Operation Honey Trap vs The Emperor of the Apocalypse-Chapter 155: Clifftop Battle

Vincent came up to General Meyer as the mission team marched out of Squeaking Point, walking alongside the big man.

"See you later mate," the General ruffled the lad’s hair.

"General, General, I gotta tell you somethin’ before you leave," he tugged on Alton’s sleeve.

Here we go. Whatever it was ought to be interesting coming from this particular kid, he thought.

He leant down so the lad could whisper in his ear.

He’d learnt his lesson about giving the boy a platform to be more widely heard; it was a dangerous move fraught with problems.

"That bloke’s got his eye on your woman. You better watch him, alright?"

"Which bloke?" Alton whispered to Vincent.

Vincent flicked his eyes towards Brenner. "That one there. The good-looking rascal."

"How do you know?" he wondered if the boy had seen something, his jealousy flicking from zero to one hundred.

"I seen the way he looks at her when you’re not around. ’N he’s always tryin’ to chat her up when you’re not there."

"Is he just?" growled Alton disparagingly. "Yep. I’m on it. I’ve got my eye on him. Don’t worry. I won’t let him steal her away."

"Good man!" cried Vincent with delight. "You’ve got to watch them pretty women. All the blokes are after ’em."

His job done; he scampered away with a wave.

"Don’t trust that Casey either!" he called back at the General as he ran off. 𝒇𝒓𝒆𝒆𝙬𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝒎

Alton couldn’t help laughing. He had a little ally there.

Indy had requested a shift in partner to move away from Niko, so she now marched alongside Baer, and Opal had been teamed with Niko.

Alton was disgusted by the whole thing.

"I’ve never seen so many partner shifts in all my days soldiering!" he growled at Delphi, who marched next to him. "This is why mixed companies are a mistake!"

"Maybe when women aren’t locked up and covered up it might be possible for mixed companies to be less fraught with drama," she replied. "Anyway, I’m sure you see plenty of fights and conflict when you’re on patrol. There must be lots of testosterone fuelled arguments."

"Plenty," he grunted, "but they’re all resolved by a fistfight or discipline".

"Well, we can resort to discipline for these fights if you prefer. They’re your soldiers when we’re in the field, and they’ll take your discipline on the chin."

"Hmmph!"

Delphi could see that he really just wanted to rant, and he didn’t want her to solutionise, so she let it be.

After a very long day of marching, the team lay hidden in a patch of thick bushland in the Gog range.

Somehow a patrol seemed to have picked up their tracks and had been following them for a couple of kilometres now.

They had entered the reserve in the hopes of losing them, but the patrol unit was determined, and the soldiers had followed their trail through the bush and up the mountain.

"I think we’re going to have to engage these buggers," whispered Alton to Delphi. "They don’t look like giving up anytime soon. They obviously know they’re onto something or they wouldn’t have bothered chasing us so far. If we keep going off course like this, we’re going to have to backtrack too far."

"I agree," Delphi nodded seriously. "We won’t be safe to make camp tonight if we don’t deal with them. It’s no small matter. Once they see us, we’re going to have to kill them all Alton."

He nodded gloomily.

"You can try wearing your night drop masks, but you’re right. The risk is that even with your faces covered they can tell by your heights and figures that you’re women. It doesn’t mean that word will get back to the Emperor about which women you are, just that there are women among the rebels. Given how suspicious my Uncle is, we certainly don’t need that news leaking just yet."

"I think we take a stand and fight them while we can still choose the battleground," Delphi whispered in reply.

"We need all the advantages we can get," Alton agreed, "given they’re seasoned soldiers, and many of our team... less so".

"Well, there are less of them then there are of us; we’re ten and they’re eight, and who knows how seasoned they all are, some of them might be relatively new recruits."

"Yes, but we can’t take that chance, so our planning needs to be meticulous."

He pulled Delphi to her feet. "Let’s go, we need to brief the others and prepare for a battle."

Alton chose the peak of the mountain with the intent of forcing the soldiers to fight with their backs to a huge cliff, leaving them no way to retreat and trapping them in a fight to the death, or face falling from that massive drop.

He had the team hide behind rocks that would position them on the only route off the clifftop, so they could block their retreat.

Their tracks deliberately lead to the edge of the cliff and then continued along and down the ridgeline. Alton hoped to use the false tracks to attract the patrol as close as possible to their chosen fighting ground.

The wait was awful for the girls. It seemed to be agonisingly slow as they lay hidden, waiting for the patrol to catch them up.

They knew from the fighting in Horsham that it was a terrifying and gruesome business, nothing like their training, and nothing could really prepare you for it.

At last they heard the crunch of gravel underfoot and the scattered voices of men floating up to the plateau at the top.

They all watched for General Meyer’s signal.

Hold. Hold. Hold, he signed, until all of the patrolmen had entered their designated kill zone.

And go! He signalled. Finally, it was on!

The ten of them stood up from their hiding places, arraying themselves in a semi-circle around the soldiers so they could only go backwards, closer to the cliff, or fight their way out.

"We’ve been engaged!" shouted their Sergeant. "Get ready to fight men!"