Phoenix Fall
White Death. Official star charts had labeled the planet as Imperial Resource Colony 58-4G. The poor souls who had to live there, and the revolutionary forces that had claimed it, called it Ymir. Something out of the Imperial Homeworld’s primitive days. But as yet another of his men died in a blossom of superheated metal, only a single name seemed appropriate to Clint. The corpse of a planet gripped by an ice age, luring men to ruin with its wealth of ore. He swept his gun across his flank, bringing the pallid world into view above him, grinning without mercy as he and his men tried and failed to push the enemy back. White Death, were they were all going to die.
The planet’s exosphere blazed with the light of burning plasma and evaporating metal. Debris hurtled in all directions amidst the combatants, jagged ghosts eager to claim the lives of their killers and their friends with equal rancor. The last of Sergeant Clink Drake’s unit fought amidst the largest of these corpse fields, a shattered capital cruiser that had taken a thermal torpedo just as it had come out of hyperspace.
“Enemy cruiser’s sent out another wave,” said Richard. The comm officer’s voice was steady and dependable as a star’s light. “Five above us, two below.”
“That makes what, eighteen now?” said Clint. He watched as more red dots flashed onto his radar screen. When they had first deployed there had been twenty-five blue dots on that screen. Now there were six. He tried to keep his voice as level as Richard’s. “Pull back to the engines. We might be able to…”
The suit’s proximity alarm alerted him to the ambush half a second before the bullets slapped against his armor. Clint stamped a footpad to release the magnetic locks and hit his thruster, propelling his goliath from beneath the breach. A pair of enemy goliaths looked in from the outer hull, the huge power suits blasting away with autocannons. He fired his last shoulder-mounted rocket into one of them. One lumbered away as his partner’s cockpit popped open, turning the released atmosphere into a momentary fireball. Then a hail of armor piercing bullets tore him apart.
“Good kill, team,” Clint said. His voice was weary with the phrase. He let his goliath drift to the far wall of the void-flooded deck before reactivating the magnetic clamps in his feet, scanning the holographic screens floating before him. Diagnostics showed no sign of a breach, but he double checked the seals on his atmosphere suit anyway, twisting in his pilot’s chair as he reached for every clasp. Back home they were calling the F-1B Goliath the apex of infantry combat, a man-shaped tank able to operate on any terrain, even space. What no one talked about was how they made you a sizeable target for enemy gunners, or the slowed reaction times. About being holed up in a little box, a slave to your instruments. If they died, so did you.
He watched the corpse of one float past. It was missing an arm and a leg and part of its head, and its outer casings were so heat warped that he couldn’t tell if it had been one of theirs or the enemy’s. He checked the thermal imaging, but found no life. At a glance, the chasis appeared to be intact. The pilot had likely suffocated when the suit went dead. Clint shuddered. Nothing could be worse for a soldier than to die like that. Better to get it over quick.
“Just sixteen to go,” Clint said. He tried to make it sound as if it were nothing. Can’t let the men think you’re coming apart, he told himself.
“And however many more are out there. Plus the cruiser.”
“Stow that talk, Richard, and keep on that comm,” Clint said. Of course, he wasn’t wrong. The enemy’s defenses had been so thick and so well set up that the assault had come up apart almost as soon as they had arrived. Dreadnoughts, stolen goliaths, orbital defense satellites; there were too many ships just to defend a mining world, no matter how rich its production. It was far more than their meager armada could withstand, and had their admiral been anyone but Old Glory Hound they would have retreated the moment they had arrived.
