by Tim C Taylor
Haarfyorun saluted and her image disappeared from the command pit.
“Chaeykz?”
“I’m here,” replied the space pilot.
An explosion rocked the control center. From the bottom of her command pit, Khallsheg-Hihn couldn’t see what had happened, but it felt like rough hands had reached inside her body and squeezed her lungs. Gunshots echoed off the overhead.
“The base is lost,” she told Chaeykz. “I haven’t much time. This is what you must communicate to your new superiors. Intel told us of the enemy’s attack routes. From the assault on the sector base, to the strikes against our posts in the asteroid belt and around Mars, we knew they were coming because so many of the individuals involved were infected by the virus. But as for the operation around Ceres, we haven’t heard from a single individual. Nothing from the pilots, the bombardiers, those who planned, fueled and armed the mission. Nothing. Find out why.”
The pit shook with another explosion, this time so violent Khallsheg-Hihn was thrown to the deck. When she picked herself up, blood gushing from her nose and her ears ringing with a hiss that drove out all other sounds, every display in her command pit had died.
Something above attracted her peripheral vision, and she looked up to see black eggs bounce off the overhead and sink gracefully down in the low-g.
Grenades.
— Chapter 07 —
Monkeys were running hither and thither across the compartment that housed the enemy’s data stores, but the Marines that Sergeant Major Hecht had scraped together from the remnants of First, Third and Seventh Companies had them surrounded. There was nowhere left to run.
Amid the panic, there was one Janissary who acted like they had a purpose, and a vital one. It had something in its hairy hand and was rushing to an equipment bank to plug it in.
We’re not supposed to call them monkeys any more, admonished his AI, whose name was Lanzi.
Hecht put two rounds through the Janissary’s skull. “Rosenberg, grab whatever that monkey veck was going to plug in.”
Laban…
All right, he admitted. They aren’t monkeys. They’re New Order monkeys. Satisfied?
Only when every last one of the vecks is dead.
Oorah to that, my friend.
Shouts of ‘clear’ rang out through the room filled with computers and heavens knew what. Menes Hecht had been many things in his life, but a code slicer was not one of them.
“Heffernan,” he shouted, “get the nerds in here at the double.”
“No need, Sergeant Heffernan,” said a young Marine inspecting the monkey whose brains Hecht had just blown out. “The… ahh… nerds were here all along.”
Bugger! observed Lanzi, and identified the Marine as Tech-Lieutenant Chan. The kid officer reports into divisional support with the other nerds. Didn’t spot him.
Don’t burn out on me yet, Hecht told his AI. Probably kept quiet because he trusted me to do my job. Chan walked over to Hecht, having taken the plug-in device off Rosenberg. Let’s see if he can do his.
“The full-attenuation Faraday cage you placed around this location is functioning well,” Chan told him. “If it fails, the enemy can connect through and wipe the data cores remotely. Sergeant Major, I don’t need your Marines to assist my team in extracting the cores. I do need you to guarantee the Faraday cage holds until we’ve got what we came for.”
“Understood, Tech Lieutenant,” said Hecht before looping in the NCOs he had acquired on the way in. “The Lieutenant wants us hairy bucket heads out of his face so his nerds can do their thing. Our job is to guard the Faraday nodes we stuck at random outside, because if we don’t, then all of this has been in vain.”
Nerd Marines, mused Lanzi as his human strode into the passage outside. Didn’t have such things when we were young. Didn’t need ’em.
Galaxy’s changed, Lanzi. Reckon we’re still good for one more campaign, though.
Just the one. After all, if McEwan can keep going, so can we.
— Chapter 08 —
“I’m hit!” cried Zébulon.
An instant later, a flare of light pierced the dark, flooding Arun’s X4B cockpit.
And then the light was gone, and Zébulon’s Barracuda with it.
“We’re not gonna make it,” said Lissa calmly.
They were hurtling towards Ceres, Arun hoping to bend the dwarf planet’s gravity field to his advantage, a complicating factor that would suit the superior flying ability of the Misfits.
Then Choosy disappeared from his HUD, and Arun knew their time was up. Even if Misfit Flight reached Ceres, they needed smart interplay between its pilots to slice the enemy apart. And they were fast running out of pilots.
“Catcher to all call signs. It’s time to thread the needle again.”
“Ready?” he checked with his bombardier.
“You just fly this crate and stop worrying your pretty head about me. I was born ready.”
With a chuckle, Arun pivoted the Barracuda around 180 degrees to point at the pursuing fighters. While Lissa let rip with missiles and cannon fire, and Barney threw electronic sorcery at enemy avionics and the intelligence inside incoming missiles, Arun concentrated on the tricky task of energy management. He had to convert their craft’s momentum into energy that he could bleed away into the local Klein-Manifold Region without dumping too quickly and turning his X4B into a miniature version of a supernova.
They’d threaded the needle once already, stopping dead in space and then turning around at high speed to tear through the pursuing fighters with shields buzzing and weapons hot.
Five of the enemy had been taken out, and another six blown apart as the Misfits had come back through the Draesheg fighters from behind.
The Misfits hadn’t lost a single Barracuda in that run, but they’d all taken a lot of damage. And now that the K-M Region was hot, both their superior maneuverability and shields were rapidly degrading.
“Arun!” yelled Lissa. “Missiles!”
Arun surrendered his mind to his AI and let Barney jerk the Barracuda about like a puppet on an elasticated string. At the same time, Barney calmly informed him that they had exhausted their own supply of missiles.
His gut lurched at the thought that he hadn’t tracked munition expenditure. And then he remembered: with their special cargo, they’d had no space for more than a token loadout.
Barney, though, worked magic with the nose cannons, destroying the two missiles that had almost made it past their other defenses.
But the missiles had been part of a salvo from the incoming formation, and not all the Misfits were so fortunate.
Boudicca’s X4B shattered into fragments.
Cheb’s blew apart just a short distance to aft, flinging out debris. As Arun looped away as fast as he could, he saw the surreal sight of a Barracuda flight seat tumbling past the cockpit, inertia flinging out its empty harness straps. But he couldn’t escape the debris field quickly enough.
The flight controls went slack, and the abrupt lack of control made his heart leap into his throat.
The Barracuda designers had built their craft to be tough. A combination of auto repair systems and automatic rerouting through the multiple backups for all critical components meant that Arun regained control almost immediately, although the flight stick response still felt soft.
“We’re hit,” he cried over the open comms channel. “Going down.”
“Good hunting in the afterlife, Catcher,” replied Lard, the only other survivor. “I’ll take a few of the monkey bastards down with me. No. No! Ahhhhhh!”
“Idiot machine,” grumbled Arun. He corkscrewed the Barracuda as the icy planet began to fill the cockpit. “Brace for impact!”
Instinct took his hands off the controls at the last second, and he flung his arms in front of his face just before they hit, but the primitive reaction was hopelessly overwhelmed by the speeds of space combat. The doomed Barracuda was coming in at 80 klicks per second when the additional deflector the
y were carrying instead of a full load of ordnance fired at an altitude of a thousand feet. Barney was watching over the descent and impact diligently, controlling every aspect to the limit of the damaged craft’s ability, but to Arun it all happened in the blink of an eye.
The deflector firing.
The cockpit exploding, robbing the air from his lungs and exposing him to the brutality of rapid pressure loss.
The sheer panic of impact as the X4B-Barracuda hit a frozen sea hard enough to melt the ice and send up a geyser of steam that froze into a spray of crystals, slowly spreading across the empty sky of this airless world.
Misfit Flight was no more.
But in its place, were the stirrings of something new.
Rainbow Bridge.
— Chapter 09 —
“It’s no use, sir, they’re too strong.”
The corporal was making her report to the kid Tech-Lieutenant, but the situation on the Carbuncle was going south fast, and Menes Hecht wasn’t prepared to waste a single second on the niceties of protocol.
He butted in.
“She’s right, Lieutenant Chan. The new wave of Janissaries has our way out buttoned up tight with force shields interlinked with auto cannons. They may be furball monkeys, but they make an effective anvil. Here at the rearguard, these Janissaries–”
“Are the hammer. I do understand that, Sergeant Major. I also know the charges we laid in the data center are still active and nearly at the end of their countdown. We need another route out. Fast.”
“Sir, if we–”
“Hold fire with that thought, Hecht. The laser borers we used to dig out the data cores… If we use them to drill into the outer hull and stuff the holes with det packs, we could blast clean through into space. Sorry, Sergeant Major. What were you going to say?”
“Ahh… pretty much what you just said, sir. I’ll make it happen.”
The Marines cut off on the outer deck were down to their last officer in Chan, but the NCO backbone was still strong, and in short order Hecht put the escape operation in the hands of Marines he knew he could rely on.
Just in time. Movement in the overhead caught his eye, and he put a burst of rounds from his SA-71 into the area as a matter of principle.
He was rewarded by Hardit blood and screams. But the enemy was coming through the ceiling at several points, and although sharp-eyed Marines had raised shields high quickly enough to contain the worst of the explosive charges the Janissaries were raining down, Hecht knew the rearguard position was overrun.
“Fall back!” he yelled, switching to armor piercing and blindly spraying the overhead with rounds.
The next rearguard point was already prepared. Equipment crates and Hardit corpses were piled into a barrier that would channel attackers into a single file. He checked that its defenders were already pointing sensors and carbines at the overhead.
Hecht organized a controlled withdrawal, his ad hoc force alternating between sprinting for the new position and throwing out suppressive fire.
“Menes, I’ve got news,” said a voice in his helmet who wasn’t registering in his HUD. It was so unexpected, it took a moment to realize who this was, even though he’d known that voice ever since way back when they were stationed out of Detroit, Tranquility.
“Laban,” Hecht acknowledged. “Kinda busy here, but I’ve always time for my old bud. Don’t tell me, you’ve given up pretending to be a space rat flyboy and want to rejoin the proper Marines.”
“Not this time,” replied Squadron Leader Laban Caccamo. “Thought you’d want to know. Arun’s confirmed KIA. I know we haven’t always seen eye to eye with him, but the man was a hero. I’m concerned how the youngsters will take the news.”
Lanzi gave him an electric jolt up the ass that threw Hecht’s aim wild. He looked around and realized he was the last Marine out in the open. With a parting gift of his last frag grenade, Hecht ran full pelt for the gap in the barricade.
“Never liked him much,” Hecht panted, “but you’re right, McEwan was a hero. And so–”
“Fire in the hole!” came the warning across SquadNet from Lieutenant Chan.
“And so is every last one of my Marines on this Carbuncle,” Hecht finished. “The kids are doing fine, Laban. Guess we need to start trusting them.”
Hecht never reached the barricade.
A section of hull blew out into space taking atmosphere, Marines, Janissary corpses and everything else with it.
Emergency depressurization systems slammed in operation, sealing off the area with force shields. But Tech-Lieutenant Chan had anticipated this, and the shield nodes near the breached section of hull had already been burned away by carbine lasers.
The shields sealing off the corridors, on the other hand, worked at full strength. Not only did they seal in the station’s atmosphere, but when the Janissaries recovered, they would be sealed away from the escaping Marines too.
Not bad, muttered Hecht to Lanzi as he allowed himself to be sucked through the hole in the space station, needing his AI to apply only a short blast from his suit motors to avoid impaling himself on the jagged edge of the blast hole. Not bad at all.
— Chapter 10 —
As the bombs blew in the heart of the Carbuncle, signaling the successful conclusion of the mission, Caccamo shook his head in disbelief, not quite ready to accept that Arun was really dead. Again and again over the years, the man had cheated death. Was this time truly different?
Marines streamed through the void, away from the doomed New Order space station and toward the relative safety of the TU warboats waiting in the evac zone. In their stationary holding positions, the TUs were highly vulnerable, dead in space if Caccamo’s X-Boats weren’t running escort patrols. Sure enough, an enemy fighter formation revealed its presence through an unwise communication ping to the station, which was beginning a slow tumble on its way down to the Lunar surface.
“Time to keep the bad guys away from the bucket heads,” Caccamo told his squadron, painting an updated mix of intercept and escort orders to his flight leaders. “As someone told me recently, every last one of them is a hero.”
“You sure about that, Cacco?” laughed Hay Bale. “Surely you’re not including Sergeant Heffernan in your list of golden heroes.”
Caccamo sent his Phantom Mark 6 corkscrewing toward the enemy warboats. As the squadron AIs interrogated the tiny sensor bots they’d flung out when they’d first reached the area, they arrived at the conclusion that there were a metric frakk-load of enemy fighters inbound.
“I’m especially thinking of Heffernan, Hay Bale. Anyone who volunteers to share your rack is going above and beyond in my book.”
Laughter washed around the squadron channel, but it was strained.
Caccamo knew it wasn’t the odds they faced that was causing the tension. They were usually heavily outnumbered when they came up against New Order fighter craft. His pilots must have heard about Arun too.
None of their success in the opening skirmish of the Battle of Earth would register in the minds of those who had not participated. No matter the odds his squadron faced, and despite all the sacrifices made by the Tactical Marines in getting away with the data cores, this would be marked as a dark day in the history of the Legion.
This was the day when Arun McEwan finally ran out of luck.
— Chapter 11 —
“Not much of a view, is it?”
The wrecked Buccaneer had hit the ground at a 30-degree angle with its nose buried in the ice and slowly sinking further. Arun looked up through the force bubble where once the cockpit’s upper surface had protected him from the environment of space. He saw a sea of white dust, heavily cratered and utterly silent.
“I don’t agree,” he told Lissa, craning his neck to look up at the ice crystals sparkling over their heads like fairy dust. “It’s a vacation. Quit complaining.”
She loosened her harness to loom over him. “Fine.” She grinned. “But next time, I pick the destination.”
“Harness is part of the life-support,” he told her, which was a partial truth at least. “You better strap back in.”
He bent his chin to his chest and breathed deeply of the warm air channeled by his harness to chase away the ice filling his lungs.
There was enough medical equipment in the seat and harness to tell whether the rattle in his breathing really did come from ice. Barney would have told him. Probably.
Talking of Barney…
“Any sign of the Hummers?” asked Lissa from the seat behind.
Arun clamped his jaw shut rather than give the only other living person on Ceres the rebuke she deserved. The other Buccaneers had not only been crewed by AIs in order to prevent infiltration by personnel infected by the Blood Virus, but also to free up space and mass to carry the Night Hummer team, and their equipment currently masquerading as crash debris. Lissa knew perfectly well that even if they were in a position to do so, the Hummers would not think to inform the humans who had led them here of their status. The amorphous aliens were not exactly known for their love of small talk.
Neither are you, observed Barney. She’s just trying to strike up conversation.
Arun mentally waved away his AI. What would he know? Lissa was a looming presence in his mind. They had been the best of friends long ago. More than friends. Far more. But now she loathed him and wouldn’t even let him use her name when they were literally the only two people on this world.
And yet here she is, accompanying you on your most dangerous mission in years as your aide and bodyguard.
“Get out my frakking head!”
Do I have to spell it out?