Master Sergeant

by Mel Odom

  The powersuit could have entered the water, could have remained submerged for days, but it would have been an easy target in the river because Banda’s mobility would have been greatly reduced in the mud. The enemy powersuits would have reduced the Terran military unit to scrap metal, and Banda would have died either inside his armor or as soon as he’d jettisoned it.

  They weren’t there to take prisoners.

  Banda stood his ground, taking concentrated hits that made returning fire with any degree of success almost impossible. Enemy lasers ignited the jungle around the powersuit. Flames gleamed against the polycarb armor. The powersuit’s onboard systems were overwhelmed by the assault.

  “Banda, I’m patching in a drone to your suit. Use it to triangulate your attacks.” Sage overrode the drone’s programming and slaved the feed to Banda’s powersuit. With the new information source, the corporal would have a better chance of targeting his opponents.

  “Roger that.”

  An instant after the response, Banda’s chest-mounted machine guns opened up and sprayed a wave of 7.62mm rounds into the jungle. Two hardsuited attackers got knocked down. Only one of them tried to get back up, and Banda’s next swath of machine-gun fire dropped the attacker before he could scramble to safety. Banda yelled in triumph. The powersuit shifted, gaining more solid footing. “Now we are going to see—”

  Two missiles scorched through the air and slammed into the powersuit, cutting off Banda’s words. Flames erupted around the powersuit and chased away the darkness.

  Rocked back on its heels, the powersuit started to tip over. Banda twisted, getting an arm down under his body to keep himself from tipping over and sprawling helplessly before his enemies. The powersuit’s four fingers plowed into the soft earth, ripping deeply and skidding toward the riverbank as it threatened to spill Banda into the churning water reflecting the flames.

  The two enemy powersuits crashed through the jungle, closing in on Banda.

  After a brief check on Kapito’s progress, Sage turned his attention back to the second drone he’d called down to his position. Powered by magnetic capacitors, the drone hovered in front of Sage. The disc-shaped craft was eighty centimeters across and nine centimeters thick, covered in armor and filled with the drive unit, comm relays, and vid/aud pickups capable of magnifying and enhancing images as well as sound bytes.

  The drones weren’t designed as weapons, and the top brass considered their replacement expense too high to be used as such. They were supposed to stay out of harm’s way as much as possible during a hot engagement, and to return to base with local intel if the troops were lost or compromised.

  The gauss rifle wasn’t strong enough to take out one of the powersuits and Sage knew he needed a way of striking back. He pulled his remaining five thermite gel charges from his gear, linked them to the same detonator, and set that for a command that would be issued by him. When he had the charges adhered to the drone with ordnance cling, he stepped back and surveyed the ongoing battle.

  Banda had shoved himself erect again, but that had only drawn immediate fire from the ground troops as well as the two powersuits ripping through trees and brush to close in. The Terran powersuit seemed to wilt under the explosive barrage but Banda’s health stats held steady.

  The two attackers in their powersuits shoved forward confidently, pouring on their weps batteries, filling the air with flames and noise. Banda struggled and reeled, unable to get himself set to return fire.

  Sage targeted the rear powersuit and inputted the approach path to the drone, then commanded it to take flight again. Immediately, the drone flashed forward, staying low and taking a circuitous route behind the powersuits. Banda’s powersuit slipped as its rear leg tore through the loose earth and slid down toward the riverbank.

  Flashing through the trees, the drone hurtled toward the rearmost powersuit. Leaves and branches clipped by its approach tumbled to the ground in its wake.

  Inside the AKTIVsuit, Sage kept his breathing steady, tasting the faint burning trace of chem smoke through his helmet’s filters. Information on the battlezone filled his HUD in transparent overlays, each of them tinted a different shade so he could differentiate them. It was still a lot of information to take in at one time.

  The general parameters of the battlefield lay farthest back and showed the Terran troops massing at D2. They were taking severe fire there, but they were holding their own. Enemy KIA lay along the jungle where the sniper team had started taking out a blood price for the men who had pursued the Terrans.

  Kapito climbed a steep rise to the west, coming up on the two powersuits closing on Banda.

  And the drone streaked through the jungle and plowed directly into the powersuit Sage had targeted. Although armored, the drone shattered against the powersuit’s polycarb skin. The gel thermite charges smeared across the powersuit’s back as the unit staggered under the impact. Before the onboard gyros could stabilize the powersuit, Sage detonated the thermite.

  The massive explosion hurled the powersuit forward, battering it against the unit in front of it. Slammed by thirty metric tons of armor, the lead powersuit swayed and the operator fought for balance and control. He turned and shrugged away from his companion, stepping back from the conflagration that consumed the other powersuit.

  Armor buckled and broken from the collision with the drone, the powersuit’s handler was left vulnerable to the thermite fire. Obeying emergency protocol, the powersuit dropped to its knees and positioned itself for evac of its pilot. The top half of the powersuit broke open and the pilot shot out in his seat, propelled by a jet assist. Flames wreathed the man, and when the parachute popped open high overhead, his burning corpse drifted toward earth until the shroud lines charred through and dropped the body.

  Unnerved by the attack, uncertain where it had come from, the aggressors broke off their assault and took stock. They didn’t have much time to assess. Sage put the Roley’s reticle over the nearest man, squeezed the trigger, and moved on to his next target as the first one dropped. He squeezed the trigger again but knew he’d missed the shot when the man pitched himself to the side.

  The surviving powersuit spun and Sage’s HUD warned him that enemy sensors had locked onto him. Abandoning his position, Sage dodged to the right, leaving the tree he’d concealed himself behind for a low stand of rock jutting up from broad-leafed undergrowth. Lasers slashed through the tree and it toppled, then exploded into splinters as a pair of missiles slammed into it.

  Sage hunkered down, head shielded by his forearms as fiery debris rained down over him. Patching into one of the drones, he scanned the battlefield as Kapito lunged up over the ridge twenty meters back from the surviving powersuit.

  The enemy pilot tried to turn his suit around, but the soft ground and his own anxiety betrayed him. The massive feet tore through the soft earth and threw his balance off. He launched a pair of missiles anyway, but they didn’t get anywhere before Kapito’s missiles hammered him. The explosions buffeted the enemy pilot and knocked him backward. He lost broken polycarb armor like a duck shedding water, weaving helplessly as Kapito came toward him.

  Lasers flickered and burned into Kapito’s powersuit, but the reactive armor kept the beams from penetrating. Sage got to his feet and hauled the Roley to his shoulder as Kapito hammered his opponent with one massive fist, then repeated the attack with the other. The blows clanked fiercely, the high-pitched shrill of contact echoing over the immediate vicinity.

  Kapito lifted one foot and drove the other down into his opponent’s powersuit, something that truly impressed Sage. Not many powersuit pilots could manage that and remain balanced. The leg of the opponent’s powersuit shredded, coming apart in squealing shrieks. Without stopping, Kapito brought both fists down onto the other powersuit’s missile launch systems, crushing them before the enemy pilot could bring them online to fire.

  Defeated, his powersuit hemorrhaging and falling apart, the pilot hit the eject button and blew clear of his failing unit. High
overhead, his parachute opened and he drifted away.

  No longer under attack, Banda hauled himself back onto solid ground, then lit up the surrounding jungle with his lasers and machine guns. The surviving attackers broke and ran.

  “We good?” Kapito asked over the comm.

  “Good,” Banda replied.

  “Maybe so,” Sage said as he stepped from behind cover. “But we’re not done yet. Move out.” He took off into the darkness, heading for the next skirmish line.

  “HAQQANI, MOVE YOUR squad into position.” Sage monitored the three-pronged attack he had put together over the last few minutes. The Charlie Company recon team had stepped up and gotten themselves together after the ambush. They’d had no choice. But they were still running ragged, not smooth, not together as a unit.

  If the enemy they faced had been more dedicated to the outcome—if they’d been Phrenorians—a lot more of his team would have been dead. That was a sobering truth and Sage kept it at the front of his mind. The soldiers, most of them anyway, were still too green to be truly effective. However, in the jungle that night, they fought for their lives. There was no question about motivation. Desperation rather than professionalism showed in their movements.

  Sergeant Haqqani moved his powersuit toward the drug compound. Corporal Leary followed behind and to the right, keeping a clear fire zone for himself. Five soldiers in combat armor trailed them.

  Kapito strode in front of Sage and the group he’d assigned to his sweep of the compound.

  A number of dead men and women lay scattered in front of D2, proof of the snipers’ ability. Sergeant Kjersti Kiwanuka had proven decidedly lethal. She’d racked up sixteen of the confirmed kills, and she had added to that tally as Charlie Recon had marched toward the compound to take possession of the buildings. Her service report image showed her to be a beauty: dark chocolate skin from her Ugandan father and platinum-blonde hair from her Norwegian mother. She’d grown up in Africa but had opted for offplanet military service.

  The ambushers had pulled back into the jungle. Evidently they’d gotten a bellyful of actual fighting. Given the toll of the dead they’d left strewn across the jungle floor—and in some cases, the trees—there couldn’t have been many of them left.

  One of the things that bothered Sage was the lack of personal vehicles that should have been fleeing the scene. Whoever had survived among the ambushers was on foot out in the brush. He considered attempting to track those people down, but that might have played into the crosshairs of another ambush. He held his team together, promising himself that if there was any way possible, all who had been involved with the ambush would see a day of reckoning.

  “Alpha Four is empty, Sergeant.” Private Petrov had only been on the ground on Makaum for the last two months. He was a new recruit, and as such he was lucky to be alive after the attack. Despite being from Moscow originally, his Russian accent was faint. He was tall, brown haired and dark eyed, with pinched features.

  “Go easy, soldier,” Sage growled. He pulled up vid access to Petrov’s suit, laying the translucent image under his HUD, seeing what was before him as well as what the young soldier was seeing. “None of this is what it’s supposed to be.”

  Petrov peered into the small building. Like the other structures in the compound, the building had been slapped together out of planks cut from the thick trees of the jungle. Sage figured whoever had put the lab up had plopped down a small group of crude engineering bots that had manufactured building supplies out of the native resources.

  The rough planks held knotholes and other imperfections and showed no evidence of any kind of real finishing. They had been cut and thrown into place as makeshift shelters. More planks had been used for the roof and thin shingles extruded from leaves and mulch prevented the rain from coming in.

  More planks covered the floors, most of them scarred and covered in dried mud tracked in from outside. The buildings remained small, just big enough to get the job done without wasted space. There was no running water, no plumbing, and no electricity, though there were marks in some of the buildings that showed where generators sat at one time. Oil leaks marred the wood and indentions showed where the supports had been.

  All of the buildings were empty now. Like a giant spiderweb, long sheets of camouflaged netting hung over the structures to provide a passable disguise that would fool most drones doing a flyover.

  Petrov’s vid relay lit up as the soldier switched on his exterior light. The illumination instantly attracted a plethora of insects that swooped at Petrov like attacking fighters. The private cursed and doused his light.

  “These men were living hard,” Kiwanuka commented. She stood to Sage’s right, covering his six while Sage ran the op.

  “Wasn’t just these men.” Sage walked along the narrow path that ran between the compound’s buildings. “There were others.”

  “What do you mean?” Kapito asked.

  Sage pointed at impressions of bare feet that showed in the dried mud of the walkways. “With all the venomous bugs and lizards in the area, I don’t figure the people who made the drugs here would go around without foot protection.”

  “You wouldn’t catch me out here in anything less than an AKTIVsuit,” Petrov said. “Or not carrying a flamethrower.” He stepped inside the empty building and explored further. There were no rooms in the building, only load-bearing posts that helped support the roof.

  Pausing, Sage captured images of the bare feet.

  “You think these guys had slaves working the operation?” Kiwanuka asked.

  “Yeah. Either Makaum people or offworlders. With the war going on, some of the corps that use slave labor find the pickings easy. There are a lot of displaced people getting Gated from worlds the Phrenorians have taken over.”

  “I’d heard about operations like that, but I’ve never seen any.”

  “Then you’re lucky,” Sage said. “I’ve worked operations where we had to recover people displaced from their homeworlds who ended up in a slaver’s ship. You don’t recover them all. A slaver gets wind that he’s hit somebody’s screens, he’ll jettison the slaves to the nearest planetfall and hope they burn up during an uncontrolled reentry. Or he’ll cut them loose in space without heat and air. Those people freeze to death long before they starve to death.” He indicated the five-toed footprint. “These appear to be human.”

  “You think the traffickers took them when they left the compound.”

  “I hope so. Otherwise, this is going to get worse.”

  “Worse than losing a third of our team?” Kiwanuka’s voice took on an edge, but Sage chose to ignore it. They were all running on nervous energy and fear right now.

  “Yeah. Worse.”

  Kiwanuka snorted softly in disagreement, but she kept the effort mostly to herself.

  SAGE STARED AROUND the long main building that was the centerpiece of the camp. In addition to the usually roughhewn walls and floor, several long tables occupied the center of the space. Stains and old burns scarred the surfaces of the tables, and a lot of those markings came from chems, not tools.

  “They weren’t working cheap labor,” Sergeant Roy Thindwa stated flatly. He’d been born and raised in Malawi, splitting his time between village life and the sprawl. He kicked a long wooden beam that ran the length of the nearest table only a few centimeters above the floor.

  All of the tables had the same kind of poles on both of the long sides.

  “They were working slaves.”

  “How do you know that?” Kiwanuka asked.

  Thindwa growled a curse. “Take a look at those beams.”

  “I see beams.”

  “He’s talking about the marks on the beams.” Sage knelt and ran a finger over the irregular grooves. He’d seen low-tech like this on other planets, and had seen the slaves that had been attached to them. The stench of those conditions and the hopelessness of the people had left an indelible mark that always made his gut cramp. “Those were made by chains. Whoever ran thi
s lab chained the workers to the tables and kept them here.” He stood. “The question is whether they were locals.”

  “Does that matter?”

  “It does. An operation this big, whoever was behind this had a lot of slaves working product. The Makaum would know if they were missing this many people. It stands to reason they would tell somebody.”

  “They don’t trust anybody,” Kiwanuka replied.

  “Then maybe they just wrote these people off,” Thindwa said. “Acceptable losses.”

  Sage took a tighter grip on his rifle. “When it comes to people, there are no acceptable losses. Not in my book.” He turned and headed out of the building, wanting to get away from the inhumanity that the beams and the chain marks represented, and from the memories such treatment dredged up. The war was bad enough. Soldiers got killed and families mourned. But what went on behind the war—or under it—was often a lot worse. As a soldier, he’d seen what had taken place on the battlefield when things were hot, and when people tried to pull themselves together later.

  “Sergeant Sage.”

  The HUD identified the speaker as Private Adrian Delome, one of the new recruits who had come in on the dropship with Sage. He was currently walking patrol around the compound, making sure the traffickers didn’t return without being seen.

  “What is it, Private?” Sage accessed the private’s vid feed and opened it onto his HUD. He bumped one of the four surviving drones into position over the private to maintain aerial recon.

  “Found something really bad.”

  Delome stood on a small ridge and peered down at a depression that looked like it had been filled in a few days ago. Rain had filled in some of the cracks with mud and softened most of the hard edges of the earth that had been moved.

  Whoever had filled in the depression hadn’t done a good job, though. The covering had been light, and as much as the rain had done to fill in the gaps, it had also washed away the ground covering the corpses underneath.