by Jay Allan
“Have you been able to make contact, sir?” Ludendorf’s tone had already told him what he needed to know, but he wanted express permission before he opened fire.
“Negative, Captain Vanik. We have issued multiple warnings. You are authorized to fire at your discretion. Your only consideration is the safety of the operation.”
“Understood, sir. I suggest all non-combat personnel remain in the bunker until further notice.” He stared out through the dusky light of late afternoon. The battlefield was going to be a nightmare. The atmosphere would begin to condense in another hour, making movement dangerous and slowing it to a crawl. He didn’t know who it was out there thinking they were going to sweep away his dug in forces in less than an hour, but as far as he was concerned, they were in for a rude shock.
He stared at the display inside his helmet. His scanner array was crude, but he could see the enemy formations approaching. He didn’t have exact numbers, but from the looks of things there were a lot of them. Two hundred at least.
His force was equipped with fighting suits, but they were sixty year old surplus units, poor substitutes for the top of the line armor he’d worn in the Corps. They lacked the portable nuclear power plants of the old Mark VII units, and that severely limited their capabilities. His people had standard assault rifles instead of the hyper-velocity electro-magnetic weapons the Marines had used. The servo-mechanical systems were powerful enough to move the suits around, but they lacked the enormous strength magnification of the Marine units. Perhaps the most telling difference in an environment like Kalte, the suits could only operate in hostile conditions for a day without a recharge, even less under full battle conditions. That was something to keep in mind on a world where a loss of air or heating meant almost instant death.
Still, they would do the job. He couldn’t imagine any enemy having better equipment. Since the Corps retired its last combat units, few forces in Occupied Space could match the standards of the old armies that had fought the wars of the Superpowers. The Black Eagles, of course. Darius Cain’s famous unit had even better armor, based on the Mark VIII designs that had never gone into full-scale production for the Corps. And a few of the other elite Companies had quality fighting suits too. But no one else. There wasn’t a single world in human space that could afford to field its own army so equipped, at least not beyond a tiny elite group of Special Forces. Certainly no pack of raiders looking to pillage a mining world.
“Mortar teams, prepare to fire at 5,000 meters.” Vanik’s troops didn’t have the grenade launchers that had been built into Marine armor, but they did have two mortar teams. With any luck, the enemy would panic as soon as his people opened up and started dropping shells in their ranks.
His eyes darted back to the display. He didn’t like what he was seeing. The enemy was too ordered, their formations too perfect. They looked more like Marines than a pack of raiders. He had a cold feeling in his gut. He tried to ignore it, but it kept nagging at him. Was it possible someone had hired one of the top-tier merc companies to attack Kalte? No, it couldn’t be. There’s no way. The elite Companies considered themselves legitimate enterprises. Their clients were worlds with real political conflicts; they didn’t take contracts for pirate raids on mining colonies. At least not openly.
Vanik glanced at his display. Just over 5,500 meters. His mortar teams would open up in…”
He saw a series of flashes on the small projected screen inside his visor. Then the ground shook hard, and the sounds of explosions reverberated in his helmet.
His head snapped around, watching the plumes of flame rising into the sky. Rockets, he thought immediately. Hyper-velocity rockets. What the hell are these raiders doing with HVRs?
“HVRs incoming,” he shouted into the com, realizing the futility of the announcement as he opened his mouth. The ground shook again as another volley hit all around. He could feel a wave of dirt and crushed stone smacking into his armor, and he dove to the ground. “Get down,” he yelled, his voice raw and scratchy.
He felt his heart pounding in his ears. Keep it together, Marine. You’re facing an enemy with HVRs. “All units, form consecutive skirmish lines now.” Extending the order of his troops would make them that much weaker against a direct assault, but there was no choice. The enemy outranged him. He had to minimize the effects of the incoming rockets or his force would be gutted before it could even return fire.
He looked up slowly, trying to get a view toward the enemy lines. According to his display, they were all hidden just behind the next ridge, but he couldn’t get a decent view of any of them. We have to advance. They’ve got better cover and longer-ranged weapons. We’re fucked if we stay here.
He stared down at the display. His troops were in three long lines, each one hundred meters behind the last. His troopers were 20 meters apart, making his overall position a little over 800 meters in frontage. “All units, advance. Fire at will with all weapons, as soon as you come into range.” He wasn’t about to sit there and let the enemy pick his people off with rockets.
He moved forward himself, trying to angle his path to take advantage of whatever cover the terrain offered. There were a few dips and folds in the ground, but he was forced to move across a lot of open country. He ducked behind a small ridgeline about 4,000 meters from the enemy positions. “Mortars….deploy and open fire.” It was time to flush the enemy out from behind that hill. The rocket launchers were still firing, but they were hitting mostly behind his advancing troops. He knew that wouldn’t last—the enemy would adjust their targeting. He had to do something now.
“Other units, continue to advance.” We’ll drop a couple mortar rounds on their heads, and then the rest of the line will be on them.
He’d just lunged forward when he saw the entire enemy line advance from the cover of the hillside. They came over the crest, 150 of them, in a single perfect line. “Fire!” he screamed, just as the entire attacking force opened up.
His line was riddled with hyper-velocity rounds, virtually identical to the ones he’d used in the Corps. The deadly weapons overwhelmed his own peoples’ return fire by a factor of at least ten. He leapt to the ground, feeling an impact in his leg as he went down. He screamed in pain, reaching around, trying to activate the pharmakit inside his armor. The old fighting suits didn’t have AI-controlled trauma systems like Marine armor. He had to flip a switch and swing his hip into the now-exposed needle to give himself a cocktail of painkillers and stims.
His eyes drifted up to his display. It looked like two-thirds of his people were already down, and the enemy was advancing. He scrambled around, grabbing his dropped assault rifle and bringing it to bear, just as four enemy soldiers leapt up over the small hill in front of him.
His old Marine reflexes took over, and he ignored the pain and fired, as much by instinct as deliberation, and he dropped the first enemy he saw. But the others were on him. He felt the impacts, round after round slamming into his body, tearing through his armor. There was pain, but only for an instant. Then it was gone, and he slipped into blackness, his final thought on the absurdity of dying here after so many desperate battles as a Marine.
* * * * *
“Captain?” Ludendorf was sitting at the bunker’s com station, frantically tuning the channel. He’d been trying to reach Captain Vanik—indeed, anyone at all on the surface—for fifteen minutes, but all he’d gotten was static. He turned toward Gerhard. The others were all gathered behind, most of them on the verge of panic. There were no cowards in Ludendorf’s crew. It took a certain amount of courage just to agree to a rotation on a planet like Kalte. But dealing with a deadly environment wasn’t the same thing as facing attacking enemy soldiers, and it was starting to look like these particular invaders had obliterated the entire defense force in a matter of minutes.
Vanik had been an Alliance Marine, like a dozen of his men, veterans of mankind’s most devastating wars. The thought that whatever was approaching had blown his people away like they were nothing was
almost beyond comprehension.
“I can’t raise anyone.” He turned and looked around the bunker, looking for anything to use as a weapon. “Grab whatever you can…tools, even a club. Anything.”
“You mean fight?” They were all looking at Ludendorf with shocked expressions. One of the junior technicians was the first to speak. “They just blew away over a hundred trained guards. What the hell are we going to do?”
“Whatever we have to.” Ludendorf turned his head, looking across the room. “You think these people are going to leave you alive? They just killed 120 of our people. You want to make it out of here, you better be ready to fight for it, because I don’t see another way home.” Ludendorf didn’t think they had any chance either, but he preferred the idea of dying on his feet. Besides, it gave him something to think about instead of just waiting around for the end.
A loud bang reverberated through the room. It had come from above, from the surface entry. A few seconds later there was another sound, and then about twenty seconds after that an explosion.
“Make sure your suits are sealed,” Ludendorf shouted. The bunker had a limited life support system, but that wouldn’t last more than a minute once the armored hatch was breached.
He ran to the control panel, staring down at the display screens. There were monitors in the shaft leading down to the bunker. There was smoke everywhere, probably from the charge that blew the outer doors. It was hard to see anything, but he could make out a few shadowy forms climbing down.
“Here they come. Everybody get ready.” His hand tightened around the plasma torch he was carrying. It wasn’t a weapon, but he knew it would fuck up anyone he got close enough to, armor or no armor. About half the others had some kind of makeshift weapon. The rest were standing around, paralyzed by fear.
There was a rapping sound on the metal, just on the other side of the hatch. Ludendorf crept toward the door, moving cautiously, hesitant to get too close in case it blew.
He could hear someone working on the other side. It went on for a few minutes, and then it stopped. Ludendorf turned toward the display and saw the enemy troopers climbing back up a few meters. He turned and yelled, “Get down…”
The explosion blasted the heavy armored door into the room, twisted into an unrecognizable hunk of wreckage. Ludendorf had propelled himself to the side, and the door missed him completely, but a quick glance told him a good third of his people hadn’t been so lucky.
He saw the shadowy figures pushing through the smoke into the room, firing at the panicking miners and engineers. He watched his people trying to flee, throwing themselves on the ground and begging for mercy.
The soldiers pushed forward, sweeping the room with their deadly rifles. There was no pause, no demand for surrender—they were just butchering everyone. Ludendorf was off to the side, out of the initial line of fire. He saw his people dying, and he felt an energy in his body, a searing rage that took him. He flexed his legs and threw himself forward, flipping the switch on the plasma torch as he lunged.
He held the torch’s cutting edge in front of him as he fell into one of the enemy troopers. The exposed plasma cut through the osmium-iridium alloy of the man’s armor, slicing his arm clean off. Ludendorf fell to the ground, his survival suit splattered with the soft white foam from his enemy’s armor’s repair systems. The soldier’s suit was trying to seal the breach on the arm before the cold and deadly atmosphere did their work.
But Ludendorf wasn’t about to allow it. He knew he had seconds left to live, and there was nothing more important to him than taking this soldier with him. A single wounded raider had become the proxy for his rage. He didn’t have a chance to get to anyone else, but he reached out with the torch, pushing toward the stricken soldier even as he felt the bullets impacting on his body.
He was focused, determined. He didn’t even feel the pain as the two of the enemy troopers raked him with fire. He could feel himself slipping away. There was weakness, and cold. His vision was failing. But his momentum carried him forward, and with the last of his strength, he held the plasma torch in front of him, plunging the blazing hot tip through the back of his target’s armor before he fell to the ground and slipped into the darkness.
Chapter 12
Old Marine Hospital
Planet Armstrong, Gamma Pavonis III
Earthdate: September, 2318 AD (33 Years After the Fall)
Sarah Cain sat in her office, quietly scanning reports. At a fast glance, she appeared almost unchanged over the past thirty years, a strikingly beautiful woman who seemed immune to the passage of time. A closer inspection revealed a few lines on her face and streaks of gray in her hair, but nothing that made her seem remotely close to her age. It was her eyes that came closest to giving her away. A deep sadness had dulled their former blue sparkle. She felt her age more than she showed it, and a sense of fatigue had been growing on her.
She was two years shy of her ninetieth birthday, but a lifetime of rejuv treatments had left her the physical equivalent of a healthy fifty year old woman. She knew the effects of the drug therapies would begin to fade more quickly in the years ahead, eventually causing her to age the equivalent of two or three years for each one that passed. She could easily live to her 120th or 130th birthday, but she also realized she would be an old woman long before that. In many ways she already felt that way, as if she was simply waiting for her remaining years to pass.
Sarah’s life had been a difficult one in many ways. She had served for years as the chief surgeon of the Alliance Marine Corps, and she had seen more horror and death than any man or woman should witness. When the final war between the Superpowers was over, she’d finally had a chance at peace, and for fifteen years she’d been happier than she’d ever imagined possible. But, like all good things, her joy had come to an end—and as usual, it was the trumpet of war that had shattered her bliss.
When the First Imperium struck again, Erik had answered the call, as he had all his life. It had been more difficult for him to take up the sword again this last time, for he too, Sarah was certain, had finally found a happy life with her and their teenaged twin sons. But in the end, he’d had to go. The First Imperium was a threat to all mankind. The Superpowers were gone, and the young colony worlds possessed a fraction of the strength that had been wielded in the first war against the alien menace. If the robotic invaders weren’t defeated, eventually they would come to Atlantia. They would destroy that magnificent world, and kill every human being living there. Including Sarah and her sons. Even if Cain could leave the rest of mankind to its fate, he could never allow such an inhuman enemy to reach his family.
This war had been different from all the countless others he’d fought, however. He’d led his warriors as well as he ever had, winning a series of costly victories that stopped the First Imperium invasion in its tracks. Indeed, there were those who said history would call his innovative campaigns in this last struggle his most brilliant. But they were also his most costly, and there was one tragic difference from his earlier battles. This time Erik Cain didn’t return. War had finally claimed him, and just like that, after forty years at her side, he was gone.
The struggle had been a brutal one, and many colonies, still striving toward self-sufficiency after the destruction of the Superpowers, were devastated before the fighting was over. Cain and his old comrades—Augustus Garret, James Teller, Cate Gilson—had rallied the tiny remnant of the old Corps and fleet, and taken command of the hundreds of planetary militias. It was an array far weaker than the ones they had led in the first war with their alien enemy, but the First Imperium invaders were themselves a splinter force, the garrison of one ancient base that, for unexplained reasons, had responded twenty years late to the Regent’s call.
Sarah hadn’t felt anything at all when they’d first told her. She was a creature of duty, and she had two sixteen year old boys who needed her. Indeed, Darius and Elias had saved her, and she’d buried her sorrow in motherhood. But that was a short respit
e from despair. Darius never got over his father’s death, and he became deeply troubled, running afoul of more than one of Atlantia’s increasingly onerous slate of laws. He left home four months before his 19th birthday, running from his grief and anger—and destined for a life of war like his father’s. Elias had remained home, but a year later he enrolled in the nascent Atlantian Patrol Service, joining its inaugural academy class. He embraced the stern laws and structured society his brother had repudiated, and he buried himself in his studies. Over time, he became more and more strident, almost a martinet, seeking to fill the void in his life with rules and regulations.
Just like that, Sarah was alone. Darius disappeared entirely for two years, and she hadn’t known where he had gone or if he was even still alive. The boy had always been emotionally cold—cynical and hard in his assessment of others and the universe in general. He’d inherited those traits from his father, but he was colder, more robotic than Erik Cain had ever been. For all his caustic disregard for rules and his distaste for politicians, Erik Cain had always had an empathetic streak, one even he had been hesitant to acknowledge. It fueled the guilt that had kept him up nights, and he carried it his entire life. But Darius was relentless, immovable, imbued with a fire even more intense than the one that had driven his father.
Sarah knew he’d left to take out his grief on the universe, and she’d been deathly afraid she would never see him again, that his rage would drive him to a tragic death in some misadventure. But two years to the day after he’d left, he sent her a message. He was fine. Indeed, he was an officer in one of the new mercenary companies, a warrior just like his father. The one thing Erik Cain hadn’t wanted.