“Seems like trust is in short supply lately.”
<>
“Sorry, Lucille. Was just thinking out loud.” Jessica walked the CASPer forward and gave the instrument panel a quick glance. She’d missed being in a CASPer cockpit much more than she’d have ever thought possible. Being a pilot would have been a good life, but she’d wanted more. So had her father. Jessica frowned. “Lucille? You’ve interfaced with the Intergalactic Haulers mainframe before, right?”
<
“Did you ever find evidence my father was a traitor to the Union?”
Lucille did not immediately respond. <
Jessica sighed. The Mk 8 was a substantial step forward for human engineering. The most lethal and most protected CASPer ever, the enemies of Earth, mercenary or not, would have paid dearly for intelligence about the development of operating systems, command and control links, and system layouts, all of which could be gained through salvage operations.
“Sonuvabitch.”
<
“I know that law, Lucille!” Jessica fumed. “Sorry. This isn’t exactly an ideal time to compartmentalize. We’re talking about something that undermines every single human mercenary company. Look, you said you stopped that program in your architecture. Did it have a master reboot command?”
<
“Godsdamnit!” Jessica slammed her left fist into the forward instrument panel. “How did you stop it?”
<
The mental clouds of impending doom in her thoughts lifted a fraction. Lucille can easily fix the problem for all CASPers, and we can still use it here to bring down Raleigh’s mission. “When you launch the command, is there a chance the program has already been run somewhere in the galaxy?”
<
“You fixed Mike 77 then?”
<
Jessica tucked her hair back behind one ear and took a sip of water from the canteen Tara had stashed in the side rails. For a split, insane second, she wondered if Tara had poisoned it before unscrewing the cap and drinking. “No, Lucille. Once we hit their jammers, and I mean the instant we target and fire, launch the reboot program. As soon as it’s sent and confirmed, terminate the command and control linkage on our CASPers. That should give us the time we’ll need.”
<
Jessica flexed her fingers and kept up the steady pace behind Mike 77. She glanced at the waypoint information for the compound. Distance and time ran down with every step. Jessica tried not to focus on them, but the rapidly decreasing values seemed to burn into her brain.
“Do what you can, Lucille. Every second counts.”
* * * * *
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Weqq
Near the Satisfaction
Kurrang pressed himself into the dark, moist soil and pushed forward on his broad chest. Once his long face cleared the vegetation, he observed the Satisfaction’s landing position and the weak defensive effort to protect it. The ship lay sprawled across a shallow marshland. Two hundred meters long, the Satisfaction rested on its fully deployed landing pads but only on its starboard side. The port-side pads were each about a meter or so off the ground, and the ship’s position at an almost forty-degree list in the mud didn’t give Kurrang much impetus to attack. The Satisfaction wasn’t going anywhere soon.
While the humans were careless and haphazard with their defenses, they were capable. Six of the mechanical warriors Jessica called CASPers stood with their backs to the ship’s hull. From what Kurrang could see, two of them—and maybe a third—were currently unoccupied. At least one pilot sat on the feet of her CASPer in a posture like she was sleeping sitting up. Kurrang watched for a moment and shook his head in disgust. Even the MinSha were better warriors than this deplorable band of humans. The more he watched them shuffling around, not paying attention to the situation around them, the more Kurrang wondered how a species could be so different. As he compared the sight of lazy mercenaries going through the motions of a point defense that should have been simple, he thought about the Peacemaker and how Jessica never seemed to stop finding ways to succeed. His first interactions with humans were inconclusive, troubling, and well beyond the training he’d received three hundred and fifty Earth years before on Ruskaant.
There, in the company of other soldiers who’d been recruited for their size, ability, and technical competence, Kurrang had learned how the more powerful guilds of the Union, specifically the Mercenary Guild and the Merchant Guild, pushed the TriRusk toward enslavement and collapse with all the good intentions that a supposedly free market provided. Though the TriRusk albinism affected one in two hundred children, it was good for business, and there were efforts in the dark markets far from the Peacemaker Guild’s oversight to breed the condition and control distribution of biologically-synthesized diamonds. Statistically speaking, it would never have worked, and the guilds wanted to pursue other, lesser evolved cultures and ply them with riches and opportunities. As the ill-tempered spotlight of greed slid away from the TriRusk to other species, namely humanity and the garden planet Earth, the TriRusk realized a grand opportunity to fade away presented itself, and they took it collectively, without substantial regret. But there were those who knew what had almost happened to them would happen to another species. Reports the humans were impressive and unpredictable warriors excited the guilds and the corrupt businesses who wished to continue their proxy aggressions on one another with pawns that no one cared about, save those on their pale, blue world. Humans were throwaway warriors and, unlike the TriRusk, without definitive economic value. In their planning and flight from civilization, the TriRusk recognized that humans were an easier target for the rest of the galaxy to pursue. As such, humans were left to their own devices and Kurrang, like all the TriRusk leaders, believed them too violent and unpredictable to garner citizenship in the Union.
When the MinSha found them, Kurrang and the others knew it was only a matter of time before someone came to collect them. None of them had imagined it would be humans. They watched the attacks in abject horror, believing the loss of their society was only days a
way. Kurrang had believed it, too. ‘He’d turned his back on his own colony to save his daughter, believing he’d be alone in the endeavor.
Until he’d met Jessica Francis.
A subvocalized song on the breeze nicked his ears, and Kurrang twitched his head to listen. He withdrew from his vantage point carefully and moved back into the light jungle forest where the squad waited. Their leader, a young female named Turrm, stepped forward to speak to him. Another sound above the treetops caught his attention, and he motioned Turrm to take cover in the shoulder-high vegetation. He accelerated to her position and dropped down to face her as two human flyers raced overhead from south to north at high speed, their fans whining in protest.
“Where are they?” Kurrang asked. “The movement we detected? Where?”
“Underground, moving toward the human ship.” Turrm said. “There is a small entrance fissure in a stone formation ten meters down the hill from where the ship’s bridge lays in the mud.”
“MinSha?” Kurrang’s eyebrows rose.
“I don’t know,” Turrm said. “I’ve never heard it before.”
Kurrang nodded. These things tended to happen when soldiers weren’t given the chance to operate in the real world. A long time ago, elders had suggested the TriRusk not be taught basic movement, tracking, and clandestine operations in the open environment. Those things, they’d argued, were skills for species that couldn’t simply co-exist. “Did it sound like rubbing two sticks together?”
“Like friction?” Turrm nodded slowly. “A little.”
“And it was moving that direction?” Kurrang pointed to the ship’s bridge.
“Yes.”
A noise alone didn’t mean anything other than something large, or a lot of small somethings, had skittered through an underground corridor below. The presence of the flyers meant what had passed by was a large contingent of MinSha fleeing, as promised, from the compound. Kurrang stood to his full height and threw a bag of explosives over his broad shoulders. “Up. The MinSha will need our help.”
“What about the flyers?” Turrm gestured at the trees. Through holes in the canopy, he could see the two human machines turning back toward them. He knew their thermal sensors were on and tracking him as the largest, brightest object in the forest, which matched his intent. The flyers pivoted and locked onto him, their noses pitched forward as they roared above the treetops. He saw the flicker of weapons fire from their forward cannons.
“They can’t stop us from up there.” Kurrang raised his voice. “Get up and follow me. Weapons ready!”
Kurrang ran toward the human ship. They could stay in the cover of the forest most of the way to the fissure, but they’d have to emerge for a few seconds near the human ship. He remembered Jessica’s words about fear and confusion in the human way of war. What better time to test the theory? Kurrang looked over his shoulder and saw the dozen TriRusk following him at a sprint. Laser bolts rained down harmlessly from the flyers, but he was certain the humans pulling security near the ship would hear the commotion and be ready to engage.
Kurrang brought his weapon up, tore through the thicker brush that had hidden his observation point, and saw several dozen humans simply staring slack-jawed and unarmed at the thirteen TriRusk who burst out of the jungle and raced toward them. In a split second, Kurrang swerved toward the stunned humans and roared.
The squad followed suit. Several of the squad lofted their grenades toward the six dormant CASPers on the perimeter. An alarm klaxon sounded from inside the ship just as the first explosions toppled two CASPers and sent some of the humans scurrying for cover and their weapon systems. The squad charged into the massing humans and were far outnumbered, but speed and ferocity gave them the advantage. Kurrang lashed out with his thick arms and grabbed a human by the neck to throw him out of the way. The man’s head popped off in Kurrang’s fist with a satisfying crunch. He saw the open cargo bays of the ship and several CASPer units mobilizing inside.
“Attack the open bays!” he roared and gestured at the ship before swinging his fists into the humans stupid enough to get between him and the ship.
The four remaining CASPers outside whined to life and proceeded to engage the squad. Machine gun fire had little effect on the fast-moving TriRusk, but two of the mechas with rail guns fired carefully aimed shots at the squad and killed three males in the space of a few seconds. Above, the flyers circled around and dove at the attacking TriRusk in a straight line abreast of each other. Kurrang grabbed a grenade and whirled to face them. Laser fire raining down on and around him, he flung the grenade at the first flyer. The flyer jinked perfectly out of the way of the explosion…right into his wingman. The two flyers crunched into each other and fell toward the downed ship. Kurrang looked back at the open bays and saw five more CASPers, all with shoulder-mounted rail guns, amble out of the tilted doors and engage.
A roar from his far right caught Kurrang’s attention, and he turned. Around the sunken bridge of the ship came at least forty MinSha with weapons blazing. Kurrang roared triumphantly at his squad to rally and engage the CASPers. He flung two grenades at a badly damaged mecha belching black smoke. The explosion knocked the suit off balance, and Kurrang leapt into the air and brought his full weight down upon it. As the mechanism thudded into the mud, the cockpit opened and a human male with facial tattoos and metal piercings that looked painful screamed as Kurrang fell upon him.
There would be no mercy for any of the mercenaries.
* * *
A wave of heavy mist rolled through the jungle as the two CASPers approached the smoldering MinSha compound. Jessica didn’t bother to engage the forward sensor arrays. She had the navigational beacon locked, and the mist rolling along the ground no longer bothered her. The extra height from being in the CASPer’s cockpit helped, but Jessica could see on her radar display the compound’s location and the significant terrain and flora around it as clearly as she needed. Only two CASPers were on the walls of the compound, but neither appeared to be moving. Jessica watched them for a moment and keyed her direct laser comms to Tara in Mike 77.
“Those CASPers on the walls. Are they manned?”
Tara replied a second later. “I can’t tell. We have to assume they are.”
Jessica looked at the outlines of the mechas. “Looks like two Mk 5s to me.”
<
That’s a good thing.
Jessica stayed behind Tara as they made their way through the mist. The whitish-gray cloud washed over her forward cameras and blanked out her vision for a few steps. The CASPer’s cockpit was nearly silent and with the vision nulled out, Jessica fought sensory deprivation for a wild, panicked second.
“Thermals, Lucille.”
The misty view disappeared in an instant, and she could immediately see the surrounding trees, bushes, and small animals scurrying away from the CASPer’s feet. In the distance, she caught fleeting glimpses of the CASPers on the wall. Both Mk 5s appeared to be oriented to the south, as if looking for something. Jessica consulted the multi-function display in front of her right thigh. The air warning system showed flyers operating at the edge of the scope, roughly ten kilometers away.
“Lucille, have you breached the C2 link?”
<
“No shit?” Jessica blinked. “They’ve linked up?”
<
The communications jammers had to be taken out fast. Any and all advantages they had in the attack would recede quickly if they couldn’t communicate with each other.
“Boss, Deathangel 25. At the eastern portal,” Tara called. The heavy door rolled upward, revealing a nearly empty central paddock beyond. Jessica watched the two CASPers on the compound’s upper surfaces. They failed to move or provide any type of security. She traced her eyes along the roof to the familiar weapon system parapets. All of them were down and stowed.
This might just work.
“Roger, 25. As soon as the door is down, get out of that thing and start your refit. Maintenance and armament teams are standing by.”
“Roger.” Tara replied. “Estimate combat ready in seven mikes.”
Jessica bit her lip. There was no way any competent commander would send out two CASPers reporting as many caution and warning system failures as theirs—especially if they were real problems. That Tara would relay something like seven minutes to combat effectiveness was equally crazy. Jessica stepped through the door first and plodded forward three steps looking for the maintenance racks. She hesitated for a moment. There were no maintenance or armament teams standing by anywhere inside the compound. Tara moved past her and angled toward the far wall. Jessica turned to follow her and froze as Raleigh’s voice sent shivers down her spine.
“So, Mason? Who’s your friend?”
Tara replied immediately. “Um, what did you say, Boss?”
“Who’s driving the other CASPer because it’s not Oso based on the data I can see.” Raleigh said. “What have you done?”
He’s got a back door. Jessica sucked in a breath. “Lucille, terminate all links. He’s on to us.”
Honor the Threat Page 32