by M. D. Cooper
Heather was about to object, but Potter had already run off the bridge.
Heather put a hand to her forehead, doing her best not to groan. Then she looked at Chief Garth, who was sitting open-mouthed, staring after Potter.
“You got cotton between your ears, Garth? Get the RMs in the tubes, yesterday, we only have twenty-four minutes till the asteroids hit that station.”
* * * * *
Potter wasn’t sure if it was the lack of adjustment to the physical body she was using—which seemed more ‘real’ to her than she thought it would—or just the gravity of what she was about to attempt, but she was quivering slightly as she slid into the pilot’s seat.
“Damn you Intrepid people and your belief in hyper-realism,” she muttered and sat back in the seat, pulling the harness down and then gripping the armrests.
The pinnace was already warmed up and spinning on the cradle to face the open bay doors as she reached out into the navigation systems.
While the idea of flying the ship using the consoles was interesting, she wasn’t about to try that for the first time on such an important mission. Instead, she closed her eyes and reduced her awareness of her body to the bare minimum, shifting her ‘senses’ to the ship’s sensors and engines.
The pinnace was her body, and she was speed.
The flight status showed green, and she hit the command for the rails to accelerate the ship out of the bay.
Potter banked the pinnace around the Fury Lance, boosting to meet the RMs that were holding steady in front of the massive vessel.
The pinnace was on the larger side, just under a hundred meters in length, and thirty wide—fifty with the atmospheric fins extended. She supposed that when the mothership was four kilometers long, a hundred-meter craft was a pinnace in comparison.
She slowed as she came over the ten RMs and extended her ship’s grav field, pulling them in close to the hull, hoping that the positive graviton field wouldn’t be enough to attract the Exdali once she transitioned.
She unfolded the data before transitioning; if she’d been fully connected to her physical body, her jaw would have dropped.
Shit! They know how to control the Exdali!
The message came with a strong admonition to only use the specific graviton waveforms to repulse the Exdali, not to attract. If they were to get out, it would take a whole fleet running the repulsion patterns to push the things back into the dark layer.
Not like I’d ever want to attract those things.
Potter checked over the ship’s status one last time and transitioned into the dark layer. Once the stars had disappeared, she checked that the RMs were still safely tucked against the belly of the pinnace, and activated the repulsion patterns in the grav systems.
“OK,” she muttered aloud, having momentarily forgotten she had a body. “Now I just need to worry about what I used to fear in the dark layer: running into invisible stationary dark matter.”
THE FIND
STELLAR DATE: 12.23.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: The Moon, Malta
REGION: Iberia System, Old Genevia, Nietzschean Empire
Borden leant out around a corner and fired on the first thing he saw, which turned out to be the back of a Nietzschean soldier who was fleeing down the large tunnel deep within The Moon.
Damn, bad form, that.
He signaled for Daphne to advance while he covered the dark shaft. Once she’d taken up a position behind a support column, Kali and Kev moved up to another. Borden followed, and the team leapfrogged their way down the passage, inexorably closing on their target.
Which he hoped was what they thought it would be.
After securing and disabling the base’s railguns, he and Gemma’s team had sat tight, waiting for the pinnace to come back and get them—until Saris had relayed the scan data that showed a nuclear blast, followed by an antimatter one.
He wasn’t going to count Gemma and the mechs out, but it meant that he and the Marines on The Moon were on their own. Rel had pored through the databases, finding that the base had passed through a lot of hands over the centuries, and the Niets only used the upper few levels.
It seemed that, once, Iberia had been an important and wealthy system, and this had been one of its primary military outposts—which was nothing more than intellectual stimulation, until Rel had found mention of something called a Starcrusher deep within the bowels of the base.
And so they left the command center—after blowing the control systems for the railguns—and had been fighting their way through the Nietzschean installation on The Moon ever since.
They’d long ago expended all their ammunition, scavenged for new weapons, and run some of those through all the rounds they could find. They were now down to the rifles they’d pulled off the most recent group of Niets they’d killed.
Each of the Marines had half a dozen weapons hanging from their shoulders and jammed into mounts on their backs, just in case they found magazines that fit one or another.
If one thing had become clear, it was that Iberia was the dumping ground for leftovers no one else wanted.
The same was true for the soldiers they’d encountered.
While Borden had to give credit where credit was due, in that they’d encountered a few squads who had stood their ground, just as many had run off when the four Marines arrived, pouring weapons fire into their foes and executing clean, well-orchestrated tactics.
While he appreciated the mechs’ way of fighting—one where they simply brought overwhelming force to bear in every situation—the ISF Marines had a long history of careful, yet effective tactics borne of their roots in the Terran Space Force’s Marines.
Borden himself had trained in the Congo on Earth, sweating out his days in boot under an unrelenting sun, learning how to make the most of every situation, especially when you were dealt a shitty hand.
Which seemed to be the rule, not the exception when serving as a Marine.
Their current situation was a prime example: nanoclouds depleted, armor hot and scored and incapable of stealth, troops scavenging for weapons and moving toward a destination that may or may not contain what they hoped it did.
‘Join a colony mission’, Borden thought with a laugh. ‘Leave all the shit behind’.
He liked to joke that serving in the ISF was the last thing he’d hoped to do after getting a berth on the GSS Intrepid, but if someone had asked him to be honest, he would have told them that he loved it.
At first he’d worried that his current assignment with the Marauders would see he and his team lost in the ass-end of space—which was pretty much their current situation—but he had to admit that he was rather enjoying galivanting across space with the mechs.
On top of that, the Nietzscheans were a foul people, whose ‘winner take all’ mentality had suffused every aspect of their society. The problem was, their society didn’t aid that many in becoming winners.
A part of him felt a modicum of guilt for mowing down so many of the poor saps that had been sent to
this outpost, but if they picked up a rifle and aimed it at him, there was no debate. When push came to shove, that was the only rule that mattered in war—after having your team’s back, of course.
Kali chuckled as she eased around a support beam and nodded that the coast was clear.
Borden cycled his vision and sighed.
Daphne pulled the satchel off her shoulder and tossed it across the tunnel to Kev.
As he advanced to the rear, a hail of bullets flew through the air, nearly striking the Marine before he reached the next column. Borden signaled Kali to hold her position at the fore, while he and Daphne laid down suppressive fire for Kev.
Rounds streaked out from behind the boring machine, striking one of the burn sticks and knocking it into a wall. But the other made it through defensive fire and landed atop the machine, its thermite core igniting and burning their way into what Borden hoped was something important.
It turned out to be their lucky day, as the machine ground to a halt, and the Niets didn’t advance beyond its cover.
Stray shots were still coming from the stalled out tunneling machine, and Borden waited for a lull in the fire before rushing across the passage and moving down to the doorway Kali had pointed out.
She stood before it, covering his approach, and nodded back at it.
Borden growled as he stared up at the large, steel doors.
Borden placed his last hackit over the pad. The device set to work, and fifteen seconds later, a dull groan filled the stale air as the doors began to retract into the wall.
Once they had split apart far enough for him to pass, he slipped inside and gazed up at the find as the interior lights began to activate.
Towering a hundred meters over Borden was one of the strangest contraptions he’d ever seen. He could tell that the designers of the Genevian B’muths must have drawn their inspiration from this thing, which proudly bore the name ‘Starcrusher’ on its side.
It had a long central body like a B’muth, with a huge railgun on its back. But rather than four squat walker legs, the Starcrusher had six articulated insect-like legs.
All of that made it look like some sort of crazy bug, but a bug with twelve very large missile pods on its back.
Kali whistled, as she moved inside the chamber.
COLLISION
STELLAR DATE: 12.23.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Chusa District, Cerulean, Malta
REGION: Iberia System, Old Genevia, Nietzschean Empire
Alison heard Illumine calling out to Del, confirming his arrival a minute before the pinnace set down in the middle of the street in front of the house.
Without another thought for Jaka and Illumine, she strode out of the house and watched the pinnace come down. If she hadn’t been so intent on killing Del for EMPing her up on the station, she would have been impressed with how skillfully he set the craft down between the large trees that lined the road.
Granted, the pinnace was small—only forty meters long, squat and ugly.
The ramp began to descend, and Alison strode down the walk toward it, wishing she had ammunition for something other than her electron beam so she could shoot his legs out the moment he appeared on the ramp.
Waiting for Del—the tall, dark-haired, cocksure bastard that he was—to clear the ship was taking all her self-control at the moment. He was almost past the aerofin on the pinnace’s tail, when Jaka called out from behind her.
“Alison. What the hell are you doing out here?”
She turned toward Jaka, ready to take the two quick steps required to drive a fist through his face, but Del called out from behind her.
“Jaka! An informant caught sight of Yakob and the woman. She’s only two kilometers from here, down on Mida Street!”
“Do we have an ID on her yet?” Jaka called out, anger and excitement tinging his voice.
“My guy saw her face, but didn’t make an ID. Sending you her picture.”
Alison had stepped back as Jaka blithely walked past, so she got an up-close view of his face losing all color as Del sent him what she assumed must be Alice’s image. His steps faltered, and he stumbled, reaching out and placing a hand on her arm to steady himself.
“The fuck…” he whispered. “No. She’s dead. The Niets killed her years ago.”
“Who is she to you?” Alison asked, gazing down at Jaka, who suddenly seemed to realize he was leaning up against the deadliest person he’d ever encountered.
“She’s…she’s my mother.”
“Damn,” Alison shook her head. “If I’d made a bet, it would have been on sister. But that was mostly to do with the fact that I can’t actually picture Alice in the throes of passion.”
Jaka spun on her. “You lied?! You knew what she looked like all along?”
Alison shrugged. “Yeah, I just wanted to make you squirm a bit. As much as I’d like to put a bullet in Alice’s head, I figured that if you knew who she was, you’d stay till the last minute, searching her out, and…well…I want your ship over there.” She finished the statement by gesturing with her GNR, pointing it right at Del.
She was about to fire, when she decided that she really would like to know where Alice was—and then get her hands on the woman. There were still twenty minutes before the station would be hit, and then roughly another ten until it came down.
Dammit…I’ve never stalled so much in my life.
“But the Discipline…” Jaka muttered as he stared up at her. “How?”
“It doesn’t work on us anymore, the chip port is just a placebo so that folks like you will think you have us under control. Now, Del—”
“Hold it right there!” Illumine said from the house’s doorway, her golden lips set in a thin line as she leveled a large-caliber rifle at Alison. It would
be enough to smart, but Alison was certain the flow armor covering her skin could hold up to a few shots from the weapon.
Or I take door number two.
She reached out and grabbed Jaka by the neck, lifting him into the air while he squirmed and grasped her arm to relieve the pressure on this throat.
“You were saying, Illumine?”
“Fuck,” the red-skinned woman whispered. “Please, don’t hurt him.”
“That’s right,” Del shouted from next to the pinnace, hands hovering over his pistols, eyes fixed on Alison’s GNR, which was still pointed at him. “You kill Jaka, you have no leverage over either of us.”
“Well,” Alison shrugged. “Other than your lives.”
Illumine set her rifle down, then kicked it away. “OK, look. Just let us go, we won’t come after you.”
Alison found herself far more conflicted than she’d expected to be. When planning out her escape, she’d intended to kill all three of these people without any hesitation, probably with a healthy dose of extreme prejudice to boot. Now she was considering letting some of them live.
“Where’s Alice?” she asked Del. “Address on Mida Street.”
“Building 4314. Suite 22.”
Something in Del’s voice caused her to peer into his eyes, where she saw a deep, simmering rage. She realized that this was the sort of man who never hesitated to kill, and would hunt her down years later if he lived.
Like I need that.
Her electron beam lanced out, drawing a straight blue line from the barrel of her GNR to Del’s head.
A second later, the man’s corpse fell to the ground, and Alison strode to Illumine’s discarded rifle, and stomped on it while the woman let out a series of small shrieks, backpedaling and tripping over the doorway’s threshold.
Alison didn’t pay her any heed and walked to the pinnace, still holding Jaka aloft by his neck. She strode up the ramp, only glancing at the headless body as she passed it by.
At the top of the ramp, she reached for the control, only to hear Illumine wailing for her to stop. A moment later, the woman fell on her knees at the base of the ramp, golden eyes wide with fear.