by Rick Partlow
It was even harder to avoid stepping on bodies or tracking through blood going back through the dead. I didn’t want to look at them, but I had to. Any one of them might be faking, might be lying in wait for the chance to put a fuck-you round into our backs, and I was in command, so I had to scan every one of them on thermal to make sure they were actually dead. Their faces were masks, soft plastic. In college, when I was bored, I’d stream old videos of those criminal forensics shows they used to have on in the early 2000s. So many of the people who discovered bodies would say “At first, I thought it was a store mannequin,” and I’d always thought that was stupid. Why the hell would a store mannequin be lying in a ditch in the middle of nowhere?
But after Venezuela, I understood. Dead bodies didn’t look real. The features were slack, the eyes dull, lacking the spark of life.
Once we were past them, I thought it would be better, easier, but it wasn’t. The ship was a tomb. Nothing lived in it except us, and the thought that we’d killed them all nagged at me. I don’t know why it bothered me. If the Jambo had blown her out of existence, I wouldn’t have given it a second thought about, but somehow, it seemed like an atrocity when we were forced to kill them individually, to look them in the eye and see that light go out. But shouldn’t it be the opposite? Didn’t they have a better chance of winning, of surviving this way?
Humans, I decided, were weird.
We passed dozens of closed hatches and there was no way we could check them all, even if they weren’t locked, so I settled for scanning them on thermal and sonic as we passed, looking for body heat or heartbeat signatures. I had no idea if the hatches or bulkheads were too thick for either to register, but it was the best I could do. Neither Baker nor I had any of camera drones, which meant taking every corner blind as well, and I was beginning to feel positively primitive while, walking through a starship in a powered exoskeleton, carrying an electromagnetic slug-shooter.
We were getting close, at least if the schematics on my helmet’s HUD were correct. We were passing through a storage level, packed full of heavy, freight-handling equipment and hundreds of the same sort of massive, metal cargo containers as on Helta Prime. Most still had Helta labels on the side, with Tevynian script stenciled above it, as if they’d been too busy to paint over the old writing.
The utility lock was just one level up and I expected Pops and the others to be there already since they were closer to the airlock than we were, so when I caught movement out of the corner of my eye, my first thought was that Pops had set a scout to wait for us. A flash of red on the HUD told the real story, the computer built into my helmet identifying the thermal signature of an enemy soldier, but by then, I didn’t need the warning. The flare of a laser weapon laser told the whole story in scintillating light and a wave of oven-door heat.
The only thing that saved me was long-ingrained Marine instincts. With the targeting optics of the KE rifle connected to the HUD in my helmet, I could have held the M900 at the hip, settled on its gimbal mount, the way some of the Rangers did, but years of training kept it high across my chest just like my old M27. The M900 was a heavy-duty piece of hardware and it absorbed most of the shot, or so I assumed since I wasn’t dead and didn’t have an agonizing burn-through in my chest armor.
And it had given its life to save mine, which might wind up killing me anyway. The feed from the gun to my HUD went black, but the sensor warnings didn’t disappear, which left me holding a half-melted club with a dozen Tevynian soldiers charging at me from behind a row of cargo containers. There there was no way I was going to be able to drop my now-useless rifle and transition to my grenade launcher in time. I was staring down the yawning, crystalline emitter of a laser rifle and I was fairly certain I was going to die.
The Tevynian soldier was faceless, robotic and high-tech behind his tinted visor, but the low-tech jacketed slugs from Julie’s carbine shattered the illusion and his visor and he tumbled forward, buying me a second to act. I didn’t go for the grenade launcher—they were too close for minimum arming distance, barely twenty yards away. Instead, I yanked my well-traveled Glock from its holster on my chest and fired the way Jambo had taught me, instinctive, from an isosceles stance, the pistol held with both hands.
The report of Julie’s rifle had been muffled and I barely heard the crack of my own weapon, didn’t feel the recoil at all through the enhanced musculature of the suit. It was a risk, using a handgun against their armor, but the Helta had designed it to defend against laser weapons because that was all anyone in the Alliance used as a small arm, and by extension, all the Tevynians used. And if 9mm wasn’t much, it was better than harsh language.
The full metal jacket slugs hit exactly where I wanted them to, into the weakest spot in the armor that I could reach, the left underarm, exposed when the soldier’s arm was raised to hold the forearm of her laser rifle. The Tevynian stumbled, crumpled, limp, but there were just too many of them and they weren’t stopping for shit, and I wondered why Baker wasn’t shooting yet but couldn’t afford to turn and find out.
Something cut through the enemy troops, slicing like a scythe through wheat, and they were down before I could transition to another target. I kept my Glock pointed downrange and risked a glance over my shoulder. Three Svalinn suits filled the entrance to the passageway. The IFF told me it was Pops, Dog and Scooter and they looked pretty damn beat up. Black scorch marks dotted their armor, the exoskeletons were actually melted and reformed in places and I knew the burns underneath had to be agonizing.
I let out the breath I’d been holding and probably would have fallen over if the suit hadn’t held me up. And then I remembered Baker and turned to check on him. He was standing like a statue, his rifle pointed downward, Grunewald’s body still draped over his shoulder. Blood splashed down his chest from the hole burned through his neck. I checked his vitals via the suit and he was flatlined. If we were actually aboard the Truthseeker or the Jambo, we might have been able to save him. Hell, they could almost bring the dead back to life. But there was no help for Baker, no help for any of us.
“Shit,” Pops said, sounding somewhere beyond weary, beyond sad. “I ain’t lost this many men in one day since Caracas. Since that day in July.”
I didn’t have to ask which day he meant. I’d been there.
“The day ain’t over yet,” I said. “We have to get off this thing.”
“We can’t take them with us,” Pops said. He was right about that. There weren’t enough of us left to carry all the dead, not in here with the gravity.
We had a contingency for this, a way to keep our tech out of the hands of the enemy. I took Grunewald’s body off Baker’s shoulder and hauled him up on my own. He felt like nothing, like lifting a sandbag. There was a keypad on Baker’s backpack, the same as on mine or any of the others, for those of us who wouldn’t be taking that last trip home. I punched in the code I’d been given when I took command of this unit, the one I hoped I’d never have to use. An indicator light flashed yellow, then red, blinking an insistent warning. In five minutes, the thermite charge in his battery backpack would detonate and consume most of the suit.
“We’ll do the others on the way out,” Pops said. I couldn’t see his face, but his voice was as grim as a hellfire-and-brimstone preacher at an atheist’s funeral. “And I hope to God there’ll be someone left to tell the world what happened to them.”
***
Spacewalks were beginning to lose their charm. The lure of the stars had turned into a looming threat and the adventure I’d found so appealing and romantic a few months ago had turned into the same sort of grinding attrition of war I remembered from the bad old days.
Somewhere beneath us, inside the artificial mountain of metal, past the too-regular hills and valleys and ditches and ridges of its landscape, the bodies of three of ours were being consumed, burned to nothing.
“I wish we could burn this thing right along with them,” Dog said, as if he were reading my mind. “Give them a Viking funer
al.”
No one replied. All I could hear was the steady rasp of my breath in my helmet, all I could feel, the rhythmic vibration of my magnetic soles striking and releasing the hull, in time with my heartbeat.
“How much farther?” Julie asked, a couple of yards to my left.
I shook my head, then remembered she couldn’t see it.
“Can’t tell you exactly,” I admitted. “But those….” I pointed at what looked like hills rising on either side of us, rounded and bulbous and elongated. “…are the drive pods. The hangar bay should be just between and below them. I’m guessing but I’d say maybe three hundred yards.”
I wasn’t carrying Grunewald anymore. Not out here. Now, I was hanging onto the edge of his tactical vest, towing him like a helium balloon. His arms and legs waved as they flopped free, obscenely lifeless. I could have left him behind too, and none of the others would have thought the less of me for it, but if I couldn’t bring the others, couldn’t give Gus and Rodent and Baker and Ginger the funerals they deserved, at least I could return Grunewald to his family, let them have some closure.
If we lived. I wasn’t very confident about that part.
“What if they got the Truthseeker?” Pops asked me. I was startled at the question and checked to make sure it was on our private frequency.
“Then we take the shuttle to Hoarfrost,” I said, making the call then and there. “It’s the only habitable we can reach.”
“It’s going to be under attack,” he reminded me. “Even if none of the asteroids make it, the Tevynians might take it anyway.”
“Then we’ll have solid ground under our feet and real air to breathe while we fight them. You want guarantees, Pops, I’m fresh out. The only promise I can make is that we’ll go down fighting.”
“I suppose if I wanted anything more than that,” he mused, “I should have taken retirement at twenty years.”
Metal passed beneath our feet, impossibly smooth.
“You got kids, right?” I asked him.
“Two,” he confirmed. “They live with their mother.”
“Divorced?”
I couldn’t see his raised eyebrow, but I could feel it.
“What do you think, Andy?”
“You ever think about trying again?”
“I hadn’t,” he admitted after thinking it over. “I figured those days were past. I was an old man in a young man’s game, and I figured it would kill me before I got the chance. Then we got this shit that made us young again and now….” His voice was tentative, uncertain. “Now, I gotta start thinking what happens in ten years. Do I still do this? Do I get out and try to start a new career?”
There were going to be a lot of people thinking the same thing, if we got the chance, if the war with the Tevynians didn’t wipe us out first. People who would have been entering their twilight years, thinking about visiting the grandkids and wondering if their retirement accounts would last, would be young again. What sort of a population explosion would that cause? Maybe we were going to need that colony around Alpha Centauri after all.
“What about you, Andy?” he asked. “You gonna give it a go again with your pilot lady? She the type to try settling down again?”
I snuck a look at Julie, her face invisible beneath the faceplate, bathed in shadow, the system’s primary star behind us.
“I love her,” I confessed to him. “But I think we’re going to wait and see what the next little bit brings before we make any long-term plans.”
It felt as if we’d been slogging to the drive pods forever, but suddenly, they loomed over us. There’s no downhill in microgravity, but the hull curved away in front of us, and below us was a cavern, light flickering from its depths.
“Thank God,” Dog murmured.
“Don’t be thanking anyone just yet,” Julie warned, pointing. “Anyone seeing what I’m seeing on thermal?”
I did. It was white-hot against the cold background, growing hotter and closer with each second, moving impossibly fast, and the stars around it shimmered as spacetime was twisted and tortured under the lash of a gravimetic field.
“That’s a cruiser,” I judged, and I was surprised at how calm my voice was.
“It sure as hell is,” Julie agreed. “And if it was Joon-Pah, he’d already be trying to contact us.”
“It’s the Tevynians,” Pops said, giving voice to what we all knew in our hearts and had to admit.
Which had to mean the Truthseeker was out of the fight. If Joon-Pah had seen us in trouble, he’d be tearing along right behind that asshole, coming to the rescue. We were on our own.
“Get into the shuttle,” I ordered, the weight of failure settling into my chest. “Like I said, Pops, if we’re going down, we’re going down fighting.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
I was in the gunner’s seat when we launched, which made the second time I was going to have my finger on the trigger in a space battle.
Be careful what you wish for…
“We better hope that cruiser is concentrating on the Two Angels and not the hangar bay,” Julie said, right hand poised over the throttle. She’d taken off her helmet when we boarded the shuttle and she shot me a wink. “Hold on, cowboy.”
Boost. I was getting used to acceleration, to the crushing weight, though I’d probably never thrill at it the way Julie did. The dim, flickering light in the hangar bay vanished in a flare of exhaust and we were outside again, shooting away from the crippled warship at three gees. Like a curtain had been ripped away, the shuttle’s sensor suite lit up with data and all of it seemed very unpleasant. It was easy to read compared to the Tevynian version, and the enemy cruiser seemed to jump right out of the display, a flickering Christmas tree light heading right for the Two Angels, decelerating into firing position.
At first, I thought it was for us, but then the ship’s main batteries opened up on the Two Angels. With her drive field down, the ship was defenseless, and the energy weapons tore right through her, in the port and out the starboard. Burning atmosphere burst through the starboard side, a flare of cosmic blood spatter, and the Two Angels listed to port, the escaping gas flame a makeshift maneuvering jet.
We were rocketing away from the ships as fast as the shuttle would take us, up to four gravities now, all the boost we could sustain for more than a couple minutes with the reaction mass we had on board, but it felt like we were crawling. Seconds crawled by and we were still too damned close, and then the Tevynian cruiser fired again. The lasers glowed on thermal, blanking out the screen, and I tensed as I waited for that final, brief instant of pain before it was all over. But the shot had been for the Two Angels, a coup de grace to the reactor, and the cruiser erupted in a globe of sunfire, expanding as if it was chasing us, as if the Two Angels had reverted back to her Tevynian loyalties now that we were gone and wanted to destroy us with her last breath.
Superheated gas brushed the rear of the shuttle and the aerospacecraft shuddered like we’d hit turbulence in an atmosphere, and. I clenched at the armrest of my acceleration couch with my left hand just a little too hard, forgetting I was still wearing my exoskeleton. Plastic cracked and metal creaked and I let go, cringing.
“I think that means we’re next,” Julie said, her voice strained, maybe from the acceleration or maybe from the explosion. “Unless they don’t think we’re worth it and launch fighters to take us out instead.”
The Tevynian cruiser was so close now she blocked out the stars, way too close to use her main batteries, and I wondered if she was just going to use her point defense turrets, just to show us how insignificant we were.
“They’re going to ram us,” Julie said, her tone almost clinical, like she was watching this happen to someone else. “Just like I did with those fighters. Use their drive field to take us out.”
“Well, that’s just spiteful.” I wanted to ask her if we could go any faster, but I already knew the answer. We could squeeze out another couple of gravities of acceleration, but it would still be no
thing compared to the cruiser’s drive field. “It’s been fun, Julie,” I told her. “I don’t regret a minute of it.”
She laughed.
“You know what, just for the hell of it, I’m gonna turn this thing around so you can pop some shots off at them. Spit in their eye before they take us out. “You good with that?”
“Go down fighting,” I said, shrugging. “Like I told Pops.” I glanced back, down the steps to the cargo hold. “Should I tell them?”
“Would you want to be told?” she asked me. “Or would you rather it be a surprise?”
“Oh, you know how I love surprises.”
“Get ready, then.” She cut the thrust with one hand and twisted the steering yoke with the other. The maneuvering jets answered, spinning us end for end.
I tried not to think about the inevitable, just concentrated on that targeting reticle. The second it was filled with the gray metal of the cruiser, I pushed the firing control.
“Guns.”
It was an exercise in futility. The coil gun was a powerful weapon for a craft the size of the shuttle, but shooting it at the cruiser was like firing an M27 at an aircraft carrier. I didn’t even catch the shimmer of the drive field when it shunted the tungsten slug aside.
The capacitors recharged and I fired again.
The cruiser disintegrated. In the time it takes to blink, it vanished in a flash of liberated kinetic energy, the drive field collapsing on itself, its power loss directed inward. Julie’s jaw dropped, her eyes wide.
“What the fuck did you shoot that thing with, Andy?”
“Greetings, my friends,” Joon-Pah said, his face appearing on the communications console. “My apologies for taking so long.”
The Truthseeker shone like a sun on the sensor screen, close enough she would be visible to the optical cameras soon. She’d taken out the Tevynian cruiser with her impulse gun.
“Oh, Joon-Pah,” I said, letting out a long and heavy sigh, “I think your timing is just about perfect.”