Free Hunter Legacy 9: Hero at the Gates by Timothy Ellis Page A

everywhere,
some of them still smoking. I looked up, rain spattering the head of my suit.
The small group of my remaining team were ponderously walking over to me.
    I stood there, thinking about what to do
next.
    The rain stopped, but not far away it was
still bucketing down. I looked up again, to see Gunbus coming down above us.
The rain started again, as Jane was forced to find some empty space to set down
on. From her Cargo Bay, a mixed group of marines, led by Jack and Sam, escorted
about half the medical team out. All of the marines were in 'slinky red', which
told me none of their combat suits was combat worthy. Jack headed for where I
was, while the rest headed for the nearest barracks. I assumed they were looking
for anyone left behind earlier, or injured and needing assistance. Or both.
Jane would be directing them in any case, so I left them to get on with it.
    "Jane."
    "Yes Bwana?"
    "Clean this mess up please."
    "Camel is already on the way down with
a cleaning crew."
    "Good. Next task is finding the
entrance to this bunker. We may have destroyed it, in which case we either need
to find an alternate entrance, or make a new one."
    "Confirmed."
    Eight combat suits started off for
different places along the wall. I assumed it meant four others hadn't made it
through the fight, protecting me.
    "Better keep an eye out for anyone
coming out of an escape tunnel somewhere. I've no idea if we took out the
General, but I suspect we didn’t, and he's either cowering underneath us
somewhere, or trying to escape."
    "On it."
    The twins dropped down from their giant
suits, and then stepped out of their combat suits, and did some stretching
exercises. BA and the others followed their example. Jack came up to us, as I
stepped out the back of my own suit. There was a patch of clean grass in front
of me, so I sat on it. The rest did the same in a group facing me.
    "What's our operational status,"
I asked generally.
    "The majority of the combat suits are
almost out of charge," said Jack. "A lot of them are damaged in some
way, and some of them are over on the grass over there. The Mesons are
wonderful to be able to fire without a tripod power source, but they really
chew through the juice if you don’t get a chance to let them recharge properly.
The whole system works brilliantly, but the power doesn’t last anywhere near as
long as with using Pulse Rifles."
    Camel roared overhead, and Jane landed on
the grass next to me. She waved in a general direction.
    "Four of my suits are over that way.
They're repairable, but weren't able to keep up with you, so I left them where
they took damage."
    "I'm sorry I didn’t listen to you more
boss," said BA. I raised an eyebrow, and she went on. "I didn't take
you seriously about adding shields to the giant suits. They would have made a
huge difference today."
    She nodded in Jane's direction, and
received one back. The two of them had some development work in mind it seemed.
    "I think we learned a few lessons here
today," said Alison.
    "A few?" I grinned at her tiredly.
    "Yes," said Amanda. "I
wished we'd thought out these new suits a lot better."
    "How so?"
    "It strikes me we've only been
thinking of them in terms of larger suits, and limited use vehicles. But what
we desperately needed here a while ago, was a small fortress. If we'd thought
it out properly, we could have changed the giant suits into a fortification,
which fired its own weapons while giving the normal suits somewhere to hide
behind."
    "Could have had its own shields
too," said BA, "keeping the regular troops safe as they picked off
attackers."
    "Talking of fortifications," I
said. "Didn’t anyone think of using the big Mesons, or bulldozer mode, to
dig trenches?"
    There was an embarrassed silence. Camel was
down now, and cargo droids were swarming out. With them came a number of butler
droids, with what looked like packs of water.
    "This whole thing was nuts," I
went on. "I mean, two combat suited armies charging each other?