Eric jumped from cover immediately, ignoring the part of his stomach that wanted to hurl at the sudden motion.

He knew that it was the concussion at play, but he couldn’t do anything about it other than ignore it as best he could and suppress it when he couldn’t. He’d fought through worse in his time. He could do it again.

The alien particle beams glowed an evil red as they swept after him, Eric staying on the bounce and a half inch ahead of burning death with each leap. As a Marine aviator, hell just as a Marine, Eric was an infantryman first and anything else a distant second . . . but that didn’t mean he was fully trained on the armor he wore.

It was relatively new issue, and his job since it had come out was more behind the lines than on them until he’d been assigned to the Odyssey. Since then he’d taken his spare time to qualify on the armor, but he knew that he was nowhere near the skill level of the SOCOM troopers he’d commanded. Eric wished a few of them had ridden down with him, actually, but that hadn’t seemed like a good idea at the time.

He landed in a skid, sliding behind a large cement memorial statue to something or someone he didn’t have time to identify and rolled over into a prone position as he lined up his next shot.

The Priminae weapon blasted the environment around him again, and again Eric saw a rooster tail of dust kick up between him and the enemy. The sheer power the Priminae had packed into the form factor of a slightly beefy yet surprisingly light assault rifle left him in utter awe.

I don’t even have it turned all the way up.

It was set roughly in the middle of the power slide, and he knew that he could conceivably eliminate the lot of the bastards with one properly aimed shot on full power. But the sheer level of collateral damage it would incur terrified Eric to no end.

A kiloton-level weapon, or close enough as to make no real difference, was not something he ever wanted to unleash in a Confederate city.

When he spotted a grouping of the aliens emerging from the tree line south of him, however, he decided to up the ante just a little. Eric slid the power control up a few more degrees and kept his aim lower so he wouldn’t take out a building or something with a miss. He then squeezed down on the trigger and unloaded a burst into the enemy position that seemed to shake the world.

CHAPTER THREE

National Guard Command Post, Intrepid Sea, Air, & Space Museum

“WHAT THE EVER loving fuck was that?”

The mushroom cloud floating over the city to the north of them gave a pretty good answer to that question, honestly, but it just felt like something Brigadier Potts needed to ask.