by Tim C Taylor
Now that she was firing a formidable armory of diagnostics at herself, it didn’t take long to arrive at a likely explanation.
Arun was the only person who’d ever kissed her.
She laughed at herself. The fate of planets hung in the balance, of trillions of lives, and her mind was snagged on a boy who was long gone, the man he’d grown into a careworn and humorless shadow of the kid who had flirted with her.
Then she corrected herself. It wasn’t Arun she missed, but the girl he had kissed. If she lost Arun then she lost her last link to the naïve but happy girl she had been before she had ordered the destruction of the troopship Themistocles, and the death of nearly everyone she had ever known. Logic scoffed that this girl had also been lost long ago, but without Arun the death of her innocence would finally hit her with absolute finality. With him would die the hope that she could ever escape the role destiny had chained her to.
She shrugged inwardly. Hope was for mortals.
Indiya eradicated all thoughts of Arun, archived the memories of the force of sexual attraction that had briefly pulled them together many years ago, and expunged all other distractions.
She was the combined fleet.
She was more than human, and less. She was a human-war machine hybrid dedicated to winning this war, and she knew the battle for Earth orbit was not yet over. Tawfiq was holding back, both sides feinting as they tried to exhaust their opponent and draw out their early punches. But Indiya also knew how to wait. In most battles there came a decision point, a change of momentum or morale when the battle hung in the balance.
Indiya waited for that moment. That was her hidden role.
And when she judged the moment was right, she would unleash her hidden reserves and crush the Hardit navy for good.
— Chapter 28 —
“The humans are inventive,” said Tawfiq. “I scent that McEwan is not as dead as I’d feared.”
“Magnificence?” queried General Ulmack, commander of near-Earth space, who was on a zero-lag connection to the Victory City bunker from her command post on Earth’s moon.
Tawfiq enjoyed her subordinate’s confusion. Whether it was better that McEwan die now or later, was not a concern for such underlings. “I always assumed the most likely outcome was for the Legion to overcome the first phase of our defenses and establish a bridgehead on Earth’s surface.”
“Yes, Magnificence. The plan accommodates this.”
“My plan accommodates luring them to the surface, but your plan, Ulmack, does not. Your task remains to defeat the enemy in space. If the Legion establishes itself in orbit, you know what you must do.”
“Yes, Magnificence. I shall surrender myself for public execution.”
“Let us hope for your sake that shan’t be necessary.”
“Indeed, Magnificence. The enemy has entered my trap and I am readying to spring it as we speak.”
“Very good. Don’t let me interfere, Ulmack.”
Ulmack didn’t know how to reply to that, so resorted to the one slogan that would never grow old. “One scent! One people! One leader! Ulmack out.”
“Still nothing?” Tawfiq asked the Hummer hovering behind in its life support cylinder.
“We are being blocked.”
“Pity.”
Tawfiq considered how the events of the coming hours would play out. Ulmack was a highly competent commander. But the Legion was also well led, perhaps better. Tawfiq gave Ulmack a fifty percent chance of success. Though it pained her to imagine this, the production of the New Corps had not accelerated as quickly as she had desired, and she wondered whether it would be better for the future of the Hardit Empire if Ulmack were defeated. She toyed with the idea of sabotaging Ulmack’s efforts but decided the risk to morale if discovered would be too great.
Instead, she opened a connection to another subordinate. “General Dine-Alegg, ready Phase 2 to execute on my order.”
“Yes, Magnificence.”
Tawfiq half expected Dine-Alegg to point out that Phase 2 would only be required if Ulmack were defeated. But the general knew better than to complain and severed the connection.
“I don’t need you, Hummer, to know that victory is certain. The only question is how inconvenient the cost of my triumph will be.”
Tawfiq didn’t expect words in reply, more a telepathic sense of agreement, that her vision of the future was broadly aligned with the precognitive creature’s.
Instead, she felt a sense of confusion in the orange blob.
“What is it? What have you foreseen?”
“Nothing. I cannot.”
Tawfiq stared at the creature in surprise. Something looked different about the amorphous orange form inside its liquid-filled cylinder. A stream of red particles was circulating through its center. If the creature had possessed a conventional physiology, Tawfiq would describe that as internal bleeding, but who could really tell with these aliens?
Suddenly she was gripping her head in agony, tearing at her ears. It was the Hummer – its pain was bleeding out across the mental link.
“Hummer? Explain!”
“This… this… this… is UNEXPECTED.”
Tawfiq quailed under the Hummer’s dismay. “How can you say anything is unexpected?” she tried to taunt it. “You collectively see into the future.”
But there was no point in trying to do the creature down – it was too alien. What was more, it showed an interesting and hitherto unexpected ability to be distressed.
“Answer me this time. What future have you seen?”
“I have not seen the future.” A wave of such horror passed across the telepathic link that Tawfiq vomited.
“The past,” the creature said. “Danger! I have seen the past. Your past. It is changing.”
— Chapter 29 —
En route to Platform 27, Arun took in as much of the view below as he could.
Earth.
A beautiful orb in white and blue, with smears of red and green. Of the countless worlds he’d seen from space, Earth was the most precious by far.
For the treaty with the White Knight Emperor to stick, and for Arun to bequeath peace and stability to the Human Autonomous Region that he and Xin had been instrumental in building, Earth must yield to Legion control. It was that simple.
Or so he had thought until he had actually seen the Earth hanging in the void with his own eyes. Perhaps every species had a deeply wired connection to their homeworld, because he knew Earth could never be just another planet to him.
Was Springer thinking the same thing?
That information would have to wait. First Sergeant Baker had ordered them to go completely silent, to take the Hardits by surprise. But into that silence, Earth was insinuating its siren song.
He recognized the shapes of the continents, with names that had spoken to him with great power since he was a boy. Africa was his main concern, and it came into view below. In the north of the continent, in a great desert called the Sahara, pinpricks of lilac light danced like bioluminescent insects. The pretty sight betrayed a deadly reality down there in the gravity well: deadly energy beams lancing up from Hardit ground stations to clear the assault division dropping into the Sahara.
With Barney’s help, he forced himself to look away from the world from which his ancestors had been taken. He had entrusted Major-General Sarwar to deliver the Sahara landing zone. He and Springer had their own battle to fight now.
Platform 27 hove into view.
Function triumphed over form in the mind of Hardit designers, and yet they always seemed to include their signature imprint of squat ugliness. Platform 27 was a misshapen, dented sphere to which rings with bulbous additions had been grafted onto the outside like an afterthought. A stubby protuberance was pointing into space, waiting for the arrival of the main Legion fleet, only minutes away now.
This was an enormous particle cannon, the platform’s interior a particle accelerator that pushed high-energy particles through the cannon to slice through any ship armor devis
ed.
A unit of about two hundred Hardit Marines had snuck around the back of the platform, hugging the hull for cover, emerging at the Legion breach point and trying to wrest it back from a depleted company of about a hundred human Marines who were trying to hold it.
Small unit tactics in the void were very different from ground combat or the claustrophobic fighting through underground defensive warrens. There was no cover in space, no high ground, no alternative but to move, move, and move again, because if you stayed still you were dead.
To the outside observer, well-trained void Marines appeared to whizz around at random, like a molecular view of a hot gas. From the inside, the truth was that small unit commanders would be choreographing an intricate dance of feint and counter-feint designed to serve up moments when enemy soldiers were outflanked, outnumbered, and consequently out of the game.
But there hadn’t been time or a safe location to put in the hundreds of hours needed for the void squads of Arun’s Rainbow Bridge sneak attack to learn that dance.
This really was random motion. Sergeants screamed at their Marines to avoid drifting away in the maelstrom of fast-moving dogfights, binding them into a semblance of cohesion and falling upon flanked groups where they could, but relying for the most part on their Marine’s fighting spirit.
And it was working… up to a point. The Legionaries were holding their own, but in this slugfest, the superior Hardit numbers were beginning to tell.
Arun excelled as a strategist, not a tactician, He always had done, but there was another military trait he’d never lost. He had been a competition-winning marksman since before the race of Janissaries had even been conceived, back when Hardits were grumpy, aggressive, and deeply unpleasant but wanted nothing more than to keep themselves to themselves. Before Tawfiq created her abominations, who wanted to exterminate all other life forms.
And thanks to their ACE-2s’ stealth functions, the Hardits had no idea he and Springer had showed up.
Barney established a figure-of-eight holding pattern. It would be easy for the enemy to track, but Arun and Barney were counting on speed of execution to keep alive.
“If you’re there…” said Springer on a tight comm beam. “I’m standing off and taking them out with aimed fire.”
“You take the monkey-vecks closest to the station,” Arun replied to his invisible partner.
In acknowledgment, a Hardit just meters away from the hull seemed to sprout horns, as a hole punched through its helmet and skull, plumes of dark matter ejecting out into space.
Arun shot one in the back, an invisible beam of coherent light reaching out from his carbine barrel and burning through the thruster pack on its rear, and out through the front of its chest. The Hardit’s suit went wild, sending the alien careering into its nearby comrade.
The Hardit equipment must have improved since the last time Arun had fought in the void, because one of the monkeys was already turning their way. But before it could fire, Arun’s carbine registered that its laser capacitor had recharged, and he put a beam through the Hardit’s faceplate, a tell-tale finger of cherry red lancing through the intervening debris cloud before the beam was concealed by the content of its victim’s head blowing out of the shattered helmet.
“Keep firing,” Springer urged.
Getting dicey, said Barney through direct mind link, which was much faster than speech. We’ve got three seconds, tops, before they shoot us.
Barney was right. After a single laser shot powerful enough to take out a Hardit in combat armor, the SA-71 carbine required half a second to recharge its capacitor. Half a second was an age in modern warfare, and the Hardits were far from stupid. They wouldn’t allow Arun and Springer many half seconds before they returned fire to end this new threat stinging their flank.
Arun gave Barney the unspoken equivalent of telling him not to worry his little AI head and keep providing him with target solutions.
Arun shot the recoilless missile launcher that a Hardit was trying to point his way. A missile exploded in a burst of luminous paint that Barney predicted would soon engulf not only the missile specialist but its companion, a tall Hardit wearing a harness loaded with easy to reach missiles.
Arun had put his life in Barney’s hands many times. Despite his smarts, which made the AI appear almost godlike in his omniscience, Barney was still machine, and machines often didn’t understand what lay in the heart of a living, breathing person – even a Hardit.
If the enemy had been machines, Arun would have evaded by now. They weren’t. Already pressed hard by the 2nd Shock Regiment Marines, and now with this deadly flanking fire, they stopped functioning like the ultra-warriors the Janissaries fancied themselves to be, and began glancing at their fellows, to see whether they too were faltering. They began to look for escape routes.
What they saw instead, were Marines of 2nd Shock extending their assault cutters at the end of their carbines and charging at the Hardits head on.
Against Hardit combat armor, the monofilament needles would blunt quickly. And in the vacuum of space, the hideous whine of the fast-rotating needles, which put the fear of their foul gods into them, couldn’t propagate, although the ethereal blue glow that emanated from the needle tips could.
Logically, this modern-day equivalent of a bayonet charge made no sense, but First Sergeant Baker knew what he was about. He wasn’t going to use logic to defeat the enemy; he was going to kick the hell out of them with fighting spirit.
And he was right. The Hardits looked for gaps in the melee and fled through them.
Those who held their positions were rewarded by Barney and Saraswati marking them as priority targets for the two old Marines who did not slacken their fire rate.
Barney began nagging at Arun’s attention.
What is it? he queried.
I want you to look at something, said the AI as they took out another Janissary. One of the enemy looks distinctive.
How? Arun replied as he picked his next target.
That’s the thing. I want you to give me your gut, human reaction, and tell me I’m not going mad.
When his carbine was next recharging, Arun allowed Barney to return his field of view to the Hardit missile specialist and its loader companion.
Paint munitions were an ancient technology for defeating stealth systems, but the Hardits had taken it a step further by making the paint corrosive enough to eat through pressurized combat suits. The Hardit Arun had shot earlier was dead, still gripping with hands and tail a missile launcher that was rapidly dissolving. The loader was coated in the corrosive paint from one of its own missiles and was floundering like a drowning man.
Arun couldn’t understand what had attracted Barney’s interest. The loader was like the other Hardits. It lacked a tail, which was unusual but not unknown. After all, Arun himself lacked legs. Void combat was a brutal business but forgiving of certain wounds that would be disabling in a gravity well. But… there was something. The body was too long, the shape not right somehow.
Then the enemy’s faceplate blew out and the occupant squeezed his eyes against the bite of hard vacuum, pain and terror written across his hairless face.
It was a human!
“Christ on a bike,” exclaimed First Sergeant Baker so unexpectedly that it made Arun jump.
He was about to reprimand the NCO for hacking into a general’s visual feed when he remembered that he was now Private Osman Koraltan, and a senior NCO could access the visuals of enlisted ranks whenever he damn well chose.
“Nice shooting,” said the NCO. “Damn! Human traitors?”
“Where do you want us, Sergeant Baker?” asked Arun.
“Inside. Koraltan, Blanco. You’re to be runners. I can’t raise the colonel, so I want you to relay him an order from General Horden. The main armament of Platform 27 has been disabled from the outside. The colonel’s priority is now the capture of prisoners and data stores. Man, better make that human as well as Hardit prisoners. Better tell him too that we�
��ve lost all the officers in 5th Company. I’m assuming command.
Arun hesitated. Springer tried to cover for him by confirming the Sergeant’s message, but Baker would know Arun was rattled. NCOs could see more than their subordinates’ visuals; they could see ammo state, vital signs, mood states, and could even remotely administer combat drugs.
“You got a problem with that, Koraltan?”
Arun had to make a quick decision. Operating as a runner wasn’t easy without legs, not in the confined spaces of a weapons platform. If he couldn’t follow the sergeant’s order effectively, Arun had to own up to his true identity.
It was no decision at all. It might be the wrong call, but the nanites acting as combat drug analogs would not allow Arun to back down.
“No, First Sergeant. Just catching my breath. We’re good to go.”
“Then what are you waiting for? Shift your fuck-ugly butts!”
Springer and Arun flew into the breach alone.
— Chapter 30 —
Endless, cloudless blue sky burned through Wokmar’s goggles and seared her retinas. Zayk’Z regarded her without comment as she was forced to look away from the sky and kneel down in the sand, taking deep breaths of the sunbaked air.
The sea of sand that stretched beyond the horizon was hot, fouled even the most ruggedized equipment, and chafed her every joint, but at least it possessed enough solidity to counter the endless nothingness overhead.
“We are Janissaries,” commented Zayk’Z kindly. “Not gods. Even we suffer on the surface of this hell world.”
The gun team leader, Sil-Sfhanikel, kicked Wokmar to her feet. “If the battery commander catches you ground hugging, then she’ll give you something more than being above ground to worry about.”
Sil-Sfhanikel bared her teeth and exceeded dominance scent, but her odor also carried undertones of wariness without anger. She padded around the gun emplacement on all fours, the other four gun-crew watching her every move with their snouts raised attentively.
“Look here,” said Sil-Sfhanikel indicating with her tail a section of the emplacement wall where the desert was spilling over. “Wokmar hugs the sand dunes, which makes me suspect her loyalty to the New Order because the dunes are our true enemy, not the humans and their lesser-race nefnast allies. Sho, dig us out before were all buried beneath the sand.”