Mavericks (Expeditionary Force Book 6)

by Craig Alanson

  Another press of her pinky kicked the selector up into three-round burst mode and she gently pressed the trigger button. The rifle had an internal weight that launched forward as the electromagnetic rails accelerated each flechette, so she felt almost no kick against her shoulder and the rifle’s muzzle barely moved between rounds.

  Three flechettes reached out and she saw an arm flung up above the ferns as an enemy was struck. She ducked down and hugged the ground as returning fire scorched the tree branches above her. One down, two to go. But she could not move from her position, one of the enemy was firing to keep her pinned down as the other no doubt tried to circle around and outflank her. The nearly-continuous enemy fire scorched the air, confusing her suit’s sensors. Confused her passive sensors, but she had other options.

  She rolled over onto her back and fired her rifle’s maser in a long burst to make the enemy take cover, then she reached onto her belt and tossed upward a hummingbird-sized sensor drone. The tiny device soared twenty feet over her head and zipped away, unable to climb higher or its sensors would be blocked by the tree canopy. The mini-drone survived for five seconds, its active sensor pulses attracting attention and ensuring its quick death. Five seconds was long enough, more than Shauna had hoped.

  Having received data from the powerful sensor pulses of the drone, Shauna’s suit had mapped out a momentarily clear picture of the surrounding forest and she took in the info in a flash. One enemy was lying prone a hundred meters away toward the river while the other soldier was racing on her right, nearly even with her. Shauna exploded up onto her knees, sent a barrage of maser pulses at the running soldier and dropped back to the ground in less than two seconds, holding her breath as the branches above her were sliced by return fire.

  Another one down, her suit clearly indicated she had killed or disabled the running soldier. She was now facing only one enemy and hope surged within her, hope that was unexpected and unwanted as thinking about the possibility of survival was a distraction she could not afford. She needed to—

  Her visor blanked out, going clear as the suit’s sensors temporarily were knocked offline. EMP, she realized in a panic. The lone remaining enemy soldier must have fired a rocket toward her, a rocket that did not explode but instead generated a powerful electromagnetic pulse that partially disrupted the mechanisms of her skinsuit. She was temporarily blind other than what her eyes could see and what her ears could hear. With a thumb, she broke the seal on her helmet faceplate and swung it upward, holding her breath to listen with desperation. While her suit’s sensors were blind, the enemy would have been unaffected by the EMP, as the energy weapon would have been tuned not to emit frequencies used by the enemy mech suit.

  What to do? She couldn’t stay where she was, and her suit’s power-assist motors were fully active, though her own muscles had to provide all the guidance without suit sensors scanning the ground ahead to prevent her from stumbling. She turned to look behind her, where the underbrush thinned out, the ground there being saturated with water in a marsh. The ground where she had taken cover was spongy and as she moved, the water broke away in a sucking sound that made her cringe, for the sound surely gave away her exact location.

  Holding still, she listened and heard a crashing sound to her left. Having little choice as her sensors were still only seventy percent reset, she smoothly rolled up to one knee and scanned the forest to the left, seeing only ferns and low-hanging tree branches swaying. She squeezed off a three-round railgun burst, feeling the stock buzzing lightly against her shoulder. Switching back to the maser beam, she—

  Was knocked to the ground as a maser burned into her right shoulder, from behind. The sound she heard must have been a decoy, the enemy tossing a stick or something to her right. She had been a fool and now she paid the price. The skinsuit had absorbed part of the maser energy, partly by the suit dropping stealth and going silver to reflect the high-energy photons, and partly by the outer layer flaking away to expel the heat. It was not enough, not to compensate for a close-range direct hit. Her right side was immobile, the helmet now totally offline. Painfully, with the suit’s motors almost fighting against her, she held the rifle with her left hand and fell back against a tree to face right, looking for the enemy.

  And seeing nothing. The enemy’s stealthware and chameleon capability was fully active, without synthetic vision she had to hope she could detect movement out of her peripheral vision as her Ruhar trainers had taught her.

  What the hell. The enemy was probably staring right at her, gloating as she slumped against the tree, nearly helpless. With nothing else to do, she screamed defiance and cut loose with the maser on semiauto mode, sweeping the forest in front of her. Her rash action was rewarded by a glimpse of an enemy silhouette lit up by maser bolts, just as a railgun dart slammed into her chest-

  Emily Perkins’ heart skipped a beat as she saw the icon representing Sergeant Shauna Jarrett go red, to reflect yet another human was dead on the battlefield. Perkins was now the only human survivor of her team, with her Ruhar liaison Nert Durndurff the only living being on her side in the battle. “Nert! Go ahead!”

  “No, Colonel Perkins, I will not leave you! We are almost there!”

  Perkins did not waste time or energy arguing with the teenage alien. “To the right, along this stream!” She turned, her skinsuit stabilizing her clumsy motions to prevent her from falling in the high-speed maneuver. With the power assist of her suit motors, she was running at the speed of an all-out sprint, a speed that by herself she could only keep up for fifty meters or less, but she had been running at that pace for a full two kilometers away from the river. It was blindingly, astonishingly fast, and it was not enough. Four icons representing the enemy were gaining on them, gaining rapidly, with two veering left and two right. The enemy was trying to encircle the two survivors, and there was little Perkins could do. Splashing along the streambed, she and Nert were momentarily away from the enemy’s line of sight as she could see her goal; a defensible position.

  When she began running up and away from the stream to a low ridge, she urged Nert onward, knowing the young alien was holding back his own pace to cover her. As Nert ran, he was firing his rifle’s maser backwards blindly. She didn’t bother to stop him, for just then she reached the top of the ridge and folded her legs to crash down into a shallow swale, rolling over onto her belly and bringing her rifle up to sight over the ridgeline. The position was not as defensible as it had looked when she scouted the area that morning, the terrain was terribly exposed behind her and the ‘ridge’ was no more than three feet tall, barely enough for her to take cover behind.

  Nert ran toward her and she raised her left hand, waving to him. The alien cadet charged up the slope in two long strides, ducking under a vine and bounding high over the ridge top, whooping triumphantly until his body jerked as he was hit by a maser beam and a railgun dart at the same time. He fell forward to hit the ground hard with a thud Perkins felt through her suit.

  “Nert! Nert!” Perkins screamed frantically, dropping her rifle and crawling to the cadet, but he was already gone. “Son of a-” Perkins bit her lip inside the helmet. As the only survivor, success of the mission was solely her responsibility now. Shoving her emotions down inside herself, she reached for her rifle, and yanked a spare powercell off Nert’s waistbelt. The counter on top of her rifle indicated she had only six flechette rounds and eighteen percent energy charge remaining. The maser exciter would eventually burn out but that took thousands of shots, nothing she needed to worry about right then. Keeping low, she crawled to her left, cringing as she bumped into Nert’s limp form, moving on knees and elbows toward a fallen tree where she could hide behind the upturned roots that would give her good cover for-

  “Ow!” Something slammed into her butt cheeks from the left, knocking her to the ground hard. Apparently crawling on her knees lifted her too high off the ground and she had paid for her mistake, a lesson she should have remembered from crawling under low-hanging wire all the
way back in basic training. Stupid! Stupid! Her visor showed the skinsuit had properly gone rigid when its proximity sensor field detected the incoming railgun round, and at the extreme angle, the round had failed to penetrate. The damage was done anyway, as she could not move her legs, something vital in the skinsuit’s motor mechanism must have been knocked offline.

  Laboriously, she crawled forward on her belly, using only her hands, sliding the rifle ahead of her and dragging herself to it. Only three more meters and she could turn over, her back to the protection of the tree roots and a partially obstructed view in the direction of the river. Her visor was showing only large, fuzzy yellow circles as the suit had lost track of the enemy. No matter, they had to come from only two directions and she could cover both. Sliding the rifle forward again, she eyeclicked to open a menu option, and selected it. With one last effort, she heaved herself to the downed tree, pulling herself onto her backside with difficulty since her legs had become useless. Sighting along her rifle, she scanned the ground in front of her, seeing nothing. Turning to the right, she—

  Had the briefest glance of an enemy helmet and rifle popping up over a bush, then a burst of darts hit her.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “Cease fire! Cease fire!” The leader ordered. “She’s dead, stop shooting, you idiot!” He was angry because the soldier who had killed the alien stupidly stood up and fired his maser at the prone target, exposing himself to potential enemy snipers and giving away the position of the entire team.

  “I got her!” The soldier exulted, pointing his rifle at the dead human. “She’s the last one, they’re all dead.”

  “Seven of them, six humans, against sixteen of us, and only the four of us survived? That is no victory to celebrate! We should have killed them all in the first five minutes. Humans are slow and weak and they barely have the brainpower of a slug but they killed ten of us! The commander is not going to be pleased,” the leader opened his helmet faceplate and spat in disgust.

  “They had the advantage,” the soldier protested meekly. “They were in a defensive posture, they knew the terrain.”

  “They only arrived here this morning, with no time to prepare a fixed defense!” The leader waved a hand to dismiss the soldier. “This team’s performance was shameful; I am ashamed to lead you. You clumsy fools,” he clearly was taking none of the responsibility on his own shoulders, “almost lost.”

  Perkins laughed softly as her faceplate swung open, coming down off the adrenaline high of the wargame exercise. “You did almost lose,” she pointed out to the leader of the Ruhar cadet team. She knew they were cadets by the academy logos on the arms of their skinsuits. With her faceplate open, the visor was no longer feeding her a false image of stealthware masking the training suits, because those units had no stealth or chameleon capabilities. The wargame had been impressively realistic, she could feel the realism. Her hips hurt, because when a nonexistent railgun dart had ‘hit’ her in the backside, the wargame controller had slammed her suit into the ground and deactivated the skinsuit’s leg motors. Trees which moments before had appeared shot up by maser beams were now intact, because there had been no actual masers, nor flechettes nor rockets. None of her team were dead or injured, the wargame controller AI would not allow a participant to harm anyone, or allow a participant to hurt themselves by clumsiness or stupidity. In that way, the wargame was unrealistic, but Perkins could see the wisdom of preventing trainees from silly accidents that would delay their training.

  “Ah!” The leader spun toward her angrily. “Silence, human! You did lose!”

  “We lost this skirmish, we haven’t lost the battle,” Perkins said quietly.

  “What?” The lead cadet asked, tapping the side of his helmet and shaking his head. “I couldn’t hear you. What did you say?” He stepped forward, leaning down and menacing the prone human with his inert rifle. “You should not-” His left foot stepped on a twig, which snapped with an odd clicking sound.

  Then he and his team of three joined the ‘dead’. Their skinsuits went rigid, lights pulsed inside their visors and alarms blared in their ears. Unable to control his suit, the cadet wobbled and slowly fell over to thump to the forest floor a few yards from Perkins. She heard a string of curse words her helmet did not bother to translate. The mines her team planted that morning had become active when she activated them with an eyeclick, moments before the game controller declared her ‘dead’. “Human! You tricked us!”

  Perkins shifted in her immobile suit to get more comfortable, she was going to be lying there a while, now that the game had declared her dead. “Yeah, looks like it, huh?”

  “You have no honor!” The cadet leader twisted his neck toward her so he could speak, as his ability to transmit through the communications network had cut off when he died. “I will file a formal protest, your tactics are not realistic! In a real battle, that explosion would have killed your team also.”

  “Yes, it probably would have,” Perkins agreed.

  “You booby-trapped your own position?” The cadet asked incredulously.

  “We assumed we would be overrun,” she admitted. “You Ruhar have advantages of size, speed, skill and familiarity with skinsuits. It seemed unlikely we could escape from your team, even though you are cadet trainees.”

  “You planned for your own deaths?” The cadet was astonished, as if such an idea was outside his imagination.

  “We planned to achieve our objective.”

  The cadet snorted in what Perkins thought was a very human gesture. “You have achieved nothing.”

  “Oh really?” Perkins turned her head and raised an eyebrow, a gesture she knew the Ruhar understood. “While you were chasing us, your team left your assigned patrol area along the river, didn’t you?” She almost added ‘asshole’ but kept that remark to herself.

  The Ruhar sucked in a shocked breath. “You tricked me!” He then spoke words that Perkin’s helmet did not translate, and his suit relaxed, then restored itself to function. Perkins spoke Ruhar reasonably well, but she wasn’t able to understand most of what the cadet said, so rapid-fire was his speech. The cadet barked orders to the three members of his team whose suits also reactivated. The four stood up and engaged in an animated argument, hands gesturing emphatically. The cadet leader jabbed a finger toward Perkins, shouting and stamping a foot while he argued.

  Though the Ruhar had somehow deauthorized her helmet translator, Perkins was able to follow most of the argument among the four, she had even learned new Ruhar curse words that she needed to research the meaning of later. “You’re not supposed to be moving,” Perkins spoke loud and slowly in Ruhar to assure the message was understood by the cadets. “According to the rules, the four of you are dead.”

  That message was received by the four Ruhar and sparked another round of argument, until the lead cadet made a slashing motion. Perkins’ imperfect skills at understanding the common Ruhar language made his words sound stilted, but the meaning was clear. “I will take responsibility! The decision is mine! We go now!” The cadet held the rifle over his head for emphasis, then turned to glare at Perkins and shifted his weight onto one leg. For a moment, she feared he would kick her with the assisted power of a skinsuit, which could hurt her badly. They locked eyes, the cadet glaring hatred at her, before he turned and ran back toward the river. His three teammates joined him, though initially running without enthusiasm. One of the Ruhar turned back to look toward Perkins, unsure of what to do, then followed the others with a sad, apologetic smile.

  “Nert?” Perkins called out, unable to see behind herself as her own skinsuit was still rigidly immobile. “You all right over there?”

  “Yes, Colonel Perkins. I am fine, how are you? That was fun!”

  “I’d be better if that jackass hadn’t broken the wargame rules and run back to his patrol area. It’s up to Striebich and Bonsu now.”

  “Miss Irene and Mister Derek, I mean, Captains Striebich and Bonsu, are brave and smart,” Nert said hopefully. “They
will not fail.”

  Perkins relaxed in the suit, trying to look around was only making her neck muscles sore. “They had better succeed, or the only result of our actions will be to demonstrate that humans have no place serving alongside Ruhar.”

  “This is crazy,” Derek remarked. “Certifiably, lunatic, nuts. You know that, right?”

  Irene grimaced and instinctively flinched when a large native fish bumped against the cockpit canopy of their Dobreh fighter. The curious creature scraped its bony lips along the see-through material, the suction cups on the ends of its flippers leaving a trail of yellowish slime. Irene tapped on the inside of the canopy, startling the fish, which darted away. In the murky river water, she could see shapes moving in a school as fish circled the strange object that had dropped out of the sky into their private underwater world. “This was your idea.”

  “No,” Derek gave the pilot in front of him a disparaging look. “I mentioned it as one possible tactic, a far-fetched one. I didn’t think this is what you would choose.”

  “Colonel Perkins approved it,” Irene toggled through the exterior passive sensors again, finding nothing within range.

  “We’re supposed to keep senior officers out of trouble,” Derek reminded her.

  “Yes, Captain Bonsu,” Irene waved him away, irritated. After saving forty thousand Ruhar lives by blowing up a tropical island, the entire team had received a temporary promotion of one grade. That was why Perkins was now a lieutenant colonel, while Shauna, Jesse and Dave were now sergeants. The promotions were supposed to be made permanent soon at an official ceremony, but so far, the team had been too busy in the field. “This idea may be crazy, but it’s the only plan either of us has thought of that could do something useful in this wargame. If the hamsters had given us a real gunship rather than this broken-down piece of crap, we could have joined the air battle.”