by Rick Partlow
The fallen rock provided plenty of cover for a small force like ours, and we scattered to it like roaches fleeing a sudden light. I was on the other side of a jagged splinter of granite from Bobbi, at the center of the formation, and I put the aiming reticle in my helmet HUD on the central tent, the largest of them.
“Thirty seconds,” Bobbi told me, her voice calm and almost tranquil. She was an absolute bitch when we were waiting for shit to happen, but once it did…
Nothing moved. My helmet sensors picked up the sound of someone snoring. I closed my eyes for just a second and pictured Sophie and Cesar at the spaceport, waving goodbye as I boarded the ship. Cesar was deep into the Terrible Two’s, but he’d kept it together long enough to smile for me when I left. I left too often. I could see it in Sophie’s face even when she tried to stay cheerful for Cesar’s sake, even though she’d never say it because she knew there wasn’t much I could do about it, yet.
Behind us, the night lit up and a roaring shockwave of sound and wind swept down through the canyon, focused by its rock passageway. The sound seemed distant, filtered through my helmet buffers, and I could barely feel the vibration in the rock I was leaning against, but I knew several kilos of chemical hyperexplosives had just turned a few hundred thousand dollars’ worth of starship into the same collection of disconnected spare parts it had started life as. A billowing cloud of red dust and flying debris rolled over us, swallowing everything in its path and obscuring all but thermal sensors.
When they came out of their tents, I could only see them as yellow, green and red outlines, inhuman and faceless. I could hear unintelligible shouts and loud, panicked curses that cut off abruptly when I pulled the trigger. The Gauss rifle kicked hard against my shoulder and there was a spray of warmth from the featureless blob of one of their heads. The human outline was falling backwards in what seemed like slow motion, bouncing off the ground and then lying motionless forever.
I scanned for another target and there was nothing but bodies, gradually going from red and white to green and blue.
“O’Neill, Waugh,” Bobbi ordered curtly. “Check the bodies. Sanders, Victor, Kurt, check the tents then turn off those damn jammers. Prouty, you stay here with me and cover them.”
The dust was beginning to settle, fading into the background as the wind swept down the canyon, and I could see the bodies clearly now. If they’d looked human before, they certainly didn’t now. They were broken things, bags of blood and meat and I had a hard time believing they’d ever been alive. O’Neill and Waugh were stripping weapons off them, then gingerly turning them over to search for more.
“Tents are clear,” I heard Sanders announce after half a minute. “Jammers are off.”
“Kane,” I called over my helmet radio. “You hear me?”
“Yes.” The voice was monotone and nearly mechanical. Not as mechanical as he wanted it to be.
“Come in and pick us up at their camp,” I told him. “It’s a cold LZ.”
“Two minutes.” Not a word wasted. Sometimes I felt lucky to get him to talk at all.
It was less than a minute before I heard the scream of the jets circling overhead. The canyon wasn’t quite as wide here as it was where the raider ship had been berthed, but Kane could land the Nomad in a bathroom. She was the same, basic delta of a converted missile cutter, like the raider ship, but that was where the resemblance ended. The Nomad had been reconfigured in a Corporate Council dry-dock and refitted with custom sensor, communications and electronic warfare suites as well as a military-grade proton cannon. She was worth a fortune, which was why she also had some pretty sophisticated security systems in her ship’s AI to keep Kane or any other member of the crew from running off and selling her.
The Nomad roared into the canyon on columns of fire, her belly jets throwing up a sandstorm that scoured my visor. I didn’t look away, just watched her touch down on five heavy-duty landing treads, their carriage sinking into their housings as the weight of the ship settled onto them. Kane had left about a meter of clearance between the tips of the delta wings and the canyon walls. The turbines spun down to a steady, background hum but didn’t completely fade as the boarding ramp extended on hydraulic cylinders and a slender, wispy figure descended, her shadow stretching far past her meter-six height.
She was attired inappropriately for the conditions in a well-tailored business suit with dress shoes shining in the light from the utility bay, and her short, conservatively dark hair was fashionably coifed in an intricate bun. I suppose she was attractive in a sort of cold, elfin way, but she definitely wasn’t my type.
“Very efficiently done, Mr. Munroe,” Divya Reddy told me, miming applause. Her voice was smooth and oily, her eyes dark and unrevealing. She probably weighed less than fifty kilos and I trusted her significantly less far than I could throw her. “I’ll have to recommend Mr. West give you a bonus this quarter.”
I waited where I was and let her approach, feeling tired in general and not a little tired of her after spending the last two weeks cooped up together inside a fairly small starship.
“What the hell does Andre Damiani care about this piddly shit anyway, Divya?” I asked her, knowing I was wasting my time but feeling obliged to go through the motions.
“I’m sure that the Executive Director of the whole Corporate Council doesn’t share his inner thoughts with me,” she answered with a dry humor that was unusually introspective for her. “Perhaps you can schedule a personal interview with him the next time you head back to Earth.”
I snorted at that, not quite a laugh but almost. I hadn’t been “back to Earth” since I’d changed my identity, altered my face and ran off to join the Fleet Marine Corps almost nine years ago. That was the major part of the deal I’d made with my Uncle Andre through his agent, Roger West, who I’d come to know during the war as “Cowboy.” I worked as his hired gun out in the Pirate Worlds in exchange for him keeping my whereabouts and existence secret from my mother, Patrice Damiani. If she’d known where I was, she would have been hauling me back to her little fortress in the Trans-Angeles megalopolis back on Earth for “re-education.”
“I have the navigation files you wanted,” I told her, tapping the side of my helmet. “So, unless there’s anything else you need, can we get off this rock and go home?”
I was coming down from the adrenalin high of a firefight and the hour-long operation that had led up to it; that’s the only excuse I have for not remembering very clearly what happened next, or the order of what occurred. I know two things happened at once, so close together I couldn’t tell which was first: the Nomad blasted off from the canyon floor with enough force that the blast of the belly jets blew Divya a meter through the air to slam her shoulder into my chest and knock me backwards off my feet, and Kane broadcast a panicked exclamation in a voice surprised enough to almost sound human.
“Incoming!”
Chapter Two
The sand and lower-than-standard gravity cushioned my fall, so I wasn’t too stunned to notice the dark, bat-like shape of an assault shuttle roaring overhead, flashes of ionized air tracing a line from the Gatling laser in its chin turret as it chased after Nomad. It was there, then it was gone, passing over the canyon and disappearing from sight in the space of an eye-blink, and I was already pushing Divya off of me and scrambling to my feet.
“Move!” I was bellowing at the others, feeling panic gnawing at my guts, knowing that they wouldn’t send the shuttle after the ship unless they already had forces on the ground coming for us. “Get to cover!”
This unit wasn’t the Recon Marines, but they were used to following orders and all of them were moving behind the rubble that shielded the tents before I could finish pulling Divya to her feet. She looked stunned and scared and I didn’t blame her. Who the fuck was this? It sure as hell wasn’t the cut-rate pirates we’d just wiped out; they didn’t have an assault shuttle or the ship to launch it from. If they took out the Nomad…
I pushed Divya ahead of me, cha
fing at how slow she was running; we were a meter from the closest cover when they opened fire and I still hadn’t see them coming. Flashes of ionized air and polychromatic explosions of vaporized sandstone and granite threatened to white out my vision and I knew they were using laser weapons, probably pulse carbines. Pulse lasers had used to be military only and they were still expensive as hell; whoever was attacking us was well-equipped.
I heard Divya scream as we dove behind a jagged boulder, and I wanted to check on her, but we were still taking fire and I knew we had to suppress it or we were all dead. I could at least tell where they were now; my helmet sensors had tracked the incoming fire to ten individual heat sources approaching from up the canyon, hugging the right-side wall. It couldn’t be more precise than that because they were moving and I was huddled behind a rock.
I shouldered my Gauss rifle, sucked in a deep breath and rolled out to the right side of the boulder I was using for cover. I pumped a half dozen rounds in the general direction of the enemy as fast as I could unload them, then rolled back just ahead of three converging bursts of laser fire.
“Bobbi!” I yelled into my helmet pickup. “Withdraw by teams up the canyon! You take Alpha first!”
“Alpha, follow me on three!” I heard her snap on the team net. Alpha was her, Victor, Kurt and Sanders. I had the three newer recruits, and I was going to have to shepherd Divya, too. “One…”
“Bravo, lay down covering fire!” I ordered, then climbed over Divya, who was curled into a ball, hugging the rock like it was her mother and Jesus rolled into one.
“Two…”
I leaned out around the other side of the rock and squeezed off another six rounds, this time actually noticing that my HUD was having a hard time picking up the enemy. I could see the thermal signatures of their carbines radiating heat, but finding center-mass was harder and I was fairly sure they were wearing Stealth Armor. More big money, from somewhere.
“Three!”
I could sense more than see Bobbi and the others scrambling backwards past the raider tents, and I ducked back for just a moment to avoid incoming fire before I stuck my rifle out the left side again and shot another three rounds.
“Bravo, you’re covered.”
“Bravo, move!” I said, grabbing Divya by the arm and dragging her away from her pet rock. She made a pained, frightened noise and I wondered if she was hurt, but I couldn’t stop to find out.
She was nearly dead weight, but she didn’t weigh that much here and I hauled her along, wrapping an arm around her waist and carrying her to the other side of the tents in a full sprint. I dumped her unceremoniously behind one of the fuel cell generators and took up a firing position. I could see the IFF transponders of O’Neill, Prouty and Waugh moving to cover on either side of me, tucked behind rocks or pallets of equipment, and once they were all in position, I keyed the team frequency.
“Alpha, you’re covered.”
I emptied my magazine this time, but I was damned if I could tell if I was hitting anything I aimed at. I thought I saw the signature of a laser carbine hit the ground, but I couldn’t tell if the one carrying it had been hit or just hit the dirt on purpose. I dropped down behind cover and switched out the magazine with rote muscle memory I’d learned years ago, trying not to flinch as laser pulses spalled vaporized metal from the other side of the generator.
I went through the motions of fire and maneuver by habit, on auto-pilot, while my brain tried to churn out a plan. We were doing okay against these guys, and if Kane managed to take out their assault shuttle, we’d likely be able to force them to disengage and break contact. If the assault shuttle won that fight, we’d have to change the plan and take their ride back to their ship. That didn’t seem likely, but it was the only possible alternative, so I just had to trust Kane to be the better pilot.
Either way, it was eight of us against ten of them and they weren’t going to be able to overrun us with those numbers.
God must have heard me thinking that, because my HUD started blinking a red flash at the corner of my eye right before an explosion ripped apart one of the tents only a dozen meters off to my left.
“Munroe!” Bobbi yelled, a half-panicked strain to her voice that I wasn’t used to hearing. “Attack pods!”
I knew what they were, even though I’d never seen one in action. Take a hopper---a normal, ducted-fan hovercraft---and stick it in an ablative shell that could survive reentry, then arm it with something simple, effective and low-recoil like a grenade cannon, and you had an attack pod. Someone had dreamed them up during the war and tried to sell the Marine Recon Battalions on them as a cost-efficient way to put air support onto a planet from orbit, but it was determined they were too vulnerable to be used in combat. All it took was a single crew-served weapon or a man-portable missile launcher to knock one out of the air.
Unfortunately, we had neither of those and we were fucked.
I could see them now, two of the bulbous, insect-like pods humming just above the lip of the canyon, tantalizingly close and basically unarmored but too fast and maneuverable for me to shoot down with a rifle.
“Disengage and scatter by teams of two!” I said, trying to avoid the hammer and anvil situation we were being forced into. “Rally point is the LZ where we were dropped off! Go!”
More explosions tore apart the night in flashes of fire and I cursed, picking Divya up bodily and throwing her over my shoulder.
“O’Neill, let’s go!”
I didn’t look back to see if he was moving to follow, just ran with Divya’s left arm clinging weakly to my shoulder. My pace seemed excruciatingly slow, even though I knew it was faster than any of the enemy soldiers who’d be pursuing me. I had perfect genes thanks to Mom, and a few extras over the last few years thanks to Cowboy. I wasn’t even close to fatigued yet, but I also wasn’t alone.
I heard O’Neill’s scream in my headphones in the echoes of another explosion, this one maybe thirty meters behind me, a couple hundred meters past the burning tents. I could see his icon flashing yellow in my HUD readout and I cursed and changed course, sliding to a stop behind a cracked outcropping of dull-grey granite at the closest wall of the canyon. I laid Divya down there, finally noticing the blood soaking the fabric of her suit over her right hip. She’d been shot and she needed a smart bandage, or better yet, an auto-doc soon or she was going to bleed out.
I left her there and darted back out, trying to get to where I could see O’Neill crawling across the sand, leaving a trail of blood where the bottom half of his right leg used to be.
Shit, shit, shit! I grabbed him by the handle built into the back of his tactical harness and dragged him towards cover; I hoped the first aid systems built into his combat armor were doing their job and cutting off the blood flow at the knee, or he was going to be dead in a couple minutes, because stripping off the armor and tying on a tourniquet right here under fire certainly wasn’t an option.
I’d almost reached the alcove in the rock where I’d stashed Divya when I felt a white-hot, searing burn across my right shoulder blade and tumbled forward from the flash of pain. I’d been shot, I knew that immediately. A laser pulse had tagged me in the back, but I didn’t think it had completely penetrated my armor; it was at its thickest in the upper torso, and it was rated to stop anything up to a full-power Gauss rifle round. It hurt like a mother, though, and I rolled over on top of O’Neill and returned fire with my own weapon.
This time, the shooter was close enough that I could make him out even with the signature-masking Stealth armor; he was a black silhouette against the sky-glow of the gas giant and I put my HUD aiming reticle right over the center of his helmet before I touched the trigger pad. A tungsten slug as big around as my little finger travelling at thousands of meters per second didn’t leave much of the helmet or the head inside it. The dark figure slumped to his knees, then collapsed to the sand.
I was already moving again, grabbing O’Neill and pulling him along, clenching my teeth against the p
ain in my upper back. I’d be okay, I was pretty sure of that. Even if I couldn’t get to an auto-doc, I had an incredibly expensive and almost impossible to get nanite suite floating around inside my blood that could repair all but the most serious injuries in hours using my own blood sugar and protein as the building blocks. Of course, if one of the grenades from the attack pods hit too close, there wouldn’t be any blocks left to build with.
I shoved O’Neill up against Divya and crouched beside them, not quite under cover myself but at least with rock on three sides of me and a clear shot at whatever came from the front. I was beginning to think the pods had given up on me when I heard a faint thrum of ducted fans coming in from the wide end of the canyon, where the raider camp had been. I scanned the sky but couldn’t see anything yet; the flames from the tents were screwing with my thermal filters and the pods didn’t put out that much heat anyway. My audio sensors would normally have been able to give me a rough idea of where the sound was coming from, but the acoustics in the canyon were tricky.
I was in a good position; maybe if I could spot it before it saw me, I could even shoot it down…
Then there was this feeling like being kicked by a boot the size of an asteroid and I was flying through the air, flying much farther than seemed survivable until a tiny part of my brain that was still working reminded itself of the lower gravity. I hit maybe ten meters from where I’d started and didn’t even try to move; I felt like one, giant bruise and couldn’t quite separate the general pain into specific spots enough to figure out how badly I was hurt. The grenade had, as close as I could figure, hit somewhere to my left, against the rock wall beside me.
I forced my eyes open, which also hurt, and found myself looking through a spider-web of cracked polymer with my HUD nowhere to be found. My helmet had taken a hit from something hard enough to shut down the display. I could still see, though, even without the helmet filters. I wore a semi-permanent contact lens on my right eye that provided me with fairly basic night vision: no computer enhancements, not much depth perception, no full-color and definitely no cohesive combination of all the helmet’s sensor data, but enough to see.