by Tim C Taylor
She flew beneath the enemy fighters and clawed at them with the cannons in her nose and finished off survivors with her turret guns.
The Hardits were being slowly slaughtered, but Karypsic was sustaining heavy damage too. Her force keels failed, robbing her of maneuverability, and spraying high-pressure dimensional conduit fluids laced with highly unstable artificial elements that burned through her armor.
“Shield strength at nine percent and dropping fast,” warned Francini.
“Another missile launch,” added Jackson. “I think it’s time to play our ace in the hole, Captain.”
“You mean, we dumb apes get to play with that which we do not understand.”
“Yep. Do you mind…?”
The tactical display was filled with so many missiles headed their way, it was difficult to read. “Be my guest, Ensign.”
Grace saw her co-pilot beaming with excitement “Jumping…!” he said. “Now!”
Greyhart had deflected every question about the technology that propelled them across time. The intercalators. They were black boxes, with insides that were impenetrable, not only through heavy shielding but through a complete absence of conceptual understanding.
How the hell could they possibly work? It was only natural for Greyhart to keep that very secret.
And it was equally natural for the Far Reach Fleet to do whatever they could to learn about this impossible technology.
Every molecule in contact with the box that transported them back in time, and the much larger one that would return them to their time of origin, was constantly recorded and analyzed. Every fluctuation in the air current, every jitter in the power hook up could be important.
And the crews who had accompanied her and her mother on the trip back to Earth had been handpicked to include the brightest techs around.
So maybe – just, maybe – they’d found a way to jumpstart the upstream time intercalator, the device that took them back in time. Just a kick, that’s all they could do. Perhaps travel back a few seconds. Maybe a minute. Just enough to put the pursuing missiles and fighters off their scent so they could collect the remaining survivors and go home.
Or maybe they would cause an explosion that would echo through all eternity.
They were about to find out.
——
Sergeant Kraken, Arrow Squad
Victory Mall
“Time to introduce yourself, gun team,” said Kraken, turning to let off a burst of railgun fire at the Hardits hitting them from the north in suicidal waves.
“Roger that in spades, Sergeant,” O’Hanlon replied.
Then the Hardits were upon him, and all Kraken could think of was the enemy, gripping his ankles with their tails, trying to sweep his legs from him with maces, and the two-handed pole arms that he’d seen slice clean through Thongsuk’s left arm.
They were so damned close to the base of the obelisk, but the Hardits were swarming all over them in a confusing melee. Kraken daren’t fire his carbine for fear of shooting his own, so it was down to assault cutters thrust into snouts, and the shattering blows from armored Marine fists. But even Kraken’s suit-amplified muscles had tired. And he had the precious dead weight of Sergeant Chen’s body hanging around his neck. And even if Chen didn’t weigh much, her suit certainly did.
He screamed as a Hardit blade pierced the front of his right thigh. A left hook dealt the Janissary a stunning blow, but he himself had been brought to a halt. A pole arm swung from behind and struck him on the side of the knee and he almost crumpled.
“Not gonna take me alive, monkey-veck!”
Pushing down with his left leg, he toppled backward, hoping to crush the Hardit behind him. He went down as hard as he could. His weight combining with Chen’s, he listened for the crunch of Hardit bones breaking.
But it was not to be. He did, however, feel the Janissary’s pole arm being pulled from its grip as he pinned the alien beneath his back.
Kraken turned to fire at his assailant, only to see the Hardit’s head explode as Andrew Stafford shot it through the back of its head, spilling its brains across the force shield that covered the enemy’s face.
“Looks like O’Hanlon’s bought us a little time,” said Stafford, extending a hand to pull Kraken to his feet.
Kraken looked around to see the fleeing Janissaries had left behind swathes of Hardit corpses laid low by the devastating fire of the microwave cannon. Their internal fluids had been superheated, bursting ruptured organs to spray through eyes, nose and ears. And the zone of industrial devastation wrought by the M-cannon ended mere feet away from where Kraken had been caught in the confusing melee.
Unwilling to dwell on how closely he’d come to being cooked, he looked to the north, where the miniature New Order tanks that had seemed so threatening moments earlier were now lifeless, the crews broiled within. Only one mini tank still rumbled along the grass, headed away on a straight line that would take it past the temple to Tawfiq, from which smoke still rose from his sister’s last stand.
“That was quite some introduction, gun team,” he said.
“They’re running like rabbits,” O’Hanlon replied, “but there’s more on their way. Don’t hang around, Sergeant.”
“Keep moving!” Kraken urged the survivors of the two squads. “No one else gets left behind, living or dead.”
Before he set off, he checked the vitals for his squad. Half of them were showing up as wounded, and he was surprised to find he himself was marked in the same state, his suit having patched the wound in his thigh, and given his bloodstream something to persuade him to ignore his wounds. But even Far Reach Marines could only run on fumes for so long before the Piper demanded his payment.
Thongsuk had lost an arm in that last wave. His suit was patching him up too, but he was in a bad way. Stafford had seen it and was now carrying Marine and suit over his shoulder.
Kraken decided that wouldn’t be enough. “Fallaw,” he said, “assist Stafford. Get Thongsuk up to safety.”
Satisfied everyone who needed assistance was receiving it, Kraken looked to his own safety and limped to the obelisk.
He stood at its base, contemplating what he was about to attempt. Between himself, Chen, and both their suits and equipment, Kraken was about to carry thirteen hundred pounds up a near-vertical stone face. It wouldn’t be easy, and it wouldn’t be fast, but he’d seen these latest scout model armored exosuits work miracles.
Maybe they would work one more.
Kraken hugged the obelisk until his suit registered a good grip, and then began to climb.
He’d scaled two thirds of the way to the top when a volley of Hardit bullets raked the obelisk. A bullet ricocheted off Chen’s suit, chipping the obelisk inches from Kraken’s hand.
A scream pierced the air below him as the gun team silenced the snipers, but a fresh spark of fear put new urgency into Kraken’s exhausted limbs. If the Janissaries were now shooting to kill, he could think of few more vulnerable ways to present an inviting target than to squeeze all the survivors of Arrow and Vengeance into a tight space at the top of a pillar.
Hands splayed wide, he used the magic gecko grip to inch closer to the top.
“No time for sightseeing, Sergeant,” teased a voice.
Kraken looked up and saw Stafford was just above him, trying to feed a rope into his hand. A rope secured to the top of the obelisk.
Why hadn’t Kraken noticed Stafford descend to him?
Didn’t matter. He grabbed the rope and let his suit’s muscles take the strain as he abseiled higher.
Then an explosion below threw him off the wall, leaving him dangling with feet kicking over five-hundred feet above the ground. He looked down at the deep crater blown out of the parkland by what looked like a New Order artillery shell. Dirt and shattered Hardit limbs had been flung into the air and were now making their descent. The crater was a hundred feet away to the northwest, and if the enemy was willing to shell its own side in order to kill the Marines, t
hey were almost out of time.
He climbed the rope with fresh urgency, now just 20 feet below the west viewport. Another shell landed. Closer this time – maybe 50 yards away to the southeast – but he was largely shielded from the blast by the obelisk.
“Don’t get distracted, Captain,” he said to himself as he hauled himself up the last distance, hand over hand. “You know how easily you get distracted.”
“Surrender immediately or die!” came an amplified voice that flooded Victory Mall. Kraken froze. It was a human voice, coming from the Tawfiq Memorial.
A human? He shook away dark thoughts about collaborators and climbed for his life.
“The supreme commander has survived your mission of murder,” said the human, “and prevails to fulfil her glorious destiny.”
“Someone silence that jerk,” Kraken called up to the top of the obelisk.
“You are cornered. Escape is impossible. This is your last chance. Surrender or… ahhhhh!”
“Die?” suggested Kraken as friendly hands hauled him and his precious cargo into the space at the top of the obelisk, where he tumbled onto a leather floor covering to join the remaining survivors.
With Sergeant Chen still over his back, Kraken checked the skies through both east and west viewports and saw nothing but empty blue.
“Where are you, Captain?” he whispered.
As if in answer, a fireball erupted on the horizon to the northwest, followed a few seconds later by the aerial scream of powerful engines headed their way.
——
A little earlier in time…
Grace Lee-McEwan
Karypsic dove through impossible dimensions.
And then snapped back into comprehensible reality. Hard.
Grace was thrown against her harness, but the dropship’s inertial compensators rapidly readjusted. Enough for her to regain control of Karypsic’s flight controls and wait for the tactical display to recalculate.
When it finally admitted where and when they were, her heart leaped. They had jumped all right, but not back in time… they’d moved forward! About thirty seconds. How? Why?
“Holy mader zagh!” observed Francini.
“You got that right,” said Grace. “But we’re out of danger for the moment. Let’s go for the pickup point.”
There was a flash to the west, swiftly followed by the bark of an artillery piece. The Karypsic identified a battery in the process of deploying on the far bank of the river.
Grace banked the dropship to starboard.
“I’m sure Sergeant Kraken won’t mind us making a little detour,” she said, and checked the status of the dropship’s air-to-ground missiles. Empty. “Francini, load a brace of fuel-air explosives for the bomb chutes if you please…”
——
Corporal O’Hanlon, Vengeance Squad
Victory Monument
The dropship circled around the Hardits down in the mall, nose down and delivering blistering fire from its nose cannon and the one remaining turret beneath its belly, the other having fallen victim to what O’Hanlon identified as beam weapon damage. Frakk! That was a space-borne weapon! What had Karypsic been up to?
The Janissaries were directing fire at the dropship, which was taking a terrible pounding. O’Hanlon did his best to relieve the pressure by firing at every heavy weapon he could see, but the M-cannon was not the machine of devastation it had been earlier. They were down to four functioning charge conduits, six having melted. Jintu was advising a maximum ten-second burst followed by a minimum one-minute cooldown, and Jimmy Jintu was not by nature a cautious man. The artillery shelling had stopped almost before it started, but indirect fire was beginning to range them from somewhere in the city. Most of the Marines with him at the top of the obelisk were leaning out the viewports firing down at Janissaries scaling the pillar. He was too busy to look himself, but when Jintu took a peek and said it was like crawling ants, it didn’t sound good.
“At last!” whispered O’Hanlon. The Karypsic ceased its strafing hover and finally rose to the obelisk, coming to rest a short distance above the west viewport.
“Sorry to keep you waiting again,” said the captain, tilting the dropship at a 45-degree angle so that her belly was presented to the viewport, and the shields on the smoking upper nacelles protected them from incoming fire. “Stopped off to have a chat with a New Order artillery battery,” she explained as Karypsic dropped down to gather up the stranded Marines.
As Sergeant Kraken was ordering all remaining grenades fired into the Hardits, Jintu warned, “Armor headed our way from the southeast.”
The grenades went off, engulfing the ground below the obelisk in smoke and far more deadly gifts, but the incoming fire only slackened slightly. And the noise vibrations from the dropship defying the laws of nature to hang in midair were so intense O’Hanlon could feel his brain melting. How Jintu could possibly know tanks were on their way was beyond him, but O’Hanlon knew from long experience that the man had a nose for danger.
“Shut the cannon down,” he ordered his team. “Give it ten seconds to cool and then we’ll reposition at the east viewport.
Jintu and Bryan waited for their moment while their comrades clambered out through the west viewport and, with a combination of amplified muscle power and suit motors, jumped up and through the egress holes and back into the bosom of their dropship.
Bryan detached the M-cannon’s tripod from the floor, and with a fluid motion from long practice, O’Hanlon picked up the main assembly and carried it over to the new position, Jintu holding the power unit and heatsink, which were still attached to the main gun. While Bryan secured the tripod in the new position, and Jintu checked it was ready to fire, O’Hanlon looked out to see what threat they faced. But he saw only smoke clouds.
“We just lost two more charge conduits,” Jintu reported.
“Quiet!” snapped O’Hanlon. Ordering the sounds of battle all around to go quiet was not so easy, but he detected a new bass note. A rumble through his feet. Armor. Heavy armor.
Sure enough, the smoke cleared enough to reveal huge armored vehicles using gravitics to hover a foot or so above the terrain on their advance from the east. The sound of cracking masonry hit the air as the formation of three tanks crashed through the domed building to the east, pulverizing it to white dust. They halted as their turrets traversed to aim at the obelisk and the dropship.
“Did you want a lift home?” asked the captain, her voice the most deafening point of reference in the entire battle zone. A moment later, the Karypsic floated into view above the east viewport.
“Get out of here,” O’Hanlon growled at Bryan and Jintu.
They scrambled to obey. O’Hanlon cleared them from his mind.
No one’s getting out of here if those tanks fire.
A single M-cannon, barely functioning, against three heavy tanks. It wasn’t an even match, but maybe he could blind their sensors. Working as rapidly as he dared, he magnified the targeting image, aiming the cannon at the main sensor blisters mounted on the enemy turrets and on the front glacis armor near the co-pilot position.
“That’s something they don’t tell you in training,” he said to himself, as he ran his beam over the blisters, finding them exactly where he expected them. “If you travel back in time, then even Hardit equipment specs are exactly what the textbooks say.”
Infantry support caught up with the tanks and jumped up onto their bodies where they began deploying force shields to protect the sensor blisters. The Janissaries made tempting targets, but O’Hanlon told himself they would have to wait for another time, as he set the cannon to continuous fire and got ready to make his exit.
Gunshots suddenly went off just above his head. And more from behind that lashed his back with pain. He’d been shot! Warnings filled his HUD of the damage done to his suit and to his body. He looked up and saw Bryan and Jintu poking their head and shoulders out of Karypsic’s belly, their carbines clearing the west viewport of Hardits who were clamb
ering inside. Stafford was dangling out an egress hole by his ankles, holding his hand out to O’Hanlon. “Jump, you dongwit!”
But Karypsic was moving away.
Blind panic set in and O’Hanlon threw himself at Stafford, climbing over the M-cannon he had so carefully positioned, burning his foot and knocking the weapon over in his desperation to get away before his ride left.
He jumped into the air, pushing with his muscles and suit motors.
But he wasn’t gonna make it.
As soon as he engaged his suit motors, he knew they’d failed. The Janissaries had shot them out.
O’Hanlon dropped through the air.
And so did the Karypsic. She came at him from above, Marine Andrew Stafford falling right out of the dropship to grab O’Hanlon in mid-air. Stafford was held by two Marines who were themselves dangling by their ankles.
A part of O’Hanlon noticed the flames flaring from Karypsic’s upper nacelles, and the holes punched clean through the dropship’s hull, but mostly he was too busy holding onto Stafford as their ride home spiraled to gain height.
As he dangled helplessly, the chain of Marine bodies gradually hauling him upward, he looked down and noticed something about the Hardit tanks that hadn’t registered before. Their main turret armaments were not cannons as he had assumed, but lasers with full hemispherical elevation and traverse. These were anti-aircraft vehicles. They weren’t in the clear yet.
——
Grace Lee-McEwan
The countdown to the downstream intercalator dominated Karypsic’s main screen, though the multiple threat warnings vied fiercely for attention. Eight seconds to jump.
“We won’t make it,” said Francini. “It’s close, but we’re still dead.”
“You’ve got to juke us, Captain,” added Jackson.
Six seconds.
Grace weighed her options.
Greyhart had volunteered almost nothing about the two intercalators, but he had insisted that once the device was engaged to trigger their return journey, Karypsic should maintain constant velocity in order for the device to precisely track their position, giving dire yet non-specific warnings about what would happen to those foolhardy enough to ignore his warning.