OOC: Continued from this RP.
Battlefields come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Maltecco was no different. Situated a short distance north of the megacity of Aspel, it had become more than just a frontline urban centre with densely packed streets, but also an important pressure point for the Sameban's to flood with disposable troops every time the Euran Army threatened to break through on open ground. The Euran helicopters came in low and fast, rattling the buildings beneath them as they swooped in on the city centre. In a house under their flight path, two Sameban Republican Army officers (a signals Major and the besieged Colonel allegedly in charge of the city centre) were shaken physically by the fleet of choppers passing overhead. One of their youngest men, more like a boy really, ran in with a rifle longer than he was slung over his back. 'Comrade Colonel, they're here! It was like you said it might be, usual formation, little ones in front and big ones in back!' The Sameban Colonel took a moment to accept this was the day he would probably have to die. His chum from Signals had much too big a grin on his face for such a moment. 'Major, a bit of respect before we go into battle please.'
'Sorry! Yes. I'm excited to fight Colonel.' The more senior man muttered words to the effect of "you're a fool" and went on his way. Their plan was set. Compress the landing enemies, try to shoot down helicopters, split them up into small groups and go in for the kill. Do this before they called further air support and don't let them penetrate the docks. Repelling the enemy would mean success. If they failed, no dignified Republican Army officer would allow themselves to be taken alive.
Riding on a black metal horse sounds impressive but it doesn't make you feel all that much safer when you're scared shitless. Amelia had stopped thinking of home, or the seagulls she could see fluttering about outside occasionally, or really anything that could help her get away mentally from this death wish. Everything was too much. It didn't help that the bloody pilots left their radios on so everyone in the back could hear the level of shit about to be flung at them. They were weirdly casual about the whole thing too, like they did it every day. 'Shit Mike, we're getting small arms to the right.'
'No lad that's an MG.'
'You think?'
'What else?' Loud clapping shook the helicopter. 'Fuck, alright. Matty, spin her up!' Amelia's hearing was preserved by her earplugs as the door gunner on the right side held down the trigger on his minigun following a few seconds of deliberation looking for the target. 'Matty!' More gunfire. 'Matty, mate!'
'Wasted them boss.'
'Good lad.' Amelia stared at Orson in disbelief. 'They're fucking kidding right?'
'What?'
'I said they're fucking kidding right?' Orson clearly couldn't hear her still. 'Never mind.' She hoped that wasn't the last conversation they had.
The co-pilot gave a thumbs up through the small gap that connected the cabin and back section. 'Thirty seconds Charlie Two, its going to get hot down there! Lovely stuff!' If she got out of this alive, Amelia would make sure to choke that pilot within an inch of his life. Seconds continued to tick away and she continued to shake like a somehow armoured leaf. Marion, that Corporal, she didn't give a fuck. Sat in the corner, chewing gum next to the Crew Chief. Gunfire could be heard in the background over squad radios - the Euran special forces operators were already on the ground and blasting their way through the primary target buildings. The Falcon pitched up and slowed abruptly, throwing Amelia off balance slightly. 'Here we go, don't hesitate on the ropes!' Lieutenant Desmond issued his reminder as he himself prepared to go out as he was going to be first out of the bird. It was the Nepharim way traditionally. Officers both high and low were expected to lead the way although it hadn't been official policy for many decades. Amelia didn't take the creed so seriously, because when it came down to it the foot soldiers like her were the ones putting themselves in harms way most of the time. The doors slid open. Ropes spiraled out to a much greater length than normal to permit for the helicopter keeping just clear of the buildings on either side of the street. Desmond went down followed by Marion, there's two guys going down the other side, Orson next, another lass down the other rope and Amelia stopped counting there because she was flying down a tightly bound bit of rope like an absolute maniac.
Don't clamp the rope with your feet they tell you, boot oil makes it too slippery for whoever is coming behind you. Don't get within three metres of the next soldier down. Amelia screwed up both of those things pretty much straight away. She slipped two metres from the ground and bundled over Orson as he tried to get away. Her instincts set in after a few moments of shock. Get up! She had dropped her rifle which wasn't the worst of her problems. Frequently accused of not paying enough attention to briefings, Amelia was sure as anything that she was about to prove her doubters wrong here. 'Wrong drop spot!' Desmond spun around looking stunned like a deer in headlights. 'Fucking what?!'
'Wrong drop spot Urban, I swear.'
'That's Lieutenant to you!'
'Fuck off!' She'd never hear the end of that bit of dissidence, this Participation Medal winning wanker of an officer was so by the book he should write his own novel. He had gone first though. Couldn't fault the spirit of Nephara's heroes past, present and future running through his very being on those grounds. There was no time to think though. The dust was completely unexpected in its ferocity as the Falcon pulled away above with everyone deployed. 'Orson, count!'
'Nine out sir!'
'Nine?' That number was wrong. Ten were in the helicopter. Amelia and the others scanned around, conscious that there was very audible heavy gunfire coming from nearby which inevitably had to come their way soon.
Private Boyle had bought it more or less the way he feared. Being more accurate, that would become true if he didn't get serious medical attention five minutes ago. Boyle writhed about, a figurative fish out of the water in this foreign land, a massive gash splitting his side open from hip to below the right armpit. 'Boyle's hit, fuck, cover me!' That medic - what was her name, Amelia could never remember - sprinted while screaming the instruction across the ten metre gap separating Boyle's squirming body from the rest of the squad. He was moving about a lot which was good. What was bad was the lack of screaming or noise. Dying men are too often quiet before they go. Desmond was torn between his genuine desire to protect the team and his understandable reluctance to put the mission on ice half a minute in to the action. He had no choice but to call it in. 'Charlie Two to, urm, shit, Marion, Euraspeak for home?'
'Baseplate?'
'No, only Navy do that, or countries like Cosumar, what do they use? Help me here!' Nobody could really believe what was going on here. It was surreal. Thankfully Orson popped up at the crucial moment. 'Crease!'
'Crease, good man mate, fuck me! Charlie Two to Crease, I have a man down, requesting medevac.' Fat chance the Euran's would send a helicopter back into this mess that quickly.
Chaos aside, Amelia couldn't really help but notice they hadn't been shot at yet. How was Boyle wounded? The medic worked it out pretty sharpish. 'He's landed on a bloody car door.' Desmond was crouched over the kid trying to work out what cruel unwritten rule of the universe had decided to fuck over Boyle today. 'That's not possible.'
'It is, look at it, right here. The tarmac's torn up for a few hundred metres both way, look.' She pointed up and down the long street in each direction. 'From the bombing. There must be loads of bits of rubble under all this dust and churn and sand, damnit. Lieutenant if we don't get him out of here he's fucking gone bung.' No plan could really account for a car door that wasn't spotted under the whirling matrix thrown up by a hovering helicopter or that Boyle would lose his footing and land hard on his side right on a long metal edge without a rubber lining. 'All right, to hell with this. Let's get him out then keep going if we can. Anyone know how far we are from where we were supposed to be?' Amelia knew they were in the wrong place but only by seeing it wasn't the same as the right place. 'No-one?' Silence. 'Fucking hopeless, great. The lot of you on your feet now!' Orson stayed prone facing down the street one way at a crowd of men assembling behind two cars in the street fifty metres away. 'A dozen contacts that way sir. I hear a hiss I swear.'
'A hiss?'
'I read in basic a hissing sound means there's bullets passing close, but if you hear a snap that means they're hitting by you. We're being shot at.'
'Nice story mate, get up before I hit you so we can move!' Amelia took the random decision to go with Orson's hunch and drop to the floor against orders.
The Lieutenant was about to give Amelia a verbal bollocking when he was thrown onto his back with a puff of dust. 'They're definitely fucking shooting at us!' Orson squeezed the trigger on his light machine gun and the men dispersed. All hell broke loose within moments. An RPG zipped by and blew out a small shopfront directly behind Amelia and Marion. Glass fragments showered them in a deadly hail. Marion screamed every expletive under the sun but came away unwounded. Amelia felt something hot pass by her leg but ignored it, adrenaline driving her to move into a crouched position and slide behind a street freezer for an adjacent abandoned restaurant, dragging Desmond with her. Her worst nightmare was coming true. Sameban militia with supporting conscripts and probably a few marksmen were attacking from three directions along three streets. Gunmen were gathering on the roofs of the buildings surrounding the junction. Marion took charge with Desmond either dead or knocked out. 'Alright squad, this can't get any worse so keep your head down, let's see out the next minute, then lay down some cover fire! How should we do this?' It was a rhetorical question spoken out loud as she looked around and decided in a few seconds who of the eight standing members of the team would shoot in which direction. She started calling out orders when a corrugated iron panel from the restaurant flickered as a straddling run of bullets sprayed along it and the nearby soil in her direction. Another Private, Brae, chose the wrong moment to try and jog across the street and did a sort of strange shriek as her foot gave way under her thanks to the force of a high calibre bullet shattering everything below the ankle. 'No fucking way!' Marion saw exactly what happened and that the shots had come from an eleven storey building towering over everything, a hundred and fifty metres down one of the forking roads.
Five minutes passed like a days of agonising torture. Their time pinned down in this position turned into hours and so it steadily became a greater misery. None of the squad could move their heads an inch for fear of losing it to a stray round. Local civil defence militia were lightly armed and often without uniforms but they were canny and knew their home field advantage counted for a lot. They persuaded the SRA conscripts with them to risk peeking over the balconies of buildings above to fire in bursts down at the Nepharim squad from as little as five or ten metres away. It was nothing short of a miracle that there were still half the squad left able bodied once Brae was chopped up by finishing shots in the middle of the street and Lance Corporal Sheridan's got spread against the side of the wrecked shop interior. Desmond woke up in a manner not dissimilar to a drunk waking from another failed attempt at getting through the night sober. 'Where we at Marion?'
'Urban you wanker get down!' She flattened her superior with a crushing elbow that probably made his sore chest worse than it had to be. 'Bitch!'
'Thank me later sir.' She fired two shots with her rifle and a poor bastard in the crosshairs twenty metres away, using a salt bin as cover, slumped over. 'Seven!'
'I told you not to count kills you savage.'
'Remember they will be counting us, Des!' Amelia was crawled up next to where Desmond was lying with her rifle jammed through a small gap, between the outdoor fridge and an overturned table that had proven to be far better cover than she could have anticipated. 'Private tell me who is dead and you can have Marion's job.'
'Seb Sheridan, Brae Hammond, Mick Boyle. You too we thought.' The Lieutenant reacted with a serene nod but broke the illusion of calm right after by vomiting at her feet.
Teary eyed survivors of near death experiences on those nauseating "true life" documentaries don't do situations of this type justice. Amelia didn't feel that way at least and she hated it more so when religious belief got the credit for their survival. She had never seen them admit they were bricking it the whole time or hoped in the moment that their mates got killed first. This whole scandalous affair was pure unadulterated chaos. There was no all seeing deity deciding fates and handing out a fair treatment. No-one who made it out of this was going to go on the small screen claiming divine intervention had spared them of a premature end. Surviving this ordeal was getting tenser by the minute and her mind kept wandering off into similarly end of the line orientated thought processes. The volume of incoming decreased as time went on and the battle unfolded around them, or so they thought. Lieutenant Desmond soon learned that the cause of this reprieve was that the epicentre of nearby combat had shifted four or five blocks eastwards. Nephara's stranded platoon were now a lost platoon. Amelia couldn't hold it together through another round of shitstorm in the vein of the last. Barely any of this squad could keep going, not least because the ammunition was try, let alone the three killed in action. Help arrived in time but way too late for her unlucky squad mates. The chopper came back. Desmond was helped with running by Marion as he led them one block east under moderate fire, carrying the dead one by one down a couple of alleyways and down the middle of a burnt out nightclub. Apart from a close call with two booby traps they made it intact.
Earlier that day Amelia wanted to knock out that smug Euran pilot but right now she could kiss him. The square they had moved to was big and the Falcon was able to descend and pick them up as soon as they had cleared some power lines using some inappropriately applied breaching charges. Marion was suspicious of the situation. 'This is easy. Too easy, you getting me Cleves?'
'I get you. Where did they all go?' Orson was staring at Boyle's corpse. Desmond was wandering around more akin to a lost lamb than an officer of Nephara's armed forces. The helicopter approached low with a gunshop not far behind surveying the surrounding area. 'Thank fuck!' No one in particularly said that yet they might as well have been, because everyone thought it, and the squad members rushed to board as soon as it touched down. The pilot was noticeably quieter than earlier offering only a respectful nod and a toned down one liner. 'Time to get out of this special holiday spot I gather.' Both the Crew Chief and other door gunner helped cover up the three dead although Sheridan's mangled state presented a bit of a challenge. Lifting off didn't relieve the tension in Amelia's mind which Orson was reading again. 'We have to go back out there don't we?'
'Not today if they don't want me going runabout.' Maltecco burned below them and not a single member of the squad wanted to gaze upon the morass of violence still enveloping thousands of people below. Amelia closed her eyes and tried to pretend she wasn't there anymore. She was going home in one place regardless of what happened in another. Suppression didn't help with anxiety she'd read but fuck it, it was worth trying anyway.
A thump rocked the entire aircraft. 'Orson?' He was knocked out of his daze by Amelia's reaction. She watched as he poked his head out of the slightly ajar door and went white. 'Pilot, we're fucking hit!'
'We're not amateurs, I know we've been damn well hit!' The co-pilot had been less jovial than his partner earlier, not much had changed. Each member of the squad held on to something nervously and tensed up waiting for any kind of explosion or descent. Nothing happened. 'Pilot?'
'Sorry Lieutenant but I'm dealing with a minor little crisis here, the food cart will have to wait.'
'Very funny but why are we shaking so much?'
'Its called a tail rotor and without it we all die, kindly be quiet while I deal with it, thank you!' The stricken helicopter got louder by the second and once again the loudmouth pilot didn't help calm their minds as he tried to diagnose the solution with his co-pilot. 'Nick was it an RPG?'
'Possibly. Or a Sameban firework display gone wrong. Chance is a fine thing.' A minute or two of struggle washed by and the pilot stopped talking in snide remarks. Actually he stopped talking completely as did the entire crew and passenger compartment. Amelia made the error of poking her head out of the window to see they had descended already to a dangerous altitude. 'Orson mate, anything you want to say?' He was caught off guard. She wanted to give him a chance to say it. 'Come on mate.'
'Say what?'
'I know alright? You're not hard to read. Don't let me die wondering.' Orson did want to be honest with her eventually so why not now? 'Ok.' He was cut off by a piercing cracking noise and the helicopter veering into a lateral spinning motion that threw everyone onto their side. 'Bollocks, Hotel Two-Two is going down. Crease, we're over Maltecco Springs Boulevard. Or some hotel. We're going in.' Amelia decided to save Orson the struggle of explaining complex thoughts in a moment like this by grabbing his hand and bracing for the crunch of Sameban soil that awaited.
2)
