by Shawn Jones
“Bravo stand down!” Cort ordered as he looked down to see it was too late to shut down the suit he had armed. He threw the overcharged bomb toward the middle of the base and dove behind a pile of bodies. Whether it was a fused circuit or because Cort keyed the destruct sequence improperly, the result was that the CONDOR exploded less than twenty meters away from where he dove for cover. three of the other suits were also too far overloaded to be shut down. In the end, when Sorano led his people back in, they wouldn’t find a single living being in the compound.
AFS Taurus
“Captain, it is going to hell down there. I just picked up four overloads and I am only reading twenty-one Marines. I have also lost contact with General Addison.”
“Helm, how soon can we get back to the planet?” Platt asked.
“Twelve minutes.”
“Do we have communications yet?”
“No sir, the transition system is still down.”
“Goddammit people! We have humans down there dying and you are telling me I can’t do a damned thing about it. Get me something. Anything!”
Solitude
Heroc and Kimberly were walking around the perimeter of Bergh Station when the message from Cort came through. Kimberly opened her flexpad and keyed in a code, which opened the message. Cort’s sweating face was staring back at her.
“Hey, baby. It’s pretty ugly here. I’ve lost thirty or so Marines. Tell JJ I said to send someone to get the third team. She will know what to do. I don’t have much time, Kimberly. I just wanted to say that I love you. Thank you for bringing me back from the edge, Kimberly. I know you will take good care of our child.” Kim saw Cort’s eyes begin to water. “You are my savior, Kim, and I was wrong. It wasn’t a bad idea at all. I left something in the safe for you.”
Kim dropped the flexpad and began to fall. Heroc caught her and said, “What is wrong, Kimberly?”
Kim remembered that day back on Mars when they had first made love. She remembered the sound of his voice when he told her she would have to do all the work. The smell of his freshly showered skin. His touch. She wouldn’t feel it again. That knowledge was driven home when she felt the different touch of Heroc’s lower arm. As Heroc tried to help the human woman who had befriended her, Kim looked up and said, “Your people are finally fighting back.”
Ten minutes later, Kim closed the connection to Admiral Jones and lay back on the bed she shared with Cort. All three wolves were arrayed around her, and Heroc sat beside the bed, with two arms petting Coke, while a third held Kimberly’s hand. Kim opened the flexpad again and began playing Cort’s message. She fell asleep with the message looping over and over, playing against her swollen abdomen.
Planet 322-3
The base was gone. Only its outer wall remained reasonably intact. But even great chunks of it were missing where the overloaded suits had detonated. The explosions served their purpose, however. Not a single Cuplan was alive within the perimeter. Sorano’s people were sifting through the debris and bodies when the Marine sentries reported more incoming enemy. Sorano ordered everyone inside and the humans began to seal the breaches in the wall with anything available, including the remains of both friend and foe.
“Here they come, Captain!” someone to his left yelled.
“Who’s got eyes?” Sorano yelled. “Send us an image.” A moment later one corner of his HUD showed the incoming horde. Fuck. Two more sections of the screen lit up from other angles. There were over ten thousand enemy fighters approaching, with armor scattered among the ground troops. Sorano had twenty-one Marines left.
“Alamo! Alamo! Alamo!” Sorano ordered.
Eight Marines and Sorano began firing into the oncoming army while the other twelve used manual connections to link their power packs to those of their fallen comrades.
AFS Taurus
“Sir, we are approaching atmosphere.”
“Point weapons, begin targeting the enemy. Fire at will.”
The communications officer said, “Sir, Captain Sorano has ordered Alamo.”
“Alamo? What is Alamo?” Platt asked, looking at the only Marine on the bridge.
The sergeant in command of the Marine reserve squad was somber when he said, “They are linking and overloading their CONDOR packs, sir.”
“Oh, fuck. Get me some sort of communications!” Platt screamed.
Planet 322-3
One by one, the perimeter Marines fell back to make their own connections to the overload chain. Additional fallen Marines had been pulled from the destruction to be linked in as well. The last three humans on the wall used their remaining ammunition to wreak havoc on the ground around the base, and created a crater-ridden obstacle course that slowed the Cuplans down just enough to give the humans time to make the final connections to the group of living bombs.
Sorano said, “It has been my honor, ladies and gentlemen.”
Twenty men and women shouted, “Oorah!” as one, and Sorano looked up to his god as he entered the final command code for detonation. The last thing he saw was the Taurus entering the atmosphere directly above him. No! Gods, no!
After the invasion of Mars by the Atlantic Alliance, weapons teams in the Ares Federation developed the Alamo protocol. The system required a manual connection between multiple CONDORs, and provided an exponentially larger destructive capability than a single overload was capable of delivering. The energy from the first explosion was absorbed by the carbon nanotube network of the next CONDOR and applied to that suit’s explosion. The process repeated for every unit, timing the explosions to feed one another.
On the Cuplan planet, that process happened thirty times in less than one tenth of a second. The resulting explosion ignited the atmosphere, and even the outer hull of the Taurus, as it fell to the surface of the planet. The great ship came to rest on top of the fallen humans as if it were a flaming monument to their failed attempt to rescue their lost companions.
--
From the bridge of the AFS Mare’s Leg, Lex Sike watched as the fleet transitioned into the enemy system. The Jonah drives were spun up and accelerating the moment the system’s defensive network disrupted the transition drives. Using the Cuplan comm system, Admiral Jones ordered her gunships to seek out the reason for the transition system’s failure. The rest of the ships sped toward the third planet to find their people.
“Sir,” the sensor and comms officer said, “There was an explosion on the planet just as we jumped in. The signature shows it to be an Alamo detonation.”
“Gods! Get me to that planet, now.” Turning to Lex she said, “Get your people ready. I want to know what happened.” Please forgive me, Kimberly. I was too late.
“Yes, sir,” Lex said as he left the bridge.
--
On the surface minutes later, Lex and his CONDOR-clad company spread out to canvass the area of the ruined base. Techs were already sifting through the carnage inside the Taurus, but as yet, they didn’t have the answers that Jones sought.
As the Admiral scrolled through the various video feeds available to her, the gunships reported finding gravity generators within the system, which appeared to be responsible for the failure of the transition system. “Disable them all, and capture a few of them for study,” she ordered. I have to call Kim.
--
Speral’s ship landed on the planet the next day. JJ and Lex were waiting for Kimberly when she stepped down from the craft with the three wolves. Lex was now in his FALCON and took her arm as he walked beside her.
“Have you found him?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Will you, Lex?”
“I don’t know. But I have a thousand Marines looking for anything.”
“Is he under the ship?” Kim asked.
“No. We have the sensor logs from the ship now. He was lost twenty minutes before the Taurus went down.” There was a preternatural silence all around them, because the search had stopped for Kimberly’s arrival, and only the sound of the small party’s footf
alls could be heard.
The strange sound each step made caused Kim look down to see the smooth glassy surface of the planet crack under her feet as if she was walking on thin ice. “Is this from the explosion?”
“Yes,” JJ said. “I wish you would have waited until we had more information, Kimberly.”
“I need this, Jade. I have to know where he fell.”
Not knowing how to respond, Jones said, “Take as much time as you need. My people have the area secured.”
“Thank you.”
When it came time to leave, Kimberly began to walk up the ramp to Speral’s ship as JJ promised to keep her updated. “Bane, come!”
The great dire wolf wouldn’t follow her, though, so Kim went back down the ramp and said, “I know, boy. I feel him too. Let’s go.”
Bane whined and looked back and forth between Kimberly and a spot in the distance. Come with me, Alpha.
No matter how she tried to coax him, Bane wouldn’t move. Finally Lex picked the wolf up, only to feel its powerful jaws close on his protected neck. But the shock of the attack by the wolf he knew so well caused him to drop the animal and rub his neck as it ran into the distance. Zandra followed her companion, leaving only Coke beside Kimberly and the stunned humans.
On a hunch, Kimberly ordered a squad of Marines to follow the wolves and began walking in the same direction. It took all her self-control and worry about her unborn baby to keep from running after them herself. Two hundred meters away from Speral’s ship, almost three hundred meters from where Cort’s explosion took place, she found the Marines and wolves pulling debris and Cuplan bodies from a depression in the planet’s surface. Oh gods. Please. Let me at least take him home. Please!
“I’ve got a heartbeat!” a Marine yelled. She began pointing at an area near Bane and more CONDORs started digging beside the wolf. Eventually, a great section of the base wall began to take shape. Additional Marines arrived and began clearing more remnants of the base and its defenders. The woman who first heard the heartbeat was pointing at one spot in the carnage. Bane and Zandra were now joined by Coke in their excitement. Even their whines and yelps seemed to push the Marines harder. No one had any question about what they would find when eight warriors finally lifted the broken barrier from General Addison’s body.
As soon as the wall was out of the way, two more men helped the woman who had first heard the General’s heartbeat, lift his broken, CONDOR armored body from the pile. She grabbed a cable from her kit and joined her suit to the General’s and began feeding him power. A moment later, she said, “He is unconscious. The suit’s power is gone and he’s on emergency air. Stand by.”
It seemed like hours, but was really only seconds before the power suit started feeding her information, which she in turn fed to Kimberly and JJ via their flexpads. Then she ordered the man’s suit to open its cracked battle visor, leaving only a clear lens between Cort’s head and those who watched her work. The trauma was horrific. His face was bruised and broken, the skin pushing against his long scar as if the great wound was a belt, keeping the side of his face from expanding like a balloon. Both eyes were swollen shut, and his nose was pointing sideways at the stressed skin of his scar. The opposite ear was almost facing forward.
The medics from the Mare’s Leg arrived and transferred the General’s power source from the female Marine to one of their own. They began removing the crushed and broken CONDOR, being careful not to disturb the FALCON underneath, and once they switched his Atlas interface from one suit to the other, they powered up the inner suit. Then they made the necessary medical connections and ordered the suit to go rigid, so they could carry him to the shuttle for transport back to the ship. As Cort disappeared with Kimberly and wolves, Lex spoke, both to the Marines arrayed around him, and to every human on the planet via the comm system.
“Okay people, you have seen what the suits can withstand now. We are not leaving without absolute proof that every one of our people have met their gods. I will not leave a soul here. Do you understand?”
“Oorah!” echoed across the base.
Solitude
Cort was sitting up in his bed when Lex arrived from the academy. The general had awoken the day before, but unlike on Mars, with Kimberly here to make sure he didn’t push himself, he hadn’t seen a single person other than Kimberly and the medical staff since regaining consciousness. He was still very hard on the eyes, but the mending process had begun.
Both legs and one arm were immobilized, and there was a negative pressure apparatus over his torso, holding his internal organs in place while his ribs and connective tissue were mended by the biosynthetics. The unrestrained right arm was intubated, with synthetic-fortified nutrition being fed directly into his bloodstream, and from the other end of his body, another tube was removing the waste from his body in a near constant flow.
Even without the scar, Lex would have been able to recognize the family legend, but just barely. Cort’s face was still swollen to nearly double its normal size, the whites of his blinded eyes were blood-reddened, and his hair was missing in several places, where various medical probes and monitors were attached to his head.
“You have five minutes, Lex. Not one more second," Kimberly admonished the young man. “He can’t see you, and he can only hear from his left ear. And if he gets too excited, you have to go. Am I clear?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Kimberly herself was also in a medbed. As the medics were transferring Cort from the Mare’s Leg shuttle to its medical bay, her water broke. An emergency cesarean meant that Cort had technically made good on his promise to be there when the baby was born.
“Lex…,” Cort began hoarsely.
“Yes, sir?”
“Before you leave, move her bed to the right side of mine, okay?”
It took Lex a few seconds to realize that meant Kimberly would be on Cort’s ‘deaf’ side, and he laughed. “No, sir. That is a battle you have to fight on your own.”
“Traitor.”
Kimberly said, “You are wasting your five minutes.”
“Yes, ma’am. General, team three was rescued without incident. They had lost comms due to a tech issue.”
Lex had spent enough time with, and studying Cort, that he was able to anticipate many of the general’s questions, so he decided to answer them up front, in order to save Cort from the additional strain.
“System 322 was a military base. They were prepping there for an invasion of Government World. That’s why the resistance was so strong. Our first team was captured before they could even map the compound. From the Taurus logs, we have determined that an unknown member of the first team overloaded his FALCON in an underground bunker. That was just before you and Bravo team overloaded the fallen CONDORs. You ended up in a ditch underneath a large piece of the wall and a few hundred corpses. That saved your life, sir.”
“How so, Lex?” Kimberly asked.
“When Captain Sorano ordered Alamo, most of the explosion blew over the General instead of through him. He still caught part of the shockwave, though. The Taurus had lost its comm systems because the base was protected by gravity generators at several of the system’s Lagrange points. They were there to disrupt our transition and communication systems. Platt had ordered the ship into atmosphere to rescue what was left of our people, but Sorano had already entered the detonation code. The ship was lost.”
Cort spoke softly, saying, “Did anyone else survive?”
“No, sir. Corporal Wong was alive when we found him, but died on the way back here.”
“What about the planet?”
“Admiral Jones ordered it wiped clean. We took off samples of their weapons and tech, then the coach guns left nothing but dust. From start to finish, it was a cluste…,” Lex glanced at Kim. “er, Charlie Foxtrot, sir.”
“What about the Cuplans?” Cort asked.
“Per the original plan, we have not made any attempt to contact them. We do know they are scrambling to figure out what
to do. One planet’s primary had kept an extra queen for personal reasons, but I sent a team out to neutralize the two of them, which means we now have their only means of assertion. We need to act soon though, sir. They will find a new command structure if we don’t.”
“Bring me H’uum and Heroc.”
Lex looked nervously at Kim, who shook her head. “Is that wise, sir? You aren’t exactly ready to receive visitors.”
“I wasn’t asking, Lex. That’s an order.” Even at a hoarse whisper, Cort’s voice carried its usual tone of finality. Fortunately for Lex, Kim came to his rescue.
“No. You get five minutes a day to be a leader. The rest of your time is going to spent on recovery and being a dad. I will lock the doors before I give you more than that, Cortland.”