by Rick Partlow
They should've left more than one guy guarding this area, he mused clinically. Then again, they didn't have unlimited forces, did they?
His headcomp broke into the security system of the hopper in seconds and the ducted fan helicopter's motors hummed to life; he could feel the motion as the fans spun up beneath him and he silently willed them to higher speeds, one eye watching Tahni blood as it pumped steadily out onto the pavement.
What if it were me? Deke wondered, waiting impatiently for the fans to get up to speed. What if Earth had lost the war, and we were the ones being occupied? Would I be out there, bleeding to death trying to take back my world?
He grinned as the indicator lights went green and he yanked the hopper into the air.
Hell no!
He was three hundred meters away when the Heartbreaker blew, a distant thump he barely heard over the hum of the lift fans. He sniffed disdainfully. It was a weapon for losers; if you planned for losing, then you were going to lose.
If they didn't want to be occupied, they shouldn't have started the damn war in the first place.
The kilometer back to the storage shed should have taken seconds to cover, but Deke was forced to fly low, almost at street level, to avoid being shot down by paranoid Ops Center gunners who were sure to see everything in the air as a threat with no communications to tell them otherwise. Destruction lined his path: burned out buildings, dead bodies, blown-up vehicles and a haze of smoke that obscured everything. The devastation flashed by on either side as he guided the aircraft through the streets of the base only a couple meters off the ground.
He ignored the blaring warnings of the hopper's anti-collision system, his headcomp denying its insistent attempts to override manual control. Instead, he gave his full concentration to flying the aircraft far too fast for its altitude, trying not to think about what might wait for him when he arrived. If it weren't for the fucking jamming, he could just call the Ops center and have them send troops out.
He frowned. His headcomp informed him the hopper had a laser line-of-sight transmitter besides its conventional microwave transceiver, probably so whatever Colonel owned it could open the door of his private garage when it was raining. If he could get a message through to the Ops center before they took a shot at him... It was a risk, but Fuck it he decided. He yanked the hopper upward with a surge of power to the belly fans and aimed the nose at the Ops center, keying the laser LOS transmitter and sending his secure military ID via his headcomp.
"This is Captain Conner, DSI," he transmitted via the cockpit pickup, "do not fire! I have personnel at the storage shed outside your north gate. They have intercepted a nuclear weapon the infiltrators were trying to use against us; it's on a timer and I need to use this hopper to get it away from the city before it blows. Do you read me?"
A second passed and he felt a hundred targeting reticles centered on the hopper's heat signature, but then a voice sounded in the overhead speakers.
"Roger, Captain Conner, we read you." It was some enlisted drone with a generic outworld accent that could have come from anywhere off Earth, but it was the most welcome sound he'd ever heard. "Do you need support?"
"Roger, if you have any Marines or Security Force troops handy, send them out to the storage shed and check on the two friendlies there ASAP. I am inbound in one mike."
It was actually less than a minute, now that he could stop flying nap of the earth. He saw the smoke first, of course...dust and smoke mixed, clouds of it rising up from multiple Heartbreaker detonations.
Shit.
The storage shed was ripped apart, blackened and half-collapsed; and the cargo jack was on its side, its undercarriage pocked and charred from repeated laser strikes. He couldn't see the nuke, or Kara and Janice, through the smoke and smoldering flames. He stopped looking at the infrared and thermal sensors, just bringing the hopper down next to the wrecked shed as quickly as he could, throwing the door upward and jumping out before the fans had settled the craft completely down.
"Kara!" he yelled, forgetting to even draw his sidearm as he looked around for her.
He moved around the overturned cargo jack and tried not to look too closely at what seemed to be burned and shredded body parts that surrounded it. He told himself they were from Tahni Heartbreakers and yelled Kara's name again.
"In here," came the response from the doorway of the storage shed. It was quiet and strained, but the voice was hers.
He ducked through the doorway and found her sitting on top of the armored case that held the nuke. They must have moved it inside to more easily defend it, he figured. Glare from the Op center spotlights leaked through the holes in the opposite wall of the shed; by that light, he could see that Kara's face was blank, her eyes staring into nothing, the carbine he'd given her held loose and nearly forgotten in her hands. She had a nasty laser wound in her leg but didn't seem to feel it.
Janice Claiborne's body lie next to her. She was still warm, but getting colder even as he watched, her blood pooling around her on the floor of the shed from multiple laser hits to her chest and neck. Her eyes were open wide, the light behind them extinguished. She might have been saved still, if they had a fully equipped medical center with a vat of medical nanites to dump her into in the next few minutes...unfortunately, the nearest one of those was in high orbit, hours away. They didn't even have a first-aid kit between them.
"She didn't run," Kara said dully, still not looking at him. "She didn't quit, even after getting hit the first time. Just kept shooting."
"She was a good troop." Deke said, kneeling down in front of Kara and finally catching her eye. "But we gotta' move this bomb, and I need your help doing it."
Kara nodded, taking his hand and coming to her feet with a wince. She slung the carbine over her shoulder and grabbed the handle at her end of the shielded case while Deke took the other end. The case weighed at least a couple hundred kilos, but between the two of them they were able to maneuver it through the door and out to the open hatch of the hopper. He set his end in the cargo area behind the pilot's seat, then helped Kara push it in the rest of the way, the scrape of the metal against the polymer floor grating at his nerves.
Deke climbed into the pilot's seat and manually accessed the aircraft's navigational systems, quickly switching it over from satellite guidance to magnetic dead reckoning. He programmed it to head east at an altitude of ten meters for twenty kilometers before landing, then manually overrode the emergency systems that would have automatically prevented it from doing what he needed it to do: splashing down in the sea and sinking like a rock.
"That's it," he told Kara, hitting the control to engage the autopilot before he jumped back out and pulled the hatch shut.
He gently took her arm and pulled her back as the belly fans on the bulbous aircraft began to spin up, billowing dust into the air. She didn't resist, didn't even blink at the particulate cloud rising up. The hopper lifted with tortuous lethargy and Deke was fairly ready to scream at the damn thing to hurry up; in seconds, it had reached its target altitude and the steering fans angled backwards, sending it off with an ever-increasing pace. He kept watching as it buzzed over the devastated landscape of the base, still deathly afraid that someone, Tahni or human, was going to shoot it down and kill them all.
That shot didn't come, and neither did the premature detonation he'd feared. Instead, the hopper faded from view in less than a minute, disappearing into the inky night beyond the spaceport and heading out to sea. He let out a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding, feeling his shoulders relax.
"Are you Captain Conner?"
Deke had heard the pounding of armored feet on pavement for the last half a minute, which was why he didn't jump when an external PA speaker on one of the battlesuits boomed the question only meters behind him. Kara did, though, he noted. She was somewhere inside her head, not paying attention to her implant sensors or her surroundings.
He turned and saw the four battlesuited Marines stomping up around the stor
age shed, scanning their surroundings for threats with weapons at the ready. Their armor was matte camouflage but it was also clean and untouched. Irrational anger flared at that and he fought to keep it buried. They'd done as they were ordered, staying put and protecting the Ops center.
"That's me," Deke confirmed. "This is Major McIntire. We have a casualty back in the storage shed if you can get someone to..." He searched for a moment for the right way to say it. "...to look after her," he finally decided.
"Uh, sir," the man---Sergeant Dorsey, according to his IFF---said hesitantly, weight shifting from one massive foot to another, pavement crunching beneath them. "Umm...you mentioned something about a nuclear weapon?"
"Yeah." He pointed off towards the inland sea. "Don't look that way."
Of course, the Marine looked that way. Deke didn't, but the flash speared his eyes even facing away from it.
Damn, didn't make it the whole twenty klicks, he mused. If it had ditched, there wouldn't have been much of a flash. Kara was still looking down, thankfully, and at least the Marines had optical shielding in their helmets. He hoped not too many people in the city had been looking out to sea.
"What the fuck?" Sgt. Dorsey exclaimed. "Was that..."
"Sergeant," Deke told him, ducking down and pulling Kara with him into a low crouch, "do me a favor and don't fall on top of us."
Deke had been counting silently since the flash. It took right around forty seconds before the shockwave hit; he reckoned the hopper had made it nearly fifteen kilometers before the timer expired. It wasn't a huge shockwave as these things went, just a sharp rumbling that would have made him stumble had he still been standing, then a hot blast of wind that buffeted them with sand and debris for a long moment.
When he rose and looked towards the sea, the mushroom cloud was already forming, destroying the night with its day-bright glow. The Marines stood stock-still as they regarded it, Lot's wife looking back at the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and suddenly turned to salt.
"Sweet Vishnu," one of them said sincerely, more a prayer than a curse.
"Is this shit over yet?" Dorsey wondered aloud, sounding overwhelmed.
"Over?" Kara repeated. Deke turned to look at her, then shuddered slightly at the set of her eyes. She finally seemed to have shook off the shock of Janice Claiborne's death, if not the anger. "This shit is just beginning."
* * *
Tyya-Khin stared in awe at the mushroom cloud rising above the inland sea. A hot wind made the trees sway in what used to be called the Imperial Garden, but Tyya barely noticed it; he steadied himself against the slight earthquake but his attention was frozen on the nuclear explosion and the thought of what it would have done to Tahn-Khandranda if it had gone off at the Commonwealth base.
"What have you done to us?" he asked, his own voice sounding tiny against the distant, rumbling roar of the blast. He turned an accusatory gaze at Kah-Rint, who leaned against one of the tall, stately trees with a look of satisfaction on his weasel's face. "What have you done to me?"
"I've made you a general, like your father," Kah-Rint told him, offering a casual gesture of salute, his tone sounding sincere. "The people will sing your name when they remember this day."
"And how would they have remembered the day if I had destroyed the largest city on this world with your weapon?" Tyya demanded, his words rising in volume as he gestured at the false dawn. "Would what remained of us sing my name or curse it?" He advanced on Kah-Rint, hands balled into fists. "You told me it was an EMP device!"
He didn't seem to notice when the two burley Tahni males behind Kah-Rint stepped forward, hands on the weapons holstered across their chests. He was armed himself, a laser carbine slung across his back, but he made no move to reach for it.
"And it is," Kah-Rint argued. "A primitive one, to be sure..." Tyya seemed ready to explode again, but the older male forestalled it with an upraised hand. "The object of this operation is to free our people of human rule, Tyya-Khin. No sacrifice is too great for this goal, and I had thought you had agreed with this before we began." He tossed his head back in a philosophical shrug. "Tarl-Kan understood this...he gave his life rather than surrender to the humans."
"You should have told me," Tyya said sullenly, turning away from the older male, wiping absently at a smudge of carbon on his cheek. It stung, having been too close to another warrior's Heartbreaker explosion less than an hour before.
"I shouldn't have needed to," Kah-Rint spat. He tossed his head again. "No matter. This is nearly as good. Had the weapon gone off as planned, we could have blamed the destruction on the humans and used it to unite our people offworld. As things stand...now the Commonwealth will have no choice but to respond to this. There will be pressure from their people to act."
"And why do you seem to think this is a good thing?" Tyya demanded, trying to keep his voice and his emotions under control.
"Because, as the humans say, for every action comes an equal and opposite reaction." Kah-Rint put a palm against Tyya's chest in a gesture of respect and trust. Tyya stared at him, not trusting him completely but not pulling away. "I must go now, while I still can. I need to be free to coordinate with our brothers on other worlds, and to provide further support to the cause. I leave our home in your strong hands, Tyya-Khin."
He turned and walked towards a hopper that was idling nearby, trailed by his bodyguards. Tyya watched them silently until the craft was airborne and flying parallel to the tombstone memorial to the nuclear blast. Only then did he walk back to the groundcar that had brought him to the park. He sat down in the front, trying to relax the knot between his shoulders.
"What will you do now, Tyya-Khin?" The voice from the back of the vehicle made his stomach lurch, made his animal hind brain nearly overpower the turmoil of his conscious mind.
He fought to make his thoughts connect with his words. "Y'aa-an-Roh," he said to the female, "I fear we have yoked our plow to the windstorm. I do not know how we can let go."
"We have lost Tarl-Kan," she reminded him. He glanced in the mirror set above the car's control stick and saw her face partially concealed by the shadows, only her mouth and eyes clearly visible. "He had much influence among the older generations, especially the surviving commanders of the Emperor's military."
"They will be the first arrested after today," Tyya said bitterly, pounding a fist into the console in front of him. It hurt his hand, and he felt he deserved it. "Much I have accomplished for our people this day, my lady."
"The young males will be energized," she told him. "They will want to take the next step, with or without you. And the anger will spread after the humans retaliate for this."
"We have ignited this flame, and it will feed on itself," he whispered. "I can't abandon them, lady; so I will lead them, even if it is only to their death."
"I will do what I can to support you," Y'aa-an-Roh promised. She reached up from the rear and put a hand on his arm and he flinched away.
"Lady, surely you know..." he warned her, his tongue thick, eyes glazing over.
"I know, Tyya," she told him, hands going to either side of his face. "My time has come and I choose you."
Tyya left any attempt at argument, throwing up the divider between the front and rear of the vehicle, ripping off his armor as he pounced upon the female. Later, when his mind worked again, he considered that perhaps she had chosen him at that moment simply to keep him from descending into despair; but there in the vehicle, surrendering to visceral instinct, he did not think at all.
Interlude:
Inside the Northwest Passage Corridor
"What, exactly," Trint asked quietly, "am I looking at?"
He wasn't sure how far down the lift had taken him, since he'd been in free fall---somehow---for the entire descent down the passage, and in complete darkness. He'd known, on an intellectual level, that the Predecessors had possessed antigravity technology; it was a bit disquieting to experience it so personally. The base's AI had guided him out of the gigantic sp
here that contained the control center for the technology that protected and monitored the whole star system and led him to a concealed hatchway in the fusion-form base over which it floated. The dark circle was barely wide enough for his shoulders to fit through, and he'd been fairly paranoid about descending into it.
Now, that concern seemed to fade from his consciousness as he looked out into the huge, dimly lit chamber somewhere deep beneath the surface. Floating near the center of it was...something. It was vaguely oblong and curved in ways that tugged at his sense of reality, like it didn't quite belong to this universe. It didn't resemble anything he'd ever seen before, but the closest he could come to equating it to something familiar was the seed pod of a tree. At first, with no perspective, he'd thought the thing fairly small, but as he tentatively stepped towards it, he could tell that it was at least a hundred meters long, and that the chamber was much larger than he'd first thought.
"This was under construction when the Predecessors left this place," the AI told him. "Under development, I should say, as it had not yet been perfected nor even really tested. Had there been more time, they would have waited to see if it worked, but they were forced to abandon it for more conventional means of transportation."
"It's a ship," Trint deduced, his voice sharp with interest.
"It is," the sentient computer confirmed. "And I completed it for them, with no expectation that it would ever be used." Trint thought he detected pride in the voice, and he knew the AI had done it on purpose to make it come across in Tahni.
"There is no Transition Line out of this system," Trint stated. "What good is a ship? It would take me centuries to return to the Cluster, even if your ship could travel close to the speed of light." His eyes and head described the Tahni equivalent of a shrug. "While I might very well be able to survive that long, I doubt I would enjoy the experience."