Battleborn

by Andrew Beery

My mom always said that vengeance was the Lord’s, but I wasn’t above giving him a little help every now and then. Call me an imperfect man if you must.

  I pumped a quick round into his right leg at about knee level. In my experience, that’s the type of hit that is quite painful. Based on the screams I was hearing… this time was no exception.

  I waved Mel to move forward and cover the tunnel leading into the dome. I wanted to spend a few moments questioning my new friend and I didn’t want to be interrupted.

  As I approached the man, he began to quiet down. Soldiers typically carried med-packs that included pain patches. I could see he had applied one to his neck. He was undoubtedly feeling quite good at this point.

  I knelt down beside him and pulled a tourniquet from his kit. I made quick work of tying off his leg. There was no love lost between us but at this point he was a non-combatant and so I wasn’t anxious to see him die.

  “My name is Colonel Riker, son. What’s yours?”

  “Piss off,” was all the answer I got.

  By this time, Horse had checked on the rest of the team we had taken out. The soldier in front of me was the only survivor. Horse took one look at the man and spat in disgust.

  “Jamison. Arthur ‘soft-in-the-head’ Jamison. He’s a Stallion from my old platoon. What the hell are you doing in a Mashuta uniform, soldier?”

  “As I said, piss off.”

  I pulled the pain patch off Jamison’s neck. I made no effort to be gentle.

  “Hey, I need that!”

  “Don’t worry. I’m going to replace it with a new one.”

  I removed a new patch from my med kit. It looked identical to the one I had just removed. I held it up for Jamison to see. I wanted him to read the label.

  “This is Naloxone. It’s an opioid antagonist which means it reverses the pain relief function of the patch I just removed.”

  I placed the patch on the man’s neck as Horse held his arms.

  “In a few moments, you’re going to feel your leg again. I’m hoping before then you’ll be in a more talkative mood.”

  I could see the sweat forming on Jamison’s brow. I was under no illusion. The Stallions underwent training that was very close to what the Wolf Corps did. That meant they were trained to resist interrogations. I had a plan for that though.

  I pulled a second med patch out of my bag. It was a red patch that every soldier carried. It was labeled Adrenalin.

  “This,” I said, “is a very special friend of mine. I’m sure you can appreciate what it’s used for and what it will do to a man already in intense pain.”

  I pulled a third patch out of my kit. I held it up for Jamison to see.

  “Phenobarbital, my old make me woozy buddy. It’s going to interact with the Naloxone already running through your system. It won’t kill you… probably… but you’ll wish you were dead. Your mind will go places you never thought it would go. It should be fun. Shall we give it a try?”

  “You’re nuts,” Jamison said through gritted teeth. He was pretty much feeling his shattered knee in all its glory now that the opioid antagonist had had a chance to do its thing.

  “This may surprise you,” I said. “But you’re not the first person to call me crazy. I kind of like it. It makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something in my life.”

  I leaned a little on the man’s leg.

  “Shall we try my little red one here?” I asked while waving the Adrenalin patch.

  I guess Jamison decided he was going to talk eventually anyway… so he began to open up. It turned out that he was a veritable encyclopedia of information once he was properly motivated.

  He was part of a forty-man team that had been deployed to this dome. Their mission was to pacify the locals and establish Mashuta dominance. Similar teams had been deployed to each of the habitats that had been attacked.

  As far as why he was wearing a Mashuta BDU, it seemed half the Battleborns were no longer operating as separate corps and had instead joined their corporate sponsors. Tiger, Stallion, and Snake went to Mashuta. Hawk transferred to TransCorp, and Wolf chose to remain independent and loyal to the Queen. In addition, a small but significant number of Marines abandoned their units rather than join the corporate forces. Wolf absorbed most of these as an auxiliary battalion. I have to admit, I was pleased that my old unit was not involved in the betrayal of the empire. I was also painfully aware that Horse was not so lucky.

  We learned that the royal family, to include the Queen, was under house arrest and that the Queen’s guard was now firmly under Mashuta control.

  In the end, I put our Mashuta friend into a medically induced sleep. We would see he got to a medical facility after we figured out how to deal with the troublesome corporate infestations affecting this and other domes.

  “So, the bulk of the bad guys are in the warrens,” the Master Gunny said. “Do we blow the access tunnels and lock them in place?”

  I shook my head.

  “There are too many access points. We’d never be able to reach them all before they could post response teams,” I pointed out. “Besides,” I added, “all we would be doing is endangering the locals by trapping the Mashuta thugs in with them.”

  “I still can’t believe my corps… my old corps… is involved in this. Colonel Hikueru would never have sanctioned it,” Horse said dryly.

  “He may not have had a choice or, more likely, he may have baulked and been replaced,” the Master Gunny said. I think she too was wondering how the various Battleborn Corps could be involved in attacking civilians.

  “All that is a discussion for another time. For the moment we need to deal with the here and now. We have roughly thirty-five hostiles running roughshod over an entire civilian population in this dome alone. Who knows the situation in the other domes?”

  “One thing is sure,” Mel said. “We are not going to root them out by force.”

  “I agree,” Horse added. “We have two options as I see it. We walk away or we look for an asymmetrical solution.”

  “Well, we are not going for option one. I have no intention of leaving these people, nor any of the people in these domes to the less-than-gentle ministrations of the Mashuta Corporation.”

  I toggled my comms.

  “Arquat, good buddy, has the Defiant been following our progress?”

  “Affirmative, Colonel, however we have been distracted by events occurring in space. It seems a small armada is headed our direction.”

  “By small, what do you mean?”

  “Impossible to say definitively at this point but something on the order of fifty to sixty ships. They should be arriving in a little over two hours.”

  I looked at my two companions.

  “It seems we have a time constraint to deal with as well. The Defiant is a sturdy little ship, but it’s not going to stand up long against a fleet that large. Arquat, how many of those Founder Marine Encounter Suits you showed us have you and the Chief managed to get operational?”

  “Three are at one hundred percent. A fourth one is operational, but its fusion power unit is only operating at sixty percent and its primary weapon is offline.”

  “That’s going to be fine. Prep all four for immediate deployment. We’ll meet you back at the ship in fifteen. Riker out.”

  I turned back to the others.

  “You guys up for a hike?”

  “And if we said no?” Horse asked with a wide grin. I suspected he liked the idea of getting to play with one of the Founder armored combat suits.

  “Too bad,” I answered with an equally broad grin.

  ***

  Twenty-five minutes later we had added the Chief to our crew and headed out. I took the MES that wasn’t quite up to snuff. To make up for the lack of a primary plasma weapon, I carried a tank-buster railgun powered by my suit’s onboard fusion reactor. Even at sixty percent power, the armor I was wearing was superior in every way to the armor typically deployed by the Battleborn corps.

  It wasn’t enough
to take on all thirty-five of the bad guys, but that wasn’t our goal. In point of fact I had two goals. The Chief and Horse were heading for the power complex. Their objective was securing a supply of the desperately needed yttrium.

  The Master Gunny and I were heading for the police armory. TransCorp facilities were different from other corporate towns in that there was a much higher percentage of freemen. Unlike most of their competition, indentured servitude in TransCorp was not a permanent state of being. Progressive changes to the corporate regulations governing slavery by the current CEO had endeared the company to the struggling masses while at the same time pissing the hell out of the competition.

  Who wanted to take on a debt with Mashuta or Hickle & Finch or any of the others when TransCorp offered such generous terms?

  Many, if not most indentured workers paid off their debts in a few years and a Jubilee was declared after seven years. This meant that the longest a person was an indentured slave was seven years. The indentured state could not, by TransCorp regulation, be transferred to succeeding generations.

  The downside to all of this was actually an upside for us. TransCorp Domers often had handguns. Aside from the Battleborn, indentured workers couldn’t carry firearms of any type. The same was not true for freemen, however. And since the general populace had weapons, the police had to have bigger guns.

  Our goal was to get these weapons into the hands of any of the Domers that wanted them. My guess was that, faced with the threat of being forced to leave the protection of TransCorp to become minions of Mashuta, they would pick up arms and fight for their freedom. And once the word got out about what Dome 43 had accomplished, the other domes would have an incentive to rise up as well.

  That was the plan at least. The only problem was that nobody had informed the enemy and they were not inclined to be helpful, as we soon discovered.

  Newly promoted Lieutenant Colonel Clarkson surveyed the fleet that was soon to be under his command. Most of the ships had belonged to the various independent Marine Battalions that had existed under the defunct Azulian Empire, but no longer. They had been subsumed by the largest of their corporate overlords… Mashuta Industries.

  Soon those ships would be heading into the void between planets. The Twins were putting up more of a fight than expected. If TransCorp was going to be strangled into capitulation, then it was essential that their external revenue streams be terminated.

  There was a second reason Clarkson wanted to head to the moons orbiting Menaechmus. Riker was there and there was a debt coming due; a debt to be paid in blood.

  Chapter 13: Dome 43

  If anybody tells you that mechanized armor isn’t seriously fun, consider having them committed. Six hundred horsepower available for running, jumping, and punching is the very definition of fun. Don’t believe me? Look it up in Janson’s Consolidated Dictionary of the English Language. It’s right there next to peanut butter and jelly as man’s highest culinary achievement. The fact that peanut butter and jelly were available in a sip pouch for said armor was a clear indication that life just didn’t get any better.

  The Gunny and I made good time working our way through the warren. Something about mechanized armor made people get out of your way. The warren itself was spacious. Humans didn’t naturally choose to live underground. They did so on the Twins because there really was no option.

  The ceilings were a good twenty feet high and the narrowest of corridors were never less than ten feet. Where three of more corridors jointed there was almost always a cavernous junction that featured an abundance of plants and water features.

  It would be easy to imagine you were not deep underground… and I guess that was the point. My understanding was that the other domes owned by TransCorp were very similar in design and amenities. The same could not be said for the other corporate sites.

  Digital displays lined many of the larger chambers. Sadly, a number were now sputtering electrical sparks and sported fresh holes. The evidence of gun play was everywhere. In several places, smeared red stains on the walls declared that this had not been a bloodless invasion… as if the carnage directly under the dome had not been enough the make this evident.

  “It should be another kilometer in that direction,” I said to the Master Gunny as I pointed down the corridor to the left.

  She nodded, which isn’t altogether easy to see when a person is wearing mechanized armor, even if it is the advanced Founder type.

  “I’m not seeing much on the IR. There’s three heat signatures just around the bend, about a hundred meters out.”

  “I see them too,” I answered. “Looks like a good place for a forward lookout. If I were a betting man, I’d say we’d see the same thing on the other two corridors leading into the police precinct.”

  “Respectfully, sir, you are a betting man and no, I wouldn’t bet against that one. How do you want to handle this?”

  I thought for a moment. I really didn’t want a fire fight if I could avoid one. On the other hand, there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that the bad guys didn’t already know we were coming. There were security cameras all over the place.

  I popped one of the four microdrones off my belt clip. The drones were multi-purpose devices that could be used for remote monitoring as well as package delivery. In this case I was going to use my little friend to drop off a ‘welcome to the neighborhood’ gift in the form of DX gas.

  Colorless and odorless, the gas was absorbed through the skin and rendered the hapless victim unconscious in a matter of seconds.

  My suit’s AI piloted the little craft expertly through the hall and around the bend. Mel and I followed its journey using a heads-up-display that appeared in the upper left-hand side of our armor’s visors. As the device rounded the corner, we got a brief view of our adversaries. They were Battleborn, there was no question about that.

  The first man that came into view drew a bead on the drone in one fluid motion and shot it out of the air. I doubt there as so much as a single second between the two events. Fortunately for us, that fraction of a second was all I needed to tell the drone to start dispersing the DX.

  I launched a second drone. This one was instructed to make the bend right above our opponent’s heads. In a perfect world, the men would already be unconscious, but I had been pissing in a bucket for far too long to mistake this world for anything even remotely resembling perfect. As my dear departed mother used to say… trust but verify.

  This time the drone survived its encounter. Three sleeping beauties were out cold on the floor of the corridor.

  The Master Gunny and I double-timed it down the corridor. As we rounded the corner, we got a nasty surprise. The soldier that had so smartly taken out the first drone pumped three kinetic rounds into my chest before I could even blink. He had been laying on the ground pretending to be unconscious.

  If I had been wearing my ship suit, there was a good chance I would have woken up dead. Whoever this soldier was, he was good. I saw a blue med patch on his neck. I knew how fast DX worked and I was impressed.

  There weren’t too many people, Battleborn or otherwise, that would have the presence of mind to self-administer a broad-spectrum counter agent in time to make a difference against a DX attack. I was beginning to develop a certain degree of respect for this guy. He kept his head under pressure.

  Fortunately for me, my Founder armor included a rather impressive active shield, as well as a remarkably durable dragon-plate ceramic passive armor.

  The look on the man’s face was almost worth taking rounds at close range. Still there was a general principle that had to be respected here. If you let one person shoot at you and get away with it then before you know it, everybody wants to take a shot at you. It’s best to nip these things in the bud.

  I leaned down and grabbed the rifle out of his hands. Mechanized armor gave me the strength and speed to negate any desire on his part to maintain control of his weapon. I folded the rifle in half. It made a very satisfying crunching
sound as it bent. I was quite pleased.

  I toggled my external speakers on. “Are we done here, soldier?”

  “Depends. If you’re TransCorp scum you might as well kill me now,” the man responded. You had to admire the bravado.

  “What’s your name, son?”

  “Sergeant Jesús Del Torres. Charlie Company, Mashuta Second Brigade.”

  I had a funny feeling I knew this guy’s story, but I was going to confirm it anyway.

  “And how long have you been a sergeant, Jesús?”

  There was a pregnant pause before he answered.

  “About two days. Who the hell are you guys? You sure as hell aren’t TransCorp. They don’t have gear like that. Hell, nobody does.”

  “I’ll get to that in a minute. Jesús, I get the feeling making Sergeant was not a promotion was it?”

  His silence answered my question.

  I decided to take a risk and share a bit of information.

  “Sergeant my team and I are not TransCorp and we are not Mashuta. I don’t know what you were told about TransCorp, but I assume it was something that was used to justify attacking civilians.”

  “We weren’t attacking civilians. They were collateral damage. TransCorp is developing eugenic hybrids for use in their military. Their laboratories are in this dome. We have every right to put an end to it. It’s a perversion.”

  I looked at him for a minute. It was clear he believed every word he said.

  “And the other fifteen or so domes that were destroyed by Mashuta orbital bombardment; were they eugenic sites as well?”

  The transformation in the Sergeant’s expression was immediate. He went from defiant to shocked to angry in the span of about five seconds.

  “This was the only dome that was to be attacked,” he said finally. “They lied to us.”

  “Yes, son, they did. Now, you want to tell me about your demotion?”

  “A couple of days ago I was a Second Lieutenant. This was my first operation. My CO ordered me to attack a civilian enclave right after we took down the dome. I refused. There was no way to do it without killing a whole bunch of innocents. I got bumped down to sergeant and they took the enclave anyway.”