Into the Maelstrom by Loren L. Coleman

Author:Loren L. Coleman [Coleman, Loren L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
Published: 1998-12-31T13:00:00+00:00

16

Colonel Raymond Sainz had ordered the rear guard loaded into the last Hydra antigrav transport, and then the Seventy-first Assault Group was fully mobilized and with a half hour’s lead against the alien creature. Lieutenant Landvoy’s Aztecs served as flanking guard as the Seventy-first worked its way out of the deeper folds of Gory Putorana, the cycles’ generators whining a protest as they raced over hills and swept around steep cliff faces. Always angling southwest. Twice, the columns were forced to double back when canyon walls ran too steep for antigravity drives.

Then the assault group hit the Kotuy River, and by following it upstream managed to avoid such blind turns. Where the Kotuy swung northwest the Seventy-first quit its banks. Raymond Sainz hated abandoning the guiding waters, but by maps he knew that to follow it any farther would mean climbing up toward the remote Irynutsk Nuclear Power Facility and then on to the river’s headwaters. Also more of the creature’s symbiots flew overhead to the north, their dark bodies easily spotted against a cloudless pale blue sky, as if reconnoitering the landscape for the monster.

No other word for it, either, that thing that had clawed its way out from a den in the earth. A monster. At first Sainz had considered the idea that it was some new creation of the Neo-Soviet empire. A colossus mutant—could that be the Chernaya Gora aim? Then he recalled how the hill had materialized after the sky changed. This abomination was no Neo-Soviet creation. It was a new scourge, alien, released in the Russian heartland and welcome to it. The colonel’s responsibility now was to his command, keeping them alive. Chernaya Gora, if it existed at all, would have to wait until the Seventy-first could rest and regain the initiative. And if he had to ride an ADD straight down that creature’s throat, Sainz vowed to buy them that time.

So instead of turning with the river, the assault group cut across country straight west. It ran them toward easier terrain, where the antigravity vehicles would be able to easily outdistance the monstrous creature or any Neo-Soviet patrol that happened to run a crawler across their path. Buttoned up in the Hades command transport, along with Major Howard and their immediate aides, Colonel Sainz followed the course plot being figured by a transportation specialist corporal. By his calculations, the Fifty-sixth Striker had to be several kilometers to their rear. Now they had only to clear the broken-ridge territory of the southeast Gory Putorana. Fifteen minutes to clear into open terrain and then a few hours until nightfall cloaked them. That was all Sainz asked for.

Then the Neo-Soviet Fifty-sixth Striker attacked.

Little warning preceded the assault. There was no hearing the whistling descent of Thunders through the Hades’ armor or over the stressed field generators of two nearby Wendigo tanks. The driver up front yelled a quick, “Incoming!” and then the Hades rocked over as if shoved rudely from the left. In the back, the colonel managed to get a death grip on his command chair.

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