Peacemaker (The Revelations Cycle Book 6)
Page 28
* * *
Level Three resembled hell. The tight corridors were filled with thick, acrid smoke. Hex used the CASPer’s thermal view system to see into the distance as marauders from the Wandering Death assaulted from a closed-off, unstable mine entrance far to the northwest of the colony. Fifteen to twenty of them came into the main tunnel complex, quickly established a defensive position and produced a withering rate of fire.
Another explosion rumbled through the mine from the northeastern side as the Selroth worked on the tight aquifer to gain passage into the complex. His radio buzzed to life. “Hex? They’re through the aquifer.”
The two tunnels to the north branched out, and Hex saw lights in the distance in the northeastern one. For a moment, the firing from the defensive position halted as they likely tried to see what was happening in the other tunnel. The lights grew closer and came with a familiar buzzing hiss.
Selroth.
He watched them approach and expected the mercenaries to open fire. A scream like a gods-damned rebel yell rang out in the cavern. The Altar squads at his command did not need orders or encouragement. They rose as one from their defensive positions and returned fire. Hex hoisted the CASPer up from its defilade position and brought both cannons to bear on the advancing forces. The Selroth numbered at least 100, maybe more. They poured through the northeast passageway and into the main tunnel. The mercenaries lifted their fire and allowed the Selroth to move up and find positions. A crew-served weapon on a tripod appeared.
“Not this time,” Hex said and fired his left railgun at the piece. It exploded and took out a circle of Selroth five meters wide. The advancing humanoids and their hissing rebreathers kept coming.
“First squad is 30 percent effective,” Plec called from his position. “Second squad is 15. We have to blow this whole level now!”
Hex walked the CASPer forward. What felt like thousands of rounds impacted the sturdy metal frame. He brought his cannons up, noted they both had less than 3,000 rounds remaining, and opened fire. Tracers let him see the rounds and walk them over the Selroth positions. As the machine guns fired, he rippled off a half-dozen missiles into both tunnels to create confusion.
“Fire in the hole!” Plec called and mashed the detonator. Under their feet, the mine groaned and rippled as the ceiling partially collapsed. Rock fell from the ceiling in small showers everywhere Hex could see. The mercenaries and Selroth howled in rage and came up firing.
It’s not enough!
“Covering fire!” Hex yelled and tried to walk the CASPer into a protected position. There was nowhere to go. The caution and warning system flashed a dozen critical warnings at once. He brought the missile pods online and fired them on semiautomatic, in rapid succession, to give the engineer time to formulate a plan.
WHAMM!
Plec’s volume of fire ended in a violent explosion. Hex turned the CASPer and saw another tripod weapon scanning toward him. The left railgun dispatched it. There was nothing he could do for Plec or the others.
<
The servo motors on the left leg seized and braced him in an awkward position, but Hex continued to fire. Seven hundred rounds per gun remained.
Shit.
He looked down, firing blindly outside, at the picture of him and Maya just a few months before, smiling, happy, with the rest of their lives ahead of them—together. They’d never imagined this. Both cannons spun into empty chambers. The mercenaries and Selroth continued to fire for a moment, and then ceased. A taller, older Selroth with black on the tips of his facial tentacles stepped forward into the smoke barely 50 meters away. None of the crowd behind him moved.
“They’re waiting for me to surrender.” Hex whispered.
Hex laughed and checked the vehicle stores. He was out of rockets and cannon ammunition. His laser might fire, or it might not, because of damage.
I might collapse this whole level and take out a whole bunch of those fuckers if I blow up like Kei did.
Hex froze. The thought ran over his mind like ice-cold electricity and made every hair on his body stand up straight. Most of the suit stood on the edge of failure at any second. All he had to do was disengage everything except the reactor safeties and it would be easy.
But the reactor would be a bigger boom.
“Disengage all safety protocols.” Hex chuckled and shook his head. “My father always said, ‘Go big or go home.’“
Using his cursors, Hex disabled the safeties one by one until only the reactor safety remained. With the right railgun’s power spooling up, he’d need to replicate what happened to Kei in order to jolt the system into electrical failure. The CASPer strained to move, but Hex brought the left leg around as if squaring to the crowd eagerly awaiting his surrender. He raised the right arm, with the hand open, methodically slowly. The railgun showed a power reading of 104% and climbing.
“Adios, motherfuckers,” Hex called over the CASPer’s external speakers. The Selroth didn’t move. A few of the mercenaries, the ones who obviously understood English or had watched enough bad movies to recognize the saying, backed away wide-eyed. Hex pushed off the CASPer’s half-frozen left leg and drove the right arm into the cavern wall. The impact jostled him, but nothing happened.
109%.
114%
Hex staggered back to the left and tried again. The Selroth howled and brought up their weapons. His external cameras failed under the onslaught. Again, he slammed the cannon into the wall, but nothing happened.
127%
At 150%, the generator would overload and shut down the entire CASPer system—the one failsafe he could not disarm.
134%
A series of heavy impacts staggered the CASPer backward, and Hex nearly fell over. The gaping tunnel to Level Four was back there somewhere. If the cannon wouldn’t fail, he’d try to rupture the reactor shell. That would be enough. He lunged at the wall again, but nothing happened. He looked down into the cockpit and panicked. The picture of him and Maya had fallen away. Hex scanned for it and saw nothing.
“No!” He grunted and shook himself inside the cockpit from side to side. “Gods-damnit!”
A cool breeze tickled his forehead. Logic told him it was a sputtering cockpit fan trying to cool down the system, but for a moment it was a seabreeze as clear and fresh as it had been several months before and conjured a memory that Hex allowed to stay. The quiet bungalows of Barking Sands glowed yellow in the setting sun as he and Maya lay there listening to the quiet surf. They’d made love there in the afternoon as the private beach was deserted and empty most of the time. Maya curled against his chest, with an elbow across him.
The smile on her lips grew wider with every passing second. Her tanned skin shone with sweat from their lovemaking and the last remnants of sunscreen many hours old. Black, curly hair hung down by her face in waving tendrils that tickled his face and neck with every breeze. A fingernail traced his bare chest as she looked him in the eyes.
“Just one more?”
He grinned up at her. “You’re insatiable.”
“I know what I want” she said and leaned down to kiss his lips gently. “I want you. With me. Forever.”
“So not just one more, then.”
She squeezed him with her elbows. “One more is all we need for now.”
Hex opened his eyes.
146%
I love you, Maya.
He pushed to the right with everything he had. The CASPer crunched into the wall, but there was no bright flash of light. No detonation. The braying sounds of his failing suit filled his ears. The left leg froze, and he stumbled backward, into open space. Falling down the vertical connecting shaft, his back toward the rapidly approaching ground, Hex tried to pull the memory back but it would not come. He’d failed. There was nothi
ng anyone could do now. In the moment, all he wanted was that scrap of memory—like after waking from a dream and desperately wanting to somehow, in some way, get back inside—to feel her as if she were there once more.
Eyes squeezed shut, tears erupted under his eyelashes. “C’mon! Just once!”
White light blossomed behind his eyelids. Amidst the sudden heat, he heard Maya playfully call, “Just one—”
* * *
The empty outer defensive walls of the Altar colony felt eerie and strange as Qamm made her way down the hill toward the fallen Raknar. Occasional missiles ripped through the open sky above her, and coupled with the sporadic laser fire, gave the impression of an early morning on a training range instead of the end of a pitched battle. Nearer to the Choote River, the air cooled and felt moister than at the higher levels. She peered around every corner as she crept quickly through the defensive revetments. Dead Altar lay everywhere. In places, their bodies lay entwined with human soldiers and their smoking, destroyed CASPers. At the last corner, the gentle breeze swept a choking smog of burning fuel, ammunition, and human remains from a smoldering main battle tank.
Qamm shuddered. The idea of dying in battle was nothing new to her, but dying without a chance of escape in a cramped and dangerous space like a tank sickened her. She glanced at the fire only once before turning into the passageway that opened to a gentle slope all the way down to the Raknar. In the placid river, she saw several Selroth raiding parties keeping their distance from the shore.
What are they waiting for?
She answered her own question almost immediately with a snort that became a silent sneer on her face. “For someone else to do their job,” she said to the breeze.
A ripple of explosions shook the upper portion of the colony enough that she felt the vibrations in the lower revetments. There were no forces in the space between her and the Raknar, but she did not want unnecessary trouble. She fingered a small button on her combat vest and pressed it—alerting friendly forces to her position as she ran down the slope, angling toward the back of the Raknar’s helm. From there, she could creep around to the open cockpit.
The sprint took only 40 seconds, and she pressed her back against the cool Raknar’s hull. Making her way around the helm took a minute, mainly because she checked every direction she could see, looking for the Peacemaker or whomever held her captive.
At the crest of the helm, Qamm glanced around the curving surface just as the Peacemaker fell from the open cockpit, rolled to her feet and scrambled into the cover the fallen mecha’s body provided. If she could capture the Peacemaker, she could have an advantage. She readied herself to move by holstering her laser pistol and removing a large serrated-edge combat knife. Up close, the blade proved to be a far better motivator than a pistol.
Hands pressed against the Raknar, she inched toward the rounded edge one last time to survey the scene when the ground buckled violently, throwing her into the Raknar’s hull, then to the ground like a doll.
KA-WHAMM!
Dust rose up from the ground and curled in an invisible gale rushing down from the Altar mines. More ripples came across the sandy soil, streaking toward her in a groaning, seething mass. The Raknar’s hull squealed and flopped.
She touched her earpiece and heard nothing. The entire command network was silent. As she looked back toward the colony, there was nothing there but dust gently billowing up from everything. A series of smaller ripples raced across the ground and were gone. Qamm stared at the silent destruction.
What did they do?
* * * * *
Chapter Twenty-Five
<
Tara strained to see anything in the CASPer’s forward quarter even with the thermal imaging system engaged. Thick clouds of dust swept down the colony passageways obscuring everything in front of her. “I can’t see it, Lucille.”
<
Tara waited. Her position in concealment, aided by the swirling clouds of dust and rock, gave her an advantage. “I’m going to let him pass. Have you established contact with Klatk or Hex?”
<
“What the hell happened?” Tara asked without expecting an answer.
<
Tara blinked. “How much of a yield?”
<
Her stomach knotted up and flipped in one motion. She mashed her eyes shut and forced herself to focus on the task at hand. They didn’t know what had happened and even if Lucille was right, it didn’t mean that Hex and the others hadn’t survived.
“Where’s the command vehicle?”
<
Tara tried to relax and formulate a plan. Most combat vehicles possessed thick armor on the fronts and sides to repel as much potential damage as possible. That typically left both the rear and the top of the vehicle vulnerable to direct fire, especially from short range. “Lucille, when I tell you, we’re going to get behind that thing and jump onto the rear deck—have the guns set to short range, and we’ll tear them a new ass.”
<
At the far-left edge of her vision, Tara saw the dust swirl up and away from the ground suddenly. An air-supported armored vehicle slowly moved past not more than two meters away. As its self-contained fan units blew the dust around, Tara identified the vehicle as a Sidar-made command skiff. With a crew of six, the four gunners worked multiple remote-controlled cannons on top of the vehicle, while the driver and vehicle commander monitored the outside situation. She’d seen one like it before—bearing a large red diamond with a Grim Reaper on the rear—the one that’d routed her old unit and left her marked as a coward.
The light turned green. “Lucille, can we jam their communications? Their internal gun control systems?”
<
Tara approved but said nothing. The rear end of the skiff appeared along with a familiar emblem that made her blood run cold.
Sonuvabitch!
“Lucille, it’s the Darkness.”
<
Tara took a deep breath. As many times as she’d seen that emblem in her nightmares, she should have been scared. Instead, there was only rage. “I’m ready when you are.”
Lucille didn’t respond for a half second. Before Tara could say anything, the CASPer stood up tall, stepped forward twice and fired its jump jets. On the screen, four targeting icons appeared on the skiff’s remote gun platforms. As the CASPer jumped, Tara sighted the railgun and squeezed her fingers to her palms on both hands. The first two gun platforms detonated as she reached the apex of the jump about five meters above what looked like a bustle rack on the skiff’s rear end.
Time slowed. The two remaining guns pivoted in her direction as her own cannons came up and centered. She squeezed again, this time holding her palms long enough that multiple rounds tore up each cannon mount and ripped into the weak upper surface armor. Each of the slugs created a gaping hand-sized hole as it tore through armor, critical systems, and flesh. Lucille cut in the jump jets to slow their descent and landed squarely on the skiff’s central command pedestal, crushing an external weapon pod and ammunition crates as the CASPer settled to the roof. The propulsion system apparently undamaged, the skiff accelerated and Lucille braced the mecha automatically with an arm on a camera system that pivoted in her direction. Tara squeezed the CASPer’s hand together shattering the camera lens.
<
Tara tu
rned the CASPer’s torso and saw a Sidar emerge from a cockpit hatch. She brought the left arm up to fire, and the Sidar threw a grenade that impacted the outstretched arm and adhered to the metal skin. An instant later, the device detonated.
<
Tara brought the right arm up and across her body. Only her fist mounted, small caliber machine gun could reach the target. She squeezed off a burst and the Sidar ducked it easily by jumping down into the cockpit again. Through the external microphones, Tara heard a squawking sound as the skiff’s speakers came to life.
“Pathetic human.”
Her CASPer lurched as the skiff shot forward and accelerated madly down the narrow passageway. With the good arm, she dug into the skiff’s light armor and tried to maintain her grip. Satisfied, she studied the caution and warning system. “Lucille? Status?”
<
The skiff lurched around a 90-degree turn. Tara felt the CASPer sliding and the left side came back online. Lucille whipped the arm out to catch the remains of a gun turret and easily maintained the mecha’s balance on the speeding skiff. The right arm let go of its temporary hold, and Tara felt it return completely to her control.
“Give me the railgun, Lucille. Full automatic.”
<
On the CASPer’s heads-up display, a targeting reticle appeared on a thick portion of the skiff’s armor. “Confirm cockpit location?”
<
Fuck it. Tara brought up the right arm, centered her fist on the targeting reticle and squeezed her palm. Sixteen rounds exited the barrel of the railgun. The first three plowed into the armor and failed to punch through. The next four made it through the ceramic armor and splintered the inside plating enough to create a deadly field of shrapnel around the Sidar leader. He was dead before the eighth and ninth rounds passed through his chest cavity and continued into the seat behind him. The next six rounds punctured the interior titanium turret and left the internal wall molten enough for the last round to pass through and into the reactor fuel storage tank. As the materials mixed uncontrollably, the skiff detonated in spectacular fashion.