The Human Legion Deluxe Box Set 2

by Tim C Taylor

  Karypsic leveled out, or tried to but even this, the most rugged of spaceships, struggled to pull out of its 80-degree dive. It bucked, writhed and juddered, setting Grace’s teeth chipping against one another. There were far safer ways of delivering munitions than using a spacecraft as a dive bomber, but this was their last chance to kill Tawfiq, and she’d had to risk everything on an accurate strike that wouldn’t simply be shot out of the sky or deflected by a force barrier… Everything, including the margin of survival for the ship.

  Karypsic fought valiantly to raise her nose above the horizontal.

  But it wasn’t quite enough.

  The ventral nacelle, on which a force keel and a shield deflector were mounted, plowed into an empty expanse of grass in a northern spur to Victory Mall, which was shaking with the impact of Karypsic’s bombs.

  Within milliseconds, automated safety systems jettisoned the nacelle to stop the ship flipping ass over tail, but Grace had to fight hard to calm the gyrating dropship.

  Explosions burst behind them as the first salvo of Hardit surface-to-air missiles narrowly failed to track Karypsic’s wild movements and ripped into the park.

  It seemed like forever, but it was less than two seconds before Grace had wrestled a semblance of control. They were trapped, flying north over the bombed-out ruins of a once-ornate stone building in a narrow rectangle of parkland surrounded on three sides by tall buildings. With speed brakes on full, the ship had an airspeed of 101 knots, and altitude of half a hand span. She was headed for a gap in the trees that fringed the northern end of the park. From there she would break through the road that squeezed through the eight-story high buildings at the north end of the mall.

  Flying a spacecraft along a road? Tempting, but that was too risky even for her.

  Just as she was about to attempt pulling up into a vertical climb – another risky option, opening up the engines to blast into the ground at point blank range – Hardit fire from the rooftops lashed Karypsic’s upper shields. The explosive shells wouldn’t penetrate, but without the deflector on the lower nacelle, if she climbed now, the enemy guns would rip out Karypsic’s guts.

  The alien thing in her mind, the battle computer, spooled up with a rampant eagerness to take on these tactical problems and provide optimal solutions.

  “Pull up!” Jackson was screaming.

  As she scanned the Hardit threat from the rooftops, she dodged Karypsic starboard to avoid hitting a statue ringed by ancient cannons. In another two seconds they would hit the buildings.

  She didn’t have time for Jackson or the battle computer. And, she realized with horror, she didn’t have the option of the road either. A fence topped with downward facing guns stretched across the road. The guns swiveled around to track this incoming vessel.

  It seemed they were out of options.

  She grinned.

  But not for her.

  “Pull up!” Jackson called out again, but Grace was already kicking in a completely different maneuver. She activated the upper force keels and extended them forward, applying greater power to the port keel. The keels reached through to lower dimensions, which acted as a highly resistant hyperfluid – resistant enough to push back hard against the keels and apply a reaction torque to the ship. Then she kicked in with the gas. With her rear engines thrusting hard, the dropship drifted. The balance of forces was so delicately balanced, so easy to spiral out of control and into catastrophe, that Grace stopped trying to think it through and slewed the ship around on raw instinct, trusting to the intimate connection she felt to Karypsic.

  She’d missed being a dropship pilot!

  The stern of the ship threatened to slide out to starboard, but every time it came to the brink, Grace caught the slide and charmed it back to her will.

  “Yessss!” she screamed as they drifted around in a semicircle, using the statue as a pivot point.

  Francini was quietly engaging the Hardit positions on the rooftops with the upper pop-up turrets. So was Jackson, when he could get a shot in from the guns mounted in the remaining two nacelles, but he was also screaming for his mamma at the top of his voice.

  “Kinda noisy today, Ensign,” Grace teased. “Is that terror or excitement I’m hearing?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, taking out a pair of Janissaries on the grass who had been lifting dangerous looking tubes to their shoulders. “Both. Just promise you’ll never pull this stunt again.”

  “How rude. See that statue of a man on horseback? He’s holding out his hat to salute us.” She withdrew the keels. “They were proper gentlemen in ancient days.” And sped away in level flight. “Honestly, Ensign Jackson, anyone would think you’d never seen a spaceship pull a doughnut before. Right, let’s see what damage Francini’s done with his bombs.”

  ——

  Sergeant Simpson, Blaze Squad

  At the gates of Tawfiq’s bunker

  “For the Legion!” roared Sergeant Simpson, and was immediately brought to the ground by mace strikes to his back.

  “Freedom!” shouted another Marine.

  “Far Reach!” cried another.

  It fell to Lieutenant Morris to express it perfectly. “By the Grace of God,” he declared to Tawfiq, “let this evil be expunged from the universe.”

  But the evil in question wasn’t listening. Tawfiq was too busy cowering on the ground, her loyal Janissaries scrambling to form a pyramid around her, holding up personal force shields against death from above.

  The passageway rang out as something struck the ground over their heads, A deep bass after-shock shaking Tawfiq’s pyramid into a broken heap. It was followed by a high-pitched whine that seemed to be edging closer.

  “Bunker penetrator,” noted Morris.

  The whine screeched so loudly that Simpson’s helmet sprayed noise-dampening foam over his ears to limit the risk of permanent damage to his hearing.

  “Good old suit,” laughed Simpson. “But it’s a bit late to worry about my ears.”

  The penetrator spooled down, its attempt to drill through to their level defeated by the New Order engineers who had built this warren.

  But the Janissaries guarding the Far Reach Marines were still glancing up in alarm, maybe opening an opportunity…

  The captain hadn’t done yet. The world was suddenly stuffed with noise, perfectly tuned to a specific pitch, rich with overtones.

  Percussion bomb.

  The soundwave was all-encompassing. Simpson’s insides seemed to liquefy and then dance to the bomb’s deadly song. His vision kept glitching and his teeth hummed. But the percussion munition was not set up to kill him – painful though this was – it would have been calibrated to a specific resonance frequency. The single note that would kill its intended victim.

  The Hardits all around were suffering even more than he was, hands held tightly against their sensitive ears. But they weren’t dying either.

  With his vision still flashing sparks, Simpson fumbled around the front of the nearest Janissary and felt for its mace handle.

  Silent, inscrutable, and aloof, he’d ignored the Night Hummers whom Tawfiq had abandoned by the blast doors. Cracks appeared in the transparent tubes of the life-support tanks. The cracks spread to form black lattice work before shattering into an explosion of crystalline shards washed away by a flood of viscous liquid. The formless orange bodies of the strange aliens fell onto the glistening heaps of their ruined tanks and flapped pathetically, like landed fish.

  Two more huge explosions shook the passageway, but the Hardit warren held strong, and Tawfiq emerged triumphant from beneath the shields of her Janissaries. Behind her, the Hummers were barely twitching now.

  The captain had done her best, but it hadn’t been enough. Now it was down to the Marines on the ground.

  Simpson looked at the mace in his hands.

  He dropped it to the ground. No, that wasn’t the way.

  “You failed,” Tawfiq told Morris, walking up to him in triumph.

  “Don’t be
so sure,” answered the Lieutenant.

  Tawfiq extended her hand toward the officer. It looked like she was holding a remote control, but the device gave a short staccato noise and then Morris’s head… it just melted. The Lieutenant’s torso crumpled to the floor.

  “It’s time,” Simpson announced to the other Marines. “We’re not leaving this place. You know what to do.”

  He shut his eyes and thought a command to his suit’s operating system to alter the configuration of his power system. As he did so, he used the strength of his suit to stand upright, even though the human knees inside had been shattered.

  The fuel cell for the Armored Combat Exosuit was a thing of wonder, an alien design still only partially understood by Far Reach and Legion techs. The tiny zero-point energy miner at its heart was a miniaturized version of the power plants that propelled starships across interstellar voids. Wonder though that was, its greatest mystery was the ability to dump the enormous heat generated by using some voodoo-science dimensional chicanery that Morris would never understand. All he needed to know was the Far Reach engineers’ enhancement. The one that redirected the energy transfer back into an unstable closed loop.

  “Now!” he shouted, and set his fuel cell to this new self-destruct mode.

  As the Janissaries flicked their ears in confusion, trying to understand what this human was shouting about, Morris couldn’t feel a change.

  Was it working?

  He thought he felt an itch in the band across his lower back in which the cell was planted, but it was difficult to tell against the roar of pain in his knees.

  The itch grew into a searing pain that branded itself into his flesh.

  Then the heat built in a positive feedback loop on a one-way ticket to overload.

  ——

  Sergeant Kraken

  Arrow Squad

  Below the statue of Tawfiq

  The marble floor of the Tawfiq Memorial shook beneath Kraken’s feet, followed by a boom echoing from deep within the Hardit tunnels.

  It had to be Blaze Squad. Had they done it? Had they killed Tawfiq?

  There was no time for questions now. Giant was still at the bottom of the elevator shaft, and her suit was reporting hushed Hardit voices mustering beyond the turn in the passageway that led to the lobby beneath Tawfiq’s statue. Whether or not their supreme commander was dead, these Janissaries would soon be rushing along that corridor to expel the human invaders.

  Kraken reached a hand down the elevator shaft to his sister below. “Come on, Giant. Time to move out.”

  Her breathing was ragged in his ears, and her vital signs in his HUD were flashing red.

  “No, brother,” she replied. “It’s time to stop running.”

  A Hardit grenade exploded in the lobby, but it was answered by a Marine carbine spitting darts.

  Frakk that! I’m not leaving you, sis.

  “Arrow Squad,” he called. “I’m going back in. Link up with Vengeance on the roof.”

  He fell back down the shaft, spraying the lobby with darts as he descended.

  The sounds of battle fell away, and the smoke cleared a little. Enough to see that amongst the heaps of Janissaries, debris from a partially collapsed roof, and the sea of dart sabots that spoke of the increasing Janissary pressure they’d fended off, there were currently no active threats.

  Giant needed medical attention. She had lost a lot of blood, but somehow she was carrying on, hauling the bodies of Spurrell and Raschid over to the bottom of the shaft. Kraken knew exactly why she was doing this.

  “Let me go,” she whispered to him. “My choice. My way. I don’t wanna drain away in a hospital bed with tubes sticking out of me and a crowd of long faces waiting for me to go.”

  “Stop that,” he told her. “Let me help you.”

  She sat back in the elevator shaft while Kraken shifted Spurrell and Raschid to sit lifelessly beside her, checking that Giant had the access privileges to remotely command the suits of the dead Marines.

  When he was done, he stood beside her, resting his hands on her shoulders. “Have you got my back?” he asked.

  “Ever since the crèche,” she replied. “And I’m not stopping now.”

  He jumped up and out of the shaft.

  And into a firefight.

  ——

  Grace Lee-McEwan

  Karypsic

  Victory Mall

  Grace hovered Karypsic above a flowerbed and let the twin heavy auto cannons in her nose play over the Janissary infantry and light vehicles streaming in from the north to engage her Marines at the Tawfiq Memorial.

  Missiles and shells hammered away at the dropship’s upper shields. They wouldn’t hold out for long.

  “O’Hanlon, report!”

  “Watching and waiting, Captain. Just like you ordered.”

  “Keep your powder dry,” Grace replied. “You’ll get the chance. It’s getting mighty hot here, but I’ll be back.”

  Grace lifted the dropship and banked around to the memorial, keeping the upper nacelles and the vital shield deflectors they carried tilted toward the surviving Janissaries.

  “Bogies headed our way,” announced Francini. “Bearing 314, range just five klicks. Hugging the ground tight. They’ve launched missiles. Twenty of them.”

  “Thank you, Francini. By Horden’s Hairy Hide, anyone would think these New Order Hardits weren’t pleased to see us.”

  “Can’t stop right now,” she told her Marines at the memorial through Karypsic’s external speakers. “Be ready for pickup from the roof. Three minutes.”

  An explosion below ground rocked Tawfiq’s statue on her marble seat.

  “What was that?” Grace demanded of her squad leaders on the ground, using pulsed light flashes to cut through the Hardit jamming.

  “Missile impact in ten seconds,” warned Francini.

  “That was Giant, Spurrell and Raschid watching our six,” Kraken replied, smoke roiling out of the shaft behind the statue.

  A lump came to Grace’s throat. She could hear the ragged pride in the sergeant’s voice.

  “Understood,” she answered him. “And I’ve got yours.”

  “Six seconds…”

  “Ready countermeasures,” she told Jackson.

  “Four…”

  Karypsic put a little distance from the memorial and then shot straight up in the sky, leaving in her wake a cloud of false target signatures.

  Most of the missiles exploded prematurely, but six pursued the ship as it reached for the heavens.

  ——

  Grace Lee-McEwan

  Karypsic shot through the air like a rocket, compressing the air in front of her into a fiery cone. The Hardit aircraft did their best to climb in pursuit, igniting afterburners and expanding fuel recklessly, but were outclassed. Their missiles, though, were another matter, closing fast all the way. Countermeasures put one off the scent, but the New Order battle techs had long experience of Legion defensive munitions and their smart missiles were already learning to defy the few tricks Far Reach had added.

  Grace rolled the ship, to present the strongest shield deflection possible to the missiles that made it through. The shields still held, but they were now too weak to prevent damage penetrating. The missile payloads melted through armor and knocked out control systems with EMP bursts and cyber boarders.

  But they were still alive, and the missiles were slowing. Failing. Their motors cutting out, leaving them to drop back down into the atmosphere.

  Grace had flown them into the ephemeral heights of the upper atmosphere, where Earth’s gravity still claimed a thin whispery cloaking of gas, but which was entirely inadequate for the missile motors designed to burn fuel in air.

  Karypsic appeared to hang at the boundary with space, the blue arc of earth’s atmosphere a beautiful sight on the horizon.

  “We’ve been sighted,” warned Francini. “An orbital defense platform, 400 klicks away.”

  Grace waited, leaving the ship vulnerable to the
powerful New Order defenses designed to fend off full-sized warships. But she gambled that the platform’s weapons were oriented outward. She had no choice; she had to be certain they had shaken off all the missiles from below.

  The platform’s painting us with a targeting laser.”

  “Karypsic dove for the ground, the armor on her belly melting away fast as the Hardit orbital particle beam found her.

  But as the ship descended, Earth surrounded Karypsic in the protective embrace of her atmosphere, shielding her with deflecting particles that defanged the Hardit beam weapon into powerlessness.

  Halfway back to ground level, Karypsic exchanged fire with the pursuing Hardit aircraft who were still in their vertical climb. Did she hit one? The pass by flashed so quickly, Grace couldn’t tell. And by that point her focus was entirely on making her rendezvous safely.

  “And we are back,” Grace told the Marines on the roof, as Karypsic glided into position ten feet above them. “Get back and strap in. I was away for 183 seconds. Apologies for being three seconds late, but we experienced a little turbulence.”

  She swapped her screen view to show the hold where Marines in their ACE-6(S) suits were jumping up through the egress portals to land in the troop compartment. The first wave scrambled away to the edges of the area to clear the space for their comrades to follow.

  “Bogies are closing fast,” reported Jackson. “And there’s another flight of six approaching from the southeast. We won’t load everyone in time.”

  Grace weighed her options. Karypsic might possibly survive an attack run by two flights of New Order fighters, but the Marines left on the roof wouldn’t.

  “Enemy aircraft inbound,” she said through the external speakers. “Cease boarding. We will draw them away and pick you up from O’Hanlon’s obelisk.”

  She sealed the egress portals and flew away, accelerating at maximum survivable thrust once she was a safe distance from the roof.

  Karypsic ducked, weaved and corkscrewed violently, spraying out countermeasures in a dance she performed with the Hardit aircraft and air defenses over a 50-klick radius from the Marines she had left behind, but would never abandon.