by John Mierau
As soon as the ICR had taken control of Gov’s satellites, a certain hacker of Lee’s acquaintance had used them to bring down Gov’s entire network. Scramblers surrounding the Row kept them from communicating in code, on clear channels.
Which meant somebody had to go tell the boss to his face that the bad men were coming.
Lee pressed his eye to the scope and scanned the grounds. No one was humping across the plaza. What were the odds they’d randomly picked the very tower where the Gov commander was hunkered down? He tracked up the side of the building. “Huh. Got it in one,” Lee murmured, tracking the heat signature of a single soldier hauling ass up a flight of stairs inside the tower. He tagged the runner, and kept scoping floor by floor for anything that could throw off the next step of the plan.
Lee and Sameen had literally walked into the Row, via series of basement tunnels. Thanks to codes stolen from Earth Gov by the same hacker who had crashed their comms network, here they were, right in the center of the Gov stronghold. Of course, neither of them expected to get out alive. Not really. He took another deep drag from the nasal cannula and focused on the world through the sensor scope.
Massive stone slabs anchored the tower Lee now scoped out, and every other yellow stone and blue crystal building in the Government Row. Scenes from the founding of the Reach colony and its hundred-and-thirty-two year history were carved in every lintel, beam, and pillar. It was a beautiful place. Or it used to be, Lee corrected himself, as his view through the scope reached the fourth floor and encountered the first of many ragged, charred holes.
He let the scope guide him back to runner he’d tagged earlier on: the poor guy was still chugging up the stairs. He scanned the opposite stairwell. It was still empty. He swung the scope down to the ground. Still clear. He focused back on the tagged runner. Unless the ground forces were using tin cans and string to send updates to their CO, this was his guy.
Dust and debris crunched under the combat boots of the small, well-muscled woman approaching to Lee’s left. The boots were shiny and new, same as the Earther uniform tucked into them.
“You find your guy?”
Lee looked up and saw Sameen viciously tugging her shoulder-length brown hair into a tight ponytail. Striking Persian features were revealed. A plain, metal hair clip bounced between her teeth as she talked. Above brown eyes nearly the same shade as her hair were several red indentations. They told the tale of how long Sameen’s head had been inside her mech suit’s neural interface crown for this operation.
Lee put his head and his brain back inside the view from the scope. There was too much at stake to leave anything to emotion.
“Yup, I found my guy.”
Today, the Reachers took back their planet.
CHAPTER TEN
“Incoming!”
“Cool your jets—” Sergeant Jake ‘Grunt’ Garner chided on the team channel. He’d seen the dozen heat signatures corkscrewing their way before the new soldier’s voice had called the audible. “Who is that?”
“PFC Bowen, sir!” the voice croaked again.
Jake pressed his buzzed bald scalp against the support webbing of his mech cockpit to extinguish an itch. “Who?” he asked again, chucking a little shit to take his mind off waiting. “Bone?”
The incoming missiles that followed them back from their hit and run at the base of the Tower exploded harmlessly on the far side of the ‘hill’: a barricade of plowed stone, rail track, and the spines of toppled buildings. All held together by the blue of crysteel. He felt damn sorry for the engineer hired to tease this mess apart, after the war was over. It would take years. The tech behind slow-growth crystalline lattice construction was decades old, and was a major component of all Reach architecture—especially the massive transparent domes beneath which the majority of Reach food was grown. The idea of exploding ultra-hard crystalline composites into pre-planned shapes and structures, however, was still an inexact science.
Wartime had been the perfect petri dish to quickly evolve the technology: what had started as emergency shelters in unstable mine tunnels before the war had been tinkered with to create improvised explosive devices, instantly formed defensible perimeters, and ‘hills’ like this one. ‘Hills’ were comprised of unstable debris made stable by the ‘glue’ of a controlled crysteel explosion. Jake was willing to bet there wouldn’t be any commuter trains coming through this track for years, but no missiles were getting through to take out his men, either.
“Bowen, sir!” the young soldier repeated, correcting him just as the missiles hit. The kid’s voice jumped an octave on the last word.
Jake stared at the line of mechs taking cover behind the mountain of debris. He had backed a few metres up from the shield of rubble, keeping an eye peeled for any surprise visitors brave or stupid enough to have followed them out of the Row.
Lee—Captain Zhang—had left Bowen and fourteen more mechs under his command. As expected, the hit and run was a cakewalk, and all had made it safely back to the far side of the mountain before the Gov soldiers knew what hit them.
Which one was Bowen? Jake mused, and leaned hard into the thick neural interface pads in his helmet. He called up an external camera view from their ride: a VTOL dropship hovering to the right of the rail, behind the one remaining wall of a five-story building.
General Jacques Kapoor had accepted Lee’s damn fool offer to neutralize the Earth Gov commander in Government Row. The leader of the resistance was up at the top of the world: Kapoor would head the final assault on North Reach at the appointed hour, while his second in command was getting ready to do the same here in South Reach. ICR forces were gathering now on the other side of the Row.
The prospect of killing Earthers didn’t dull the pain much: When Jake had said goodbye to two comrades in arms this morning—of course Sameen had volunteered to go in with Lee!—he had no idea if he’d ever see them alive again.
Jake grit his teeth, and brought his attention back to the here and now. He ‘thought up’ the names of the troops huddled around him. The neural interface crown in his mech intercepted the thoughts and obligingly drew little yellow boxes in his retina over each mechanized suit displayed by the dropship’s camera feed. Two fire teams of four soldiers each, led by two corporals also from Jake’s regular unit. All ten soldiers huddled behind the ‘Hill’ as impatiently as he did.
Ah. There was Bowen.
Jake blinked away sweat. Why the hell could he run, jump, fire, and shoot with ease through the mech’s neural interface, but anything that required pointing and poking in the real world was hard for him?
He called up Bowen’s status. The kid was a new addition to Corporal D’Angery’s fire team, filling the hole Lance Corporal Cooper left—when he stepped on a pressure mine on the march into South Reach City and blew bits of himself into orbit. Garner saw a yellow box around Bowen’s ammo count.
“Look at your ammo count, Private! You’re almost down to the bone! Danger, chunk him up.”
“Yes, sir!” Corporal D’Angery boomed. Garner watched the mech suit on Bowen’s right grab the private and yank him around, almost toppling Bowen’s mechanized suit into the mountain of debris. The more seasoned marine popped a small door on his chest and withdrew a daisy-chain of ammo clips.
Bowen dropped D’Angery’s gifted clips while attempting to reload his forearm-mounted guns from the ammo feeder, or ‘toaster’ because it popped up hot lead when you needed it. “Not like that!” Danger snarled, kneeling gracefully in his mechanized armor and recovering the clips.
“Pay attention!” Danger slammed one polymer and metal glove on the side of his head. “Class is in session!”
Garner grinned. That was D’Angery: no nonsense and right to business.
Jake forced himself to take some breaths and chill out. This wasn’t an especially dangerous mission. You could die anywhere, anytime in the field, but this was not the big play of the day. Garner figured the higher-ups had put Bowen here to wipe the ‘green’ out of hi
m.
“You taking notes, ‘Bone’?” D’Angery teased the kid over the open line. Jake raised his eyebrows: just like that, Bowen was ‘Bone.’ Jake had a feeling the handle would stick around, just so long as the Private First Class Bowen did.
Danger’s suit popped a replacement clip out of his own ammo feeder. The soldier demonstrated ejecting a clip from the tri-cannon mounted on his right arm (catching the full round easily with the same hand), then slammed the now-empty chamber on the bottom of his weapon over the clip sticking out of the ‘toaster.’ The gun whined as it fed itself the first few rounds.
On screen, Danger watched Bowen try again, this time cleanly reloading his weapon from the new supply of clips Danger had put in his ammo feeder. “Yeah, now you’re packing!” he said encouragingly.
“Stop flirting, Danger,” came a bored female voice from the left of Bowen. That would be Wicker—Corporal Tabitha Wick, leader of the other fire team assembled. “Bone’s his name, not his occupation.”
Several other soldiers snickered on the open line.
“Alright settle,” Garner ordered, ignoring the laugh in his own voice. The channel obligingly quieted down.
Jake waited. He hated waiting. He hated it so much, he decided he’d even prefer talking to the platoon’s pilot. He clicked open a private channel to the sole occupant of VTOL dropship hiding behind a building on his left.
“I hate sitting here while Paladin and Ghost have all the fun.”
Jake hated waiting. He understood the plan, but he’d rather be up there doing his part.
“Fun? Yeah, right, fun!” Pilot Willard Tsu slung the words fast. “Those lucky bastards are about to have all the fun. Every single explosive round of fun.”
“They’ll be fine,” Grunt responded, in a more playful voice than most of his troops would suspect he was capable of making, especially to Lieutenant Willard Tsu—callsign ‘Angel’—the pilot of the dropship. “Ghost and I worked it out.”
Jake felt a rumbling through his mechanized suit, and craned his head around to peer up through the blue-tinted crysteel of his helmet. He had to lean into the sudden rotor wash from the dropship suddenly hovering in the air above him. He unconsciously raised his hand to protect his face from the whipping trash and dust. Even after more than a year in a mech suit, he sometimes had that reaction.
“I knew it!” the high-pitched voice shouted. “What’s the plan?”
Jake dropped his hand with a scowl, equally unconscious of the precisely balanced servos and mechanical systems which kept his six hundred pound suit from falling over with every movement he made.
Willard Tsu had been a pain in Jake’s ass since long before Jake met Lee Zhang. In public, neither Jake nor Tsu missed an opportunity to tear a strip off the other, and their dislike for each other was legendary throughout the ICR. Although, Jake had to admit, Tsu had hauled his ass out of hot zones less capable pilots would never have attempted…and he was family, as Tsu loved to remind him.
Jake dragged his hand back towards Government Row. In response to his brain’s impulses, the mechanized suit bowed in imitation of a maitre’d, as if pointing the way to his finest table. “By all means, buzz on over and provide support, toothpick! I’ll send some privates to sweep up your privates, later on.”
“Just tell me!” The craft dipped its nose in Jake’s direction. “We both know you’re going after Lee. If I’m not there to fly your ass out and you get crispy, I’ll be sleeping on the couch for a—”
It was an old joke between them. It had been funnier months ago, before Gov caught Elena hiding rebels in the basement of her restaurant and sentenced her to espionage. At least she was still alive, behind bars in a prisoner of war camp. Or had been, the last Jake and Tsu had heard.
Jake whipped around to face the towers again. “We got babies here you might have to fly out on the double. Besides, one of us has to be around when Elena gets out.”
Tsu registered his displeasure by killing the channel and slamming Jake with a little backwash as he flew the dropship back to its original position.
The cannons on both his arms spun up in response to the spike of emotions. He buried it all: the fear, the helplessness, the guilt. He let the anger ooze up. He’d use it against the Earthers.
“Let’s go, Lieutenant,” Jake growled. “Get this party started!”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“Nothing works!” The tech slammed his fist into the monitor. “Whoever fragged our comms planted this infection months ago, maybe years. It’s gotten into everything.”
Earth Forces Captain Noelle Carson rubbed the bridge of her nose in frustration. The day before, every comms channel had gone dead, and every image and file had morphed into indecipherable modern art.
She took in her reflection in the dusty monitor. Her uniform was still crisp, despite her being in it for three days. Even under the harsh field lights lighting up the room—the ‘Row’s power grid had failed weeks back—her brown skin shone with health. After weeks assigned to command, her shaved scalp bore no trace of interface crown marks, or of how badly she itched for a shower. Her pale blue eyes remained bright and clear, though she hadn’t slept for days longer than she’d worn the same uniform.
“How long just for audio?”
“You kidding?” the junior lieutenant shrieked, then gulped. He dug his palms into his eyes. His movements were jerky, frantic. “Sorry, Captain Carson. The worm keeps mutating and propagating and I—I can’t even guess right now.”
Noelle nodded coolly and dismissed the tech. She stepped closer to the monitor, watching a garbled stream of white text scroll through a jumbled image file. The monitor still swayed from the tech’s blow. She reached out and still it. “Something’s coming,” she told her image in the monitor.
Her gut told her the Fleas were planning a big offensive, but she couldn’t say that out loud. Not without intel. Not without a plan. She was an officer, and there was too much panic already chasing the mobile command center that moved daily around the outskirts of Government Row, from floor to floor and tower to tower, as the rebels marched closer and closer.
The timing was getting desperate on both sides. A poke in the eye like this morning’s attack didn’t mean anything on its own, but both sides knew the convoy was due. Both sides knew the odds would whip back into Gov’s favor when it got here.
She tapped the screen. It didn’t even respond to her touch. “Deaf, dumb, and blind,” she whispered.
In the early days, she’d felt sympathy for the Reachers, had her own questions about the land grabs, and the raft of laws limiting people’s movements and associations. That was before an avalanche of terrorism and impossible demands, before the cowardly hit and run tactics on Gov supply convoys desperately trying to shore up the cities when the agriculture communities united with the Sand Fleas against Earth.
She’d protected convoys herself, demonstrating skills that promoted her to the front lines. Skills that had kept her alive while other soldiers fed Reach’s sands with their blood.
When the Reachers hit the platform just now, she’d longed to crack a window and tear a strip off the idiotic commander on the ground. The fool had committed twice as many resources as the Reacher’s swipe had taken out. They didn’t have those kind of resources, which was probably why the commander had put them in, to avoid looking weak.
Noelle didn’t like to bluff.
A quick glance around showed her nobody was watching. She closed her eyes and sagged, forehead almost touching the monitor. When she’d first been summoned to the Row, she’d been proud that surviving a year defending South Reach had counted for something. She’d been grateful, on behalf of soldiers she served with, that Gov’s new military commander was ready to listen to seasoned soldiers about how to hold what little ground Gov still controlled in South Reach.
Commander Winter was that rare soldier that reached senior leadership without losing the ability to recognize good advice when he heard it. Perhaps that was becau
se his predecessor had died before his time, when his fluid-filled lungs lost the battle with Reach’s low barometric pressure and drowned him from the inside. And his predecessor’s predecessor had been blown up by the Reachers. As had that man’s predecessor.
Whatever the reason, Winter had come to rely on Noelle for the unvarnished truth. Her captain’s bars, and a permanent post as his advisor in Government Row, were her reward. Or, if you knew her well enough to ask her off duty… her curse.
Her father the general had raised her to execute, not point out stupid to senior officers who ought to know better.
Some days, Noelle thought the paper cuts she got filing reports hurt more than all her battlefield injuries.
“Hold it together, Ivy,” Noelle told herself, using the name her squad-mates had given her on her first training mission after signing up. Back before the rebellion, when Gov meant Gov for everyone. Before Reachers turned on Earthers, and a career soldier with plans of shipping out with the Marines on the next convoy discovered her Gov needed her right there at home.
Some days, she wished her father had lived to see what kind of soldier she’d become. Most days, she was glad General Brock Carson (Retired) had died peacefully in his garden soon after the stroke took his wife Hailey. It would have broken both their hearts to see their adopted home ripped apart in Civil War.
‘Pack that up, Noelle.’ She could almost hear the general say those words. “You got a job to do, girlie,” she murmured aloud, straightening up and tugging on the bottom of her uniform jacket.
The next Fold convoy was almost here. It was up to her to keep Government Row and its commander safe until the cavalry made its dramatic last minute arrival.
Afterwards, as soon as Gov had the troops to push the Reachers out of South Reach City, she’d find her way back to her unit. She’d sock someone in the mouth if that’s what it took to get back to real soldiering, she thought, and felt a cocky grin slide into place.