First Kill
The rifle lay beside her as her back pushed tight against the shattered wall. She was breathing slowly to control her heart rate. The walker's metal joints squealed, and its feet pounded the broken pavement of the street below. Counting in her head, she reached zero. With a flick of a finger, moved the rifle's selector switch to auto. Taking the pistol grip, she raised the weapon to her shoulder and braced it on top of the shattered wall.
The building was an apartment complex in the past. Now, it stood ruined and derelict like most buildings in her city. As she got ready to fire, she noticed the remains of wallpaper still clung to the wall she hid behind. Pastel ducks, bunnies and bears told her that the room she occupied was once a nursery. Now it was a ruin.
The walker's thumping feet propelled it closer. There, it was two hundred meters down the street. Standing four stories tall, the Walker's torso pivoted from side to side looking for danger. Through the holographic site, she could make out the unit markings. This was a command vehicle of the Seventh Union Mechanized Infantry Division. It was probably the battalion commander's mech based on the antennas protruding from its iron grey head.
The walker's sprouted small weapon pods from either side of its head. It was malevolence in motion. Walker's projected the power of the Union. More so than their navy as these were the sharp end of the Union's will.
Sweat rolled out from under her dusty balaclava and into her eyes. She tried to blink them clear as movement could attract unwanted attention. Waiting was always the hardest part. Engage too soon and you risked the rounds not being able to penetrate. Too late and they may not arm in time and would bounce off the mech's armor.
There. She pulled the trigger and unleashed on the walker. With the mech a bare fifty meters from her position, the inferno rounds ate deeply into the armored skin. The first four shots were right on target. They impacted on the cockpit view screen and armor in the head of the beast. The remaining eight rounds walked to the left across the head and into the right weapons pod. Using the recoil to push her over, she fell on her back beside the wall she used for cover.
The weapons pod pulsed with light that brightened the ruin she hid within. She could only feel the deafening explosion. Her ear buds she wore under the balaclava protected her hearing from loud noises but amplified the quiet ones. Blast waves rolled over the building and knocked loose more bricks, dust and debris into the room. Covering her head with her arms, she kept her face from being torn by falling brick and shrapnel.
With her head turned towards the center of her position, she locked eyes with a blue cloth rabbit. The well-worn toy was dust covered. Another reminder of what the Union has done to her home, her people and her planet. She reached out and picked up the toy. The face and ears were threadbare from the attentions of a child now long gone from this ruin. She thought of her own family, her little sister Janice in particular. Janice was only eight when she joined the militia. It was only a year later when the bombs fell on her city and Sergeant Rachel Duncan's only remaining family was the militia.
Duncan couldn't risk wiping the tears from her eyes, least she rub dust and debris in them and make it worse. She placed the toy into her satchel before sitting up and peering at her handiwork. The walker sat embedded in the building across the street. Smoke rose from the stump that once held the weapons pod. The walker's mangled right leg lay twisted and ruined.
Reaching back into the satchel, she withdrew a full magazine. This one had blue tape wrapped around the base with lettering reading anti-personnel. These were a mixture of grenades and flechette rounds for the rifle's, main gun. Ejecting the spent one, she reloaded the weapon. The empty magazine went back into the bag.
She watched the street below. Union infantry were close by any of their walkers. Command mechs never moved without infantry support. But there were none visible. To her astonishment, the escape hatch opened at the bottom of the walker's head. A brown uniformed officer dropped to the ground below.
He must have hit very hard. Landing awkwardly, the union soldier fell to his left side. He grabbed his ankle but didn't utter a sound. He writhed on the ground but was silent. If it wasn't for the ambient noise of combat elsewhere in the city, she would have thought she was deaf.
Sighting in on the officer, she waited for more men to emerge. Her heart was hammering in her chest as she attempted to keep track of time. When an eternity passed, two minutes according to her wrist chronometer, she moved and made her way to the stairs. She took only a minute to reach the street.
Taking cover in a doorway, she pushed another button on the rifle. This changed it from using its main weapon to a smaller caliber solid projectile thrower. The larger one carried a variety of possible loads. Inferno rounds, the ones she used on the walker, were an incendiary device that ignited in flight and burned with such intensity, that they could burn through almost a meter of armor plate. It was this ammunition that allowed her people to counter the threat of the mechs. They also could fire grenades, small high explosive projectiles and flechettes, a bundle of needle like spikes that spread out when shot. The latter two munitions were better suited against ground infantry than the walkers and vehicles of the Union. The secondary weapon fired a tiny round at a high velocity. It was more accurate and had better range than the main gun. It was more useful when dealing with enemy personnel moving through the city as it was suppressed.
The rifle was heavy. Fully loaded, it weighed seven kilograms. It resembled a long, rectangular flower box. A pistol grip protruded from the bottom as well as the main gun's magazine. The ammunition for the secondary weapon was within the rifle's stock. A small hollow square sat on top of the center of the rifle. This was the holographic site. It offered ten times magnification for the shooter. The normal setting, she left it at was three.
At street level, she could better appreciate the size of the walker. The officer had fallen three stories to the ground below. Smoke now flowed from the top of the walker's head and from the escape hatch that the soldier fled from.
Moving from cover to cover behind rubble piles and vehicle remains, she advanced on the wounded Union officer. A ground car blocked her view of the walker's feet. The officer should be right behind it. The destroyed civilian vehicle had its nose buried in the asphalt street. It was only a burned-out shell.
Climbing onto the vehicle's remains she saw... nothing. The officer was gone. Looking to the left and right she spotted drag marks in the dust and debris covering the street. He must have pulled himself along the ground into the building his walker crashed into.
She jumped down from the civilian vehicle and ran to the door. She closed her eyes for a second and took in a deep breath.
End Sample
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Copyright © 2017 CN Stoesen
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination, obtained with permission of use, or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without prior written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination, obtained with permission of use, or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.