Free Out of the Black (Odyssey One, Book 4) by Evan Currie Page A

stationed in a ring of fire around the Block. Okinawa, Germany, Iraq. We’ve got nothing but obsolete gear here
.
    We’ll just have to do the job despite all that
.

    The munitions truck was expecting them, as promised, and Weston was glad to see that they had a decent supply of depleted uranium rounds in a few calibers.
    “Show me the twenty millimeter rounds,” Eric said, nodding to the crate he could see on the back of the large truck.
    “Yes sir.”
    Eric loaded a single round of twenty millimeter by hundred and four millimeter depleted uranium into the Priminae weapon. It wasn’t a gun by the strictest definitions, and certainly wasn’t a rifle or anything that like. It was a gravetic accelerator cannon, and as such didn’t actually need any specific type of ammunition. Anything you could fit into the receiver would fly just fine out the business end.
    The gun took the twenty millimeter round, levitating it smoothly into the ready position. He checked the clearance quickly. Eric figured he could go larger, up to eighty millimeters in a pinch, but lugging around munitions that size would be a pain in his ass and he felt the need for mobility.
    Besides, this city is about to buried in bullets I can pick up whenever I need them
.
    Eric grabbed a canvas bag from the truck, flipped it open quickly, proceeding to shovel rounds into the bag from the crate. When he was done he flipped the bag over his shoulder and nodded to the men. “Thanks for the reload. Does anyone have a full uplink?”
    “No sir. Lost them just before the first impacts.”
    Eric sighed, but he wasn’t surprised. When the
Liberty
went up, the pulse was probably big enough to take out evenhardened orbital birds. Thankfully, the atmosphere would have kept it from frying most ground-based systems, but that didn’t help him much at the moment.
    “We’re having decent luck with the Net, though, sir.”
    “Oh?” Eric cocked his head, but then nodded quickly.
    It sort of made sense, now that he thought about it. The global network had originally been designed as a military communications system, so one of its biggest features was the fact that it was designed from the ground up to route signals around broken links. It was also mostly running on fiber now, so the backbone of the civilian network was actually better defended than most military systems.
    “Alright. I’ll link in that way,” he said. “Thanks.”
    “No problem, sir,” the reservist said. “Where are you going now, if I can ask?”
    “Back to my ship.”

CHAPTER FOUR
    Beijing, China

    MAJOR GENERAL KONG swore at the display, unable and unwilling to believe what he was seeing. The city crawled with enemy units, literally and figuratively
crawled,
and the reports coming back in made it clear that their normal response teams were utterly ineffective.
    “We need to bring in heavy armor and air support. Police units are insufficient!”
    “I am well aware of that, Chairman,” the general growled. “We are bringing our forces back from the exterior bases, but it takes time. Our forces have been arrayed outward since the war, so we have few heavy units to deploy.”
    “Do not give me excuses! Bring those units back immediately!”
    Kong tuned out the ravings of the Chairman, knowing that, for the moment at least, he had little to be concerned about from the man. In the current situation there wasn’t a military officer in the entire Block government who would listen to the Chairman over him. For all intents and purposes, he was the military, and right now the military was in charge.
    For all the good it seemed to be doing.
    The enemy forces were not particularly tough, as best as he could tell from reports and recordings, but they were more than a match for the police units initially sent against them. Internal military had somewhat more luck, but even those were relatively light in terms of firepower and armor, so at best they were holding the line while heavier forces were