by Jay Allan
“Yes.” He stood stone still as his executive officer nodded. “And I’m going in with Kuragina.”
Teller’s eyes snapped back to Cain’s and his mouth opened to argue. But he got one good look at his commander’s face, and he held his tongue. He’d known Darius Cain most of his life, and he knew that expression. He knew it far too well.
* * * * *
Cain walked down the corridor of his flagship toward his quarters. The landing was commencing in three hours, and if his Eagles were going to have their final showdown with the Gold Spears, he was damned sure going down with the first wave. He’d originally expected the campaign against Lysandria to be relatively quick and easy, but now he knew it was going to be a hard fight. He had most of his strength with him—about 6,000 ground troops in total—and preliminary scanning reports suggested the Spears had roughly the same. Of course, his people were invading, and their enemies were down there, dug in and waiting.
He was stressed, worried about the campaign, and his anger toward his rivals was gnawing at him. But there was something else too, something he couldn’t put out of his mind. Tom Sparks had researched the debris he’d brought back from Karelia, and he’d confirmed the few bits and pieces came from state of the art fighting suits, as good or nearly so as the Mark VIII units his people wore. But there was no indication of who had fielded units so equipped or why they had ambushed a party of his troopers. He’d reluctantly accepted the likelihood that his missing people were dead, though it had still stabbed at him to leave Karelia without being sure. He’d hoped Sparks would be able to ID the source of the equipment, but the brilliant scientist had been stumped.
Now he was facing another anomaly, something else that didn’t make sense, and on the very next campaign. Cain always researched his opponents thoroughly, and he didn’t make mistakes. If it had been remotely feasible, possible even, for the Lysandrians to hire a company as costly as the Spears, he would have known it. Events were never entirely predictable, but this was the second consecutive campaign that had him analyzing bizarre occurrences. Darius Cain didn’t believe in much, and certainly not coincidences. Something was going on. He had no idea what it was, not even a starting point. But he knew there was some kind of trouble coming.
“Erik told me you were going down with the first wave?” The familiar voice came from behind. He turned and saw Ana Bazarov walking up behind him. He usually had a smile for her, but he was too troubled this time, and he just nodded. “Yes,” he replied simply. Cain had become quite fond of the refugee since he’d saved her from a brutal assault on Karelia. Even he didn’t understand the effect she had on him, but the thought of seeing her hurt—or left behind on a planet destined for servitude and economic depression—was something he’d found upsetting, and he’d taken her with him when the Eagles departed.
She’d been hostile to him at first, feeling she’d merely traded one assailant for another. But when it became apparent he had no intention of harming her or her sister, she began to warm up to him, slowly at first. Now there was real warmth in her voice, and worry as she thought of him leading his vanguard into the teeth of heavy resistance. The news that the Gold Spears were waiting down on the surface had spread rapidly through the fleet.
“Why?” she asked softly, reaching out and putting her hand on his arm. “You don’t usually land with the first wave, do you?”
He felt an urge to pull away from her, but it vanished quickly, replaced by the calm feeling she usually gave him. He resisted his initial impulse to snap back at her. He was tense, and his mind was deep in thought, trying to understand what was going on. Darius Cain had a paranoia as strong as his father’s. He was sure the suspicion he felt was warranted, but his efforts to develop a hypothesis had so far produced only frustration. He was fond of Ana, perhaps even infatuated, but he didn’t have time for her now.
“I land at whatever point I feel is best for the operation. When I drop later, it is because it is tactically advisable to direct early operations from the fleet. Physical safety is not a concern in the decision. I am prepared to go anywhere I send my soldiers.”
“Shouldn’t you make sure your soldiers have secured the area before you land? I’m not military expert, but…”
“No,” he said, more harshly than he’d intended, “you are not a military expert.” He paused, softening his tone before he continued. “Look, Ana…” He forced a smile. “…I appreciate your concern, but you have to trust me on this. War is my business. And I’m good at it. Very good.”
She didn’t look convinced, but she just nodded and looked up at him with watery eyes. “Be careful, Darius.” Her voice was soft, affectionate. “Please.”
“I am always careful, Ana.” It was the first lie he’d ever told her.
* * * * *
“I want your people to form a large perimeter and dig in as soon as we land. I wouldn’t put it past Ling to send his people in to try to pinch out our LZ as soon as we hit ground.”
“Yes, sir.” Cyn Kuragina stood next to Cain, fully armored except for her retracted helmet. She’d had long blonde hair when she’d first arrived to join the Eagles, but she’d been shaving her head for years now. She stared back at Cain with piercing ice blue eyes. Kuragina was a very attractive woman, but she’d given herself over completely to the martial life. Cain pitied the man who tried to pick her up when she was on leave. He’d be lucky to keep his teeth. Kuragina loved men, at least the ones who made up 80% of her regiment, but for most other purposes, she preferred women.
“The Teams are going in on the lead wave too, so make sure your people know they’re there. I don’t want them seeing bogies when it’s just our scouts and snipers.” Nothing made Cain as crazy as friendly fire incidents. He mourned every one of his soldiers lost, but the ones caught in the crossfire cut the deepest. The Eagles all had friend or foe transponders, but jamming and other battlefield confusion sometimes overrode precautions. No matter how good a unit was, no matter how well trained and equipped, when the shit got really nasty, troops got hit by their comrades.
“Understood, sir.” She paused, staring at him with those glacial eyes. “And prisoners, sir? Is it true we’re not to accept any surrenders?”
Cain returned her stare, and his eyes were no less frozen than hers. “There is to be no quarter given to the Gold Spears, Colonel. They have had their warning, and they have chosen to disregard it.” His voice was like ice. “You may accept the surrender of local forces, but only if you are confident you can do so without compromising the security of your command.”
“Understood, sir.” She snapped to rigid attention.
“Very well, Colonel Kuragina…you may see to your regiment’s dispositions.”
She saluted crisply and turned on her heel, a difficult maneuver in armor. Cain watched her walk briskly toward the launch bay. He’d always liked Kuragina. When he’d first seen her, straggling in with a shipload of new recruits, he’d bet himself she would wash out in less than a week. She was the shortest of her trainee class by a good quarter of a meter, and half the men outweighed her by 50 kilos. But she was the toughest of them all, and she finished at the top of the class. She’d risen through the ranks faster than anyone else in the history of the Eagles, and she was the only regimental commander who had started as a trainee instead of coming to the unit with previous combat experience. He still remembered watching her kick the living shit out of a male trainee almost twice her size. She’d walked away almost without a scratch, and her opponent ended up in the infirmary.
Cain walked toward a long wall at the end of the ready room. There were empty racks stretching for a hundred meters, with one suit remaining in place. He walked over toward the hulking black armor, sliding his shirt over his head as he did. “Open,” he said, as he continued to undress.
“Open,” the AI responded as the suit popped like a clamshell.
“Diagnostics?” Cain pulled the last of his clothes off, stowing them on the small shelf next to the suit.
>
“All systems confirmed 100% functional, General.”
The AI’s voice was calm, almost human-sounding, but not quite. He had a passing memory of Hector, his father’s AI. Hector had accompanied the elder Cain during most of his career. Darius could remember his father’s stories, liberally laced with complaints about the poor attitude the AI had developed. It had all been part of a program implemented by the Corps, an elaborate experiment with enhanced personality AIs designed to adapt to their individual officers to lower stress and improve interaction. Darius didn’t know if it had been a success, but he suspected it had been, at least to a greater extent than his father had ever admitted. Erik complained about Hector, but he’d also brought the AI with him when he retired, and he spent the next fifteen years sparring with it about one thing or another, as the computer presence went about the mundane tasks of running the Cain household.
“Very well, begin power up sequence.” Darius’ AI had substantially less personality than Hector. When he’d had the Mark VIII units put into production, he hadn’t worried about esoteric details like customized AIs. His suits’ systems served their purposes and did their jobs, without excess banter with their wearers.
Cain backed into the suit, pushing himself upwards and into place. “Close,” he said, and he prepared himself for the inevitable pain as the suit shut and a series of probes and intravenous connections jabbed into him. The Mark VIII suits were the ultimate union between man and machine, but the interface that made all that possible was not a gentle one.
“All systems activated. Neural interface established and functioning.”
No shit, it’s established. The neural connection was the worst part of suiting up—a thick probe that drove into the top of the spinal column. It was something new in the Mark VIII armor, an innovation that no one but the Eagles had, at least to the best of Cain’s knowledge. It allowed direct communication between the wearer’s thoughts and the artificial intelligence controlling the armor. It came close to allowing an Eagle trooper to control the mechanicals of his suit the way he moved an arm or a leg—or took a deep breath. But it hurt like a motherfucker going in.
“Let’s go,” he snapped to the AI. An instant later he felt the suit moving down the track toward the launch tubes. Landing was one area where the Mark VIII suits were a step ahead of the Mark VII’s his father and the Marines had worn. The “eights” as they were called, were capable of individual orbital insertion, while the Mark VII’s had been designed for use with landing craft.
Darius could feel himself moving down the launch prep track. He knew the procedure so well, he could imagine every step of it as he stood silently inside his suit. First, the disposable thrust pack would be bolted to one of his armor’s multi-use hardpoints. Then, the three braking parachute modules would be attached, after which he would be encased in a thin metal launch pod. The cocoon would then be force-filled with expanding, heat-resistant foam before he was placed in the electro-magnetic launch tube.
A Black Eagle ready for launch was almost like a bullet in a gun, ready to be blasted out of the ship into the upper atmosphere of the target world. It was a streamlined system, requiring far less tonnage of support materials than the old Gordon and Liggett landers the Marines had used. It allowed Cain to carry almost twice as many soldiers per ton on his transports, a huge advantage in the leaner times that had come upon mankind.
He felt the pod moving to a horizontal position as it fed into the catapult. He was not only in the first wave, he was in the initial group of that wave. He knew his people were going to have a tough fight on their hands on Lysandria. There was nothing he could do about that. But he could damned sure be on the front lines with them, and nobody was going to keep him from that.
“Eagle One command center, this is General Cain…commence landing operations.”
Chapter 6
Settlement Jericho
Planet Earth, Sol III
Earthdate: September, 2318 AD (33 Years After the Fall)
“We just got word on the com unit. The Martians are making another series of aid drops. We should have ours sometime tomorrow.” Ellie was walking up the path toward the small shelter she and Axe had shared for 25 years. She had a big smile on her face. “That’s really going to help us with our winter stores.”
Axe turned abruptly when he first heard her, and he slipped something behind his back, hiding it before she rounded the corner and looked up at him. He stifled a cough and gave her his own smile. “That’s great news. We can really use it.” Jericho’s population had been growing steadily over the past few years, and now there were over a thousand men, women, and children crowded within its makeshift walls. Axe had been determined to turn away the last few bands of refugees, but Ellie had convinced him to take them in.
He understood her sympathy, but he also knew there was a limit to what they could do. Thirty years after the Final War, Earth was still a ravaged wasteland, its poisoned hills and fields traversed by wandering bands, survivors of the doom that had claimed most of mankind. Axe knew how tenuous life was for the scattered groups, but he felt his first responsibility was to Jericho’s existing residents, many of whom had been with him for years and who had helped to build the settlement to its current state of relative prosperity. It was a constant challenge to feed the people they already had. If it hadn’t been for the Martian drops…
He remembered the early years, right after the war, the nightmare just to survive from day to day. Axe had been about 40 klicks from the city when the bombs hit. New York had shrunken considerably since its peak centuries earlier as a massive metropolis, but the Manhattan Protected Zone had still occupied a prominent place on the target lists of the enemy Superpowers. Half a dozen of the big city-killer warheads had impacted by the time the attacks ceased, leaving nothing whatsoever of the kilometer-tall towers that had reached into the sky.
Axe and his small band of followers had taken refuge deep in the cellar of a long-abandoned factory, hiding from bombs, from radiation—from the nightmare that had descended on the world. But eventually they ran out of food and water, and they were forced to leave the relative safety of their hiding place in search of sustenance.
They didn’t dare get any closer to the radioactive hell surrounding the city, so they went east, eventually reaching the very end of what had been called Long Island. Once a densely-populated part of the massive New York metropolis, the island had long been mostly abandoned, a sea of crumbling suburbs where millions had once lived, before the government decided people were easier to control in densely populated cities than they were dispersed over hundreds of small towns. Now there was little but the remnants of 150 year-old houses and stores, all that still stood to attest that so many had once called the place home.
Axe had realized his small band needed to get off the island to survive. They’d managed to scavenge what they had needed to survive in the short term, but Axe knew they had to find someplace they could hunt and grow food if they were going to survive in the years to come. His limited knowledge of geography told him the route back west was out of the question. There was no way off the island in that direction that didn’t come within the lethal radiation zone around the city. In the end, they left from the east, building crude rafts and barges to cross the narrow sound to the coast of what had once been Connecticut. They’d then marched north for weeks, staying away from the deadzones and finally settling in a wooded area right next to a river.
Axe didn’t know what the place had been called, what state or government administrative unit had ruled over it, but none of that mattered anymore. It was far enough from the devastated and polluted areas closer to the old urban centers, as good a place as any to stop fleeing, and that is what they did, struggling to build their growing community through one challenge after another. They survived the Great Dark, the two-year long partial nuclear winter that followed the war, and a hundred other calamities after that, but thirty years later they were still there.
A
xe had been a gang leader in the Brooklyn sector of old New York, every bit as ruthless as any of his brethren. He’d learned to kill at a very young age, and he’d murdered more people than he could remember. He was ashamed of his youth now, though he realized his experience had helped him lead his band of refugees to this place, and to provide a haven for countless others over the years. Had he been a normal Cog, he knew he’d have died in Brooklyn when the bombs came. How many of his thousand would also be dead in that scenario? There was no way to know, but he suspected the answer was most of them. He’d often considered the strange way life worked, that his earlier brutality had given him the ability to save so many lives later.
He shook out of his thoughtfulness as he felt Ellie sit down next to him. “What’s wrong?” she said. “You look like something’s bothering you.” She smiled and put her arm around his back.
Ellie was another odd addition to his little band. He’d found her when he was scavenging the Manhattan Protected Zone just before the final attacks, robbing whatever he could in the wake of the Cog revolts that had swept the city. She’d been a captive of a member of the elite of the Political Class, and he’d found her locked up, brutalized and left behind to die when the politicians had fled.
She had been skittish and terrified. For months, he’d worried she might take off and die on her own somewhere, alone. But she had stayed with him. It took a long time for her to get past what had happened to her, but she found the strength she needed, and they’d been together ever since.
“Nothing’s wrong.” He was lying, and he suspected she saw through it. But she was used to him being overly protective. He tried to change his tone to something more cheerful, with very limited success. “You mind tracking down Horace and letting him know about the drop? Tell him to put a group together to go collect it.” The Martians had been making humanitarian deliveries for twenty years now, air drops that usually came pretty close to landing at the designated coordinates. A Martian drop was full of useful items—food, medicine, and tools—and he knew if he didn’t have his people out there and ready to load it up and bring it all back to Jericho, someone else would find it.