“This is where we earn the big bucks, Jess.” He said with a grin over his shoulder.

Simpson just shrugged, then started getting out of the commander’s hatch of the APC with her hand cannon.

“We’ll do what we can, sir.” She said to the Major as she stepped down onto the ground.

They walked forward to the barricade, which a couple of soldiers pulled open, and they moved up to the entrance to the alley. Andrew thought about sticking his head around for a quick look but then decided to go bold. He pulled power from the sun that was shining down the length of the narrow road they were on and then boldly stepped around the corner with Simpson bringing up the rear, staying snuggled up behind him. The alley had a row of shops at ground level on the right and a blank wall on the left that led to a multistory unit block further down the alley. They had just reached the southern edge of the multistory unit block when a man stepped around the corner of the building from what looked to be a parking area at the end of the alley. He had tall black boots, dark pants, and a shirt that was similar to the mentalist Andrew had fought earlier but lacked the coat.

“Surrender,” Andrew called out in English.

“I am a True Man. I do not surrender to livestock.” The man said in English with a strong Japanese accent.

He threw a pencil-thin force punch at Andrew, which caught Andrew by surprise. He had his shield tinted as normal so that Simpson could see it, and a spot directly in front of his forehead was pushed back almost to his skin, the pressure forcing his head back slightly. Fuck! Right. He returned the favor, throwing as hard a force punch as he could. The Jap was still staring at him like he expected Andrew to fall over. Andrew’s punch must’ve gone through the man’s shield because a small dot appeared on the man’s forehead, and then a spray of material appeared from behind his head. The Japanese man’s expression changed to a look of surprise, and then he keeled over, falling flat on his back and not moving.

Andrew stepped forward, pulling a bit more power from the air, although there wasn’t so much to be had in this shaded alley. He heard a crackling noise and rounded the corner to the car parking area just in time to see a glowing circle appear. There were four people on this side of the circle, all looking back at Andrew. They had white cloth cowls of some description over their ordinary clothes. As soon as the center of the circle changed to a warehouse or something, they jumped through, even as two other men jumped the other way and began setting up a ramp. There were other people in the warehouse and what looked like a tank or an APC of some description. Not a design that he had seen the Japanese use before.

The northern and western defense lines kept being overrun, and then the enemy advanced from the southwest as well. In the end, their remaining troops simply collapsed in the face of the enemy onslaught, and finally, all that was left were the two of them and three other people standing in front of where the portal beacon was, hoping like hell that the portal would open on time. The few remaining cyborg soldiers were up at the entrance of the lane, ordered to protect the portal site to the last cyborg.

Chapter 18

Portal

Andrew could see a barricade with troops manning it about a hundred meters along, and from his perch on top of the APC, Andrew could see there was a similar barricade on the far side, perhaps two hundred meters or more beyond the first barricade, that was blocking this road almost to where this road reached the main road they had advanced up earlier. There were heaps of vehicles, including proper tanks, over on that side, which was probably why the officer brought them around this way, where very few vehicles were blocking the way. There was a road off to the right that the officer’s APC pulled up across, giving Andrew’s APC room to park next to them.

“Their portal’s at the end of that alley up ahead there on the left. We can bomb the thing, but we don’t want to damage the city more than we have to,, so we were wondering if you could do something about it. There are at least two mentalists in there who refuse to surrender. We think they’re waiting for the gate to open so they can escape. We’re not sure how many other people are down there. Every drone we’ve put up gets obliterated.”

Andrew cocked his head as he considered the situation.

“You can’t get closer by going through the buildings?”

“We tried that, but they seem to be able to sense us coming, and they’ve collapsed the buildings all around the area where they are, which is making it difficult.” The officer replied.

Andrew could now see that he was a Major from the collar tabs. The man paused before continuing.

“We could just wait for them to go, but we’re worried that they’ll bring in more reinforcements or perhaps some sort of biological weapon or even nuclear.”

Andrew nodded. Now, that was a valid point he hadn’t considered before. With a portal, they could just leave a bomb, either nuclear or biological, and simply walk away through the portal. Damn! All right. Time to earn the big bucks. More likely biological, he decided. Something they had a vaccine for that they could release to decimate us locals and then waltz back in later to minimal opposition.

“Can I have permission to do a deal with them if they will surrender?”

The Major scratched his head as he considered this point.

“Shit. Yeah, if you can come up with some way of guaranteeing there are no further portals opening down there, then yes, you have permission to do a deal. Intelligence says to look for a long rectangular object, probably buried in cement, that will be the portal beacon. If you destroy that, it will make it very hard for them to find us again.”

Toshiro stared off into space for a moment.

“How much damage did they do?”

“Very little. The enemy mentalist you reported from the southern front snuck forward and took out our mentalist and then commanded all the women and children to throw their munitions over the bridge into the river and flee to their side of the bridge. Our own troops shot quite a few of them before they got clear of the bridge, but then that mentalist came across the bridge and demolished what forces we had left in that area.”

Toshiro sighed. “Well, Captain Tokigawa,” he picked up a com unit and set it to start recording. “Please record a factual accounting of our current military position and what our options are other than dying in place.”

The Captain rattled off a brief summary that covered pretty much everything he had told Toshiro and concluded that their position on this world was untenable and that they should retreat.

“I concur, Captain. For the record, I am declaring this invasion of failure. I am ordering all surviving personnel to retreat through the portal as soon as it reopens.”

He shut off the recording, pocketed it, and then began organizing the defense. He ordered the troops to start setting up barricades to block the streets and make it more difficult for the enemy to drive through an opposed. But there simply wasn’t all that much left that he could do anything with. The only good news was another mentalist appeared. He had been on the northern front, where he had been wounded, but did manage to extricate himself. He was junior to Toshiro and wasn’t impressed with Toshiro’s orders to retreat.

Somehow, he hadn’t faced any of the enemy’s strong mentalists and wasn’t impressed with Toshiro’s wariness about facing them. The only enemy mentalist Kobe Toyoda had faced he had killed, so he was dismissive of the enemy. Even so, when shown the numbers the enemy had on the front lines, even he had to admit the position was hopeless, at least without reinforcements from home.

Together, they set about shoring up the defenses as best they could, but it quickly became clear that it was an impossible task without fresh troops. They did their best to halt the enemy’s advance, but it was just impossible. As soon as they set up a strong defense line, hundreds of the drones he had been told about would descend on the defenses, wreaking havoc before the enemy ground troops advanced. As a result, the enemy ground forces would then have no problem punching through the defensive positionand moving on to the next.

Toyoda ran into the strong mentalist that had been deployed on the northern front, whom he had not previously faced. Somehow, he managed to survive, but it had been a close-run thing. He looked quite shaken when he returned to Toshiro and admitted that only an artillery shell exploding against the enemy mentalist’s shield, distracting her and knocking her to the ground, had allowed him to escape. The fact that a female mentalist had proved stronger than him was so shocking he’d blurted out the truth to Toshiro without trying to lie about it.

Toshiro felt hollow in the stomach. How could this disaster happen? They had been pushing the enemy back everywhere up until recently, but the enemy had clearly not been committing all their troops or at least only enough to stop his people from completely breaking through while they built up their reserves. Down south, the arrival of the Nuzeelanders and that damnable mentalist had reversed their fortunes. Three whole divisions of fresh troops was a staggering number for them to deploy out of the blue. “Anything else I need to know about?”

“We have indications that there are at least two more divisions following up their advance that are so far unengaged. It may well be that the units are reserves for the formations they have deployed, but we don’t think so.”

“Marvelous. What have we got left?”

“Not much, sir. According to the mechanics, there are two damaged gun carriages that they have just finished repairing that can be deployed, and they will have one tank repaired by tomorrow, but that’s all there is in the way of armor without reinforcements from home. Their drones have taken a massive toll on all our armored vehicles. We were organizing a combat group around six of the personnel carriers and roughly thirty cyborgs that have recovered sufficiently from injuries and damage to be put back on the front line.”

“There are approximately one hundred wounded ex-civilian soldiers that we can put back on the frontlines tomorrow as well. We have approximately a thousand male civilians we can arm that we hadn’t up until now because there unfit in one way or another, but apart from that, we’re basically scraping the bottom of the barrel unless we get reinforcements from home.”

“And how heavy  are the casualties the enemy has taken from those fresh divisions during their advance?”

“Because of the drones, their casualties have been light, sir. Maybe five percent tops.”

Toshiro shook his head. “And their divisions are what, sixteen or eighteen thousand men strong?”

“Probably more like twenty thousand, sir.”

The man looked scared and stiff despite trying to keep a blank expression on his face. He probably expected Toshiro would punish him for the bad news he had just delivered. Many commanders would, Toshiro knew. Toshiro had never felt any need to shoot the messenger, no matter how unhappy he was with the news he was receiving.

“What about arming the women?”

Captain Tokigawa snorted. “Besides the fact that we have never used women in combat, it is an idea that was discussed. Unfortunately, General Koga decided to use the women and children as suicide bombers. He had grenades and other devices strapped to them, with a mentalist commanding them to cross the bridge on the southwestern side of the city. The idea was that they would spread amongst the attackers and blow them up, hopefully breaching the entire front.”

Kyron the Warlord is nearly finished. It should off tot he editor by Monday next week all being well.
The next book will be The Harrecan Problem, the 2nd New Federation book which sees the re-appearance of and old friend.
After that it will be Taroniah at Sea followed by Kyron the Conqueror early next year.

I am not sure what, if anything, I will serialize after Ostraya is done.

Would you guys be interested in the fist book of my Multi-dimensional wizard? Bearing in mind that MC doesn’t start as a multi-dimensional wizard and the book needs some hefty revision, which may or may not take place while I serialize it.
I don’t really have much else in the finished category.
Let me know what you think.

Peter

“The main headquarters is on the tenth floor, sir. They want to up there immediately, sir. The elevators are over here, sir.”

Toshiro’s head was still throbbing, but he was feeling somewhat better, and he followed the man to where the bank of elevators was. Once aboard one, he leaned up against the wall of the vehicle until the doors opened on the tenth floor. What was clearly a floor of normal offices had been rearranged to make it a usable command center. It was immediately evident that it had been done in a hurry and in a very ad hoc manner. What was also apparent was the confused state of all the staff. A regular army Captain pulled away from the crowd of what looked to be civilians, mostly with a few uniforms sprinkled amongst them, and came over to Toshiro and saluted.

“Captain Tokigawa, sir. As the senior remaining military mentalist, I have to inform you that you are now in command of the invasion.”

“What?” Toshiro said in surprise. “What happened to General Koga?”

“His command vehicle was hit by one of those big missiles of the enemy’s. No survivors. General Yamashita took command two days ago and went forward to study the situation as he had mostly been on the southern front. I don’t think he appreciated how fast the enemy was advancing and got caught near the front and killed by one of their mentalists, apparently. She appears to be nearly as strong as the one you’ve been facing down south.”

Toshiro shook his head, which wasn’t a good idea. “So what happened on the northern front? I thought things were going well?”

“They were until the enemy deployed three completely fresh divisions with armored vehicles and aircraft without any warning. Since then, they’ve been taking down our satellites as fast as we put them up, and we’ve run out of the rockets at the moment anyway. On top of that, they’ve developed these killer drones that hunt down our drones and take them out. It has really curtailed our intelligence gathering abilities and has meant that we had barely a few hours warning about the new units they were deploying.”

He pointed to a map that was on the wall of the building. There were red lines marking the enemy advances all over it.

“They punched through here, here, and here, catching us totally unprepared. Not that we would have been able to stop them anyway with the losses we’ve been taking. These are all new troops they have deployed, and they have taken the time to fully train them and combine them with the leavening of veterans from the north. Lots of armor, lots of artillery, and thousands of drones. They’ve clearly been stockpiling their drones rather than using too many of them too openly, so we were totally unprepared for literally swarms of them flooding the front lines.”

The man paused and shook his head.

“Tell me.” Toshiro encouraged him.

“They use them for recon, plus they have these hunter-killer ones that are designed to take down our drones, and then they have armed drones. Some carry one or two hand grenades, and others carry RPG rounds strapped to them. The ones with the RPG rounds they simply guide straight into our vehicles, kamikaze fashion, and they are almost impossible to stop. They just rolled right over our front lines and advanced nearly fifteen kilometers on the first day. They are only five kilometers north of the outskirts of this city now.”