Birthright: The Complete Trilogy

by Rick Partlow

  “Weapons emplacement in the northeast dome,” Kara reported without emotion over the cockpit speakers.

  “I got it,” Cal droned, giving his attention to the ship’s targeting systems.

  “Remember we want intell,” Kara cautioned him.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Cal murmured, seemingly to himself.

  Cal didn’t move a muscle, but Rachel knew he didn’t have to. The Ariel seemed to slow and dip slightly and Rachel thought the interior cabin lights dimmed as a scintillating lightning bolt of accelerated protons sliced through the air and struck the ground what seemed like less than a meter in front of the dome. The turf exploded with the violence of a ton of soil that had just had all its moisture liberated in a flash of heat the temperature of a sun, and the wall of the dome blew inward from a blast of steam moving at hypersonic speeds.

  The Ariel’s drives roared back to full power and Rachel could feel a forceful shove from underneath her as the belly jets began lowering them to the ground.

  “Subtle,” Pete commented dryly.

  There was another lightning bolt from somewhere above them and to their right, flashing down into one of the other domes from the Dutchman to take out another weapons emplacement, but before Rachel could see much detail the Ariel was touching down. The ship jolted heavily on her sturdy landing gear and Rachel tried to keep her hands steady as she hit the quick-release for her restraints.

  Caleb was first out of his seat, vaulting out of the cockpit with a lithe agility she still marveled at after all these years. She knew Trint could have been second, but he hung back, bringing up the rear on purpose. Rachel waited for Pete to charge out of the cockpit, an eager grin plastered across his face, then she headed after him at a more sedate pace.

  “The most important thing out there,” Trint said quietly from just behind her as she stepped through into the utility bay, “is to act without hesitation. Do not think about what you need to do, simply do it.”

  Rachel nodded but didn’t respond, concentrating instead on quickly but carefully snapping her pulse carbine into the connections that attached it to her vest, then pulling on the helmet Cal had adjusted for her earlier. The byomer reflex armor came with a hood like the one Cal and Deke had worn in the war, but trying to wear it had made her too claustrophobic.

  She barely had her helmet on by the time the rear boarding ramp descended and was still trying to get used to the holographic Heads-Up Display projected in its visor as she tromped down behind Pete. She could feel the frost in the air even through her byomer suit, a chill that was different than the slightly-too-cold climate control on the ship. It was just above freezing outside, about as warm as it ever got, and light enough that the night vision filters in her visor didn’t have to activate. She was grateful for that, since things were confusing enough as it was.

  There were people running everywhere and only the blue halos her HUD put over the friendlies kept her from shooting one of Chang’s troops. She saw Caleb taking a knee just past the ramp and then going prone and she followed his example, remembering his instructions to keep watch over a portion of their perimeter. She couldn’t see any enemy around, but she heard yelling and the sharp cracks of pulse guns and her helmet sensors told her that they were coming from the dome just past the one the ship’s proton cannon had struck.

  Rachel stole a look around at the dome they’d fired on and her eyes went wide at the destruction the single shot had wrought on the building. There was a hole at least five meters deep and twice that wide burned out of the turf in front of the wall and the wall itself had been shattered. A gaping section of it no longer existed, jagged and burned at the edges. Of the crew and the weapon they’d served there was not even a trace left.

  She shuddered at the thought of the lives snuffed out as if they’d never been, and a small part of her wondered if it had bothered Cal at all. A blast of heavy pulse gun fire sliced through one of Chang’s operatives less than fifty meters away and half the woman’s body wasn’t there anymore, what remained slumping to the ground in a mass of charred and smoking tissue that didn’t remotely resemble a human.

  “This way!” Caleb called over their tactical communications net, his voice echoing in her earpieces and in the air around them.

  She saw him rise up from his crouch and sprint for the blasted opening in the wall of the dome ahead and she scrambled to follow. Pete was off to her right, trying to stay in the wedge formation, while Trint was behind her and to the left, but it was all she could do to keep track of them and herself while still looking out for threats and trying to run without stumbling. Her weapon felt like it weighed a ton and the soft ground seemed to suck at the soles of her shoes despite the light gravity. Everything seemed harder and she was sweating in her armor, even with the cold.

  Cal disappeared into the smoky darkness of the interior of the dome, its interior lighting taken out by the blast that had provided their entrance, and Pete ducked inside behind him. Rachel hesitated for just a heartbeat at the edge of the hole, letting her helmet’s optics tell the story of what was inside. Her husband and brother-in-law showed up as blue-haloed figures moving along the curve of the wall to the right of her position, while fires and charred equipment glowed red, yellow or white here and there for a dozen meters into the dome.

  It took her a moment to notice the threat icons. Each was red and yellow with a hint of blue on the thermal scanners, but they were haloed red by the targeting computer in her helmet to let her know they were potential enemies. They were scattered through the far end of the building, probably in different rooms though her helmet’s sensors couldn’t see the walls. Each of them probably ready to kill her…

  She shook off the fear and moved to the left, opposite the direction Cal and Pete had taken. She knew Trint was coming with her and she kept moving, not wanting to make him think she wanted him to get in front of her. If she was going to be taken seriously as an asset during this trip, she had to pull her own weight.

  The further she moved along the circumference of the building, the clearer her surroundings became. The lights were out, but the smoke was thinning and she could see the walls that separated off sections of the dome through the light-intensifying filters of her helmet's optics. This was some sort of operations building, she thought. There were inactive holotanks and the supercooled bulks of quantum computers towered in the center of the place, a deep, glacial blue on thermal. The rooms she saw looked like offices and conference centers like the ones she'd seen on Inferno at the military base there.

  It was right then she saw the body…or rather, the part of a body. Someone had been too far away from the blast to be totally vaporized but too close to live. It had been a man, she thought. Not modified too heavily, just a regular looking man in a grey uniform. There was nothing left of him below the chest. No blood, just a cauterized lump of black, like a log that had been struck by lightning. His face was untouched, and he wore a look of surprise, as if he’d tripped over something and was more embarrassed than hurt.

  Rachel swallowed the bile that had risen in her throat and skirted away from the corpse, trying not to stare at it. She was glad her helmet filtered out the smell.

  You’ve seen dead bodies before, she chided herself. You’ve seen the dead bodies of your husband and your daughter. This is surely nowhere near as bad as those.

  She concentrated on the thermal signatures of the living threats ahead of her. The closest was about ten meters away, behind the closed doors of a conference room, crouched alone in a corner.

  Probably unarmed, she thought. And they want prisoners to interrogate, so…

  “I’ve got one,” she announced on her throat mic. “Trint and I will take them alive.”

  She heard Cal’s voice make the beginning of a sound and then clamp down into silence for a moment and she knew he had to be forcing himself not to tell her to stop and let Trint take the lead.

  “Roger that,” he finally said. “Be careful.”

  She smiled thinly,
knowing how hard it must have been for him to let her accept that risk.

  Just have to make sure I don’t get killed.

  The door to the conference room was shut, and she waved Trint forward, facing outward to cover him as he let his weapon hang free and went to work on the locking panel. She didn’t see what he did; her attention was focused on scanning for threats as she crouched in the hallway next to him. Whatever it was, it only took a few moments before he was tapping her on the shoulder and waving to the open door. Rachel already had the stun grenade in her hand, her thumb poised over the safety. She flicked off the safety then chucked the weapon through the opening and ducked aside.

  There was a muffled thump and a light she could see with her eyes squeezed shut, then a shrill shriek that hurt her ears even through her helmet’s filters. She waited a second past the cessation of the noise, then looked at Trint and pointed to the right, indicating she would take the right side of the room. He nodded acknowledgement, the unnatural stiffness of the motion showing that it wasn’t a natural instinct for him, and then they both slipped through the doorway, weapons at the ready.

  The room was dark, but her infrared filters and the computer simulation of her helmet’s optics made it look like broad daylight; so she saw clearly the uniformed man lying senseless on the floor beneath the conference table. He would have been tall had he been stretched out, but he was curled into a fetal position, his pale face twisted in confusion and pain from the effects of the stun weapon.

  “I will secure him,” Trint said, stepping forward and pulling a restraint web from his vest pack.

  Rachel nearly overrode the Tahni, but held her tongue; Trint taking charge of the prisoner made sense. If the man was booby-trapped or had a hidden weapon, the cyborg would take less damage.

  “We have a prisoner,” Rachel reported over their tactical communications net as Trint used the web to immobilize the Naga mercenary. “We’re in the,” she quickly checked the compass built into her HUD before going on, “northwest conference room. Do you want us to stay here with him?”

  “Wait one,” she heard Cal’s terse reply. There was the crack of weapons discharging---it could have been from Gauss gun projectiles breaking the sound barrier or from a laser pulse causing a miniature thunderclap when it ionized the air in its wake---barely audible through the walls of the conference room.

  She tried to remember how to access the feed from Pete’s helmet camera, but then decided against it---no use getting distracted. She kept her eye and her gun trained on the door to the conference room, waiting for Cal to respond.

  “Negative on staying in there,” Cal finally said, voice still calm and business-like. “We can’t guarantee the security of this building yet. Take him outside and get him back to our ship.”

  “Understood,” Rachel acknowledged, trying to imitate his curt professionalism. “We’re heading out now.”

  Trint had heard the transmission and was hauling the prisoner to his feet, supporting the dead weight easily with one hand. Rachel nodded to him, took a deep breath and went out through the door in a crouch, the muzzle of her carbine following her eyes as she watched the hallway. The Tahni moved ahead of her, holding the prisoner in front of him as he headed back towards the hole in the exterior wall. She followed, walking backwards, seeing the thermal ghosts of the other occupants of the building as they ran this way and that, watching flares of red and white as they traded shots with each other.

  She fought back an irrational urge to go help Cal and Pete, knowing it was ludicrous: Cal had forgotten more about close-quarters combat than she would ever know.

  “Watch your step,” Trint warned her, but she didn’t need it: the HUD in her visor was showing her the scene behind her and she could see in the projection that she was coming up on the entrance to the dome and a half-meter drop to the ground below.

  She looked back to make sure she didn’t stumble, just long enough to get one foot firmly on the ground. When she looked back up, someone dressed from head to toe in black armor was pointing a pulse rifle at her chest.

  She couldn’t think to jump, she couldn’t think to dodge, she couldn’t think to shoot; but she could fall. She was half-off-balance anyway, one foot tentatively on the ground and the other slipping off the raised lip into the dome; it just took an unconscious relaxing of her plant leg and the ground was rushing up at her back, just as the black-armored trooper fired the laser weapon.

  An actinic flash flared above her and she squeezed the trigger of her carbine reflexively, the long, barely-controlled full-auto burst travelling upward as she fell and chopping through the chest and neck of her assailant. The breath went out of her in a panicked wheeze as her back hit the ground and her vision filled with stars, but her finger stayed pressed against the trigger and the magazine emptied with a wash of heat she could feel through her byomer armor, the air around her filled with the crackle of static electricity and the snap of superheated air.

  By the time her vision had cleared, the armored trooper wasn’t visible and she scrambled to her feet, sure that the soldier was coming down to finish her off… Then she bumped up against something hard and unyielding and spun in a near panic to find Trint standing behind her, his weapon at the ready in his free hand, while the other still held the insensate Naga employee.

  “It’s all right,” Trint told her, nodding back at the dome. “He’s done.”

  She turned and saw that the armored figure had collapsed backwards back into the charred entrance way. His head had been blown off his body by her laser-fire, and his chest was a ruin of charred and bloody craters.

  “Why didn’t I see him on thermal?” Rachel made herself ask, fighting against the sick feeling in her stomach and forcing her hands to go through the practiced motions of replacing the empty magazine in her carbine.

  “Stealth armor, they call it,” Trint explained, gesturing towards the downed enemy with the muzzle of his carbine. “Good to conceal heat signatures…” His face twisted in the Tahni equivalent of a smile. “…not so good against pulse lasers. Come, we need to get back to the ship.”

  Rachel shook off the feeling of unreality that had settled onto her and tried to pay attention to her helmet’s threat indicators. Then she remembered the stealth armor and decided she’d better rely on her eyes.

  This is just the beginning, she realized, with a gone feeling in the pit of her stomach. What the hell am I doing?

  Chapter Eleven

  Conner:

  Deke squatted on his haunches and stared into the face of the dead woman, frowning slightly. The female was fairly young according to the data his headcomp had extracted from her corporate ID chip, not yet forty, with seven years’ service in the Department of Security and Intelligence that had abruptly ended four years ago. Jillian Rosales was, according to her job description, an encryption engineer; but that intellectual pursuit hadn’t stopped her from grabbing a pulse pistol and trying to shoot it out with Deke and Kara when they’d broken into her office suite.

  Now, she was folded over herself, crumpled in front of her work-station with a pair of fist-size holes through her chest. Bright red blood stained her impeccable uniform and the floor around her and he could see it pooling around the toes of his boots where they contacted the tile. It was beginning to turn dark now, nearly an hour after her death. Lights still flickering from the damage the breaching charges had done to the dome’s power relays played over the woman’s once-pleasant features, now twisted with pain and panic…forever.

  “I don’t think that one’s going to talk,” Kara said, stepping up behind him.

  Deke looked up at her, still frowning.

  “You’d be surprised,” he said mildly, eyeing her. Kara still wore a suit of byomer armor that matched his own. Skin tight, it hugged every athletic curve of her and nearly broke his train of thought. “Why does a crypto tech grab a gun and run headlong into a firefight she knows she’s going to lose?”

  “Who knows why people do things?” sh
e asked with a dismissive shrug. “Maybe she thought we’d kill her anyway.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” Deke allowed, finally straightening to his full height, still looking down at the dead woman. “Maybe she thought that. But there were, what, sixty, seventy people here?” He waved around them, indicating the larger base outside the enclosed dome structure.

  “Seventy three,” she told him, “according to the last count Robert’s people came up with.”

  “And how many surrendered?” The question was rhetorical as he already knew the answer.

  Kara scowled and he could tell she wasn’t happy with the answer. “None,” she replied quietly. “We captured five, but they were all taken with sonics or stun grenades.”

  “Yeah,” he grunted, finally stepping away from the body. “You want to start working on the systems in this building?”

  “I already checked,” she told him, shaking her head. “They were wiped on a molecular level, probably about the time we hit orbit. We’d better hope we can get something from the ones we captured.” She waved at the exit. “They’re about to start now. Wanna come?”

  He followed her out of the room, feeling tired. Not physically, but mentally…and, it seemed to him, spiritually.

  “This is kind of illegal, isn’t it??” he asked her quietly.

  “We’re way past legal, Deke,” Kara said with a derisive snort, stepping over the body of a security officer in the entrance hallway. “We went past legalities when they sent an alien ship to attack a military base. At this point, we’re at war.”

  “That’s a relief,” he murmured. “Wouldn’t want to think I’m a criminal all of a sudden.” He couldn’t see Kara’s face from where he walked behind her, but he hoped that had brought at least a smirk.

  The ground outside the dome wasn’t as clean and well-groomed as it had been when they’d landed. Scorch marks and debris littered the areas around the dome, along with the odd corpse and the smoking wreckage of a ducted-fan hopper. Deke knew from the reports he’d audited via his neurolink transceiver that casualties among the attackers had been light, and that they’d all been from Chang’s people. Most of them had come from one of the shuttles that had been damaged by a ground-based Gauss cannon. It had gone down on the ice fifty kilometers away and there was no response to communications.