Darby leapfrogged his way down a wide main street parallel to the plaza, throwing one IFF flare to distract a sniper while he sprinted from the cover of a tall red news box across a dusty boulevard to the cover of an abandoned landcar, whose owners had left so fast the doors were still open on both sides. Keeping an eye on the small red diamond that highlighted the sniper on his visor, he poked his head up to take a look down the boulevard at the plaza. He felt the minute impact of a spark hit his faceplate moments before the impossibly highpitched whip of the sniper's bullet blew past his right ear. The round punched a clean hole through the top of the trunk, down the bottom of the car, and sent a puff of asphalt dust up form the road right behind Darby's left boot. Not wanting the give the shooter even the minute time it would take to chamber a new round, he almost dove from his cover point into an awkward crouch walk, swinging his rifle in his arms for balance and momentum. The movement also served to agitate his active camo, which vibrated tiny gelatinous cells under the fabric to make his outline indistinct. Another round corkscrewed a smoke trail in a diagonal in front of his chest, so he spun with his right shoulder and crashed through a falsewood door, tripping on some debris and tumbling onto his back. Rolling with the impact, he came up in a crouch with his rifle up and ready but the dark old storage room of an abandoned restaurant was empty. He quickly moved against a steel counter for cover and waited for a ranging shot form the sniper, but apparently he was out of the shooter’s sight.
The storage room opened into the kitchen, where the light coming in from the shattered door danced on hanging pots disturbed by the violence of his entry. He scanned in thermal for a garrison upstairs or further ahead, but could only detect the faint outlines of chairs stacked on tables. He found the front door and snaked his helmet camera cable out a crack opened in the door scanning for threats, especially more snipers. He was only fifty feet from the location of the French unit, which constituted one more boulevard and a short alley. He cleared that next street without incident, apparently the sniper cover was patchy, and made his way down a narrow, debris-strewn alley as the chevron representing the entrenched french unit narrowed and the distance numbers decreased to nothing.
Darby stepped out of the alley into a sun streaked hole of a three storey building. A shell had apparently blasted straight down through the roof and all three floors and made a sizeable crater that was ringed with sandbags and razor wire. He realised he was inside the french unit’s perimeter, a neither he nor the soldiers occupying it had noticed. He spoke loud enough that his comm unit broadcasted his greeting out from his helmet speaker as well as his comm link to the other Wolverines.
“Lieutenant Darby arriving at waypoint.”
There was a number of startled cries from around the sandbagged emplacement, and a trio of dirty men in Gens D’Armes uniforms rushed him from the darkness of the store front. It took the presence of an equally dusty noncom with a pistol to ease them down from shooting the stealthy Wolverine.
“Sergeant Reno?” He asked the NCO, who was staring right down the alleyway Darby had unwittingly infiltrated the position from.
Though Darby didn’t ask again, there was a noticeable delay in the NCO’s reaction which came with a snap look and a lurching grab for the front of Darby’s vest. He greeted the Wolverine with a slap on the helmet and various tugs at his uniform, which felt very much to Darby like arriving at an Italian dinner party. Apparently satisfied with the new arrival, the french NCO retreated with his trio of soldiers back into the dark storefront without saying a word. Darby followed, his visor polarising the make the dark interior visible faster than his naked eyes would have, and hesitated as the troops sat at a table and began playing a card game they had apparently abandoned when they heard his announcement. He walked swiftly the to NCO, who was no successfully ignoring him, and stood as close to the mans face as he could.
“I’m here to relieve you of command Sergeant.” He said, to which the french NCO nodded disinterested. “You’re under my authority now, along with your unit.” He added as an after thought, hoping that would snap them into soldiering properly.
Seeing they seemed to have no interest in manning their positions, he took the card river on the table in one hand and dropped them to the wrecked store floor. That seemed to motivate the rest of the french unit to man their positions, or at least go somewhere else in the area to avoid the inevitable chewing out their Sarge would soon be receiving from this Confederate soldiering behemoth.
Instead, Darby walked the man to the back of the position, where he had entered unnoticed, and began to illuminate the various glaring holes in their defences. The still silent NCO nodded and softly issued a few orders in French to his unit, prompting a few tired-looking soldiers to come back with a kitbag and begin loose reinforcements. They then inspected the storefront placing the plaza, where the wrecked chamber of an overheated machinegun lay in a pool of spent casings and had been propped on a counter split in half by a shell inpact and dusted with debris from the ceiling. All of the shelves and tables closest to the window were black and most were at least partially melted while any vertical surface was pocked with bullet holes big and small. Darby noticed that, while the NCO was certainly listening, the man didn’t seem remotely interested in keeping his unit or himself alive. He grabbed the Sergeant by the shoulder and pulled him close.
“Listen, I know that I’m not a local, and you must think that I’m only here to boss you around and get you killed for nothing. I’m just a soldier, just like you and them and those people in the plaza across the street. I don’t want to die, and don’t want any of your boys to die either but I am better at this job than you are. I have better training, better tools, and better opportunities to showcase them. I need you to listen to me out there, and I promise you I will not waste your lives.” Just as he was thinking what a terrible politician he would make, he realised the rest of the unit had gathered behind him while he’d been talking and were now in some semblance of parade. He turned to address all fifteen of them. “I’m a representative of a mobile company from the Confederation carrier Monolith, we have two hundred infantry fighters on the ground and almsot half that number are poised to assault this plaza. We will be providing suppressing fire to the quadrant visible through this storefront, and will be expected to backup the assault.” He paused, thinking maybe he should say more, but decided he might as well move on to topics he was comfortable with.