by Rick Partlow
The shuttle didn’t explode as much as it came apart, vaporized metal sparking burning gas in trailing jets of fire. Pieces of the bird tumbled forward, haloed by glowing red, slowly descending as gravity overcame momentum until it impacted with the ground. A half-dome of yellow flame rose above the jungle, the fusion reactor flushing in a shower of plasma, collapsing into a mushroom cloud towering hundreds of meters to merge into the midnight darkness.
Definitely dead. Not like last time, these guys are dead. You killed them.
Still nothing. Not a pang of guilt, not a single twinge of regret.
The other pilot gave up on his ground support mission, banking left into a desperate, rolling climb.
What is he thinking? she wondered. Does he think I’ll let him go if he gives up?
That was the difference between a pirate crew and a military one; the military pilot knew the mission was more important than their life. And giving up on one wouldn’t necessarily save the other.
G-forces pushed her against her restraints and tried to squeeze the blood away from her brain as she followed him. She heard Acosta’s rasping grunt and wanted to tell him he’d better keep his mouth shut if he was going to puke, but she couldn’t force the words out. Right now would have been a good time to pop off a missile, but she hadn’t included any with her combat loadout for this mission, replacing their weight with extra capacitor banks for the lasers. It had been a tactical decision based on numbers. The enemy shuttles would have ECM and chaff and lots of other anti-missile defenses, and she could have only carried a half a dozen missiles at most. It had seemed more prudent to be able to cycle the lasers faster and have basically unlimited firepower.
No point in crying over spilt milk.
She pushed the stick further over and clenched her abdominal muscles to keep herself conscious against the massing gee-forces. It was a close thing—a black tunnel was closing in around her vision and her head was filled with a dull roar. Katy was sure if she passed out, there was no way in hell Acosta would be awake to take the stick. She had a vague sense of something wet striking the side of her neck and she just knew the worthless piece of shit had thrown up.
It took everything she had to pull back from the roll, to throttle back; her arms seemed to weigh a hundred kilograms, and her fingers were cramping up. The centimeters from the end of her armrest to the throttle control could have been kilometers. But the pressure eased off and when it did, she was on the pirate bird’s tail, only half a kilometer back. The reticle was green and solid.
Lightning connected the two aerospacecraft for the blink of an eye, the visual side-effect of the laser’s destructive energy, and the bandit shuttle ripped itself apart in a spray of white-hot plasma so bright it blanked out the view screens. Katy pulled up sharply, feeling the shudder of superheated air trying to swat her out of the sky.
By the time she leveled off, the remnants of the enemy shuttle were spread out over three square kilometers of fiercely burning jungle just outside the city. She sucked in a deep breath and risked a glance beside her. Acosta was shaking himself, something wet and bright green splashed over his flight suit. Katy sneered at the man and opened a line to the other bird.
“Lee,” she broadcast, “splash two over here. How are you guys making out?”
There was no response for a moment, and she checked the sensor readout. The pirates were jamming as best they could, and radar coverage was spotty, but she had a laser line-of-sight link to the other assault shuttle. She could see it trying to make a tight turn far out to the west of the city. It was the kind of turn you’d be making if you were trying to get on someone else’s tail, or if they were trying to latch onto yours.
“Katy.” The word was gasped past g-forces she could almost feel through the radio. “Weapons malfunction. Going to need a hand.”
“Shit,” Acosta murmured, wiping a hand over his face to clear away the vomitus.
“Hold on, Francis,” she told him, feeding power to the engine and pushing them into a tight turn. “The show’s not over yet.”
The city streets were tight and narrow and claustrophobic, and Jonathan couldn’t see a damned thing except straight ahead. He approached the intersection cautiously, trying to find the Identification Friend or Foe transponder signals on his HUD and realizing with a sinking feeling in his gut that they were being jammed. The feed from the headquarters bunker was being jammed as well, and his whole commo board was nothing but a wide wedge of static… except for Marc Langella.
Langella’s Golem was about a kilometer ahead of him, past the next intersection, the streetlights glinting off the barrels of the Vulcan cannons on his flanks. His mech’s upper torso swiveled from side to side, the long, cylindrical bore of his Electro-Thermal Chemical main gun scanning back and forth coaxially as he hesitated in the gap.
“You have any comms up there, Marc?” he asked over the the laser line-of-sight hookup.
“I got Prevatt moving parallel on my left down Fifth Street,” Langella told him. His voice was tight, betraying nerves he usually didn’t let on. “She’s got a link to Second Platoon three blocks up at the intersection of Fifth and Corwin, but they haven’t seen anything.”
Jonathan hunted for the streets on the map overlaid on his HUD, trying to build a picture of what he had and where they were. He needed eyes in the sky, but there was no commo with the shuttles and any of his troops who went far enough to see the enemy might not be able to report back.
Fuck it.
“Marc,” he said, “I’m going to take a hop a couple blocks to the northeast and try to get eyes on the bandit mecha. Start moving in that direction and picking up whoever you can. I have a feeling they’re still coming in from that way.”
“Log… .” Langella bit down on the name and corrected himself. “Jonathan, you’re the damned company commander. I can do it…”
“I need to see,” he cut his friend off. “I can’t lead this company if I’m blind and deaf. Just start them moving and I’ll try to get a clear shot to you when I spot the enemy.”
He didn’t wait around to let Langella continue the argument. The jump-jets pushed him into the cushioning of his “easy chair,” and the featureless, grey walls of the business district blurred behind a wall of smoke and steam. His Vindicator cleared the rooftops in just over a second and he got flashes of the streets below, nothing clear enough to make sense, but enough for the interpolation in his passive sensors to let him know nothing as big as a mech was down there.
The turbines screamed, channeling all the power they could from the fusion bottle, but they were limited by mechanics and physics, and he was barely able to maintain enough altitude to clear a single city block. He let up on the foot pedals and guided the machine to a clear spot on the next block over, landing hard enough to crumble the pavement under the Vindicator’s footpads. The turbines still whined their protest, huffing and puffing as they spun down, but he was already moving, running—as much as something weighing forty tons could be said to be “running.” It was more of a ponderous, lumbering trot, but concrete spider-webbed with each stride and groundcars left parked in the road shuddered as he passed.
There was nothing. The city’s civilians were safe in their shelters, but he saw no ground troops, no vehicles, no planetary militia, and no enemy mecha. It made no sense. They’d been heading this way the last time they’d been spotted, and the route he’d taken with the assault platoons should have cut them off before they reached the city center.
They couldn’t have gone back around to the west, he reasoned. They would have run straight into the strike mecha and the Arbalests and there wouldn’t still be jamming because they’d all be scrap metal. But if they’d kept coming in from the east, he’d have seen them by now.
He pulled the Vindicator up short and barely kept the machine upright, the footpads digging up long trenches from the pavement, sending fist-size bits of aggregate skittering down the street.
“Any Slaughter unit!” he yelled int
o his audio pickup, opening up to the general address net. “Any Slaughter unit that can read me, this is Slaughter One. The Gomers are coming in from the north! I repeat, the enemy mecha have circled around to the north!”
Nothing. He was trotting his Vindicator the way he’d come, but he stopped at the next intersection and swiveled to the right, heading north. He’d hoped he would have a line-of-sight link to one of his mecha from the intersection, but saw nothing, and he cursed impotently. They hadn’t thought the enemy would try entering the city from the mud flats there—the footing was treacherous, the approaches steep up the outflow of the water treatment plant. They’d assigned a militia unit to watch for infiltration from ground troops and left it basically unguarded.
Swearing impotently, he hit the jump-jets again, rising on columns of shimmering fire above the broad, flat roof of a warehouse and barely clearing it. His left footpad caught at the edge of a ventilation fan near the front face of the building and a sickening emptiness opened up inside his gut as the Vindicator began to cartwheel forward. Desperate, he cut thrust to the left-side jet and the world swung back level, the ground approaching way too fast beneath him in the view from the posterior cameras. His heels dug into the throttle controls and the street blackened and fragmented from the thrust of superheated air, then everything was swallowed in billowing clouds of dust and debris and then impact.
Whiplash bounced his head off the easy chair’s padding and his teeth clicked together hard enough that he thought he tasted loose enamel. It was all he could do to bring his right leg forward to turn a sure fall into a stumbling lurch, bringing the Vindicator into a kneeling position in the open yard around the cargo loading dock at the front of the warehouse. A tall, wire-topped security fence separated the yard from the broad lanes of the truck route circling around the perimeter of the city, leading to the spaceport.
On the other side of the fence was a column of enemy mecha.
There were two platoons’ worth, if the bandits used anything like military organization, marching down the road, heading inward toward the city center. Six of them were Hoppers, slapped together with fabricated parts and bristling with whatever weapons the pirates could steal or salvage, but there were two assault mecha at the rear of the column. They were older models, designed just after the Fall, when everyone was scrambling for position, building whatever they could with what they had. They looked crude and awkward, an armored gingerbread man, whatever their official designation might have been was lost to two centuries of war. They were known colloquially as Reapers and they still carried enough armor and weapons to be dangerous.
Great. I found them, now what the hell am I going to do with them?
They’d seen him already—it had been hard to miss his landing. They were swiveling in place, moving almost in slow motion, cannons tracking and weapons raising, and there were just too damn many of them. He had to move!
One more jump, just as high as the overworked jets would take him; heat flooded into the cockpit as turbines already pushed to their limit went from red-hot to white-hot and he very nearly passed out. He couldn’t think about the heat, couldn’t even think about the cannon rounds, the bullets, and lasers ripping past his cockpit because his focus was on the tactical HUD, on the IFF display, hunting all around in the scant seconds he was airborne, searching for just one friend.
And there she was, just a kilometer away, paused in a T-junction between the government center and the edge of a shopping mall, Prevatt in her hunched-over Golem, more beautiful than anything he’d ever seen before.
“This is Slaughter One!” he said as clearly and quickly as he could, already feeling the Vindicator beginning to descend. “All Slaughter units to this position! I have found the enemy mecha!”
There was no time to repeat it; he was only thirty meters above the enemy column and falling fast. He targeted the Reapers and launched a flight of Fire-n-Forget missiles with a backward slap of his left hand, waiting till the last possible second to pound the jump-jet pedals to their stops. The turbines screamed in protest and vented their rage with another wave of waste heat, but it was all lost in another bone-rattling landing and something flashed red in the damage display readout on the far right side of his HUD.
Left hip actuator, he thought clinically. Not a big deal; I won’t live long enough for it to be a problem.
He didn’t panic, though he might pay for it later, somewhere in the dark with no one around. He was running scenarios through his head and grabbing at any possibility likely to work, yanking it out and implementing it as the selections scrolled by.
Chest-deep thumps rolled off the missile strikes, hardly able to miss at this range even with the jamming, and white, yellow, and red flashed just out of the range of vision of his canopy. He’d come down almost on top of the second Hopper in the column and he used the proximity and his Vindicator’s superior mass to lunge forward and smash a shoulder into the side of the ostrich-legged machine. The Hopper’s legs came out from under it, clawing at the air as it crashed on its back, an overturned turtle on the beach. Jonathan didn’t flip it upright the way Logan had on the family vacation they’d taken to the shore when he was a boy; instead, he stomped a footpad down into the cockpit. Transparent aluminum crumpled under nearly forty tons of mass balanced on two meters of footpad and the man or woman inside was instant roadkill.
His stomach twisted; dying that way, with your cockpit crushing you inside it, was a mech pilot’s worst nightmare. He couldn’t bring himself to feel sorry for a bandit who preyed on innocent people, but he also didn’t look back at the smashed cockpit. He pushed away from the wreckage and swung his mech’s plasma cannon to the left, counting on the Hopper to his right, the lead machine in the patrol, not being able to get a clean shot off at him because he was right in line with the other mechs in the column.
Though the possibility of friendly fire certainly wasn’t slowing down the other two Hoppers in the column—they cut loose a spread of missiles at point-blank range, two dozen of them, more than enough to strip away his armor and disable the Vindicator. Only two things saved him: distance and panic. He’d launched on the Reapers from about fifty meters away, which was as close as you could fire a standard mech-launched missile and have the warhead arm itself. The Hopper closest to him was only forty meters away. The missiles that didn’t miss outright hadn’t even had time to accelerate to their top speed when they hit, ringing off his Vindicator’s chest plastron like a gong but doing no real damage.
The other enemy machine, the one just this side of the Reapers, was twenty meters farther out, just room enough for his warheads to arm, and they did. Unfortunately for him, half of them locked onto the bandit Hopper behind Jonathan, passing meters away from his cockpit and slamming into the Hopper, engulfing it in flame and smoke. The others managed to hit the Vindicator, stripping away a ton of armor beneath a chain of gut-punch explosions and a wall of searing heat.
But not before Jonathan fired his plasma cannon. The heat and light and concussion of the missile strikes faded to nothing beside the raw power of a star handed down to man, as if by some celestial Prometheus. He’d aimed at the further of the two Hoppers to his left, instinct or thought working faster than his brain could comprehend telling him it was the greater danger. At just sixty meters, the scintillating ball of sun-fire tore right through the Hopper’s chest armor and incinerated the pilot inside it. The machine froze in place, the turbines still spinning but no one left at the controls.
He’d survived this long on surprise and violence of action, and he knew that advantage was fleeting, just like he knew the two Reapers hadn’t been taken out of commission. He’d seen them striding forward with their stiff-legged, tottering gait even before the Hopper’s missiles had struck his Vindicator and hidden everything behind a shroud of smoke and a wall of fire hot enough to blank out his thermal sensors. The Vindicator tottered to the left as armor was blasted off the right side of its chest, sending it off balance, and Jonathan shifted
its weight, throwing the machine’s left leg out at an awkward angle to catch it before it collapsed to the pavement.
Something shrieked, the tell-tale sound of ripping metal, and flashing yellow turned to insistent red on the damage display. The hip actuator had frozen and his Vindicator wouldn’t be straightening up again without the benefit of a repair bay… which he would most likely not live long enough to supervise.
His left arm was down, keeping the Vindicator off the pavement, but his right shoulder was up and squared toward the Reapers, and the 30mm Vulcan mounted there was up and ready while the plasma gun was swung off to the side, thrown wide in an effort to keep his balance. He armed the gun with a flick of his left finger on the control panel at the end of the armrest there, fired it with a squeeze of the trigger on his joystick.
The rotary cannon roared, the barrels spinning faster than a human eye could follow. It would burn through the whole hopper built into the right side of the Vindicator’s chest in seconds, but he held the trigger down just the same, knowing he wouldn’t have to worry about running out of ammo unless he lived through the next two minutes. Hundreds of tungsten slugs the size of his thumb pounded into the chest plates of the closest Reaper—he wanted to aim at the leg, to knock it off balance, but he didn’t have the luxury of precision targeting at the moment and the chest was big and close.
The Reaper had a universal weapons mount on its right arm, and it could have carried anything from an ETC cannon to a plasma gun to even a light coil gun, but these were bandits, and they made do with what they could find and feed and maintain. This one mounted a high-power laser, easily identifiable by the outsized focus crystal at its emitter, and the mech’s pilot was firing the weapon even before he had it on line with Jonathan’s Vindicator. Humid air, rich with vapor and particulates, lit up in lightning-sparks of plasma just above the right shoulder of Jonathan’s mech, arcing downward until the 30mm rounds began chewing into the chest armor.