Before any of her teammates could respond, they heard an exchange between a junior officer on the ground and the command center. “Acknowledge receipt. The Lieutenant Colonel and staff all dead or missing. We’ve sustained heavy casualties. We need an immediate evac. That’s a no go on reaching the supply drop at coordinates ….”
“Who the hell are you, you idiot?” someone roared, cutting the speaker off before he could finish. “Use the CO channel!”
“Somebody just got busted,” Danika muttered. Clearly she wasn’t the only one that had just had her first taste of the real thing and was having problems remembering training—Notthat she was rattled enough to forget that that sort of information shouldn’t be passed through anything but the CO—command operations—channel! They were going to be damned lucky if the enemy hadn’t picked up that damaging Intel! “Not that it looks like he’s going to have to worry about it. I doubt there’s going to be an evac and I’m guessing you guys saw what I did at the base of the cliff. The enemy is advancing and it doesn’t look like they plan to take prisoners. You guys think you can make it to the drop?” She asked when she’d done a visual and discovered that the cyborgs had taken far more damage than she had.
She didn’t think they had time to wait for their nanos to make any sort of repairs. She didn’t think it was pure luck that the enemy had pounded the hell out of them and driven them back against a wall. Their objectivemighthave been to outflank them and close the fist, but she thought there was a good chance that they’d known about the ridge to start with and the confederation forces had reacted just as the enemy had hoped. That might also mean that the enemy knew of a route up the escarpment or had forces closing on them now from the rear.
From the chatter on the local communications channel, she thought most everyone that had survived—so far—was beginning to get the picture.
“We can’t just leave our people down there!”
“We can’t do anything else. If we don’t get to that supply drop before the enemy we’re going to be in the same shape they are!”
“Where’s air support?”
“Where are the med-evacs?”
“You’re saying you think they’re tied up in another battle?”
“What the hell kind of Intel is that? There wasn’t supposed to be any resistance here!”
They complained and speculated for the first half hour while the remnants of the companies that made up their battalion struggled through almost knee deep snow, but they discovered they’d walked right into a blinding snow storm and nobody had the energy to waste on talking anymore after the storm hit them. It was all they could do to focus on putting one foot in front of the other and keeping tabs on the rest of the group to keep from getting lost.
They were about half way between the ridge everybody was beginning to refer to as slaughter ridge and the drop site when a series of massive explosions prompted them to hit the ground. It only took them a few moments to realize that the bombardment wasn’t close enough to be an immediate threat.
Long term was another matter.
“Oh my god! We are so fucked! That was the supplies that just went up in smoke!”
“Would you just shut the fuck up!”
“I don’t know which one of you stupid fucks gave the coordinates away, but you’re going to be a dead mother fucker if I get my hands on you!”
“Why doesn’t everybody just shut the fuck up?” Danika yelled angrily. “He didn’t get the chance to give away the exact coordinates. My guess is that either none of the channels are as secure as we thought or they didn’t need the coordinates. It sure as hell didn’t take them long to get there.”
“Hey! We don’t know that it was our supplies! Could be another group taking a pounding.”
Danika glanced at her team questioningly, feeling a ray of hope. It died when Seth shook his head. “That is the coordinates we were given.”
“I guess we’d better hump it, then,” she said tiredly, “and see what we can salvage. I have a bad feeling we’re going to need anything we can find.”
There wasn’t much to salvage. It looked as if the bombardment had been a long range effort, however, and when they’d rested briefly and began to sort through the debris that had cooled enough to allow for a search, they began to find a few useable supplies. Danika supposed they should just be grateful that the enemy didn’t seem to have the technical capabilities of the confederation or they would’ve been completely screwed.
Or maybe it was more a matter of being spread too thin and not having the munitions they needed to totally annihilate the confederation troops?
By her, admittedly, rough calculations, the armada that had brought them had been carrying a force of nearly a half a million—counting cyborgs—which she’d considered actually counted as more than a single soldier since they were many times stronger than their human counterparts. That was the main reason she hadn’t been unduly nervous about the mission. As far as anyone knew—or at least had been told—there weren’t any enemy bases on Xeno-12.
Clearly, the confederation thought they’d been clever in not declaring war until they’d nearly reached the planet they planned to take and hold since it offered the most strategic advantage in protecting the confederation’s interests in this system.
Either they hadn’t been clever enough, though, or the enemy was smarter than they’d given them credit for.
Or the grunts like her just hadn’t been important enough to get the memo. The only warning they’d had was to expect thepossibilityof pockets of resistance. They sure as hell hadn’t expected such a ferocious, focused attack that they wouldn’t even be able to organize a counterstrike once they got on the ground!
They hadn’t been able to pull themselves together at all! It had been a total rout!
She had a bad feeling, though, that the lack of action by the fleet meant that the disaster her battalion had experienced on landing wasn’t isolated. The only explanation that she could think of for the lack of air support, med-evac, or complete evacuation was that the entire force was under attack and unable to lend support.
So maybe it hadn’t been a brilliant military tactic to spread their own forces so thin? Granted it was a big planet and she could see why they wanted to be sure they had enough forces on the ground globally to repel any attempts by the enemy to sneak in the backdoor, but they shouldn’t have just assumed they’d beat the enemy to the planet to start with.
