We grabbed ammo from squads who were sitting down and folding their arms. “No judgments,” I shouted. “Just grab what you can.”
Zeus was a mile away now, and the slow picking through surrendering people meant we weren’t moving away quickly enough. But I wanted everything we could get our hands on.
“Are we sure none of the ships are coming back down for us?” Tony Chin asked.
“If they were only taking soldiers, something bad might be going down upstairs,” Amira said. “I’ve been trying to patch in, but there’s a lot of interference. That can’t be a good sign. . . .”
One of the skyscraper-sized anti-orbital guns glowed red. Electricity sparked up its sides, gathering into a house-sized ball at the very tip, and then leapt into the sky.
“I think shit’s all fucked up and shit,” Lana Smalley said.
“Has anyone seen Shriek?” I asked. He would be able to provide some hints as to what might be happening. He’d seen more of this than any of us.
“He got on the jumpship,” Ken said.
“We need to move,” Amira said. “Not many people standing anymore. We stick out.”
“Where are we going?” Dismont asked.
A good question. “If the jumpships aren’t coming back down, and everything is up in the air—” I started.
“Not everything,” Ken said.
“Can anyone here repair a broken jumpship?” I asked on the common channel.
One of the yellow vacuum suits in our midst raised a hand. “I’ve worked maintenance before getting promoted down to the power core and retrained. What’s broken?”
“We sucked crickets into an engine and then crashed,” Ken told him.
“We’ll need parts,” the engineer said.
“Amira? Where can we find parts?” I asked.
We were all moving as a group, trying to keep the yellow-suited engineers in our midst. Amira broke away for a tunnel. “Downstairs,” she said.
After the heavy doors shut behind us, they groaned and started smoking. “What’s that about?”
“Slowing Zeus down,” Amira said.
+ + + +
We had to make the hard choice of loading up with spare engine parts instead of ammo. We left the guns on the floor. But with a plan at hand, the four squads pulled together quietly.
Mohamed Cisse carried a turbofan on his back like Atlas, the engineers clustered near him, and we formed up around them. Amira led us back up and out. We popped out like groundhogs and ran for the hills. After a few lopes, we started dropping even more gear and just picking up the engineers under our arms so we could leap our way from rock to rock.
A triangular formation of raptors fell in behind us, but Ken took Alpha squad and fell behind a bit. The firefight was intense and brief.
We crested the hills and pelted downhill toward the open plains and the ethane lake where we’d crashed with the new platoon members just a day before.
“Keep up the pace,” Ken muttered. “We went down a long way from the base, and the engineers don’t have that much air. Don’t stop for any Conglomeration, just keep moving.”
I didn’t respond. I was too busy focusing on each armor-enhanced leap that took us farther away from Shangri-La.
+ + + +
“I think the Conglomeration may be taking orbit,” Amira said, looking up from the bank of the ethane lake.
I looked up as well. But there was nothing more than Titan’s usual gloom and thick clouds. “How can you tell?”
“I’m listening hard. Through the static. I think I’m feeling some battle chatter. Ship-to-ship stuff.”
Three squads got their shoulders under the jumpship and lifted it up. “I think I just shorted something out,” Erica Li said. “Someone take my place.”
They all staggered the jumpship up out of the liquid ethane, letting it all gush out of the gaps as they waited, and then carried it up onto the bank.
Someone started coughing on the common channel. “Shit, same here, something blew inside my suit. There’s smoke.”
“Contact,” Ken said.
“Take Alpha and engage,” I said. “Bravo, Delta, circle up and keep the ship in the middle. Charlie, you’re there to help the engineers move anything heavy.”
As everyone scrambled to, I stood by the jumpship and looked out across the ethane lake, half expecting crickets to come boiling out of it again. But there was only stillness.
A moment of calm in the storm. It caught in the back of my throat, like a hiccup. As if I’d still been moving forward and then suddenly braked, and everything came up.
The sound of weapons fire floated over Titan’s air, breaking the moment of stillness.
“Ken?” I asked.
“Raptors. Scout team. We’ve been located,” he reported.
“Fall back and tighten up. Charlie, you’ll have to help the engineers and shoot anything that gets through. How is the ship looking? How long do we need?”
“Two hours,” came the response.
“We have fifteen or twenty minutes before the bad guys hit us,” I told them. “Hurry.”
The first wave of crickets hit ten minutes later.
+ + + +
The next hour, we ground the crickets down as they came at us. Amira took point, using the EPC-1 to down them in swathes. Anything that got through, we stomped into tiny debris.
But the raptors that came in afterward required bullets and direct confrontation, though some of the mines that Ken had taken the time to lay down killed many in the first batch. There was no running now. We had to keep them from the jumpship as the engineers swore and removed this part and that part.
It didn’t take long to run low on ammo, even despite short bursts and frequent direct confrontation. It took three to four of us to wrestle down a single raptor and break its helmet or shove a grenade into some key part of the Conglomerate armor.
We were losing people. Several engineers dropped in the crossfire. Aran Patel started screaming when Mohamed Cisse jumped out and caught a raptor that leapt into the inner circle. It had swung around and ripped open his armor with the wicked nano-filament blades on its legs. In seconds, Cisse ended up shredded, and his armor scattered around the ground before everyone opened up.
“Out,” Min Zhao shouted.
And more and more of the platoon started tossing weapons to the ground.
The sound of a loud belch got me to stare back at the jumpship, as I’d almost forgotten what it was we were doing here.
“Everyone get in,” Amira yelled. “I’ve got power.”
“You’re flying it?”
“No one else can interface with the systems or has any experience.”
We fell back. Charlie squad covered us from the doorway, which now was just Aran Patel and Suqi Kimmirut.
There were too many of us. We crammed into the jumpship face to face.
“Amira?” I asked.
The jumpship’s engines leapt up an octave, trying to push us into the air. Instead, we scraped along the rocky ground. Metal screamed and something snapped off the bottom of the jumpship.
Energy beams sliced against the sides of the ship, one of them punching through. Blood and flesh splattered against my helmet. The ship bounced off a boulder, spun slightly, and smacked into something. I wiped blood away just in time to see a yellow vacuum suit spin out of one of the large rents in the side of the jumpship.
“Hold on!” Amira shouted. The jumpship wobbled higher into the air and the ground started to fall away. “I think I’m getting this.”
The jumpship shuddered again as we rose slightly higher. Another loud bang from something striking the side made me jump.
Alarms started whooping from the cockpit. “We going to make it?” I asked.
“I’ll get back to you on that,” Amira said.