Full Metal Heroine: A Military Space Opera Adventure (Lady Hellgate Book 2)

by Greg Dragon

  “Strut, there is absolutely no way the hub is involved with Meluvia’s situation. That’s too many coincidences for it to make any sense.”

  “Oh, but it does if this all goes back to the Geralos. Remember the Louines I told you about, the ones who rescued the Nighthawks? They were part of a complicated arrangement that had human bodies sold and traded to the Geralos. Dyn was but one camp in many that are littered about the galaxy, and the Geralos have brokered deals to keep human prisoners flowing in.

  “Consider that the gangs were told to hit this hub, knowing that both of our ships would be here, stuck doing repairs. There is no way we’d sit on our hands and allow innocents to be harvested. They expect us to jump out to help and leave Meluvia open for another assault. They were so close, Cory, can’t you see? We won the battle, but the war is still raging to take Meluvia over.”

  “That makes sense, but there are other starships in the Anstractor galaxy. If we jump out, we could get Helysian or one of the others to come in.”

  “You assume that the other starships aren’t occupied on important missions of their own,” Retzo said. “This goes all the way to the top, Cory. Someone on the council could be compromised.”

  Captain Tara Cor seemed to think this over as she crossed her legs and drank. Finally, she spoke, but in a voice so low he had to strain his ears to hear. “My men are dying, Strut, and you’re offering me up conspiracies. The Aqnaqak will not leave our Marines stranded. Right now, I have an assault ship that is on its way back to the hub, violating a direct order for them to return home to us. Are you hearing me, Retzo? My own Marines are connected in whatever this kidnapping schtill is, and I don’t have the time to consider conspiracy theories.”

  “Wait. You asked them to transport one of the civilians here? Tara, what were you thinking?” Retzo said, as he tried to recall the last time they had civilians on his ship.

  “I’m thinking that when my sergeant reports that a civilian told him she could identify the kidnapper’s ship, that is a civilian that I need to personally see. She said one spoke with a Genesian accent. Tell me, Strut, how many Genesian spacers do you have on this ship?”

  “Well, we do have quite a few rates from Genesian backgrounds.”

  “No, he had an accent, indicating someone who was born on the planet. Someone with a Genesian accent is obviously not a boomer.”

  “What in the worlds is going on? First the Louines with my Nighthawks, and now we have Genesians attacking our hubs. Two so-called neutral planets. I’d like to be there when you speak to this civilian, Cory, if you don’t mind. I still believe that all of this is connected somehow.”

  “You can join me, Strut, but I need to go. Aqnaqak needs her captain, and I aim to jump and find my Marines to bring them and the civilian witness home.”

  “My Nighthawks are on the surface tying up your loose ends, Cory. I cannot leave them high and dry, either, and they are committed to their duty in service of your crew. You leave and they’re stranded. Do you understand what I’m saying? Send support for your Marines. I can offer up a squadron that will make stardust out of any so-called ace. Just don’t leave. The minute you jump, we are thyped. This isn’t a supposition, I have evidence to support my theory.”

  “Strut are you … I hope that this isn’t … well, you know, there’s duty and then—”

  “You think I’m making up schtill to keep you here?” he said. It was both offensive and disappointing, this thought that he would risk human lives just to keep her here with him. “Before there’s an us, there’s a race of human beings who can’t return to their planet. All because of a vicious race of parasites looking to eat our brains. Before everything I have done in this life, I have placed the Alliance and my duty as a captain. No, this isn’t about us, or what I want for myself. This is about the thousands of young lives who look to us to keep them safe. Meluvia is our ally, and I will not see them go the way of Vestalia. But in order for us to hold the line, I need you to stay in place, Cory.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said quietly, and he collected his anger and pushed it back into the furthest region of his heart. She had hurt him, and she was wrong. All he could think of now was that she was heading into a trap. “What do you have in mind, Strut?”

  “Send an infiltrator to find those kidnapping thypes and bring them to justice.”

  “An infiltrator seems like a lot just to find a tiny SatSec vessel.”

  “I’m pretty sure that vessel is on its way to dock on something else larger and extremely hostile. Our infiltrator can disable them, and then they’ll be forced to surrender.”

  “Sounds like we want to take them alive.”

  “We do, to corroborate my assumption that this isn’t just a random attack. We find the source and interrogate it to get to the root of the treachery. Then we can shut the entire operation down and go back to the business of winning this war. Are either of your infiltrators docked on the Aqnaqak, or should I prime the SoulSpur for launch?”

  “I’ll send StarLance. She’s just finished fueling up, and the crew is itching to scratch something since I’ve had them home for a year. What do you plan on doing while we go after the pirates?”

  “I plan to have a word with our Alliance to see what they know about these ‘random attacks.’”

  There was another pause, this one quite lengthy, and Retzo began to wonder why Tara would take issue with him talking to the Alliance. “Strut, why don’t you wait until we strike before you speak to the council? If one of our members is compromised, I don’t want any more of my Marines killed.”

  20

  They set out at twilight, dressed as Nighthawks, which meant black shirts and coats with matching pants and boots. Their uniforms were lined with flexible graphene plates, which allowed for a full range of movement while protecting against low-caliber rounds. On their heads they wore the Vixen’s helmets, conveniently black to allow for stealth as they pushed north through the woods.

  Leading them through was Quentin Tutt, who continued to impress Helga with his mastery of tracking and blending into the bush. She was quickly seeing that the files on her new partners were criminally vague. They were so much more than she could ever imagine.

  It brought to mind her own file and what it would say. Helga Ate, callsign Hellgate, which was a silly nickname from childhood that had resurfaced in her adult life. Missions: one, rescuing settlers on a Louine moon. Strengths: a matchless pilot, yes matchless because of a genetic gift that only one in over 600,000 Vestalians had.

  She was what they called a seeker, a prescient freak that could see things beyond their own dimension. Seekers were the reason behind the Geralos hunting humans, and she had only recently learned that she was one of them. Now her “talent” for flying no longer seemed earned from hours of simulation, since the type of seeker that she was had better reflexes than usual.

  Seekers, the ones who understood their powers, could dream of things future, past and present. The Geralos used them to bolster their own natural psionic abilities, which allowed them to see beyond their limits and take over the minds of other species.

  Helga and Cilas had seen the takeover happen on Dyn, when one of their fellow Nighthawks went from trusted brother to genocidal executioner. She had also been in their death camps, where they froze human bodies and bit into their brains. Her Casanian blood had been her salvation, since it was poisonous to the Geralos, who then tried to see if it was possible to chemically remove her Casanian genes.

  It had been a period of hell that still haunted her to this day, and like Tutt, that situation could never be summarized in her records. Only Cilas Mec and Brise Sol knew what really happened on that moon, and Brise was discharged, his whereabouts unknown, while Cilas was here with her, but he still didn’t know about her gift.

  Helga wondered how he’d react if she ever were to tell him. Secretly she feared becoming an experiment for the Alliance if they were to learn about it as well. It had been a
surgeon, a Louine, who told her what she was, and she had sworn him to secrecy. Still, someone was bound to suspect, she knew, and then she would be made to face it.

  She groaned loudly, which earned her a concerned look from Raileo. She shook her head. “It’s nothing. I’m just thinking about something I left back on Rendron,” she lied.

  Really, why am I so worried? she thought, thinking about her youth as a cadet and the number of seekers she knew about throughout her lifetime on the ship. The answer to that was zero; she had known of absolutely no seekers. Come to think of it, she hadn’t heard of anyone having the gift.

  To most spacers the whole thing was a myth, another scary story the survivors of Vestalia told their children to keep them safe from the big bad lizards. At one point, Helga questioned the Louine doctor’s findings as well. She doubted he’d met many seekers to know that she would be one of their number.

  It seemed unlikely, considering the speciest attitudes of the Louines, who wanted no part of the “human war” and disallowed visitors on their planet. Still, she could not explain surviving two major conflicts on the Inginus, and then there was the battle for Meluvia where she swapped bullets with Geralos aces.

  For all the downplaying of her abilities, there were things she had done that she could not explain. Her comms crackled and it was Quentin speaking. “This is where we go our separate ways,” he said. “Keep moving straight ahead to find the hidden town. I’ll send word when the package is sent.”

  As soon as he had clicked off, Cilas pulled Helga and Raileo close, squatting below a large bush as if someone was watching them go.

  “I don’t have to warn you all that once we start this trek, we’ll be glowing hot. Up there is a small army, possibly terrorizing people. Now, we are all good people, some of us better or worse than others, but before you consider your moral obligations, remember that you are owned by the Galactic Alliance. The minute you accepted entry onto my team, you decided that duty comes before everything else. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes, sir,” Helga and Raileo said. They exchanged glances, and Helga could tell that the young recruit was worried.

  “You are bound to see some things that will ruin your future dreams. There will be torture, death, children without their parents. It’s going to be a schtill show, but it’s okay, as long as you two remain with me. We are not supposed to be here, do you understand? When Tutt makes the call, the Meluvians will likely contact the Alliance to ask why ESOs are here without their knowledge. We are illegally here, Nighthawks, invading someone’s country. We had to do it this way in order to extradite this man.

  “You are going to see atrocities that will make you question your humanity. It is going to anger you, and it will make you want to find him yourself. Don’t. Stick to my orders and stay with me. Tutt will be calling in the Meluvians, let them handle the rebels. Our mission is what?”

  “Wolf,” Raileo said flatly, and Helga repeated his name. Cilas scanned their faces closely, as if he could read their futures, and when he was satisfied, he turned and resumed his march. Helga’s mind started to dance. She had expected craziness after what Quentin reported, but the way Cilas was talking, it was going to be a lot worse than she could ever imagine.

  They followed him obediently through the mysterious woods. Night had come and the stars were numerous, their splendor only trumped by the red and blue moons that seemed to grow from the horizon. In this setting, Helga felt a bit sentimental. If she were to die tonight, after a scene such as this, she would consider it beautiful and poetic. The only thing missing for it to be a perfect death was her spaceship, the Vestalian Classic with her inside the cockpit.

  They followed the lieutenant silently, keeping their fingers near their triggers. Before Helga knew it, they were hearing gunshots, and several meters more, loud shouts, and bloodcurdling screams. Helga hoped that Wolf was not a part of whatever this was, that this was all a big misunderstanding and the former operator was really a prisoner of war. It was difficult to imagine that someone with the same background and training as Cilas would be capable of the pain necessary to yield the sounds she heard.

  They emerged near a large building, and Helga was surprised to see that there was no gate or ditch bordering the town. It was dark, but the helmet had night vision, which she activated to get a good look at what they were getting into. Squatting behind a busted statue, Cilas looked back at the trees where she and Raileo stood. He motioned them over quickly, then made a signal with his fingers for them to keep quiet.

  “What is it?” Helga whispered.

  “Do you see the bird flying around up there?” he whispered back.

  She looked up at the black leaves concealing the moons and was startled when she saw the small bird, glowing a neon green within her night vision. “Yeah, I see it. Is it lost?”

  “It’s not real,” Cilas said quietly. “It’s a reaper drone dressed up to look like wildlife.”

  “That fake bird’s been flying around since we broke past the gulch,” Raileo said. “I knew something was off about that thing, but everything here is so alien. When I kept on seeing it, that same thyping bird, I knew that it was some sort of spy.”

  “The MLF has known our location since we left the temple, I bet,” Helga said.

  “No,” Cilas said. “If that were true, they wouldn’t have allowed us to track them to this town.”

  “So, what do we do now, sir?” Raileo said, his youthful face grimacing with anticipation.

  “It’s a reaper drone. Alliance contraband. We’re here to reclaim our equipment from the enemy,” Cilas said. Then he got up to a knee, shifted several sections of his auto-rifle, and Helga saw the bird explode into a ball of flames and feathers.

  “Proper shooting there, Lieutenant,” Raileo said, and then got up as if to scan the sky for more.

  “Thanks, but that was close. We need to keep an eye out for more,” Cilas said. He stepped out from the statue and raised the auto-rifle up to his shoulder. “We were almost exposed but at least we still have the advantage. We underestimated Wolf, and that is going to stop right now.”

  “What else can we do?” Helga said as she stood up gripping her favorite pistol.

  “I will talk to Tutt, tell him to check the skies, but we need to keep on moving so that we can find our mark and get him. That’s if he’s not already dead,” he said, cursing as a chain of automatic gunfire drowned out everything around them. “We’re out of time, Nighthawks. We need to get going before they have a chance to send another drone.”

  Cilas was in war mode now, so Helga quietly followed him between the buildings, her skin crawling with anticipation for what was to come. Raileo trailed them, with his head on a swivel, foiling any chance of the enemy to flank them.

  It was quiet in this area of the town. All of the excitement seemed to be deeper to the north, and it was easy to forget that at any moment they could meet their death. This town, like the first, had houses built in a tight, orderly grid. Important buildings were nodes in the center of squares, where multilevel apartments and houses were built in such a way that made it easy to get around fast.

  Helga heard people inside of their homes doing a poor job of hiding from the MLF raiders. There were children crying, and she even heard the sound of broken glass. “Thype,” Cilas whispered, as he squatted before a clump of fabric wedged against the back of one of the homes.

  “What is it?” she started to say until she saw that the fabric had a face. It was the corpse of an old woman, clutching some sort of animal. Who in the worlds would do this? Helga wondered as she examined the bullet wound in her forehead.

  “Contact,” Raileo said suddenly, and she heard his pulse rifle let out a stream of bullets. When she turned to see what happened, there were a handful of men behind them. Some were scrambling to find some cover, while others were on the ground rolling around in agony. Helga fired her pistol into them and Cilas did the same, dropping the would-be ambushers tha
t had survived Raileo’s salvo.

  Cilas quickly checked Raileo to see what had happened. “I’m good,” he said, out of breath. “Just got the wind knocked out of me.” He struggled to his feet and Cilas exchanged looks with Helga. A bullet must have gotten through the young Nighthawk’s armor, but they didn’t have time to investigate.

  They heard boots on the rocks and shouts in a language they couldn’t understand, so Helga dropped to one knee and prepared for what was to come. But Cilas had her arm and was pulling her inside of a house, where they almost tripped over the corpse of a man with a gaping wound inside of his chest.

  No lights were on inside, but with their helmets it was unnecessary as Cilas started shutting windows and sliding furniture to bar the doors. While he did that, Helga crawled over to Raileo to examine his wounds, but something threw her and she rolled, crashing into a table as bullets began to perforate the walls.

  The HUD of her helmet went haywire with warnings, but a cursory glance to the lifeline of her comrades showed that everyone, even Quentin, was still alive and well. She hoped that he would make the call soon so that reinforcements would be coming from the Meluvians.

  Would they be alive to take advantage? That was the reality that she now faced, but this was all in a second’s thought as she mentally locked civilian Helga away so that the warrior, Lady Hellgate, could take over.

  It was so loud that it became disorienting. Holes appeared in the walls, bringing in light to invade the darkness. If there had been any time to reflect, Helga would have remembered the cave back on Dyn where they had waited, she and the other Nighthawks for the Geralos spies to make their way in.

  Back then, up there in all that blackness, the starlight produced a column of light that looked very similar to what she saw now. But there was no reflection when the bullets began to fly, and though they left that sliver of beauty in their wake, they ruptured and destroyed every single thing they touched.