Earth in Darkness (Earthrise Book 14) by Daniel Arenson

Author:Daniel Arenson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Moonclipse
Published: 2020-12-15T07:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY

"Colonel Linden, we have to retreat!" Cyborg shouted over the roar of battle. "We can't win this. We must get off this planet!"

The battle was raging across the ice. Thousands of marines stood with their backs to the walls, firing machine guns at the enemy. The centipedes kept coming. Wave after wave. Whenever the soldiers mowed them down, fresh scum rose from cracks in the ice.

"Has anyone managed to contact the fleet?" Addy shouted. She was firing an assault rifle, peppering the scum with bullets. Poor Calcifer was out of plasma charges.

"Nobody can reach them!" Cyborg said.

The officer stood on the ice, his metal legs steady even as the world shook. Addy envied him. Her own boots kept slipping as she fought.

"What about the Prison Bureau?" Addy said.

"We've been hailing them on all frequencies." Cyborg loaded a fresh magazine. "They're ignoring us. They're hiding behind their walls and letting us die out here."

"Or they've been compromised," Addy said.

The marines had raised a snowbank outside the camp's concrete walls. They stood behind it like soldiers behind sandbags, rifles slung over the top. This crude, snowy barricade surrounded the prison camp. The trenches they had dug right after landing were already overrun.

It was only a matter of time, Addy knew, before the enemy breached these defenses too.

Without air support, we're toast, Addy realized. Thousands of soldiers. An entire brigade. Wiped out. Under my watch.

She couldn't let that happen.

She hated the idea of retreat. She had never retreated from a fight. Not as a kid fighting bullies on the streets. Not in all her years of war.

But throughout those years, she had been a grunt. Just a common soldier in the trenches. Now she was a leader. She could not doom these soldiers to die just because she was too proud to run.

There's no shame in retreat, Addy realized. Sometimes it's necessary to die valiantly. And sometimes it's necessary to run, to live, and to fight another day.

Very un-Addy-like, she knew. But maybe she was finally growing up.

"Very well, Cyborg," she said. "Spread the order among the companies. We're to get these dropships flight-ready again. Then we blast the hell off this pla—"

White light blazed in the sky.

A boom shook the world.

Addy grimaced, blinded. She knelt and covered her head with her arms. Gunfire died across the battle. Even the scum screeched, paused from fighting, and curled up. The sky blazed as if a billion lightning bolts flared at once.

And then it was over.

The air sizzled.

Addy rose slowly, woozy. She looked around her.

"What the hell just happened?" she demanded. Nobody answered.

She looked up at the sky. White blobs spread across the zenith, flaring out to sickly yellow. A bruise across the sky.

"That was a nuclear blast," she said. "A fucking nuclear explosion. The fleet. Oh God … the fleet."

Cyborg squinted, staring upward. "That nuclear blast wasn't in space. It didn't target the fleet. It looks like it was just a few kilometers up."

"How can you tell?"

"Because I—" He frowned. "Well, because—" He paled.

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