The LAV crashed headlong into the side of the building, smashing through a pair of windows directly inbetween two steel girders. Perelli felt the vehicle lurch and roll. The entire compartment shook the soldiers inside like beans in a tin can. They couldn’t see what was happening outside as any external fixtures on the vehicle, from optics to radio antenna, were ripped off. They could feel they were definitely upside down at one point.

  Finally the vehicle came to a sudden stop, throwing everyone forward into the man next to him and then into the bulkhead. There were several seconds of stunned silence. Had they truly stopped moving? No one could tell. Perelli quickly put an end to the inaction.

  “Dismount! Dismount! Everyone out!” he shouted.

  The emergency release on the loading ramp was pulled and explosive bolts blew the armored panel off. Rifles spilled out of the vehicle, weapons raised.

  The wind whipped at them and swirled inside the building, let in by the shattered windows. They found themselves inside of an expansive laboratory, a large trail of destruction cleaved straight through it by their entrance. Sterile white walls, dotted by a pillar every couple of yards encased an open series of desks, computers and workbenches. Windows lined the outer perimeter of the floor. The whole building shook every time another armored vehicle crashed into it.

  The Rifles found their drop pod had crashed all the way through from one side to the next. The front four wheels hung precariously over the side. The whole hull threatened to slip over at any minute. The driver was quick to follow them out.

  They didn’t receive a warm welcome. Just as stunned, the tower’s defenders had watched the audacious Vanguard soldiers breach the one-hundred and twentieth floor of a skyscraper with a tank. They recovered from their stupor and opened fire with small arms.

  The Rifles and the U.N element came under fire while in the open. There was little to no hard cover for them to hide behind. The entire floor quickly became a high-intensity gunfight. There was no time for tactics or to think. There was only a vicious duel in which the slow died and the quick bought themselves another tenth of a second.

  The Rifles took accurate fire from well-trained defenders. The shock troopers in Nyx Dynamics-supplied armor were motivated and made well-placed shots. The only thing saving the Rifles was the composite battle armor they wore, with its high ballistic rating. The defenders were similarly armored, but Vanguard .30-06 ammunition was specifically designed for killing vampires. Mere kevlar didn’t stand a chance.

  Thirty-aught-six armor-piercing sabot and high-explosive tips dropped the ardent thrall soldiers in only a few rounds. Still, in a fight where milliseconds mattered, it made them hard targets.

  Perelli took a round square to the chest, knocking him backwards. His own aim remained true and his assailants head snapped back as an AP round hole-punched his forehead.

  The defenders made a good showing of themselves. These were not the cultists Perelli had faced in the cathedral on Kotlin. They didn’t falter or fire wildly. All of their rounds were well-placed. Two of the U.N troops went down from shots to the chest and legs.

  Other LAVs impacted the floor they were on. Like battering rams, they heralded the arrival of the castle’s besiegers. More Rifles spilled from their holds. Some didn’t make it two steps before falling under the enemies guns.

  The shock troopers didn’t waste their lives. They were quickly being outnumbered. As soon as they saw their losing fight, they popped smoke grenades and disappeared into the cloud.

  Perelli withheld the order to give chase. Instead, he ordered the consolidation of their position. This was now his beachhead. Secure, reload, regroup. Then expand their foothold to the adjacent floors. Sustained force of violence was important in a CQC engagement, but he couldn’t just throw his squads piecemeal into enemy fire and let them be whittled down. He needed to establish overwhelming force.

  He picked the men of his now well-mixed element out of the smoke easily. Their drop had been rushed, the method sloppy and their breach chaotic. Two other LAVs that were supposed to be his weren’t there. Either they had impacted on a different floor or missed the target entirely. The interior steel and concrete structure of the building, combined with the jamming effect of the storm, made wireless comms impossible. Until he established a line-of-sight for laser comms, he couldn’t communicate with anyone.

  The ground was covered in the dead, the wounded and spent casings. Thankfully, more enemy dead than Vanguard. But now he had a lot of wounded to triage.

  Moving with purpose, a medic was organizing the consolidation of the wounded outside one of the vehicles, which he was setting up as a field hospital. Chief Weber tasked squads to the chokepoints at the stairwells and elevators. A few more gunshots rang out, probably from hostiles too slow in their withdrawal. Every defiant act of the enemy was met with liberal application of machinegun fire from Milo and Marcus.

  The smoke was no obstruction to any of them. Their HUDs ID’d friend or foe and combined with the various optical filters, rendered the gesture useless.

  “Floor is clear, sir!” Weber reported.

  “Headcount?” Perelli prompted.

  “Twenty, even. Six wounded. It’s a clusterfuck, sir. All different elements.”

  The Lieutenant was less concerned about the mixing of units than he was about ensuring a proper force balance. A force that was too heavy, too light, too many medics or too few, would put him in a much tighter spot. As it stood, he considered himself lucky. Twenty Rifles, among them a medic, six assault troopers, two NCOs and a radioman. A good balance, optimal even.

  If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  “You, get over here.” he pointed at the radioman with his large comms suite on his back.

  “R3C Jinwoo, sir.” The Rifle quickly moved to his side.

  Perelli redirected him. “Get up on the battlenet. We’re at a high enough elevation. You should be able to raise our spotter unit on laser. I want a SITREP.”

  “Aye, Aye, sir!” The Radioman quickly moved to the broken window and shifted his suite in front of him. He aimed the laser projector out over the city. They had a full view of the fire raging on the coast.

  “Strip everything we can out of the LAVs.” Perelli ordered Weber.

  The German went about the task immediately. He led a team to begin stripping the vehicles bare. They even took what was left of the cannon ammunition.

  “Boss! We got somethin’ over here.” A Rifle called out from the center of the laboratory. Perelli moved to investigate.

  Two Rifles were standing at the head of an operating table. One of them held up a white sheet while the other kept his HR-15 leveled at what lay on it.

  “I don’t know this thing is, or… used to be.” The one holding the sheet said.

  On the table was a monstrous creature. It was hairless and fleshy, but its skeleton was unlike any animal on Earth. Its ribcage jutted out in sharp spikes. It had six conjoined arms on its torso. Its head was stunted like a pugs. Two beady eyes, like those of a fish, sat directly above a wide maw with sharp teeth. The teeth weren’t big but they were twisted into unconventional shrapnel-like shapes. Most worrisome was the uniformity of the cutters. They were clearly designed not to consume prey. They were a weapon; one purposefully designed to create wounds impossible to stitch or stem the bleeding from.

  Worst of all were the legs. It had human legs.

  Perelli was sickened by the site. He motioned with his hand to lower the sheet.

  “Atleast its dead.” he told them. “If you found a live one, we might have a problem.”

  “Ah, about that.” One of the Rifles moved to another table sitting opposite. The sheet on it was shredded. A trail of thick green bile led from the table, across the floor, up the nearest wall and into a vent. The vent cover had been animalisticly shredded and claw marks extended into the darkness beyond.

  “We have a problem… ” Perelli said. “Alright, boobytrap that vent opening. We don’t need hostiles showing up in the rear.”

  “Aye, sir.” The Rifles went about sealing the hole.

  The radio ran up to him. “SITREP for you, sir.”

  “Go ahead.”

  Chiefs Weber and Novak were quickly at his side.

  “Assess you landed on floor five-zero. Whole unit scattered, but no misses. Elements landed on all floors from four-five to seven-one.”

  “Shit.” Perelli couldn’t hold in the curse. The 71st floor was the throne room. Whoever landed there was probably in a fight for their lives; if not already dead. “Where’s the largest concentration?”

  “Floor six-zero. Just above our intended LZ.”

  “Reports on hostile activity?”

  “Everywhere. All floors. Spotter says he’s received distress calls from all of them. We’re the first to report in with a stable situation.”

  Perelli instinctively checked the seating on his weapon’s magazine, then turned to the rest of his element.

  “Let’s go hunting.”

  Cry Havoc

  The sky-carier’s belly was well-peppered. As the ship exited the opposite side of the storm, it was worse for wear. Fires in her lower spaces had spread. The forward port side engine was failing from the collision with the dragon, which still clung to the bow. Its maw continued to leak thick black fluid which in turn gave rise to skeletal warriors.

  The number 1 turret had ceased functioning. In a perfect sequence of failure, the fire in the forward machinery space had spread to an adjacent compartment: The auxiliary ammunition bunker. The bunker was small and intended as a munition storeroom for the embarked ground troops. It location was intended to be make it easy to move ammunition from a ready-staging point to the troop hold. It had never been used for its intended purpose due to several design flaws, including its proximity to the belly of the carrier, where incoming enemy fire penetrate through to the hold. It had become a hideaway lounge for the crew during its long period of disuse. When Cry Havoc had been loaded for the invasion of Los Angeles the space for weaponry at a high premium and the bunker had been stocked full of shoulder-fired rocket launchers, grenades, 20mm cannon shells, machinegun belts and assorted cans of small arms ammo.

  That volatile cargo now burned and secondary detonations ripped through the bulkheads deep in the internals of the ship.

  Axton walked through a smoke filled passage. Red lights flashed and alarms sounded. A thin veil of smoke clung to the overhead of the passageway. Occasionally personnel rushed past with firefighting equipment; hoses, SCBAs and extinguishers. None stopped to acknowledge or salute the Leader-Commander, they had their own battle to fight. Tambor wouldn’t have it any other way.

  The invasion of L.A was underway and he was an accessory now. He wished he could have gone with Whirlwind battalion to face down Persephone himself, but he had taken Camila’s advice: Don’t. He’d only be a distraction. If it became necessary to use WMDs, the Vanguard needed him alive to see it through the fallout. It was a lamentable situation for him. The culmination of years of work and bloodshed on the part of the Terra Vanguard to finally root out the evil that besieged humanity from within and he would be effectively sidelined. He recalled when he used to interrogate Persephone himself. He would have loved nothing more than to look her in the eyes when she was finally condemned to the hell she belonged in; to end her long charade of mystical vampire bullshit at the point of the humble bullet.

  Though, perhaps this was more fitting. The Queen believed herself the herald of a grand design, and Tambor was supposed to be a part of that design. The Centurion of the Apocalypse. He would wash his hands clean of the darkness he was born of, and that would start with the vampires.

  Instead, Tambor’s battle lay ahead of him. Rounding a corner, he came into a wide passage full of Rifles. Like him, they were fully kitted. Ammunition and gear crates were passed around as an eclectic mixed force was assembled. There were members of the ship’s force; technicians and mechanics in haphazardly thrown together kit, some having having little more than a chest rig and a shotgun. They contrasted sharply against the occasional stay-behind ground-pounder in full tactical armor plating.

  Tambor himself stood out, his black unmarked servo-assisted armor an imposing sight.

  He came to the front of the column, where the most ready responders stood before a closed double-door leading out to the hangar bay. The leader briefed his team while two others held the levers, ready to open them for their comrades.

  The leader, a salty looking Chief Rifle didn’t stop his brief.

  “Remember your training! Do not let the enemy get close, but understand they will. Do not worry about conserving ammo’, there’s more where that came from. Be careful of clingers in the overhead. Fast-response team passed that on to us-what was left of them-Also, watch where your shooting. Deck-ops reported no ordnance, but there was active refueling in the hangar. Try not to hit any fuel bowsers. Let’s not start any more fires for the damage control teams.”

  He looked up at Tambor.

  “You with us?” He asked.

  Tambor nodded, “Freikorps. Call me ‘Sven’. Nevermind my unit. I’d like to help.”

  The Chief’s shrugged, having no idea who he was talking to. “I sure as shit ain’t gonna say no to another gun. Fall in.”

  Tambor grinned behind his ballistic mask. “Aye, Chief.”