“Here they come.” Somebody else yelled, and the troops around Andrew all took cover.

Looking down the road, he can see Japanese troops working their way up both sides of the street, darting from cover to cover. The Ostrayan troops began firing, but after inflicting a couple of casualties, their bullets seemed to lose their effectiveness. Andrew reached out mentally, and he could feel the enemy mentalist somewhere up ahead. The fellow was keeping out of sight but was obviously close enough to the front to put a shield up in front of his troops.

“Cover me!” He yelled.

With that, he took off down the side of the street along the footpath, running from bush to bush. The Ostrayan troops layed down covering fire, not that it was all that effective, but it did serve to keep some of the Japanese heads down while he made his way along the street. He could sense the enemy mentalist much better now and decided the fellow was just up the road a little way.

He tossed a fireball in the direction of the mentalist, which must’ve caught the fellow by surprise because there was no immediate response. The firefight between the Ostrayan troops and the Japanese forces continued unabated as he threw another fireball where he thought the enemy mentalist was hiding. Instead of trying to take the mentalist on frontally, he ran down the cross street to the next intersection, where a few Japanese troops were starting to advance carefully. They spotted him and opened fire without a lot of effect against his shields. He threw a couple of fireballs in their direction. Two of the Japanese troops were badly wounded, and one of the cyborgs screamed as he burnt to death.

A few Ostrayan troops advanced down the street behind him, so he pushed forward, taking a lot of fire on his shields until he reached the next intersection. A wrecked car at the intersection provided cover so they could see around the corner. He quickly informed the soldiers that he was putting a shield in front of them and that he would tint it red so they could see it and shoot around it while staying shielded most of the time. With that in place, he stepped out from behind the vehicle and began advancing up the road. At first, the Japs concentrated their fire on his shield while the troops with him kept learning around the outer edges and picking off Japanese soldiers and cyborgs whenever they exposed themselves to fire at Andrew. It was all going quite well until a very strong enemy mentalist appeared at the end of the street.

“Shit!” he exclaimed as the mentalist threw a fireball at him.

He was able to get his energy shield up just in time, but he still felt the heat of the explosion. He threw a fireball of his own back to keep his opponent busy. “Might be an idea to get under some cover, fellas, till I sort this guy out.”

He was just planning to head for his tent when he heard his name being called.

“Harris, Harris!”

He looked around and private with the radio waved at him.

“There are problems on the left flank. The Captain’s sending a car. Grab your gear.”

‘Righto.” He yelled back.

Andrew grabbed his pack and quickly shoved his few toiletries and such into it, plus his spare uniform that had turned up three days before. He’d hardly finished packing when he heard the sound of a vehicle traveling fast, and a green-painted ute came racing down the road and screeched to a halt barely a meter from him.

“Harris?” The driver asked.

“That’s me.”

“Hop in.” The driver said.

Andrew jumped in the front next to the driver, who took off like a bat out of hell, doing a screeching U-turn throwing up a cloud of dust, and racing back up the road that he’d just come down. It didn’t take that long to get into the town, or at least the edges of it, but when they got to the roundabout, instead of turning right, they went straight across. The driver must have sensed Andrew’s unspoken question.

“They’ve got around the left flank entirely and are threatening to break through into our rear.” He offered by way of explanation as they began wandering through the edge of the suburban area.

At first, there had been a road they could follow that ran roughly in the right direction, but before long, they started having to drive along dirt tracks and semi-suburban streets that didn’t necessarily go in quite the direction they wanted in order to make progress. The driver got on the radio at one point to find out exactly where he was needed and then turned rather more east than north. The road they were following ran almost due east and ran along the side of the hill at a slightly higher elevation than what they had been on, and he could see burning buildings and the occasional explosion ahead in the direction they were traveling.

The road swung around to the north, but the driver did a hard right that took them to a roundabout where a detachment of troops was frantically digging in along the line of a canal or stormwater channel. A couple of the troops waved over, and the driver pulled up.

“Got the mentalist from the right flank here.”

“Beauty.” One of the men said with a Corporal’s insignia. “The bastards are pushing down this road after taking the bridge over the river. They’ve got a couple of them mentalists with them since the Captain got injured, we haven’t been able to stop ’em.”

“Are you talking about Captain Greaves?”

“Yeah. She got hit early on when she was battling one of their mentalists. We got him, but she got carted off by the medics. Sergeant Hollister is down at the city center doing what he can to stop their mentalist down there. The Captain got patched up, but she hardly got back to the front lines when another one of their mentalists did something, and she went down like a sack of potatoes. We managed to get her out still alive, but we’ve been pushed back steadily ever since. Part of their army is pushing west from the quarry while the rest is trying to push into town along Gisborne road. We were holding them at the bridge up until half an hour ago when another one of their mentalists turned up, and we just couldn’t stand.”

The Kyron The Mercenary paperback is done and uploaded – Amazon should approve sometime on Friday for you yanks.
The next book – The Taxon War – New Federation 1 – should be out by the end of the month – depending on the editor.
This is the start of a sweeping series with real Space Opera scale story lines so there is some setup..
Taroniah Takes Control is up to about 70k written so should be ready for the editor when they finish The Taxon War.

Ostraya is nearly done – its up to 60k and I’m nearly at the end. I will then send it to Pam to see what she thinks and what changes need to be made before feeding it to the editor – assuming Pam is happy with it. I hope you’ve been enjoying the unedited alpha version of the story.

Do you want me to serialize something else once Ostraya is finished?

That’s all for now.

He threw out his senses and detected all the various men with mentalist capability out to his right. There were several that had some mentalist power, although when he looked, it was clear they were cyborgs. That was apart from the strong glow just near a tree at the bottom of the embankment. He studied to position and realized a man standing next to the tree wearing a long coat projecting a large shield to protect the Japanese troops. This had to be one of the full-on mentalists, and Andrew had no idea how he would fair now that he was facing a trained mentalist.

He began collecting power, and the man at the tree immediately turned his attention in Andrew’s direction and began advancing, gathering power himself. Not sure how strong the man’s shields were, Andrew through a slice out as hard as he could. The power of the attack staggered the Japanese mentalist and must’ve surprised him as he stopped advancing and threw a fireball at Andrew, followed by a second and the third. Andrew’s shields had no trouble coping with the attacks; indeed, with the last one, he drew power from his opponent’s spell while at the same time addressing the men behind him.

“Open fire on the chap in the coat. I will try to distract him and cause him to change his shielding, or I might even break it entirely.”

He had no idea whether they’d be in a position to take aim at the man, but he immediately threw sleep and then stun, followed by a really strong fireball of his own. The enemy mentalist shifted his shields to mental and energy just as he had hoped and didn’t appear to have enough power to have a third shield running as two of the men with Andrew shot several holes in the man almost simultaneously as the fireball arrived. The mentalist collapsed, and Andrew began picking off the cyborgs with the mentalist ability with the slice spell thrown hard.

Without the mentalist to protect them, the rest of the Japanese assault force quickly began to take casualties, and over the next two hours, the Ostryayn troops drove them back over the railway embankment. From there, they kept going and drove the Japs back across the creek bed until they came under direct fire from heavy weapons on the low hill to the rear that now provided cover for the retreating Japanese troops. Having Andrew able to protect groups of soldiers near him with a shield of his own spread out in front of them enabled the Ostrayans to advance in the same way the Japs had originally, nicely turning the tables on the enemy. Lieutenant Langford was just organizing a new assault up the hill when Captain Wright turned up and told them to resume defending the railway embankment and not to press too far beyond it for the moment.

He then called Lieutenant Langford back to headquarters so that he could be debriefed about the attack, and Andrew overheard Captain Wright saying that there was a much more serious attack on their left flank beyond the town. By the end of the day, their section of the front had calmed down again, with just the occasional artillery shell landing on something the Japanese drones spotted. Andrew took himself back up to the top of the embankment where the railway crossed the road and could hear the shelling going on to their east. He also spotted a speck in the sky not too far away from their front, and he did a quick radio check with Captain Wright, resulting in them declaring it an enemy drone. It was too far away for them to fire at effectively, but Andrew let off a very narrow, highly focused lightning discharge in the general direction. He didn’t think he hit the drone, but it went down like a shot duck and stayed down as far as they could tell.

“That’ll be that hot Captain Greaves.” One of the men said. “For a Spec, she’s not bad!”

As Andrew rather agreed with that thought, there wasn’t much he could say, so he just nodded in agreement. He pointed to the right rear.

“I’m going to keep following the railway line to get a better feel for our position here. Catch you later, guys.”

“Yeah. Later.” One of the men said.

Andrew continued to follow the railway line, which curved right around the entire area, making a large horseshoe shape. The Japs apparently stayed with the creek line, leaving a very wide no man’s land between the Ostryan defense line on the railway and the Jap forward positions in the creek bed. A road came down from the town at about a forty-five-degree angle that crossed the railway line, and that bridge marked the end of his unit’s operational area. Studying the terrain as he walked along the railway, he decided any major offensive would almost certainly be directed at the curve that was essentially at the bottom of the battalion’s deployment area.

The only redeeming feature of the area was the fact that the curve of the railway line rose above the surrounding ground level on a bank with the highest point where it crossed over the main south road. Of course, in truth, it was the ground dropping down rather than the railway rising up, but even so, the bank the railway was on would provide a good cover against anyone trying to attack out of the streambed.

Chapter 10

Combat

Over the next two days, Andrew settled in as the time passed without any excitement occurring, apart from the fact that it rained heavily on the first day. Just before dawn on the third day, Andrew was awakened by the crump of mortars and the boom of artillery shells landing close by. His tent wasn’t far from the headquarters building, although it was covered with a camouflaged netting, along with three other tents in the immediate vicinity. He threw his uniform on a raced over towards the vehicle park, where he jumped in the first vehicle heading south. The ute already had four other soldiers in the rear, but they squeezed over the let him sit on the tailgate. The driver floored it, throwing up dust everywhere as they headed for the front.

They didn’t have to go far to find the war. There were Japanese infantry and cyborgs all over the railway bank where the road passed underneath it, and the driver of the ute had no option but to pull over to the side of the road behind a line of trees and scrub, bouncing over the property’s barbed wire fence as shots came their way. Andrew had thrown up a shield so no one was hit, and as soon as the vehicle stopped, they all piled out and took cover in the trees and bush, returning fire against the Japanese troops.

It was a basically untenable position, particularly as Japanese troops began pouring off the railway embankment to their right, flanking their position. More troops were coming down the road behind them but were stopping further back under enemy fire. Then he realized that the Japanese troops out in the open to their right were not taking any casualties despite the fire being directed in at them from both Andrew’s own group of men and from the increasing numbers of troops that had stopped further back up the road and were deploying into the paddock to the right of the road facing the Japanese.

The Japanese positions weren’t terribly obvious until he brought up his distant viewing spell, and the bushes leaped toward him visually. Ah, there you are. He thought to himself with a smile. He could see several of the Japanese troops in a trench they had dug on the far side of the creek. The trench didn’t look that long and only appeared to hold five or six men. He turned his view slightly to his left and could see that there was another trench maybe twenty meters further along the creek. Presumably, the trenches were only dug in areas are soft ground. He briefly considered trying out some of the longer-range spells on them but then decided that keeping his presence on this front a secret was probably a better idea.

He dropped back down to the other men and grinned at them.

“No shots. My lucky day, I guess.” The other men just shook their heads at him, so he grinned and pointed further along the railway line, where it curved around towards the road. “I’ll just do a recce over there and see what’s happening.”

The railway actually passed over the road on a wooden trestle bridge, and the creek curved up towards the railway at that point. He eased himself up the side of the bank and carefully looked over the top. The Japanese weren’t actually positioned on the opposite side of the creek bank here but further back along the ridge, where a line of interlocking dugouts covered the area. You couldn’t really call them trenches so much as hollows. It looked to Andrew as if they shoveled out a bit of dirt which they piled up at the front of the hole they were digging, and that would do for a defensive position. Given that they were on the high ground, relatively speaking, it was probably good enough.

He looked around and saw a group of soldiers dug in on the other bank at the bridge’s western end and gave them a wave. They just shook their heads at him. He shrugged, clambered back down the slope, and then ran across the road to their side. A couple of bullets whizzed past him, fired from somewhere, and then he was across the behind the bank on the south side of the bridge.

“Ya mad!” One of the men yelled at him as he climbed up the bank to their position.

“Na. I was prepared.” He said and tapped the patch as he turned his shoulder so they could see it clearly.

“Well, I’ll be blowed; we got our own medallist!” The man was Corporal’s stripes on his sleeves said.

“Yep. I’m not going to make any rash promises, but hopefully, it will come as a bit of a surprise to those fellas when they attack.”

“You know when they’re going to attack?” The corporal asked.

Andrew shook his head. “The Captain thinks it will be real soon.”

“He’s been say’n that for a month, mate.” Jason shrugged. “I just got here, so I’ve got no idea. But my Captain seemed to think having me over here was a good idea.”

As promised

Just so everybody is up to date
Next book to be released is

The Taxon War
New Federation book 1

this is the first of a new Space Opera series – the second book of which series will see the re-appearance of a well-know character from elsewhere.

The Taxon War is with the editor now (only just so it won;t be out until next month at the earliest)

After that will be Taroniah in Control followed by Kyron The Magician
Beyond Kyron 4 I am not sure
either The Princess and the Spy or the second New Federation book….
Ostraya is nearly finished – it will then have to go to Pam Uphoff for her consideration – she may want significant changes if it doesn’t fit in with her other books/plans . After that it will need to go tot he editor so it might be out this year or perhaps not until next year – art this stage it will get published separately to the normal production schedule.

Maps

Tomorrow I will post all the Ithria maps I have lying around so they don;t submerge this update.

Bear in mind that the map gets changed/updated as things happen.

What am I reading?
One of my favorite authors, Nathan Lowell added 2 books to his Ishamael Wang books – third later this month or next. His books are slow and satisfying to read – start with Quarter Share
Pam Uphoff’s latest book – Aslanov – a couple of weeks ago – currently re-reading the entire Wine of the Gods series.
The latest in Chris Nuttall’s Schooled in Magic series – The Demon’s Design – great series

Several other unmemorable books – sigh
One defect of becoming an author is I’ve become much pickier with what I read.

sorry I’m late people

He went over and looked and then backed out. “Seems like it has everything. If you need something, see Sergeant Krasny over at HQ. Try not to move around too much in the daytime, as they have drones up now and then and occasionally drop artillery on us. So far, they haven’t directly targeted the HQ, as they generally concentrate more on the front lines.”

“Thanks, sir. And where are the front lines?”

The Lieutenant motioned him to follow out into the field. He pointed at the raised line at the far end of the paddock.

“At the moment, the railway embankment is our front line, with the far side of the creek beyond there being their front line.”

“Is it all right if I go down and have a look?”

The Lieutenant studied him for a moment and then shrugged.

“It’s your funeral.”

“Sir. I’ll just check out the tent and see what’s what.”

Andrew saluted, and the Lieutenant returned the salute and walked away. The tent was well-ordered, and he saw four meal packs with relief. Nothing had been said about meals up to this point. As an added bonus, the tent came with a gun and five clips of ammo, which tended to indicate the previous fellow had been wounded when off duty. He grabbed the gun, checked it out, attached a couple of magazines to his webbing, and then headed toward the railway embankment. He sent his senses out ahead and picked up the troops dug in along the line of the railway.

About two-thirds of the way across the paddock, he realized how stupid he was simply walking across the open ground, but he couldn’t detect anything threatening him, so he kept walking and soon reached the scrub that grew on the beside of the embankment. He climbed up the bank and nodded to the three men in the small trench near the top who had been watching him.

“Pretty ballsy walking across the field like that.” One of them commented.

Andrew dropped down into the trench and shrugged. “Quickest way to get here. So, where are the Japs?”

One of the men pointed at the line of scrub about four hundred meters away.

“They’re dug in on the far side of the creek. We don’t catch sight of them very often. They don’t seem to have many snipers, but every so often, one of their snipers will turn up and take potshots at anyone who sticks his head up over the berm.”

“There’s never any warning. Just bang, and someone gets a hole in his head. Damn annoying, mate!”

“I can imagine.” Andrew concurred.

He moved up to the top of the rise.

“Hey, mate. Don’t go stickin’ ya head up. Ya never know when one of their snipers is about.”

“I’ll be right, mate.” He answered, pointing to the red circle with a red diagonal cross-bar patch on his shoulder.

He put up both a physical and energy shield in case a powered cyborg took a shot at him. During their basic training, the instructors warned them that the cyborgs would charge up their lasers in the rear areas and then save the charge until needed. The Cyborg lasers degraded rapidly in the atmosphere, but they were still deadly out to several hundred meters, they had been informed. Satisfied with his defensive measures stuck his head up over the rise so he could see the creek and the scrub that ran along it.

Andrew thought the Captain was going to dismiss him, but after contemplating Andrew for a few moments, he instead turned to the wall to his right and pointed at the map that was displayed there. He pointed to the wiggly line of a creek.

“We’re deployed along the northern side of this creek with a secondary line of defense set up this side of the railway line in case they push us back. They took the airfield last week though we didn’t try and defend it very strongly as it was nothing that was easily defendable.”

He glanced at Andrew to make sure he was paying attention, then pointed at a spot on the map.

“Down here, where the road crosses the creek and passes under the railway, is where they’re going to attack. They’ve been slowly building up their forces, trying to hide them from our drones, but my estimate is that there’ve got close to a thousand troops in this area here.”

With this, he waved his finger around the area directly to the south of where they were, covering an area extended east to west of their position.

“They’ve been camouflaging their troops in all these small patches of trees in the hope of hiding their numbers, but when you look at the aerial photos, it’s pretty clear that there are a lot more troops in the area than what HQ seems to think.” He pointed at a patch of greenery southwest of the road that ran largely east-west across most of the map before turning northwest near the edge. “We’re pretty sure the headquarters is in that building there. We’ve tried bombing it a couple of times, but all we’ve done is lose several drones and one aircraft. They definitely put those mental shield things up when we tried to bomb, so we’re pretty sure that’s where their mentalists are hanging out.”

“If that’s where their mentalists are, sir, then we’ll need to track the vehicles when they leave, so I can get myself in a position to face them down across the battlefield.”

“You honestly think you’re powerful enough to face one of their mentalists in the field?”

“Only one way to find out, sir. And as they won’t expect us to have a mentalist or at least a powerful one, at any rate, they’re more likely to put a second rater on this flank where they don’t expect they’ll need one, if you see what I mean, sir.”

The Captain studied for a short while without commenting. Finally, he nodded.

“Can’t fault your willingness to fight, I guess. Well, you’ll get your chance soon enough. My people think they’re going to attack sometime in the next week.” He turned to a Lieutenant whom Andrew hadn’t noticed, standing in the corner of the room.

“Pete, find this man a billet, please.”

“Sir.” The Lieutenant motioned to Andrew. “Come this way, please.”

He was led around the building to a small copse of trees where there were a bunch of tents. The Lieutenant pointed to a tent off to the right. “Jackson got invalided out the other day, so you can have his tent.”