by Jay Allan
“Very well, Private. You may return to you post.” He turned. “Milland, Suvion…you will accompany Private Tienne, and reinforce the position in our rear.” Milland-1902 and Suvion-9364 spun around and snapped to attention. “Yes, Lieutenant,” they responded almost simultaneously, as they rushed to line up behind Tienne.
Javais watched as the three troopers jogged down the corridor, and then he walked toward Caron, who was already approaching him. “Reports of enemy activity, sir. I have dispatched reinforcements to the main position behind us. They appear to be following our route through the complex. I am uncertain if we have suffered any additional casualties, or if any of the enemy have been eliminated.”
Caron took a deep breath and sighed. “I had hoped we could get in and out of here without any outside interference.” He turned and looked back at the shelves, and the various boxes that had been forced open. They were full of electronics, all or almost all of it seemingly intact. It was a tremendous find, the kind of thing that would almost guarantee Union superiority in computing and artificial intelligence for a generation or more.
It was also enough to assure Caron and the others on the mission the great rewards that accompanied success in the Union. Javais and his Foudre Rouge weren’t focused on the accumulation of personal power the way the Sector Nine agents were, but he understood the military importance of the find, and the advantages it would give his people the next time they went up against the hated Confederation Marines.
“Send a runner, Lieutenant. I want a status report on the team sent to find the reactor. We can’t leave here until we’ve rigged the place for destruction, but if we can set the reactor to blow, I think the materials we’ve found here are sufficiently valuable. It’s time to start getting this stuff back to the ship, I think. At least if we can confirm we’ve found the reactor.”
“Yes, sir. Of course.” Javais agreed, at least to the extent he had an opinion. Like all Foudre Rouge, he was far more comfortable just following orders than he was analyzing them or developing his own viewpoints. “I suggest we secure the boxes we intend to take with us, and take them back to the ship in one group. That will provide maximum protection against any enemy forces we encounter.”
“Yes, Lieutenant, very good. Instruct your people to begin repacking the opened crates…and preparing as many as we can carry for transit. I want to be ready to go as soon as we receive word that the reactor has been prepped.”
“Yes, sir.” Javais stepped back and saluted, and then he walked forward, shouting out commands to the Foudre Rouge working on the crates. He’d been born and bred for combat, trained and conditioned from birth to ignore fear, pain, hardship.
But Javais-0194 would still be glad to leave the haunted imperial ruin behind.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Unidentified Imperial Ruin
Somewhere Under the Endless Sea
Planet Aquellus, Olystra III
Year 302 AC
“You sure you’re okay?” Andi was walking next to Gregor, not the easiest feat with the narrowness of the corridor and the bulk of her friend. He’d looked well enough, most of the time, but she’d caught a few winces and one or two deep, struggled breaths. She knew he was in pain, and she was far from sure just how bad the damage from his wound truly was. “I’m pretty sure it’s all clear behind us. Maybe you should go back…”
“No chance, Andi. I’m not leaving you.” Gregor’s voice was harsh, at least for the first few words. Then, his tone softened. “If you want to bail on this expedition and head out of here right now, I’m all for it. This place gives me the creeps, and as far as I’m concerned, Durango can eat shit. But if you’re staying, I’m staying.” Andi turned and looked right at her friend. She had known Gregor long enough to understand she wasn’t going to change his mind. The big man was good-natured and generally cooperative, but when he set his mind to something, he was as immovable as a mountain.
“Just be careful. You’re a big target, and I don’t care how invincible you think you are, that wound you’ve got is slowing you down. If it gets worse, you let me know right away, okay?”
Gregor snorted derisively, the closest thing to a response Andi was going to get.
She shook her head slightly, simultaneously annoyed with Gregor’s obstinance, and impressed by it. Then, she pulled out the small portable scanner she’d hung from her belt. She’d tried half a dozen times already, but she did it again anyway. It was just as useless as it had been every other time. She hadn’t really expected anything different. She’d seen what the materials in shattered imperial ruins did to scanner beams and communications. And she was in the middle of the largest ancient construct she’d ever seen, one that seemed nearly intact.
She turned back toward her comrade, belatedly answering his comment about leaving. “I’d like to go, Gregor, I really would. But we gave our word.” A lie, one of a sort, at least. Some part of her did want to go, of course. The place was terrifying, and the fact that there were Foudre Rouge on the loose only made it that much worse. But Andi was driven by more than her promise to Durango. There was something about old imperial relics, about humanity’s lost and amazing past, that always drew her in. She’d never spoken to anyone about it, not even her closest friends on the crew, but she’d felt it nevertheless, even from her first expedition under Captain Lorillard.
Andi Lafarge had come from one of the foulest pits mankind had ever created, and yet she’d come to see wonders the Confederation’s vast and mostly prosperous billions could hardly imagine in their wildest dreams. She was driven by duty, certainly, and by stubbornness. But, also by curiosity, by the need to know more about a past that seemed almost a fantasy against the grim realities that had surrounded her most of her life.
“Well as long as you’re here, I’m with you.” Gregor’s voice was full of defiance, but he couldn’t quite keep the pain out of it. Andi winced, feeling a pang of guilt for her insistence on continuing. She could press on through her own suffering without hesitation, but watching any of her people enduring misery cut at her deeply.
“Well then, we’ll…” She stopped abruptly. She’d heard something from up ahead. Her mind snapped into action, her eyes focusing, trying to make out the motion she could see accompanying the brief noise. Her rifle was out and in place, and her finger was tightening on the trigger before her mind was consciously aware of the threat. “Down!” she shouted to her people, almost by reflex, and then she dove forward, firing even as she sailed through the air and down to the deck.
She wasn’t sure if her own fire had started first, or if the incoming shooting had beat her by half a second. But in an instant, the corridor was alive with intense fire crisscrossing back and forth in a wild storm of deadly force.
She stayed low, pressing her body down onto the cool metal floor, trying to present as small a target as she could, even as she aimed and fired again and again. She twisted her head, quickly confirming that her people were down, and that they were firing. They’d been caught in the open this time, the two sides meeting in a long hallway with nothing but distance—perhaps sixty meters—and shadowy stretch, courtesy of a series of apparently broken lighting fixtures, to offer protection.
At least it was even. The Foudre Rouge were as out in the open just as her people were.
She flipped her rifle to full auto. The enemy soldiers—she knew in her gut they were Foudre Rouge—were down also, doing all they could to evade her fire. The lying positions reduced the aim of all the combatants, and the withering fired ripped back and forth over the heads of those engaged.
Andi could feel her heart pounding, and she struggled to stay firm, to keep her arms and hands steady, and her aim true. Her mind was racing, trying to come up with an idea, some tactic or trick—anything—to get her people out of the firing line. But there was nothing.
Andi had been in fights before, brutal and deadly ones, but the haunted immensity of the imperial complex, the fact that she was fighting Union regulars and
not Badlands toughs, and the looming threat of the enemy ship up there somewhere, just waiting for Pegasus, were all rapidly becoming too much, even for one of her grim and stony resolve. Hope was a fragile thing, and even Andi Lafarge relied on some expectation of escape to sustain herself…and that kind of expectation that was rapidly fading.
She wanted to run, to flee from the complex, to go back to Pegasus and get the hell away from Aquellus. But that wasn’t an option. The instant any of her people got up, or even cut their own fire to crawl away, they were finished. They were in a fight to the death, with no other option but to continue. Even surrender—something she couldn’t imagine—was off the table. She didn’t believe the Union forces would take prisoners…and if they did, she knew it would lead to a worse fate that dying right there in the corridor.
She looked down the hall, trying to decide if she’d hit one of the Foudre Rouge. She wasn’t sure, not until she could see another one from behind, crawling over the forward shape, shoving it to the side.
She locked her eyes on the soldier coming to the front. He was low, tucked in close to the deck, but he popped up a bit, five or six centimeters, as he shoved his fallen comrade aside.
It wasn’t much…but it was enough. Andi’s finger tightened, and three shots ripped down the corridor. The soldier’s head disappeared in a wild spray of blood and bits of gray mush.
That’s two, at least.
“Three,” she muttered to herself, as she saw another Foudre Rouge hit. Gregor’s shot, she guessed.
The giant was still in the fight, however badly hurt he was, however much pain his wound was causing him.
The enemy fire lessened in intensity. For an instant, she thought it was a trap, some lure to get her people to rush the enemy position. But then she saw movement.
The Foudre Rouge were pulling back.
She stayed where she was, resisting the urge to pursue. She knew she would encounter any survivors again, most likely with reinforcements, and almost certainly in a stronger position. But she still wasn’t sure it wasn’t a trap. She maintained fire, fairly sure that only one of the enemy was still shooting back. She tried to get a read on how many had escaped. Three? Maybe four?
Definitely only one left.
She didn’t know if the remaining Foudre Rouge was a sacrificial rearguard, but it certainly looked that way. However much she despised the Union soldiers, she couldn’t help but admire the self-sacrificial bravery she was witnessing.
That only went so far, though. She wasn’t going to let him get away.
She maintained her fire, reaching around for another clip, reminding herself the entire time not to get careless, to stay tightly pressed on the deck. It slowed her reload a little. A fair trade for not getting my head blown off.
She was still shoving the new clip into her rifle when the Foudre Rouge made his escape attempt. He stayed low, exhibiting a level of discipline Andi had to respect, however much she hated the Union and its soldiers. She felt her hand shaking as she tried to hurry the reload, but before she could bring the weapon to bear, the enemy soldier rolled over on his side, clearly hit. Then, another round came in, and another. The figure stopped moving, and he lay there looking very much like he was dead.
She wasn’t sure which of her people had scored the hits, but it didn’t matter. They were a team.
A damned good team.
She stayed where she was for perhaps twenty seconds, her eyes locked on the bodies, and then on the corridor beyond. Carelessness got people killed, and she had no intention of leaping up and walking into some wounded soldier’s fire. But the three motionless forms were pretty messy, and she discounted the likelihood that any of them could still be alive. One more glance down the corridor, and she decided the rest of the Foudre Rouge were gone.
She stood up, still slow and cautious, and she turned toward Gregor. “You okay?” she was staring at his shoulder, at the wound, looking for signs of renewed bleeding. But everything seemed fine.
“Yes, Mother…I’m fine.”
“You won’t be for long if you call me that again.” She managed a smile, for a second or two. Then she turned toward her other shipmates. “How about you, Vig? You okay?”
“I’m good, Andi…but I’ve had enough of these Foudre Rouge, I’ll tell you that much.”
“Yeah, you and me both.” A pause. “But I doubt we’ve seen the last of them.” She turned her head. “Anna?”
“I’m okay, Andi.” She was holding a rag, which Andi realized had been cut from her jacket, against her upper thigh. “I caught one, just a flesh wound. Bullet didn’t even go in, it just grazed my leg.” The amount of bleeding evident seemed like more than a graze to Andi, but she nodded anyway. Anna seemed fine.
“Hey,” she said, looking at Jackal. He was still on the deck, looking back up at her.
At least his open eyes were looking up at hers. But he wasn’t moving.
“Jackal?” Andi felt her insides tighten, and she reached down toward her friend. “This isn’t funny, you know.” Jackal was the closest thing Pegasus had to a trickster, and for a few seconds, Andi grasped at the hope that he was playing a practical joke on them all. But reality set in with a deathly coldness.
She knelt down, dropping her rifle to the deck as she reached out and grabbed Jackal’s shirt, shaking him, pulling him upward. She could feel it immediately, even before she saw the widening pool of blood coming out from underneath him.
Her face was less than ten centimeters away, her eyes staring into his.
Into his empty, lifeless eyes.
Jackal was dead.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Unidentified Imperial Ruin
Somewhere Under the Endless Sea
Planet Aquellus, Olystra III
Year 302 AC
“Take it…take it all, the ammo, the grenades. The knife, too.” Every word sliced into her like a hot blade, but she said them anyway, instructing her people in excruciating detail to strip Jackal’s body of anything that might be useful. She tried to tell herself it made sense, even that Jackal would have wanted his friends to make use of his equipment. It was the absolute truth, but it still tore her guts out.
But that didn’t stop her.
“Let’s go…we’ll have to leave him here.” Another blade this time, just as imaginary—and just as painful—as the others. Andi didn’t really believe Jackal’s corpse had any real meaning. She’d seen enough bodies left to rot in the Gut, that of her oldest friend, the Marine, among them. But it still felt somehow…wrong.
But necessary. There was no way they could carry him, not and maintain readiness for the fight she was sure was coming. Gregor had already tried to pick him up, but she’d ordered him not too. The giant was badly wounded, and the last thing he needed was a hundred kilos thrown over his shoulder as he pushed forward, almost certainly toward another fight.
“Jackal wouldn’t want any of you to die here, not if his ammo or his weapons could make the difference. So, let’s do what we have to do and then get the hell out of here.” Andi’s normal curiosity was gone, her fascination with the ancient imperial facility lost in a sea of regret and grief. But she was even more determined to complete the mission. Breaking and running earlier would have been bad enough, but if her people turned and skulked away now, Jackal had died for nothing.
That, she couldn’t endure.
She reached down herself, scooping up several clips from the small pile of Jackal’s possessions her somber and silent comrades had made in the corridor. Her rifle wasn’t exactly the same as his, but they both took the same ammunition. She slammed one into place, and she looked down the corridor, her eyes frozen with malice. She’d fought the Foudre Rouge, killed them, because they were the enemy, because they were attacking her.
Now it was personal.
“Alright, we don’t have any more time to waste. We move in, find what we came for…and anybody who gets in our way gets greased. Got it?”
She turned and began
down the corridor, as the rest of her people replied with a series of grunts and acknowledgements, and then followed her.
She continued for ten minutes, then fifteen, stopping often to listen, and to look for any signs of the enemy. She was astonished at the apparent size of the facility, and somewhere between her focus on the mission and the roiling rage at Jackal’s death, she wondered what it had been used for. It had clearly been intended to be hidden, which suggested some kind of secrecy to its purpose. Perhaps it had been a base of whatever intelligence agency the old empire had operated, or some secret research institute. If the latter, she could hardly imagine the value of some of the contents. Old imperial equipment was far more advanced than anything known on the Rim, so much so, some of it seemed almost magical. What kinds of wonders were imperial scientists working on when the end came?
She stopped at an intersection, looking carefully both ways before stepping out into the perpendicular corridor. There were small trails, tiny clumps of dust and debris left behind by boots. From what she could see, there had been traffic in both directions. That meant, whichever way her people went, they risked leaving enemies behind them. It was a disturbing thought, but one that would be lessened in no way by pointless delay. She flipped a coin in her head, and she turned to the right.
“Anna, Vig…keep an eye behind us. We don’t need any surprises.”
“Got it, Andi.” Even Vig Merrick’s usual exuberance was gone, driven off by Jackal’s death and the fear and exhaustion running them all down.
Andi continued down the corridor for several minutes, and then she stopped and pulled out her portable scanner. She didn’t expect to see anything useful. The imperial alloy had pretty much blocked the device every time she’d checked. But, to her surprise, there was something. Radiation. Not dangerous levels, at least not yet, but definitely something detectable, in spite of the dampening effect of the walls.