by Rick Partlow
The Ranger platoon was over the curve, out of line-of-sight, and I’d lost them on IFF, but the sounds of the firefight crackled in my headphones, amplified by my helmet’s audio pickups. The sound of one side of the firefight, anyway, because the hum-snap-crack of our KE guns was lost against the staccato drumbeat of heavy machine guns. Their reports echoed back to us around the curve in the station, distorted and tinny but instantly recognizable. 12.7mm Kords, the same thing the Chernobog had been using the last time we’d faced them, a deep-throated thunder…and then, something else, something like a gong the size of a shuttle being rung by the round from a coil gun, an explosion. Another.
“Mines?” I gasped to Pops, only a few feet in front of me. The walls blurred on either side of us, our pace outstripping an Olympic sprinter.
“Recoilless rifles,” he said, the words clinical, as if they didn’t mean death for our own people, for Rangers we knew by name, who we’d trained with for over a year.
The haze was getting thick, rolling down the broad corridor ahead of us with the echoes of detonations, promising death and destruction and I was at the point where I just wanted to get there and get it over with.
And then I got there.
The service lock for the ship was huge, nearly thirty yards across, meant for hauling in cargo and heavy equipment using powered loading jacks, and I’d expected the enemy to have pushed through already, to run right over the Space Force Security Force. I’d underestimated the Zoomie bastards. They hadn’t had too long, maybe a couple hours since they found out the enemy shuttles were heading their way, but they hadn’t wasted the time.
They’d closed the cargo lock doors for Alpha, of course. They’d have been morons if they hadn’t. But those doors were tucked into a niche just below the hangar bay, not thickly armored like the rest of the ship because they had to open, and a few pounds of high explosive would have torn through without making the ship unusable. But the Security Force troops had hauled a couple dozen heavy, metal cargo containers across the entrance corridor end to end like barricades on Omaha Beach on D-Day and those ornery little fuckers were still there. Human heat signatures glowed on IR back behind the cargo containers, along with the oblong shapes of crew-served weapons, although they weren’t firing right now.
They were, perhaps, the only people not firing. The Rangers had no cover, nowhere to hide, so they hadn’t tried. They’d charged into the Chernobog forces and I could see the bodies they’d left behind, the armor peeled away from them where the warheads had detonated, just too much even for the high-tech armor supported by the high-tech exoskeleton. I didn’t have time to read their IFF signatures, didn’t have time to mourn them, just a half a second to note the number. Four dead. Four dead in seconds, nearly two hundred yards away from the Russian positions.
And the Russians did have positions, because after all the nice things I’d thought about the Security Forces, they’d gone and left the cargo jacks they’d used to move the containers out on the other side of the damned barrier. I guess I couldn’t really blame them, since they had to move the containers in from the loading bay outside the ship and once the barriers were in place, there’d be no way to get the last of the loading jacks inside. But damn it, someone should have run them down the corridor or something, because the Russians were using them for cover, and if the Chernobog machine guns and recoilless rifles couldn’t penetrate the thick, heavy cargo containers, probably filled with iron ore filings for the fabricators, then the Security Force guns couldn’t penetrate their own robotic cargo loaders either.
And neither could our KE guns. The cargo jacks were basically remotely-controlled forklifts the size of a front-loader/backhoe, tons of metal rolling atop the sort of caster-style wheels the Helta favored and not even a tungsten dart traveling at nine or ten thousand feet per second could cut all the way through them.
And I’d arrived just in time to see Lt. Landry fuck up royally.
It was like a still life painting, the Ranger platoon in a wedge formation charging across the empty space between us and the cargo jacks, tracer rounds streaking an angry red through their ranks, a pair of recoilless rifles discharging with flares of pale yellow, their warheads frozen in mid-flight and I wanted to scream at the man to break off. But the frozen second was an illusion and reality caught up with it in a double-explosion of warheads striking home.
The weapons were SGM-50’s, magazine-fed recoilless rifles, the replacement for the old SPG-9 that had been around since the 1960s, fielded for the first time in Venezuela. They’d mounted them on technicals there, Toyota pickup trucks, and drove them up behind our Strikers before they fired. I’d lost a whole fire team to the things and I hated them with a fiery passion before I ever heard of Chernobog.
Three Rangers went down, pieces of them tumbling away, charred metal and flesh and God only knew where one ended and the other began, and I finally got the words out.
“Rangers, get behind cover!”
But Landry couldn’t hear them, because he was one of those charred bodies on the expanse of metal floor. He’d traveled with us to worlds light-years away but he’d died within sight of home. Someone took charge, though, because the whole formation curved to their right, heading for the cargo containers and shelter from the rain of enemy warheads.
They weren’t going to make it, though. There was too much open space to cover, too much time under fire. Unless someone laid down suppressive fire.
Shit.
“Julie,” I said, “take your crew and head for the cargo containers. Don’t fucking stop, get on that ship and get her out of here. We’ll take care of these guys. Pops, bring the team and follow me.”
I hadn’t slowed up and neither had Pops, but half the team had stayed back with Julie and the crew and now they broke off and came after us. We headed left, around the curve of the wall of the docking bays where the enemy shuttles had landed, away from the cargo doors. The Russians might not even have seen us, as focused as they were on the Rangers and the Space Force positions, but I wanted them to notice us, so I raised my KE rifle to my shoulder and gave them a subtle reminder we were there.
They were hunkered down to avoid fire from the front right, but there was a whole squad of them sheltered behind the closest of the cargo jacks who were wide open on the left rear. Recoil seemed to slow my sprint with each touch of the trigger, but each of my hypervelocity rounds took a Russian mercenary down with it, three of them dying with as many shots, the gimbal mount and the computer tracking doing for our armor what a much larger and more cumbersome version had first managed decades ago for the M1 tank. I wish I was a good enough marksman to make three headshots in a row on the run, but I had to give the suit’s targeting system the credit.
Two more went down to Pops before the rest bolted from cover, trying to get to one of the other jacks, one with more shelter from this angle. The Space Force crews didn’t have Svalinns, but they did have KE rifles—big, crew-served weapons fired from a tripod with a power pack hooked into a wheeled dolly the A-gunner had to drag along, looking for all the world like an old, World War One Lewis gun. They were heavy and awkward to transport, but they did a lot more than the M37 carbines could. What was left of the Chernobog squad didn’t live to regret they’d broken cover.
Which left the Delta team in the uncomfortable position of being the center of attention. I’d wanted it, wanted to draw their fire, but I also didn’t want to die. We didn’t have time to follow the Rangers to cover and wouldn’t have even if we did because I was trying to keep the Russians focused on us until Julie got behind those cargo containers. We couldn’t turn around or we’d be exposed to enemy fire the whole way and wouldn’t be able to shoot back.
The only way left was…left. Back into the corridor where Chernobog had come from, toward their shuttles. And if we were heading back toward their shuttles, they’d have to pay attention. I didn’t bother giving an order. The team knew to follow me. I just began backing into the corridor, firing off round a
fter round from the hip, not hitting any of the Russian mercenaries but keeping them looking my way. Recoilless rifle warheads streaked past me, barely visible until they hit the wall twenty or thirty yards farther down, the concussions rocking me even through the armor, fragments of metal pinging off my armor. Something large and going very fast smacked right off the side of my helmet and I glanced over my shoulder, making sure I wasn’t backing into an enemy position.
I was, but it wasn’t armored Chernobog mercenaries waiting for me back by the row of shuttle docking collars, it was a cluster of smaller figures in Chinese-made space suits. I’d seen them on the news and in propaganda videos they’d put out, with their distinctive red highlights and the yellow stars on the left breast. I couldn’t see the faces through their polarized visors, but the rifles they were firing at us were hard to miss. Type 95 automatic rifles, bullpups with the magazine behind the pistol grip, they were distinctive and used by only one country: the People’s Republic of China. The Chinese were the pilots, the Chernobog mercenaries the muscle.
The 5.8mm slugs smacked into my armor with petulant whines and little other effect and I decided I didn’t want to waste KE rifle rounds on the Chinese flight crew. The grenade launcher unfolded off my back like the wing of some giant insect and I barely took the time to aim, just sending a burst of three frag rounds into the middle of eight space-suited figures. The detonations were muted thumps, small puffs of black smoke that reminded me of the pop of a firecracker in our cul de sac on July Fourth when I was a kid, but the Chinese flight crew seemed quite impressed and they stopped trying to kill us and concentrated on trying not to bleed out.
The bastards might keep us from getting the Alpha ship, but they wouldn’t be taking it anywhere.
I had my grenade launcher out, so I figured I might as well shoot it a little more, particularly since I couldn’t get a clean shot at the mercenaries from back in the docking corridor. A flick of my finger switched the load from fragmentation to armor piercing and the targeting to proximity overhead burst. I waited until I felt the solid clunk of the new rounds sliding into the chamber before I fired.
The cargo jacks were a solid line across this side of their position, but there was movement through the gaps, just shadows of armored figures, enough for me to aim. I fired off half a dozen rounds and was startled when a few dozen more streaked out from beside me. I’d been so involved with my own part of the battle, I hadn’t even noticed the rest of the team filtering in beside me, taking up positions on either side of the corridor. The first ones in, Dog, Ringo and Preacher, had set themselves on watch down toward the shuttle airlocks, but the others had followed my lead and peppered the enemy positions with grenade fire.
The grenades detonated in a chain fire, as if the blast from one had caused sympathetic explosions in the others, and streams of incandescent plasma rained down on the Chernobog positions, sintered metal ignited into flaming gas by the explosive core. They were brand new tech, barely tested much less battle-proven, and I had no idea whether they could penetrate the Chernobog armor, but they would, at least, keep their heads down.
I pushed out toward the entrance of the corridor, emboldened by the covering fire, and saw what was left of the Ranger platoon reaching cover behind the cargo containers. The gaps left by the Space Force Security troops were small, barely enough for a single Ranger to squeeze through at a time, and some of them didn’t bother to wait, using the enhanced musculature of their exoskeletal legs to leap onto the containers, grabbing handholds and skittering over the top like cockroaches fleeing the light.
Julie and the Space Force crew were right behind them, running as fast as they could in pressure suits, an awkward, waddling stomp. I fired another volley from my grenade launcher to try to cover them, convinced the Russian mercenaries were going to risk exposing themselves to our fire to try to take out the crew. White smoke curled toward the ventilation ducts in DNA spirals as metal burned, obscuring my view, but through the thermal filters red-hot Svalinn armor came out from the cover of the cargo containers to escort the Space Force crew in. One of the Rangers was Quinn, the other his squad leader, McAfee, or so the IFF told me and I would have to take its word, since they all looked alike in armor.
When the last of the bridge crew disappeared behind the cargo containers I vowed to buy Quinn a drink when this was all over. Assuming he was old enough to drink.
I moved my shoulder against the left hand wall and took a knee out of instinct, a feeling that we’d reached a tipping point. We’d kept Chernobog pinned down for almost a minute, and they had to know their whole operation was falling apart. They weren’t going to sit there with their heads down, not when they still had ammo left to burn and lives left to waste. The only question was whether they’d make a run toward our positions behind them, try to get back to their shuttles, or if they’d make one, final push for the ship.
As if some ancient trickster god were reading my mind, the shuttles from the Jambo chose that exact moment to make a firing run on the docked enemy birds. I’d known they’d be coming for them eventually, and honestly, I’d wondered what was taking them so long. Now I knew they’d just been fucking with me, waiting for the exact wrong time to launch those damned missiles.
The explosions were out in the soundless vacuum, but the enemy shuttles were connected to the corridor by the airlocks. The metal conducted the sound and the vibration, the burning atmosphere blowing out of the ships and through the locks with the force of the explosions. There were ten airlocks on this side of the drydocks, and four of them had been occupied. I hadn’t been able to tell before, but now it was easy to count the four white hot jets of fire flashing through the locks, blowing the doors out of their frames, ripping the docking umbilicals away in a hail of metal fragments.
I should, I realized, have left the whole fucking place in a vacuum and not been so damned smart. The heat washed over me, reminiscent of stepping off the ramp of a transport plane in Kuwait on a midsummer afternoon, not quite a burn, not through the armor, but a crackling of the sweat on my skin vaporizing, robbing me of the next few breaths I took. The concussion would have knocked me down had I been standing, would have killed me outright if I hadn’t been wearing the Svalinn suit, but the most dangerous thing it did was distract me.
Vacuum warnings were ringing in my ears, lights flashing at the corners of my HUD, and debris was tumbling out of the gaps in the wall where the airlocks had been. If I hadn’t screwed with the emergency seals earlier, the compartment would have been cut off from the rest of the station and the outflow of air would have ceased in seconds, but when I had hit the controls to refill the atmosphere, I had neglected to undo my little admin trick with the seals. The whole station was emptying out of those four holes, and taking everything not nailed down with it. Everything that was left after the first time.
The Russians had to be as surprised as we were, but I had to give whoever was leading them the credit he was due. They used the opportunity, charging into the teeth of the defense, counting on the explosions to distract the Rangers as it had us. Recoilless rifles fired in the eerie silence, just a slight flare from the ignition of their propellant’s on-board oxidizer betraying their discharge, the explosion of their warheads vibrating through the floor like a door slamming. They punched through the outer skin of the cargo containers but didn’t penetrate far, the gout of burning metal from their detonation only a couple yards into the payload.
But it didn’t have to. All it had to do was keep the Rangers’ heads down, keep the Space Force defenders behind cover long enough for the Chernobog mercenaries to get across that hundred yards of open space. I needed to move, needed to get my KE gun into action, but it seemed like I was moving through mud, like time had slowed down just for me while everyone else ran at full speed.
“Julie,” I transmitted, “get on that fucking ship now!”
The words seemed to throw time back into gear and I was back on my feet, the M900 at my shoulder. Julie might have answe
red, but I couldn’t hear her voice over the blood pounding in my ears and the vibration of the KE rifle discharging, its stock smacking against my shoulder. Hell, she might have been on the ship already and I would have no way of knowing. The space suits didn’t have IFF transponders like the Svalinns and the last I’d seen of her was thirty seconds ago, maybe more, when she’d disappeared from sight behind the cover.
The Russians were making a suicidal push because it was the only thing left to them, determined to make it past the Rangers, past the Space Force troops and onto the ship, to use it for shelter if they couldn’t steal it outright, and I had to make sure they got the suicide part without getting the ship. I didn’t even think about leading from the rear this time, didn’t consider how nuts it was for me to be walking point. Beyond the threat to Julie, which would have been enough, this was the last stand. We all knew it, had known it days ago. This was fourth down in the final seconds of the championship game and if the quarterback had to run the ball into the three-hundred-pound defensive linemen, then he would.
Chernobog mercenaries fell to tungsten darts, some mine, some from the Delta team, and a squad or two of them turned on us at the back of the company-sized gaggle, machine guns firing. Something smacked into my chest and drove the wind out of me and I ignored it and pushed forward.
“Andy!” It was Julie and I decided she hadn’t answered me earlier, because this one came through loud and clear. “I’m on the bridge! Should I wait for you and the Rangers to board?”
“Negative. Launch now! Get the hell out of here!”
As much as I wanted to be with her, to face the end with her, there was no way we could get on board the ship without letting Chernobog in after us, and the attempt would just get more of us killed.
I cut down two more of them and took another round to the gut for my trouble, the impact like being hit with a baseball bat. All it would take was one of those machine gun rounds hitting me in the helmet and I’d be dead, my air seals broken, but there was no safety in turning back, no safety to be had in any direction, so I might as well go down swinging.