He ran, jumping over debris and crashing through pristinely-landscaped parks. His armored feet kicked up great chunks of dirt and grass as he ran. The simulator aided his movements the same way a real Zephyr would. He heard and felt more impacts shaking the ground underfoot, but so far nothing catastrophic.
“Better pick up the pace, greeny!” Magnum said.
Ethan risked a glance over his shoulder just in time to see the falling tower briefly blot out the sun.
Then it hit.
A racing gray cloud of bactcrete dust rippled out from the impact, engulfing everything in its path. Then came the belated boom! and a subsequent roar of settling debris that rattled Ethan inside his armor.
The wave of dust and debris hit a split second later, picking them up and launching them through the air. Ethan felt a brief, gut-dropping sensation of falling, followed by the jarring crunch of his landing. He was surprised that the fall actually hurt. Bouncing up and shaking it off, he spun around. Blinded by the swirling dust clouds, he snapped on a sensor overlay to help him see. Up ahead Magnum appeared as a bright green outline.
“You still alive back there?” Magnum asked.
“For now,” Ethan croaked, jogging up beside the lieutenant.
“Do a systems check. Wouldn’t want you to call foul because your weapons are all jammed.”
“That was close,” Atta whispered. Ethan noticed that she was speaking to him on a private comms channel. He switched to that channel so that Magnum wouldn’t hear what he said next.
“I thought you were going to fight this one for me?”
“Not for you, with you. I’m auditing the battle from the instructor’s pod next to yours. I had to wait until Magnum wouldn’t see me climb in.”
“Hey, Greeny! Look alive! We’ve got incoming.”
Ethan whirled around to see a few dozen red enemy silhouettes advancing on them.
“Get behind cover!” Magnum roared, pulling him down behind a giant boulder in the middle of the park where they stood.
Then lasers screeched out toward them and crunched as they bit off chunks of the rock they were hiding behind. Magnum peeked around the corner and returned fire with gauntlet-mounted ripper cannons. High caliber rounds thumped out, and one of the red outlines vanished from Ethan’s HUD. There were still plenty more, approaching fast.
“We’re going to be in melee range, soon,” Magnum warned. Better arm your energy blades.”
“Energy blades?”
Ethan heard Atta sigh meaningfully in his ears. “Make two fists and flex them down. The blades extend from the top of your gauntlets. But watch it! You need to—”
Ethan armed the blades and a pair of swords slid out from his gauntlets, hitting the rock in front of him with a shower of sparks.
“—hold your arms above your head,” Atta finished.
Once fully extended, the blades glowed bright blue, shielded to protect the nanometer-fine edges from breaking. Being careful not to accidentally touch Magnum—or himself—with one of the blades, Ethan held his arms up as Atta had suggested. He leaned back against the rock, and steeled himself for what was to come.
Vibrations shuddered through the rock, along with the faint rumble of whirring and clanking footfalls. Magnum took another potshot with ripper fire—thump-thump-thump—and Ethan saw a second red outline vanish from his screens.
The enemy returned fire, and chunks of rock went flying. A pitter-patter of pebbles rained down around them, and Magnum withdrew to reveal that his arm had been reduced to a laser-scorched stump, sheared off at the shoulder.
“Frek it…” Magnum said, panting noisily over the comms as he flexed his smoldering stump in a circular motion. “Looks like you’re going to get a chance to make up those kills, greeny.”
Ethan grimaced, his eyes fixed on the charred flesh of Magnum’s missing arm. This simulation was getting too real for his tastes.
Magnum extended a single energy blade from his remaining arm, and they waited, listening to the vibrations coming through the rock as the stampede drew near. The HUD showed the nearest drone just ten meters away, then two, then—
Ethan leapt up and slashed over his head. A drone went flying by in two pieces, severed wires gushing sparks.
Beside him, Magnum roared and pirouetted, slashing sideways as a drone raced around his side of the boulder. Ethan lashed out on his own side and cut another drone off at the knees. Then the remaining drones swarmed them, firing lasers at point blank range, and using grav guns to push and pull them around. Ethan narrowly missed being bifurcated by Magnum’s blade. A stream of lasers glanced off his left arm, blasting off armor plates to expose bare, burned skin. The sudden sting of those laser burns took Ethan’s breath away, and he stumbled.
Drones grabbed him and began hammering him with metal fists. His armor dented and crumpled under the strain, and the impacts actually took the wind out of him.
Simulated pain? What the frek?
“That’s just 10 percent of the real thing, Ethan!” Atta said. “Don’t let it distract you! You’re about to win!”
Ethan gritted his teeth and spun in a circle with his arms outstretched. His blades cut through both of the drones busy hammering him, and they fell in a puddle of twitching parts.
“You’re up by one!”
Magnum screamed and Ethan saw that a pair of drones had him by his head and legs and they were pulling in opposite directions, determined to rip him apart. Magnum lashed out, cutting off the head of the drone holding his, but it went on pulling. Ethan raced up and punched both his blades straight through the chest of the one that had Magnum’s feet; then he slashed up and out, slicing the drone’s arms off. Magnum’s legs fell with the drone’s severed arms, and he dispatched the drone behind him with another slash. Ethan turned in a quick circle to make sure that more drones weren’t racing up behind them, but all that remained were twitching parts.
Then something caught his eye. A severed metallic claw clutching a flashing silver sphere.
“Grenade!” Magnum called out. He struggled to get up, but his legs were twisted up under him and clearly broken.
Ethan saw the grenade flashing faster and faster, and he knew it was about to kill them both. He dashed toward it and threw himself on top. The ground heaved under him, and suddenly he felt himself weightless and flying through the air. His torso stung fiercely, cut by a thousand knives. Then his displays went dark and the simulator ceased aiding his movements, becoming a hard shell around him.
Ethan heard a hiss and whirr as the simulator peeled open. Light streamed in, and Ethan stumbled out. He was startled to find his torso stinging with echoes of the pain from his simulated death. His cheeks itched, and he reached up to find them wet with tears.
Beside him, Magnum’s pod flayed open and he came limping out, his expression grim. His cheeks were also wet. The lieutenant strode right up to him, and for a moment Ethan was afraid he was going to get another slap of re-spect.
What he got instead was a bone-grinding hug.
“You saved my life,” Magnum croaked.
“I—”
Atta climbed out of her instructor’s pod, drawing their attention. Magnum withdrew from their embrace, his eyes narrowing as he glanced from Atta to Ethan and back again.
“I thought you left,” he said.
Atta shook her head. “I decided to audit and give Ethan a few pointers.”
Magnum turned back to him and gave a grudging nod. “Welcome to the Rictans.”
“I won?” Ethan asked, turning to Atta.
“No… final count was five for Magnum, and four for you. That’s counting the negative one you acquired by killing yourself again.”
“But you’re not counting the plus one he gets for saving me.”
“You were incapacitated, so it doesn’t count.”
Magnum snorted. “Sure it does. I left the sim alive thanks to him. Any recovery team could have picked me up and put me back together again. He lost one asset to save a
nother. That means we both scored five. A tie. Put that together with his victory in the last sim, and he’s the clear winner. Come on, Commander, it’s time to give you a real welcome to the squadron,” Magnum said, wrapping an arm around his shoulders to guide him toward the door.
Ethan noticed that Magnum was still limping. “Are you okay?”
“Phantom pain. Residuals from all the nerve stimulation.”
“That’s why our cheeks were wet when we came out,” Ethan said, wiping a tear away with one hand and looking at it suspiciously.
“No shame in that,” Magnum said. “Eyes watering is just a reflex.”
“That was only 10 percent of the real thing?” Ethan asked, casting a glance over his shoulder to Atta.
She nodded. “But in a real battle you two would have been auto-dosed with painkillers, so the pain was comparable to what you would actually feel.”
“But why the frek would you simulate pain?”
“You stopped for two full seconds when your arm got burned. That kind of hesitation can get you killed. If we’re conditioned to the pain from sims, then by the time we get into a real fight we don’t even flinch.”
“All those fake deaths make for some interesting nightmares,” Magnum said. “Not sure why the brain likes to relive trauma, but there you have it.”
“No guts, no glory,” Atta said.
“No guts, no glory,” Magnum agreed.
Ethan grunted at that. He wondered how many guts were about to be spilled on Avilon with no glory to show for it. The Union was heading for disaster. Therius knew they couldn’t win, and his plan was to threaten Omnius with their own extinction. Ethan traded glances with Atta on their way down the corridor from the simulator rooms. He could see by the hollow behind her eyes that she was worrying about the same thing.
Something had to be done before it was too late.
Chapter 31
Atta gazed down on the glossy black, egg-shaped capsule. It was big enough to fit a full-grown Gor, armor and all. Beside her stood Torv, and beside him, was General Raka of the Second Battalion.
“This is going with the Second Battalion to the surface?” Atta asked Raka.
The Gor nodded once and spoke quickly in a sibilant stream of hisses. Atta’s translator supplied the gist of what he said a moment later.
“Yess,” Raka replied. “We do not know what it isss, but Admiral Therius says it is important that we find a safe place for it and defend it.”
Atta didn’t need the translator, since she was receptive to Gor telepathy, but she had to wear one to get used to it. At Avilon the Eclipser would block the Gors’ telepathy along with all other forms of quantum communications.
“We also have one of these,” Atta said.
“What iss it?” Torv asked.
“I’m afraid to say until I know more. I need to talk to the other battalions first. How soon can the other generals meet with me?”
Torv closed his eyes. After a few moments of silence, he replied telepathically. “I speak with them. They meet with you now.”
Atta nodded. “Good. Let’s go.”
* * *
Rictan Squadron grudgingly accepted Ethan’s leadership after hearing how he’d thrown himself on a grenade to save Magnum, but that didn’t mean he’d earned his place among them yet. He’d quickly realized that Magnum’s shoes weren’t the ones he had to fill. The Rictans made frequent references to someone they called The Sergeant, or Mr. C.
Ethan had been tempted to ask about that, but the Rictans only had six members rather than the usual eight for ground squads. That meant they’d lost two men along the way, their sergeant obviously being one of them.
In an effort to be a better commander, Ethan tried to get to know his squad. Rictan Two was Magnum, Three was Hop, Four was Rockhead, Five was Streak, Six was… Blades, and Seven was Carnage. Ethan had the feeling there was a story behind each of those call signs, but he hadn’t had the time to ask.
Training consisted of back-to-back simulations on ground, in air, and in space. For the most part, Ethan managed to keep up, but the Rictans were much better mech pilots, and at least as good as he was in the cockpit of a Nova.
Now, an hour after eating a bland breakfast of locally-grown grain that had been mashed into a lumpy porridge, they were all getting ready for a live exercise with real Novas. Their job was to escort the 1st Battalion—Atta’s battalion—down from the Liberator, providing cover against a superior number of enemy fighters. In this case the enemy fighters were Gor-piloted Shells, but the real ones would be Avilon’s faster, more-maneuverable drones. The exercise was meant to mimic what they would have to do upon arriving in orbit above Avilon.
Ethan sat in his cockpit strapped in and waiting for clearance to launch. Holo displays glowed blue and status lights shone bright all around him. Beyond his canopy lay the main entrance of the hangar, shielded with the fuzzy blue haze of static shields. The mission parameters called for a relatively slower launch via the main entrance rather than the ship’s Nova launch tubes. They couldn’t afford to rocket out ahead of the drop ships they were escorting.
“Rictans, status report!” Ethan called out over the comms.
Multiple affirmative clicks came back.
“All ready and waiting, SC,” Magnum replied, addressing him by the abbreviation of his rank.
Ethan set his comms to the command channel. “Mission control, Rictans are green for launch.”
“Acknowledged, Rictan One, please standby… you are cleared for launch. Proceed to nav point Alpha and follow the sequence down.”
“Roger that, Control.” Switching back to the squadron’s channel, Ethan said, “Rictans, we are go for launch.”
“Roger that, SC,” Magnum replied.
Click. Click-click.
Ethan dialed up his Nova’s grav lifts and hovered off the deck. His fired up the main thrusters with a sudden roar, and he and Magnum jetted out side by side, passing through the Liberator’s static shields with a sizzle of dissipating energy.
Once through the semi-transparent barrier, space turned from blue to black, and Origin snapped into focus as a mottled green and white ball. Ethan watched on the grid as the rest of the Rictans slipped out behind him in wing pairs. Rictan Seven was the odd one out, so he formed a trio with Five and Six.
Ethan bracketed the nearest drop ship and flew up alongside it. It looked like an overturned garbage dumpster, heavily armed and armored, but no good at maneuvering in atmosphere or generating its own lift—hence the name drop ship.
“I’ve got incoming enemy contacts at zero by five by twenty, coming up fast from the planet,” Magnum reported.
Ethan eyed the group of red enemy contacts on his gravidar display. He counted over six squadrons of Shells in that group—three times as many as they had Novas guarding the First Battalion.
Ethan switched to Hailfire missiles and bracketed the nearest enemy fighter under his crosshairs. All of the ships were set to fire simulated munitions and harmless, low-grade training lasers, but that did nothing to still Ethan’s pounding heart. The last time he’d been in a Nova cockpit shooting at Shell fighters, the stakes had been real, and all of the munitions had been live. It was hard to tell his brain otherwise now. In the back of his mind he had this terrible feeling that those Shells would switch to live fire when everyone least expected it.
“SC, we’re ETA five minutes to firing range,” Magnum said.
“Arm Hailfires and mark your targets, Rictans; we don’t want any overkill.”
A handful of affirmative clicks came back over the comms. Five minutes ran down in what felt like seconds. Ethan’s targeting reticle blazed a solid red and he pulled the trigger, letting fly the first simulated Hailfire. Moving on to the next nearest target, he did the same, being careful to avoid the targets already marked by his squad mates. Hailfires jetted out in streams and began splitting apart as they neared their targets.
The enemy opened fire with bright purple pulse lasers, s
hooting down dozens of those warheads before they could get close enough to do any damage. A handful got through, and Ethan watched space light up with simulated explosions. Enemy contacts began winking off the grid one after another.
If the engagement had been a real one, those Shells would have been firing back with their own missiles, but they were trying to simulate drones, which would be unable to use their quantum-launched missiles thanks to the Eclipser.
“That evened the odds! Enemy’s down by fifteen,” Rictan Three reported.
“Don’t get cocky,” Ethan replied.
Then they reached laser range with the enemy, and the black of space became dazzling as a sun. Enemy fire was so thick that Ethan could barely see the planet through the intermittent flashes of light. The comms came alive with screaming as Rictans tried to warn each other all at once. Five and Four winked off the grid, and Magnum cursed as viciously as if they’d actually died.
The drop ships opened fire then, spitting out golden streams from their ripper cannons. Incoming Shell Fighters were forced to divide their attention, and Ethan flew in a zigzag to jog the enemy’s aim. The drop ships took out a few squadrons of Shells, then they flew by one another at speed, and the enemy was forced to come about to chase them down into the atmosphere. Given how much inertia those Shells had to overcome, they likely wouldn’t catch up again until the drop ships had already landed, meaning the first part of the mission was already a success.
“Nice work, Rictans,” Ethan said. “Time for phase two.”
“Sooner I get out of this cockpit, the happier I’ll be,” Rictan Seven said.
“Cut the chatter, Carnage,” Ethan said.
The atmosphere rushed up fast, and soon clouds began streaking by in puffs of white. Ethan’s Nova shook and his shields glowed bright blue with the heat of atmospheric entry. Their drop coordinates appeared in the distance as a hollow green diamond. Ethan pulled up a few degrees, aiming more squarely for it. A pair of drop ships raced down to starboard, fading in and out of view as clouds intermittently blocked them from sight. Then they all blew the bottom out of the sky, leaving swirling holes in the clouds. The ground sprawled beneath them—a carpet of green jungles and craggy mountains.
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