The Battle for Burbank
‍An excerpt from the Battle for Burbank novel
By Mike Van Putte

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Calder was standing on the tarmac when a green flare arced up to the south, low over the residential area, rising before the Verdugo Mountains and the gray overcast. A blue flare followed. The first told him Clybourn Road. The second was armor.

Armor!

Just as suddenly as the flares, Sergeant Mara Delgado appeared beside him.

“They’re coming,” she said.

She spat.

Battalion pronounced that the People’s Insurgency Army (more accurately criminals that banded together after The Fall) were coming through Glendale for downtown Burbank. As the newest lieutenant, Calder was assigned to secure the flat killing fields they called the only operational airport and the company’s west flank while the company held Burbank. So, he positioned his troops in a U-shaped defense behind the runways. He set the CP beside a board that promised departures to cities that no longer answered.

To his front was open ground. He’d spent four years watching ground like this on a screen, technicolor polygons assigned cost values. Here, it was the distance between a trooper and their destination, and according to battalion, every meter wanted Calder and his soldiers dead. But battalion turned out to be wrong. The PIA didn’t want Burbank. They would come up the Los Angeles River channel and then rush Cahuenga or Vineyard.

The attack began with the deep rumble of engines, the whine of lift fans, a high-pressure blast of air and gravel. Turrets crested the rubble, and pulse cannons blasted across the tarmac, searching for targets. The black tanks transitioned from column to line, each thirty tons of composite armor and killing implements, riding above the tarmac, clearly believing they were the most powerful things on the field.

The old instinct rose, to task an asset, to drop a marker, to let the system solve it. The system was dead. There was only Tran.

Corporal Tran was nineteen, from a town down south that the PIA now held. Tran hadn’t said forty words since joining Calder’s troop.

Now, he sprang out of a spider hole two hundred meters off the left tank’s flank, Hammer launcher shouldered. There was a crack as the rocket flashed up, turned over, and came down through the turret. The machine crashed onto its skirts, venting, and somewhere inside it three crewmen stopped believing in anything.

The lead tank’s coaxial walked fire across the open ground toward Tran’s hole. He was already crawling through a shallow trench to his next position while rounds chewed the concrete around the abandoned hole.

The right tank died the same way—from a woman the crew never saw.

The lead tank turned right into Harris’s field of fire. His Tesla gun released a blast of blue-white lightning that crackled and arced, frying circuits and crew.

Then Tran let loose with another rocket that crashed into the tank, the turret lurching aside as it dropped.

That was the arithmetic of war. A tank costs more than a city block. A rocket costs less than a pulse rifle. Where destruction was cheaper than survival, you didn’t buy armor. You armed troopers with rockets.

Then the Walker lumbered out from behind the southern ruins. It stood three stories on two legs; Calder had read the assessments. But knowing something and standing under its guns were two different worlds

Its main gun roared, and the eastern hangar exploded in a shower of concrete where second squad had been. Men screamed on that side of the line. It kept coming, took a long step over a burning tank, and a foot came down on a fighting position. There was no more screaming.

Its head traversed, pulse cannon firing in staccato, each whip-crack bursting superheated concrete off the runway like lethal hail.

Specialist Okonkwo had the platoon’s last heavy weapon on a tripod in the deep shadow of the control tower base. He walked fire up the right leg, into the knee and its cluster of actuators. The Walker took a step, and the leg was not there to take it. It went down like a tree, slow and then all at once, twisting as it fell so that the cockpit came around to face them.

For one instant, the operator was visible inside before themachine crashed into the runway and collapsed into a fireball.

The entire theory of modern war was burning on a runway in Burbank.

And where was their infantry?

The airfield had gone quiet. Calder’s hands were shaking.

A green flare arced over the southern residences.

His scout had survived; the enemy was pulling back.

‍Calder climbed out and began walking the position. That was what a lieutenant was supposed to do.

The air smelled of burning metal, hydraulic fluid, and something chemical and faintly sweet.

They had held.

The eastern hangar was a crater with a roof folded into it. The eleven men of second squad were down to four. The medic, a quiet man named Roshan, was treating a fellow comrade, looked up at Calder, and shook his head.

Okonkwo was alive; his loader wasn’t.

In nineteen days, Calder had lost a third of his troops. He couldn’t name half of the dead.

Delgado was already giving orders. The platoon skimmer was racing down the runway, evacuating wounded. Troopers were cross-loading ammunition, moving bodies, and checking enemy debris and dog tags.

He found Webb in his position.

Webb had been the youngest and had died in his bunker with his rifle in his hands, facing the enemy. Someone had put a tarp over him. The boy’s boots poked out, the laces double knotted.

Calder looked back over the airfield.

He’d broken an armored thrust with infantry and killed tanks and a Walker. He had been right about the riverbed. Acceptable losses against assets destroyed. He’d written sentences exactly like that and had believed them.

Delgado came and stood beside him at the bunker. She did notlook at the boots poking out from the bunker.

“They’ll come back,” she said.

“You called the riverbed. Don’t get all cocky about it.”

He looked back at the burning machines, and the skimmer racing away.

He looked at the boots.

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