Refraction | Part 1 | Darwin's Steroids
29) Onslaught
I have vastly underestimated these fucking guys desire to see me dead. I was thinking that four guys with superior firepower seemed like a pretty big investment for one guy, even if he’s a super fucking bad-ass like me. But these guys are not kidding the fuck around. When they show up, they show up in force. A full platoon of sixteen well armed United World Army soldiers drop in about half a klick from my position. They have a demolitions outfit, and a heavy machine gunner. Again I’m struck by the overwhelming amount of logistics they are throwing into this project. These guys are military trained and well enough equipped to take over a small country. All for little old me. Apparently these guys have no issue with overkill.
Not much for explanations, though. Maybe one these guys will stay alive long enough to talk to me for a while. I have my eye on one soldier in particular. He’s obviously a specialist, some sort of irregular attached to the group. I’m betting its just for this particular assignment. The Sergeant in charge of the platoon seems to defer to him, and his uniform carries no insignia, it’s just plain black fatigues. Here’s the kicker though, and it’s a fucking doozy. He has swords, two of them. Two swords. A wicked looking kitana and its deadly, short counterpart the washazaki. One might be inclined to think this man is an idiot, but if there is one thing I’ve learned it’s this. In a situation where everybody is carrying around automatic machine guns and hand grenades, you better take a dude who carries around samurai swords pretty fucking seriously. He’s the one that disappears silently into the smoke and noise of a battle then suddenly pops up right next you and chops your head off. I decide to head down into the silo.
It’s a lucky thing they didn’t send Marines, these guys are green and it shows. I almost feel bad for them, but you know, they came to kill me, which is pretty fucking uncool.
The silo sits in the bottom of a shallow bowl shaped valley. The platoon mounts the eastern ridge of the bowl and fans out. By the time I get to the bottom and seal the door they are in position to assault. The ridge is a rough circle, Sarge is at 12 o’clock, the platoon is a semi circle between 10 and 2. I am at the bottom of a fifteen story well watching a bank of monitors. I can see twelve of them, and have a good idea of where two of the others are. The fucking ninja, as fucking predicted, has disappeared. The back of my neck begins to itch.
They move as a unit, ten of them moving down into the valley, five on the rim repositioning to fill in the gaps left behind. I’m interested to see if any of my traps work, and I’d prefer it if the auto guns created at least distraction before I had to make my first move. I buried twenty mines in a ring around the silo, and set ten traps of various design in its immediate environs. One of the automatic machine guns is mounted covering the entrance to the silo from the inside. The other is on the surface, set to trip after the first gun fires, pinning the enemy in crossing fields of fire.
I score a lucky hit with one of the booby traps, a claymore that was seventy five years old if it was a day. I’m surprised it blew up at all, but it did, its hundreds of tiny lead balls shredding the poor sucker coming down the hill from 11 o’clock. The rest of the platoon manage to regroup at the bottom of the bowl, maintaining a decent field of fire, unfortunately not at the right target. A scout group of two men break away and belly crawl to the edge of the gaping hole. One of them covers the entrance while the second pulls out a snoop cord, plugs one end of it into his helmet and tosses the other end over the edge if the silo. It’s too small to set off the guns and I can’t tell if it affords him an angle on the weapon. I start to think I made a mistake wiring the guns together. I should have just set them in the open and hope they scored some hits before they got blown up. I’m not really used to this kind of fight. How was I supposed to know the fucking Military was going to show up? Last time it was just four clowns in business suits. (Although I got to hand it to crane guy, he was a persistent son of a bitch.)
What happened next is a perfect example of why I chose not to follow my father into the military. In a normal job you have a bad day it means you get sacked. So you go out get drunk, go home, think about suicide, fall asleep, you work it out. In the military a bad day means you get called out into the desert, reconnoiter a entrance to a missile silo, and as you turn to signal to your commanding officer, you roll over onto an anti-personnel mine commonly known as a ‘toe-popper’. It’s built to cripple rather than kill, but then it’s also meant to be stepped on, not rolled over.
The shit I’ve seen in the last few months.
The guy in the junkyard, that shit was almost surreally violent, but this poor schmuck up top, he was just classic war violence. Doesn’t make it any prettier. I can’t hear anything, which takes the edge off, but it was still kind of a shock when this guy’s guts suddenly exploded out of a fist size hole right above his navel. Then he sort of looked down at this hole, which is smoking, and probably the last thing his senses ever register is the smell of his own boiling spinal fluid. He keels over and his hand flops over the rim of the silo. The auto gun wakes up, recognizing living meat, and shoots it off. Then the auto gun on the rim opens up and tears the other guy to pieces. He just falls apart all over the place. Where the DU gun vaporized, the auto gun tenderized. It shifts targets at least three times that I can see. Twice into the sparse bushes and once into the guy with the hole in his guts and no right hand. Then a concussion rattles the frame and the surface gun stops firing. I have no idea how this will affect the performance of the first gun but its got me worried. I have three confirmed KIAs, leaving twelve army and one ninja.
I’m out gunned, out manned, and under siege. So far, so good.
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