by Piers Platt
“Who has another missile?” he asked. He ran to the next truck, and found a police officer firing his auto-rifle at the tanks.
“Do you have a missile?” Beauceron asked.
“No!” the man yelled.
A dead police officer was sprawled behind the truck, killed by a gruesome shrapnel wound. A missile launcher lay discarded beside him. Beauceron picked it up, scanned the instructions again, and then ran to the front of the truck, kneeling beside the wheel. The closest tank had stopped on the roadway – the gun tube rotated, and appeared to point directly at Beauceron. He took aim and fired the missile, just as the tank opened fire with a machine gun. The machine gun fire tattooed the ramp, rushing upwards toward him with startling speed. Beauceron threw himself down just in time – the last rounds passed overhead. He pushed himself up in time to see his missile destroy the tank.
“We’re out of missile rounds,” Emeka reported. “And I’ve still got a handful of tanks coming at us on this side. The road is partially blocked, but I don’t think it will take them long to figure out a way around.”
Beauceron peered out at the chaos past his ramp. Several of the street lamps had been knocked out in the fighting, but the fires from the burning tanks lit up the roadway – through the smoke, he could see more tanks maneuvering.
“The street’s still clear on this side,” Beauceron said. He counted the tanks quickly. “Seven tanks remaining. I think we may need to fall back to the terminal building.”
In the distance, Beauceron saw another tank drive out of a side street, its treads skidding as it rounded the corner onto the main street, joining the rear of the formation.
“Make that eight tanks,” Beauceron told Emeka, grimacing.
But as he watched, the new tank’s gun swiveled, and it fired, point-blank, into the tank directly ahead of it.
“What the …?” Beauceron muttered.
The new tank fired again, and another tank’s turret blew off, flipping twice in the air before crashing into the façade of one of the buildings. The new tank continued to dash forward, firing successively into each tank as it overtook them.
They don’t even realize they’re under attack, Beauceron realized. They’re all focused on us up here on the platform.
Another tank exploded, and a police officer near Beauceron whooped excitedly. “Who the fuck is that?” he asked Beauceron. “Did one of our guys steal a tank?”
Beauceron shook his head. “I have no idea,” he said.
The new tank blasted the final tank in the formation and then backed up. Beauceron watched as it rammed the smoking hull of one of its victims, pushing the tank across the road. It maneuvered again, awkwardly, and pushed two more tanks into the road, forming an ersatz barricade. Then the tank smashed its way into the center of the pile, and Beauceron saw the hatches pop open. A man climbed out, and bent to help a woman through the hatch. She pulled a bulky medical kit bag on, and then leaped down off the tank. The man turned back and dropped a grenade down into the turret, and then jumped down himself, and the two of them ran toward the ramp.
“Hold your fire!” Beauceron called out. “All officers hold your fire. Friendlies coming in.”
Behind the running pair, the grenade exploded, disabling the tank. Beauceron walked to the top of the ramp, waiting as they climbed up to the platform. “Thank you,” Beauceron said, as they reached the top. “That was incredible, what you just did.”
The man stopped in his tracks, and a broad grin spread across his face. “Martin fucking Beauceron.” He laughed. “I can’t believe it.”
Beauceron frowned. “Have we met?” He looked over at the woman, and his frown deepened. “Miss McGovan …?”
“It’s a long story,” Jaymy said, smiling.
Then realization dawned on Beauceron, and he turned back to face the man.
“… Rath?”
Rath chuckled, and shifted his face smoothly, transforming from a neutral cover identity back into his natural appearance.
“Contractor 621, at your service,” he said, grinning.
Rath ducked as a jet-powered drone streaked past overhead. It strafed the police vehicles, cannon rounds impacting among the trucks. Back down the street, they saw more tanks pulling onto the road, with a gaggle of infantrymen close behind.
Rath’s smile evaporated. “Shit. We better get to cover.”
25
>>>Our right flank is exposed, Six said, showing Dasi an external security camera feed of the battle. We should shift officers from the center of the platform to the left side of the ramp, which has the best field of fire.
“Detective Beauceron’s got a lot of incoming troops. I need five officers to shift over and reinforce his ramp,” Dasi radioed.
A lieutenant acknowledged, and she saw the men dash across the platform, ducking as another drone made a pass overhead.
“Thanks, Dasi,” Beauceron replied, a moment later. “Any word from our friends up in orbit?”
“Atalia’s got control of the transfer station,” Dasi said. “But I haven’t heard anything yet from Paisen.”
“Well, just so you know, an old friend of ours just joined the fight.” On the security cameras, Dasi saw a man near Beauceron hop out of the back of one of the Jokuan armored trucks, carrying what looked like a sniper rifle.
“Hi, Dasi,” Rath radioed, waving at the cameras.
“Rath?!” she gasped.
“Who did you say joined the fight, Detective?” Colonel Emeka asked.
“Rath Kaldirim, sir,” Beauceron replied.
The radios were silent for a moment.
“If you’ll have me, sir,” Rath added.
“If you’re crazy enough to want to stand with us, Kaldirim, I’m not stupid enough to tell you to go away,” Emeka said.
Dasi heard Rath laugh. “Roger that, sir. Dasi: Martin said you’re tracking troop movements,” Rath said. “I’m sending you a link to my neural interface. Link me to that map, so I can see what’s going on.”
“You got it,” Dasi told him. “In fact, I’ve got some targets for you. There’s a team of mortars setting up on the outskirts of the parking lot.”
Dasi saw a notification from Rath arrive in her heads-up display. Her hands flew over the keyboard, and a moment later she had him linked to the real-time maps Six was monitoring. She highlighted the mortar position on her map.
“Got ‘em,” Rath said. She saw him set the rifle’s bipod on the cement barrier, and squat down behind it.
>>>I do not think we will win this fight, Dasi, Six warned her. Especially now that drones are up.
Well, can you hack them? Dasi asked the program.
>>>I am trying. But military-grade encryption is particularly robust.
* * *
Rath took aim on the mortar site, and waited as the mortarmen readied their first round. As they lifted the round up to drop it into the tube, he fired, detonating the round in their midst. He shifted aim quickly, dropping three mortarmen in the next position. The third tube managed to launch a round, but Rath put a hole in their tube a moment later, knocking it out of commission. The rest of the mortar team took cover behind a car.
Next to him, Jaymy finished treating a wounded officer. Rath gave her a tight smile.
“There are a lot of others that are wounded,” she told him. “I’m going to see what I can do for them.”
“Okay,” Rath agreed. “Just stay low when you move,” he told her. “Keep your head down.”
“Yeah,” she said. She patted him on the shoulder. “You too.” Jaymy zipped her medic bag closed, and then hurried off, hunched over, to another group of officers.
“Rath: tanks closing in on the ramp,” Beauceron yelled.
Rath repositioned the rifle, but through the scope, he could see only buttoned-up hatches – the armored crewmen were all taking cover inside their vehicles. He took aim on the lead tank’s gun sight and fired an explosive round, and the sight shattered. The tank fired back a moment later, and R
ath pulled the rifle down, ducking under cover himself as the round exploded below the concrete barrier.
“I can’t stop those tanks, Martin,” Rath shouted.
“This is Emeka: the tanks are breaking through on this side, too,” the colonel reported.
“Okay. Prepare to fall back to the terminal,” Beauceron radioed.
* * *
>>>I am ready to take a more active role in this battle, Six told Dasi.
Yes! she exulted.
>>>I cannot access the drones’ weapon systems due to a failsafe measure in their programming. However, I can control their flight.
* * *
“General Yo-Tsai.”
Yo-Tsai turned away from his command station. “Yes?”
“Sir, our drone squadron launched several minutes ago,” an officer wearing the uniform of Jokuan’s air force announced. “They’re providing close air support for the units attacking the spaceport, as ordered. We’ll have an uplink to their visual feed in a moment.”
“Post it to the main screen,” Yo-Tsai told him.
The man nodded, and bent over his computer terminal. Yo-Tsai turned to face the Rampart Guardian’s main viewscreen.
“This is from a high altitude surveillance drone,” the air force officer announced, as a video appeared on the screen. They saw a dimly lit spaceport terminal, looking out over a wide parking lot of vehicles. In a semi-circle outside the spaceport’s entrance, Yo-Tsai could make out burning trucks, and the flashes of small arms fire.
“They appear to have inflicted some damage on Colonel Zhu’s tanks, sir,” a battle captain observed.
Yo-Tsai’s scowl deepened. “Give me a close fly-by, at ground level.”
“Yes, sir.”
The view switched to another drone, which dipped into a steep dive, changing course. The aircraft flew low over the platform, and the battle staff watched in silence.
“The enemy has taken casualties, sir,” the battle captain opined. “We’ve destroyed many of the captured trucks.”
“Uniforms?” Yo-Tsai asked.
“No, sir,” the battle captain replied. “But weapons and equipment are consistent with Interstellar Police issue. It’s a police unit, as we suspected.”
“No more than a hundred enemy combatants on the platform,” the air force officer estimated.
Yo-Tsai grunted. “In that case, they’ll soon be overrun. A brave stand, but foolhardy. Show me footage of the platform fly-by again.”
The replay appeared on the screen.
“Freeze it,” Yo-Tsai barked. “Back up a few frames.” He strode closer to the screen. “Zoom in. That man, there. The short one. He seems to be directing the other soldiers.”
“Sir,” the air force officer said. “I think that’s a man called Martin Beauceron. I’ve seen him on the news before.”
“Well, whoever he is, I want him alive,” Yo-Tsai said. “When we launch our punitive PKD strike across the Federacy, I want him to see firsthand the suffering his actions have caused. Send the drones in for one last bombing run, and then tell Colonel Zhu his tanks are cleared for their assault.”
The view on the screen switched to a low altitude drone, which was lining itself up for another run at the platform. On the screen, they watched as the drone selected several missiles, aiming for three groups of police officers. Suddenly, the drone banked hard, dropping into a tight spiral. It seemed to be pointed straight at the ground, but at the last second, they saw a tank loom large in its forward-facing camera. Then the view was replaced by static.
“What was that?” Yo-Tsai asked.
“Drone malfunction, sir,” the air force officer said. “Switching to another one now.”
Yo-Tsai turned back to the screen, where another drone’s feed appeared. But all they saw was the ground and a brief flash of armored vehicle hull, before its feed, too, went dark.
“What the hell is going on?” Yo-Tsai asked.
“I-I don’t know, sir,” the air force officer stuttered. “The drones aren’t responding to navigation commands.”
“They’re crashing themselves into my tanks!” Yo-Tsai thundered.
The air force officer typed frantically at his console, then shook his head. “We’ve lost all of them.”
“Sir, Colonel Zhu reports heavy losses in his armor battalion,” a battle captain said. “He says they’re combat ineffective.”
“Well, are both of his infantry battalions combat ineffective, too?” Yo-Tsai asked angrily.
“No, sir,” the battle captain replied.
“Then tell him to send them in. And bring me my transport: I’m going down there to finish this myself.”
* * *
“Uh, what just happened?” Rath asked, looking out over the top of his rifle at the burning column of tanks.
“I don’t know,” Beauceron replied, standing up in the sudden calm. “Colonel, any surviving tanks on your side?”
“All clear,” Emeka replied. “I don’t know how, but those drones just wiped out every last tank headed our way.”
Beauceron frowned, then turned and looked over at the terminal building. “Dasi, was that you?”
“… uh, yeah,” came the reply. “I got access to some more of their systems over here.”
“Well, shit,” Rath told her. “See if you can crash their space fleet, too.”
“I don’t think so,” Dasi said.
Rath turned and looked back at the terminal building. Jaymy and a few EMTs had established an aid station just outside the building’s entrance, he saw. Several officers were carrying injured comrades over to the area for treatment. Jaymy knelt over a wounded officer, applying a compression bandage from her medical kit to a wound on his leg. Rath could see a long row of officers waiting for treatment.
He felt a hand on his shoulder – Beauceron took a knee next to him.
“It seems we have a brief respite,” Beauceron observed, nodding his chin toward the Jokuan lines.
“They’ll be back,” Rath said. He looked at the detective, and winced. “You’re hit.”
Beauceron glanced down at his arm, where a piece of shrapnel had scored a deep gouge. His shirt-sleeve was soaked in blood. “I didn’t even notice,” Beauceron said.
Rath handed him a bandage. “Martin, what the hell are you doing here?”
“I could ask you the same thing,” Beauceron said, wrapping the bandage around his arm. “I’m here on orders from the Federacy. We were trying to stop the invasion. The plan was to hold the spaceport and the transfer station, and we were supposed to have fifty thousand IP officers en route to back us up.”
“They better get here soon,” Rath observed.
“They’re not coming at all,” Beauceron said, sighing. “Some senator back on Anchorpoint decided to hang us out to dry.”
“So what’s the plan?” Rath asked.
“We hold as long as we can, and distract the Jokuans while Paisen tries to get on board the Rampart Guardian,” Beauceron said.
“Paisen?!” Rath asked. “She’s here, too?”
Beauceron nodded, and touched the control for his throat microphone. “Dasi, any word from Paisen?”
“No,” Dasi replied. “But on the bright side, I haven’t picked up any radio traffic from the Jokuans that would indicate she’s been caught.”
Beauceron sighed. “If we’re lucky, she can seize the controls to those orbital drones. Then at least the Jokuans won’t have control of such a powerful weapon.”
“Even if she succeeds, that leaves Tarkis full of Jokuans,” Rath said. “What then?”
Beauceron shook his head, and remained silent. Rath swore.
“I heard they convicted you,” Beauceron said.
“They did,” Rath agreed. “Guilty on all counts. I was headed for sentencing when Ricken busted me out.”
“So you decided to help him start this war?” Beauceron asked.
“There was never supposed to be a war,” Rath said. “All we wanted were new elections. N
ot … this.” Rath gestured. “Jesus. I never wanted this.”
Beauceron took a sip from his water bottle.
“It’s my fault,” Rath continued, chagrined. “And either way, you should probably arrest me when all of this is over.”
The detective laughed. “Somehow I don’t think either of us will live that long.”
Colonel Emeka appeared from behind the nearest truck and jogged over, kneeling beside them. Rath could see a sheen of sweat on the older man’s forehead, glistening in the night.
“Kaldirim,” Emeka said, extending a hand.
“Sir,” Rath replied, shaking it. “Nice to meet you.”
“Yeah,” Emeka snorted. “I probably chased your ass down a few alleys back in the day, huh?”
Rath chuckled. “Probably.”
“Well,” Emeka told them, “I just took a walk around the perimeter. Bad news and worse news: bad news first. We’re down to seventy-two officers in fighting shape. And I use the term loosely: about a third of those are wounded in some way.”
“And the worse news?” Beauceron asked.
“Even accounting for captured weapons, we’re getting dangerously low on ammo,” Emeka said. “We’re going to be throwing rocks in a few minutes.”
“You don’t have your Forge, Rath?” Beauceron asked.
“Nope,” Rath said. “Back in an evidence locker on Scapa, as far as I know.”
Movement in the distance caught Rath’s eye. He glanced back down the rifle’s eye-piece. At the far edge of the floodlit parking lot, he saw a handful of Jokuan soldiers emerge from the darkness beyond the lights, and begin weaving their way through the first row of cars. As he zoomed out, hundreds more soldiers came into view, hurrying forward through the parking lot.
Rath fired, startling Beauceron and Emeka. His target dropped, face first, onto the pavement. The two police officers peered out across the parking lot, and Beauceron’s eyes went wide as he surveyed the oncoming forces.