Deathwatch (The Faded Earth Book 1)(51)
Yet her team—Reeves’ team—was not called in for these larger conflicts. Beck was thankful. Not because of any desire not to do violence, which was as unavoidable as it was sickening, but for the simple fact that the weaknesses in her team were becoming clearer as the day went on. The first and least important was their lack of seasoning. None of them, her included, had the experience and emotional callouses needed to function with the cold calculation required to seamlessly integrate with people outside their team.
The rest of the Watch trained ceaselessly to be essentially interchangeable in battle. Beck understood that they were simply not there yet. They worked with each other just fine, even covering small mistakes when a teammate made them. That was a benefit of working closely together, but it only worked because they knew each other.
The larger problem was that the last two weeks of training were saved for large-scale conflict. Learning to fight on your own, then as a team, then as an army. That was how it went. That training was to have started today. As a support unit, a fire team that could move in to handle small operations and plug holes, they were good. As part of a larger fighting force relying on practiced, shared tactics, they would only be a danger to others.
Five minutes ago, that changed. They were called to back up a line of Watchmen under heavy attack. This was the wall of steel meant to cut off a section of the Rez being searched and cleared, but the infected had attacked it with unusual coordination and tactics.
Finding the place was easy. Like all Rezzes, Shān was built on a pattern designed to make each of the small cities logically consistent regardless of size. Roads and paths were laid out in a grid, named with letters north to south and numbers east to west. They rounded a corner and Reeves raised a fist.
The team halted. Fifty feet in front of them stood the line, ten Deathwatch Sentinels shoulder to shoulder behind mobile, temporary barricades that looked like nothing more than giant shields slammed into the path in front of them. Two fought without helmets, and one of those hadn’t even removed his. The bottom half was still latched firmly to his neck joint, the top shattered and ripped away.
“We’re, uh, kinda on the wrong side here,” Wojcik said.
“No, we’re not,” Jen added. “We’re hitting the infected from behind.”
Reeves sighed loudly over the channel. “Yes. The six of you attack in a wedge. I’ll be your support.”
A chorus of objections cut across the channel, but Reeves muted them all. “This isn’t a democracy. Do it or go home now.”
Reeves was not a man who believed in half measures. Beck raised her gauntlet in agreement. The others followed suit.
With no time to waste, they moved. The number of infected was impossible to gauge by eye, though the HUD pulled information on the number of tablets clustered in the pile and put it at thirty-one. Which was a guess at best. Surely some of those devices were in the pockets of the bodies being crushed to paste beneath the feet of the swarm, while some of the active infected would have dropped theirs along the way.
The nascent Pales were using objects of every imaginable type as weapons, clearly things taken from homes and businesses because they were easy to carry and hard enough to break the metal and ceramic armor with enough force. Steel Six was tough, far more so than nearly any alloy of the old world, but the joints and attachment points of armor could only take so much. Deathwatch helmets were complex and flexible, made of many parts that also made them vulnerable to repeated hits, and the infected targeted them.
Beck noted as the team moved in that the enemy was fighting far smarter than she would have imagined possible. Three of them manned each gap in the barrier between the shield sections. One on either side to grab the Watchman there, holding them as best they could, while the one in the middle attacked the helmet, apparently recognizing the simple truth that a head shot will stop just about anyone. What made the tactic so effective was the weight of numbers; every time one of the infected fell—often, as the Sentinels fought furiously and hit hard—another would take its place before its body hit the ground.
Their wedge got twenty feet away before the infected realized something was wrong. Beck and Jeremy stayed at the head of the wedge, weapons raised high. Five or six Pales peeled from the group and flung themselves toward the pair. Beck’s armor whirred as her blade came down, cutting the man nearest her in half from left clavicle to right hip. She followed through with a kick that sent the infected behind him sprawling into the legs of several more enemies, giving her time to reset her stance.
Jeremy was, if anything, even more effective. His first strike lopped the arms off two of the infected, and if the blow did not kill outright, blood loss would take them in short order. He also managed to stay perfectly in tune with Beck, never getting ahead or behind, keeping his shoulder close to hers.
“Oh, fuck me running,” Tala said from behind Beck. “Guys. Problem.”
What she saw before the rest of them, even Reeves, was the tide turning in nearly a literal sense. The sea of bodies assaulting the more heavily fortified line of Watchmen did a sort of group pause which rippled from one side of the swarm to the other, their heads all turning in series to take in these new interlopers.
A few more moved toward Beck and Jeremy. Which enticed yet more.
Then it was all of them. Every damned one.
“Fall back!” Reeves shouted over the channel. “Fall back and keep each other safe!”