by Tim C Taylor
The passageway leading away to port was hidden from view, but a ghostly view appeared in Springer’s vision. She concentrated on the red outlines of figures with tails and guns trained on the junction – threat indicators placed there by Saraswati’s best estimate of the Hardit position. The shapes were fuzzy: the AIs were guessing a lot of this.
“I see them,” Springer acknowledged Arun, before thinking at her AI. Why didn’t you, Scout Girl?
I did. You were too busy worrying about General Impediment to be disturbed by such minor details as the monkeys around that junction who wish to kill you.
“We’ll rush them together,” said Arun. “Grenades then darts. I’ll take point. Keep suit jets cold until ten yards from the junction.”
“Roger that.”
With a precise kick off the bulkhead, Springer sailed slowly through the air, her gifts for the waiting Hardits ready in her grenade launcher.
They’d met Hardit opposition three times since entering the station and come through unscathed. Hardits made poor warriors in space, but Springer still felt the brittle fear that turned her ribs to ice every time Arun put himself in harm’s way.
Getting a bad feeling, chimed Saraswati.
Me too, thought Springer.
Danger had been so much easier to face when they were kids. Those lucky enough to live through the novice and cadet programs enjoyed a life expectancy in battle of less than a day. Her friends had named her Springer because she always pushed herself back up after all those dumb mistakes she’d made as a kid – before going on to do something even dumber. All that had been her thumbing her nose at the universe. If she was going to die young, she used to tell herself, she was going to live what little life she had on her own frakking terms.
Nowadays, the fear of danger gripped her so tightly that she risked locking up.
This has a bad smell, said Saraswati.
Arun had his finger on his carbine’s trigger, only fifteen yards out from the junction.
Saraswati said nothing. She’d have to be truly stupid to confuse the hell out of her Marine a second before she fired, but the AI’s worry rang through Springer like an alarm klaxon.
“Abort!” screamed Springer through the link to Arun.
Without waiting for a response, she threw her carbine backward and lunged for Arun’s boot. She grabbed the hollow space where his ankle should have been, on a vector that allowed her to plant her boots against an air scrubber bolted to the starboard bulkhead. Luckily, the bolts were strong. With the amplified strength in her thighs, she first stopped Arun’s forward flight, and then flailed him around until he was flying back the way they’d come.
“I know you,” he said. “You… Ow!” She winced as his head bounced off the port bulkhead. “You do dumb things for the right reasons, Springer. I’m just a little slow to understand why these days.”
“Saraswati smelled something wrong,” she explained.
Her words would have sounded lame to anyone else in the Human Legion. Arun could easily have fired at the very moment she jerked him out of position. They could be dead now. It told her a lot that his first instinct was to trust her.
Arun conferred with his nonhuman partner for a couple of seconds before replying. “Barney agrees,” he said. “The enemy are too static. We approached close enough for them to hear us, but they didn’t react.”
“A trap,” Springer agreed.
“Specifically, a lure,” suggested Arun.
“Which means they were waiting in ambush.”
Barney and Saraswati must have agreed with their human partners because they added new threat symbols in the guesswork view of the hidden starboard passageway, painting them in blurred lines of orange because they were based entirely on conjecture rather than sensor data.
Springer covered Arun while he brought out a plasma torch and began cutting through the starboard bulkhead.
“It’s a water store,” he said once he’d burned a hole through. He hesitated, and she knew why. Arun’s instinct was to always take point at the first sign of danger, but Saraswati was a specialist scout model AI.
And they needed to know what lay ahead around the starboard turn.
“Cover me,” said Springer, and pulled herself through the hole.
Water was one of the most precious commodities in space, and that was doubly so for Hardits who used it as the basis of many coolant and hydraulic systems. They’d encountered Hardit water storage compartments so often that Springer had already learned one thing about water and pressurized zero-g environments: even in large storage areas, surface tension was usually sufficient to keep it wrapped in one bubble.
She floated through the water, keeping herself relaxed and ready to respond to threats from any direction. Saraswati was sending quiet pings to clarify the situation and soon learned that the station’s defenders had cut a panel from the bulkhead that separated the water from the suspected ambush location, and encouraged the water out into the passageway, the liquid obscuring the enemy’s thermal image.
Just one problem. The water was quickly slowing Springer’s momentum. She would never make it to the far bulkhead of the compartment, which meant she was going to be stuck here, unless she opened up her suit jets.
“Arun,” she said. “Saraswati was right. I count five, maybe more, waiting for us through the… Shit!”
One of the ambushers poked her head into the compartment, saw Springer, and began frantically communicating hand signals to her companions.
That face… It had a breathing mask over a hairless face and a flat mouth, not a snout. It was a young human woman.
“Springer! Report!” shouted Arun.
Two more human ambushers ghosted past the woman who had spotted Springer and swam into to the compartment, rifles strapped to their backs.
“Engaging,” said Springer as she fired three grenades through the missing panel and out into the passageway beyond. She lit up her jets.
“They’re human,” she said for Arun’s benefit.
“Stay inside the compartment,” he replied.
“Roger that.”
Springer gasped when a round creased her shoulder. She allowed Saraswati to guide her suit in a random evasive pattern while she inspected the medical and suit diagnostics. She would live, they told her, but she could do without the red ribbon she was bleeding into the water like an accusing finger. Before she could tell Saraswati to step on the gas, the shockwave from her grenades blasted through the water. It felt as if a lump hammer was thumping her chest, from the inside.
She fought hard to keep her senses, but her head was filled with the roar of white noise, and when she bounced hard off the bulkhead, she completely lost any sense of orientation.
Help me! she begged Saraswati.
If Saraswati spoke, Springer was too dazed to hear, but she thought she felt a sense of calm projected from the AI, followed by…
The view through her visor switched from the confusion of combat inside a huge bubble of water to a security image of a young Arun McEwan wearing a cheeky grin and the old-style camo fatigues in use before the Legion adopted their black uniforms. He was using charged boots to walk down a starship passageway, and from the way the charged routes were marked, this was Beowulf. This must have been on their return to Tranquility, the Legion’s first ever campaign.
What the hell are you doing? she asked Saraswati.
Motivation. The AI fed her a quick succession of images. Arun creeping into Springer’s rack when they were teenagers, wounded in the Battle of Swoons on Antilles, making hungry zero-g love on Beowulf just minutes before she tried to push him out of her heart for decades, a heart that stuttered when Saraswati ended with a medical image of Arun undergoing emergency surgery to amputate his legs. Frakk, he had been such a mess after Tawfiq’s torturers had toyed with him. She’d had no idea.
Stop that! I have to see what’s happening now.
Not yet.
I’m in the middle of a firefight, you insane m
achine.
No, it’s over.
What?
Arun sorted it, Saraswati told her. You were unconscious for ten seconds.
Then let me go to him.
You asked for my help, and that’s what I’m doing. I’m motivating you to save him from himself. The AI gave a dramatic sigh. If Arun dies, you will never be right again, and either you’ll leave me, or you’ll do something to get us both killed. But Arun is always going to take foolish risks to keep you from harm, because–
Because that’s who he is.
So, you do understand, after all. I’m just saying, Princess. If you want to keep me safe from Arun’s death wish, then you need to keep yourselves out of danger. Why a general should be running around bayoneting monkeys is beyond me. That kind of performance is simply not dignified, and you should give him hell.
Let me see!
Yes, mistress. I obey.
The visor display changed to show the water compartment she shared with three dead humans, and then changed again to superimpose a view of the passageway that lay beyond the bulkhead. Arun was inside the main ambush group. Eight of them, all dead, and by the looks of their corpses in addition to whatever damage the grenades had inflicted, Arun had shot them with darts and gutted them with his assault cutters.
No, not quite, she realized as she jetted through the missing panel and out into the passageway. One of the enemy combatants was still glowing red with a hollow outline, meaning the potential target was alive, but Saraswati didn’t currently rate him as a threat.
The only threat going on here came from Arun himself, who had his hand in the wounded man’s hair, dragging him out of the water and then ripping away his mask.
Springer glared at the traitor. He was young and with the slender physique typical of the human race before the White Knights had bred them for specialist roles. He was bloodied and groaning in pain with his hands pressed against his side where a cone of blood flowed into the air.
He flinched when Arun yelled in his face with a fury she’d never heard before. “What the hell are you doing fighting for them, you treacherous piece of filth?”
The man swallowed hard and summoned as much defiance as he could to look Arun in the eye.
“I am of the Faithful,” he said.
Springer did her own flinching when Saraswati gave her an electric shock: wake up and focus!
She left the traitor to Arun and carried out her duty, moving to the junction and checking all three routes for threats, noting the platform was still turning, and the empty suits and charged energy weapons a short distance along the port passageway: the lure that had nearly meant their deaths.
“Faithful?” said Arun. “Faithful to whom? To God? To your puppet governor, Romulus?”
The traitor laughed, but it quickly choked off into a wet, bubbling sound.
“We’ve got company,” Springer warned Arun. BattleNet was reporting a party of Legion Marines headed their way along the port passageway.
“We are faithful to the supreme commander,” explained the traitor with pride. “To the Blessed One, Tawfiq Woomer-Calix. It will be an honor to die in her name.”
“Grant that frakk his wish,” ordered a woman’s voice that Saraswati identified as Major Aliya Shadid, one of the cluster of armored Marines thundering their way.
“Negative,” Arun answered thoughtfully. “I want to know what we’re facing. I didn’t expect to encounter a human enemy.”
The SA-71’s characteristic whine and pop was the only warning Shadid gave as she put a dart through the traitor’s head from a distance of fifty yards.
“I don’t give a wet fuck what you want, Private. Any more of your insubordination and I’ll shoot you myself. Now, who the hell are you and what in God’s name are you doing in my battlezone?”
Arun wore a look of disgust as he opened his hands and allowed the shattered body of the Faithful man to drift away.
Princess, warned Saraswati, I don’t think the Major was joking. Remember that job I gave you?
With a hasty salute. Springer reported in. “Private Blanco, sir. This is Koraltan.” She gave Arun a kick and he saluted too. “First Sergeant Baker dispatched us as runners to contact Colonel Platov.”
“He’s dead. Give me the message.”
“Major-General Horden advises that Platform 27’s main weaponry has been disabled from the outside. You’re to shift priority to securing prisoners and capturing data stores.”
“Idiots!” snapped the Major. “You should have told me that before I shot the traitor. Both of you, form up behind. You’re with me now.”
Springer let the Marines pass. There were nineteen of them, plus the major, and they were moving as fast as their suit jets would allow. “Grab my boots,” she told Arun, and headed off in pursuit, towing General McEwan behind.
“Change of plan, frakkwits,” a Sergeant Khoury told them. “We were already after the data cores. That’s when we intercepted an enemy transmission. Hardit special ops have already retaken Platform 31, and they’re about to try for the other platforms too. We need to warn General Horden.”
“Why is the platform moving?” Arun asked.
“Because we’re shifting around to shoot Platform 31 out of orbit,” replied the sergeant.
“But General Horden said she had destroyed the gun.”
The sergeant sighed. “General Horden waves her magic name and bewitches simple privates and stripers with its spell. But she’s not as all-knowing as she wants you to think. For example, particle cannons have simple barrels that are regularly swapped out, which is precisely what we’re doing right now. Platform 31 is going to be toast as soon as we get the gun back online.”
— Chapter 32 —
“Turn it up, will you, Colin? Just a tad. I like this one.”
The combat AI plugged into the Mark 6 Phantom’s central console obediently amplified the thumping double bass of the Nova Bop track. Whatever it was called. The name escaped Caccamo’s mind.
“Sonny Sidse,” offered Colin, interrupting his pilot’s thoughts, as always. “Track’s called ‘Down Under Dreams’ from his Blue Beyond album, released 2565 A.D.”
Squadron Leader Laban Caccamo allowed Colin to feel his thanks as he loosened the harness of his acceleration seat and reclined it backward.
No matter the service branch, most people Caccamo knew detested the endless waiting as about the worst aspect of life in the Legion.
Not him. Not anymore. While Caccamo sat with the rest of his squadron awaiting the order to launch from the Lance of Freedom’s cavernous Hangar-B, outside in space the Battle of Earth was about to hot up. He kept half his mind on its progress while he relaxed in his X-Boat, basking in the cinnamon-scented air and his careful selection of Earth music.
“If one liberates a planet, it’s only good manners to get to know its music first, don’t you think, Colin?”
“Only a Philistine would think otherwise. Although… Laban, hate to bring it up, but… Have you any thoughts regarding the battle? Tactics? Orders? That kind of thing.”
“Really, Colin? You disappoint me. You can read my mind better than I can, and we both know it.”
“Yes, Laban. That was rather the point.”
Caccamo sighed. Colin was so much easier to get along with when plugged directly into his mind instead of talking through the headset speakers. He was beginning to regret setting his AI the challenge of being able to speak so convincingly as a human that he could get himself a flesh-and-blood date. “Very well. Hit me with the battle hymn.”
“Activating war music now, Squadron Leader.”
Only a few notes into his trumpet solo, Sonny Sidse faded away to be replaced by Caccamo’s game music – a track from Earth’s 20th century that he felt most perfectly captured his desire to crush the New Order. It was a number called ‘Putting on the Ritz’.
“It’s a trap,” Caccamo said.
“Obviously. If that were ever in doubt, 2nd Wing’s telemetry is worsening
by the second.”
Caccamo threw up his hands in surrender. “I get it, Colin. We’re outta time. You win. Give me a sample of what they’re saying.”
The jazz music faded to the background to be faced by pilot chatter from First Fleet’s other void wing.
“Setting shunt threshold to forty percent,” said Wing Commander Knutsen, a Jotun X-Boat flier with a gambling problem for which Caccamo felt some responsibility.
“Not enough,” said Void Captain Puja Narciso, the commander of First Fleet’s void wings who was out there in the fight. “All pilots in 2nd Void Wing – lower energy shunts to 30 percent and be ready to reduce further. The monkeys are frakking with the Klein-Manifold Region for a reason, so keep loose. They’ll attack soon.”
“You getting this, Cacco?” asked Dock, the leader of 3rd X-Boat (Strike) Squadron, not far away on the Divine Embrace, the other carrier of First Fleet’s central reserve. Like Caccamo’s carrier, the Embrace was advancing inside a cloud of picket ships and drones.
Laban Caccamo had been born to fire carbines as a Marine. His flying ability had come as a welcome surprise. The command responsibility that had come with it, much less so. Less than an hour earlier, Wing Commander Abayomi had been arrested, falling foul of the latest Blood Virus random sample testing.
Which left Caccamo as senior squadron leader in 1st Wing.
You’re the boss now, big man.
Taking Colin’s hint, Caccamo planted his most winning smile onto his face. “Squadron Leader Dock,” he answered cheerfully. “I’m surprised to hear from you. Thought you’d still be on your tea break.”
“I think it’s gotten beyond tea, old boy. Analysis?”
“We’re going to die,” said Caccamo without hesitation. “The monkey-frakks finally figured how to wipe out our X-Boats.”
“Damnation, Laban! I’ve come too far to walk into this slaughter without a fight. Think, man. What are we to do?”
“Klein-Manifold energy levels spiking,” said Puja over fleet comms. “All pilots reduce energy shunt limiters to 10 percent.”
Caccamo slammed his fists into his seat arms. “Mader Zagh, Dock! What do you think I’ve been doing ever since the first reports came in that the Hardits had heated the K-M too hot for us to use? I’ve got nothing. There are 300 souls in this void wing looking to me for answers, and I’ve got nothing.”