The Lost Stars: Shattered Spear by Jack Campbell

appeared. Solid slugs and energy bolts slammed into the attackers, each one causing a gap in the stealth protection even if they didn’t penetrate.
    Gozen was firing as fast as she could aim when an object raced overhead from behind. The grenade exploded among the frontmost attackers, knocking two off their feet and slowing those behind them.
    She rose to a crouch, ignoring the shots coming at her from the attackers, and put a careful round straight into the face shield of an enemy barely a meter away. The soldiers with her dropped three more who were still charging.
    One attacker made it past them, spinning to face the door to the armory then jerking backward under the impact of a shot from Drakon at point-blank range. The attacker hit the wall behind, then before he or she could leap forward again a dozen more hits from the other soldiers riddled the attacker’s armor.
    “Get your eyes back on sentry!” Gozen yelled, seeing that nearly every soldier was now facing inward toward where the last attacker had fallen. “Comply!”
    Under the lash of that command the soldiers hastily took up positions facing outward again.
    Gozen checked her display for signs of damage to her own armor and to the other soldiers. “Lieutenant, have one of the soldiers on yourside get Private Honda inside the armory and try to patch him up. Medina, how bad are you?”
    “I’ll live,” Medina said. “It hurts and my sensors are degraded, but I’m still combat effective, Colonel.”
    A warning note sounded inside Gozen’s armor, accompanied by a blinking red danger symbol. She was still lining up her rifle when two shots were fired from soldiers near her.
    The not-quite-dead-yet enemy who had suddenly swung a weapon toward them jerked under the hits, then lay still.
    “Make sure they’re all dead,” Gozen snapped.
    More shots, each one aimed at the helmet of a fallen foe. Then silence again.
    “They’re vipers all right,” Drakon said.
    Gozen didn’t have to turn to see that he was kneeling to examine the attacker who had gotten closest to him. Her display showed Drakon’s position behind her. “Sir, are you sure that one is safe?”
    “Yeah. I used a minipulse to fry her armor’s systems. Her systems are all as dead as she is.”
    “Vipers usually operate in units of twelve,” Gozen said. “We only killed six.”
    “That’s a good start,” Lieutenant Develier commented, his voice a little ragged. Common soldiers might hate the agents of the Internal Security Service who were nicknamed snakes, but even that hate paled next to their revulsion toward the elite vipers who were often used to execute battlefield discipline on soldiers who were thought to have committed crimes, or who were judged to have been insufficiently aggressive, or who had just been picked at random to be killed as lessons to the other soldiers.
    “We don’t know which direction the next six will come from,” Gozen warned. “Everybody stay sharp. Drop some more smoke in both directions.”
    They waited again. Gozen, her armor automatically tied in to the command net when she suited up, could see that Drakon was trying to work around the jamming still blocking their longer-range communications and the tactical picture outside their line of sight.
    Her display abruptly came to full life and incoming calls began clamoring for her attention. Gozen was trying to grasp all of the new information when she heard Drakon bellow a command.
    “Focus on what’s in front of you!”
    Cursing, she raised her weapon again just as more shapes appeared exiting from the smoke. Gozen and the others on her side pumped out shots, this time joined by two grenades that broke the enemy charge.
    As the last attacker fell, Gozen felt a twinge of something wrong. “How many?” she demanded. “Get me a count!”
    “Four . . . no five. Five, Colonel.”
    “We got one viper unaccounted for!” She switched circuits to broadcast that to everyone in the building now that her