Sorry guys – public holiday yesterday and was doing family stuff and plain forgot.

They came shopping center, but once they had reached it, some of the troops who ducked inside reported that the inside had been completely trashed. Some of the shops had even been burnt out. And still no civilians. After waiting for the troops to check out the shopping center, they continued their slow advance up the road, but almost immediately, they came under mortar fire from Japanese troops across the river. Andrew thought about marching up the road across the bridge in the face of the Japanese fire, but he was getting tired mentally and was still a bit shakey from the earlier blast, so he decided to wait and let the Nuzeelanders earn their keep for a change.

They proceeded to set up artillery on a road that ran diagonally across the street they had been advancing down. Andrew stopped a bit back from where it reached a parkland area before retreating to the shopping center. They set observers up to the top of the shopping center roof to direct the artillery fire, and it wasn’t that long before they started dropping shells on the Japanese positions, forcing the Japanese to relocate their mortars. At the same time, Nuzeeland troops began filtering forward into the parkland and into the housing area close to the river to the west of the road Andrew had been marching down. Andrew found a comfortable spot to sit at the front of the shopping center and just rested for some time.

Chapter 16

Suicide bombers

Finally, he decided he’d better get active again and stood up, but he hadn’t even taken a step before he heard a voice behind him.

“Sit back down again. You’ve done enough for the moment.”

He turned and found the Nuzeeland Captain from back on the road frowning at him. He went to salute and remembered they were in a combat zone, and stopped himself.

“It’s not going to be easy getting across that river regardless, so sit down and rest and let the artillery salts soften them up. You’ve done more than enough anyway. Oh, and I received notice that you are to be promoted to Sergeant. Congratulations.”

“Thank you, sir.” He hesitated and then pointed across the road. “If you’re not going to need me in the near future, sir, perhaps I can go and catch a bit of rest over there.”

The Captain looked to where he was pointing at the motel that was across the road and nodded.

“The Japs have probably stripped anything valuable out of it as they have everywhere else, but hopefully, the mattresses will still be there. Good idea, Sergeant. Take Simpson with you. Both of you get some shut-eye. We’re either going to attempt across the river tonight once it’s dark or first thing in the morning, so I want you fresh for then.”

Andrew nodded and replied. “Sir.”

Simpson nodded at the same time, and the Captain nodded back. They turned around and headed across the road to where the motel was. Strangely, although the office and the rooms had been stripped of electronic and electrical goods, most motel rooms still had comfortable beds. The keys to the rooms were still in the doors where the Japanese looters had left them, so there was no problem accessing the rooms. Andrew grabbed the first one he passed, put his hand on the doorknob, and pushed the door open.

They pushed forward, keeping right up against the buildings on the right-hand side, ducking into doorways and such as they advanced another hundred meters or so without anything happening. Then, a fusillade of shots erupted from diagonally across the road to their front, indicating that some of the Japanese troops had gotten into a position to fire on them. None of the shots had any effect, as he was holding a really hard shield to defend against the shells from the AGC’s cannon. He opened a small hole for Simpson over his right shoulder and put a sound shield over his ear to protect against the sound.

“Can you see that?”

Her response came in the form of the shot she fired, which he assumed hit one of the Japanese. Her accuracy was such that she would hit with four out of five shots she fired in the huge rifle she wielded meant that whatever she fired at stayed down permanently, generally speaking. He stood still and let her take several shots, which resulted in the Japanese fire diminishing rapidly until it stopped altogether, and they proceeded to move further down the road again. He must’ve lent a bit too far out when provided the target because the AGC fired, the shell hitting his shield, which he had angled, fortunately.

Because he had been protecting them from the shots from diagonally across the road, the shield was at about a sixty-degree angle to where the AGC was firing from, and instead of exploding in his face as the shell earlier had, this one deflected off his shield at a shallower angle and impacted a building a good distance back up the road and again, on the other side of the street. He jumped out from the cover they were using, concentrated, and lobbed a tight fireball into the fighting compartment of the AGC, using a bit of telekinesis to pull it down into the open top. He ducked back just as the thing exploded in a massive ball of fire.

He grinned at Simpson, and they began walking down the road, not bothering to hide anymore. The occasional Japanese burst of small arms fire in their direction was invariably met by Simpson sticking her gun passed his shoulder into the hole he created in the shield and her blowing the person firing away. Between attacks by the enemy, he could hear firing both left and right as the Nuzeeland troops moved down the parallel streets, clearing the enemy from them as well. They passed the smoldering wreckage of the AGC and continued their advance in the face of the occasional Japanese fire.

So far that day, they had found no Japanese willing to surrender, although they hadn’t really come across any civilians yet. The troops advancing behind them ducked into buildings as they passed to clear them, but most of them were empty, just the occasional holdout who all seemed to be soldiers that were too wounded to retreat. Strangely, the further they advanced, the less the resistance proved to be. He wasn’t sure whether it was because the Japanese were running out of troops or enthusiasm. Most of the houses they passed seemed to have been ransacked at some point since the invasion started, but they didn’t look like they had been subjected to long-term occupation by civilians, or at least that was how it looked to Andrew. Which he thought odd given the civilians they had found earlier, but he supposed they might have been families of some of the troops and were further forward for that reason.

“What are you doing?” She asked.

“Trying to modify the healing spell that I know so it’ll work on my ACL.”

Simpson shook her head, but the medic perked up.

“You really think you can fix an ACL rupture with one of these spells?”

Andrew shrugged. “Maybe. I’m going to give it a go in a minute if you want to hang around.”

“This I’ve got to see.” The medic said. “Growing up, magic was just something they did in the old days. Uncanny people tended to be ostracised in recent times. Not that I’ve ever met anybody quite like you.”

Andrew nodded. It sounded as if Nuzeeland was worse than here and more like what his father had complained about. He still hadn’t seen much of that sort of discrimination so far himself. The few bits and pieces of discrimination that he’d experienced were mostly verbal quips that he hadn’t paid much attention to. He grinned at the medic and focused on his modifications to the spell. He reasoned that he could use the bit for pulling the skin back together to repair a cut, as it should work just as well for repairing the ligament if he got the spell right. He studied what he had come up with, memorized it, and then cast the spell on his knee.

It hurt briefly, then it ached for a bit, but the swelling started going down, which was another section of the spell, and the rapidly forming bruise from where his knee contacted the ground started fading as well. The medic watched with his mouth hanging open. The ache started to die away, and Andrew flexed his knee. There was no shooting pain, so he reached over for his trousers, which had been deposited to his left. He fed his legs and decided that lying down was too awkward, so he stood up gingerly. He eased up on his good leg when he put weight on his bad knee. It was fine, perhaps a little sore, but nothing to write home about.

“How is it?” The medic asked, unable to keep the amazed tones out of his voice.

“It feels a bit tender, but it’s fine.” To emphasize the point, he walked a couple of paces before returning to pull up his trousers on finally.

“Damn.” The medic said.

Before they could do anything, there was a hissing sound as a shot from the AGC down the street went swooshing past to explode against the building across the road. Looking around, they spotted the APC that had been easing around the corner further up the street and signaled it to back up out of view.

“Time to earn our pay, Simpson.”

She grinned at him and moved over to where she put down her rifle. “Ready whenever you are.”

“Okay. We’ll keep to the right and see what we can achieve.” They grinned at each other, and the medic just shook his head as Andrew eased around the corner with his shields up, angled from right to left, and started down the street. They must’ve been seen at first, but then the AGC fired a shell, which he felt more than he saw. It impacted his shield but didn’t explode due to the angle he was holding it, and the shell rocketed across the street and exploded against a building on the far side of the street, three buildings further up the street. The impact still staggered him, but he was pleased that it didn’t explode on contact with his shield.

“She did a good job, bro.” The medic said. “Any other problems? Heard you got blown off the front of the APC.”

“Yeah. Scared the hell out of me, I can tell you. My left knee’s bad.”

“Right. Will your trousers come off, or do we need to cut them?”

“I think they’ll slide off if I undo them.”

Simpson had stood up and glanced around the corner of the building but mustn’t have spotted anything because now she looked down at him with a grin.

“I could help.”

The medic was getting his left boot off while he tried to undo the righthand one.

Simpson leaned down and took over, undoing his right-hand boot, then helped slide it off his foot. She then moved sideways along his leg to get a little better position and reached for his belt. Her hand stopped short of the buckle, and she looked him in the eye, grinning just a little before going further. He could tell she was enjoying herself, and she smiled at him. He tried to shrug without hurting himself any more than he already was.

“Go for it.” He said and lay down, closing his eyes.

By lying there with his eyes closed and trying to ignore things down in his waist area, he was able to keep himself under control, particularly as he made a conscious effort not to try and differentiate between whether it was Simpson or the medic doing something. He felt his trousers being slipped down and then gentle prodding of his knee. He tried to think of a healing spell that would work, but generally, they didn’t work as well on your body as when used on other people.

“The verdict, Doc?” He said after a few moments when the gentle ministrations stopped.

“It’s a bit hard to tell here in the field, but at a guess, I’d say it’s an ACL when you landed.”

Andrew considered that.

“If you got a pad, you can show me a diagram of the ACL injury, mate?” He asked, sitting himself up on his elbows.

The medic shrugged, looking puzzled, but he pulled a combat pad out of his jacket. It was slightly different in design from the Ostrayan ones but worked the same. He fiddled with it for a little bit and then showed Andrew a picture of the ACL rupture. Actually, the pad had a series of pictures from different angles, and Andrew studied them all for a few moments, swiping backward and forwards on the screen as he lay slightly on one side to free up one of his arms while he rested on the other’s elbow while his free hand held the pad.

He mentally brought up the healing spell that he had memorized the best. It was suited cuts, even bullet holes, rather than a ruptured ACL. He couldn’t remember anything better in his grandmother’s journal, which he didn’t have with him anyway, so we set about modifying the spell on the fly. He must’ve looked a bit odd lying half on his side, staring into space as Simpson finally interrupted him.

The next Princess book is out

The Princess & The Spy

The next book will be Taroniah at Work (changed the title) followed by Kyron the Warlord.

With that, he took himself off, heading for a group of officers who had gathered nearby, clearly waiting for him. Whatever it was, he said to them it was over with pretty quickly as they split up and headed off in various directions. Troops began relaxing and setting up tents, except for the ones on patrol out towards the Japanese lines. For their part, the Japanese seemed content to just sit in their defensive positions and wait rather than do anything aggressive. Andrew could hear a considerable artillery barrage happening off in the distance somewhere to the north, but their part of the front went quiet now that they’d knocked down the Japanese drone.

In the morning, the night-time patrols reported no sign of the Japanese, so they mounted up and resumed the advance up the main road into the built-up area to see if the Japanese had indeed pulled out. They encountered little resistance, just the occasional sniper. Andrew was riding in the front of the lead APC with his shield out as before, and he quickly took care of any snipers after their shots hit his shield. The buildings all looked like they had been ransacked as the Japanese retreated, or perhaps when they’d originally advanced, as it was hard to tell without stopping. The first serious resistance came when they reached a retail area where several roads intersected. Numerous signs referenced Belmont, so he assumed that was the suburb they were in.

They drove up Corio Street and turned right into High Street. The Japs had one of the AGCs hiding off the road with just the edge of the body and the gun sticking around a building, and it fired as they rounded the corner. Andrew wasn’t expecting the blast from a large caliber shell, and he was knocked off the front of the APC and onto the ground, where he landed heavily.

“You all right?” Simpson called.

“Back up, back up quick!” he yelled at her, and she quickly passed the message on to the driver.

He had done something to his left knee, and his arm felt like he’d come off a motorbike at speed. He scrambled over toward the shop on the righthand corner even as the APC growled backward, just in time too, as the next shot from the AGC just missed and hit a tree on the far side of the corner. He couldn’t put any real pressure on his knee, but he could hop and managed to get behind the cover the shop on the corner presented. The door had been smashed open, and the inside looked a mess, although, with no lights on, it was hard to see in the gloom. The Nuzeeland troops were deploying and beginning to advance down the side street. Simpson came running over, cradling her massive gun and carrying a first aid kit.

“Shit! Your arm’s all grazed. Let me get some stuff on it. You’re going to need a new tunic.”

She proceeded to start undoing the buttons on his tunic and then stripped it off him. He was having trouble moving his arm, so he sat and let her tend to the grazed section of his elbow and arm that he couldn’t get a proper look at because it hurt too much to twist his arm around. She was finishing wrapping it up when a proper medic arrived and watched her finish.

The next morning the Nuzeelanders were fully prepared to assault the Japanese position. They deployed dozens of the small mortars they carried with them and opened the day’s activities with a steady barrage of mortar shells being dropped on the obvious Japanese defensive positions. Then Andrew led a squad of troops across the beach using the colored shield with holes as he had previously done. About halfway across Japanese opened fire with a machine gun which rocked him back but then Simpson took out the Jap firing the machine gun, and by the time the replacement fellow took over control of the gun, Andrew was ready and lobbed a fireball at him which dealt with him and the gun because the ammunition started exploding.

As he reached the edge of the scrub on the eastern side of the beach, a Japanese mentalist appeared at the top of the ridge and started lobbing fireballs at him. Andrew used the heat from the impacts on his shield to build up his own power while he felt out the man’s shield, decided the fellow wasn’t that strong, then used the needle punch to the forehead to kill him. The death of the mentalist seemed to take the fight out of the rest of the Japanese in the area, and their defensive position crumbled. The collapse spread through their whole force, and soon they were retreating east along the coast road once more. This time they started leaving behind the odd Japanese who surrendered. The few who started surrendering were among the non-cyborg Japanese, and as the pursuit continued further to the east, the number of surrendering Japanese increased.

At Torquay, the Japanese tried to defend the built-up area, so Andrew took the lead group of Nuzeelanders around the northeastern side of the town before driving south into the center of the town, bypassing a lot of the Japanese defenders and their positions. Enough of the Nuzeelanders advanced through the built-up area to keep the Japanese occupied until it was too late, and Andrew’s column cut them off, reaching Spring Creek before most of the defenders realized they had been bypassed. On the instructions of the Nuzeeland Colonel, the advance halted at the bridge over Spring Creek, and they started mopping up the Japanese trapped to the southwest of the waterway. Once again, most of the cyborgs refused to surrender, but an ever-increasing number of civilian soldiers did, and for the first time, they rounded up a whole bunch of women and children. Apparently, the Japanese occupation had reached the point of allocating houses in Torquay to Japanese families.

It took the rest of the day to work their way through the built-up area and clear of Japanese. The next morning and discovered the Japanese troops on the far side of the creek had all retreated during the night, and they heard from high command that the advance through Winchelsea had reached the outskirts of Gilong itself. It seemed the entire Japanese army was falling back on Gilong for fear of being cut off from their dimensional gate. Andrew and his people resumed their advance. The Japanese had blown the bridge across Spring Creek at first light, but the creek wasn’t that deep, and the Nuzeeland APCs had no problem fording the creek, and the advance continued. Their ordinary wheeled vehicles couldn’t ford the creek and had to retreat and use a road further to the northwest, rejoining the main road north of Torquay, which might have been a problem except that the Japanese had fallen back completely, forming a new defensive line at the edge of the built-up area along the railway line.

Late again – sorry

“Does anybody speak Japanese?” He asked the troops with him.

Unfortunately, they all shook their heads, but he tried anyway by putting a mental shield around the civilian soldiers, hopefully cutting off their superior’s mental control. Then he stepped out onto the edge of the car park, where he was quite obvious and attracted quite a bit of fire that impacted his shield without serious effect.

“Surrender!” He called out, pointing at the Japanese and then putting his hands in the air to indicate that they should surrender.

At first, it had no effect, and they continued to fire him, but then one of the men threw down his weapon and said something to the others. This caused mass confusion as some also threw down their weapons while others turned and opened fire on the ones who had thrown down their weapons. In the end, most of them killed each other, with only about four still on their feet at the end of the small firefight, and they were all clearly the belligerent ones as they started firing at Andrew once more. Not that it helped, as one of the New Zealanders had crept through the bush and now lobbed a grenade into the section of the trench where the four remaining Japanese were, which killed them all once it exploded.

It took a another twenty minutes for the rest of the Japanese pocket to be crushed and then the pursuit started along the coast road towards Amglsea. Andrew once again resumed his position sitting on the top front of the APC with Simpson behind him, standing in the commander’s hatch as they raced along the road after the fleeing Japanese. Every couple of kilometers, they would run into one or more enemy troopers who had been left to snipe them, which would slow them down, not that the snipers lasted long. If Andrew didn’t force-punch them, Simpson would get them with her rifle.

At one point, they were ambushed by a whole group that even had a mortar that opened fire on the column. Rather than stop and deploy, Andrew had Simpson tell the driver to keep going and angled to the left to the left where the mortar shells seemed to be coming from. Andrew protected the front of the vehicle with his shield, and they crashed over and through the Japanese defensive position as the fireball he threw into the mortar pit exploded exuberantly. The rest of the Japanese defending the position had been rather shocked by the APC driving straight up and over their position while protected by Andrew’s shield. The APC crashing over the top of them disrupted and stunned them to the point that the rest of the Nuzeeland force had no trouble taking them out relatively quickly.

The column continued their pursuit to the east until they reached Anglesea. Here they discovered the Japanese were dug in on the far side of the river using the defenses they had constructed when they’d first advanced to that point. As it was very late in the day by now, the Nuzeeland commanders elected to deploy and camp for the night on the western side of the river and worry about attacking the Japanese the following day. This suited Andrew as he was getting to the completely worn-out stage, and he was worried bullets would start getting through his shield before much longer, given how tired he was.

Sorry people – forgot yesterday

Chapter 15

Driving forward.

Andrew saw the enemy mentalist crumple and collapse to the ground and then had a brainwave. He felt the enemy troops and put a mental shield around them, hoping they would stop fighting if they were cut off from the mentalists’ control. It was only partially successful, and a short firefight amongst the Japanese troops that ended in favor of the loyalists going on the fire coming his way, he resumed covering his troops with a tinted physical shield as they stood up out of cover in advance behind him, laying down fire on the enemy whenever they revealed themselves. Without the cover of a mentalist, the Japanese couldn’t hold against the attack and began falling back.

As the Japanese casualties mounted, the retreat began to gather speed and affected the troops on either side as more and more of the Nuzeelanders got into the fight. Soon the attack was over the ridge, starting down the other side following a street that led straight to the water. While the fighting became house-to-house on either side, Andrew strode down the street, protecting the troops advancing alongside him with his shield and taking out anybody that stood in the way. Word must have spread amongst the Japanese because as they got closer to the shore, they could see dozens of Japanese troops running along the coast road from the right and heading for the left before Andrew cut them off.

As his advance neared the shore, one of the armored gun carriers the Japanese favored appeared to his right and fired a shot at him before he could react. The shell exploded against his shield, knocking him down, but he stood back up and somehow managed to keep his shield up while collecting more power. He slashed the AGC before it could fire again, the slash impacting diagonally across the front of the metal shell that protected the compartment the gun was in, causing the gun to sag to the left and down and taking the machine out of action. From the red that appeared running down the shiny surface, he’d also taken at least one of the crew out of action.

The troops with him surged forward to reach the water and take up defensive positions trapping the goodly number of Japanese in the pocket that was created. He made sure the defense line facing east would stand up to an attack by the Japanese in an attempt to break through to their trapped forces and then turned his attention to the troops trapped in the pocket. He began advancing along the coast road even as more than Nuzeeland troops came down the slope from the ridgeline fighting house-to-house and driving the Japanese before them. The small portable mortars the Nuzeeland troops had gave them a distinct advantage against the Japanese, enabling the Nuzeeland troops to winkle out any Japanese troops in makeshift defensive positions. Advancing along the road, he spotted a group of non-cyborg Japanese soldiers hastily digging trenches in a section of soft ground near a parking bay and people using the beach.