug in. If they have some sort of warren full of eggs under their ship, a nuke isn’t going to do much but wipe out surface structures. I suppose we can drop enough bombs on them to start a full-on nuclear winter, but destroying the planet to get rid of an alien colony hardly seems to achieve our goals.” William gave a noncommittal shrug.
“So, we just have to push forward then,” Dan said. “Maybe, if they were fighting in the open with clear lanes of fire, advancing with just infantry and conventional armor would be ok. In the city? The Orakh had already shown that an ambush could come at any time and that it could cost them dearly.
“Half a league, half a league, half a league onward,” William recited with a chuckle, his long strides eating up pavement as he paced Dan.
“Don’t do that,” Dan warned with a slight frown. “It just feels like you’re tempting fate by quoting that poem.”
William snorted, the steady thud of his heavy footsteps rattling the blacktop as they walked in silence for a period.
“I didn’t take you for the superstitious type.” William broke the silence. “Luck and all of that is just what we make of it.”
“Maybe, but I don’t see the point in pushing the envelope. There are enough Orakh running around here that everything is up in the air. I don’t think we have the time to back off and let things stew, but I’m not the most confident without the mechs here to back us up.”
“With proper air cover,” William responded flippantly, “this will be like a walk in the park. The troops just need to hold off the Orakh long enough to call the reapers in. We might lose a couple people in ambushes, but beyond some incidentals, everything will be fine, trust me.”
“If you say so,” Dan answered, unwilling to continue the conversation. William was stubborn, and at some point, he’d decided that their organization was too big to be threatened by the Orakh. Even with a fried mech in the streets, he refused to acknowledge that the aliens were a credible threat.
He might be right, Dan mused. Once the Orakh were in the open, both the powered armor and the infantry made fairly short work of them. An M-16 wasn’t an ideal weapon against their resilient physiology, but enough massed fire against one of the monsters charging you with an axe was more than enough to solve the problem.
Their main concerns were a combination of numbers and terrain. They didn’t have any sort of idea how many Orakh were hiding in New York. It might be ten thousand, and it might be a million. The only thing that Jennifer and Tatiana had been able to determine for sure was that there were more Orakh than Dan had troops.
Even with the Orakh being tied up by the NYPD and the national guard, Dan knew he was going to be heavily outnumbered. Usually, that wouldn’t be a major problem. Orakh took more to put down than a human, but it wasn’t like most of them were shooting back. So long as weapons teams took down their shamans, his soldiers would have the luxury of making the Orakh come to them.
Of course, the Orakh were perfectly okay with that. Even on flat ground, the giant frogs wouldn’t have a problem with simply charging into machine gun fire. Here in the city? Any alleyway or storefront could hide a monster lying in wait. Unfortunately, Dan didn’t have the firepower to just level the buildings on his way to the landing site. It might be noisy and wasteful, but it would simplify the hell out of his problems.
At least William was here to take some of the load off of him. The man might be arrogant, but with him on hand, Dan had access to a competent military commander. Dan could outfight any dozen soldiers under his command, but when it came time to give orders and react to sudden changes of circumstances, he was out of his element.
William stomped ahead, shouting at the column to tighten up and began setting sentries. Even if he underestimated the Orakh, at his core, the ex-general was a professional. Before long, they were moving again, even faster than before the previous ambush and with a level of discipline that Abe either couldn’t or chose not to enforce.
The march slowed several times as pockets of Orakh swarmed out of buildings or parks to throw themselves at the army. After a couple clipped commands from William, they quickly reacted, forming a bowl around the charging monsters that allowed most of their soldiers to fire at once.
By the time they reached midtown, the only additional casualties were a pair of men who sprained their ankles trying to climb down some rubble from a gutted building. Dan began to let himself feel a bit of optimism. Maybe that first ambush had depleted the Orakh’s defenses after all.
The buildings began to change. Where originally the city had been populated by towering edifices of steel and glass, now they began to look more run-down. The walls hemming their column in were dull, covered in recent growths of moss and fungus. Entire tops of buildings were missing, often replaced by wooden or stone platforms. Periodically, Dan would spot an Orakh peering over the edge of such “remodeled” buildings before ducking back behind cover.
“Tatiana,” he whispered, pointing her camera up at a skulking shadow in an office building. “Has anyone else spotted these?”
“Yes!” she replied cheerily, her full-volume voice drawing a wince from Dan. “A handful of other soldiers have made note that we’re being observed.”
“First of all,” Dan hissed, “volume down. I don’t want anyone noticing that we’re aware of our guests. Second, can you begin taking note of as many of the Orakh as we can and pass that information on to William? They aren’t recklessly attacking us, and that means there’s probably a commander nearby. Whenever they’re being patient, we should treat it as a bad sign.”
“No need to worry, Dan,” Tatiana replied, her voice as loud as ever. “The lead vehicles have spotted the Orakh landing craft. We’ll have you and an elite team inside in a matter of minutes. Whatever the aliens are waiting for, it’ll be too late when you gut their ship.”
“Are there any obvious guards outside it?” Dan asked hesitantly. He didn’t hear any gunfire, but that didn’t mean William wasn’t sending some of his more mobile soldiers to handle matters quietly.
“I told you there wasn’t a need to worry,” Tatiana chided him. “The landing ramp is down, and there isn’t an Orakh in sight on the ground. All you need to do is pick your team and walk inside. Easy peasy lemon squeasy.”
Dan frowned. Even if that was true, the Orakh knew it, too. Well, maybe not the warriors, but their commanders and shamans were a different story. They wouldn’t simply stand by and let him burn down their egg room like he’d done in New Orleans. The minute he stepped inside that ship, something was going to happen.
He didn’t think that it was going to be something friendly.
