by B. V. Larson
Straker’s comlink clicked and he heard a faint singing under someone’s breath. “If I die in a combat zone, box me up and ship me home... ” One of the mechsuiters’ microphones must have been on voice-activation: Lieutenant Flint, his HUD told him.
“Who’s got that beautiful voice?” Straker asked, laughing.
“Oh… sorry, sir.”
“No worries, Flint. Men have been singing battle songs since the ancient Egyptians—probably before. Watch your glide slopes.”
Following his own orders, Straker began his landing sequence, turning his fall into brief flight, and then his flight into a stall. The atmosphere was so thin, he had to use a lot of jet power—meaning fuel. In fact, it was half-gone by the time his feet touched the ground.
“Watch your fuel states. There’s no resupply,” he said, and then took off at a ground-eating lope toward the nearest building.
Infantry-class weaponry—semi-portable crew-served lasers and railguns, or antitank missiles—met his advance, and he turned to run laterally, slipping his Jackhammer aside, rolling into a somersault to throw them off before springing to his feet again. The best defense was not getting hit, he reminded himself, and put a force-cannon bolt into the source of the heaviest fire. He used the twisted wreckage of a laser turret as cover and reversed himself, popping out to take another shot where they least expected him. Soon, the old battlefield rhythm of move and shoot, shoot and move, reasserted itself. He was come home again, here on this scarred and desolate planetoid, once more doing a deadly dance with his enemies, a place he’d occupied from his earliest memories as a kid playing mechsuiter vidgames.
Platoons of fearless Korven infantry defended every strongpoint as he worked the edges, stripping away the resistance to open holes into the facilities for the battlesuiters and golems. The golems divided themselves into four-man squads, using cover and concealment among the rocks and vegetation—clumps of colorful giant fungus, the only thing that seemed to be able to grow in the harsh environment. They slipped in close, infiltrating until they could suddenly, savagely spring upon their enemies and rend them from close range. They made the deadly Korven look like clumsy children, spinning among them with seeming impunity as they dodged and killed.
The battlesuiters used more conventional tactics. As soon as a mechsuiter disrupted a Korven unit with force-cannon bolts and gatlings, battlesuiters assaulted with exaggerated speed in their powered armor. They led with salvoes of bunker-busting mini-missiles and followed up with storms of blaster and pulse-gun fire as they advanced. Plasma grenades cleared foxholes or bunkers by flash-frying Korven with sun-hot gases, and then the Breakers breached the vast complexes.
But for the mechsuiters, the problem was simply one of numbers. The Korven infantry seemed endless. Straker’s HUD estimates of the opposition rose into the hundreds of thousands as more and more units converged to counterattack. He got some relief when Trollheim was able to circle around for a second firing run, but Salishan reported that the remaining enemy ships were still stalking the battered dreadnought, and they had enough force to destroy her if she turned to slug it out. She did deploy all her remaining armed small craft—shuttles and pinnaces—to provide close ground support.
Unfortunately, each boat was met with storms of fire from the ground, and Straker ordered them to keep back, preserve themselves, and snipe from above at long range. He wished they had a supply of cheap dumb gravity bombs, but those went out of style with aerospace carriers. He made a note to himself that, with the potential increase in smaller actions, the Breaker ships could use refitting for flexibility, even if it cost them some raw firepower.
The three skimmers also strafed the enemy for a short time, but were called away to help Trollheim deal with the remaining enemy squadron stalking her.
In short, the elite Breaker forces were being ground down, swamped in a sea of enemies, dying the death of a thousand cuts—or a million pinpricks. Thousands of shots slowly wore away Straker’s superb armor, and his fuel state dropped lower and lower as he faced not companies, not battalions, but whole brigades of Korven infantry. They’d been in some form of hibernation, it appeared, waiting for the planned assault. Battlesuiters reported seeing empty warehouses full of recently vacated stasis tubes used to store sleeping soldiers, alongside bare weaponry racks.
Unfortunately, these barracks were intermixed among compounds of captives, or he’d have used low-yield nukes on them.
The compounds of captives were horror shows. Straker could hardly spare a moment to absorb the reports, but they told of endless rows of millions of creatures of many species, all immobilized and hooked to semi-organic machines. He ordered his battlesuiters and golems not to try to help them for now. They were alive, even if in some ghastly state of thrall.
Instead, he concentrated on killing, endless killing.
At first, the slaughter slaked his thirst, but now it became drudgery, necessary but joyless... and according to his suit’s calculations, it was a losing battle.
Yet there had to be a way. He needed some new element, some trick of tactics. And that meant...
“Straker to Zaxby,” he comlinked on the fleet channel.
“Zaxby here.”
“We’re being ground down. The mechsuits are running out of fuel and ammo. We’ve lost twenty battlesuiters and a couple of golems, and there seem to be more Korven all the time. If we don’t do something, we’ll be swamped. I need a magic trick from you.”
“I can provide it, but you won’t like it.”
“Meaning?”
“Do you want to win and rescue our people, or debate morality? It’s better that you leave the details to me.”
Straker thought about the golems, and the compromises he’d already made. He imagined Zaxby’s action would cause excessive collateral damage—possibly casualties among the innocent captives. Did he even want to know the specifics?
He recalled Carla’s face, and his responsibilities. What had Loco said? If he wasn’t willing to make the hard choices, he should never have committed the Breakers to battle.
“Okay. Do it, whatever it is. I can hate myself for it later.”
“Or you could choose not to... but you are who you are, Derek Straker. As am I. So, one magic trick, coming up in two minutes.”
Two minutes later Straker’s HUD showed Redwolf appear from underspace, directly above the largest concentration of Korven troops, and then it disappeared again. A moment later, a massive explosion blossomed at ground level. At least a hundred thousand enemies were vaporized in one heartbeat—along with untold numbers of captives.
Probably, millions had just died.
Yet there were millions more captives—tens of millions, perhaps—spread out over dozens of square kilometers of basements. The fact that the captives were underground while the storehouses and infantry barracks were on the surface no doubt saved some—but the toll was unimaginable.
Straker simply chose not to imagine it. He couldn’t afford to let himself care at this point. Zaxby clearly didn’t care. Straker had to trust that the lunatic hadn’t killed Carla.
What Zaxby had done for certain was remove perhaps a third of the enemy forces in one stroke.
Just as Straker ordered his men to advance into the swirling dust and flame, another, even larger explosion lit up the west side. More enemies were vaporized.
His HUD told him that this strike, unlike the first, was accompanied by a lot of radiation and fallout. He realized the first must have been Redwolf’s lone antimatter float mine, and this one, the final blow delivered by the ship’s single available nuclear weapon.
Straker’s HUD also told him Zaxby had dropped these weapons on areas free of Breakers. The battle now looked much more even.
“Zaxby to Straker. Along with sheer numbers killed, I destroyed their primary and backup command centers. You should find the going much easier now. You’re welcome—Zaxby out.”
“Thanks,” Straker said into a dead comlink. He opened the g
eneral ground forces channel. “All right, Breakers. The enemy must be shaken and shocked. Time to push. Let’s finish off these bastards.”
He switched to the fleet channel. “Small craft, skimmers, I need you now to support our attack. We’re going to wipe out the enemy and rescue our people.”
Redwolf joined the support, strafing and blasting. Straker gathered his mechsuits into a single unit and advanced on the largest remaining concentration of enemies, perhaps a hundred thousand of them. The Korven fought viciously, but without coordination. Zaxby had been right—again.
He’d done what was necessary—what Straker should have done from the start: killed millions to save tens of millions... in the long run, it could be billions.
Maybe Zaxby should be in charge, Straker thought. But no, the Ruxin had no moral compass, and this situation was an extreme exception. The exception may test the rule, but the rule was still necessary, or all of life devolved into cold expediency. Into mindless, vicious, inhuman warring for dominance.
That way lay madness.
More madness, anyway. There was plenty of madness to be had here.
Even with his new advantages, Straker realized he was still running out of fuel—and time.
“Straker to Hetson.”
“Hetson.”
“I’m on fumes, and I’m out of gatling ammo. I’m going to dismount, turn my suit over to your remote control, and go underground. I’ll try to link up with our battlesuiters or golems. You do the same when the time comes. Fight in the suits as long as you can, then dismount. Press them now. My SAI thinks we’ve nearly broken them.”
“Roger wilco, sir. I’ve got your datalink. Good luck.”
“I’ll be on comlink, but with no HUD, I’ll have to rely on verbals. Straker out.”
He searched for and found a hole in the floor of a collapsed building. Below, he could see rows of captives. With a sigh, he gave the final commands for his suit to unlink, link itself to Hetson’s and to let him dismount.
To unlink was to diminish. Suddenly, instead of a metal god striding the battlefield, he was just a tiny man standing among the wreckage, watching his war machine depart with deliberate, fuel-conserving steps. Worse, he found he couldn’t breathe. The thin atmosphere couldn’t sustain human life.
But then, he didn’t need to breathe—for a short time. A couple of minutes, according to Mara’s words. Squatting, he dropped down the hole into the underground.
And found himself in Hell.
Chapter 32
Straker, Axis of Predators base, underground.
The captive creatures Straker saw here in the vast underground warehouse were Humbar, or very like them. They were bovine, all females, many with swollen udders. All were dead or dying from the lack of atmosphere brought on by breaching their subterranean storehouse. The machines to which they were attached—which had organic components in a bizarre hybrid of mechanics, electronics and rubbery resinous tentacles—showed lights and readouts, but they couldn’t keep their victims alive without pressurization and oxygen.
Some of the females were visibly pregnant. Straker saw one which had given sudden and sickening stillbirth, a miscarriage brought on by the trauma of atmosphere loss. The bovine calf lay where it had gasped out its dying breaths, still attached by its umbilical cord.
That it was not human gave Straker enough emotional distance to carry on. He couldn’t afford to care right now. Rather, he channeled his disgust into anger, feeding a surge of rage. He raced down the rows of dead things toward a hatch with a standard dogging wheel. It had shut when the atmosphere pressure dropped, but it was easy enough to unlock.
What was hard was opening the door against the pressure on the other side. Without Mara’s Breaker Bug boosting, he’d never have done it. Atmosphere rushed out as he braced himself and pushed until he could squeeze through.
The hatch slammed itself shut behind him.
He found himself in another warehouse of people. This time the Humbar were all males, and were alive—more or less. Before he could notice anything else, something leaped at him from between the rows.
He caught the animal in midair. No, it wasn’t an animal. It was an immature Korven, all teeth and claws and hunger.
He ripped it apart with his hands and dropped its remains on the ground.
Down the rows he stalked, destroying several more of the spawn, which attacked him on sight. For some reason they didn’t attack or try to eat the helpless bovine males.
As he jogged toward the far end of the warehouse looking for the next door, one captive’s attendant machinery came suddenly to life. A laser on a mechanical tentacle sliced open its belly and a Korven offspring the size of a twenty-kilo dog fell out onto a tray. The tray contained a separate chunk of warm, bloody meat, which the creature quickly set about devouring. As it ate, the tray lowered itself to the floor. As soon as the obscene thing was birthed, two organic tentacles pulled the bovine host’s sliced skin together, sealing up the caesarian birth with resinous goo.
Straker stomped the Korven hatchling before it had a chance to finish its meal.
More Korven spawn skittered around the nauseating nursery. Some had been decanted; some had ripped their way out of their hosts on their own.
He killed them when he could.
The process became clear in Straker’s mind. Use females to breed more hosts. Use implanted males to breed more Korven. Unlike in the wilds of nature, with these machines the implanted creatures could be re-used many times, re-implanted, living out their hellish days hosting parasites which became soldiers—soldiers that would be used to destroy their own progenitor’s homeworlds.
That explained why the Korven spawn hadn’t eaten the bovine hosts. They must have some biological inhibition, to keep them from destroying valuable incubators.
Living, sentient incubators.
Straker looked for one bull with scars older than the one who’d just birthed his parasite, but who was not showing the bulge of a new parasite—one best able to survive being unhooked, he judged. He stepped forward to smash the machine holding the bull and stripped away the tentacles and wires and tubes attached to every significant part, leaving the victim lying on the floor. The creature soon woke, but dully, his eyes glazed and uncomprehending, and then fell unconscious once more.
Straker left him there. The bull would either live or die. If he lived, maybe he could free more of his people. Right now, Straker had more pressing matters.
He tried his comlink. “Straker to Prime.”
There was no answer. Probably the underground walls and machinery were interfering with the signal.
“Straker to any Breaker.” He rotated channels. “Straker to anyone.”
“Golem 37 here, Derek.”
Straker snorted at the irony. “Yes... Derek. I need weapons. Can you spare a golem or battlesuiter to find me?”
“I have your signal. One of us will be there soon. 37 out.”
Within minutes a golem opened a hatch and jogged up to him, a satchel formed out of a tarp over his shoulder. “Golem 23 reports as ordered.” The thing’s—the man’s—wry smile showed he fully understood the strangeness of the situation. “Here’s your gear.”
The golem set down the tarp and unfolded it. Inside was a stained battle harness, still with most of the usual equipment in attached pouches. “This was 19’s. He took an unlucky head shot, so it’s still in good shape. And his two blasters, with spare ammo and power packs. Sorry, no body armor.” The golem thumped his chest, his natural breastplate of duralloy. “Don’t need it.”
“This will do.” Straker put on the harness and adjusted it, and then hefted the blasters. “Time to kick some ass. Lead on.”
“Talking to yourself again?”
Straker coughed a laugh. “Loco would have a field day with this situation. Needling us.”
“Tell him I said hello. Or rather that you said hello... Whatever.”
Straker felt the irony, and the longer it went on while he
marched with his artificial brother, the more it transformed into a sense of macabre tragedy. He accompanied a man created in his own image, closer than a twin brother, closer than Loco or Roentgen or anyone else in his life. At this very moment many more were out there, fighting and dying. They would perform their functions until, inevitably, they died. Whether that death came from violence or natural expiration, they weren’t destined to last as long as a mayfly.
Strangely, part of him wished he could die with them. That some other Derek Straker could carry on, live with Carla, raise the kids and even lead the Breakers. That would be easier. Dying would be simpler, cleaner, without guilt at his own mistakes, free of ambiguity—questions of who deserved to survive, who to die, regrets at what he’d done to win. Were his unsettled feelings about his unnatural brothers now leaning toward envy?
“How’s the battle going?” he asked the golem as they jogged from cellar to cellar, warehouse to warehouse. From time to time they killed Korven hatchlings, and tried to ignore the endless horror of the millions of immobilized sentients, some of whom watched them with pleading, helpless eyes.
“We’re winning. Or at least, we’ll win in the end. The aerial support is what did it—that and a platoon of Uber-Dereks. The mechsuits ran out of ammo and fuel, and the battlesuiters are almost as bad off, but the skimmers and boats can strafe for hours—even fly out to refuel from Trollheim if necessary. Golems don’t need anything but rations. We brought along ten times the ammo and powerpacks we thought we’d need, and used two-thirds of it, but we have plenty left. Only lost three of us so far, too. If we lived a normal lifespan—hell, if we lived five years and the Breakers could make enough of us, we could overthrow Steel.” The golem’s voice held no hint of bitterness, only wistful acceptance.
Straker knew exactly how he felt. It was how he’d feel in the man’s place. “But we can’t do that. Copy myself endlessly... that’s what the Mutuality tried to do with the Lazarus and Tachina clones, and look where it got them. I’m not a god or superman to be replicated and turned into some master race. I’m a leader. Leading myself is redundant and narcissistic.”