The Midnight Sun (The Omega War Book 2)

by Tim C. Taylor

  “Nice shooting, sir,” said Albali. “Hardcore!” It wasn’t his words, but the admiration within them that warmed her. “Let’s hit the deck,” he said.

  The squad fell to the ground, braking with their jumpjets when they neared the tree canopy. Sun winced at the fuel expenditure. There’d be no resupply on this planet, other than stripping the jump juice from dead troopers. An opportunity that might arrive sooner than she’d want.

  Three Condottieri fighter-dropships had come about and spat fresh lines of tracer-mixed fire through the squad. Wuey was hit, her torso careering wildly through the air, screams still issuing from her mouth as her severed legs dropped on a different trajectory. Corporal Oranjeklegg and Branco fired missiles at the incoming craft.

  “Get ready to fire on enemy CASPers deploying out those dropships,” warned Sun.

  But not only did no CASPers emerge, but the enemy craft veered away. Then she realized why. The Indomitable Streak was down deep inside the atmosphere, the lasers in her belly turrets invisible other than shimmering lines of superheated air. As the beams passed through their targets, the effect on the Condottieri was brutally apparent. It was like watching a chef preparing vegetables in a restaurant. An invisible knife sliced fuselage, wings, and flight cabins into thin pieces of metal debris that spun toward the treetops below.

  The flight crews were still alive, their silhouettes tumbling and flailing through the air as one of her own dropship’s crew had done seconds earlier. She didn’t enjoy watching them die, but neither could she feel sympathy.

  No CASPers emerged from the wrecked dropships.

  Which meant they’d already deployed and would be waiting in the swamps below.

  “Sergeant,” she said to Albali, “we skim across the treetops. We’ll make for the LZ, but first we set down here.” She marked the location on the map grid, but there was little need. They all knew she was indicating the crash site of Javelin-7’s flight cabin.

  She looked up and saw the Streak burrow its way up through the atmosphere, leaving a thick contrail in the clear blue sky.

  Humans waging pitiless war on other humans – dark days had arrived, indeed. She reminded herself that Midnighters and Scorpions had fought, but only because they’d found themselves on opposite sides of a contract. The Scottish company had turned out okay. There remained hope.

  A ping alerted her to a data stream being received by her CASPer, but suspecting cyber-attack, it was locked down hard in quarantine.

  “Major,” said Sinclair.

  Shorn of its usual humor, his voice sounded shocked. “I have to race for the stargate now. I’ve sent you all I have on our tactical analysis of your landing, and all data I could find on your environment. All the enemy dropships are destroyed. Only two of yours made it to the landing zone. I’m sorry for your losses, Major, but it gets worse. The frigates will be here in five minutes, and when they do, even a sub-orbital hop from your dropships will be shot down from orbit. I’m also reading a lot of activity around the emergence point. Looks like we only faced an advance party, and now the main group is here. I’ll send for reinforcements. You have my word on that. Hang tough, Major Sun. You can do it. Captain James Sinclair, out.”

  * * * * *

  Chapter 51

  It took a handful of minutes for Sun and Shock Squad to locate Flight Sergeant Angela Jackson. The trees here were a hundred-foot-high lattice of trunks that entwined with each other aggressively. They looked like a brawl of titanic wooden snakes, each trying to crush the life from the others and climb higher into the light.

  Jackson was laid out on a horizontal stretch of trunk twenty feet in the air. She looked so restful lying there on her back, not a scratch on her body beyond a slight scorching of her flight uniform.

  But her back was broken, and Jackson was dead.

  Sun retrieved the personal packet from the inside pocket of Jackson’s flight jacket and ordered the squad to wrap her in one the chutes that had been waving from the treetops. “You will be avenged,” Sun said quietly with the half squad standing around the body, the other half guarding a perimeter. “And you will not be forgotten. Nor you, Connor, wherever you are.”

  She looked at the CASPers. They were hulking brutes of metal and ceramic. Faceless. Lethal. But inside were human beings, and just a few hours ago they’d been relaxed, preparing to jump out of the system to the safety of home. But they hadn’t gotten away. And they weren’t safe.

  That was why she hesitated. The people inside those suits might not be ready to fight for someone else’s Raknar museum pieces, nor for some political events back on distant Earth, but some of them would fight for Flight Sergeant Jackson and Ensign Connor. The pilots hadn’t been mercenaries caught in the line of fire. They’d been murdered.

  “Sergeant,” she said, “head them out for the LZ.”

  “I want one thing to be clear,” said one of the troopers.

  She looked up at the interruption. The voice came from the exterior speaker of CASPer-S7. Driver name: Trooper Sanjay Sharpe. Blades to his friends. Was this the moment when everything would fall apart?

  “I didn’t see no contract,” Blades protested. “And I sure didn’t sign up to be hunted through the jungle for some crazy lump of ancient tin. Do you seriously expect us to wait here as they hunt us down one by one, slice us in two like they did to poor Wuey? Let them have their Raknar. I say we run and we hide. We go so deep that one day those bastards that murdered Jackson and Connor decide it’s not worth the trouble to come after us. Then they’ll go away.”

  Sun jerked in shock. Somehow her main armaments had activated, and their two reticles had centered on CASPer-S7.

  No one spoke.

  Blades snapped open his cockpit and began freeing himself. “If you’re gonna shoot me,” he said, “do it now and have it over with. Better that than make me sweat in this jungle hell until the Condottieri find me and kill me anyway. Who’s with me?”

  Desertion in the field carried unlimited penalties, including execution. Sun had written that into the terms of employment herself, but were they actually working a legitimate contract? Events had moved so fast that she hadn’t seen what they’d signed up for.

  Blades was taking gear from his suit and stuffing it into his emergency survival pack.

  If discipline fell to pieces, it would be more than just Blades who’d die as a consequence. What would Blue do?

  But her sister had gone down with Midnight Sun, and even if there were survivors, none could help Sun now. She had to choose her own path, here and now, with everyone watching.

  “Sir,” said Albali on a private channel, “permission to shoot the deserter?”

  Blades slung his emergency kit over his shoulder and checked his CL32 sidearm.

  “Denied,” Sun told the sergeant. “If anyone shoots him, it has to be me.”

  Sun raised the arm of her CASPer.

  Blades shot a scowl of disdain at her front camera. She glared back at his image in her screen.

  Then he walked away into the swamp.

  I can’t do it.

  She kept her arm pointed at the absence where Blades had been and did nothing.

  Branco did. He stomped through the muddy ground to block the deserter’s exit.

  “What are you gonna do, pretty boy? Murder me?”

  Using both of his CASPer hands, Branco grabbed Blades around the torso and picked him up, dangling him three feet above the ground.

  “Figures,” said Blades, contemptuously. “I saw you go berserker back on the Exuberance. You’re no better than those murdering Condottieri bastards.”

  “You piece of scum,” said Branco, “you’re not worth wasting a bullet on. But that gun and equipment? They belong to the Midnight Sun Free Company, your former employer.”

  Sun picked up on what Branco was doing, and the lock in her mind vanished. “You can take your water, emergency rations, and compass,” she told Blades. “But weapons, slate, and everything else stays with us.”


  Branco released Blades, who dropped the gun and other items and fled into the trees.

  Albali shouted after him. “You’re lucky the Major’s got a softer streak in her heart than most bother to see. I’m not like her. If I ever see you again…” He spun the ammo drum on his back. “I’ve got fourteen hundred rounds in here, and every one has your name on them, Sanjay Sharpe. If I ever see you again, you’re a dead man.”

  “If anyone else wants to join Blades,” said Sun to the group, “go now. Anyone who wants to earn their pay, follow me to the LZ. There are Condottieri already on the ground and more on the way. Let’s move, people. It’s our job to make them feel welcome.”

  * * * * *

  Chapter 52

  The Condottieri patrol sloshed through the muddy ground 40 feet below Branco’s position in the trees. He carefully lifted one of the foliage-laden branches he’d cut to form his nest of concealment and tried to sneak a look at the patrol below.

  “I swear I’m getting trenchfoot, Sarge,” complained one of the Condottieri through his helmet speaker. “I can’t even see my Tri-V bank through the mold and leeches colonizing my CASPer.”

  “Shut up, and earn your pay.”

  “I worked a contract on a sulfur-choked moon once,” said another voice. Female, and about 20 feet farther out, according to the HUD in Branco’s scout helmet. “Smelled like the pits of hell, but I just know this merde-ball posting is gonna be even crappier.”

  “It’ll get a whole lot worse if you don’t button it,” warned the man Branco guessed was their squad leader. His scout HUD reported that the man’s words were being simultaneously carried through radio comms. This redundancy suggested the trees were causing the same havoc to Condottieri signals as it had the Midnighters.’

  “Movement ahead,” said the first voice, professionalism reasserting in his voice. “Bearing 234. Range 40 yards. Holding position about 35 feet above the ground.”

  Branco reached for his sniper rifle, but to sling it, not to fire it. Having worked for Binnig, the manufacturer of the CASPers, he knew all the weak points of the Mark 8 CASPer, and that was his problem – there weren’t any. The best his rifle could do was maybe crack the plating of a suit’s heat exchanges. But it was a difficult shot, and all it would achieve was to make the occupant slowly broil in their own juices over a matter of hours.

  “Target moving east,” said the Condottiere.

  Branco sighed with relief. As far as he knew, he was the only member of the ad hoc scout team up in the trees. Whatever the patrol had spotted, it wasn’t another Midnighter.

  He placed his rifle down as quietly as he could and turned slowly to bring his binoculars to his eyes. There was motion out toward the outer tip of his branch. It was a tree scorpion – about five feet away. Eight legs and a tail-mounted stinger as big as his fist. Its stinger was curled high in the air as its back legs danced a furious jig. Territorial display, probably. Branco reached for the stun gun at his hip.

  The creature’s steps grew more aggressive, legs flicking out because this branch was clearly not big enough for the both of them. Then it crab-walked around the underside of the branch and out of sight.

  Branco jerked in panic.

  Unlike the Condottieri sloshing below sealed in their metal suits, the eight volunteers for the scratch scout team needed speed and stealth. Outside of his safe CASPer and clad only in the light scout armor they’d retrieved from Javelin-8, the wildlife was far more terrifying. Branco sat up on the back of his heels, careless that his head was now poking out above his carefully constructed nest of branches. Somewhere on the underside of that branch was a tree scorpion about to leap out and jab him in the nuts.

  But he was wrong. The scorpion reappeared on the branch at the same position from which it had disappeared, still five feet away. Having completed its circumnavigation of the disputed branch, it stood still, staring at him through bulbous eyes on greasy stalks.

  “Just playing mind games, eh?” Branco whispered. “Well I ain’t playing around, pal.”

  He pointed his stubby stun weapon at the creature.

  It bunched its legs, ready to spring. Lurid yellow gunk oozed from its joints, screaming toxicity. It wiggled its butt like a cat about to pounce.

  Branco clicked the safety off and was about to fire 30,000V through the scorpion, but the instant the capacitor charged, the creature sped off screaming, dropping down to the branch below and scurrying out of sight.

  “Good decision,” said Branco. With the stunner safed but still ready in one hand, he opened up his concealment and was finally able to train his binoculars on the Condottieri patrol below.

  * * * * *

  Chapter 53

  Even after years spent in deep-cover espionage, breaking into high security areas with the prospect of torture and grisly death if his unsuspecting targets ever caught him, nothing had prepared Branco for the horror of this swamp. The moment he’d clambered down from his mud-splattered CASPer to change into the scout equipment, he’d been assaulted by legions of bloodsucking insects, and every inch of his skin had become a feeding ground for leeches. No matter that his blood was presumably poisonous; he was warm and an easy target. But in the short term, despite the bacteria that must be infecting his many tiny wounds, the bloodsuckers were only an irritation. That tree scorpion, though, had looked seriously poisonous. Who knew what else might be lurking in the thick undergrowth, waiting to sink its venom into his veins?

  He couldn’t remember ever being so scared.

  The confident way the Condottieri patrol spread out in good order to face the threat they’d identified suggested they hadn’t yet learned to fear the swamp. Suddenly, a shape flew through the jungle at the CASPer in the center of the enemy horseshoe formation. It resembled a six-foot-long slug, a flapping, flexible under-frill supporting a mucus tube that wound through the air like a high-speed snake.

  At the last moment, it veered right and flew at a different trooper.

  She cried out in fear, but her training cut in and she blasted the creature into a cloud of brown slime drops with an extended burst from her arm-mounted machine gun.

  Pieces of slug and slime splattered on her suit, to join the thick mud splashes already there.

  But this was no mud.

  “Merde! Merde! It’s burning through my suit!”

  She threw herself to the ground and tried to roll the corrosive gunk away in the mud and brackish water.

  Branco looked nervously at the trees nearby, wondering how common these slugs were.

  But nothing flew out at him, and soon the mud-rolling CASPer calmed and reported that her suit was damaged but functional.

  The patrol moved on.

  After he was sure they weren’t doubling back, Branco returned to his assigned task. He looked out along the length of the branch through the hole the team had hastily cut through the foliage just two hours earlier, allowing him a viewpoint down onto the landing strip about 500 yards away.

  The Zuul had built their small town and landing strip on a square patch of swamp area about five klicks on each side. Over the decades, a combination of drainage pumps – many of which still worked – and levees had partially dried the area and thinned out the trees, shrubbery, and ferns, which had claimed the space yielded by the enormous trees. The vegetation was still thick, though, except for around the landing strip, which had been hardened with gravel and raised significantly higher than the surrounding area.

  It was hardly the bustling spaceport the cult leaders must have envisioned. Instead it was a standard T-cross landing strip and a few crude support installations: a fuel dump, hangar, and a handful of general purpose prefab boxes. Javelin-8 was parked on the eastern end of the strip, pointing west toward the town, looking poised, ready to take off. Farther east, where the landing strip gave way to dense wood, were signs of destruction from where two squads of Midnighter CASPers had dragged the other Javelin dropship a short way before conducting some emergency field surgery that
involved removing wings and much of the interior.

  The initial Condottieri patrols soon found evidence that the dismantled dropship had been carried away. Branco had watched them through hidden cameras, but the Condottieri soon found the cameras too. Now he was blind to what was going on beyond the cleared area of the strip.

  For the moment, that didn’t matter, because the Condottieri focus was currently on Javelin-8.

  They weren’t fools.

  It would have been so much better if the Condottieri had discovered the apparently deserted island in the swamp, left the stuffy confines of their CASPers, and huddled around a campfire, swilling whiskey and beer to pass the time while bunching up to make themselves easy targets.

  Unfortunately, the Condottieri were professional mercenaries.

  Three enemy squads, about ten CASPers apiece, had clearly been tasked with investigating the landing strip, which was about two klicks to the east of the Zuul colony town that was dominated by the terraforming station to its south. Two squads had secured the perimeter, and the third had split in two – one half forming the patrol Branco had seen, and the other investigating the downed Javelin-8 via bloodhounds.

  The bloodhound hunter-killer robots were about the size and shape of a small keg of beer, but the many legs that sprouted from their bodies scurried them across the ground like spiders, halting from time to time while the sensor band on their bodies conducted a full hemispherical sensor sweep.

  The Condottieri had three of the bloodhounds and, after protracted exploratory sniffing, one finally popped open the hatch to Javelin-8.

  Branco sighed with relief. He’d avoided being stung, shot, and poisoned long enough that finally, he could act. Grudgingly, he acknowledged the part the swamp world had played. Even here on the drained island, the ground was a sea of mud that supported islands of twisting roots and thick undergrowth. It might be a hellhole full of beasts trying to kill him, but this land was perfect for hiding signal wire.