by Rick Partlow
The Tevynian shuttles were docked in a circle on the emergency seal and at the center of it was a neat, symmetrical hole they’d burned through the shield with their lasers. Which made it, I guess, not as much of a shield as they’d hoped, but it was the thought that counted.
“Get ready,” Julie told Grunewald, adjusting our course slightly to line up the gun. “Send it.”
The coil gun spoke a dozen times and the Tevynian shuttles died in a rather unspectacular fashion, most of them simply fracturing somewhere amidships, though two of the ten did blow up quite nicely when something set off the reaction mass.
“All right, last stop,” Julie said, waving toward the cargo bay. “Time for you and your boy-band to earn your pay. And remember, I’m not gonna be able to stay here and wait. Too many enemy fighters around. I’ll run a patrol on a long orbit around the rock. Contact me when you get control of the station’s comms.”
I unlocked the suit’s joints and loosened the magnetic anchors to walking strength and was about to head out of the cockpit when she stopped me with a hand on the metal armor over my bicep.
“You said something back on Earth, in Idaho,” she reminded me. “I mean, you kind of said it. And I kind of did, too. And I think now might be a good time to make sure we both mean what I think we mean.”
I wanted to roll my eyes because now was most definitely not the time for this, but what could I do? She was my superior officer, after all.
“I love you,” I assured her. “And I have told that to a grand total of three women who weren’t my mother, and only meant it twice. You’re the second, and definitely the best pilot.”
“I love you, too,” she said, then shooed me out of the cockpit. “Go kick some ass.”
The magnetic soles of my boots clomped noisily on the way to the cargo bay and I wished the Helta could fit gravity generators into something as small as a shuttle.
Hell, if we could just figure out how to use the technology to create antigravity, we wouldn’t need shuttles, we could just land the cruisers on a planet, or hover a few feet over it and hop down. Not to mention it would make a devastating weapon capable of destroying a planet and…well, yeah, maybe it was okay that we couldn’t figure it out.
“Everyone get ready,” I told the Delta team.
The ten NCOs and warrant officers, the best of the best the US Army had to offer, straightened as one. Most carried the same KE gun I had slung off my shoulder, but two of them were carrying the plasma guns the Helta used for crew-served weapons, fat, meter-long weapons that weighed an obscene amount and were awkward even for a Svalinn to handle. But they were so damned useful….
“Who’s carrying the special munitions, Pops?” I asked him, gesturing at the heavy, metal case fashioned into a backpack by the expedient of bolting heavy shoulder straps to it.
“That’ll be me,” he said, pulling the case from the magnetic rack it was secured to. “Not that I don’t trust the rest of you with a fusion bomb, but I don’t trust the rest of you with a fusion bomb.”
I shook my head, half in wonder and half out of fear at the idea of a hydrogen bomb in something small enough for one of us to carry. Using the powered exoskeletal armor, granted, but still…a fusion bomb.
“Visors down.” My own snapped into place and the suit’s small air supply began to circulate, a cold breeze against my face.
“Close up the cockpit seal,” I radioed to Julie. “We’re ready to de-ass this vehicle.”
“Roger that.”
The hatch to the cockpit swung shut with a whine of servomotors, sealing the air in with them, because the energy fields that would hold in atmosphere were something else the Helta couldn’t put on a shuttle.
“Hold on,” Julie added. “Coming in to dock. Gonna be a bit of a bump.”
Maneuvering jets altered the ship’s attitude and there was the slightest of love-taps on the main drive to kick us forward and down before the belly jets gave a corrective blast and my stomach lurched. And then we were down, our landing gear ringing against the hard metal of the emergency seal, the jolt nearly enough to send all eleven of us stumbling despite our magnetic soles.
Someone hit the hatch control, maybe Julie or maybe Chief Grunewald, and air rushed out of the cargo hold, escaping into the vacuum as the boarding ramp began to lower.
The team didn’t need me to tell them when to move out. They’d practiced this a thousand times with me and probably a thousand more on their own when I was busy doing officer stuff. The point man clomped down the ramp, the impact of his magnetic boots vibrating through the deck and into my suit, the rest behind him in a tactical wedge that opened up as they stepped onto the surface.
And I came behind them, emerging into the stark blackness of interplanetary space. I forced myself not to stare at the countless stars, despite the temptation I’d given in to during every spacewalk I’d been on so far. The universe was, as I’d suspected all those years making shit up for stories to tell other people and to myself, incredibly beautiful and I never got tired of just staring at it.
I concentrated on the smooth, shining metal of the emergency seal, slick and polished even under our boot magnets. Nothing alive moved out here except us, but debris from the shuttles tumbled in silent memorial to the spacecraft we’d destroyed. Would their troops inside the base hear about the destruction? Would they be waiting for us on the other side of that hole? Should I order a mortar prep before we went inside?
I decided against it between one step and the next. They might know we’d destroyed their shuttles, but they wouldn’t know about the Svalinn armor, wouldn’t know about humans being involved in the war at all yet, and the longer we kept that close to the vest, the better chance we’d have.
“Pops, send a scout in,” I directed once we’d gotten within twenty yards of the hole.
Up close, it was clear it had been drilled with a laser, probably off one of their cruisers. A ring maybe ten yards wide around the hole was wavy and uneven where the metal had melted and hardened again. Pops raised a fist to halt our Ranger file, and I half expected him to take a knee or go to the prone, despite the absurdity of trying to do that in microgravity when we were only holding on to the surface by the magnets in our boots.
He waved at Dog and Ginger and the two Delta operators clomped forward, looking like ridiculous 1950s science fiction movie man-shaped robots. When they reached the edge of the hole, both went down to a baseball catcher’s squat, as close as they could come to a crouch, and peered over the edge.
This would be the tricky part. There was gravity inside the rock, but it only propagated through the projection plates, and those were installed between the floors of the hollowed-out sections, which meant anyone crawling in from the surface would immediately go from gravity so fractional it was barely discernable to a Helta-standard pull, just shy of Earth normal, within a few feet. That would have been tricky just maneuvering bodyweight, but we were walking around in six hundred pounds of armor, servomotors and power packs, not to mention the weight of our weapons and ammo.
Dog went first, keeping one foot anchored to the surface and swinging the other one around through the hole. I couldn’t see what he did once he was past the edge, but I guessed he was attaching a foot to the interior surface of the burn-through before he cut loose from the exterior. Then he was gone and Ginger followed, slightly less awkward because he’d watched his friend try it first.
We lined up like a bunch of privates waiting to turn our rifles in to the armory after a field exercise, and I had to clench my jaws to keep from grinding my teeth. It went against every instinct I had as a Marine and I’m sure it grated on Pops and the others as well, but there was nowhere to hide.
“Clear,” Dog reported, his transmission crackling and static-filled from the interference of the metal.
I surged ahead Pops and the others, leaning forward to get a look at what the drop was like. I don’t know what the face I was making looked like, but it felt like the face I’d made t
he first time I’d bitten into a lemon when I was about six years old. The emergency seal was around three feet thick, below it was a sheer drop of about fifty feet to the docking bay. A few Helta orbital transfer vehicles were on the landing pad down there, slightly fuzzy looking from viewing them through the energy shield holding in the atmosphere.
The hole the Tevynians had blown through the seal wasn’t big enough to allow their ships through and the only way in without a long-ass rope and somewhere to anchor it was to swing down in abruptly changing gravity onto a catwalk twenty feet down and a good ten feet past the edge of the hole. It was some sort of maintenance walkway, anchored to the walls on either side of the docking cylinder, empty except for the two Delta operators.
“Okay, sir,” Ginger said, waving to me from the catwalk, “what ya gotta do is, get both your magnetic soles anchored on the inside of the hole, then push off as hard as you can and swing your feet underneath you. The gravity is light here, doesn’t get to Helta normal until down in the docking bay, I think.” He shrugged expressively with his hands—you had to in the Svalinn armor. “It’s easier than it looks.”
“It’d have to be,” I muttered. I would really rather have let Pops go first and t help me in, but that would have made me look like a whiny little baby and everyone was watching.
I sighed deeply, locked my rifle into place at my side, and imitated what I’d seen the two of them do, crawling down the slick surface of the interior of the hole, locking my boot magnets and standing up straight again, the world suddenly thrown off by ninety degrees, Dog and Ginger and their elusive catwalk now at an angle overhead, like they were the ones standing sideways on a wall.
I crouched, talking myself through it, ready to unlock the magnets at just the right instant.
“You sure you got this, sir?” Pops asked me. I didn’t look, but I assumed he’d be using our private frequency, because that wasn’t something that he’d ask in front of the others. “I could go first. I know how you jarheads are with heights and jumping out of planes and shit.”
By way of an answer, I jumped. It felt like nothing more than pushing off a solid surface in microgravity, the same as I’d done aboard Daniel Gatlin’s construction shack before we’d boarded the Selene what felt like a lifetime ago…for about fifteen or twenty feet. That was when the the artificial gravity exerted its influence over my trajectory and I was suddenly diving head-first into the abyss, unless, of course, I hit the catwalk first and broke my neck.
The only thing that kept me from panicking, besides the general scar tissue built up over my panic reflex after more combat in strange places than any one man had a right to expect in his life, was that I was falling slowly. I twisted into a somersault in then nearly lost my shit when I passed through the energy barrier. It wasn’t painful, not exactly, but there was a static shock worse than any I’d ever got from touching a metal doorknob and the hair stood up all over my body.
I managed to keep myself from spinning head over heels and when I hit the catwalk, it was with the hollow, vibrating clang of the heavy soles of my boots. I locked the armor’s joints and activated the boot magnets to keep from stumbling over the side like an idiot, then straightened, grabbed my rifle and moved away like it had all gone as I planned it.
“Watch the atmosphere barrier, Pops,” I warned him, grinning even though he couldn’t see it. “It’ll fuck with your head.”
“Roger that, sir,” he said, and I thought I could hear his tongue planted firmly in his cheek. “I’ll keep it in mind.”
Hey, you can take the Marine out of the Corps, but you can’t take the Corps out of the Marines.
Chapter Twenty-One
“Anyone else think it’s too fucking quiet down here?” Dog wondered.
I felt an urge based on pre-Helta experience to snap at him to maintain radio silence, but there wasn’t really a need to stay quiet in the armor. No one outside could hear our voices, and this close together, we were using laser line-of-sight links instead of actual radio frequencies, so no one could pick it up unless the transmitter was actually pointed at them.
Not that there was anyone else to point it at.
We’d climbed a ladder—or the Helta version of a ladder, anyway, involving rings fitted to parallel poles—from the catwalk to the floor of the docking bay, checking carefully around the spacecraft, the maintenance gear and cargo cranes and the heavy freight canisters locked into racks and found nothing. No Helta, no Tevynians, no bodies, nothing.
The plans we’d downloaded from the Truthseeker’s databanks had shown a spiral ramp winding through the mining operations facilities, administrative offices and crew quarters down to the engineering control rooms for the reactor and the plasma drive, and finally into a maintenance access tunnel into the actual drive tube for the propulsion unit. We’d found the head of the ramp on the other side of the landing pad and followed it around the perimeter of the base like peeling an orange.
We’d moved fast, sacrificing stealth for speed and the chance at surprise, hoping to hit the Tevynians before they got control of the engine room and maybe help out the Helta crew along the way.
We were in what I thought were the administrative offices, though it was hard for me to tell function with Helta architecture. I knew it wasn’t the crew quarters because it lacked the jungle gyms they called a communal bunk, and we’d already passed through compartments packed with some sort of heavy machinery I thought had to connected with the mining operation, so I was assuming the haptic holograms floating at seemingly random points in the huge, interconnected room, surrounded by bean bags and miniature aerobics trampolines had to be their version of one of those new-age hippie offices like they had in Seattle or Portland.
And still not a soul to be seen, not so much as a blood stain.
“The Helta knew the Tevynians were coming,” I reasoned. “They had time to close the emergency seal and the Tevynians had to send one of their cruisers in to cut through it with a laser. These Helta aren’t military, either, so what do you think they’d do?”
“They’d hide,” Pops opined, “behind the biggest door they could lock.”
“And down here,” I finished, “the only door I saw in the blueprints that you could lock was the one in the reactor control room. There was a big radiation shield there, right?”
“Not bad, sir,” Dog told me. “I guess there’s a reason they made you an officer.”
I snorted. “They made me an officer,” I told him, “because I was stupid enough to let them pay for my college. But that tells us where the Helta are. And the Tevynians need to get into that compartment in order to get control of the reactor and the plasma drive, so they’ll be trying to break in. The question is, are all of them there trying to break in? Because there were ten fucking shuttles and maybe they’re smaller than ours, and maybe some of them were still outside, but that’s got to be at least a hundred of them in here.”
Dog was leading, and he was a good man. He’d been with Delta for seven years, seen combat in a dozen different countries before he’d been sent out on this crazy mission to fight space barbarians and he was the only reason we didn’t die in the next half-second. I didn’t know what was happening. He came to a corner, a curve in the room toward what we thought must be the exit to the next compartment, the one I thought would be the crew quarters, and he froze between one step and the next, then he launched himself backwards, crashing into Ginger and me and knocking us off our feet with a clatter of metal and ceramic.
And the flash. I saw the flash, felt the heat, knew instinctively it was a laser and that meant it was the Tevynians even before Dog yelled. “Contact, front!” he said, his voice strained. I was rolling off of him, bringing my rifle up. “Shit, there’s a whole platoon of them right the fuck there!”
If it had been a platoon of Marines or Rangers, or hell, maybe even just regular old US Army infantry, I would have expected them to hunker down, get behind cover and set up a firebase before they sent out a probe at an un
known force. But these guys were Tevynians, who had to be the descendants of Celts from Eastern Europe in the Third Century or so BCE, and Celts of whatever era were not known for their subtlety or strategy.
They stormed around the corner, hosing their lasers at hip level like the largest stadium rock concert ever and I jerked the trigger of my KE rifle reflexively, sending a stream of tungsten darts exploding outward in the most expensive spray-and-pray ever. I wasn’t alone, because Pops was better at this game than I was, even though I’d had a three-month head start with the Svalinn armor. He was on his belly, laying down suppressive fire with more control than I could have hoped for with thirty Tevynians shooting lasers in random directions.
Between the two of us, we blunted their charge for a half a second, tearing the front rank to shreds, taking down a full squad between us, or at least what would have been a squad for us. I didn’t know what the hell military organization these guys had beyond the Alexandrian phalanx, but we killed ten of them, giving the rest of the team enough time to get an angle that wouldn’t involve blue-on-blue fire and start shooting.
Or at least it gave Scooter time to fire his plasma gun, and that was enough. If the lasers had been dazzling and disorienting fired in close confines, the Helta plasma gun was a howitzer fired in the back of a Prius. The polarizing filters in my visor went dead black and heat reminiscent of the first time I’d set foot in Kuwait in the middle of summer slammed into me just ahead of a shockwave hitting my sinuses like a baseball bat. In the next instant, when my visor let me see again, four or five more of the Tevynians had disappeared in a cloud of burning metal and plastic and the rest finally got a case of the brains and withdrew under covering fire. Or maybe I was giving them too much credit and they just ran away still shooting, but the results were the same: we scooted in the other direction, away from the crackling bursts of laser fire.