by Rick Partlow
“I’m here, Jason,” she said, holding a hand up to pause Kage as he was about to order the retreat. “Are Val and Natalia safe?”
“We got them out, but the controller was destroyed,” McKay told her. She felt the bottom fall out of her stomach as she realized what that meant. There wouldn’t be any fire support. “Shannon, I need you to break contact with the biomechs and fall back from the bridge as far as you can…get behind some serious cover.”
“Why?” Shannon asked, confused. “What’s coming?”
“Air support,” she could hear the grin in his voice, recognized it very well after the last six years. “I’ll explain the details later, just trust me.”
She could hear the silence as the transmission ended. She shook her head, smiling despite the circumstances. “General Kage,” she called. “There’s been a change of plans…”
* * *
Commander Caroline Pirelli felt like a traitor, leaving most of her shipmates to chancy reentries wherever their lifepods happened to take them, but she’d abandoned the ship on board one of the assault shuttles and they had a job to do. There were half a dozen of them, not counting the one that General McKay had taken earlier-five from the Decatur and another that was the standard complement for the Sheridan-and thank God it was SOP to keep them armed and ready in case of emergency.
Because I’d say this definitely counts as one, she mused.
As the senior officer on board, and a qualified pilot, she rated the co-pilot’s seat on the bird, so she had a very clear view out the cockpit window as the shuttle entered the atmosphere, flying point in a lopsided V formation. The brown, green and blue hemisphere stretched below her, half sheathed in darkness, half bathed in the glow of dawn as the blinding glow of the sun emerged from behind the curve of the Earth. It was beautiful, she reflected for a moment, suddenly realizing that she was home again and also realizing how much she’d missed it.
Hope Mom and Dad are okay, she fretted silently. They lived near Capital City…
* * *
“Pull back!” Ari Shamir yelled over the general frequency as he ran from position to position, grabbing each of the troopers in his company and pushing them in the direction of the designated rally point on the other side of the original LZ.
It was hard getting most of them to listen: they’d been fighting on and off for hours, and scavenging the dead for ammo when they hadn’t been fighting…the biomech’s and their own. They’d lost half their number as of the last surge, and God alone knew how many were dead in this assault. Everyone was in a haze, getting tunnel vision and focusing on putting rounds downrange to the exclusion of all else, including commands over their radios.
Ari stumbled and nearly went down as a bullet slammed into the armor pad over his right thigh; he felt as if he’d been smacked by a baseball bat, but he didn’t think that the slug had penetrated. He limped-ran to the last fighting position, a hole dug hastily between two trees, then fell into it, taking cover. There had been two Colonial Guard troops in the hole before this last attack; one was gone, hopefully to the rally point, while the other was sprawled half-in and half-out of the fighting position. Blood soaked the dirt and grass around him, though Ari couldn’t see where he’d been hit.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, Ari thought that he should feel something, horrified or sad or sickened…but too many people had died that night for him to work up the emotion. Ari caught his breath for a moment, crouching at the bottom of the hole, and tried to flex his right leg. It hurt like hell, but it didn’t seem to be broken and he couldn’t feel any blood soaking it.
“Roza,” he transmitted on her frequency. “Are you at the rally point yet?”
There was no reply and now he did find the energy to curse. Pulling his carbine up, he climbed out of the foxhole and fired off three quick bursts at a pair of biomech troopers who were advancing across the open field between him and the ditch. One of them went down and the other staggered and Ari took the opportunity to make a run for it.
He should have gone straight to the rally point and organized what was left of his company, but instead he ran a serpentine course that took him across the last line of defense to where Roza’s company had been dug in, behind a low berm that had once been the back wall of a convenience store. Biomech corpses were scattered in clusters of two or three everywhere he looked, but they began to grow thicker as he approached the berm.
The whole length of the earthen wall was buried beneath a pile three or four deep that spilled over the top…and that was where he began to see the bodies of his people. Some had been cut down from behind as they tried to run, but others were half-concealed under the corpses of the enemy, dying where they had fought.
Heedless of his own safety, he pulled out a flashlight and began shining it on each of the bodies, desperate to know.
“Roza!” he called on her radio frequency, then switched to the external speakers and shouted it. “Roza!” The word echoed through the night, but there was no reply.
There…he’d seen movement from one of the bodies, hunched up against the inner wall, with a biomech corpse collapsed over it. He grabbed the Protectorate trooper by the back of its armored vest and yanked it off, grunting with the effort of moving the massive, 120-kilo body. The biomech’s faceplate was shattered, its face pulped by a 8mm slug and its blood coated the barrel of the CG trooper’s rifle from the point-blank shot.
More blood-human, this time-stained the right arm and left side of the Colonial Guard armor from bullet wounds, and something, maybe the concussion from a grenade explosion, had damaged the helmet, knocking loose the faceplate. It was Candidate Matienzo and he was barely conscious, his eyes blinking at the glare from Ari’s light.
“Matienzo, can you hear me?” Ari asked, shaking the man’s shoulder.
“Captain Al-Masri?” Matienzo muttered groggily.
“Where is Lt. Hudec?” Ari asked, remembering to use her cover name. He was fairly sure that Kage hadn’t bothered to explain the situation to the officer candidates.
“Don’t know,” he shook his head, wincing as it obviously caused him pain. “We were trying to fall back…”
Ari grabbed Matienzo’s left hand and pulled him to his feet. “Come on,” he said, “we have to get to the rally point quickly.”
They were turning to head away when he heard the gunfire nearby. There had been the constant background noise of automatic fire in the background for so long he had shut it out, but this was nearby, not even fifty meters away. Ari sprinted towards the sound, trusting Matienzo to follow him.
This is crazy, he thought as he ran. If I keep chasing every movement and gunshot, I won’t make it out of here. She’s probably dead. But he didn’t care and he couldn’t leave her. He’d rather stay there and die than leave without her. The thought was intimidating: he was thirty years old and had never felt that way about anyone before.
It didn’t take long to find the source of the gunfire-it was just over a small rise then down into what had been a drainage ditch a hundred years before. Four biomechs were on the banks of the drainage ditch, firing down toward the culvert; someone was taking cover in the concrete-lined tunnel, returning fire sporadically.
Ari sighted via the aiming reticle in his helmet HUD and fired a three-round burst into the back of the closest biomech’s neck. The Protectorate trooper pitched forward like a marionette with its strings cut, its spinal cord severed, and he shifted to the next target before the other biomechs realized he was there. By the time the second biomech went down, the other two were turning, but it was far too late: the Colonial Guard soldier had crawled forward out of the culvert and was adding another gun to the battle.
Ari saw out of the corner of his eye that Matienzo had come up beside him and was firing his battle rifle one-handed-at this range, it didn’t matter, as none of them could miss. The remaining two Protectorate troopers fell under the withering crossfire and suddenly the area around them was deathly quiet.
Ari
jumped down into the drainage ditch and knelt down to help the soldier there as she dragged herself out of the culvert. She couldn’t stand: there were bullet wounds in both her legs and her helmet was gone, a gash in the side of her head matting her short, dark hair with blood. She was also the most beautiful thing Ari had seen in his life.
“Thank God,” he breathed as he lifted Roza from the ditch. Then he remembered to key his external speakers. “If it weren’t for this damn helmet,” he said, “I would kiss you.”
“Later, kedves,” she leaned her head against his chest for a moment. “Now, we must get out of here.”
“Hold on,” he told her, crouching down and throwing her over his left shoulder, hearing her gasp at the pain it caused in her legs and wincing in sympathy. “Matienzo!” he said. “Watch our backs and follow me.”
His left arm wrapped around Roza’s legs and his right hand filled with his carbine, Ari took off at a trot, as fast as he could manage carrying her extra weight and as fast as they could go and still allow Matienzo to keep up. The first hint of false dawn was visible as a grey line across the eastern horizon and Ari used it as a beacon, more real and visceral than the indicator on the map in his HUD, more comforting than the lines of tracer-fire that cut through the darkness all around them.
“Hurry!” He could hear Matienzo’s yell over his external audio pickups and he risked a glance backwards. A few hundred meters behind them, hundreds of biomechs were swarming out from the wash and he could see hundreds more behind those, all pushing in, spurred on by whatever human was controlling them, sensing that this was the time to throw everything in on one final attack.
“Kusemek,” Ari grunted, reverting to the curse words of his youth on the streets of Tel Aviv. Motherfucker. He tried to run faster, but his right thigh felt like jello and Roza was not a small woman: a meter seven and 54 kilos of muscle, not to mention the weight of her armor. His breath came in short, painful gasps and his feet pounded the dirt, sending jolts of pain up the muscles of his back and into his shoulders with each step, and still that icon on the map seemed so far away…
The pounding of his own pulse in his ears was so loud that he almost didn’t hear the whine of the turbines, couldn’t understand Matienzo’s shouted warning…and was totally unprepared when the officer candidate took him and Roza down in a body block. He rolled off of Roza, ready to scream an obscenity at the younger man, which was when he saw the assault shuttle screaming down behind them, anti-personnel missiles dropping free from its hardpoints and rocketing their way.
Ari threw himself down over Roza, catching a glimpse out of the corner of his eye of Matienzo curling into a fetal position, hands over his head, and then the whole world exploded. A pressure wave lifted him and Roza off the ground, sending them tumbling across the ground, coming to a rest in a rut in the field. When his head stopped swimming, Ari saw a wall of fire where the advancing biomechs had been, the line of fireballs slowly mushrooming into the night.
The assault lander rose into the sky above them, climbing against the bright stars then tumbling back into a turn that took it down the way it had come, passing back over the next wave of Protectorate troops and letting loose another flight of air-to-ground missiles. Ari watched in awe as the ground erupted with a chain of explosions a kilometer long…and then felt elation as he saw a half dozen more assault shuttles coming in from the west, breaking out of a V formation to split up and split the enemy force into separate sectors.
Waves of missiles rained destruction down on the Protectorate forces, secondary blasts from their APC’s exploding in antiphonal counterpart. As they expended their missiles, the shuttles opened fire with chin cannons, hovering on belly jets to pour explosive shells into clusters of surviving biomechs.
Roza sat up beside him, pain etched on her face but satisfaction in her eyes as she clung to his neck for support and, he hoped, just because. Ari worked free the yoke at his neck and pulled his helmet off, feeling the refreshingly cool night breeze drying the sweat on his forehead. He leaned down and kissed Roza gently, savoring the warmth of her, the softness of her lips for a long moment.
She put her head against his chest and just rested there for a moment. Thinking of her wounds, he patted at the pockets of his tactical vest, but found them empty.
“Matienzo,” Ari said, “do you have any smart bandages left?”
“No, sir,” the young man said, shaking his head…then stopped and stared at Ari curiously, seeing him with his helmet off for the first time. “Captain Al-Masri,” he said, frowning, “what the hell happened to your face?”
Ari laid his head back on the grass and laughed.
* * *
Jason McKay stepped down the ramp of the lander slowly, chains of exhaustion and pain dragging at him. His emotions were a roller coaster, taking him from deep sadness to extreme relief and almost giddiness, and it took a concerted effort to keep himself from breaking into sobs. There would be time for that later.
Dawn was breaking over the trees, the golden light coloring the billowing smoke that climbed into the morning sky and adding a hint of gold to Shannon Stark’s red hair where she stood waiting for him, her helmet held under her arm. She looked as drained as him, but they met somewhere in the middle, falling into each other’s arms.
“Hi honey,” he whispered in her ear, recalling words he’d spoken to her over five years ago, “I’m home.”
She snorted, punching him lightly in the shoulder.
“Easy!” he hissed, wincing. “I think my collar bone is broken.”
“I told you you should stay behind that desk,” she said, touching lightly at the bandage on his neck, her tone still playful but tears welling up in her eyes.
“General McKay,” General Kage approached them, clearing his throat. He had stripped off his helmet as well and sweat matted his dark hair. McKay kissed Shannon on the forehead, then turned to face the CeeGee officer.
“General Kage,” he said, nodding to the man. He didn’t know what to expect from the man, but given past experience, he decided to try to defuse the situation preemptively. “Sir, from what I’ve seen and been told, your people fought very well here. Their sacrifice saved tens of thousands of lives.”
“And you saved our lives, McKay,” Kage acknowledged, surprising Jason with his gratitude. “So I gather from that,” he waved at the other shuttles, which were still patrolling back and forth along the battlefield, hunting stray biomechs, “that our ships in orbit prevailed?”
McKay’s expression was grim. “Yes, sir, they did. But not without a hell of a cost. The Bradley is disabled, and the Decatur and the Sheridan have both been destroyed. Admiral Patel,” McKay kept his voice from breaking with an effort of will, “sacrificed his life ramming the enemy cruiser with the Sheridan after the crew had abandoned ship.” He nodded at the assault aerospacecraft. “Some of them are on those shuttles.”
Shannon had looked up sharply when he mentioned Patel’s death, then closed her eyes, mouth moving in a silent prayer, her hand grabbing his in a tight grip. McKay sighed. “It’s not quite over yet. There are some Protectorate ships still insystem, but our cislunar cutters and the Fleet Headquarters station should be able to stand them off until the rest of our cruisers arrive.”
“There is one other matter that needs resolving as well, McKay,” Kage reminded him. McKay squinted curiously, but it was Shannon who answered the unspoken question.
“Antonov,” she said. “I doubt he would put his ass on the line out here in the battlefield, especially not dragging around Fourcade and Riordan. So,” she shook her head, “where the hell is he?”
* * *
Brendan Riordan had been wondering for days now when Antonov and Fourcade were going to kill him, and now he thought he finally knew. He’d had his suspicions when they’d received the transmission from…well, from someone telling them that the Protectorate cruiser in orbit had been destroyed and that Dominguez was dead. They’d been hiding out in a safe house in the middle o
f nowhere outside Ottawa when they’d got the news and Antonov had flown into a rage, smashing everything in the place not bolted to the floor and smacking Riordan around a bit before Fourcade had managed to calm him down.
That was when Fourcade had mentioned the shuttle, and Riordan had begun to suspect that he would shortly be a dead man.
“We just need to get into cislunar space,” Fourcade had said, trying to mollify a seething Antonov. “Then we get in contact with one of the remaining ships and have it take us back to Novoye Rodina. They still can’t touch us there with the defenses we have in place…and we can add more before they’d be ready to make a run at us. Yes,” he’d admitted, spreading his hands to forestall the outburst he had known would be coming, “we’ve lost a lot of resources, but we have the ability to make more. General…I know you’re a patient man. You waited more than a century to attempt to exact your revenge because you wanted to be ready. We just have to be patient for a little longer.”
Antonov had still been incensed, but he’d gone along and they’d taken Riordan’s private flyer, the one whose registration had been spoofed so that it would come up as a different vehicle every time it was used, and made a beeline for west Texas.
Neither of them had spoken to him the entire way, but he’d known why he was being brought along. For years now, he’d kept a private shuttle in an unobtrusive little hangar on a shut-down storage facility just outside the boundaries of the Rio Grande Nature Preserve. It was a just-in-case emergency getaway vehicle; a bit of paranoia that he’d felt was justified by the various pots into which he’d stuck his political spoon. The hangar and the shuttle were only accessible to his DNA and biometric identification, so they would need him alive to access it…and then they wouldn’t have any need for him at all.
Riordan understood full well by now that he had made several huge mistakes, the biggest of which had been the illusion that he’d ever been in control of this scheme. No, the one who had been in control was Kevin Fourcade. Oh, Antonov was giving the orders, but the one who’d arranged everything, the one who’d created an army of biomechs that Riordan had never known existed, the one who’d given the Protectorate forces a Goddamned star cruiser as well as many more warships than Riordan had ever agreed to and conveniently left off the fail-safe shut-offs he’d insisted on…that one was Fourcade.