A Pale Dawn

by Chris Kennedy

  The braking forces built in only seconds, going from zero to just over nine Gs. The cockpit had flooded with interface gel moments after they dropped, so they felt nothing but a smooth ride as the Raknar was buffeted. The plummeting machine was bright as a star as it burned down at an ever-increasing angle, and G forces topped seventeen Gs before they began to decrease. The being known as Jim/Splunk listened to an ancient melody composed of a thousand intricate systems working in perfect harmony.

  The atmosphere eventually became thick enough to slow them below the speed of sound once they’d reached an altitude of twenty kilometers. Sections of armor deployed, acting as flaps, and thrusters fired to control descent. As soon as the flight path leveled off, sensors detected the anticipated attack. Four missiles launched from Johnstown,

  The missiles might have been a threat several months ago. But in addition to the upgrades, the Fae had also brought the other systems up to date. Included among them were automated mid-range defensive measures. The missiles were swatted from the sky without Jim/Splunk even aware the threat existed.

  Jim felt the rush of their descent as an almost sexual explosion. Below him, weapons began to fire upward at the descending war machine. Jim/Splunk evaluated their descent, noted the weapons concentrations, and used the Raknar’s various flight surfaces to alter their targeted coordinates.

  When the Raknar’s altitude reached below two kilometers, it retracted the flight surfaces, locked its legs together, and reaction mass was channeled through the three fusion torch chambers. Naked drive plasma burned the atmosphere as millions of pounds of thrust blazed from the Raknar. Jim/Splunk felt a little of the fifty Gs of thrust as the Raknar slowed from 950 kph to under fifty in just three seconds.

  The leg-mounted fusion torches cut out as the legs unlocked, and the Raknar hovered for a split second with only its back jet firing as the operators and native system evaluated the landing site. Half a kilometer below, a unit of unarmored infantry stood their ground, pouring every type of fire they had up at the hovering nightmare. The radioactive wash of the torch meant they were all dead, eventually. Jim/Splunk cut the back jet and the Raknar dropped like a stone. They fired the leg jets and flexed just before impact. A thousand tons of Raknar landed in the midst of the unit, and the radioactive blast of the jets turned the survivors into disassociated atoms.

  The Raknar settled its mass, adjusted its stance, and began evaluating threats. There were no serious threats within a kilometer. The descent torch chamber linings were ejected. Several tons of composite metal/ceramic that would be radioactive for 500 years were left behind to reduce exposure to the operators as the machine strode forward.

  “Time to kick ass,” Jim/Splunk said, crunching over the half-melted remains of a troop transport. Thousands of dead Lumar littered the ground or were crushed underfoot as the machine took 20-meter-long strides toward the nearest hillock.

  A series of intermediate-range missiles flew in from the city. They were dealt with in the same way as the previous ones. The Raknar’s top sensors cleared the hillock, and heavy MAC fire came its way. The mecha didn’t have a head, at least not in the way a Human would recognize, just a massive torso with arms hanging below the knees of its short legs. Jim always said it reminded him more of an ape than a giant robot.

  The magnetic accelerator cannon rounds were designed to take out tanks or even large troop carriers. They were made from super-dense metallic alloys and carried a depleted uranium core. Each one could deliver hundreds of tons of kinetic energy on target. The projectiles hit the Raknar armor and either ricocheted away harmlessly or were flattened and stopped.

  For all their firepower, the MAC carriers were themselves nothing more than a soft target to a Raknar. To Jim/Splunk, the attacks were beyond trivial; they were insulting.

  “This is all you have?” Jim/Splunk laughed. They activated the mecha’s medium range weapons, selected the upper laser array, and simultaneously engaged all the weapons carriers. In less than a second, they were all flaming wreckage.

  Jim/Splunk roared their laughter, unaware it was broadcasting over the Raknar’s external loudspeakers at 200 decibels as the machine stormed up the hill to see the alien army arrayed before it. Thousands turned to see the machine rise above them like a colossus, its laughter loud enough to shatter glass.

  Before the enemy could decide whether to attack or flee, the Raknar’s rocket-powered jumpjets flared to life and lifted it into the air with an ear-splitting roar even louder than the laughter. The jumpjets used the same nozzles which had previously acted as the Raknar’s ascent/descent fusion torches. Now they were routed to provide rocket power instead of fusion. They provided less than 20% of the power of the fusion-powered engines, but they also didn’t throw enough radiation to kill everything in a one-kilometer-radius.

  As the Raknar soared into the sky, the enemy mercs screamed in terror and tried to flee. The mecha flared its jets and thundered down into their midst. The shockwave of its landing sent hundreds flying through the air and knocked over tanks. A few fired at the huge, raging machine; most simply tried to flee.

  Close-in defensive weapons were brought online, and streams of chemicals sprayed around the mecha’s legs in all directions. The liquid gasified quickly, spread by the blast of the Raknar’s jumpjets. A second later, one of the weapons fired at the Raknar detonated the thermobaric explosion. The heat and shockwave massacred the surrounding mercs. The survivors threw down their weapons and ran in all directions.

  Jim/Splunk scanned the area. Some weapons were still being fired at them, but none were even a theoretical threat. A series of defensive lasers on the Raknar’s torso neutralized them. “This is all?” they wondered.

  Twenty kilometers away, a starship began to lift off from the starport in Johnstown. It was identified as a Besquith design. The Raknar turned and raised an arm. The target was acquired, details of its flightpath analyzed, and the reworked 406mm Mark 7 gun roared. The newly built breach mechanism worked, and another round was loaded, the arm moved upward and the gun fired again, then a third time.

  The projectiles were custom made, each one weighing 900 kilograms, computer-fused, armor-piercing, and each held 650 kilograms of K2 explosives. All three projectiles hit the starship, which was essentially torn in half by the explosions. The two pieces careened downward, just missing the city as they slammed into the ocean.

  Jim/Splunk ejected the spent main gun magazine, grabbed another from the holder at the mecha’s waist, and fit it into place. They waited for another ship to take off or a challenge to their supremacy on the battlefield. None did, but another sensation reached them, and they gasped in revelation.

  “Adversary!”

  The Johnstown city wall exploded in two places as a pair of massive forms raced through the breach. Darkly armored, fast moving, 100-meter-long insectile nightmares came at the Raknar in a serpentine pattern. Two Canavar.

  The part of Jim’s mind which was still functioning at a Human level examined the alien monsters. These were at least half again bigger than the ones he’d fought over a year ago on the planet Chimsa. These two didn’t stop to call a challenge or appear hostile to each other. These were fully in control of themselves and operating together.

  The gun arm came up again and fired, and the recoil rocked their shoulder back. The Canavar dodged the shell which sent up a huge gout of dirt and rocks just meters from their racing forms. They emptied the other two rounds of the magazine as the Canavar closed. The monsters easily dodged the shots then straightened their course and came straight on. The distance closed quickly.

  Jim/Splunk felt no feelings of dread or fear—only excitement. The Raknar safed the cannon and reached its hands down to both legs and grabbed the two sections of the Ia’kaa. The move to link the sections together only took five seconds. In that time, the Canavar exploded across the intervening space, closing to within a kilometer of the Raknar.

  Jim/Splunk fired the jumpjets, leaning backward to buy distance and
time. The Ia’kaa was assembled, but it took time to energize. The lead Canavar launched itself at them—a 100-meter-long insect missile traveling just shy of 200 kilometers per hour. That move did catch them by surprise, and Jim/Splunk tried to dodge while kicking at the same time. Neither move worked, and the Canavar slammed into them full force.

  Jim/Splunk partially rolled before the impact so the Canavar collided with the Raknar’s upper legs instead of the center torso. Pincers powerful enough to rend battleship armor scrambled for purchase as the two spun wildly through the air, out of control.

  Jim/Splunk ignored their wild flight, leaving that to the Raknar’s innate controls. Instead, they concentrated on channeling fusion power to the Ia’kaa. The charge was incomplete, but the Canavar had found a gap in the Raknar’s leg armor and was beginning to bite down. They swung the blade’s edge, crackling with terawatts of power, into the side of the monster’s head.

  There was a massive discharge of energy into the Canavar, accompanied by an explosion as chiton cracked and flew away in meter-thick chunks. The Raknar’s leg thrusters screamed as the Raknar spun an instant before both monster and mecha slammed into the ground with enough force that people hiding in basements around Johnstown screamed in alarm from the thunderous tremors.

  The Raknar landed back first, rolling with the force and velocity of the fall. Rocks and dirt flew as the mecha skidded. The Canavar lost its grip as the Ia’kaa temporarily stunned it. Jim/Splunk kicked out as they rolled, and the long, segmented insectoid was flung away in a spinning, sinuous rope of chaos. Jim/Splunk brought the Raknar to one knee, deploying the foot blades on the opposite leg and digging into the ground. Trees, grass, and boulders flew as the momentum was canceled, and the mecha finished its skid, ending on its feet.

  All available power was channeled into the Ia’kaa as the second Canavar leaped over its stunned compatriot, using it as a springboard to launch itself at the Raknar’s center torso where the operators lived.

  Jim/Splunk waited until the last second, then fell backward, away from the enemy. The Canavar’s pincers slammed closed, scraping and sending up sparks from the Raknar’s armor but failing to close on it. The Raknar swung the chisel-tip point of the Ia’kaa upward, and the weapon penetrated the Canavar’s head segment, punching through the thick armor with a deafening Crunch!

  An instant later, Jim/Splunk triggered it.

  The tip was chisel-shaped, and it functioned in two ways—the first was like a drill bit. The tip was super-hardened; it had been heated by fusion power until it was nearly as hot as star plasma. This helped it penetrate dense, hardened armor or a Canavar—armor so hard it could resist the most powerful MAC round, gigawatts of laser energy, or blunt nuclear fire. The other reason was that once it penetrated, the tip delivered a microgram pellet of antimatter into the dense matter of the monster’s head.

  The explosion was a half kiloton in magnitude, blowing the Canavar apart from the inside out, and slamming the Raknar back onto the ground.

  “Die now,” Jim/Splunk snarled as the blast smashed into the Raknar, and the Canavar’s body was blown high into the Talus sky, along with a fiery blast wave and a mushroom cloud that climbed into the sky.

  The Raknar rolled to its feet, reached down for another Ia’kaa blade section and snapped it quickly together. Jim/Splunk reveled in the death of the ancient adversary, aware at the same time they only had three of the blade tips remaining.

  They were also aware that setting off the weapon so close to the Raknar had caused some minor damage. Normally the tip would be thrust into the enemy, and then the Raknar would jump away to a more prudent distance prior to detonation. Using the Ia’kaa in such a way was suboptimal and presented a certain level of danger to the operators. An Ia’kuu would be a better option, but that wasn’t available yet. Still, it had worked, and there was no mission-critical damage.

  Jim/Splunk danced the Raknar back several hundred meters, giving them room to act; the Ia’kaa was held out to the side in its right hand as fusion power generated another antimatter pellet.

  The other Canavar rolled onto its dozens of legs, and its head spun toward the Raknar, mandibles spread wide, as it issued a roar of rage across the distance between them. The area was a chiton-and-gut-strewn nuclear hellscape, smoking and burning in the aftermath of the matter-antimatter explosion. The Raknar itself was smoking in places where its paint had been burned off by the blast.

  The Canavar flexed the spines on its back, and the meter-long, five-centimeter thick pointed lances quivered and snapped forward with explosive force as the monster launched dozens of them at the Raknar at more than the speed of sound. As they flew, their shape made the spines spin like flying drills.

  Jim/Splunk snatched a shield plate from their left side, gave it a flipping wrist motion which made it snap/deploy open between the Raknar and the fusillade of inbound drill-spines. All but three slammed into the shield, spending their energy and embedding in the absorbent metallic surface.

  The other three hit the mecha. One lodged in a heavy torso armor plate. Another ricocheted off the arm holding the shield, taking a long chunk of armor with it. The last one found an articulation point between two armored plates and carved its way through in the blink of an eye.

  Sensory hairs on the spine felt the tip penetrate the armor and set off a biochemical reaction, and the spine exploded inside the Raknar. Immersed in the tank of interface gel, Jim/Splunk sensed more than felt the fragment penetrate to bite into flesh. The Raknar ensured the operators didn’t know more.

  The Raknar’s shoulder-mounted missile launcher snapped up and a salvo screamed away, targeted to detonate on and around the Canavar’s head. The monster tensed to launch more spines just as the missiles slammed home. They were Human-made weapons, though, and like the cannon, incapable of causing more than minor injury to the Canavar. Nevertheless, it reeled away from the attack, the spines flying randomly. A second later, the Raknar landed all 1,000 tons of its mass on the middle of the Canavar’s 100-meter length.

  The Canavar’s body was split in half by the impact, the Raknar’s feet penetrating a dozen meters deep into the ground after cleaving the monster in two. The beast writhed in agony from the fatal blow, but still managed to whip its head around, its snapping mandibles reaching for the Raknar to tear, rend, injure. Jim/Splunk caught the head in their massive arms and squeezed and twisted with all the machine’s mechanical might, and the head came away in a fountain of gore.

  Jim/Splunk took the spasming head and held it aloft, screaming their own primal battle cry of success. Then they turned and marched purposefully toward the city. Before they’d covered a single kilometer, another starship roared up from the starport. Just like before, a series of shots from the former battleship gun ripped it from the sky.

  Human merc units were flooding in from the south, others dropping in on dropships. The surviving enemy units were surrounded; most surrendered. Those who didn’t were quickly neutralized. Jim/Splunk stood in the midst of it all and watched for a time, then turned away. They weren’t needed anymore.

  They began to jog toward the city, aiming toward the gaps in the wall created by the now-dead Canavar. The Raknar’s systems identified the defenses and began to provide the operators with options to engage those defenses. Only, none of them fired. Jim/Splunk could see the defenses were manned by alien troopers, and they were determined to be insufficient to stop the Raknar.

  Jim/Splunk came to a stop less than a kilometer from the wall. The defenders faced the ultimate war machine, which had just defeated two of their terror weapons. The Canavar were supposed to utterly devastate the Humans when they tried to retake Talus, then slaughter every other Human on the planet as a message. Humanity’s time as a preeminent merc race was over. All of that was laid to waste by a Raknar, run by a Human.

  Jim/Splunk understood that, and they sensed the hesitation. They wanted to storm in and slaughter every alien in the city, to grind their bones to powder under the Raknar�
�s invincible treads. Except more than the aliens would die. A hundred thousand or more Humans lived there. Despite the chaos and some of the Humans’ twisted political ideology, they were still Humans, and the Raknar flattening the city would send the wrong message to those Humans.

  The Raknar swung its arm back and threw the Canavar head like a missile up and over the city’s walls. It slammed into the side of an office building, cracking the concrete and blowing out several windows. It hung there in the splintered concrete for a long moment before slipping free and sliding toward the ground. It left a huge splatter of greenish blood and an equally long smear all the way down.

  Jim/Splunk stood and waited. Their message was delivered, the meaning indisputable. The part of them that hoped for battle was at a loggerhead with the part that didn’t want to kill more Humans.

  “Make up your minds,” Jim/Spunk roared over the Raknar’s loudspeakers. A second later, the aliens surrendered.

  Splunk broke contact as the last of the interface gel drained away. Jim sighed as the oneness became separateness, then gasped. The gasp became a gurgling choke. He looked down in the dimly lit cockpit and saw bright red blood pumping from his chest.

  “Splunk?” he gurgled, and went limp in the harness.

  “Jim!” he heard a tiny voice yelling over and over. Then the darkness took him.

  * * *

  Dropship One, Descending to Paradise, Paradise System

  “Nice of the Merc Guild ships to run away,” Lieutenant Simon Douglas, the pilot of the dropship, said. “All things considered, I don’t mind making a drop where I don’t get shot at.” He paused and then added, “Um, sir, where did you want me to land?”

  “At the Underdeep landing pad,” Nigel Shirazi replied from his CASPer in the back of the craft. “Why?”

  “Because it’s gone!” Douglas exclaimed. “Along with anything else that used to be on that rocky promontory…including the rocky promontory, itself! I’m getting—yeah, I’m getting radioactives. Looks like they nuked the entrance to Underdeep.”