by Mark Wandrey
“Okay,” he said. “I can deal with the Human troopers. Just take out the huge machine, then I can sweep up the Human infantry later.” They didn’t appear to have anything heavier than ballistic weapons. His troopers were vulnerable to the small arms; his J-F9a wasn’t. He started to maneuver.
Wham!
“What now?” he bellowed.
“REAR DECK ARMOR 10%,” the computer displayed as the Human in his powered armor sailed over the tank, riding a pair of its rockets like an acrobat.
“Unbelievable,” Chosht bellowed. The powered armor landed, and Chosht pivoted his turret toward it. “I have you,” he said and reached for the firing control. The huge machine unfolded an underslung earth-moving boom and hit the tank like a hatchling hitting a rock with a stick. Oh, it’s an excavator, he thought as the tank flew sideways.
* * *
Murdock scored another hit on the rear deck of the fucking tank, and it was a good one.
“Yes,” he said as he sailed over the J-F9a with only two of his three jumpjets still working. Not bad, he thought as he made an okay landing. It was then he realized the tank’s turret was already in line with his landing position. “Oops,” he said, “that’s bad.”
The excavator nailed the tank squarely with its huge scooping mechanism. It looked a little like a scorpion tail mounted upside down with a ten-foot-wide bucket on the end. He would have laughed at the absurdity of the scene if the tank hadn’t rebounded from the impact directly into him.
His CASPer bounced off the side of the tank with a horrendous crash. Inside, it felt like he’d been hit, well, by a tank as the J-F9a skidded along the tarmac. The impact wasn’t enough to lift the forty-ton tank into the air, though it could have been enough to flip it. Instead, it managed neither of those things. The tank spun in a circle until it collided with the already crushed HecSha dropship, at which point it came to a sudden and noisy stop.
Murdock, weighing only half a ton, wasn’t as lucky. He was spun wildly, fighting the suit’s already finicky gyros, and using his jumpjets to try and turn the bouncing flight into a flat trajectory. It didn’t work. He rebounded off the side of a concrete retaining wall, and lost consciousness when he hit the tarmac.
* * *
Chosht cursed constantly, partly from the pain and partly from the frustration of getting his tail kicked by a giant digging machine. After he hit the remains of the dropship, Chosht put the drive system into overdrive and worked it back and forth until he pulled free of the smoldering remains. Of course, the entropy-cursed monster machine was still moving toward him.
He pivoted the gun and fired at it again, again, and again. Each shot tore massive gashes in its superstructure, legs, and underside.
“Will, you, just, die!” he bellowed as it came closer and closer. He fired yet again, and the shot penetrated deep into the machine’s guts. Something exploded, and it froze. “Yes!” Chosht cried in triumph as it started to fall. Toward him. “No!”
Chosht spun the guidance controls and jammed the power all the way down. The tracks spun crazily, reluctant to bite into the ever-deepening ice on the tarmac. For an agonizing second, he thought he would meet the same fate as the dropship; crushed under the machine. He wasn’t sure it could completely smash the J-F9a, but would it really matter? Trapped under a thousand tons of wrecked excavator was just as bad.
However, the tracks finally got enough purchase, and he managed to scoot out of the way, as much as forty tons of Zuul-manufactured heavy tank could “scoot.” The excavator, shot dozens of times and trailing smoke from many of its wounds, fell like some inconceivable herd beast, hitting the starport tarmac with a thunderous crash, and shattering the concrete for a dozen meters in every direction. Chosht’s tank did a tiny bunny hop on its treads as he brought it to a stop. He’d beaten the thing!
The biggest adversary gone, Chosht looked for the Human in the powered armor. He wasn’t surprised to see it slowly climbing to its feet. It looked as bad as the excavator—burned, dented, and barely functioning. Chosht decided he’d just run it over. He powered up again and started to turn. A rocket flashed out and hit him squarely in the already-damaged tread section, shattering the mechanism. The J-F9a made a hideous grinding noise and came to a ragged stop after turning a half circle on its remaining treads.
Both mostly disabled, the tank and the powered armor faced each other with less than a hundred meters between them. The snow was finally stopping, and there was a tiny line of red sun on the horizon. Dawn.
“Come on, you fucker!” the powered armor’s speakers blared. One of its arms pulled a grenade from its belt and threw it at him. It bounced off the glacis plate and exploded. Clang! The temerity of this Human! If he’d been born a HecSha, he would have been a commander. Well, now he was going to be dead. The Human half walked, half stumbled forward. Chosht took control of the offensive system and spun the turret slowly toward the Human. Now it ends.
* * *
Mika was spinning back and forth. What the hell? She opened her eyes and groaned. It felt like someone had spent a week beating her with a sock full of marbles. Her back and ribs hurt, and her vision was swimming. She shook her head, which hurt more, but partially cleared her vision. Bent over double, she realized she was swinging in space by a rope.
“Dandridge,” she called. There was no answer. She craned her head around backward and saw the top of the building they’d been using as a sniper’s nest was gone. Only a smoking ruin remained. She was hooked to a climbing rope, one of the ones Dandridge had brought in case they needed to climb through the damaged part of the building. He hooked me up when I wasn’t looking, she realized, then threw me off the building before the tank fired.
She looked back at the ruins of the building and knew Dandridge hadn’t had time to save himself. “You crazy fucker,” she said. Though his sacrifice had saved her life, she was far from safe. She tried to see where the rope was attached, and could only see that it disappeared into the wreckage at the top of the building. “Jesus Christ,” she said, “what’s the damned rope tied to?” As if in answer to her question, she dropped a meter and jerked to a stop.
“Owww!” she cried as her web gear dug into her guts and chest. She was pretty sure she had some cracked ribs. It didn’t help that her rifle was dangling from its sling another meter below her, still attached to her gear. She was about to detach it and let the weapon drop when she heard the distant crackle of small-arms fire followed by a metallic Crunch, Skreeee, Bang!
Mika was no fan of pain. Who was? But you didn’t serve years as a special ops sniper in a Human merc unit if you couldn’t suck it up when it counted. She dug deep, grabbed the strap on her gun, and started to haul it up to her. She’d just reached for it when a familiar stab of pain, followed by nausea, slammed into the back of her head. The world spun crazily.
She gasped, and the rifle fell out of her grip, snapping against the lanyard. Her vision swam, and she was back on mission, picking off Aposa infiltrators one after another with her rifle, until a laser beam took a chunk out of her brain. Then she was back.
“Not now,” she begged, biting the inside of her lip until she tasted blood. We’re sorry, Sergeant, the vertigo and nausea episodes will never completely go away. The words of the merc doctor on Karma echoed in her mind, the words that had ended her career, and gotten her a medical policy payout and a cabin on Valais. She’d never asked for it and never wanted it.
Now she was dangling six stories up as occasional snowflakes fell, her friends were dying, and she was helpless. “I am not helpless,” she snarled, and grabbed at the lanyard again. Slowly, deliberately, one hand grip at a time, she hauled the weapon up. It started again, the same burning, and the bile rose in her stomach. Must be the position, she thought, refusing to let go of the gun. She hugged the rifle to her chest, nestling the barrel between her breasts, and waited for the sickness to pass.
Kaboom! The explosion echoed across the snow-covered city of Atlantis. Mika felt the rope slip
a little, though not as much as last time. She glanced down at the weapon. It looked okay. The plug had come out on her pinplants, so she reached down and slipped it back in. Instantly the gun’s status appeared in her mind.
“60% MAGAZINE – LASING CHAMBER 32% – WEAPON READY.”
“Good boy,” she said and patted the weapon. She was an old-school shooter. She’d never liked using her pinplants to aim. No, Sergeant Mika Gruszka preferred the Mk 1 eyeball. She liked to see through the scope and leave her pinplants to manage things like weapon controls, power levels, and firing. The timing of pulling the trigger was best done at the speed of thought.
She linked with the scope and moved the barrel to get a view. Using it through her pinplants, a mental window appeared in her mind’s eyes. She found the starport and zoomed in. “Holy fucking shit,” she hissed at the scene of destruction.
The excavator was down, faceplanted in the snow-covered ground and burning like a merry yule log. Nothing was moving except… “Murdock!” she screamed in joy. Holy hell, he was alive! She didn’t know how, but there was no doubt it was him. How many CASPers were on this planet? One.
The fucking dozer was still there, too, and they were facing off like a couple of old west gunslingers. Only it was a popgun versus a particle cannon. Murdock didn’t even have a gun; the crazy motherfucker was throwing grenades at the beast of a tank. The turret was moving. She realized he was alive just in time to see him die for real.
“45% MAGAZINE.”
So the gun wasn’t perfect after all; the magazine was leaking. She hoped she wasn’t breathing any of that shit. She slipped a little more. The distance below her loomed. The tank was on target. Fuck this, she thought.
Gently swaying in the snowy morning of Atlantis, six stories above the street and six and a half kilometers from the starport, Mika used her legs to move the gun. A lifetime of training, though, prepared a sniper for any number of variables. It taught them how to position, how to plan, how to calculate a shot. Nothing prepared you for dangling from a rope and shooting a laser at a target six and a half kilometers away.
Her very first lesson as a sniper came back to her. “We’re snipers,” the man said, an old warrior dating back to pre-contact days. “One shot, one kill; that will be your creed.”
“One shot, one kill,” she whispered, timing her movements from the wind and matching them with the mentally projected scope. The tank barrel was lining up on Murdock. She found the point she was looking for.
* * *
Murdock snatched his last K-bomb from the CASPer’s harness and hastily threw it. He was hoping for a hit on the tank’s particle gun barrel. It was the only chance of disabling it. The suit’s shoulder servo caught, and the throw was for shit. Well, he thought, at least I’ll die in a CASPer. The barrel pointed right at him, and fired.
* * *
“Die, you worthless mammal!” Chosht yelled and pressed the firing stud.
“REAR ARMOR FAILURE.”
“FUSION PLANT DAMAGED.”
“F11 SHROUD PIERCED.”
“WARNING…CONTAINMENT BREACH!”
“What just happened?” Chosht asked, and the magnetic containment on the J-F9a’s fusion reactor failed. As Jim Cartwright had learned on Chimsa, if there was a flaw with the J-F9 series Zuul tanks, it was the fusion plant. When they failed, their baffle plates didn’t do a very good job of blowing clear to let the star-hot plasma vent safely to the sides.
This one didn’t turn into a small nuclear bomb like the one had on Chimsa; its baffles worked mostly as they were intended. However, the one vent Murdock had managed to stomp on was connected to the forward baffle, which would have routed the plasma from the front of the fusion plant out the roof of the rear deck. Unable to go out the vent, it instead breached the forward firewall of the engine compartment.
Chosht heard a loud bang, the baffle plates blowing out, followed by a high-pitched scream. A split second later a tongue of star-hot plasma was funneled into the crew compartment, instantly vaporizing everything inside. He never knew what happened.
* * *
The tank exploded with a brilliant white flash of actinic lightning, like a tiny star. Jets of plasma burst through every vision slit and instrument hole, reminding Murdock of a tiny little lighted glass ornament his mother use to put on the top of their Christmas tree. The tank’s turret blew off. If flew a few meters in the air, spun around, and crashed back onto the burning wreck with a thunderous BOOM!
The shockwave of the explosion blew Murdock off his feet, and the CASPer crashed backward into the snow and ice, sliding a few meters before coming to a stop. How many times am I going to get knocked on my ass today? he wondered.
“Murdock,” he heard on his radio, the voice a little static-filled from the low-power receiver.
“Mika? Shit, girl, I figured you went with the building.”
“Yeah, and I thought you died in that starport building, too.”
“Dandridge?”
“No,” she said simply.
Shit, he thought. “You okay?”
“Not really. I’m dangling from a burning rope, I think, and I’m a little worse for wear.”
“I’ll see if we can get someone there.”
“I’d appreciate it,” she said.
Murdock put the call out, and Vince answered immediately. He was in the area and would get right on it. He grunted as he forced the suit to work, eventually getting to his feet. The CASPer was pretty fucked up. “I need to get a handle on the situation here.” He scanned the area for hostiles and didn’t find any. The starport looked like what it was, a bloody war zone. He spied a figure moving toward him. As it got closer, he recognized the familiar old stoop-shouldered man using a spent rocket launcher as a crutch.
“Well, I’ll be fucked and left for dead,” he said as Dod hobbled up. Murdock pointed at the smoldering tank. “You do that?”
“I shot out the tread,” Dod said and spat blood in the snow. “Don’t know who blew the dozer to shit. Looked like the reactor fragged.” The old merc glanced back the way he’d come. “When the tank blowed up my truck, it knocked my ass out for a bit. Guess I’m lucky the dino bastard didn’t cook the cab part as well.” He gestured at the front half of the garbage truck they’d used as an APC. His words were a bit slurred; it appeared he’d lost his false teeth in the fight.
Murdock pulled an arm free inside his CASPer and scratched his head; noting it was wet, he saw there was blood on his hand. He’d been beaten up pretty thoroughly himself. Who the fuck knocked out the tank? he wondered. There was no way his K-bombs did it.
“Don’t think many of the irregulars made it,” Dod said, looking around, then up at the dead monster excavator. “What do you think about those two crazy fucks?”
Murdock looked up at the wreck as well. It had ended up making more of a difference than he could have guessed. Problem was, the cockpit was up on top, and with it lying on its face, they couldn’t see it from the ground.
“A lot of people died today,” Murdock said. The whole thing looked shot to shit. Plus they weren’t responding to the radio. “Let’s round up whoever we can find.” He looked at the HecSha barracks suspiciously. “We need to clean this up, fast.”
* * * * *
Chapter Fourteen
Mika was beginning to regret not telling Murdock she was in the shit. Twice more the rope slid further, the second time at least two meters. It was a synthetic fiber, tougher than steel and as light as anything you could imagine. Its one weakness was it would melt, and at a substantially lower temperature than steel. Like, a lot less. The burning ruins of the building above her were certainly hot enough. Her rope was slowly turning into goo.
The starport was a disaster, of course. She could still see through her rifle via the connected pinplants. Her shot against the tank was probably the best one she’d taken in her life, maybe the last one. If so, it was worth it. Murdock was far too sweet a guy to die to a fucking dozer.
She s
till clung to her rifle. She knew logic dictated she dump it, but her mind refused to accept that. It was a Mabushii QN-55, the last service weapon she’d used as a merc. Just under two meters long, it was nine point two kilograms of deadly technology, and had been her tool of the trade for twenty years.
Mika’s commander had gifted the QN-55 to her upon her medical retirement. Better models were available, she knew. The weapon had sentimental value to her. Enough for her to justify that nine point two kilograms wouldn’t make the difference between her living and dying. Frankly, she’d rather end her life with it in her arms than watch it spin to the ground without her. They were family. Forever.
The rope gave another jerk. Is this it? she wondered. When it jerked again, she realized it wasn’t giving way; it felt like someone was yanking on it. She craned her head around, ignoring the pain in her stomach and threats of another episode from her screwed-up brain. One of the windows on the last intact floor was a short distance above her. Inside was Murdock’s informally adopted kid, Vince. He was reaching through a break in the window and shoving the rope with a rifle.
“You okay?” he yelled, barely audible through the remaining window.
“Do I fucking look okay?” He smiled and shook his head. Mika sighed. Then the rope dropped a little more and his eyes got big. He was gone for a second, and when he came back there were a dozen more kids there, all younger than him. She was about to ask him what they were going to do when she saw them all picking up a good-sized office desk.
“Cover your eyes!” he yelled, and got out of the way.
You have got to be fucking kidding me, she thought, and then they were running at the window. “Don’t do—” CRASH!