by Rick Partlow
Armor splintered and cracked under the hail of slugs, the tungsten penetrators digging through the thick chest plates with dogged persistence. The laser slewed sideways to the left, not from the impacts of the rounds but from the panic of the pilot as he tried to spin the narrow transparent aluminum strips of his cockpit away from the incoming fire and forgot to let off the trigger. The laser bursts sliced into the luckless Hopper at the end of the column, nailing his left-hip turbine and blowing it out in a spray of plasma.
Jonathan would have laughed at the enemy’s misfortune, but he had his own to think about. His Vulcan’s barrels were spinning dry, his ammo supply gone, and he was still bringing the plasma gun back in line, and it wouldn’t be soon enough. The second Reaper was already firing his own primary weapon and his laser was on-target. Jonathan’s Vulcan cannon was swallowed up in an actinic flash of white, polarizing the canopy and blinding his external cameras, and he knew the next shot would spear right through his cockpit.
He triggered off a blast from his plasma gun even though it wasn’t yet lined up with the Reaper and couldn’t even hope to target him with his sensors blinded, hoping against hope the shot would distract the enemy pilot. He fully expected the laser to burn right through him before his canopy even had the chance to depolarize and let him see the shot that killed him, but… nothing happened.
And when his sensors came back online a second later, followed closely by his canopy clearing, he saw the Reaper was on the ground, its left leg blown off, power sparking from severed cables at the bare metal of the left hip. For just the barest fraction of a heartbeat, he was convinced he’d managed a miraculous shot with his plasma gun, but the notion was dispelled when something moving at hypersonic speeds, visible only by the faint trail of ionized gas in its wake, took the second Reaper in the center of the chest. The ETC round penetrated straight through to the fusion reactor and the pirate mech disappeared in a yellow globe of flushing plasma, most of the cockpit incinerated along with the pilot inside it. Thrown off balance, the Reaper toppled to the pavement, crashing heavily, metal and concrete impossibly burning from the heat of the liberated plasma.
Jonathan followed the round back to its source, saw the Golem ripping right through the security fence outside the cargo dock of the warehouse. His IFF display said it was Marc Langella, but he knew it already from the demon face painted over the mech’s cockpit in subdued universal camouflage colors.
The disabled Reaper was still moving, its pilot trying to push himself up on the mech’s articulated left hand in a futile attempt to stand on one intact leg. Jonathan lined up his plasma gun carefully and fired, the blast burning through the cockpit. The Reaper smashed to the ground, cracking charred concrete beneath its bulk. Everything was preternaturally still for a long second, until Langella’s voice came over their private channel, the man’s voice tinged with unmistakable disapproval.
“Dude,” he said, “you’re my CO and you’re my friend… but you can’t do this sort of shit anymore.”
He wanted to argue with the man, but he shut his mouth on the words, forcing down his pride and his ego and really thinking about it.
“You’re one hundred percent right,” he said instead. “Now give me a hand up. My left hip actuator is bad, but I think I can limp back if I can get this thing standing.” He chuckled ruefully. “And I really don’t want to have to wait for a ride again.”
18
The first enemy plane went down easy. They’d both been so intent on staying on Lee’s tail, neither of them noticed Katy’s assault shuttle rising up from a nap-of-the-earth run only three meters above the jungle treetops. Not until it was too late.
“You’re in range,” Acosta told her, trying to be useful. She appreciated the attempt, but still hadn’t forgiven him for puking on her.
“Yeah,” she said, eyes locked on the targeting reticle, trying to will it to go green. “I noticed.”
She touched the firing control and ionized air flared sparks in a line two kilometers long, connecting her shuttle to the enemy bird for just an eyeblink. It was enough. The armed lander folded in on itself, its starboard wing separating in a spray of white fire, sending the aerospacecraft tumbling out of control, pinwheeling into the river five kilometers outside town, steam exploding in a white cloud against the stars.
“Thanks, Katy,” Lee said, his voice infused with a sigh of relief.
The last enemy bird cut and ran, but played it smart. He knew they would run him down if he just headed back to orbit, knew he’d never make it, so he headed down instead, straight for Piraeus. Katy muttered a curse and pushed the stick downward, following him in, knowing what he was trying to do.
“If he gets in over the buildings, we won’t be able to shoot at him,” Acosta warned her.
“Yes, thank you, Francis.” I will not lose my temper, I will not lose my temper…
She had to get below him, she decided. If she could get a low angle on him, she could force him back up, unless he was suicidal.
The secret is to be just a little bit more suicidal than the other guy.
The nose of her shuttle dipped, her port wing tilting up as she banked east and dove, opening up the throttle. Acceleration peeled her lips back from her teeth and drove the breath from her chest and the stars disappeared above the upper camera view, the only lights still visible on the screens the street lights of Piraeus, sullen and subdued under the mists off the river.
“Make yourself useful,” she grunted to Acosta. “Try to let them know they’ve got incoming.”
Acosta didn’t respond, and Katy couldn’t afford to take her eyes away from the controls, not going this fast this close to the ground and the rooftops looming large ahead. She was about to repeat the order when he finally began to croak out a transmission, forcing air in past the acceleration.
“All Slaughter units, this is Cover One Bravo. Be advised we have an enemy bird coming in low over the city. I say again, we have enemy aircraft inbound. Cover One out.”
There was no reply and she gave a mental shrug. The bandits could still be jamming their signals, either from their mecha or from the drop-ships, wherever they’d landed. Or it could be everyone down there was too busy to answer. Lacking further orders, she was going to take this guy down.
Maybe.
He was good, and desperate, and the combination was making him hard to pin down. Every time she went low, he went lower; she was only a half a kilometer back of him, but she still couldn’t get a weapons lock. And the city was dead ahead, so close she could see the writing on the advertisements plastered across the entertainment district. Apparently, Polite’s Shang-Style Barbeque had the best stir-fried gator in the Periphery; she reminded herself to give the place a try if it wasn’t burned down.
She was as low as she could safely fly, only meters above the rooftop, and she swore the enemy bird was actually below her, his wings barely clearing the facades of the buildings on either side of it.
Crazy fucker, she thought, not without some admiration.
She was, she decided, going to have to chance pulling up and firing her laser down into him, despite the damage she might do to the city. She’d just begun to pull up when she saw the missile streaking upward from the streets below. Instincts yanked the stick to port in an evasive course, but the missile wasn’t aimed at her. It described a precise parabola, guided by a laser designator from below, and speared through the bandit shuttle, consuming it in a fiery blossom of red and yellow. Burning debris rained down into the middle of the city and she couldn’t help but wince at the damage it would do.
She throttled down the shuttle, pulling a tight turn around the area where the missile had originated, trying to give whoever had launched it a chance to establish a laser line-of-sight link.
“Cover One, this is Ranger One.” She would have recognized Lyta’s voice without the call sign. “The bandits landed dismounts and they tried to storm the Palacio, but we took care of them. I’ve had reports from scouts that th
e drop-ships are still on the ground northwest of the city, but they won’t be there long once they figure out they’re losing. Go take them out, then find Slaughter One and report to him. Ranger One out.”
“Wilco, Ranger One,” she told the woman. “Cover One out.”
She eyed Acosta sidelong, offering him a half-smile, more because of satisfaction at the results of the day than for any good feeling she might have developed for the man.
“You heard the lady, Francis. Call Lee and tell him to scout for our forces.” She turned back to the tactical display and opened the throttle, pushing the stick toward the northwest. “Let’s go find some bad guys.”
More than anything, Lyta Randell wanted to walk point.
Used to be able to get away with it, when I was just a platoon leader.
Oh, sometimes the battalion commander would hear about it and give her a ration of shit, but Ranger platoon leaders were supposed to be a bit closer to the edge than your normal soldier. Even as a company commander, she’d been a bit closer to the front than she should have been. Now, though, she was a major, and their company was all by its lonesome without higher to send them a new CO if she bought it.
So, she swallowed her pride and took her spot in the formation between First and Second platoons, with the medic and a commo specialist attached to her hips like remoras on a shark. She’d left Top, First Sergeant Benitez, back with Third platoon at the Palacio, and he’d tried to talk her out of even that. She should be back with the civilians at the command post, he’d said, where it was safe.
Ha. The old man meant well, but she wasn’t some wet-behind-the-ears CO still wiping the shine off her railroad tracks, and she wasn’t intimidated by a First Sergeant, not at her age.
She felt the rough stucco of a storefront wall scraping against the body armor over her right shoulder and she glared through her visor at the medic, who was too damned close, and taking up more than his fair share of the sidewalk. She felt like telling him to go join Second platoon’s squad on the other side of the street, but thought he’d probably be lost without an officer or NCO to tell him where to go. She hoped he was good at his job… and that they didn’t have to find out.
She heard the gunfire about two seconds ahead of Lt. Crowe’s warning in her helmet headphones.
“Ma’am, we have contact ahead, one hundred meters east of us.”
Crowe sounded calm and analytical in the face of the enemy fire, which she’d expected. The man should have been a captain, but he’d given up a chance at the review board for this mission. The column had stopped and dropped to a knee at the upraised fist of Gironde, the Second platoon leader, and she mirrored the motion, making sure her parasites did as well.
“Roger,” she confirmed. “I’m coming up.” She pushed herself up using the butt-stock of her rifle as a lever, then raised a palm to stop the medic when he tried to follow her. “You stay here.” She pointed to the communications specialist, who hadn’t moved, enjoying the break from toting the heavy orbital communications gear she’d been carrying on her back for about three kilometers now. “You, come with me.”
Gironde was motioning at his squad leaders as she passed him, giving orders in the privacy of his helmet, his voice held inside by the sound-proof visor. The enemy, the ground troops of this “Red Brotherhood,” didn’t use modern helmets with built-in light amplification and short-range radio. Theirs were basic, cheap, leaving the face and neck open and unprotected; they might be good for keeping out grenade fragments, but not for much else.
Well, if they weren’t amateurs, they wouldn’t be pirates, would they? They’d be mercenaries.
The shops gave way to the fabrication district at the intersection ahead, the street lights ending just as abruptly. Flashes of light and echoing peals of thunder teased at her senses from deep inside the rows of warehouses and factories and she knew the mech-jocks were fighting their own battle, totally oblivious to the “crunchies” below them. Her own struggle was more immediate and visceral, illuminated by lines of tracers arcing toward First platoon’s positions.
Crowe had settled them into cover behind a row of delivery vans parked at the curb next to some sort of shop. She couldn’t read what they sold because their sign had been shot out, bits of glass and plastic littering the sidewalk below, crunching under the soles of her boots. A stray round impacted the sidewalk less than a meter from her and the communications specialist threw herself down behind the wheel well of one of the delivery vans, nearly knocking over the Ranger already sheltered there.
Crowe was kneeling beside the company’s mortar crew, which Lyta had attached to his platoon, directing them as they set up the base and tube for their weapon in the gap between two of the boxy delivery vehicles. Incoming gunfire smacked against the opposite side of the vehicle but failed to penetrate, and also failed to break Crowe’s concentration.
Damn good soldier. I wonder if he isn’t being wasted here when he should have his own company.
Oh well, it had been his choice.
“How many we got?” she asked, trying to get a look over one of the mortar crew’s shoulder.
“Looks like about two platoons’ worth of them, probably the group that hauled ass when they saw their people get slaughtered at the Palacio,” Crowe told her. Another bullet pinged off the side of the truck only centimeters from his head. He paused and stuck the barrel of his rifle around the side of the truck, firing off a few short, controlled bursts before he continued.
“They’re dug in down the street.” He motioned past the edge of the line of warehouses, past an empty gravel lot to a line of dredging machines parked end-to-end. “They’re using the equipment as cover and their backs are up against the canal running down to the fusion reactor cooling stacks.”
“Your assessment?” she asked him.
“For us?” he shrugged. “It would be a hell of a place for a last stand. We could hold up there until someone called in an airstrike. For them, unless they feel like swimming in that shit, it’s a deathtrap.”
Her smile was far too broad for the circumstances and it was probably better he couldn’t see it. It was considered bad form for a soldier to enjoy killing, but she made an exception for pirates and slavers. She’d seen the shattered lives left in their wake once too often to ever offer them mercy.
“Don’t tell me, Marshall,” she said, motioning toward the enemy positions. “Show me.”
Crowe snorted a humorless laugh and slapped the gunner on the shoulder. The gunner was a junior NCO, an unlikely little man named Evans who didn’t look as if he could lift his own weight, much less carry a mortar tube, but he managed somehow.
“Hang it!” Evans barked. It was a holdover from ancient times, as almost all mortars were magazine fed, just a signal for the assistant gunner to jack the charging lever and load the round for launch. “Fire!”
The “shoonk!” of the mortar firing was a homelike sound, comforting with the memories of years spent on firing ranges. The explosion of the round impacting only fifty or sixty meters away was less comforting, but the dredging machines contained the blast and the fragments, sending the concussion echoing out toward the canal and sending a mushroom cloud of dirt and dust and sooty smoke high into the air. Her instincts tried to force her to flinch, to duck behind cover, but there’d been no danger of a short round; Evans was guiding the shots with the laser designator in his helmet.
The enemy had figured it out as well and poured a hail of gunfire in the general direction of the mortar team. Evans and the rest of the crew dove away from the weapon, but not quite quickly enough. Lyta saw the blood spray and knew someone had been hit, but all four had gone to the ground and she had no idea which one was wounded.
“Covering fire!” Crowe yelled into the general platoon net. “Lay down covering fire, damn it!”
Nearly two dozen rifles spoke as one, chattering spitefully as if they resented the fact their machine guns had been left behind with the force in the Palacio.
We
could use them now, Lyta admitted, but it was a calculated risk.
It seemed to be enough. The incoming fire was slacking off and Evans was pushing himself up, unhurt. The loader was scrambling to her feet, but the assistant gunner stayed down, clutching at her left arm.
Lyta knelt down over the woman, switching frequencies with a touch of her wrist computer.
“Medic!” she snapped. “Get up here, we got wounded.”
The assistant gunner was a corporal and Lyta was ashamed to admit she didn’t remember her name until she read it on her name tape.
“Steady, McClendon,” she told the woman, squeezing her shoulder, more a symbolic motion than a meaningful one since she wouldn’t feel it through her armor.
Evans was up and firing again, making slight adjustments with a small joystick at the base of the mortar, walking the rounds up and down the line of dredgers, backlighting the machines with wreaths of fire. Yellow paint peeled away in charred and blackened flakes, and one of the machines crashed sideways, its left rear wheel blown completely off. Lyta let the barrage go on until the medic skidded in beside her and took over McClendon, then she tapped Evans on the shoulder and signaled “hold fire” with a hand waving up and down across her face, just in case the too-close concussion of the mortar hits might drown out her radio call.
“Marshall,” she said to Lt. Crowe, “I don’t want them swimming off and winding up someone else’s problem. Advance.”
“Sgt. Borgmier,” Crowe snapped the orders out crisply, “stay here with Third squad and lay down suppressive fire along the right side of the line of dredging machines. First and Second, on me, Ranger-file.”
On us, you mean.
She followed on Crowe’s heels, ignoring protocol just this once. She sure as hell wasn’t going to stay back and hide behind cover while he was chasing down the pirates. It was only fifty meters, after all.