Chapter 19 – Hacksaw

The eight Manticoran troops surged in through the gap first, putting their armored bulk between the main force of volunteers and whatever might be inside. They shrugged off a sudden fusillade of killing curses, tribarrels and plasma rifles flaming. Brief screams flooded the space, and then suddenly went silent in the aftermath of the apocalyptic violence visited upon their makers.

"Entry's clear." Sergeant MacNeil commed.

Harry was, briefly, shocked by the sheer destructiveness of the stranded warriors from the future. There was something unnerving about stepping through the opening to view the wreckage that had once been… twenty? Twenty-five? Some obscenely large number of Death Eaters who had crowded into the entrance hall, and into firing slits built into the walls. His stomach shifted uneasily, but did not turn.

He pressed a gloved finger to his commswitch. "I can see that." he said with a dry chuckle that didn't hold much humor. "Separate into two groups. Two platoons per four Manties. Hurry!"

Opening up a direct link to Sergeant MacNeil, he commed her as well while the troops shook themselves out. "Sergeant, you'll be going with me. We're going to do the dumb thing and go charging through… well, whatever they've got, straight to the cells. I think we can handle that. The other group's going to go cause as much destruction as it can and cover our entrance."

"Roger, sir. Plan Light Brigade is a go." She said diffidently. The reference almost went over Harry's head, but he caught it at the last second and chuckled to himself.

Opening the all-hands frequency back up, he cleared his throat. "Let's get moving, people."

Harry took up a space directly behind the Sergeant and her fireteam, as they set off at an easy lope that had the wizards of the group struggling to keep pace, though keep pace they did. The Manty private carrying the plasma rifle shoulder-charged a thick steel door directly ahead, and between him and the corporal that followed him the door crumpled like tin foil and buckled to the side, forced permanently open. Harry raised his weapon, finger stroking the trigger stub and sending a lethal bolt of sickly green magic snapping into the side of a Death Eater laying against the wall, bleeding from the head, thrown aside by the door's bending under the force of two one-ton armored behemoths impacting it.

"Good kill, sir." The corporal said. "Sergeant, I'm getting readings from my ground-penetrating radar now."

"What've you got, Corp?"

"At least two levels below us, probably more, given the readings. Seems to follow some sort of standardized pattern though. Probably a trap. Probably a lot of local assholes with bad intentions between us and the stairs, on the stairs, and anywhere near an elevator or magic teleportation bullshit device."

Harry nodded to himself as he listened. "Probably." He chimed in. "Suggestions, Corporal?"

"Sir, I am a huge fan of Dynamic Entry. I'm an even bigger fan of the bastard child it had with the Ordnance blokes, known as Explosive Dynamic Entry. Blow a hole in the floor. Toss explosives through the hole. Jump in and finish off anything that lived through both of those. Rinse and repeat til we hit the cells, then fly back out with your people. Simple enough, sir."

Despite the situation – and he could hear heavy fire in the background as the Havoc teams made good on their name – Harry chuckled. "Sergeant, I think he's got a good idea."

"Yes, sir. Specialist Caulfield, bring up that breacher!" Sergeant MacNeil said, barking the order.

The fourth member of the fireteam shuffled forward on battle steel feet, reaching back for the suit to place a charge shaped like a cone in her hand. "Let's see, two-ton yield should get through this…" she said, pressing a button on the side of the charge and linking the yield to it through her suit's computer. "Alright, everybody back!"

The rest of the Merlin teams stood back, conjuring shields to protect themselves and their squadmates, and at the Sergeant's signal, Specialist Caulfield triggered the detonation, causing all the force of a two-ton explosive charge straight downward in a sixty-degree cone, the first half of the charge blowing a small hole at the top, creating spalling and shrapnel that tore into clothes and flesh and equipment below in a whirlwind of horror. The second half of the charge followed milliseconds after, dropping into the hole created by the first blast and detonating, widening the hole enough that the Manticorans could drop in two abreast, debris bouncing off shields and armor in the room the Alliance held.

Harry called out among his people, making sure none had been hurt. He was relieved to find that none had, though Ernie had been missed by the slimmest of margins by a chunk of concrete and rebar the size of his head that had bounced upward off of someone's shield spell.

The Manticorans, meanwhile, dropped in and wreaked havoc. The screaming stopped after a few seconds, and Harry chanced a look in. The room had been laid out much like an office, which had afforded the Death Eaters places to hide and take cover in amongst the cubicles. It hadn't saved them, not for very long at least; not even the hardest wood or even steel can long provide protection from five-millimeter tungsten projectiles thrown at a mind-boggling cyclic rate at hypersonic velocity, and even less so for the Corporal's plasma rifle.

Still…

We need to move quickly, before they realize we know where the prisoners are and kill them all off, Harry thought angrily. Even this way will take a while. Maybe too long.

Almost unbidden a memory sprang to his mind. "Are you a wizard or aren't you?"

"Argh." He said aloud, and leveled his wand at the floor below, keying his comm with his free hand. "Sergeant, stand clear." Her armored form seemed to look up at him for a moment, but she moved almost as soon as he said it. He reached deep, deep inside himself for the magic he would need for this, until the hairs on the back of his neck, on his head, on his arms stood on end, and the air about him thrummed with power. And then he let it all loose, with one purpose.

"Defodio Maximus!" He shouted at the top of his lungs, and in a whoosh the power left him, his vision greying for a moment as the spell tore free of the tip of his wand to smash into the floor below. As strong and reinforced as it was, it couldn't withstand the sheer power which he'd packed into it, gouging a hole four meters wide into it.

Nor could the next one below it.

Or below that one. For five levels the spell continued, and even the sixth was warped and deformed. He heard mutters of "Good Christ!" and "Merlin's balls!" from the team behind him and half a dozen other things over the comm net. The momentary feeling of success left, however, when a torrent of spells tore back up the hole he'd made from Death Eaters lucky enough to be out of the spell's line of travel. The steady staccato streams some of the spells came in told him they had spell rifles of their own down there, and the game they were all playing was suddenly a little more dangerous. As if it had needed the boost.

Ginny came running up, clenching a mortar bomb in her hands. "Out of my way!" she shouted, moving people to the side, getting close to the edge of the hole and lobbing the bomb up in a graceful arc that sent it plummeting straight down below. There was an instant of further screaming, a deafening explosion, and a moment of silence before spells began streaming back up, albeit in a much feebler number now than before. He heard another series of smaller explosions, and the fire slacked off further still.

"Going in." MacNeil called out, and Harry heard the roar of jump jets as the Manties dropped down into the bottom of the hole.

"And we're following." He said, stepping forward and falling, his suit's jets flaring and cushioning his fall to the bottom.

When he arrived, he found himself in the middle of a firefight still raging. One of the Manties had scorch marks on his armor, and his movement was a little labored. As Merlin team members dropped down after him, Harry raised his own rifle and sent spell after spell into the enemy.

They knew we were coming, he thought numbly. Even before we blew in the front door, they knew.

They'd concentrated their numbers and their most powerful spellcasters here, and he realized it was the cell level. The Nibblers were between them and their objectives – and every missed spell or plasma bolt or tungsten sabot would hit his people.

Ginny stepped in close to his side, her bolter raised and laying fire down with the steady, ear-shattering thundercrack that characterized its kind as much as the whine of the tribarrels and pulsers the Manties used did. Ron and Hermione closed in against him on his other side, Hermione with her wand out, concentrating on holding up the most powerful dueling shield he'd ever seen short of Dumbledore.

But even with the teams and their interlocking shields and the Manties' death dealing capacity, the enemy had firepower of their own, working as a cohesive team rather than glory-hounding the way the old Death Eaters had. Bolter shells vanished, pulser darts flashed into light like raindrops of fire against powerful shields, plasma bled off against a ward he could almost feel the power of, even from across the broad, cavernlike room they found themselves in. Empty cells lined the walls for two stories around them, their occupants forced to occupy the space directly behind their captors lest they be freed or escape and join their rescuers.

Two American volunteers suddenly went down as the shielder was overwhelmed and an unlucky Blasting Curse slammed into the shooter behind him, tearing the shooter in half and killing the shielder with backblast. The two pairs to either side of them were injured as well, and wavered – which was all it took for spells to slip past their shields as well, finding chinks in their armor, and suddenly Harry was down six of his seventy-five.

"Close up that bloody hole!" he roared into his comm. They didn't have reserves, unless they called on the Havoc teams to assist them – and that might trap them all here. His people shuffled, filling the gap by shifting so that, while his line was looser than he would have liked, there wasn't an opening any longer.

Suddenly the room filled with a blast of light, heat and sound. Even through the protection of his suit, his ears were ringing with the sheer volume, his visor not having darkened quickly enough to entirely save him from the flash. He threw himself to the floor, blinking rapidly. His vision cleared, and he saw what had caused the flash.

Ernie, seeing that the fight wasn't going well, had pulled back out that cannon of his.

There was a two-and-a-half meter hole gouged into the concrete in the center of what had been the Death Eater formation where the tungsten bolt had impacted, killing those near the impact point outright and injuring those around them seriously where the shrapnel didn't finish them off as well. The Death Eaters were already recovering from the disorientation, as were his people, but he thought he could see them wavering as well.

He looked over, and saw Ernie laying as if thrown backward, blood leaking from his mouth even as he lay still and stark upon the floor. Oh, no.

Harry's shock and disorientation were interrupted by a whoosh of displaced air, a greasy feeling of dread, and an amused, malevolent cackle. Slowly, his eyes turned back to where the Death Eaters were, and took in the man in the black robes who stood in the middle of where Ernie's last shell had hit.

"Harry Potter," he said in a voice that was as much a sibilant hiss as it was speech, "Dear boy, you threw a party and forgot to invite me. But worry not. I have brought gifts for you and all of your friends, Harry."

A/N: Hello all! So that was a far longer hiatus than I'd ever thought it would be. Life, as it does, decided to sneak up on me and shank me in the back with jobs and responsibilities and yadda yadda… long story short, I actually have military experience to back up my writing with now.

Love it, hate it? Let me know. I'm happy to read reviews – which were, in part, what finally inspired me to write for this story again. I still get favorites and follows and the like on a fairly regular basis for this story. Gives me a kick, it does.

Can't promise when the next chapter of this will be up, but it will be some time between now and the Apocalypse, I can assure you.