by Rick Partlow
The battle was already raging by the time we reached its front lines. The one advantage we had was that the Tahni couldn't afford to destroy the control center---they needed those defense satellites to maintain their hold on the planet. That meant they wouldn't be using air support or heavy weapons, but God knew their shock troops were bad enough. I only hoped they didn't have any Imperial Guard cyborgs. I still had nightmares about those things.
Sizzling, crackling electron beams stabbed out of the night all around us as we fell into positions around the building, the crackle of their beamers intermixed with the sharp hum-snaps of the rebels' Gauss rifles and the hissing whine of their lasers. Brush burst into flames and dirt exploded in great chunks as the multikilojoule bursts of charged particles touched it, but our men and women steadily pumped round after round into the night without flinching.
Those among us firing the lasers went quickly. The Tahni backtracked the laserbursts on infrared and focused their fire on the sources. A half a dozen people I had known since my childhood took electron beam hits and blew apart in bloody explosions of flash-boiled bodily fluids. Deciding to forgo my high-signature plasma gun for the time being, I drew my Gauss pistol and started pumping carefully-aimed rounds into the mass of oncoming shocktroops.
The Tahni had been called out hastily and with little organization, and their advance showed it. They were massed in the open with no overwatch formation or suppressive fire, and it took a heavy toll on them as my neighbors, most of whom had been hunters all their lives, picked them off one by one. The shocktroopers' battle armor was a good defense against beam weapons, but the high-caliber Gauss rifles I'd brought in spat out tungsten slugs at more than 3,000 meters per second, passing through even the troopers' duralloy breastplates like they weren't there.
The worst part about it was that we wouldn't even know when the fleet arrived. We could hold for days, dying in place, and it would all be for nothing if Jason hadn't been able to convince the brass to go through with the plan. But there was nothing else to do. We had nowhere to run to anymore.
The electron fire from the shocktroopers seemed to taper off and they gradually began to withdraw, leaving a score of their number lying on the open field. Hearing a handful of whooping cheers come from the perimeter, I squashed a desire to yell out that it was too early to celebrate. They'd find out soon enough, I figured.
It didn't take more than about thirty seconds before we felt the ground begin to shake beneath us. I didn't even need to see it to know what it was. It came quickly into view, towering a good ten meters over us as it came over the rise, a bulkily humanoid shape wrapped in thick armor and bristling with weapons.
I had faced Tahni mecha once before, and the only thing that had saved my ass was the timely arrival of my spaceship. Since my ship was in three pieces on the opposite side of the planet, that didn't seem too likely. What seemed very likely was that we were all about to die.
Yeah...all of this would be for nothing. My parents and my sister were dead, me and Rachel and my brothers were about to die, and it was all for nothing. I had come here and given these people hope---told them that if they stuck together we could win. I'd even had to fight my older brother for the right to lead. Now I was going to get all of them killed, and it would be all for nothing. Like hell. With a yell that came from somewhere around my testicles, I jumped up from my position, grabbing my plasma gun. If we were all going to hell, I was going to lead the way.
In the seconds between the time I sprang from cover and the time I closed the distance to the machine, I let my battlecomp run all the possible attack patterns against a Tahni strike mech. Besides telling me I was fucking nuts, the computer let me know that the only weakness the big machine had was a maintenance hatch between the legs that led all the way up to the cockpit. Not being stupid, the Tahni engineers had given it full armor plating, but if you aimed in just the right spot, you could spring the catch and open the door.
Typical Tahni thinking---building big and brutal, but not considering the more intricate details. Still, as the hits from the mech's proton cannons blew up several square meters of dirt around me, it was easy to appreciate big and brutal. A blast impacted only a couple of meters away and threw me forward head over heels, jolting my gun free of my hands and filling my vision with stars.
I shook my head clear just in time to see the spiked underside of a rounded footpad coming straight down at me. I rolled clear and felt the ground shake as it crashed down only about a half a meter from me. Springing to my feet, I scooped up the fallen plasma gun, and ran between the mech's pillar-like legs.
Scanning the thick, duralloy plating that covered the articulated leg joints, I spotted the lines of the maintenance hatch and raised the muzzle of my assault gun. It was a bit tricky trying to keep the weapon steady while dodging those huge feet, but I finally got one clear shot.
No matter how big a guy is, I thought to myself as my finger tightened on the trigger, you give him a shot to the 'nads and he's going down...
The gun bucked against my shoulder and a starbright ball of plasma shot out of it, splashing over the machine's groin. The metal blackened, several layers of it burning away, but there was no noticeable effect on the mech---until the maintenance hatch fell open, its catches incinerated.
I dropped the plasma gun and jumped for all I was worth, barely catching hold of the edge of the opening with my fingertips. I hung there for a moment, my feet dangling a couple meters off the ground, then pulled myself up onto the first rung of the access ladder. I didn't pause for breath, just scrambled up the ladder, past the forest of superconducting power trunks leading from the machine's reactor. Above me, I saw, was the rounded hatch that separated me from the pilot's compartment, an ejectable pod not actually built into the rest of the machine.
Unlike the outer hatch, this portal wasn't locked---it was only secured by a hand-cranked lever. I drew my Gauss pistol, braced myself against one wall with a leg, and reached up to undog the hatch.
The heavy portal fell open with a bang that was much too loud, and I was suddenly standing between the legs of the Tahni mechjock, his "easy chair" situated just behind the hatch opening. He looked down at me, his face hidden behind the visor of his neural interface helmet, and began clawing frantically at the pistol holstered across his chest.
I emptied the magazine of my sidearm through the opening, the heavy slugs punching into the mechjock's groin and tunneling upward to blow his brains out through the top of his helmet. The cockpit was suddenly splattered with blood, the Tahni's body going limp against his harness, and I could feel the whole mech begin to lurch forward.
I had time to think a shot to the nads...before the machine totally lost its bearings and crashed nose-first into the dirt. I was thrown through the hatch into the cockpit, slamming my shoulder into the bulkhead. The crash shook me like a human maraca, and I felt for a moment like I'd broken every bone in my body, but my headcomp told me that I was basically undamaged.
Slowly, gingerly, I pulled myself up from where I was pressed against the bulkhead, retrieving and holstering my sidearm. This, I told myself, was it. If the damn Tahni had anything else to throw at me, I was going to sit down and cry.
It was a bit easier to crawl out of the access tunnel horizontally than it had been to climb it vertically, and I quickly emerged into the night to the sound of uncontrollable cheering. I felt a bit like taking a bow, until I looked around and realized the rejoicing wasn't for my little act of heroics---it was for the light grey Commonwealth Marine landers descending on pillars of fire, their proton cannons stabbing out into the Tahni shock troops with claps of thunder.
"Holy shit," I breathed, just staring at the landers. All I could think was how close we had cut it; the Fleet ships had to have been converting from Transition Space before we even hit the control center. A few minutes the other way and...
"Cal!" I heard Isaac's voice behind me, turned and saw him running up to me, arms outspread, a huge smile splitting
his face. In that one, drawn-out moment, I could see so much of Dad in his wide, honest face, his handlebar mustache and square jaw.
Then, suddenly, the joy in his eyes turned to horror, and I saw the warning coming to his lips. I started to turn, but he threw a body block into me, knocking me off my feet backwards. As I fell, I could see the slugs impacting across Isaac's chest, penetrating the tactical vest that was all the armor I'd been able to persuade him to wear. He jerked, dancing backward as the bullets tracked upward, one finally taking off the left side of his skull in a spray of red.
There was a scream welling up inside me, but my headcomp realized the danger behind me and forced me into action. I somersaulted forward, scooping up Isaac's Gauss rifle, and tumbled into a crouch, facing the direction from which the barrage of gunfire had come. Standing there, struggling to reload his rifle, was a Tahni tech officer, dressed in their characteristic light armor and dress cap. I pumped a half-dozen rounds into him, throwing him backwards, his head disintegrating from the hail of tungsten slugs.
I reflexively scanned the area for other threats, but found none. Dropping the rifle, I turned back to where Isaac lay face-down, stumbling blindly over to him, my eyes veiled over with tears. I fell to my knees beside him and started to turn him over, but stopped myself---I knew I shouldn't. I wouldn't like what I saw. I felt my breath tighten in my throat, and had to let it out in a scream. I screamed as long as my breath held out, wailing an inhuman howl that echoed through the night.
When the breath was gone, it was as if all the emotion was gone out of me as well, as if I had become a statue, staring down at the body of my older brother. It was several more seconds before I felt a gentle hand settle on my shoulder, and saw Rachel's face appear before my eyes.
"Are you all right, Cal?" she asked me softly. I looked up at her, but there was something wrong with her...her face was covered with blood, and her right arm was blown off above the elbow, the sick white of the bone sticking out obscenely.
I tried to say something, but my mouth worked soundlessly, too horrified to speak. Rachel looked at me in concern, as if she didn't realize she was wounded.
"Are you all right?" she repeated. "Are you all right..." The face seemed to blur, transform into a slimmer, darker one, yet one that shared the look of concern.
"Are you all right, Constable?" Kara McIntire asked me, floating over my cot. I looked around, saw I was in the little cabin in the Hecate once more, and let out a deep sigh.
"Yeah," I croaked hoarsely, working at undoing the sleep restraints. "What's wrong?"
"The capacitors are charged," she informed me. "But there's at least a dozen ships out there, and they're running active scans."
"I'm coming." My headcomp told me I'd gotten a little over two hours of sleep, which was about ten less than I'd needed.
I made my way up to the cockpit, lit up with the viewscreen projection of the steep-walled impact crater in which our little ship was nestled. The sensor readouts were having a nervous breakdown, warning us that they were picking up massive microwave, laser and neutrino scans, but I ignored them, strapping into the pilot's seat.
"Do you think they'll pick us up?" McIntire asked me, taking a place in the right chair.
"Not likely," I said. "This asteroid's got a lot of radioactives---should screen us off pretty well."
"How the hell did you find this place?" McIntire stared at the screen.
"When I transitioned insystem during the war," I explained, "I needed a hole to crawl into in case they spotted my warp corona. Jason and I researched the Corporate survey of the system's outer asteroid cluster, found a rock with an impact crater deep enough to put me out of sight, and a uranium content hot enough to keep me off their scans. Just lucky no one's mined it out in the last ten years."
"How long before we can get out of here?" She rapped the control panel impatiently.
I shrugged. "I'd give it another hour before they give up on us."
"And if they don't give up?"
"Well, we could make a run for it, now that the capacitors are charged. It'd only take us about a half hour to make minimum safe distance at maximum warp. Of course, the Patrol cutters would catch us long before that, with their bigger reactors. And with our capacitors charged full, the warp field wouldn't have any place to discharge if we took a hit, so we'd burst like a balloon." I smiled at her genially. "So I guess we'd better hope they give up."
"Goddamnit," she breathed.
"Relax," I told her. "We're in a lot better shape now than when we were stuck in the middle of that station."
"I've had enough hiding," she exclaimed with surprising ferocity, turning on me with fire in her eyes. "I don't give a damn if they kill me, but I've had my bellyful of hiding."
"Must be rough, being on the run," I said. "Most people couldn't handle it...but then, most people didn't use to be DSI Cadre."
Her head snapped around, and she shot me a look that had my hand inching toward my pistol...but then she seemed to relax, letting her breath out in a quiet sigh.
"I guess I should ask how you know," she said softly.
"You beat me to the draw back on the shuttle," I explained. "Now, I know there's a lot of jackheads out there with wired reflexes, and I know I got mine ten years ago, but I'm still equipped with what is essentially the cutting edge of augmentation. That's why I'm still alive after almost six years of dealing with the Skingangers.
"My big advantage over the street-surgery types," I went on, "is my headcomp. All my nerve-wires are linked to it, and it's still superior to anything on the open market---shit, half of it's still classified. There's no way you could have been faster than me, unless you had a headcomp on a level with mine, and there's only two places you could have gotten one.
"I know," I said with a lopsided smile, "that you weren't with Omega group, and that only leaves one other possibility---the Department of Security and Intelligence. Back in the war, they had operatives that got our kind of wetware. But it was the implant laser that clinched it. Only one kind of DSI personnel got that kind of implantation...the Cadre. The deep cover agents that got sent to occupied worlds to organize resistance movements. We weren't supposed to know about you, but when you're involved in the kind of shit we were, you hear things." I cocked my head curiously. "I always wondered why they didn't have a few of you on Canaan."
"They tried." She surprised me with her candor. "Their ship was destroyed en route. That's why they didn't send the Glory Boys in---you were too valuable."
My jaw must have dropped to my ankles when she used the term Glory Boys. As far as I knew, there were only about a dozen people alive that knew that name, Colonel Murdock's unofficial nickname for the dozen of us. It had been his idea of a joke, considering we were the most highly-classified unit in human history.
"It wasn't Cutter's idea to ask you for help, Constable," she informed me. "It was mine. I...stumbled upon your existence during the war. I was on Loki during the Tahni occupation, and during a resistance raid, we were unexpectedly helped by a pair of commandos in some kind of high-tech combat suits. They disappeared afterward, but I asked a few questions when I got back. Once I knew you existed, it wasn't that difficult to dig up more information. Just out of curiosity, of course," she smirked.
"After the war, I stayed in...they gave me a cover as a Corporate mineral scout." She must have noticed the look of surprise on my face, because she nodded. "That's right---I'm still with the Department. Or I was until this all began, at any rate."
"Go on," was all I trusted myself to say to that little tidbit of information.
"I was supposed to be spying on Corporate Council operations...we suspected them of attempting to manipulate and bribe planetary governments and Commonwealth officials."
"Oh there's a news flash," I muttered.
"I just knew what they told me. My partner wasn't involved---he was just a greedy little gnat I'd picked up as a cover. The Department has several operatives in place in the Corporate Council-
--or they did. Now, I suspect it's probably the other way around."
"You mean the Council has control of the DSI?" I gaped at her, not believing what I was hearing.
"All I know," she went on, "is that, when I reported the attempt on my life to our man in the Council Security Force, they came after me with fucking assault shuttles. After that, I didn't trust anyone. I went to Cutter because he was an old friend from my days in the Cadre, and learned about you later on, but I don't trust anyone else. For all I know, they could have their hooks in the Patrol, too. I'm not sure I could trust Fleet Intell, even if I could get anyone there to believe me."
"If you're telling me the truth," I said, thinking furiously, "then there's something you need to know. I ran a memory dump on Fourcade's headcomp back at the station, and I found out something---something I didn't tell you before because I wasn't sure if I could trust you." I sucked in a deep breath, looking her in the eye. "The Corporate Council is funding, organizing and directing the Predecessor Cults."
"Gaia's tits," she hissed, eyes widening. "Why?"
"I'm not sure I could tell you why, but I did find out how. They've convinced the Cultists that they're in contact with the Ancients, and that they've come back to warn us of some sort of impending doom."
"How did they manage to convinced them of that?" she wanted to know.
"Easy---they let the Predecessors do the talking for them."
"What the hell are you saying?" She stared at me like I was insane.
"Our friend, Kevin Fourcade," I explained, "was introduced to living Predecessors. Invited to run bioscans to prove they weren't robots or cyborgs. Whatever they were, they were living non-humans, not of any race discovered so far in the Cluster."
"What..." her eyes seemed to be on something light-years away. "What did they look like?"