Excerpt: In The Presence Of Enemies

Hauling herself out of the blood and mud, the warrior looked about her at the desolation she'd wrought, and tried to find some meaning in it.

She knew the battlefield like she knew a lover she couldn't stand any more. Intimately, loathsomely. The smell of dead bodies and ruined landscapes, the sounds both sharp and subtle of people killing each other with whatever means they could bring to bear. The sick desperation of it, the manic clawing of the fight not to defeat the enemy but to just stay alive, hinted at the edges of her senses like a harrowing nightmare that refused to let her go.

She didn't know the city's name - only waypoints and markers that used the APDF location codenames and numerics, and she'd memorised them so she wouldn't need to refer to her HUD's mapping system. All she knew was that the city was a charnel house. The fighting had gone from warfare to slaughter. It wasn't about tactics, anymore. It wasn't about securing objectives. It was about causing as much damage as possible to the enemy, regardless of the cost to one's own forces. She didn't need to be a genius to realise that she was just as disposable as everyone else that had died around her.

Half a mile away, quintasonic bombers dropped out of their transit speed to deliver their ordnance; thousands upon thousands of hellfire explosives, peppering the densely-packed urban areas that were being used as cover by the Seven Sisters Military Union's infantry forces. They were being obliterated hand over fist, turned into simple matter, meat byproducts scattered across the city without a name, over by Checkpoint Gamma Twelve. Smoke streaked the sky in all directions, turning it into a crazy barcode that promised the demolition of friend and foe alike; the skies were an angry red, perhaps reflecting the bloodshed enacted on the ground.

Apparently, the warrior was to be spared that fate. Her position had been abandoned by both sides; and she could honestly see why, because it looked like the hole in the city's chest where its heart had been ripped out. It was a gaping wound, buildings jagged and wrecked, streets reduced to rivers of human slurry and discarded weapons and equipment. A small park that she had been in when the shit really hit the fan was turned into a quagmire, plants and trees still burning, the heat of them on her face and back.

Her name was Amaterasu Constance Kadenko, Morrigan Clade, effectively without rank in the SSMU. She was a specialist; she took orders from theatre commanders and nobody lower. She repeated her name to herself inside her own head to stave off a burst of anxiety she could feel building in the back of her skull - it always happened after the case, when the battle was over and she'd survived.

Stepping around the human detritus that littered the area, she swallowed, uncapping her water canteen and taking a little sip from it. The charnel smell of humans flash-fried by explosive rounds reminded her that she hadn't eaten in three days; she would see to that when she was out of the city and on the way to another deployment. There was always another deployment.

She couldn't tell which side the bodies were from. The uniforms were so mangled, the equipment so badly trashed, that she couldn't see if it was the grey of the SSMU, or the Perseus Military Combine's dark red and green scheme. For all she knew, they were ALL SSMU, and blood had just painted half of them as the enemy. It was a nightmare.

One of the bodies moved - she felt it rather than heard it, the shift of the texture of the air making the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. Her head snapped around.

She couldn't tell what faction the woman belonged to. Most of the soldier was missing. The parts that remained were alive, somehow, moving in some grotesque mockery of life.

The warrior capped her water bottle and slid it away in a smooth motion; then she drew her side arm and put a single round through the woman's skull from fifty yards away. She spasmed once, then fell still, oblivion mercifully snatching away her pain.

She exhaled, then holstered the coil pistol. It was the only ranged weapon she had left. When she'd deployed from the dropship five days ago, she had a bulky plasma rifle, two disposable anti-armour rocket pods, and a railgun ranged and configured for sniping. She'd lost it all, a bit at a time - it was a war of attrition, after all. The second rocket pod, she'd detonated not twenty minutes ago; she'd flattened the area around her with it, scythed down the PMC's assault troops as they got close, and given the rest of the PMC incursion force something to think about.

Wiping the back of her hand agaisnt her brow, she closed her eyes, listened to the city around her dying. It was, apparently, one of the last cities to be torn apart; the world was almost not worth fighting over anymore.