Battle of Ninth Street and Environs, Crozier District
Apartment Building
Caleb moved into the apartment building with his contubernium, rifles smoothly swivelling to cover the corners of the half-destroyed lobby. He watched Dale scan the map and point the Angelans up and to the right. Caleb nodded and gave a thumbs up. "Watch for civilians," he reminded the ETC militiamen gently. The subtext was clear; the Angelans' rules of engagement bound them to fight anyone who fired on civilians. Don't let that be you.
"All right," Caleb said crisply into his headset. "Let's go. Cold and fast." He tapped Habakkuk on the shoulder. "Take us up."
Once again, the Michaelites stacked up at the base of the stairs, and then moved quickly up, rifles scanning, hugging the wall. Halfway up, Habbakuk came to such an abrupt stop that Sister Jasala Dejmar, ascending behind him, almost ran smack into his broad back. The big point man turned, put a finger to his lips, and pointed at the stairs. Half an inch in front of Habbakuk's foot, a fine line of fishing wire was stretched across the steps just above the floor; almost invisible, it led up on each side to the shadows at the top of the stairwell, where Caleb now saw bunches of grenades hanging like obscene fruit. The priest pointed up, then down at the tripwire, and the other Michaelites nodded, thumbs raised. One by one, the Angelans stepped over the tripwire and continued up the stairs, treading as lightly as they could.
It almost wasn't enough. A hand suddenly appeared at the top of the steps, clutching a grenade. Habbakuk dropped to one knee, ready to try to throw the frag back up the steps, but it turned out not to be necessary. From the back of the file, Lucio's rifle blurred up and there was a sudden hard crack. To Caleb's astonishment, the hand clutching the grenade suddenly separated from its arm in a spray of blood. The Angelans flung themselves against the wall of the stairwell as the grenade dropped to the floor of the upper landing, still grasped in its severed hand, and detonated with a deafening roar. Well, they damn well know we're here now, Caleb thought.
Reaching the top of the stairwell, Habakkuk pulled out a small mirror on a wire handle - a standard part of a Michaelite point-man's kit - and extended it around the corner, swiveling first left, then right. Half a second later, he flinched back as a roar of automatic fire destroyed the mirror in a spray of glittering glass shards. Breathing hard, Habbakuk held up two fingers, and pointed to the right around the corner. Caleb held one hand to his throat, and Habakkuk shook his head. No civilians, then; the throat-grab sign was theoretically for hostages, but the Angelans had adapted. Caleb nodded, but tapped a flashbang clipped to his own armor anyway. A thermobaric grenade could go right through these walls, and kill a kid in the next room. Or burn the building down.
Habbakuk nodded, and Jasala detached a stun grenade from her armor and pulled the pin with her thumb, the other fingers still wrapped tightly around the safety spoon. Habakkuk gave her a quick nod, and Jasala tossed the flashbang out into the hallway, bouncing it off the opposite wall of the stairwell so that her hand never extended beyond the corner. Braced for the noise, and protected from the flash by the wall of the stairwell, Habakkuk waited only a split second for the detonation before he swung his head and chest out into the hall, still using the corner of the stairwell as cover for the rest of his body, and fired twice with his SG2. The soldier he was aiming at had risen above a barricade made of an upended armoire in order to reload a Mary Jane, and the buckshot didn't leave much left of the man above the waist. At the same time, Jasala, on one knee, spun out below Habakkuk - also exposing only her head and upper chest - and tore the other soldier apart from brow to collarbones with a tight burst of caseless fire. The man was crouched behind the armoire, rifle resting on its top, rubbing furiously at his eyes; blinded by the flashbang, he couldn't see that his head was exposed. Ordinarily, Angelans fired single shots, for greater accuracy; but the new LY21s made it possible to get off ten rounds in less than a second, before a shooter's aim could deviate too much at close range. "Clear!" Habbakuk barked into his headset, and the Michaelites moved quickly out into the hallway, one file hugging each wall.
With a quick series of hand signals, Caleb ordered the surrounding Michaelites to clear the apartments whose doors lined the hallway. First and foremost, the peacekeepers were still trying to evacuate civilians. The ten Angelans split into five teams of two, and each team moved up to one door. This was a drill they had practiced to perfection, and executed under fire countless times. One soldier kicked the door open; almost simultaneously, the other threw a prepared stun grenade into the room. The first soldier then yanked the door back shut, sealing the nonlethal but utterly disorienting detonation inside the room. The whole process typically took under a second. The Angelans then allowed a split second for the flashbang to go off, and then the first soldier kicked the door back open and stormed inside, instantly moving out of the doorway with his back to the wall of the room; no one wanted to be a target silhouetted in the doorway. At the same time, the other Angelan entered the room and broke the other way, moving along the wall in the opposite direction to set up a crossfire on whoever was in the room. Speed and control were everything; by two seconds after the flashbangs' detonation, the dogma went, any enemy soldiers in the room should be dead or subdued, most often without ever having fired a shot.
As for any civilian inhabitants of the apartments, they were given a minute to recover from the flashbangs; while they were still getting back their vision and balance, the Michaelites repeatedly announced their identities. "Angelan peacekeepers! Angelan peacekeepers! It's okay, sir, ma'am; we're here to get you to safety. It's all right." The inhabitants were then sent down to the lobby, where they were told to stay away from doors and windows and wait for more peacekeepers to come and take them to the refugee corridor. The Angelans would then return to their methodical sweep of the building.
Outside the Apartment Building
Shooting at a fully upgraded Sorcha HIFV with RPG-16s was symbolic more of the power of hope than of good judgment, but it was still plenty terrifying for the Michaelites taking cover behind the vehicle. Since the rockets were unguided and fired from such close range, the first two hard-kill tiers of the Lyran GOLIATH APS simply didn't activate. Instead, the four WATCHKEEPER launchers sprang to life, sending two spreads of tungsten balls out at angles calculated with computerized precision to intercept the RPGs. The rocket aimed at the turret hit the spread aimed at it while it was still almost twenty meters from the HIFV, and it detonated prematurely; Martha Wallenstein felt the heat scorch her face. The Michaelite ahead of her, Brother Karbazir Ryvyn, shouted "God's blood!" and fell back against the side of the Sorcha with a jagged piece of shrapnel embedded in his arm just below the shoulder armor.
The second RGP was intercepted just five meters from the Sorcha's treads, and shrapnel from its detonation rang on the HIFV's far side. The rocket had detonated close enough to the treads for some of its force to reach the Sorcha, but the HIFV's tracks were mostly covered by shrouds of titanium-Chobham armor strong enough to resist a direct hit from an RPG-16, let alone a blast weakened by sixteen feet of distance. Still, Martha heard the Sorcha's driver, Sister Maria Boggs, shout something alarmed into her headset over the roar of detonation, followed by a rather more intelligible statement: "I think we're okay."
"Good." Martha was still shaken, but now she felt a deep fury boiling up within her. We told them who we were, and they shot at us anyway. There was no room in her heart for mercy. "Kill 'em." Martha snarled, and the Angelans settled down to do just that.
First, the Sorchas opened up. By now, the HIFV that had gone to rescue Jacob Hadn't was racing back to help the other Angelans, so that two Sorchas rather than one opened fire on Martha's command. With a roar, the high-pressure 50mm autocannons raked across the buildings around the central apartment block, the buildings from which the Monarchists were menacing the civilian convoy. With the right ammunition, those cannons could rip through APCs, IFVs, and even some MBTs. Now, they scourged the Monarchists with fire and shrapnel, shredding walls and doors, leaving stone and concrete pulverized by firepower. At the same time, the LY60 14.7mm HMGs mounted on each Sorcha began to fire as well; capable of punching through 30mm of steel armor at 500 meters, the machine guns aimed with computerized precision, cutting down any Monarchists who strayed from behind the most robust of cover. And the Sorchas' coaxial grenade launchers fired too, filling the buildings which the Monarchists used as cover with smoke and CS gas, to blind the soldiers and force them into the open.
The dismounted Michaelites, for their part, hurled smoke grenades to obscure the area between the civilian convoy and the Monarchist positions, the latter of which were now the object of a brutal hail of fire from the HIFVs; the goal was to keep the soldiers from seeing what the civilian vehicles were doing. Martha waited for the smoke to build up, and then ran, covered by the fire of the HIFVs but bend double anyway, up to the lead van. Behind her, she could hear the fabric-ripping sounds of LY21s firing, the deep, rapid boom of the Widowmaker grenade launchers, the steady crack-crack-crack of the marksmen's careful fire. The Sorchas' heavy weapons could make staying behind cover impossible for the Monarchists; but as soon as the soldiers raised their heads, the Michalites were waiting to cut them down with small arms.
Now, Martha slammed into the side of the civilians' van, her shoulder armor denting its sliding door. "Angelan peacekeepers!" she shouted, hammering on the window. "Angelan peacekeepers! You need to get out of here! We can hold them off while you go. Two blocks that way is the refugee corridor - you'll know it because it'll be full of peacekeepers and aid workers and civilians. Then turn right and keep going until you get to the Cookish - I mean, the Olympic Stadium. Make sure that all the other cars in this convoy follow you, all the way. All right? God bless you, and go!" She slapped the side of the van, an instinctive military move-out gesture, and then snapped into her headset. "These people are moving out; let's make sure they don't get killed in the process, all right? Keep those damned schismatics' heads down!"
