(Untitled)

[theredstars]

If the recon holds up, Urik said yesterday, this whole mess should be over by 15:00 hours.

Thanks, Uri, Alex thinks bitterly, huddling behind a flaming krawl at 15:30, in a break between shouting at her comm. She's starting to get hoarse -- from bellowing orders over gunfire and over the goddamned screaming 'Gorkas, and from yelling at this

Comments

[joiningyousoon]

And finally, suddenly, there is a harried, worried answering voice.

It ought to be a familiar one.

"It's Maya! We've got you, Alex; where the hell have you been?! Four hours since our last contact!"

[theredstars]

"The 'Gorkas are running Protocol Resistance Shields," Alex snaps. "They're blocking our communications, nav systems... we've been ambushed near the train station! That recon from Central Command was useless!"

They should have expected this shit. Hell, they did -- but the damn 'Gorkas are proving more inventive and even more stubborn than anticipated, and the usual sorceress tactics are apparently making no more of a dent than the usual krawl tactics.

Alexandra, a stubborn bitch of some renown herself, never thought she'd have cause to be more angry at Nokgorkan stubbornness than she already was.

"Where are the other units? I need reinforcements immediately! It's a complete disaster down here!"

[joiningyousoon]

"We've lost contact with most of them-- It's--"

The pause of a warkaster cycling through data; weighing outcomes.

"The 181st and 129th have been all but wiped out. We ordered the 19th and the 76th to break through to your last known location, so they're on their way!"

[theredstars]

"Negative on the 19th! They got the hell out of here under heavy fire! No sign of the 76th as yet..."

Alex pauses to flatten herself against her krawl as some more of that heavy fire explodes against its side.

"Pass a message on to Urik, will you?" Skymarshall Antares, she ought to say in front of the troops, but hell with that. Half of them are corpses in the snow and burned-out krawls by now, anyway. "Last night, at the briefing -- I know I gave him hell, but tell him he was right about one thing. There wasn't any good news."

"This is Goncharova to the column!" she bawls, with the tap to turn down volume on her comm enough to keep from deafening Maya. Automatic reflexes, not courtesy; she'd do her friend the kindness, but she's long past having attention to spare for that. "Whoever's left -- fire at will!She's answered with another thunder of gunfire and cannons. From the enemy as much as her own troops, damn them all to hell. "We haven't got much left, Maya