Furnace (Hunter-Killer #1)

Chapter 33 - Here's to a Safely Swimming Soul

Somehow this one hurt more than all the rest.

Dry-eyed and tight-jawed, Ryke slouched out of his Hunter-Killer, an empty feeling in his chest, like someone had hollowed him out. He couldn't quite process it. The pilots they'd lost before were taken against their will. Nothing Ryke or anyone else did could have stopped that.

But Amelia?

He'd had a choice and he'd let her die.

He closed his eyes and exhaled long and slow, resting his head against a cool metal support pillar as he tried to think. What could he do? What could he say? What could anyone say to make this ache any less?

Well, he needed to think of something, because there were seven more pilots who felt just like him. Shuddering through a breath, he pushed up off the pillar and turned, sweeping a hand through his sweat-slick hair and looking around the hangar, treading water in the chaos.

Amelia's death had not been in vain – in fact, the furthest thing from it – and he consoled himself meagrely with that fact. After their successful detonation of the deep-strike mine in their sector, several other squads had followed their example. Suicidal assaults from tight-knit units of Hunter-Killers had triggered over a dozen other mines around Brekka, annihilating hundreds of Scraegans with every blast.

It seemed that even their brutish adversaries could be shocked. The string of cataclysmic blasts had turned the Brekka plateau into a smoke-flooded mess of burnt husks and molten metal, and the Scraegans had quickly retreated to lick their wounds. The howls from the fires that night were thick with mourning.

It had cost the human defenders nearly thirty Hunter-Killers in exchange.

Not a bad trade in cold hard numbers, but the damage wrought by the Scraegans went far beyond just the Hunter-Killer squadrons, badly mauled though they had been. Nearly forty percent of the vaunted wall defences had been obliterated by the Scraegan bombardments and breaches had been blown open in eight different locations across the wall. The Brekkan militia regiments and Scout Cadre support units had been shredded too, having sacrificed bodies and vehicles to plug those gaps.

Now, on top of having virtually the entire Hunter-Killer Corp to repair and rearm, the overstretched members of the Engineering Cadre had to deploy more sapper units to mine the breaches and bring up temporary defences. Quad-barrelled cannons were bolted to flat-bed haulers and dragged into position to cover the ruined wall sections, and militia troops worked feverishly to evacuate civilians living in the outer districts of the city.

Many of those same civilians were now being quickly mustered into volunteer fighting forces to bolster the city's ailing defences. Most of them had rudimentary training thanks to Brekka's mandatory service, and if there was one thing the human defenders had in abundance, it was guns.

Ryke admired their courage, but he didn't like their chances if they did come face to face with a Scraegan. He ran his eyes over the burnt and bludgeoned structure of his Hunter-Killer. It would need yet another shoulder shield, and several of the armour sensors had been burnt out. The audio-visual filters had been overloaded by the explosion – those would need replaced too.

As he glanced around at the scurrying engineers, their haggard, soot-stained faces, red-rimmed eyes and burnt overalls, he found himself wishing he could just do it himself. He thought of Ivy sprinting her way through this carnage, trying to fix up every single machine before the Scraegans came again. He wished he could have spared her and her comrades at least one of those jobs.

But the Hunter-Killer pilots were not trained to fix things. They were trained to kill things.

Shoulders sagging wearily, he trudged away from his smouldering mech to check on the other members of the squad. Thaye slid down her ladder as he passed her mech, meeting his gaze for a moment. She gave him a stiff nod of tacit approval; she wasn't judging him. As he walked by she gave him a gentle clap on the shoulder.