by M. D. Cooper
The AM-4 snorted.
Rika laughed and then spotted a pair of Niets moving down the middle corridor she was covering. A depleted uranium rod leapt from the muzzle of her GNR and shredded the strut they were hiding behind. Only one of the enemies retreated.
Though his tone carried a note of amusement, she knew that he was making a veiled comment about how she shouldn’t be on the ground in an engagement like this. Even in private, Chase never directly questioned her command decisions, but he did make his opinions known.
In short, he believed that her value as a leader was greater than her value as an individual combatant.
He’s right, of course. What colonel deploys with frontline soldiers?
The problem Rika continually faced was that she liked being a soldier in the thick of things. It was so much easier, just a matter of point and shoot. Being a colonel wasn’t so bad, even a colonel in command of a fleet and all the lives aboard her ships.
But a civilian leader? That was something else entirely.
Rika was watching feeds from Kelly and The Van as they moved into the bay where the Nietzscheans had been holed up. The weapons fire finally fell silent as at least twenty of the enemy surrendered.
Chase laughed.
Rika chuckled as she tagged the location of the Niet who had retreated down the middle corridor.
Rika pulled the hull plate free and let it fall to the deck, not wanting to leave it as cover for any enemies. She dropped a pair of sensor drones and then threaded her way through the Nietzschean corpses, following in the path of destruction The Van had wrought.
At the end of the corridor, Shoshin stood outside the bay the enemies had been spewing from, covering a pair of injured Niets while another knelt next to them, applying biofoam to their wounds.
“Hurry it up,” he growled at the woman. “Soon as you get them sealed up, I want you to take your buddies into the bay.”
“I can’t move them,” she protested. “Not till their med systems stabilize them.”
Shoshin shrugged and lifted his rifle. “Then I take them out of the equation. We can’t guard wounded POWs in every corridor across the station.”
“Fuckin’ mechs,” the Nietzschean soldier grunted. “They take your heart out when they cut up your body to make you into a machine?”
“No.” Shoshin shook his head. “Your people did that when you burned my homeworld. I was already missing most of the parts they cut off to make a mech by the time your people were through with me.”
Rika cocked an eyebrow. Shoshin was one of the most reserved of her Marauders; he rarely spoke at all, let alone shared anything about his past. He hadn’t even opted to have facial reconstruction surgery, still sporting the near-featureless and skinless face that the Genevian Armed Forces had granted him upon mechanization. She wondered what was loosening his tongue.
The Nietzschean opened her mouth to speak, but then saw Rika standing nearby and shook her head, turning her focus back to her task.
After a quick slap on Shoshin’s shoulder, Rika walked into the bay to see The Van standing guard over the now two dozen Niets who had surrendered. Only a few of them were injured, and most of the others were only lightly armored.
“So? Should we toss them all out the airlock?” Kelly asked aloud.
Keli snorted, her rifle sweeping across the group of Niets. “No worse than what they would have done to us.”
“Easy now, private,” Rika said as she looked over the group. “Who’s senior here?”
A man held up his hand. “Captain Harl. Company intelligence officer.”
“And your CO?” Rika asked. “Did he cut and run?”
The man’s expression said yes, but he shook his head. “He was headed to the C&C. Probably there by now.”
“I guess we’ll just have to go pay him a visit,” Rika said, noting that Squad Three’s first fireteam was almost at the bay. “CJ’s going to be here in a minute to keep an eye on you, and then you’ll get shipped off to the detention site on Capeton.”
“Capeton?” one of the Niets blurted.
Keli took a menacing step toward the speaker. “Airlock’s still an option.”
Five minutes later, Sergeant CJ had arrived and taken custody of the POWs. With things in hand, Rika, the two Kellies, Shoshin, and The Van got on the move. They were bolstered by CJ’s first squad, consisting of Yig, Goob, Cole, and Fiona.
The nine mechs moved through the station with practiced efficiency. Their internal mods fed visual overlays directly into their optical nerves, giving them multiple views of their surroundings, noting access hatches, corridors, likely places for ambush, and defensible positions.
In addition to the wealth of real-time data, the mechs of Rika’s M Company had run a dozen simulated assaults on Lisbon Station while en route. While they didn’t know it quite as well as the backs of their three-fingered hands, they weren’t going to lose their way, either.
Rika nodded in response, wishing everyone wasn’t constantly bringing up their priorities—especially when those priorities ran contrary to the mission she’d been given by Admiral Tangel.
The admiral had instructed Rika to keep driving until she reached the heart of the Nietzschean Empire. Just because they’d killed Emperor Constantine two weeks ago, didn’t mean that the Niets were on their knees.
The enemy’s fleet admiral, a man named Hammond, had escaped Genevia with a
sizable fleet. He would make it back to Nietzschea and rally their forces for a counterattack, and at present, he had just one target to strike out at: the Genevia System. If Rika started to liberate neighboring systems, he’d be spoiled for choices, and she’d be spread thin defending those systems.
If the ISF fleet under Admiral Carson were going to remain in Genevia, things would be different, but Rika knew that the ISF ships were in high demand. Before long, they would be called to aid in one of the other battles raging across the Orion Arm of the galaxy.
No, it’s my job to stop Nietzschea. Tangel entrusted me with that; I’m going to do my duty.
Rika just wasn’t sure when running a nation had become a part of that duty—though it occurred to her that such responsibility might have been one of Tangel’s desired side effects.
After all, she went through a similar progression. Except she’s responsible for half of known space.
The thought of being in charge of what amounted to the bulk of humanity was enough to make Rika’s head spin—something which did nothing to mitigate the angst she felt over being in charge of her own small corner of the Orion Arm.
Rika tapped into the appropriate feeds and saw that Fred’s team had made the sighting.
Niki pulled up the available routes, and Rika selected the best one for her team.
The corporal’s statement triggered a suspicion in Rika, and she looked over the lower decks of the station’s spire.
Lisbon was a standard ring-and-spindle station: a fifteen-kilometer-long spire with six toroid rings along its length. The rings were situated at the upper end of the spire, and the central command systems, as well as the primary reactors, engines and station-keeping systems, were at the lower end.
What wasn’t down at the lower end were ships. A few bays serviced the engineering section, but according to the logs, no vessels were currently berthed down there. Which meant that either the Nietzschean colonel had an off-the-record escape craft he was heading toward, or he had other plans.
The AI snickered.
A moment later, the station’s general evac sounded on both audible systems and the Link, lights flashing every few meters on the bulkheads.
The SMI-4 mech laughed.
Rika saw that The Van said something privately to Kelly, but didn’t tap into the message. Whatever it was silenced the SMI-4, and there was no chatter until the team reached the shaft that would take them down to the engineering levels.
Kelly grabbed a handhold inside the shaft, swinging out of the way.
The other two SMI mechs moved into the shaft, its five-meter diameter easily accommodating their lithe forms. Kelly let go first, followed by Keli and then Fiona.
Lisbon Station’s central spire only tugged at half a g, and though the three mechs only fell at sixty kilometers per hour, their forms disappeared almost immediately, thanks to their stealth armor.
Two minutes later, Kelly called up,
Without prompting, Yig and Cole jumped into the shaft next, the RR-4 mechs also disappearing from sight within seconds. Rika didn’t wait for them to get far before she followed after, knowing that the moment she touched down, The Van would follow. The AM-4s, Goob and Shoshin, would be last.
Advance by model was something the mechs were well versed in. They’d practiced maneuvers like this a thousand times, and everyone knew their place, regardless of the fireteam and squad they normally belonged to.
As Rika fell, she pulled visual feeds from the other SMI mechs, noting that the bottom of the shaft was a wide platform with crates stacked on one side, sitting at the edge of a two-hundred-meter open space. A dozen meters below the platform, and seventy closer to the center of the spire, was the Nietzschean’s likely target: the station’s power plant.
Like many stations, the primary source of power was an array of fusion reactors. Lisbon, however, also possessed an antimatter reactor. Station records showed that there were several kilograms of antimatter on hand—more than enough to blast the spire to bits and twist the toroid rings apart.
Rika sent an affirmative response, continuing to watch through her team’s eyes as the RR-4s touched down and spread out.
A hundred meters before she reached the bottom of the shaft, Rika activated her a-grav systems and slowed enough that the impact of her feet on the platform was no more than a muted thud, lost in the general cacophony of the cavernous space.
She moved toward Kelly’s position, the SMI visible only by a marker on Rika’s HUD indicating that the mech was crouched at the edge of the platform. Once there, Rika surveyed the routes that the enemy could take to reach the antimatter, which was stored in three separate locations, each accessible only via catwalk.
With her mechs all present, Rika divvied out the rest of the targets.
g up with a catwalk below.
The K1R’s low chuckle rumbled in their minds.
Rika had been wondering the same thing. There were plenty of places to hide in the massive space, but if the enemy was after the antimatter, there were only so many routes they could take, most of them out in the open.
She re-checked the most expedient routes to the facility from where Fred had encountered the Niets, and could only conclude that Kelly was right: they should have seen some sign of the Niets by now.
Rika reviewed the station’s layout, looking for some other possible objective—either escape or destruction—but determined that, unless the Nietzscheans planned to dive out of an airlock, there wasn’t any other reason for the enemy to come down to engineering.
The Van snorted.
Rika glanced over her shoulder at where she knew the stealthed K1R to be standing.
By the time the mech was on his way to aid Goob, Shoshin and Cole were engaged as well. Rika watched her mechs’ feeds, ready to move to a team’s aid, but each group’s progress was inexorable, and she was confident that they’d reach the antimatter storage facilities before the Niets.