The Assault - By Brian Falkner Page 0,23

the others in his squad had long since learned to tune it out.

Kezalu was on the fifty-caliber machine gun, mounted high on the Australian Army Land Rover. It was one of the few human weapons they actually used. Most Earth weapons were so primitive, heavy, and underpowered that they were not worth bothering with. But the big fifty-cal, although huge and unwieldy, fired such large projectiles that they could punch through body armor, vehicles, even buildings. And the weight of the weapon was not an issue if it was rack-mounted on top of a vehicle.

The Land Rovers were primitive, internal-combustion vehicles, and nobody much liked them. They had appropriated hundreds of them from the Australian Army when they had sent it running, however, and they were well suited to the rough desert terrain.

Kezalu had been singing a song from his homeland, the kind of song that only a young, innocent soldier, straight out of basic training, would sing. In some squads it would be seen as a sign of weakness, and the other soldiers would have beaten it out of him after the first day. But Yozi did not hold with that, and the members of his squad knew it, so they left Kezalu alone.

But Kezalu had stopped singing. He cocked his head to one side, as if listening.

“Stop the engine,” Yozi murmured to Zabet, the driver.

She complied immediately, flicking the Land Rover into neutral and letting it coast slowly to a halt. Yozi twisted around in the oversized (human-sized) chair and signaled Alizza in the Land Rover behind them to do the same.

Kezalu took off his helmet, listening. This time, without the rumble of the noisy engine, Yozi heard it too. They all did.

The sound of gunfire. The short popping sound of coil-guns answered by the hard cracking noise of a machine gun.

A human weapon.

Yozi aimed a flat hand in the direction he thought it was coming from and looked up at Kezalu. Kezalu shook his head and aimed his own hand slightly to the left of Yozi’s.

“Call it in,” Yozi said.

Zabet nodded and reached for the comm.

Wilton was hammering away on his coil-gun, laying down a constant stream of fire that would use up his entire ammo supply in a few minutes if he didn’t slow down.

“Cease fire, cease fire,” Chisnall called, and the firing stopped.

Echoes of the noise seemed to be rebounding off the big rocky hillside in front of him, but he knew that was just his ears adjusting to the sudden silence of the desert.

There was a short burst from the boulders in front of them.

“MP5s, are you sure?” Chisnall asked.

“I’m sure.”

“Hey, scumbugzzz,” he called out in English, but in his best Bzadian accent. “Hey, scumbugzzz. Stop you shooting, yezzz.”

The voice that came back was unmistakably English.

“Lay your weapons on the ground and raise your hands above your heads. We have you surrounded.”

No, you don’t, Chisnall thought. Not with just one or two of you.

“I coming out, yezzz,” he called out, and then said quietly on the comm, “I don’t think they’re Pukes.”

“Careful, LT,” said Brogan in his ear. “It could be a trap.”

“Phantom, you know what to do,” Chisnall said.

He raised his weapon high above his head and stepped out from behind the rock.

There were no shots.

He walked forward, keeping the coil-gun above his head, then unclipped it from the holster spring and slowly laid it on the ground. He did the same for his sidearm and advanced toward the boulders, keeping his hands high.

“That’s close enough, thanks,” the voice called. “Now the other chaps.”

Chisnall dropped the accent. “Who the hell are you, soldier?”

“There’s a platoon of us,” the voice said.

“No, there isn’t,” Chisnall said. “There are two or three of you at the most, and if there was a platoon in this vicinity, I’d know about it.”

“Who are you?”

“Lieutenant Ryan Chisnall, Allied Combined Operations Group, Recon Battalion,” Chisnall said.

“You look like a Puke,” the voice said.

“I’m no more Puke than you are,” Chisnall said. “Good disguise, though, yezz?”

“Keep your hands on top of your head,” the voice said. “And come behind the boulders.”

Chisnall walked forward slowly, making no movements that might alarm the men. He stepped between two of the boulders.

There were just two of them, one injured. Both in their twenties or early thirties. Both in the uniform of the British Royal Air Force. They had just one weapon between them, an MP5. Brogan was right.

“Dammit, you really are a Puke,” the man said as Chisnall rounded the rocks. He aimed the