Master Sergeant

by Mel Odom

  The use of the hardsuit’s oxygen limited the amount of time they could remain on-site underground, but Sage knew the chances of them catching a bullet or a beam was greater than succumbing to drug fumes or lack of oxygen.

  A few meters away, Jahup struggled with stripping armor from one of the downed mercenaries. The young Makaum man hacked and coughed, and he didn’t have as much control over his movements as he would have normally, because he was already fighting for air.

  Sage dropped back to aid the young man, expertly stripping the dead mercenary’s head gear with one hand, then helping pull the mask and helmet over Jahup’s head. Returning his attention to the corpse, Sage removed the man’s vest from him, providing a little armor and the oxygen supply to Jahup. He helped the young man into the vest and got it operational, filling the appropriated helmet with oxygen.

  “Sergeant,” Murad called over the suit comm.

  “Coming, sir.” Sage handed Jahup the dead mercenary’s rifle, showed him how to fire it and how to replenish the charge packs, then draped a bandolier of them over the young Makaum man’s shoulder.

  Jahup nodded thankfully. “I must find Noojin.”

  “We will,” Sage replied. “If she’s in here, we will.” He didn’t bother to tell the younger man that locating the young woman would only be possible if they remained alive, which was looking doubtful. Staying low, Sage returned to the lieutenant, who was staring fixedly at the inside of his own faceshield.

  “I’ve got a lock on the comm stations,” Murad said. “The drones have tracked the comm array, but they can’t access the network. They’re locked out and can’t bypass the security.”

  “Where are they?” Sage asked.

  Murad put a hand on Sage’s wrist and shared the connection to the drones.

  A 3-D map popped into view on Sage’s faceshield and blips appeared on the image to show the location of the drones. After a brief consultation, he realized the drones had massed at a room on the lower floor on the east side of the complex.

  “I’ve got them, sir.”

  “Can you get to them?”

  “Yes.”

  Murad lifted his rifle and added his firepower to that of Kiwanuka and the rest of the team. “Good luck.”

  Sage pulled himself toward the edge of the platform and studied the floor twenty meters below. He pulled a grappling hook from his combat vest and encircled a support post that held up the safety railing around the outer edge of the platform. When he pulled on it to test its strength, the post seemed like it was strong enough to hold him.

  Sage threw a leg over the side, held the Roley in one hand, wrapped one leg in the cable, and slid down to the floor one-handed. He released the rope and stepped away, barely avoiding having Jahup drop on top of him.

  “You’re not armored,” Sage objected.

  “Noojin is in here somewhere. I am going to find her.”

  Sage didn’t have time to argue. “I’ve got drones out scouting. Keep your comm tuned to this channel.” He made the adjustment on the young man’s helmet comm. “If I find her before you do, I’ll let you know where she is and how to get her.”

  Jahup nodded and hurried off, taking advantage of cover wherever he could.

  Staying low himself, Sage ran to the outer edge of the lower floor. The heat from the blazing chemicals and the smoke eddied around him, coalescing into a strong physical presence. Sage stepped into the darkness, and fought to keep his directions straight because the embers flying through the air caused problems with the hardsuit’s vid.

  Before he knew it, he ran into a wall he never saw until he was up against it. Rebounding, barely able to stay on his feet because he’d been moving quickly, he flailed around and located the passageway’s opposite wall and kept himself upright and moving.

  Forty-seven meters and three turns later—two right and one left, all marked by his fingertips rather than visually—Sage reached the complex’s command-and-control center. Windows took up almost half the walls on all four sides.

  Sage bounced a sonar blast off the wall and discovered the transplas was twelve centimeters thick, followed up with a spectroscopic analysis that showed it was fire-resistant and blast proof.

  The drones hovered around the structure like fat bumblebees. None of them were any larger than Sage’s fist. Two of them sported miniature satellite dishes.

  Four people lingered inside the command and control module. All of them were armed, but only two of them appeared to be military people. In his 360-view, Sage saw three men step out of the swirling smoke, then drop down as their heads exploded inside their helmets.

  “I’ve got you,” Kiwanuka stated calmly. “Now pull back from that building. The lieutenant found a door opener.”

  The drones flitted back a safe distance and Sage followed suit. On the other side of the transplas, the guards started arguing. The female pointed at the door and brandished her weapon, and Sage gathered that she liked her odds. Or maybe she disliked the odds of staying inside the room.

  A half dozen other mercenaries rushed at Sage out of the whirling smoke. Alcohol-fueled fire wreathed two of them, but they paid the flames no heed.

  Sage whirled to face them, knowing he was exposing his back to the mercenaries inside the room. He raised the Roley, but before he could fire, a powersuit lumbered out from behind them.

  Cursing his luck and the bad timing, Sage switched targets. He knew the Roley wouldn’t penetrate the armor, but he hoped shooting at the pilot would cause some distraction.

  As his sights settled over the pilot’s chamber, Sage saw that a dead man sat behind the transplas at the controls. He fired anyway and the gauss charge burst created a disturbance in the air over the transplas shield.

  “Don’t, Sage!” Murad barked. “I’ve got the powersuit slaved.”

  In the next instant, the powersuit attacked the mercenaries before it with fists curled into giant hammers. Three of them were dead before they knew anything was wrong. A fourth died before she could do more than turn around and take aim. Sage shifted the Roley over the two survivors and took them down with well-placed bursts.

  For a moment, the powersuit froze, surveying the carnage that lay around it. Sage knew the machine wasn’t malfunctioning. Murad was frozen, not believing what he had done.

  “Lieutenant,” Sage called over the command frequency.

  “My God,” Murad breathed hoarsely.

  “It’s all right,” Sage said. “What you did here, it’s all right.”

  “I did it—this—because they were going to kill you.”

  “I know, sir. I appreciate the help.”

  “They never had a chance.” Murad sounded dazed.

  Sage put steel in his voice. “Maybe not, sir, but it was their choice to be here, their choice to do what they’ve been doing.”

  “I know.”

  “Get it together, sir. We need you.”

  The powersuit stepped over the dead mercenaries, set itself, and drove a huge hand through the transplas shield as the people inside backed away. One of the huge hands curled around a mercenary, squeezed, and withdrew with a corpse hanging from its fingertips.

  Sage pulled an entangler grenade from his combat vest and threw it into the room. When the grenade went off, the gleaming monofilament snaked around the room and trapped the three surviving mercenaries.

  The drones swarmed through the opening and settled onto the computers like gleaming mosquitos.

  Sage took up a position to guard the command-and-control module. He sorted through the vid relayed through the ParaSights, looking for more targets.

  “We’re in,” Murad exulted. “Spinning up the data now. We should know who’s arranged for this operation in seconds.”

  Hurry, Sage thought silently, knowing that Murad wasn’t wasting any time, but knowing also that their teams were bearing the brunt of full-scale attacks.

  One of the ParaSights hovered over Jahup as he went room to room shouting the girl’s name. Someone must hav
e answered him from behind one of the doors, because Jahup then stopped and concentrated on opening the door. He didn’t see the two mercenaries step around the corner behind him.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  The Cer’ardu Heights

  140 Klicks West of Makaum

  0326 Hours Zulu Time

  Noojin! It’s Jahup!”

  “Jahup!” Noojin’s voice was rushed, not understandable.

  Frantic, his mind summoning horrible image of things that might have happened to Noojin since he’d last seen her, Jahup stepped back from the door and aimed at the locking mechanism.

  “Jahup! Two gunners behind you!”

  Sage’s voice thundered in Jahup’s borrowed helmet. He reacted instantly, like he would in response to a member of the hunting band. He threw himself down and to one side, bringing up the pulse rifle. He aimed by instinct and fired on full-auto, burning through the charge park and leaving a score of carbonized scorch marks marring the walls.

  The two smoldering corpses dropped their weapons and fell over in a tight cluster.

  “Noojin,” Jahup called as he swapped out the spent charge pack for another. “Back away from the door.”

  “Okay! I’m safe! Hurry, Jahup!”

  Jahup pressed the trigger and held it till the locking mechanism burned a bright-cherry red and dripped from the space. He swapped out charge packs again, lifted a leg, and drove his foot against the door.

  Shivering, the barrier sank inward. In the next instant, Noojin was in his arms, holding him tight.

  “Get her a mask and get out of there,” Sage ordered over the comm. “The fire is out of control. It’s going to destroy everything in here.”

  Jahup checked the two dead men, hoping that he had not destroyed their helmets. He had been aiming at their center body mass, so the chances were good. Only one of the helmets had survived, but he only needed the one. He helped Noojin into it. She was racked with coughs, already on the verge of succumbing to smoke inhalation.

  He worried about her, about whether or not she had already inhaled too much smoke, and about whether they would get out of the caves alive. More explosions detonated all around them. Rifle in one hand, he wrapped his arm around Noojin’s waist and helped her back in the direction of the Terran soldiers.

  0329 Hours Zulu Time

  “We’ve got the intel, Top,” Murad announced. “Uploading it to Colonel Halladay now.”

  “Do we have what we need?” Sage asked.

  “There are definite ties to DawnStar. This should be enough.”

  The comm crackled inside Sage’s helmet and cleared up immediately. “Attention, Alpha Team, this is Command. Be advised that we’re about to planetfall on your twenty within the next three minutes.”

  Three minutes? Sage knew then that Halladay hadn’t waited for confirmation. He’d launched early, trusting that the evidence they needed would be found, and found in time.

  Or maybe the colonel had been planning on taking the heat for the engagement anyway, since he had soldiers on the ground in harm’s way. Either way, Sage respected the man for his commitment. Then his thoughts were swept aside as his second ParaSight flashed on a face that he knew.

  Velesko Kos was running through a tunnel that led outside of the complex. Four armed mercenaries ran with him. Sage didn’t know if the man was abandoning the site or if he was going to take control of the battlefield.

  Sage pinged the ParaSight and got the GPS location of Kos. “I’m going after Kos,” he said as two members of the fireteam arrived. “You two take over security for the lieutenant.”

  “Roger that, Top.”

  Sage ran, leaping over exploded debris, dodging flames where he could, and running through them when he couldn’t. He pushed himself, looking forward to the coming battle.

  For six long years he had been sidelined, working with young men and women to turn them into halfway-knowledgeable cannon fodder for the war with the Phrenorians. Velesko Kos wasn’t Phrenorian, but he was an enemy, one of the worst the Makaum people had known. Sage was determined not to let the man escape.

  0331 Hours Zulu

  Velesko Vos was determined to escape as he emerged from the underground labyrinth. He didn’t know how such a small insertion team had wreaked havoc within the complex, but it had been done. His profits were going up in smoke that very minute, and he knew DawnStar would hold him accountable for everything that was happening. His only choice was to get offplanet as quickly as he could.

  But when he saw the dropships plummeting out of the sky through the murky haze of drifting smoke, he knew even escape might be too much to hope for. As he watched, the assault team deployed, spun out into the air like floating seeds. Within seconds, the units were on the ground.

  The surrounding landscape looked like it had been carved from old Terran stories about hell. Smoke spewed from craters punched into the earth by light artillery. Dead mercenaries and exploded powersuits lay in scattered disarray, slain and destroyed by one-man barb fighters that had offloaded from the dropships upon reentry into Makaum’s atmosphere.

  Kos cursed and glanced around in the direction of the drug base, spotting the hidden hangar where Dubchek had housed light aircraft. With all the confusion, Kos thought there was a chance he could get away. He turned and ran toward the hangar, two hundred meters distant.

  Without warning, the armored man on Kos’s left slammed into him, knocking both of them down. Kos regained his footing. Only then did he see the gaping hole in the side of the man’s helmet, which denoted a bullet from a large-caliber handgun.

  Fearing what he knew he was going to see, Kos turned and spotted a familiar figure standing just outside the entry point to the complex. Terran Army Master Sergeant Frank Sage had survived the battle in the underground bunker and had lived to continue his war outside, in the jungle-covered mountains.

  “Kill him!” Kos ordered the two men beside him as he lifted his weapon and took aim at Sage.

  0333 Hours Zulu Time

  When Kos and the two surviving mercenaries turned their weapons on him, Sage threw himself to the ground with the .500 Magnum levered forward. He sighted on Kos, tracking the man, and fired while the man was on the move.

  Instead of striking Kos, the big round cored through the faceshield of one of the mercenaries. The inside of the man’s helmet turned crimson and his twitching body dropped bonelessly. Sage eared the hammer back and took aim again as he pushed himself to his feet.

  Kos ran, dodging behind trees. Two more of Sage’s rounds tore through branches and knocked limbs from the trees.

  Sage ran, taking advantage of cover himself as his quarry returned fire. He had an easier time of it because he was running forward and firing ahead of him. Kos and the other mercenary had to try to fire behind them. Sage didn’t know where Kos was running, but he knew the man had a plan.

  When he’d fired the .500 Magnum dry, Sage popped the cylinder open and shook out the brass, slipping fresh rounds into it with a Speedloader. His attention was split for just a moment while he’d worked his reload. The mercenary took advantage of that instant, stopping behind a boulder holding burning debris from a powersuit hit directly by troops from the dropships.

  The mercenary swung out with a laser rifle held to his shoulder and fired.

  A superheated beam burned through Sage’s upper left chest, leaving open wounds in the front and the back.

  WARNING! YOU HAVE BEEN SERIOUSLY WOUNDED. YOU SHOULD SEEK SHELTER AND AWAIT MEDICAL ATTENTION. YOUR LEFT LUNG HAS BEEN IMPAIRED.

  Sage ignored the warning and took aim at the mercenary’s exposed head and shoulder as the man steadied himself for another shot. Knowing Sage was firing back unnerved the man, though, and the follow-up laser blast sizzled through the air only a few centimeters above Sage’s chest.

  Sage squeezed the trigger and watched the mercenary’s head snap back. On the move again, Sage watched as the stricken man went down, still moving, still struggling to bring his weapon up. Sage took aim,
preparing to send another round into the mercenary’s head, but before he could squeeze the trigger, a large, chitin-covered thing popped up from the earth, grabbed the mercenary, and yanked him down into the hole it had emerged from. In a heartbeat, the man and the overgrown centipede were gone.

  Skirting the hole, Sage ran after Kos. Although the laser had cauterized the wound in his chest, the exertion Sage was putting himself through tore open the wounds. Blood started seeping into his lung, taking away his air space. He told himself that he could survive with one lung and stubbornly continued the chase, despite the pain and the swelling constriction in his chest.

  “Med panel,” Sage gasped. He was still gaining on Kos, but not as rapidly as before. “Seal the chest wounds and start a drain on the injured lung.” He continued running, head spinning dizzily from lack of oxygen, and knew the nanobots in his body would start working on him.

  REQUEST PERMISSION TO ANESTHETIZE

  printed across the inside of his faceshield.

  “Negative,” Sage croaked. Then a sharp, gnawing pain bit into the front and back of his chest.

  REQUEST CESSATION OF COMBAT.

  “No.” Sage spotted the hidden hangar ahead of him and knew that was where Kos was headed.

  All around them, the Terran Army spilled across the landscape, locked in fierce battle. Powersuits fought hand-to-hand in places, like mythic titans, and sometimes they stood or crouched in firing positions, unleashing machine guns and missiles. Soldiers and mercenaries in hardsuits were locked in mortal combat.

  Losing perception of the world around him, Sage reached the hangar only seconds after Kos did. Kos hid inside in the darkness, where three small aircraft sat waiting.

  Struggling to stay on his feet at the hangar entrance, Sage put the pistol away and slid the Roley from his shoulder. Activating the grenade launcher, Sage rolled around the doorway and pumped gel grenades at the three aircraft. An instant later, all three aircraft exploded, filling the hanger with heat and light and flying debris.