Into the Maelstrom

by Loren L. Coleman

  “Prince Seven, have you estimated force strength of Neo-Sovs yet?”

  Phillipe ignored the question that crackled over his headset, intent on raking a line of fire from his Rottweiler heavy-assault weapon over a pair of Vanguard infantry. Three hours of hit-and-run attacks left him in no mood to field repeated requests. The Hum-Vest made it difficult for comms anyway—a convenient excuse.

  Not so for Davidson apparently. “TC&D wants our estimate of the attacking strength,” he yelled, drifting the Pegasus along a parallel track to the Neo-Soviet rear lines.

  “I heard,” Savoign said, swinging the Rottweiler around to reach for another target. Missed. The Pegasus had been stripped of its light-missile system for use as a lunar messenger and scout sled. Savoign had welded a simple open bracket onto the crossbar and a post to the base of a Rott. Insert post through bracket, and he had a bastardized turret weapon, good at least against unarmored targets. He popped the clip and grabbed another from the bag at his feet, thought better of it, and simply settled in for support. “Clear out!” he ordered.

  Davidson turned into a hairpin, racing the Pegasus away from the Neo-Soviet return fire. A few bullets spanged off the vehicle. One skinned the air near Savoign’s head. He waited for ten seconds after the bullets stopped skipping around them before he slapped off his own Hum-Vest. The experimental powered vest ceased the throbbing hum that gave it its name, and the temporary force field it generated collapsed. “How is she holding up?” he asked.

  “We’ve blown a flywheel generator, but we’re good to go still.” Davidson turned off his own vest. “My Hum-Vest is heating up pretty bad. I think I’m about to lose the field.” He glanced into the back as he swerved around to set up another run. “You want to answer Control?”

  “Tell them we’ve seen no sign of their main force. Still. We’d call if we had, damn it.”

  “Tycho Control, this is Prince Seven. We have no estimate for you yet beyond original contact.” Davidson left off the corporal’s qualifier.

  “Copy, Prince Seven. Keep us advised.”

  Savoign stood up, straddling the two passenger seats, and slapped the fresh clip home, chambering the first round. He waited until he saw the first puff of gray soil indicating a Kalashnikov pointed in their direction, and slapped his powered vest alive again. The hum rattled his back teeth and gave him the eerie feeling of a feathered touch crawling all over his skin. But it kept the bullets away for now. Only problem with the units was that they weren’t extremely dependable. Still in prototype stage for the Union in general, on the moon such equipment was a bit more commonplace.

  “I’m hit!” Davidson yelled only two minutes into the run, giving the stick a slight hitch that gave Savoign a shaking and almost threw him off. Davidson slapped a quick release and threw the smoking vest unit into the empty passenger seat. “Field collapsed. I’ll give you another fifteen seconds.”

  Ducking himself back into the Pegasus carriage, Savoign shook his head. “You get us out of here now! Where are you hit?”

  Not waiting to be told twice, Davidson leaned the sled hard over until the gyro deadened the stick and forced him into a slightly milder turn. “My leg. I took a ricochet off the front board.” The blood drenched the leg of his gray uniform a dark red-black.

  Savoign cut the long strap of Davidson’s ruined Hum-Vest, wrapped it about his leg and twisted the loose ends together into a knot. “Use your free hand to hold pressure on this. Not too tight, though.” The pair sped away, looping in a very wide arc that would bring them in at the back side of Tycho.

  The commlinks built into their helmets crackled to life. “All units, break away. Assault suits and powered armor recover your equipment and rendezvous with Tango carriers two klicks at twenty-five degrees.”

  Evac of all augmentation suits? Savoign ignored Davidson’s pointed look and opened his transmitter. “Tycho, we are en route with wounded. Request repeat.”

  “We found the main Neo-Soviet force, Prince Seven. They caught the general’s support force heading out to our aid, then turned on Tranquillity. They are off the air. This was a diversion. We’re going to button up on the defensive and send what we have to the general’s aid.”

  Savoign bit back an outburst. No one had expected an overwhelming attack against Tranquillity Base itself, the center of control on Luna. Hayes maintained a large army there. It would be a suicide run, or near enough. Though with their recent string of successes, General Tamas Yorikev might have decided to make the gamble for a Neo-Soviet-dominated Luna. The corporal glanced over at Davidson, who was looking fairly pale. “We better get you in and looked at.”

  The PFC shook his head. “Ares first. You’ll be needed at Tranquillity.”

  “The Freedom—”

  “You can task it just as easily from Tranquillity if you have to. And they do have other weapons specialists on Luna, you know.”

  The corporal hesitated, his desire to be suited up again and wading in against the enemy warring with the more unique and curious task of helping to program a battle-station assault against ground targets. There was also Davidson to consider, but the kid was strong and had already voiced his vote. Savoign nodded, grabbed a fresh clip, and sidled back around to man the Rottweiler again. “Then you better punch through the Neo-Sov line. It’s the only way we’ll make the time.” He shoved the new clip in, chambered a round.

  “The Void take anyone who tries to stop us.”

  * * *

  Sergeant Tom Tousley knew that, technically, he had committed a gross act of insubordination. The Union forces were placed on standby duties while Neo-Soviet Vanguard reconned the area. His particular orders were to stand down and wait for further orders. Crawling about in the darkness with what remained of his squad was not a choice he had been given.

  The Sleeper had slipped into a dry canyon growing some strange black grasses amid the tumble of rocks and stretches of barren ground. It looked settled in for the evening, though the more dangerous symbiots prowled a wide perimeter. Its Feeders roamed the immediate area as well, bloated and waddling, not many of them airborne now. The few still in the air were flying a straight-line path up onto the nearby slopes of Gory Putorana, except fewer were coming back than went up, and finally they quit flying and grouped about the Sleeper.

  Tousley had only seen the Sleeper dormant while it fed, the last time being over the site of the Irynutsk Facility. He wanted to know what had brought it here, to rest. He wanted to know how to kill it. He was tired of running.

  Maria Carr guarded his back as the two held the upper slopes above the dormant Sleeper. In case things fell to hell, they guarded the way out. Nash and Private Nicholas formed a guard for CBR specialist Loveday, talked into joining them on this excursion. Well, tricked into it was closer to the truth. Nicholas was in bad shape from blood loss, though like the sergeant his body armor had protected him from the worst of the shots the Zyborg had hit him with. He refused to be left behind, and Tousley needed him. Their three-man team was working in as close as they dared to the symbiot force. Everyone wore night-vision specs, borrowed from one of the Trojan supply carriers, and silenced Pugs to accompany their assault rifles.

  Tousley opened a channel. “Baker Team, what have you got?” He kept his voice low, not a whisper, but the next thing to it. The foul, acrid stench rising from the shallow canyon already told him something of what he wanted to know. Caustic, like flame-scorched earth or a diesel fire. He remembered the scent from Irynutsk.

  Nash’s transmission was breaking apart, but still the sergeant could hear his confidence. “You were right on the money, Sarge. Corporal Loveday is reading all sorts of contamination below. It’s glowing off the scale.”

  “Is there a vector?”

  “He says none he can see, and it should be glowing just as hot. It’s either a dump or it’s piped in.” Tousley was betting on the latter. “He wants to work in closer—”

  “Negative,” Tousley interrupted. “We have half of what we came
for. Fall back into position for stage two.”

  He uprooted some of the black grasses and shoved them into one of his many pockets. He then tapped Brevet-Corporal Carr on the shoulder and motioned upslope and in line with the path the Feeders had taken earlier. It was slow going at first, the way covered by loose rock. Then they hit a well-beaten trail, stamped by the prints of Neo-Soviet combat boots. More than a simple patrol of Vanguard could have made recently.

  “Payday. We’ve got a trail.” He came quickly upon two different forks. “An entire system of trails. Baker, when you hit them remember to angle up and to the left. I’ll scratch an arrow at each fork I notice.”

  Midnight slowly crawled by. The sergeant took it as a positive sign that he had yet to be called over the Seventy-first’s command freq. Across the canyon and above on a protected bluff, the lights of the encamped Union force could just be made out. Higher up still were the brighter lights of the Neo-Soviet Striker. Word was that Colonel Romilsky had wanted to attack earlier, but that Sainz had vetoed the plan to allow his people a period to recover from what had been a near rout. Tousley didn’t buy the breakdown-in-communications act the upper echelon put on for the benefit of those who had found themselves unsupported at ground zero. Though even Major Howard was in on that one, so Tom had no recourse but to let it slide. For now.

  He found the small but deadly battlefield higher up, around a ventilation exhaust camouflaged by fake trees and brush. The canyon had a crenellated look, and the small bluff guarded a second draw that ran back the other side. Three Feeders lay in immediate sight. Nash found two more and a dead Vanguard infantryman as he and Nicholas approached via a different path with the CBR specialist. They brought Tousley the dead Neo-Soviet’s shoulder patches. The name and rank he cared little for, but the unit was not the Fifty-sixth Striker. Tousley couldn’t read Russian, but the insignia was clear enough. Where the Fifty-sixth emblem was that of a silver-eyed hawk’s head, this one was a shiny black peak.

  Chernaya Gora. Black Mountain.

  They were standing on it.

  “Sergeant. Company.”

  Maria Carr’s hissed warning came as a light flickered along the upper slope not fifty meters away, a group of figures sliding over the rise from the other side of the bluff, over the partially hidden draw. Through the night specs, the flash stood out like a white-hot beacon. The sergeant flicked the lenses up onto his forehead, but not before counting eight armed infantry.

  “Ground and freeze,” the sergeant ordered in a whisper. Five Union forms melted to the ground. He tried to breathe shallowly, the acrid scent natural to the black grass burning his sinuses.

  There was a chance that this was an ordinary Vanguard patrol sent by the Fifty-sixth. If so, the Union patrol could claim a duplication of orders to recon the area and bluff their way back to camp. That thought lasted all of the two seconds it took to complete it. Anyone allowed to patrol this bluff knew of the Black Mountain facility, and certainly was under orders to protect it at all costs. Escaping from this one clean would mean nothing less than the Neo-Soviets passing by and not spotting the Union force. The flash switched off, and Tousley shook his specs back into place. The eight figures were heading straight down into them.

  “No such luck,” he whispered, barely any breath behind the words. “Silenced Pugs on my order, and not before. Weapons free if they fire anything noisy. By rank take the targets in order. I have one and two.” With complete surprise, the Neo-Soviet force would die as silent a death as the Feeders had earlier in the day.

  A touch of luck which simply was not with them. Corporal Loveday sneezed, all the more loudly as he had tried to stifle it even to the last possible instant.

  Ah, hell. Tousley cut loose with his Pug, the soft zipping noise of the silenced shots tearing through the calm night air and stitching into the forward-most Vanguard. He drew a line at helmet height, heard the cracking noise of bullets passing through either protective gear or skull. Skull, apparently, as one infantryman went down without so much as a gasp.

  That was all the luck his squad could muster. Three Vanguard cut loose on full automatic at once. Though they were firing blind, these soldiers were no fools. Each took a safe line of fire and sprayed figure eights that would give maximum effect to their spread. Someone cried out to the sergeant’s left—Nicholas or Nash—and the Kalashnikov barrage was answered with silent death and a single Pitbull now chopping away at the enemy. Two more Neo-Soviets fell, and the remaining four fell back at once. Another didn’t make it two steps. The sixth fell in the final flurry of traded fire as the last two cleared the bluff and dropped from sight.

  “After them?” Carr asked, rolling over to Tousley’s side. “Jim took another round in the back of the leg, but he’ll live.”

  The sergeant shook his head. “No. We lost the chance.” He slammed a fist into the ground. “Go drag Loveday out of whatever hole he crawled into after that performance and help Nash with Jim. We’re out of here.”

  “The colonel is going to step on us, isn’t he?”

  Kelly Fitzpatrick’s death had dragged him out here and cost him a wounded man, and the sergeant would sleep well enough on that, but it was not the kind of action that endeared one to the chain of command. Tousley’s first impulse was to agree with Carr. His second was to put off answering until later. He’d take the fall if there was one to take, that went without saying. But then he held up the shoulder patch of the man Nash had found and walked up hill to compare it to the identical one on each of the fallen Neo-Soviet Vanguard. He ripped a few more from sleeves.

  “Maybe not,” he finally said. “Just maybe not.”

  24

  * * *

  T he Siberian early morning had a cold bite to it, dusting the ground white and frosting breath. Raymond Sainz had forgone his cold-weather jacket, meeting the predawn cold in regular combat fatigues and his Kevlar vest. His anger would keep him warm. He and Major Howard stood in the neutral ground between their Hades command transport and Romilsky’s Zephyr. Sergeant Tousley’s people backed the two Union officers as they faced off against Katya Romilsky and a full Vanguard squad. The dawn still hours away, the floodlights of both vehicles provided light.

  Sainz rarely relied on his size for intimidation, but today would take every advantage he could get. He towered over Romilsky. She gave back a strong presence thanks to the broad, armored shoulders and torso of her officer’s trench, though clearly Sainz’s arrival ready for a fight had startled her for an instant. The Union commander had strapped on two Pug autopistols, one at his left shoulder and another riding his right hip, reversed for a cross-body draw. A pair of grenades dangled from the vest’s front. The Vanguard had shifted into ready stances, and the tension was palpable as the two leaders squared off.

  The Fifty-sixth’s commander refused to look up at Sainz, and instead her icy gaze stared past him to bore into the hard-set face of Sergeant Tousley. “I find it insulting that you brought this man as your guard, Colonel.” No pretense of civility, snapping out her fury in Russian with the most basic form of address possible. “You know what he is responsible for.”

  And Romilsky was no doubt wondering exactly how much they knew. Classic Neo-Soviet confrontation would be to overtrump her right away, parading his knowledge of Chernaya Gora and escalating the stakes. He had no intention of playing the game her way. “Your request for a meeting interrupted our debrief, but I know the important details, yes.” He spoke English, letting his displeasure show in his own lack of courtesy.

  It also left vague whatever knowledge was in his possession, and Romilsky’s eyes showed a flash of feral cunning before she managed to hide it. She ran a hand back through her short auburn hair in a delaying gesture, unconsciously tracing the silver streak in it. “Firing under a flag of truce is a crime the Union recognizes. You will turn him over to me.”

  He had expected that. The Neo-Soviets had always been good at playing the hypocrite. “No,” he said simply.

  Anger flare
d in Romilsky’s face at the abrupt dismissal. Her voice was tight with barely controlled rage. “I want that man!” she demanded, stepping to one side and stabbing a finger at the sergeant.

  Matching her step, Sainz blocked her from even being able to see Tousley. His tone was even and deadly calm. “You’ll have to go through me to get him.” He didn’t look back at the sergeant. Tousley had been instructed on the role he would play—silent and confident of the Union’s superiority, not much of a stretch for him. But if he showed one trace of fear or doubt in his commander, Colonel Sainz’s play would be undermined. The Seventy-first’s CO gambled on Tousley setting aside his prejudice for loyalty to the Union.

  So far, by Romilsky’s actions, Sainz had figured correctly. “This is your Union justice?” she asked. “Under a flag of truce your soldiers are allowed to make unsanctioned patrols and murder allies? Temporary allies.” Her stressing of the informal arrangement made the qualifier an obvious threat.

  Rebecca Howard turned back to the squad, leaving Sainz to remain in constant eye contact. “How about it, Tom? Do you have a defense?”

  One he had already been coached on. “They shot first,” he lied, a trace of smugness to his voice.

  Katya Romilsky was at a loss for words for all of three seconds. Then, “That is a cold-blooded lie,” she accused Tousley in English. “They ambushed a patrol of Neo-Soviet Vanguard without provocation.”

  It was the opening Raymond Sainz had been angling for. “Define provocation, Katya Olia,” he said calmly, slipping into Russian for the benefit of her Vanguard. This was a confrontation he wanted passing around through the Neo-Soviet ranks. “I’d be interested in seeing if these fit under your definition.” He produced the Black Mountain uniform insignia Tousley had brought back to him. A few straws of the black, bladed grass that grew on the contaminated slopes were twisted into the ripped cloth as well.