The Price of Liberty (Empire Rising Book 4) Read online

  “Oh yes,” Pennington said. “We knew that our one escape tunnel wouldn’t be enough. We have been working on digging an artificial one. It was still weeks away from being dug out by hand but I have sent men to try and blast their way through the last two hundred meters of rock. The Indians will detect the explosions but hopefully we can get everyone out before they move a force to block us. I was going to give my men another ten minutes and then start sending groups of civilians their way. I want people moving out as soon as they open up a way out.”

  “Good,” Johnston said. “That gives us a chance. Where are you sending those that get out?”

  “We have four evacuation sites, Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta,” Pennington answered. “I had them set up more than a month ago. There are some limited supplies there, hopefully they will be safe places to regroup before we move on. I fear that even if we get out of this, the Indians won’t let us stay in one place for long.”

  “No,” Johnston agreed, “but that is a problem for another time. It sounds like you have things under control here. With your permission, I will take over leading the soldiers, we will buy you as much time as we can.”

  “Permission granted, and good luck Major.”

  “You too,” Johnston replied.

  Still holding Clare’s hand, he pulled her off to one side, “Here,” he said as he pulled out the two remaining ration bags from the stash Clare had hidden within the tree trunk. “You’re going to need these.”

  “What do you mean?” Care said, determination creeping into her voice. “I am staying here to fight.”

  “No, you’re not,” Johnston said. “Your place is with the groups heading into the forest. If the Indians know about the cave, they will be expecting us to have escape tunnels. There will be patrols everywhere. You are one of the best trackers and guides here. The evacuation groups need you.”

  “No!” Clare protested.

  “Yes,” Johnston insisted. Instead of allowing her to argue he pulled her into a kiss. “Do it for me,” he said as their lips broke. “I can’t fight whilst I am constantly worrying about you. You have your skills and I have mine. Please don’t get in the way of me doing what I must.”

  “Ok,” Clare acquiesced, hating the logic in his words. She pulled out her datapad and scanned the map Pennington had sent everyone with the Evac locations marked on it. “I’m going to Gamma. If you don’t meet me there I will never forgive you.”

  “I’ll be there,” Johnston promised, even though they both knew he was probably lying.

  Before he could leave Clare pulled him into another kiss. “See that you do,” she said as they broke apart.

  Johnston could see tears rolling down her cheek but he knew that if he stayed any longer he might never leave. Instead of reaching out to mop them up he spun on his heels and moved to where his marines were waiting for him. For a moment he expected Moony or one of the others to make a joke but they kept silent.

  “Where do you want us?” Mooney asked.

  “Right here,” Johnston said. “Our enhancements will give us an edge in this more open environment. I’m going to order Pennington to move the civilians further into the cave system towards the escape tunnels. We’ll try and delay the Indians from reaching this cavern but when they do, I want you to make them sorry they ever tried to get in here. We’ll turn this cavern into a killing ground. Are you all with me?”

  “To the end,” Moony said. The others nodded.

  “Ok,” Johnston said as he nodded too. “Then let’s be about it.”

  After passing his plans to Pennington, Johnston strode to where the majority of the resistance fighters waited for orders.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Johnston almost shouted to be heard over the commotion in the cavern. “You have been fighting the Indians for more than four months. You have hurt them badly. But we always knew they were likely to find us here. Councilwoman Pennington is working to get everyone out safely. But she needs us to buy her some time. I need twenty fighters to come with me and join the guards further up the entrance tunnel. We need to give the Indian’s a bloody nose. The chances of us coming back are slim, so I am asking for volunteers.”

  More than forty fighters stepped forward. Johnston wasn’t surprised. Ever since the first Indian soldiers had landed on their planet, the fiercely independent people of Haven had been more than willing to sacrifice their lives to kick the Indians out.

  After picking twenty volunteers he walked to Moony. Johnston gave him some final instructions. “Split the rest of them in half. Send one group with Pennington, they are to be the last defense if they get past us here. Use the rest to set up three firing lines in the cavern.”

  “Aye Sir,” Moony said. “What about you?”

  “I’ll do my best to get back to you,” Johnston said. “Just don’t shoot me by accident.”

  “We’ll try not to Sir,” Moony said with a grin.

  “With me,” Johnston said, raising his voice again so that the volunteers could hear him.

  Satisfied that they were going to follow him, Johnston broke into a jog back up the tunnel that lead to the entrance. On his way he passed two guard stations and he deposited five extra fighters at each.

  Before he even got to where the vault door had been, the sounds of fighting could be heard echoing down the tunnel. When a short sharp explosion erupted from what sounded like less than forty meters further up the tunnel just around the next bend, Johnston knew the defenders were in trouble. If the Indians were close enough to be using flash bangs, they were about to overrun the defenders.

  He sprinted to the edge of the turn and signaled for the resistance fighters to stop. Taking a quick peak around the corner he got a snapshot of what was happening. It looked like there were only three guards left. They were crouched behind two large boulders as they fired their gauss cannons further up the tunnel. All Johnson was able to make out of the Indians was a wall of combat armor rolling down the cave.

  “On the count of three we’re going to give those guys some covering fire to fall back,” Johnston ordered. Without waiting for a reply he started counting. “One, two...”

  Instead of finishing his count, he moved. As soon as he rounded the corner he tracked in on the closest Indian soldier with his plasma rifle. Three quick shots and the soldier was down. In less than a couple of heartbeats, Johnston shifted his aim and sent three bolts into another soldier. Only then did the rest of his men catch up with him. As tens of gauss cannon rounds tore into the unsuspecting Indians, Johnston called out to the last two defenders to fall back. The third was already on the ground, a smoking hole in his chest.

  The defenders didn’t need to be told twice, they got to their feet and ran past Johnston and his men. As soon as they were safely around the bend in the tunnel, Johnston turned and ran after them. “Let’s go,” he called. “Back to the next bend. We’ll try and hold there.”

  As the other men turned to follow him, a flurry of plasma bolts cut down one of them. Johnston didn’t have time to stop and check if he was still alive. Instead he waited for the rest of his men to pass him before pulling a grenade from is belt and throwing it around the corner. He turned and ran after his men. The explosion that echoed around the cave moments later sounded muffled, suggesting Indian soldiers had absorbed a lot of the blast.

  Forty seconds, Johnston said to himself. That was how much time he had bought Pennington and Clare so far.

  It seemed that barely a handful of seconds passed from when his men got into position around the next bend, to when Indian soldiers came barreling into sight. Plasma bolts and gauss cannon rounds cut the first two Indians down. The others quickly backed up out of sight. Almost as soon as they did, several round spheres bounced down the tunnel towards them.

  “Eyes” was all Johnston had time to shout before he covered his ears with his hands and buried his head under his armpit. The explosions from the flashbangs were deafening and Johnston cursed himself for not picking up some ear buds from
the supplies deeper in the cave. He had lost his own pair in the Havenite forest after the ambush.

  When he felt his vision clearing he opened his eyes. The first thing that greeted him was one of his fighters standing up clutching at his eyes. Johnston couldn’t hear anything but from the movements of the man’s lips it was obvious he was crying out. Johnston tried to reach the man to pull him back into cover but a plasma bolt from an unseen Indian soldier ended his misery.

  As if the fighter’s death was a signal to the rest of the Indian soldiers, a wave of plasma bolts rained down on Johnston and his men. Occasionally they tried to pop their heads out of cover to return fire but the volume of plasma bolts was just too much. Another fighter caught two bolts in his head the second he peeked around the boulder he was behind. Then, when Johnston tried to lift his rifle to fire blindly, a bolt hit his rifle and sent it spinning deeper into the cave. Johnston was acutely aware that the incessant rain of fire was slowly burning away the boulder he was crouched behind. Soon it would be gone and he would be a sitting duck.

  “They’re advancing,” one of the five remaining fighters shouted, somehow he had managed to get a look up the tunnel without being hit.

  “I have one more grenade, as soon as it goes off we’re going to make a run for it,” Johnston said. “Don’t stop until you get to the guard station.”

  “You don’t need to tell us,” another fighter said.

  Without looking, Johnston armed and hurled the grenade as far as he could up the tunnel. As soon as he heard the explosion he jumped to his feet and ran, only stopping to scoop up a gauss cannon from where its now dead owner had dropped it. As plasma bolts zipped past him he fired blindly back up the tunnel.

  “Hold your fire, hold your fire,” one of the fighters running alongside Johnston shouted as they rounded a slight bend in the tunnel and came into view of the next guard station. Thankfully, the guards weren’t too trigger happy and Johnston and the three remaining fighters made it safely behind the permasteel barriers.

  “Get ready,” Johnston said to the men and women around him. “They are right behind us.”

  “Don’t worry Major,” one of the soldiers said. “I’ve been saving this for just the right time.”

  Johnston couldn’t help but grin. Slung over the soldier’s back was a small SAM, it would certainly do the job. “Good work soldier,” he said. “But make sure you save it until we are about to fall back. Let’s draw in as many of them as we can.”

  “Aye Sir, I’ll do that,” the soldier responded.

  Looking around at the two permasteel barriers that blocked half the cave, Johnston found an unused firing slot. He poked his gauss cannon out the hole and prepared to fire.

  Three minutes, he said to himself.

  As he expected, the first Indian soldiers came into view almost immediately. This time they were exercising a lot more caution. One soldier poked his head around the bend in the tunnel. He snapped it back again as gauss cannon rounds shot towards him.

  “They will try and rush us,” Johnston said, “they’ll throw flashbangs first.”

  Several round balls came flying around the bend in the tunnel. Johnston covered his eyes and ears the best he could. Both his eyesight and hearing had been augmented as part of the physical and genetic enhancements he had undergone to join the special forces marines. To give him some protection from flashbangs and other explosions, his eyelids had been reinforced, so as long as he got his eyes closed in time, the flashbang’s effect would be limited. His hearing had no such protection and so even with his hands over his ears and the protection provided by the permasteel barrier, Johnston felt disorientated and deafened from the blasts that rang out all around him.

  Thankfully he didn’t need to be at his best to fight in the tunnel. Seconds after the flashbangs went off, he picked up his cannon and fired blindly up the tunnel. As soon as he felt able, he opened his eyes and tracked in on his targets. There were ten Indians charging down the tunnel. An eleventh was on the ground and Johnston guessed he must have fallen to one of his blind shots.

  Using his lightening quick reflexes, he took out one, two and then three of the Indian soldiers, all with head shots. Plasma bolts exploded against the permasteel barrier but it held. As Johnston sighted his cannon on the next Indian soldier, the combat armored woman fell to the ground, two gauss cannon rounds having ripped the armor’s chest open. The rest of the resistance fighters were back in the fight.

  From the safety of the permasteel barrier they made quick work of the Indian assault, dispatching all the charging soldiers before they made it to the barrier. One or two resistance fighters let out a cheer but Johnston wasn’t about to call this a victory. Making use of the brief silence, he stood and inspected the other side of the permasteel barrier. It had originally been over forty centimeters thick, the Indian plasma rifle fire had burnt more than half of it away, and some spots had been hit a number of times and looked like the plasma had almost burnt all the way through.

  “This isn’t going to hold much longer,” Johnston said as he pointed at the worst spot on the barrier. “Get ready to fire that missile.”

  “Yes Sir,” the solider said, setting down his gauss cannon and picking up the SAM launcher.

  “Wait for my orders,” Johnston said.

  They didn’t get any more time to converse for a noise from further up the cave drew everyone’s attention. Johnston ducked behind the barrier, but not before he got a glance at what was coming at them. He wasn’t sure exactly what it was, but it looked metallic. From the way it was moving, it seemed like the Indian soldiers were carrying it. It’s an oversized riot shield, he thought.

  Heads and weapons poked out from all around the metallic object and plasma bolts rained down on the permasteel barrier. They have a barrier of their own, Johnston thought, one that can advance.

  He tried to fire a couple of gauss rounds at the barrier but they ricocheted off. Giving up on that, he zeroed in on the small section of a soldier’s head armor that was poking around the barrier and squeezed his trigger.

  See how you like that, he thought when the Indian soldier fell to the ground.

  The defenders felled two more Indians and for a moment the advance of the metallic object stalled. However, they lost one of their own when a plasma bolt bored through a weakened spot in the barrier and hit the fighter hiding behind it.

  Before the resistance fighter hit the ground, Johnston felt a searing heat hit him just under his left armpit. He screamed as the plasma burned through his battle suit and skin and into his rib cage. The force of the bolt and the pain threw him to the ground. Before he was fully aware of what was going on, one of the resistance fighters was at his side. She held something to his neck and Johnston felt the hypo-injector shooting chemicals into his body.

  The pain lessened enough that he was able to think clearly. “Thank you,” he said. “My body can take it from here.”

  The woman gave him a strange look but she shrugged and turned to pick her weapon up. The resistance fighters didn’t know what made Johnston and his team so different from them, but they had seen them do enough superhuman feats that they expected the unexpected.

  Johnston waited for his enhancements to kick in. Slowly at first, the remaining pain lessened, then it was gone all together. When he looked down at the large wound in his side he saw that the bleeding had stopped. It still looked ugly and was potentially fatal, but his enhancements allowed his body to shut down the pain receptors in damaged areas so that he could function. He did have enhanced healing too, but it wasn’t miraculous, if he survived the night, it would still take weeks for his body to fully heal.

  Satisfied the pain was gone, Johnston pushed himself back into a sitting position to see what was going on. The Indians had given up on pouring fire into the defenders. Instead they had reorganized themselves and the barrier was moving closer to the guard position.

  “They’re working to get close enough to lob flashbangs over our barrier an
d charge us again,” Johnston shouted. “Time for that missile. Hit the cave ceiling right above them.”

  “With pleasure,” the soldier holding the SAM said. Without waiting for any further orders, he stood up and aimed the SAM where Johnston had instructed him.

  Johnston and the rest of the fighters ducked behind the barrier for cover. A grin of satisfaction spread across the fighter’s face as he fired the SAM up the tunnel. The explosion caused shockwaves that rumbled under Johnston’s feet and debris pummeled the barrier and shot past it to fly deeper into the cave.

  In his jubilation, the resistance fighter who fired the SAM had stayed standing to see the effect of his weapon. As Johnston looked on, a fist sized boulder bounced off his head bashing in his skull. Johnston shook his head, the fighter had been brave, but foolish.