Ahead of us, as far as the eye could see, the alien jungle belched poisonous steam. Loz'an acid shells were still eating through the last of the organic matter, turning the undergrowth into a churning gray sludge. The burning wreckage of two attack fighters beside the fort walls sent thick black smoke drifting lazily into the sky. Then came the stifling, unnatural silence, the kind that always settled in right before all hell broke loose.
There was still no sign of enemy infantry through our sights, but I was not fooling myself. They were already deploying into combat formations and probing our flanks. I had no intention of waiting for them out in the open, so the shield over our cave was already running at full power. The briefing had been perfectly clear: the moment your position is exposed, keep the perimeter sealed and lower the shield only to launch a counterattack. No exceptions.
I gave my little army a quick once-over. Everyone's nerves were stretched to the breaking point. Ted had chewed his lower lip until it bled. Danny's fingers kept drumming against the handguard of his rifle. Steve tapped out a steady rhythm on the rock with his fingernails. Even Mary, who usually stood as still as an ice sculpture, was now impatiently tapping the toe of her boot against the ground. I understood them completely because I was stuck in the same pressure cooker. The worst part before a massacre is never the fight itself. It is the long, sickening wait for the first blow to land. I would rather take the hit right away than sit through this paralyzing suspense.
Uneasy whispers rippled through the veterans dug into their positions.
"What's taking 'em so long? Think they didn't bite?"
"No freaking way. Those green freaks are up to something. I've got a bad feeling they've cooked up one hell of a surprise."
"And we're just sitting here like damn ants under a magnifying glass, waiting to get roasted."
It looked like Loz'an command was deliberately dragging out the silence, hoping to wear down our nerves and bait us into making the first mistake. That was bad. Once a defensive force starts coming apart psychologically, the next stop is a mass grave. Since Leon had pinned these damned commander's stripes on me, keeping everyone's head in the game had become my job.
"Listen up, platoon. Ross here." I switched to the squad-wide channel, keeping my voice flat, steady, and matter-of-fact, as though I were reading a quarterly financial report. The soldiers immediately looked away from the smoking jungle and turned toward me. "Nothing's changed. The enemy isn't cooking up some brilliant master plan. They're scrambling to patch holes and figure out how to answer our attack without bleeding themselves dry. Remember, time is on our side. Ted's plasma residue is eating through their central shield a whole lot faster than our generator is burning through power to keep this dome up. Every second they spend hesitating drains more of their energy reserves. We're winning this exchange no matter how you slice it."
"The accountant's got a point," Danny said, lifting his monocular and playing right along to lighten the mood. "That white junk's still chewing through their barrier. They're probably out there with hoses trying to cool plasma down with water."
"What a bunch of morons," one of the veterans muttered with a disgusted snort.
A wave of relieved chuckles rolled through the line.
The speech probably would not win any Hollywood awards, but it accomplished what mattered. The tension inside the cave eased, and people stopped imagining elaborate versions of their own deaths. I once read a line in a field manual that stuck with me: the less time an infantryman spends philosophizing in a foxhole, the better his trigger finger works.
To lock that fragile calm into place, I moved on to the final assignments.
"Ted. Your job is to keep cranking out plasma cores the size of soccer balls without stopping. Your targets are Loz'an heavy armor. The second you spot an armored walker outside their shield, send it a present. Keep them coming."
"You got it! I'll nail it!" The teenager practically bounced on his feet, his face lighting up with his usual reckless grin.
"Drop the military talk," I cut him off sharply, my face expressionless. "Forget the jokes until this operation is over. Just follow orders. That goes for everybody. Playtime's over."
"Yeah... got it," he muttered, the swagger gone as he went back to shaping another plasma charge.
I glanced at Danny, expecting our officially appointed youth mentor to chew me out for being too hard on the kid, but Kim only narrowed his eyes in quiet approval. He was a seasoned soldier. He knew the difference between a training exercise and the seconds before first contact. This was no time to coddle anybody.
"Mary, you're on dome maintenance. Keep the barrier clear of plasma residue, acid, and debris, and keep an eye on the cave in case anything breaks through. Your job is defense, period. Don't go off on your own, and don't get drawn into firefights."
She gave a quick nod. I liked that practical attitude. For all her prickly edges, she did not have that idiotic teenage urge to throw herself into danger just to impress the people around her. Unlike the guy standing next to her.
"I'm gonna wipe every last one of 'em out," Ted said, rolling his shoulders with a cocky grin. "Watch and learn, shorty. I'll rack up more kills today than you'll get in your whole life."
Mary simply rolled her eyes and ignored him. Despite being younger, she was mentally at least a decade ahead of that loudmouth.
"Steve, Danny, the sky's still yours," I said, wrapping up the assignments. "Keep your fingers ready. I'll watch the timing and drop the dome whenever their aircraft commit to an attack run."
Both veterans nodded in unison as they checked their optics.
"Miguel, your team holds..."
I never got to finish. A solid vanguard of Loz'an assault troops burst out of the smoking undergrowth with the familiar high-pitched whine of their engines. The creatures came racing toward our position on high-speed unicycles, sweeping the ridge with dense streams of laser fire. Our outer shield answered with a low hum, vibrating under the relentless impacts. They were charging in a wedge formation, a classic cavalry assault meant to overwhelm us with sheer volume of fire while charging in at full speed.
I stood motionless at the control console, cold as stone, watching the S-Power consumption gauges in the central network drop through the corner of my eye. The important thing was not to move too soon.
When they were about thirty yards from the ledge, the Loz'an troops leaped off their machines in perfect unison. Their massive drive wheels immediately sank into a broad strip of dense polymer hidden beneath a layer of scorched leaves, bogging down with heavy, sucking squelches. Sandra knew exactly what she was doing. Her ability to generate tons of ultra-viscous adhesive might have looked unimpressive beside flashy powers like pyrokinesis or telekinesis, but when it came to battlefield engineering, nobody could match her. She had flooded the entire approach with hundreds of gallons of the industrial-grade goo. The Loz'an vanguard ground to a halt, transformed into a field of perfect stationary targets.
"Miguel, you're up," I said quietly into the radio.
Thick clouds of gray, oily smoke erupted from beneath the scorched ground directly under the assault troopers trapped in the glue. Miguel's gift was much more than a simple smoke screen. He could make his smoke solid, but only within his direct line of sight. He was one of the few Awakened in our squad who could attack effectively without ever leaving the safety of the base's defensive perimeter. The dense cloud poured into the Loz'an breathing pores as they struggled helplessly in the trap like flies on sticky paper. A second later, the smoke hardened inside their bodies and ripped them apart from the inside out.
Plans never survive first contact. Four riders reacted in time, slamming on their brakes before reaching the polymer field. They spread out and opened sustained fire from a safe distance. Most of the shots missed, but every hit that landed shaved another sliver off our shared energy reserves.
"Opening the dome in three... two..." I calmly counted down, waiting for the exact moment they entered their reload cycle. "Fire!"
The shield blinked out for a heartbeat, and a perfectly coordinated volley from my assault team erased the surviving riders and their machines. I hit the control to seal the dome again, but I never got to finish the motion.
[Tactical Mode Activated]
The world froze. My mind instantly accelerated beyond its normal limits, bringing time to a complete standstill. Funny enough, I had recently reconfigured Tactical Mode so it would trigger only when a threat appeared outside my direct field of view. Now, in the dead silence, I clearly saw four blinding laser beams slipping through the narrow gap before the dome could fully close.
My heightened perception reconstructed everything in an instant. The shots had come straight from the fort. Loz'an snipers. Their commanders had deliberately dropped their own defensive barrier, letting Ted's plasma bombardment slam into the administrative buildings without interference, all to give their marksmen a clean firing lane.
Their aim was flawless. One shot was headed for the distribution tanks. Another targeted the control panel beneath my finger. A third was on course for the technicians' heavy fixed turret. The fourth was aimed squarely between my eyes.
That reckless unicycle charge had been nothing more than an elaborate diversion. Its sole purpose had been to force us into opening the dome and exposing our critical systems to sniper fire. I had to admit it. Loz'an command had used that delay well. The entire maneuver had been planned with impressive precision.
The laser beams crept steadily closer. While time remained frozen, I had one chance to limit the damage at the lowest possible cost. I was not worried about myself. My personal shield was already active. I slapped my left hand over the control panel and shifted my body just enough to intercept the shot headed for the distribution tanks. At the same time, I completely shut down the cave's main shield and shaped four dense S-Power projectiles at the fingertips of my free hand, compressing them as tightly as pistons.
Time snapped back into motion.
Three laser beams struck my chest and arm with sharp cracks. My personal shield dipped hard, but that was nothing compared to losing our entire ammunition stockpile. In the same fraction of a second, four compressed bolts shot from my fingertips, tore through the jungle, and punched straight through the hearts of the alien snipers on the fort walls. Instant kills.
The cave's shield slammed shut.
Our only irreplaceable loss was one of the technicians' turrets. There was no way I could have protected it. It stood far beyond my reach. The machine exploded into twisted metal, showering Steve with sparks.
"What the... What the hell was that?" Ted flinched as the turret blew apart.
"No time," I said grimly, wiping the sweat from my palm onto my pants. "The war's here."
The Loz'an sniper gambit had failed, but their orders to wipe us out had not changed. Their main force rolled onto the ridge.
Enemy heavy aircraft swept in wave after wave, methodically blanketing the cave with acid canisters. Heavy armored carriers equipped with plasma flamethrowers burned away Sandra's adhesive fields, clearing a path for the advancing infantry. Tanks entrenched in the valley below hammered the rocky overhang above us, sending tons of shattered granite crashing down. Every vehicle in that armada shimmered behind its own thick S-Power shield.
The cave became a deafening furnace of explosions. Traps kept triggering one after another, and Miguel's smoke could barely finish off one group before another pushed forward. I was constantly catching tiny openings between bombing runs, hammering the dome controls up and down so our snipers and Danny could pick off bombers as they banked into their attack runs.
At one point I had to intervene personally. A heavy assault walker armed with a turret-mounted laser machine gun reached the base of the ridge. If that thing started laying suppressive fire into our shield, it would drain the entire network in under thirty seconds. I dropped the dome, gathered my energy, and drove a powerful kinetic blast beneath its front axle. The armored vehicle pitched forward, lost traction, and in the same instant I hurled a spear tipped with superheated energy straight into its engine compartment. Its shield started collapsing almost immediately.
"New target priority!" I shouted over the radio, barely cutting through the roar of battle. "Next time the dome drops, everybody focuses on that machine gunner! Take him out first!"
The nightmare seemed endless. Sweat soaked through my clothes as I felt like a hardcore gamer trapped inside some insane castle defense simulator with the difficulty cranked to impossible and every timing window shaved down to nothing. We were surviving on pure reflex.
Then, without warning, the barrier over the Loz'an fort vanished. The laser turrets mounted on its walls spun wildly, rotated one hundred eighty degrees, and unleashed a devastating barrage into the backs of their own forces. Enemy tanks and armored walkers, completely unprepared for an attack from behind, exploded one after another, erupting into towering fireballs.
I could not help smiling. Leon. That stubborn military mutt had actually pulled it off. His team had reached the terminal, and thanks to Tony's Technosense, they had seized control of the fort's defensive systems and turned the enemy's own weapons against them.
We had held the line. The backbone of their assault had been broken. All that remained was to methodically eliminate the infantry still fighting below.
[Tactical Mode Activated]
What the hell?
My mind froze reality again, and that should have been impossible. The system only reacted to an immediate, unavoidable threat to my life. We were winning. Our shield was fully sealed and operating at maximum output.
I stood motionless, slowly scanning the frozen battlefield outside the cave. My eyes tracked laser beams suspended in midair, droplets of acid hanging motionless, and fragments of shattered rock. Then, amid all that metal and chemical chaos, I saw it.
A large, unnaturally dense sphere of crackling blue-violet electricity, fired from somewhere deep inside the smoking jungle. It flew in a perfectly straight line, completely ignoring the laws of ballistics.
Damn.
The Loz'an had been holding one more fully Awakened in reserve all along. Their hidden trump card. One perfectly placed strike from that thing could turn our victory into a complete disaster.