by C H Gideon
“Chaps, engage those targets with priority on the Poltergeist,” Jenkins ordered. “Styles, forward all target locations to the battalion and put all of our Owls on that command vehicle. Request orbital strikes from the Bonhoeffer on all locations, with priority on that Poltergeist,” he finished eagerly.
“Negative on orbital strikes, Colonel,” Styles said with disappointment as the battalion unleashed its fury on the enemy command platform. “Bonhoeffer’s weapon control systems are on temporary standby following some sort of core computer breach.”
“Acknowledged.” Jenkins grimaced, hoping that he and his people could bracket and scrub those targets before they lost the Bonhoeffer’s target locks.
Shockingly, the Poltergeist was just sixteen kilometers from Terran HQ. It seemed to be nestled beneath a two-meter-thick layer of ice lined with sensor-disrupting materials. How the Bonhoeffer suddenly located ten high-value targets was beyond Jenkins, but whoever was responsible would earn himself Jenkins’ undying gratitude.
“Missiles away,” Chaps declared, sending missiles downrange while Preacher and several other mechs did likewise. Even the fortified Beta and Charlie Sites, over thirty kilometers from HQ, sent their limited supplies of mid-range missiles at the Poltergeist.
The Poltergeist, apparently aware of its pending demise, broke cover and sped off at nearly three hundred KPH. MRMs and LRMs tore after it, while artillery mercilessly pummeled its recently-vacated foxhole. Some of the SRMs struck the foxhole as well, but others adjusted course and pursued the accelerating vehicle as it passed the six hundred KPH mark.
Burning ordnance pursued the fast-fleeing Jemmin vehicle, and for several seconds, all eyes were on the tactical plotter as a dozen missiles slowly converged on the Poltergeist’s location.
The first missile struck true, slowing the enemy platform to just under four hundred KPH before it resumed its breathtaking acceleration.
Unfortunately for the Jemmin commander, that dip in velocity proved decisive.
Three more SRMs slammed into its stern in rapid succession while five were torn from the sky by Jemmin countermeasures. An MRM impacted on the ground in front of the Jemmin vehicle, which passed through the flaming steam cloud and cut a stunning visual worthy of a top-shelf action holo-novel. An LRM was ripped from the sky by some sort of Jemmin drone, but a final SRM snuck underneath the briefly-tilted Poltergeist and exploded.
The Poltergeist’s hover-drive system was destroyed, causing the roughly disc-shaped vehicle to careen into the ice and tumble like a rolling coin, going end-over-end and scattering hull debris as the vehicle started to come apart.
Just before the Poltergeist came to a rolling stop, four MRMs sent by the Beta and Charlie Sites slammed into it. In a cataclysmic release of energy that equaled roughly two megatons, the Jemmin command vehicle ceased to exist. The steam cloud from the blast site tore skyward, preceded by the multi-layered mushroom cloud that seemed to clear a path for the boiling, seemingly volcanic jet of steam released from the immense explosion.
Roy’s command center erupted in cheers, but Jenkins knew this fight was far from over.
“There are still at least nine Specters out there,” Jenkins bellowed, quickly quieting the compartment. “Let’s deal with them before we break out the champagne.”
But the truth was he felt every bit as exhilarated as they did. His people had just done the unthinkable: they had destroyed the most valuable and potent Jemmin ground platform known to humanity.
Unfortunately, as with the Arh’Kel on Durgan’s Folly, he suspected no one would learn about their victory until everyone in the unit was well into their grey hairs.
“Maintain focus, people.” He swept the room with a hard look. “We’re not out of the woods yet.”
16
Frigid Fury
Xi shook her head in confusion. She remembered shooting down the flyer, and being unable to hurt that Goddamned centipede thing, but after that, nothing seemed to make sense.
She looked down at her console, seeing that only a quarter of the indicators and interfaces were online. Her neural link was severed, and after looking down at her chest, she realized she had emptied the meager contents of her stomach at some point in the last minute or so.
She tried to speak, but nothing came out. She worked her jaw up and down for several seconds, cleared her throat, and repeated the attempt.
“Podsy?” she asked, belatedly realizing he was no longer part of her crew. She shook her head again, causing a wave of vertigo to wash over her that made her grip the arms of her pilot’s chair until it had passed. “Blinky?” she said, this time more loudly. “Lu?” she demanded, unstrapping her harness and falling out of the chair, only realizing after she hit the deck that Elvira was tilted twenty degrees starboard.
She got to her hands and knees and reached for the door, relieved to find that it quickly opened at her command.
The rear cabin was in shambles. Scorch marks covered the walls, and a fire had apparently broken out near the left power coupling. Sarah Samuels was normally strapped in near that coupling, but Xi saw no sign of the reporter.
“Blinky?” she called, staggering to her feet and gripping the smartly-positioned rails along Elvira’s ceiling. The rails allowed her to balance, despite her vertigo, her progress slower than she would have liked as she made her way through the compartment. She only remembered the fire that had burned Lu after she had traversed half the cabin. “Samuels?” She raised her voice, wondering if she was the only survivor of the bizarre fight.
“I’m here…” Samuels replied weakly. “But I…I hit my…ear.”
“Stay down,” Xi commanded, her focus sharpening after hearing the woman’s voice. “I’m coming.”
The rearmost section of the cabin was where the gun mechanisms were accessible. They were secured behind a thick bulkhead that featured a single, narrow hatch situated along the starboard side of the compartment. Xi moved through that hatch and was relieved to find all three of her fellows alive.
Blinky was breathing but unconscious, lying across Sarah Samuels whose eyes rolled around aimlessly. Lu, on the other hand, looked even worse than Podsy had back on Durgan’s Folly. The back of his head was scorched, bloodied, and rough. The left side of his face was badly burned as well. His left arm dangled at an unnatural angle, but he too was breathing, and it appeared that Blinky had managed to put tourniquets on his arm to stop the bleeding.
Xi performed a quick inspection of the trio, finding none of them in immediate danger of dying from blood loss or asphyxiation, so she reached for the med-kit Blinky had used to bind Lu’s wounds.
She produced a pair of stim syringes, rolled Staubach over onto his back, and injected the high-powered cocktail directly into his heart.
For a few seconds, nothing happened. Then he gasped, sitting bolt upright as his eyes snapped wildly around the room.
“Blinky, focus,” she said, placing a hand on either side of his face and locking eyes with him. “Where are you?”
His eyes darted left and right several times before settling on Xi, and after a few short, panicked breaths, he said, “Shiva’s Wrath?”
“Good enough.” She nodded. “Listen, Lu’s hurt—” She gestured to the burned Wrench-turned-Monkey, then the reporter. “—and so is Samuels. Can you drive the ATV?”
Blinky, true to his nickname, worked his eyelids up and down a dozen times in rapid succession before nodding. “I…I think so. I’m a little wired, though.”
“I know,” she said apologetically, gesturing to the empty syringe. “It’ll wear off in about twenty minutes. You need to rendezvous with Winters and his platoon. They’re due south of here. Where are you going?” she asked when his attention seemed to drift.
“Due south,” he replied, his words coming faster than normal, “gotta chase the winter.”
“Close enough,” she agreed, helping him stand. “Take Lu,” she urged. “I’ll get Samuels.”
Together, they brought
the pair of injured to the hatch where they strapped rebreathers onto everyone. She pulled the emergency lever and the hatch swung open, clanging against Elvira’s hull as the flames on the ice-field where the flyer crashed were still burning, though less intensely than before.
With the thankfully-slender Sarah Samuels’ arm around her neck, Xi carefully walked down the ramp to the icy ground and found the ATV’s deployment switch. She was rewarded by the hiss of pneumatic cylinders which released the sparse, six-wheeled vehicle, dropping it to the ice beneath Elvira’s stern.
“Ms. Samuels,” she said, propping the woman up in the vehicle’s right-rear seat and strapping her in, “you need to stay awake, okay?’
Samuels was still groggy, suggesting she might have suffered a severe concussion. Deciding against further attempts to communicate with the reporter, Xi helped Blinky strap Lu into the ATV’s left-rear seat.
“Fire it up, Private,” Xi said, gesturing for him to take the driver’s seat.
“I can’t do that, Captain...” he began to protest.
“You can, and you will,” she snapped. “I have to complete this mission alone. Hook up with Winters to the south. That’s an order,” she said, her voice cracking like a whip on the last words.
Blinky looked like he wanted to argue, but reluctantly nodded and boarded the vehicle. Its capacitors were green, and a test of its motors showed it was ready to roll. “Good luck, Captain,” he said, his hands trembling slightly from the stims.
“Move out,” she clapped him on the shoulder. He pulled his hood over his head, checked that his passengers had no exposed skin, and sped off to the south.
Xi eyed the flaming wreckage of the flyer, seeing only a few pieces larger than a meter in diameter. She then turned her focus to the right side of Elvira, where she and her people had just disembarked, and appraised the damage.
The front and middle legs on that side were almost completely destroyed, with the middle leg’s joint annihilated. It was a miracle the blast hadn’t gone completely through her mech’s armor and vaporized everyone inside.
Bits of the centipede’s carapace were strewn about, embedded in the melted ice, which was the main culprit for Elvira’s aggressive rightward tilt. A meter of ice had melted away beneath the mech, likely from a combination of the explosion and the burning liquid the centipede had covered her with prior to that.
“Damn…” she muttered, bracing herself on the gangway’s rail before hearing a faint noise from behind her. She set her jaw and slowly turned toward the source of the sound, which perhaps unsurprisingly originated from the dying flames of the flyer’s wreckage. “Of course…” She grimaced as the sound of chitin scraping against the ice was accompanied by a flicker of movement beyond the flames.
Knowing that her fight was not yet over, she regained Elvira’s interior and made for the small arms locker. Inside was a collection of weapons, some of which she was rated on and others she was not. She strapped a sidearm to her uniform, clicking it into place just below her hip as she took a tac-vest and visored helmet from the rear of the locker. Strapping the protective gear on, she reached for a handful of micro-grenades, a combat knife and, finally, the locker’s anti-material rifle with collapsible tripod.
“I don’t play to lose,” she declared, snapping a ten-round clip into the rifle and hefting it before her chest as she made her way to the mech’s exterior hatch.
Once she was there, she peered through the portal and saw something that was both completely unfamiliar and still expected.
The thing stood a head shorter than Xi, with a stooped posture and half-insect, half-crustacean-looking physique the basic shape of which resembled nothing so much as a mythological centaur. It had no proper head, but its four legs supported a medium-long body. At the front of the body was a pair of long, double-elbowed “arms” ending in four-pronged pincers. Those arms protruded up from a short “torso” affixed to the front of the thing’s main body, and seemed remarkably thin and wiry considering the thick, blade-like proportions of the lower limbs.
The creature passed through the flames as though they were not there, making a bee-line for her position at a pace equal to a brisk walk.
And while it was possible the thing meant her no harm, she wasn’t about to risk being wrong about that.
Moving down the gangway, she nearly lost her footing on the last step but managed to save both herself and the rifle from a fall to the ice. Gritting her teeth in annoyance, she unfolded the rifle’s tripod and ducked beneath Elvira’s hull, slipping her body back a couple meters before laying her rifle on the ice and sighting in on the thing.
The range-finder showed it was forty meters away. Point-blank range for such a potent weapon. Jacking a round into the chamber, she pressed her finger against the trigger and put the thing in her crosshairs.
“Nighty night,” she whispered, squeezing the trigger and sending a fifty-caliber slug downrange. The gun’s report was deafening—especially since she had chosen to fire it beneath Elvira’s tilting hull, where the sound waves immediately reflected back at her with near-full intensity.
The bullet struck just a few centimeters from where she aimed, and the impact sent the thing skittering across the ice as its chitinous legs failed to find purchase on the frozen surface. But just as quickly as it had been knocked off-target, it resumed its forward progress with machine-like focus.
“Seriously?” she muttered, her ears ringing as she centered the oncoming thing in her crosshairs and squeezed the trigger a second time.
Amazingly, the thing somehow dodged the second bullet and barely broke stride while doing so.
“Oh no, you don’t.” She grimaced as it passed the twenty-five-meter mark. Switching the gun to full-auto, she was counting on its impressive, active recoil-dampening system to keep her from spraying all eight remaining bullets high and wide.
Xi drew a short breath and exhaled as the thing reached the seventeen-meter mark, at which point she unloaded the rifle’s remaining ammo.
The insect-looking thing evaded the first round, but the second and third struck it just above where she had wanted. One of its arms was blown off by the third round, and its rear leg was luckily crippled by the last.
But the creature’s focus was incredible. In spite of its terrible wounds, it tossed some sort of grenade at Xi even as it skittered back from the force of the fifty’s multiple impacts.
Xi log-rolled as fast as she could away from the rifle, but the grenade-like device still caught her in a spray of acid that caused her helmet and vest to hiss as smoke poured off them.
She kept rolling toward Elvira’s relatively-raised stern section, feeling angry burns begin to erupt across her left shoulder and back. Her neck soon felt as though a thousand needles were stabbing it, and she knew she needed to get her vest and helmet off.
Before leaving the relative cover of Elvira, she tore her helmet off and tossed it aside. Unstrapping her vest, she screamed in pain as her right hand was burned by a thick clump of flaming material that was actively eating into her protective armor.
Her head was on a swivel as soon as she doffed the ruined armor, and her hand went to the micro-grenades stuck to her belt. The barest flicker of movement beneath Elvira prompted Xi to toss the first of her three grenades near the abandoned rifle, where it exploded with a blinding flash and ear-splitting crack. Shrapnel flew outward as the rifle was destroyed by the explosion, but Xi could not see whether the bug had been caught by the blast.
Acting purely on instinct, she drew her sidearm and looked up to Elvira’s badly-damaged topside just in time to see the creature appear between the dual fifteens. The same place Sergeant Major Trapper and his Pounders had nested during the last push on Durgan’s Folly.
Snarling in primal anger at this thing somehow transposing itself on Trapper’s memory, Xi fired her sidearm a dozen times at the bug-looking beast. The rounds were surprisingly more effective than she expected, with the repeated impacts causing it to lose its foo
ting atop the derelict mech’s hull. The creature’s legs splayed as it struggled to keep something approaching a combat-ready posture, but Xi kept it off-balance with well-timed shots that struck its body near the lower leg joints.
Using a one-handed grip, Xi emptied her thirty-round clip at the thing. As she fired, she drew the second grenade from her belt and tossed it on top of Elvira. Ducking beneath the mech’s raised stern, Xi was protected from the blast while she drew the third and final grenade from her belt.
“All or nothing,” she hissed, discarding her sidearm and drawing the last weapon at her disposal—the combat knife. Whirling out of concealment, she barely managed to avoid the thing as it leaped toward her. Less a matador and more an unpracticed ice skater, Xi’s feet slipped out from under her, and she crashed to the ground a meter from where the centaur-bug did likewise.
Raising her knife, she stabbed down on the creature’s lone-remaining arm as it flailed in her direction. She hesitated, wondering whether she should use the last grenade or not, but suddenly, something happened.
The creature’s body relaxed, but not in anything like a death rattle. Its lower limbs splayed wide while its upper limbs spasmed, twitching left and right in search of something to grapple.
Muted whumps and brilliant flashes pierced the sky above as Terran anti-missile fire scraped inbound ordnance from the air. And beneath that ongoing battle to protect this historically unprecedented first contact situation, Captain Xi Bao did the nearly unthinkable.
She dove knife-first on top of the creature, plunging her weapon deep into its torso. Xi twisted the blade left and right, digging the blade deep and wrenching like she was attacking a lobster with dinnerware. She knew even as she did it that she might have just made the most catastrophic mistake of her life, and that she might have just cost the Terran Republic the chance to form a productive relationship with a new species.