Naero's War: The Citation Series 2: The High Crusade by Mason Elliott Page A

demanded.
    “Not yet, but we’re close. We can tell you where the sniper last fired from.”
    “Boys, what good does that do us?”
    “Sir, they move thirty meters left and then back thirty meters right, popping targets of opportunity from that position in any direction, at random.”
    “Then what? That can’t be all of it,” Naero said.
    “Hmm, the full analysis says that they move again within five to ten minutes at most, and they set up again within one minute and start shooting again.”
    “That’s tight, guys. Thanks a lot,” Naero told them. “These sniper teams are elite and extremely well-trained. They excel at this.”
    “Sir, we still can’t locate the next exact location of the shooter, but we can pinpoint several possibilities. May we suggest having auto or miniguns ready to shred all of those areas at the same time? We might get lucky with a scattershot approach?”
    “Negative. One sign of something like that and they’ll just fade away and set up shop somewhere else, where we aren’t.”
    “What if we mass stun the blanket area and sort it all-out from there, sir?”
    “No good either, guys. Stunfields won’t affect phazed troops. We know at least that much. Explosions or indirect fire won’t, either. Their rounds only un-phaze an instant before they hit their targets. We can only detect them for sure when they pause to recharge.”
    “Sir, didn’t phaze armor originally kill the users in some horrible fashion?”
    “It did. Phaze-sickness. But we think the enemy has improved upon that tek by now, although it sucks up lots of juice to function. They will still be forced to recharge at some point, or swap out energy paks or some such.”
    “Sir, we’ve got just such an apparent recharge spike.”
    “Get it up on the Combat Grid locator.”
    “Wait a sec–no good, sir. We’ve got five more bursts of charging echoes just like it, all within thirty klicks. Probably just echoes.”
    Shetanna kept up the feeds live to Squad-4 and the others, now positioned around her, ready to go in. Then she spotted the pattern and what it meant.
    N, those aren’t echoes or feedback scatter and chatter.
    I know, Om.
    “People, listen up,” Naero said. “Each one of those pockets of blips is coming from a six-person sniper team operating in this area, each of them independent. One or two spotters, two shooters, and the other pair are mostly guards or lookouts. That’s how they’re making this work.”
    One of the attached snipers called in. “That’s how they make all of this work so well. The shooters kill as much as they want. Then they vanish with their team before the area gets too hot, and they go do the same thing somewhere else. I bet they already have the next location selected before they even move.”
    Word reached them. An enemy sniper had just killed Spacer Marine Macon Abraham with a clean head shot.
    “Now the slashers are killing us. Suggestions?” Sergeant Bucci asked. “How do we break them down and take them out?”
    “Let me try something,” Corporal Nelson suggested. “Maybe our MCL can help. I happen to be a telepath myself, a very strong one.”
    “Nelson,” Naero said, “I’m a Mystic. I’ve already tried to detect their minds. But you can’t detect a mind that is phazed or even cloaked, for that matter.”
    “Hear me out, sir. You can do so…if you’re phazed right along with them, at the same time.”
    “You can phaze, Nelson? I didn’t know that. Not many Spacers can. I sure can’t.”
    “Yeah, I can phaze. I just can’t move very much while I’m doing it–and it’s exhausting. My whole family can do it, more or less. We used to play hide and scan, and we figured out the whole phaze and telepathy thing.”
    Naero zipped over to Nelson’s position and they found some cover nearby. Naero focused and opened her third eye. Then she placed her hands on Nelson’s shoulders, studying her through a mindlink and with biomancy, all at once.
    “Go ahead,