Curran looked up and swore. One of them had somehow climbed up the side of the building, tearing it all to hell in the process, and was menacingly looking down on them.

“Elevate the barrel! Get it locked up!” he ordered.

“It’s too tight, Major! We can’t aim that high!”

Curran felt his stomach twist as he recognized the crackle of energy on the front of the alien even as he opened his mouth to give a futile order.

The explosion of the beast left him stunned for a moment, as much because of the incredible shock wave that followed it, blowing out windows all down the street even as pieces of the alien rained down around them.

Curran pivoted his scanners around. “What the hell was that!?”

“Two more, dead ahead, sir!”

He refocused his attention where it needed to be. “Continue firing!”

Eric leapfrogged the battle, staying low and hugging the side streets as he jumped forward. He could feel the burn in his legs, unaccustomed as they were to the kind of work he was putting them to in just the past few hours. He’d trained as a rifleman, like all Marines, but it had been a long time since those days and he knew that he was going to feel it come morning.

Assuming he was alive in the morning.

He caught glimpses of the fighting as he crossed Waterbury Avenue, the muzzle flash of the electromagnetic cannon on the battle tank making a distinctive sight as the ablated material of the round ignited from the air friction.

He landed low, sliding feet first under cover along a grassy strip between two buildings, narrowly avoiding wrapping himself around a tree in the process. He rolled clear, remaining prone as he crawled up to the tree he’d narrowly missed, and braced his weapon against it.

“I’m in first position.”

Short signal bursts, four of them, told him that the others heard him and were moving into their own positions even as he spoke. Eric poked his head out a bit, eyes flitting around, but he couldn’t see the beasts that he knew were out there. Despite being linked into the Guard’s IFF signals system, Eric found that he couldn’t get a location lock from them, as their system simply wasn’t calibrated, nor advanced enough, to keep a virtual lock on the enemy.

Irritating. Use your thermals, damn it.

Radar lock would be useless, he knew, but the tanks were fully capable of getting a thermal lock on a target and communicating it over the network. Why they weren’t doing so, Eric had no clue. He back-doored into their network and added an order to their queue, using his Confederate authorization codes.