by Joshua James
“Gear up, dammit!” he screamed in his face.
He reached down and grabbed a hammerhead helmet—he had no idea if it was his—and slammed it over the kid’s head. The seals slapped shut automatically, and as it pressurized, the skin flap covering his facial orifices slid back to reveal a stunned, wide-eyed kid with a crooked nose.
Lucky shoved him forward into the jump hangar. He wasn’t above using fresh meat as a shield.
The hangar was just a gaping hole. No techs to do final checks. No chutes to dive through. In fact, not a hangar at all. Just a huge ragged hole in the side of what was now a dead box in space.
So long, jump carrier Beetle IV. He hadn’t known the name of the carrier a moment before, but it showed up in his mind when he searched for it, in the way uploaded mission data tended to. He saw it was assigned to the destroyer Argyle. Never heard of that either. Fleet command mixed and matched these boats, just like the Marines they stuffed in them.
It didn’t help he was on the wrong side of the galaxy jumping with a legion he didn’t know.
“Go!” he screamed and pushed clear of the side of the transport, tumbling off in the direction of the yellow-brown Class-D planetoid they had come all this way to dance with.
“Not exactly the way they draw up jumps in combat school,” observed Rocky, helpful as always.
Lucky wished he had time to appreciate what a total cluster this old jump carrier had turned into, but now wasn’t the time.
He did anyway.
The spiders in his head simply could not resist patterns. Find them. Build them. Follow them. For better or worse, his head was full of pattern-recognition wetware that never turned off.
“Outward explosion pattern,” reported Rocky. The spiders liked her better.
“So what?”
“So this was an internal detonation.”
It was possible the damage had concealed an entry point from outside the ship. But his spiders didn’t think so, and that was enough for Rocky. And him.
It was an internal detonation.
Miraculously, the kid seemed to get his bearings in the zero-G. Lucky suspected he had ceded all control to his AI copilot.
Lucky let inertia flip him around so he had a better view of the jump carrier, as Rocky slapped a magnified view in his mind’s eye. He knew his relationship with the data was more of a direct neural flow, but that was freaking hard to wrap his tiny brain around. He wasn’t paid enough to think that hard.
The damage wasn’t isolated to the port side. The entire topside was crippled beyond repair.
He watched a set of Marines jump. Then another.
A single point of light burned Lucky’s eyes. Radiation.
“Drive is going critical,” announced Rocky.
“No kidding.”
Four tiny figures appeared at the hole in the jump hangar.
And then they were gone, sucked inward as the carrier ripped apart.
7
New Target
The hammerhead thrusters pushed him and Nico toward the planet in an ever-steepening dive.
In the silence of space, Lucky watched the carrier erupt, its millions of carefully machined parts flooding outward into the heavens as deadly projectiles.
Lucky felt his arm shift slightly. Rocky was deploying his locusts. Tiny disk-shaped drones poured out from the back of his jumpsuit and mixed with a burgeoning cloud that spilled out of the rookie’s suit and other nearby Marines.
The AI copilots of the diving Marines coordinated the drones and began picking off projectiles. His pattern-recognition spiders bounced around in his head at the pure joy of the chaotic feast of data, finding their happy place in the trillions of permutations.
Damn crazy technology.
There was a reason the Union dirt lovers were afraid of it. Then again, they were afraid of everything new. And easy. Always the crappiest life on the crappiest-class planets. Way to build a civilization.
Lucky flipped his all-comm open.
“Sound off. Who we got?”
“Jiang here.”
“What the hell was that?” said Malby.
“Nice sound off.”
“Shove it, Jiang. This is so screwed up.”
“Nico, sir!” said the rookie, too enthusiastic for the party.
“Cheeky.”
“Dawson.”
They were sliding into classic two-by-two defensive waves coordinated by their AI systems.
“What the hell just happened, man?” Malby repeated.
“Something fucked up,” said Jiang.
“Internal,” Lucky said. “Maybe mechanical?”
“Wait, what?” Malby shot back.
“Didn’t your AI see it? Those explosions. Definitely internal.”
“Man, my AI ain’t telling me shit,” said Malby. “Net is down. I got no chatter.”
Lucky waited for the others to chime in.
“Jiang, what about you?”
“What about what?”
“Did your AI pick up on the explosion pattern?”
“Negative,” she said. “But I’m not surprised yours did.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
She didn’t answer.
“What about you, Sarge? Any word from priority net before it went tits up?”
Priority net would be high command orders. The word from the top.
“Sarge?” said Lucky.
No response. Could it really be? Had the masochistic, misogynistic, pig-sticking son of a bitch actually bought it?
“Who in the almighty corps told you to count off, Lucky?”
No, he wasn’t that lucky.
“Just here to help, Sarge.”
“Help less, navigate more. New target. Tighten up. We go in hot, drones out.”
New target? He must’ve gotten something from the brass, then.
“Have a look,” said Rocky.
A magnified image appeared in his mind’s eye. A simple rectangular building with blast marks along its perimeter that looked to be several stories tall stood at the edge of a ridge that dipped into a deep crater. Immediately inside the crater, nearest the building, a steep, rocky peak climbed out so that its top reached above the crater lip.
“I don’t pick the targets,” said Rocky, preempting any comments from him. “I just point your sorry ass at ’em.”
Field tents on one flank told Lucky this was where the first landing party had touched dirt and set up a perimeter. He recognized several grounded stingray rail-gun drones holding position about a quarter klick around the building. But no Marines. No scientists.
“No local net,” confirmed Rocky.
The original mission dossier called for a step-by-step approach. Lucky and the rookies here were to go in and establish the perimeter for the platform cannons already in transit. Or supposed to be. What exactly was in transit now was up in the air.
Probably a bunch of tiny pieces up in the air now.
He felt another set of stims hit his system as his nanobots began shifting his biological internals to account for the increasing Gs. The Marines would look like fireballs to an observer, even entering the thin atmosphere of the small planetoid.
“What’s the sitrep here? What else is in transit?” Lucky asked on all-comm.
He could already hear the slur in his speech. This was biological, and there wasn’t much he could do about it—not much his AI could do about it except monitor his organic systems.
He wouldn’t black out. That was virtually impossible with everything in his system. But he would feel himself start slipping away.
Drift, they called it. Everyone who did combat jumps experienced it. There was just no reason not to push further than clear consciousness would allow when you possessed an internal AI copilot who could manage the jump just fine without operator input.
But it still sucked.
He got no answer from the comms, but Rocky’s voice chimed in.
“Not much. I don’t have … of a net
work at this point, but I’m not sure if that’s because… didn’t get a coordinated jump, or…”
Damn, he was drifting now. Feeling the Gs.
He started seeing stars in his peripheral vision again, mingling this time with the ones already there.
His mind started to wander.
He knew where it would go.
The same place it always went.
His nightmare.
His hell.
8
Drift
Hello, nightmare.
Hello, Lucky, said his nightmare.
But he wasn’t Lucky. Just plain old Private Lee Savage, the adopted son of Admiral T’Hap, the little brother of the best pilot in the corps, a rookie on his first cycle, ready to prove he was all that.
Lucky woke up and just wanted to breathe.
He was drowning. There was green-yellow liquid over his face, filling his eyes, his nose, his mouth.
He tried to reach up, but his hands wouldn’t move.
He tried to yell, but his mouth wouldn’t open.
He was frozen inside a tank of gel, staring upward into a vast open space.
He could see something just at the edge of his sight, above and behind him.
He couldn’t understand what he was looking at.
They were symbols more alien than anything he had ever seen carved into a rock wall. No, not carved. Embedded somehow, like they were a growth in the rock itself.
He was sure the symbols were a language, but he couldn’t explain why. As he watched, they morphed into letters he could understand. But the words made no sense.
The ceiling was higher than any hangar he had ever been in. The other walls were formed of rock too, but so far away he couldn’t make out any details. Scaffolding crisscrossed everywhere he looked.
This was a massive space carved into rock. So big, clouds had formed inside it.
Not clouds. Smoke.
A flickering in the haze. A burning smell.
And then he saw the flames licking up the side of the tank he was in. Everything around him was burning.
He strained to move.
He screamed at his body, but nothing happened.
This is where I’m going to die, he thought.
Not in his fighter.
Not alongside his sister.
Here, in some impossible excavation site in a vat of snot.
He tried accessing his AI copilot—the one they told him during basic training would be with him for the rest of his life—but he only got static. He was alone in his mind.
Some Frontier Marine he was turning out to be. Captured on his first real mission.
He strained to remember something. Anything. The past was a haze.
An image flowed in from his subconscious. A creature stood over him, tool in hand, digging inside his mind. Shivers of electricity fired up and down his spine.
Had that really happened, or was it a dream?
He tried to steady himself by tying together stray moments in his mind.
He had been in his training fighter. He remembered that much.
They were attacked by … something. What was it? He couldn’t remember, maybe didn’t want to remember.
It was just dumb luck that he’d been out with the alert fighters when their carrier was hit, the token rookie taking his turn with the big kids. Dumb luck that he wasn’t dead.
But now Lee realized it had been very bad luck.
A shadow crossed his face. A red cloud darkened the edges of his vision.
He jumped, or tried to. Nothing happened.
Then he felt the tiniest of shocks on the back of his neck.
Next he felt the goo around him draining away.
And he could move.
So move, dammit!
He jerked up and felt wires yank back against his neck and head.
He reached behind, and to his horror found something like an umbilical cord with hundreds of wires wrapped in a fine mesh digging into pinpoints in the back of his neck.
And then he felt the ground shift, and a giant hand reached out and swatted him across the room. He felt his head recoil as the wires ripped away. The tank he’d been lying in flew across the room. The rocky ground beneath him was cold against his naked body.
Around him, equipment was burning. Strange, foreign gear. Not Empire tech.
Something exploded near him, and he felt heat flare from it. He tried staggering to his feet and immediately fell back. It felt like he hadn’t walked in weeks.
The smoke was thick now. He tasted burnt air flow into his lungs. He put his face down to the cool floor and gagged.
He crawled blindly, tears filling his bloodshot eyes.
A shadow again crossed his face. This time, he reached out as the red cloud darkened the edges of his vision.
His hand bumped something.
It was the tank, flipped over in front of him.
If he could just get under it, there would be an air pocket. A second to think. Something.
He clawed at the edges, felt it fall back, clawed again and felt the edge lift. He thrust his face into the crack and took a clear breath, a cough wracking his chest.
He dragged his shoulders and the rest of his body under the lip. He finally yanked his feet inside, and the edge crashed back to the rock, creating an imperfect seal but keeping the majority of the killing smoke at bay.
He took another clear breath.
Now what?
Now you leave dreamland, Lucky. See you soon.
Lucky shivered. He knew the voice. It was Him.
It was The Hate.
9
Screwed
Lucky awoke to Rocky’s voice.
“More trouble.”
“What—”
A bright light burned a hole in his vision. Pain radiated from his eyes, invading his mind.
His head snapped back into the padding of his helmet.
His faceplate darkened as new stimulants entered his system, and his eyes itched for an intense second. He realized his retina had just been scorched and repaired.
“Holy bastard, will you look at that,” said Malby.
Lucky was looking, all right, but he didn’t believe what he was seeing.
It wasn’t every day you saw an Occupier-class starship explode.
“Altchinger drives,” he said.
They were the largest power source in the region, probably in all of Union space.
But it should have been impossible. With so much shielding and so many safeties in place it was damn near impossible for the drives to go nova.
But the universe likes a good challenge.
In the vacuum of deep space, the destruction was a haunting sight.
At ten klicks from bow to stern, there had been a literal city inside. The starship was the Lindleson. The city was—or had been—New Promise.
The city name meant more to him than the starship.
“Rocky, did I—”
Lucky blinked, and a handful of memories appeared.
He remembered drinking in a shitty bar there on a mission three cycles back and getting into a fight with a pack of stuck-up Navy blackshoes and then buying a couple of them drinks later on. He remembered screwing one of them and thinking it would’ve been more fun if she didn’t have a brace on her busted arm.
He remembered sitting in plenty of bars there, watching tanks patrol the streets and druggies begging for credits.
And now, it was gone. New Promise had always lived at the mercy of her starship. It was a city of soldiers who knew the risks.
But you’d still rather have your hand on the stick when it was your turn to go. Nobody wanted to die in their sleep. No soldiers, anyway.
Those poor assholes didn’t know jack.
“Holy hell,” said Malby.
“Gods in Olympus,” said Jiang. “There were a million souls onboard.”
“Anybody know the drivers?” asked Cheeky over all-comm.
On a ship of that size, typically two
or three Frontier Marines would coordinate flight responsibilities. There was an entire ecosystem of near-ship activity buzzing about endlessly.
“Patterson and Milky for sure. Not sure who else was on rotation…” Jiang trailed off. “Well, I guess it doesn’t matter. They’re all dead now.”
“Everybody was on the Lindleson,” said Dawson. “Command. Everybody.”
Lucky picked up on the sadness in Dawson’s voice. He wasn’t talking about the sector Admiralty.
He heard more heavy breathing from someone. Maybe the rookie. Maybe all of them.
“KIT, Marines,” said Peters. “Keep it together.”
Malby respectfully declined to do so. “We’re screwed, man!” he screamed in all-comm. “Totally screwed. What the hell’s going on? This can’t happen. This can’t be happening, man!”
“Enough, Private!” barked Peters. “We have a job to do, and we’re inbound to do it. So look alive.”
“Or look dead,” several Marines said in unison.
He wasn’t wrong. There was nothing they could do now.
Plus, Lucky didn’t give a shit about that old can or anybody on it.
Hell, man, what is wrong with you, Lucky thought.
“What isn’t wrong with you?” said Rocky.
He knew combat stimulants were partly to blame. The cocktails he was pumped full of after the escape from the Beetle IV left him full of rage. Not fear. Not concern. Not even focus as far as Lucky could tell.
Just rage.
He also wondered how much of that was actually the stims in his system and how much of that was really just him.
So, there was something wrong with him. That wasn’t new.
But there was something wrong with this whole operation. The Empire didn’t screw up like this.
And putting a force this huge inside Union space for a tactical insertion? That wasn’t just strange. It was wrong.
Sure, the Union couldn’t do anything about it. Even when their whole system wasn’t going off the grid, they barely had the tech to spit in the Empire’s eye.