by M. D. Cooper
Rika wondered if Shoshin was going to say anything further. The man was very protective when it came to Kelly and Keli. It was a strange dynamic that their team had, but it worked; it was part of the reason why Sergeant Crunch had advocated that their fireteam not get a fourth member.
Theirs was a comradery that Rika understood all too well; her first fireteam had also consisted of just three mechs. One of them being Kelly.
“Should shift you over to Leslie’s group,” Chase muttered in response to the woman, a smile pulling at the corners of his lips. “You’d be great at espionage.”
Kelly gave the captain a look of pure innocence. “Who’s to say that I haven’t already done a bit of work for her? On the side, so to speak.”
“That really sounds like a euphemism,” Keli giggled.
Chase joined in with a laugh. “Double entendrephamism.”
“OK, people,” Rika managed to speak around the smile splitting her face. “Game faces. There will be feed drones watching us from here on out.”
The lift doors opened, and with smooth precision, the two Kellies exited the lift car, their GNRs held across their chests as they strode between the two rows of mechs lined up in the hotel lobby. Chase and Rika followed them out, walking side by side, and the two hundred mechs in attendance saluted sharply, the action punctuated by the sound of their heels—or rear foot claws, in many cases—slapping together.
“Present arms!” Barne’s voice thundered through the lobby, and the mechs raised their primary weapons into the air, creating an arch that the pair, followed by Shoshin, strode beneath.
Beyond the mechs stood a host of dignitaries, hotel guests, and what staff had managed to pause for a peek at the leader of the force that had liberated the Genevia System.
Rika could make out a wide variety of attendees. Everyone from wealthy merchants to local police chiefs were present in the crowd, each watching her with hawk-like eyes as she walked toward the front doors and the sunlit street beyond.
A fear crept into her mind that something terrible was going to happen the moment she stepped onto the street, but when she strode into the early morning light, there was nothing to see—or fear—than more crowds of people, these ones held back by drones and local Jague police.
She noted that on her left, two B’muths stood idle, ready to form the rear of the procession, so she turned to the right, staring down the long stretch of road.
Rika sighed.
“Colonel Rika,” Carson extended his hand as the Marines arrayed behind him drew up and saluted her. “The ISF is honored that you’re including us in your celebration.”
Rika clasped Carson’s hand in her own, giving it two firm shakes as she replied, “The Genevian people are forever in the ISF’s debt. We would still be living under Nietzschean rule if it were not for you.”
Carson smiled, and Rika looked around at the crowds lining the streets. Most people were clapping and cheering, but some looked worried, their expressions pensive.
Rika knew what they were worried about, and she decided that a march through the streets of Jague amidst a doubtful populace was not how she wanted to start the day.
Time to change tactics.
With a few quick strides and a boost from her a-grav system, she leapt into the air and landed atop the foremost B’muth’s head. She turned toward the assembled crowds and clamped her feet around a groove in the massive walker’s armor while tapping into its public address systems.
“People of Jague!” Her voice thundered from the speakers, silencing the crowds. “People of Belgium, People of Genevia! I stand here before you not as a conqueror, not as a victor on the field of battle, but as a sister, as a daughter of Genevia.”
“I know that many of you wonder what having so many mechs come to Genevia might mean. Seeing us together like this makes you worry that we’re angry, that we’ll exact revenge for what was done to us, that the strength we displayed in fighting the Nietzscheans will be turned against you.
“Let me tell you now that you have nothing to fear from us. We know that the people had nothing to do with our mechanization, but even those who did perpetrate these crimes against us are forgiven. We will not seek any punitive measures…. We only seek acceptance from our people.”
A ripple of surprise flowed through the crowds, and Rika saw her mechs stand a little straighter.
She’d not spoken to them about her decision not to seek reparations. She hadn’t needed to. No mech saw themselves as a victim; they considered what had happened in the first war with Nietzschea to be the crucible that forged them into the exact weapon that the people of Genevia needed.
“We are your sons and daughters, your brothers and sisters. We have come home to you with a gift. The gift of freedom. Not only that, but we will bring this gift to all of Genevia, until we see every last member of our great extended family, our people, liberated from Nietzschea!”
For a moment, there was silence, and Rika feared that she’d misspoken somehow, but then the crowd roared in response, and she stood tall, masking the relief she felt, knowing that she’d struck the right tone.
“But before we lift the chains of oppression across old Genevia, we’re going to strike at the enemy’s heart. The next system we strike is going to be Nietzschea itself. Emperor Constantine is dead, but his empire will live on—unless we put it down like the sick beast that it is.
“So join us today in celebrating a momentous victory against the Niets, join with us as we honor those who gave their lives for our freedom, and stand with us as we thank our allies, Admiral Carson and the ISF—right before we crush them on the football field!”
Rika hadn’t even finished her statement when the crowd began to cheer so loudly that even her amplified words were drowned out. Capitalizing on the excitement, she gave word for the procession on the street below to begin their march.
The only response she received was a laugh, and then Chase turned to walk next to Admiral Carson, the two men’s heads bent together in conversation.
A moment later, the B’muth began to move, and Rika checked on who the operator was.
The man the mechs all called Bondo laughed.
Rika held back a sigh as the walker continued to trundle forward. The mechs didn’t often rely on B’muths, dropping them only when they needed to bring overwhelming firepower in short order. Mostly it was because the walkers weren’t much deadlier than a pair of determined K1R mechs, and made for larger targets.
Rika snorted.
She still felt vulnerable. That was the first rule of the battlefield: take your helmet off only if you want to die.
She just had to convince herself that Jague wasn’t a battlefield. It was a friendly city.
Well, mostly friendly.
* * * * *
Caleb rechecked the device, double-checking the magnetic shielding and the hard-Link cable that ran into the networking trunkline. The last thing he wanted was to go to all this trouble only to have a comm issue derail everything.
Especially because I won’t get a second chance if things misfire—at least not a shot this easy.
Though he was confident he could take out the Marauder leadership in the parade, Caleb wondered if his benefactors had overestimated the disruption their deaths would cause. From what he’d learned about the mercenary organization, there was a strong chain of command—much of it still aboard their ships. There was no reason to believe that they wouldn’t be able to operate in Rika’s absence.
Not only that, but Admiral Carson of the ISF was present. It was entirely possible that if he died, his people would have a strong reaction—and not the sort Caleb’s employers wanted to see. He had expressed those concerns, but they were noted and then overruled.
Well, I get paid either way, he thought as the device checks came back clean.
Satisfied that no one would spot it with scan or on the net, he proceeded to give it one last visual inspection.
The bomb he’d devised was simple: four grams of antimatter held in a containment vessel. He’d send the signal to disable the field holding the antimatter, and it would fall into a block of uranium.
People often thought that it was easy to make an antimatter bomb. In theory, it was. There was no chance of a misfire; as soon as antimatter touched matter, annihilation and destruction would ensue. The tricky part was the risk of diffusion.
When the first atoms of antihydrogen hit any normal matter, the explosion would fling out the remaining antihydrogen atoms. Some of those atoms would move a good distance before hitting other matter and annihilating it.
Normally that wasn’t a problem, but he needed to ensure that the bulk of the blast went upward and tore through the road in order to kill the mechs. To facilitate that blast shape, the antimatter in his bomb was stretched into a film that was just a few atoms thick. When it fell toward the block of uranium, the sheet of antimatter would hit the dense uranium atoms simultaneously. Or close enough to make no difference.
If it worked as well as he expected, the bomb would create a sizable crater in the center of the city.
Caleb rose and gave the meter-high oval one last check, testing that it was secure and perfectly level. As he stepped back and surveyed his work with approval, an alert caught his attention, and he pulled up a feed of the restaurant above.
There had been motion in the back hall, but from what the restaurant’s visual feeds showed, there was no one present. Granted, they hadn’t sent the alert; it had come from Caleb’s own equipment, a carefully calibrated sensor that detected vibrations in the floor.
It had given several false positives through the night, which had been expected. Isolating vibrations in a large building in the middle of a busy city was no simple task. So he’d dutifully checked the restaurant each time it had triggered, and each time, the restaurant had been completely empty.
He was tempted to ignore the alert now, especially given that the parade had begun, and he needed to get outside of the blast radius, but at the same time, if his bomb was found, all his work would be for nothing, and a future attack would be far more difficult.
He backed out of the shadowed alcove in the long-abandoned service tunnel. Once out of the narrow space, he pulled the steel cabinet back into place and then dusted himself off before pulling his stealth cloak on.
Caleb knew it wouldn’t hide him as well as the mechs or the ISF Marines, but he didn’t need it to shroud him in full sunlight, just in the subterranean corridors. In addition, the cloak only needed to hide him long enough to get the drop on whoever was snooping around.
That’s what he told himself, at least.
In reality, he knew that his chances of spotting a stealthed enemy were slim to none. It was more likely that they’d physically run into one another.
“Shit,” Caleb muttered, arriving at the inescapable conclusion that he needed to remain near the bomb until he was either certain that the alert had been triggered in error, or the investigator entered the tunnels and he could figure out how to take them down.
And then hope I can still get away before the bomb goes off…or scrub the mission entirely.
Given the nature of his benefactors, if he walked away from the job, he would need to get out of the Genevia System and find someplace far away to restart his career—something he wasn’t prepared to do just yet.
Four minutes. If no one comes into the tunnel by then….
With pursed lips and a decision made, he deployed a flight of microdrones, directing some to activate a Link suppressor before backing into a shadowy alcove to begin his wait.
* * * * *
Leslie eased down through the hole and into the passage below. It had taken some time to find all the sensors monitoring the opening—or at least, what she hoped were all of them—before it had been safe to proceed.
Even so, she had to assume that whoever was operating below the restaurant was expecting her.
She’d instructed Piper to alert Rika that Leslie suspected a bomb—she couldn’t think of what else it could be—beneath the road at the restaurant’s location.
The AI hadn’t confirmed that the message made it through to Rika before Leslie had gone EM-silent, but she wasn’t worried. Piper could be trusted to let them know not to pass this way until Leslie gave the all-clear.
The moment her feet hit the tunnel floor, she eased to the side of the space and looked over the debris left from the hole’s opening, scanning for signs of how many people might be in the tunnels with her.
Unfortunately, once she moved past the dust and rubble, there was no sign of anyone having been in the passage at all.
Track sweeper, she thought, looking at the evenly distributed dust that appeared to have been settling for decades.
She didn’t have any such equipment, and left light footprints in the dust as she moved in the direction of the street, assuming that if there was a bomb, it would be positioned directly under the parade route.
After a dozen meters, the dark passage rounded a corner and met another unlit tunnel that led in the direction of the street.
She followed it as quickly and quietly as she could, finally reaching a passage that ran lengthwise beneath the road above. It was wider than the others, almost four meters across, and five high. From where Leslie stood, she could see a dozen alcoves and side-passages that ran off it.
Well, crap, she thought, looking for any sign of her prey.
No sound came from above—and she was certain that a company of mechs and ‘Muths would be easily heard in the tunnels—and she grew certain that the parade had diverted.
Leslie turned to the right and flushed out a nanocloud, sending it in a wide spread ahead of her. Time was now on her side, her primary goal shifting to the capture of whoever was operating down here. She wanted to find out if they were working alone, or at someone else’s behest.
She moved as quickly as she dared, watching the feeds from her drones as she advanced. Her probes spotted a pipe that appeared to have been scratched recently, and she moved toward it, but by the time she arrived, the drones found that it was still connected to the water mains and liquid was flowing unimpeded.
Several other false positives distracted Leslie until she was sixty meters from where she’d entered t
he tunnel. A dark passage led off on her left, and while the dust on the floor was undisturbed, there was a handprint on the wall that told a different tale.
It wasn’t a smoking gun, but her nanoprobes picked up a small amount of oil in the handprint, its viscosity indicating that the print had been deposited there within the last day.
Leslie let the nanocloud move down the side passage, the drones sniffing for any signs of a bomb while she followed a few meters behind. She was beginning to suspect that whoever had come down into the tunnels was long gone—either that, or they were lying in wait for her.
Let them try, she thought with a smirk.
The smirk faded as her nano finally saw another sign, a scrape on the floor near an equipment rack. It was fresh, and there was no doubt that it had been moved within the past day.
About time, I—
The thought faded away as the probes flew around the rack and showed a meter-high oval sitting in the darkened alcove.
From the outside, Leslie had no idea what it was, but the device’s size alone was troubling enough. Her first thought was that it could be a nuke, but her probes weren’t detecting any radiation.
Pulling the rack aside, she crouched down next to the device, noting that a hard-Link cable ran from it through a small hole in the wall. The blueprints of the area indicated that there was a network trunkline on the other side of the wall, meaning that the physical connection was likely in place both to detect tampering and to enable remote activation.
Checking the time, Leslie saw that the parade was only a few minutes away, though the procession would be two blocks to the east on the first alternate route. Those two blocks had been an ample detour when she thought that it was a small explosive. What she was looking at now could be a nuclear bomb, or something far worse. The concern that it might be an antimatter device took root in her mind.
A quick calculation told her that if she were dealing with antimatter, the device’s yield could drop the skyscrapers linking the road above. Given that they were each a kilometer high, the alternate parade route was well within the destructive zone.