Nyx Tower – Floor 60

  Six defenders were gathered in a semicircle around their mangled drop pod. The APC was upside down. The hull was bent and twisted. That anyone had made it out alive was a miracle unto itself. Escaping the crushed can had been harrowing on its own. Its occupants found themselves locked in another fight for their lives from the moment they escaped. Around them, a series of strange machines whirred in unison. What they were manufacturing or synthesizing or testing was a mystery. Conveyor belts carried strange CNC machined material from one station to the next, where collections of spider-like robotic arms poured rapidly over the items.

  The assembly line had been damaged by the Vanguards arrival, however. The machines performed erroneous tasks, sometimes skipping material or applying their changes in incoherent patterns with no synchronization. They had become dangerous to those around them. A cutting laser might slice off of its workstation and into the next one over. Some robotic arms flailed wildly with reckless abandon, causing them to impact other machinery, the walls or even the ceiling with brutal force. It was a nightmarish dance of industrial death.

  Among this OSHA violation, a firefight raged. Men ran among the assembly lines trading gunfire. The shock troopers of the Ruthvenian Order fought hard. They moved quickly in the shadows and hammered the invading Rifles with grenades and machinegun fire. The Rifles were forced to crouch low, practically on their bellies, to shield themselves behind their inadequate cover.

  Lieutenant Olsen was in a tight position. Atleast, that was how he chose to think of it. In truth, it was downright perilous. He had hit the floor with twelve Rifles. He now had six, and of those six, two were walking wounded.

  He had no radio and hadn’t made contact with anyone beyond this floor in hours. He had attempted to secure the floor in order to atleast prevent movement of enemy troops either up or down. But he had lost that fight. Hostiles moved freely. Some descended, but most were ascending. He could not tell if it was intentional or panicked, whether someone had them on the run or they were just consolidating for a counter attack on the lower floors. The strategic picture hardly mattered amidst a fight for his life.

  “Dry!” Someone shouted, raising a hand skyward.

  From behind him, Olsen’s NCO fired one last round from his HR-15 and slapped in a new magazine.

  “Here!” he called out and tossed his weapon to the Rifle that had run out of ammunition. “Make it count!”

  The NCO drew his sidearm.

  The rate of incoming fire was increasing. The enemy was massing for one final attack to push Olsen’s ragged element over the side.

  Olsen turned around to face the sole sapper he had left. The man was working feverishly to string together a line of demolition charges. It was supposed to be a precaution in case they were overrun. A nice deadman’s trigger to pass along a final “Fuck you!” if the situation came to that… and it looked like it was coming to that.

  “Are we ready?” Olsen asked him.

  “Not nearly!” The sapper reported. “I don’t have enough det-cord. The detonator is also faulty. It’s not producing enough voltage to initiate the destruct mechanism. I’m doing what I can.”

  Olsen’s jaw tightened.

  “What do we do, sir?” His NCO asked.

  A shout came from the enemy line, as if on queue. “Your position is hopeless! Your comrades have all been killed! You fight for nothing! Surrender now, and you will be spared!”

  “Ya think they mean it?” A young Rifle asked, fearing the worst.

  “Not even remotely.” The NCO sent a potshot from his pistol back in response.

  Olsen remained stalwart. “Hardly my first encirclement.” He said wryly. “Poltava was not desirable.”

  He asked their sapper, “Can we still do significant damage if we detonate with an incomplete chain?”

  The sapper shrugged, exasperated. “I-I don’t know. I can detonate one kilogram now. I don’t know how much damage that will cause.”

  Olsen nodded somberly. “Well, keep your finger on the trigger. When you hear our last shots go out…. Detonate.”

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  The sapper nodded.

  The firefight resumed. Incoming fire was hot and heavy. With no restraint left, Olsen’s Rifles returned it in kind.

  The shock troopers advanced, climbing over machinery or the dead bodies of their comrades. They howled like madmen, thirsting for the death of their enemies. The Rifles could not muster enough firepower to adequately suppress them. The thralls charged daringly.

  The sapper couldn’t bring himself to look up. Hands shaking, he held the two wires for his string of explosives close to his chest. Crossing them and completing the circuit would cut in the battery from the wrecked APC, which would be his makeshift detonator. He couldn’t be sure it would work. He listened intently to his team. He counted every outgoing round.

  One by one, their guns fell silent. The heavy thump of .30-06 was soon replaced with the lower crack of their 9mm sidearms or whoosh of the new caseless .50 caliber. Soon that ran out as well.

  They all went dry one by one. The last one still firing was Olsen. The officer was firing every half second, every round was well-placed. The sapper ticked down the seconds.

  “Stand by!” Olsen shouted, feeling his magazine grow lighter. The moment they stopped firing, they would be overrun. Everyone else was affixing bayonets

  Before he could give the order to detonate, on his last round, the floor gave out beneath the middle of the assembly complex.

  There was a groan and the ground heaved upward like it was taking in a great breath of air. Then it collapsed downward. Several dozen square yards of steel, machinery and concrete gaveway. It poured down into the floor below as if sucked into a maelstrom. Sparks and fire shot upward. A large number of shock troopers fell away with it into the gaping hole that now occupied the center of the floor.

  The fight was brought to a standstill as both sides gawked at the sudden and violent implosion.

  A hail of automatic fire spewed forth from the hole. Olsen couldn’t believe his eyes. It was like a vertical cavalry charge. The battle had suddenly grown exponentially to encompass multiple floors. Rifles emerged from the hole while applying liberal automatic fire onto the thralls who were about to overrun his position. He realized that their breach had come from two floors below. Their blastpoints had been precise enough that the ground below peeled like a lid from a can and created a ramp up onto the 60th floor. Soldiers on either side of the building and across multiple levels now fired up and down at eachother.

  The storm troopers were thrown into disarray. Their assault was shattered by the changed environment. They could not even retreat. One by one, they were liquidated by machinegun fire. Two Vanguard assault troopers were leading the way to Olsen’s beleaguered troopers. One plastered the enemy with armor-piercing flechettes from a grenade launcher while the other advanced slowly with a .50 caliber rotary cannon. The distinct Whirrrrr! and the sound of a rapid flood of brass hitting the ground was music to Olsen’s ears.

  A Chief Rifle followed them closely, directing their fire. He looked just as surprised to see the officer as Olsen was to see him.

  Olsen limped over to Lieutenant Mike Perelli’s improvised TOC, having left his team to rearm and regroup while the larger element fought two levels above them. He found the officer studying a map with several other troopers. Olsen was perplexed at how they had managed to secure a map. When he got closer he realized it was a series of fire-escape cutouts that they had ripped off of the walls and stitched together.

  “Man, am I glad to see you.” Olsen said to his fellow officer. “That maneuver was brilliant. Your blastpoints were precise; how you got the floor to drop like that. My compliments to your demolition team.”

  “And I’m surprised to see you.” Perelli told him, and then added sheepishly “And also sorry.”

  “What for?”

  “We didn’t know you were up here.” Perelli admitted. “We thought you were all already dead. And our demolition plan was to collapse the entire floor while still maintaining the load-bearing beams intact. Sloppy placement is the only reason you didn’t get a hundred tons of concrete dropped on you.”

  Olsen pursed his lips behind his mask. “Well... I appreciate the save anyway. Sitrep?”

  Perelli sighed, “Not horrible, but not even remotely good. I’ve picked up about thirty effectives on the way up here. Equal that in wounded. Hospital is on the 51st floor. Two squads are on the 47th guarding against anyone coming up, but so far no one has come.”

  “That’s… odd.”

  “I know. You’d think they’d be swarming like ants to their queen. It’s got me paranoid.”

  “Have you found the Striker-Commander? Or Waller”

  “No joy. They must be higher up. I asked our spotter, but they’ve had no contact with either.”

  “Logistics?”

  “Bad. We’re good on ammo for now, but we can only advance for so long. We’re expending grenades and breaching charges at a disgusting rate. We can’t sustain offensive operations.”

  “I’ve been watching these thralls move more upward than down. There’s probably a fat defensive line waiting for you a few floors up.”

  “Did you see any frames?”

  “None, yet. You?”

  Perelli shook his head.

  “So what’s the plan going forward?”

  Perelli gestured out to the sound of the multi-level battle unfolding above them. “Attrite them here and weather the night. The sun’s going down and I’m certain they’ll use the night as an opportunity to counterattack. Better to do it while we’re in a defensible position.”

  Olsen nodded in agreement. “Sound’s good.”

  He turned to leave, but decided he had one more question for the new Lieutenant. “What were you again? Before you were with Whirlwind?”

  “Recon, for a mechanized division. Then Freikorps.”

  “Tracks.” Olsen cracked a slight smile and turned to rejoin his element.

  Perelli shrugged.