Primary Targets (Earth at War Book 2)

by Rick Partlow

  No orders were given and none needed to be—these guys had been working together a lot longer than I’d been with them. They backed up and I went with them, doing what Pops did because that was usually the right thing. In that sense, he’d taken the place of Jambo, not so much as my friend and the insulator between me and the military but as the one to copy, the one to watch for cues. I was a combat Marine; there was a qualitative difference between my training and a Delta operator’s.

  The team had taken cover behind what was available, the holographic projectors, decorative curves in the wall, humps in the floor filled with what looked like soil. I thought they might be planters but there was no vegetation in them, just black dirt.

  “Everyone good?” Pops snapped, an edge in his voice that I’d come to recognize as his “some fucker just shot at me” tone.

  “I’m hit,” Dog said and I sought his position immediately on the IFF display, finding him to my right.

  Master Sergeant Douglas Calhoun was hunched behind a curve in the wall, his rifle at the ready, still on his feet, not that any of that had much significance when his armor was capable of holding him up without any help from the body inside. The right side of his chest was blackened and bubbling, the ceramic and Kevlar melted away and I gritted my teeth at the sight and the thought of what the laser blast had done to him.

  “How bad is it?” I asked him.

  “I’m still breathing,” Dog grunted. “And I can still shoot.”

  “Sgt. Calhoun,” I said, using what I’d come to think of as my officer voice, the one I used when I had to remind someone who was in charge, “if your suit’s pressure integrity has been compromised, then we need to know before we have to perform vacuum operations again.” Which, of course, wasn’t the real reason I wanted to know how badly he was hurt, but it gave him an excuse to tell me without looking soft.

  “It didn’t burn all the way through,” he said, his voice sounding strained and harsh. “Or at least the suit’s telling me I’m still airtight. But I got what feels like third-degree burns on my chest and it’s bleeding into my skinsuit.” He hissed out a breath and I knew he was in some serious pain. “It ain’t nothin’ I can’t handle.”

  “Take a pain pill, Dog,” Pops ordered. That was a shorthand. It wasn’t a pill, it was an analgesic dermal patch the armor could apply on demand.

  “I’m good, Pops,” Dog insisted. “That shit clouds your brain and I need to think.”

  “Why start now?” Ginger cracked and there was a round of chuckles.

  I sighed. The wound worried me, but honestly, as long as he could still walk, we had more pressing matters.

  “Pops, we need a look around that corner.”

  “Got it, sir. Gus, Rodent, scout the corner.”

  Rodent, Sgt. First Class Will Pena, was a quiet type with stringy black hair and a patchy beard, though I didn’t know if that was why he’d gotten the nickname. You didn’t ask about guys’ nicknames, they told you if they wanted to. He’d been a demo guy when they’d been a normal Delta team, but since they’d been assigned to the Extraplanetary Force under my command, everyone’s specialties had become secondary to operating the suits.

  The two of them circled the far edge of the room, moving fast and light for all the 600 pounds they were carrying, a testament to hundreds of hours of practice. No laser fire sought them out from the corner so I had to assume the Tevynians had drawn back behind cover and were just waiting for someone to peek around the corner.

  Luckily, we were a bit more high-tech than that, even when we weren’t totally prepared for the job. Gus pulled an object the size of a golf ball from a pocket in his tactical vest and whipped it around the corner, bouncing it off the wall. A small display popped into existence in the lower right-hand corner of my HUD the second the camera drone was deployed, and an app in my suit’s computer systems turned the topsy-turvy bottom-up view from the multiple cameras on the surface of the small probe into an image I could make sense of.

  The next compartment was indeed the crew quarters. The jungle gym arrangement the Helta used for communal sleeping was evident in the background and the Tevynian soldiers were just as evident in the foreground. It was interesting seeing them try to organize themselves when they weren’t actually shooting at me, they were perhaps smoother and more businesslike than I’d hoped. Someone, an officer or a senior NCO, was directing them to cover, setting up supporting fires in case we made a charge around the corner. They didn’t know what they were facing, but they weren’t panicking.

  That was depressing for a number of reasons, not the least of which was the realization that all they were missing was experience.

  The ball kept rolling, giving me a brief look at the exit through the crew quarters. I touched a control on my wrist to freeze a frame of the playback and zoom in on a brief burst of light I’d seen at the corner of my vision, through the exit. The rest of the compartments in the base had been arranged along the Helta idea of no barriers, open concept architecture taken to the next level, but there were certain things that demanded practicality.

  The engineering section was one of those things. The compartment offered access to the fusion reactors and had to be capable of being sealed off with radiation shielding, so the whole section was separated from the crew quarters by a long corridor. The radiation shield cut the passage in half with a dull gray barrier reminiscent of the emergency seal across the docking bay, though quite a bit thinner. The Tevynians had come prepared to break in and they were working at the metal with some sort of cutting device, probably some sort of industrial laser. Whatever it was, it was throwing out showers of sparks and I didn’t know how long the shielding was going to last.

  One thing I did know was that there were over a hundred Tevynians between the living quarters and the engineering passageway and we were not going to get through them even with two plasma guns. Someone saw the probe and pointed, and then something bright stabbed at it and the feed went black.

  “Shit,” Pops said earnestly. “Ginger, throw another one but program it to just sit around the corner so we can keep an eye on them.”

  “They’re going to get through that door,” I judged, watching Ginger pull out another of the small drones and program it through his wrist keypad, then toss it against the wall.

  This time, it bounced into the center of the hallway and stopped dead just a few feet in. The screen popped up again. I touched a control to shrink it since all it was showing was the Tevynians, waiting.

  “And we ain’t gonna be able to save that Helta crew,” Pops said, the words harsh and dispassionate and yet just as true for all that. “There’s way too many bad guys between us and them. If we could use our mortars in here, we might have a chance, but there’s just not enough overhead space for them to arm even if we could keep them from smacking into the ceiling.”

  “We could lay the special munitions here,” Dog suggested. “It would wipe out the Tevynians and wreck the engineering compartment. They wouldn’t be able to steer this thing or use it to grab any other rocks.”

  “That doesn’t sit right with me,” I said, a sour taste in my mouth. “It’s one thing not being able to get to the Helta crew, but it’s another to kill them ourselves.”

  “Unless you got a better idea, sir,” Pops said, “it might be the only way to shut that reactor down.”

  I remembered watching old cartoons on the internet when I was a kid, back when having high-speed internet had been a novelty and it still came through an ethernet cable coming out of the wall. I’d been at my friend John’s house—his parents were rich, or at least it seemed that way to a poor preacher’s kid—and we’d watched a show from the 1950s. When one of the characters had a good idea, a little light bulb popped on over his head.

  Huddled against the wall in the Helta administrative offices, I had a light bulb moment.

  “We don’t have to take out the reactor,” I realized. “We just have to make sure they can’t move this rock.”

&
nbsp; “So?” Pops snapped, then realized he was being disrespectful and changed it to, “Sir?”

  “The plasma drive,” I reminded him. “Remember? We saw it on the way in, the electromagnetic coils. We could plant the nuke there, on the coils, and take out the drive.”

  “Ain’t they designed to turn fusion energy into a drive?” Rodent asked.

  “When they’re turned on. You can’t contain fusion energy with regular matter. You have to use an electromagnetic field.”

  “But we’d still have to go through the Tevynians to get to any maintenance tunnels that could take us to the drive,” Pops pointed out.

  “Not,” I countered, grinning in the privacy of my helmet, “if we do it from the outside.”

  Pops said nothing. I wasn’t sure if his silence was stunned appreciation of my genius or mute horror.

  Then he said, “You want us to walk on the outside of this asteroid and stick a nuke inside a fucking fusion rocket engine that could ignite at any minute? Am I understanding that right?”

  I guess it was mute horror, after all.

  “How the fuck are we going to walk out there anyway?” Rodent asked. “There ain’t much gravity on an asteroid this size.”

  Rodent was pretty well versed in the whole physics thing, which should have surprised me but didn’t. Maybe the Space Rangers could get away with letting their officers keep track of the science for them, but Delta didn’t go into a situation unless they knew everything there was to know about it.

  “You’re one hundred percent right,” I acceded. “Walking would be next to impossible. But there was a compartment behind us with shitloads of mining equipment. And I’d swear to God I saw something that looked a lot like those hand-held spacewalk thrusters NASA used to use back in the 1960s.”

  “That’s not a bad idea, sir—” Pops was was interrupted along with my train of thought by movement in the drone feed.

  Someone jumped the gun and fired their laser or they might have actually made it. The actinic lance of ionized air flashed past my position and impacted the far wall in a brief fountain of fire, a second before the shooter emerged from the hallway with a squad of soldiers at his back.

  “Scooter!” Pops snapped.

  Scooter, Master Sergeant Joseph Dale, was as rough-looking and fierce as any soldier I’d ever met, with a scar across his neck I had never had the nerve to ask the origin of, and how he’d come to be called Scooter was a bigger mystery than Rodent’s moniker. He loved big guns, though, and the plasma gun was the biggest one he’d ever carried.

  The shot was a thunderclap that shook the walls and the Tevynian infantry charge disintegrated along with the three soldiers at the head of it. The others retreated and I saw one of them motioning frantically at the one I’d pegged as the commander.

  Probably explaining why they can’t take us out.

  “What about these fuckers, sir?” Pops asked me. “If we bug out, they could burn through those doors and fry us when they turn on the engines.”

  It was a good question, one I’d already considered. Or, at least, I’d considered it in the last ten seconds since the Tevynian charge.

  “You’re staying here, Pops,” I told him. “I’m taking Rodent and Ginger and the nuke. You keep these guys occupied, distract them from the reactor room.”

  “Keep ’em occupied, huh?” he said. “Just the eight of us are gonna keep all ninety or whatever are left of them occupied for you?”

  “If anyone can do it, Pops,” I assured him, “it’s you.”

  “You trying to stroke my ego, sir?”

  “Is it working?”

  “Damn. I think it is.” He laughed softly. “Hurry up, sir, even these fancy pop guns only carry so much ammo.”

  “Come on, Rodent, Ginger,” I said, starting for the mining operations center. “Let’s go blow some shit up.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  “You know I don’t like this shit,” Ginger said.

  I was too busy to turn around and see which particular shit he didn’t like because I was trying not to float off into the vacuum and get stranded until my air ran out. The Helta maneuvering units looked a lot like the old NASA thrusters, like oversized pistols attached to large, cylindrical compressed gas tanks, but they were designed for use by aliens and it wasn’t exactly an intuitive process. In fact, it had taken longer to figure out how to use them than it had to find the service airlock.

  We hadn’t been able to go back the way we’d come because jumping out of the hole in the emergency seal would have been exponentially harder than dropping into it and this was closer. Not as close as if we’d been able to fight our way past the Tevynians, but…

  “Stop whining, Ginger,” Rodent said, his tone laid back and good-natured. “You aren’t the one carrying a fusion bomb.”

  I gave the pistol grip of the maneuvering unit a careful squeeze and a burst of compressed gas shot out, propelling me forward. My gut was on the biggest rollercoaster in the universe and I went right into the first drop when I realized I’d given the thing too much and I was floating right the fuck out of orbit. Frantically, I turned it in the other direction and fired again, a braking thrust that also pushed me toward the rugged, crater-strewn surface of the asteroid.

  “Naw, man,” Ginger explained, “it’s that shit. The boss just fucking hit escape velocity with just one little burst of these things. We’re like our own little spaceships here, but we ain’t got no navigation computers to tell us how long to fire the rockets.”

  He wasn’t wrong.

  “Trial and error, Sgt. McCormick,” I said, hoping I sounded more confident than I felt. “We’ll be fine.”

  “Why couldn’t we just call Colonel Nieves?” Ginger asked me. “Have her fly around and take the drive out with the shuttle’s coil gun?”

  Which was a fair question. I’d immediately thought of it when we couldn’t get past the enemy force inside.

  “Couple reasons,” I said, carefully angling the thruster and squeezing the trigger with less pressure than last time. I still rose slightly as I moved forward, but I arced down again, following the curve of the surface. “First, you can’t disable the drive by taking out a couple of the magnetic coils near the end. It wouldn’t be as efficient, but it would still work. Second, there’s shitloads of jamming going on out here, between the Helta and the Tevynians, and there’s no guarantee she’d even hear our transmission. And third, how the hell could we send one when we don’t control the communications center? In case you forgot, it’s inside the reactor room.”

  “And how are we supposed to call her to come pick us up when we can’t get control of the reactor room?”

  “Don’t worry,” I reassured him. “I’m sure she’ll notice this.”

  I tried to look down, at the rock, at the horizon, not because the endless ocean of stars scared me, though I wasn’t crazy about the idea of dying out here. I was worried about letting it distract me. How many spacewalks was this for me? Five? Holy shit. I had five spacewalks in nothing but a suit. How many astronauts could say that back when NASA was the only game in town? How many could have said it even with Gatlin and Elon Musk and Richard Branson running their own private space programs?

  Now, of course, we were building all sorts of shit in Earth orbit, so maybe it wasn’t a big thing anymore, but it sure was for the ten-year-old boy inside me who’d wanted more than anything to go into space.

  And all it took was aliens pulling us into an interstellar war.

  I was getting too low, barely twenty yards off the ground and still descending. I snuck a look in the rearview camera and Rodent and Ginger were even lower than I was.

  “Time to hit the jets,” I said.

  How much farther was it, anyway? We’d been out here for at least half an hour and this asteroid was only a few miles around.

  I squeezed the controls and began rising again. The two Delta operators imitated my trajectory as best they could, though Ginger held on to the thrust for a moment too lo
ng and rose higher. I was about to order him to correct when he did it himself with a half-second braking burst. He might have been griping about the lack of a navigation computer, but these guys hadn’t been assigned out here without knowing a little something about everything we might encounter, physics included.

  There. I saw it, a flash of reflected light from the distant primary star.

  Come on, let it be the engine, not just another maintenance port or antenna or something.

  I was getting antsy at how long this was taking. God alone knew what was happening in the engine room. Was Pops still keeping the enemy distracted or were they burning through that door right now? Were we going to crawl inside that drive tunnel and get fried?

  “That’s it,” Ginger said, sounding definite. “That’s gotta be it.”

  And damned if he wasn’t right. The edge of the drive bell was a wall ten yards high made of burnished metal and my mind boggled at the sheer industrial capacity it must have taken to construct something this big. I mean, sure, they used robots for a lot of it, but the investment of time and capital was staggering.

  And I suddenly wondered why. The question came out of nowhere, but it wouldn’t stop nagging at the back of my mind as we approached the wall. What would make the Helta so insistent on putting their heavy industry in space in the first place? If they were such conservationists that they couldn’t even bring themselves to chop down trees, how did they advance from the ursine equivalent of hunter-gatherers to their current technical civilization?

  We passed over the edge of the wall and I pushed down the questions, another of many that would have to wait for another day. The drive tunnel reminded me of an open pit mine, if the pit was bottomless. The hundred yard wide tunnel was lined with electromagnets, like the inside of one of our KE guns but on a colossal scale, an engine large enough to propel a whole asteroid. Somewhere in the depths of that tunnel was the station’s reactor, a fusion containment bottle as large as the Truthseeker, capable of both propelling the station and melting other asteroids into slag ready for refinement.