Wardogs Inc. #3: Metal Monsters (Wardogs Incorporated)

by G. D. Stark

  YOST: WE CAN’T HOLD THE CITY. FIVE OF SIX BATTALIONS HAVE BROKEN. LORD GENERAL IS IN THE HALL OF MEETING. HE IS NOT ANSWERING ME. FALL BACK TO RALLY POINT ALPHA.

  WARD: WHAT THE HELL?

  Multiple flaming projectiles flew overhead in the setting sun, deep into the city. The enemy was unleashing its big guns now. I couldn’t hear the explosions, but they shook the ground beneath our feet.

  “Gardoros,” I said. “You’ve done what you can. Get your men out of there!”

  I looked for a reply but nothing appeared on my screen. Dammit.

  “It’s you and me, Ward,” I said. “Let’s get to the Lord General!”

  WARD: THAT’S THIRTY BLOCKS FROM HERE, TOMMY. WE MAY NOT BE ABLE TO MAKE IT.

  “We’ll make it,” I assured him. “Let’s go! Maybe we can steal a jeep or something!”

  We cut through the alleys, dodging burning wreckage and the occasional potshot from the enemy advancing behind us. About five blocks in, we found a family hovercar, idling and half-loaded with suitcases. On the ground was a dead man staring blankly up at the sky next to the shelled ruin of what I assumed had been his house. A large piece of concrete had crushed his chest. He’d waited just a little too long to run.

  Ward nudged him with his boot. WARD: HE WON’T MISS THE CAR.

  We jumped in and tore up the highway, surprising a team of Axiosi scouts as we plowed through the middle of them. We also had to deal with people begging for rides, knots of looters, old guys with even older weapons either looking out for looters or waiting for the enemy, and a widespread state of complete chaos. Fires were everywhere and personal possessions scattered the roadsides. It was the first time I’d seen what a falling city looked like from the inside, and it was not a pleasant sight.

  Eventually we made it to the edge of the citadel and saw the gates of the access road. Ward shouted at the nervous Sfodrian guards there and pointed to our suits, so they opened the gate to let us through. As we climbed to the top I looked out the window and glimpsed multiple columns of the enemy advancing through the streets, with sporadic fire coming back from the city’s scattered defenders. Perhaps a dozen knights lay here and there below, destroyed by the deadly Unity nanites. Then we rounded one edge and drove under one of the great staircases where men, women and children were hauling their belongings to the top, jostling and panicking as smoke and shells flew through the air.

  Finally we reached the Hall of Meeting and jumped out of the vehicle. I winced as I hit the ground, having forgotten for a moment about my busted ribs. Outside the great hall, guards held back the panicked civilians, most of whom were either screaming or crying. We pushed our way through the crowd, none too gently, until we reached the guards.

  “Let us in!” I yelled through my external speakers. “We have to see the Lord General!”

  The guards gaped at us, then pulled us quickly through, shoving back the crowd that tried to take advantage of the gap.

  We marched in to the building and found the Lord General and seven knights standing in a circle of torches. The smell of incense filled the air. The Lord General turned and said something to me but I couldn’t hear him.

  WARD: HOW DARE WE WHAT? WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT, DAMMIT? WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN HERE WHILE YOUR CITY BURNS?

  The Lord General said something to him and then I saw something in his hand. A black blade, glowing red with energy down the center.

  WARD: YOU’RE KILLING YOURSELVES?

  I suddenly realized we had just interrupted a mass suicide ritual.

  “Goddammit!” I yelled. “To hell with your stupid honor!”

  The Lord General pointed to a projection on the wall. It was a tactical map, and suddenly the despair of the Lord General and his knights didn’t seem so insane. Waves of glowing red dots revealed that not only was the city being hit from the north, the enemy had now flanked the east and west and was streaming up the streets in three directions towards the citadel. Ward and I looked at the map in horror.

  WARD: DAMN, TOMMY, HOW THE HELL ARE WE GOING TO GET OUT?

  “I don’t see how we are.”

  WARD: WELL, I’M NOT BLOWING MY HEAD OFF IN HERE LIKE THESE NUTCASES. I SAY WE FIGHT OUR WAY OUT OR DIE TRYING.

  “Damn straight, Wardog!”

  We had just turned our back on the suicidal Sfodrian lords and were heading back toward the exit when the lights above went dim for a moment and the ground shook.

  WARD: HOLY MOTHER OF POSSENTI, WHAT WAS THAT?

  “That’s orbital artillery!”

  We raced for the door, shoved the guards aside, and looked outside to see blasts of green fire coming down from the sky like the wrath of a furious thunder god.

  “It’s the TA!” I yelled. “The destroyer must have got here early!”

  I ran back into the chamber and looked at the tactical map and saw the enemy advance to the back was suddenly evaporating in very large circles as the destroyer repeatedly hammered the enemy positions with its massive laser cannons.

  The Lord General dropped his blade and shouted something to the knights. They rushed out of the chamber en masse.

  WARD: THEY’RE GOING FOR THEIR SUITS. THEY’RE GETTING BACK IN THE GAME!

  I switched over to our private channel. “Captain, you there? What’s going on?”

  YOST: LOOKS LIKE THE SPACE CAVALRY ARRIVED. I SEE YOU’RE AT THE HALL. LINK UP WITH JOCK, HE’S CLOSEST TO YOU.

  “Let’s go, Ward,” I said. “Back into action!”

  We left the citadel in our car and found Jock’s battalion defending the retreating refugees on the stair. The enemy front lines were still pressing in but they were confused and they had lost their momentum, and every mighty green blast from above demoralized them. From the top of the citadel, rows of massive knights launched rockets down into the broken enemy as they fell back from the city. By nightfall, the city was silent.

  Of course, I couldn’t hear anything anyways, but I could no longer feel the ground shaking. The fire from the heavens finally came to a halt and the shooting stopped, leaving only the glow of burning buildings to light the abandoned streets of the city.

  Chapter 14

  The Lord General surveyed the surrendering Axiosi officers with the air of a conqueror, as if he hadn’t been about to off himself in despair just a few hours before. My hearing was starting to come back but I felt like my ears were full of liquid. Words were being exchanged but it was mostly too quiet for me to hear.

  “The Axiosi are going to turn over the Unity mercs,” Ward told me me and I nodded. “They’re negotiating a prisoner exchange now.”

  We were watching from the edge of a civic square, along with the rest of the Wardogs who were still standing. Morrel and Ace were both down, as was Jock, but all three of them were alive. Wardogs are hard to kill. Park had been winged and his arm hung limply at his side, but he wasn’t about to miss the end of the battle, broken arm or no arm.

  As we watched, a group of Axiosi turned over five Unity mercenaries to the Lord General. They had been stripped of their suits, and between their weird metal appendages and glittering eyes, their inhumanity was obvious to everyone. The Sfodrians surrounded them and guided them into a group behind the Lord General and his knights.

  “Looks like they lost a few,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Ward said. “The TA probably nailed some with that artillery.”

  Even as he spoke, a sleek atmo-ship circled down from above and landed neatly in the unoccupied portion of the square, decked out in blue and red colors. It was an armed transport, bristling with weapons, and it had some sort of fancy seal painted on the nose. The Sfodrians turned and stared at the new arrival as if they were unsure what to do next. I think it was the first time I’d seen the Lord General look surprised.

  “Damn,” Ward said. “That’s not the TA!”

  I was just reaching the same conclusion. A clean-cut officer in a navy blue uniform stepped out beneath the bright white emergency lights of the square. I noted the hazy red
of a personal forceshield glittering around him. He was flanked by a platoon of twelve marines, armed, armored, and also sporting shields. They weren’t taking any chances. And the battlesuits looked more advanced than ours.

  I saw the officer look over our battlesuits and shake his head. “Who is in charge here?” he asked, his voice obviously amplified.

  “I am,” The Lord General responded. “Lord General Landros. I speak for the Spartocracy.”

  “All right then,” he replied. “I see we have some Wardogs here, why don’t you come on over as well. I’m sure you’ve got something to say for yourselves.”

  “Behave, gentlemen,” Yost ordered over our coms. “This isn’t the Navy, it’s the Rhysalani. Looks like this is out of our hands now.”

  We set down our Feempers and walked over to where the Lord General and his knights stood with the Rhysalani officer. As I got closer, I looked at his insignia. He was an admiral.

  “I am Admiral Anselm haut Glauser of His Grace’s Navy, and I am here to represent the interests of His Grace the Duke of Rhysalan.” He looked over at the group of silent Unity cyborgs. “It appears you have some persons of interest to us.”

  As he said it, the Unity mercs bowed their heads, then a moment later, jerked them back upwards in surprise and suspicion.

  “Ah, your suicide cylinders or whatever they are. No, they won’t work,” the admiral laughed. “Not this time. We have some rather sophisticated dampening fields in place, so you will come with us, like it or not.”

  The Unity mercs tried to make a break for it towards the cliff wall some meters away, but they were none too gently held back by the Sfodrian guards. The Admiral nodded to his marines and four of them surrounded the Unity prisoners, pushing them inside the interlocked forcefield of their personal shields. I noted they weren’t touching them.

  The admiral turned to Captain Yost and Lord General Landros. “I would request that you finish your surrender talks with the Axiosi here quickly. We will talk in two kilosecs.”

  He then turned around and returned to his ship, leaving us all standing there shell-shocked.

  “I assume you have some sort of contract with the Sfodrians here,” the Admiral said to Captain Yost, then took a sip of his cup of tea. We were standing inside the Hall of Meeting. The captain had insisted that all of us attend so there wouldn’t be any scuttlebutt going around. He wasn’t sure what the Rhysalani had planned, but he wasn’t about to let them cut us out. “Visit strange new worlds, kill people for cash and prizes, then go home, am I correct?”

  The captain inclined his head. “That’s essentially correct, Admiral.”

  “And you,” the admiral said, turning to the Lord General. “You lot found yourselves in well over your heads.” He waved his hand around at the forty-odd knights in a grim circle around us. “You’ve ruled here for a long time. “Giant robot suits and all that, very good stuff. Not good enough, unfortunately.”

  The Lord General looked more grim than he had when he was in the middle of killing himself. He gave the Admiral the very faintest of nods, but even that effort clearly cost him dearly.

  “Never mind all that now. We have a serious problem with those posthuman lunatics ourselves,” the admiral said. “Bloody devils give the Ascendancy a dickens of a time and they have given the Duke more than their fair share of the heebie jeebies. I understand why you hired the Wardogs, they’re not a bad option, but the fact is that you will need a lot more than a handful of mercenaries to face the Unity.”

  “We didn’t know who we faced,” the Lord General snapped. “And we have defeated our enemies many, many times on our own.”

  “But you had to know something was up,” the admiral continued. “Something that you couldn’t handle. Though you didn’t hire very many guns, now did you?” He looked around at us with a raised eyebrow. “A platoon, then? Unless you have some stashed away somewhere.”

  “A platoon,” Captain Yost confirmed. “We worked in an advisory position.”

  The Admiral smiled slightly and raised a hand. An aide refilled his tea and he took another sip. “Well then, it seems your advisory position would have ended rather badly for both parties if we hadn’t decided to crash the party and put an end to the affair. Did you manage to catch all the cyberdevils, then, or will we have to round them up?”

  “We have them all,” the Lord General said. “Our technicians provided us with a scanner capable of detecting their heat signatures.”

  The captain reached over and very gently gripped Edgerton’s arm before he could say anything. I wasn’t sure what had outraged the tech more, the fact that the Sfodrian lord had just taken credit for his invention or the way in which he’d described it incorrectly. It could go either way, I figured.

  “Very good,” the admiral said. “That could prove quite useful. We’ll ask you for the specs before we leave.”

  “This guy is something else,” Jones muttered over our personal channel.

  “Yeah, but we’d probably be dead if they didn’t show up,” Zelag said back.

  “Shush,” Squid cut in. “Talk later.”

  “And, of course, since His Grace the Duke of Rhysalan is not in the business of providing charity, we’ll be generous and split the fee with Wardogs Incorporated. We’ll also take the prisoners, of course, since they’re of no use to you.”

  “Split our fee?” Jock shouted in disbelief. “We worked our asses off for weeks, training up their militia and saving the damn knights, putting our blood and sweat on the line and you want to-”

  There was a rousing rumble of agreement from me and the other Wardogs. We’d done the hard work, and this Rhysalani just waltzes in and expects half the take for his trouble? Hell no!

  Captain Yost didn’t say anything at first. He was obviously thinking the matter through. He opened his mouth to speak but was interrupted by an unexpected party.

  “We also object,” the Lord General said.

  The Admiral looked at him quizzically. “You do, do you?”

  “Yes,” the Lord General said. “We do.”

  “As do we all,” said Sir Mephiston. “The hirelings have fought with honor, and even in their failure they would have died with honor. Now you seek to rob them of their coin?”

  The Admiral shrugged. “You would all be dead without us. If not worse. And His Grace the Duke, as I said, and apparently must say again, does not do charity.”

  “Take the prisoners,” the Lord General said. “We can recompense you for your fuel and your armaments expenditures as well. But we had no contract with you.”

  “Do you know, I thought you might say something to that effect,” the Admiral said. “Let me remind you that your planet is now being orbited by the Berchtold, a Vulkan-class destroyer. I believe you had a ship of your own before, did you not. I understand it developed some navigation problems of some kind. Suffice it to say that we currently hold the uncontested high ground.”

  He smiled and stretched. “Let us all step outside for some fresh air, shall we?” He walked out and we all trailed after him, wondering what he had in mind. Outside the Hall of Meeting, the dry wind whistled past us and we looked down at the recovering city. The fires were mostly under control now and the power was beginning to be restored here and there.

  “What are we doing out here, Admiral?” the Lord General said angrily. “We are men of honor, not merchants in uniforms. We made a deal with these mercenaries and we do not intend to permit you to break it.”

  As if in answer, a massive stream of green light came down from above, blasting a huge crater into the hillside just outside the city, shaking the ground and blinding us all for a moment with its intensity. It left behind a massive pit, steaming as the waters of the aquifer poured into its molten center.

  “I would have moved the impact a little closer into town for maximum effect,” the Admiral said to the officer next to him. “Could have made a very nice lake for a city park, I think. Have the gunner make an adjustment, please.” He turned
back to the Lord General. “Pray, continue, Lord General Landros. You were saying?”

  The Lord General said nothing, his jaw working up and down for a moment, then finally he managed to speak. “We will give you what you ask,” he said at long last. “We are deeply appreciative for your gracious intervention against the Axiosi, and we have decided that your terms are eminently reasonable.”

  The Admiral nodded. “Thank you. On behalf of His Grace, the Duke of Rhysalan, I accept. We’ll take care of the paperwork.”

  He looked at Captain Yost. The captain smiled grimly. “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”

  “Ah, an educated man!” said the Admiral, looking delighted. “Wonderful! You must dine with me tonight, Captain. I’m certain we will have much to discuss.”

  “What just happened?” Ward elbowed me.

  “We just took a pay cut,” I explained.

  “Half a loaf is better than none,” I told the others, a little too loudly judging by the way everyone looked at me. My ears were still ringing.

  We were strapped in on a rattling old atmospheric transport headed back up to the spacedock. I sat in between Zelag and Pitt. My hearing was better after a little work from a doc, but it wasn’t fully recovered yet. My ribs were bound up and aching, but they would heal. Sometimes, just surviving counts as a win. If a platoon of Wardogs disappeared on an independent world out in the boondocks, no one was going to care except for their significant others and the legal team back on Kantillon. You have to take what you can get.

  “I’m a little disappointed things came to a head so soon,” Pitt said. “I just about had the labeling system finished up at our warehouse.”

  “Do you think we’ll get our completion bonus?” Zelag asked.

  “Who knows,” I said. “Maybe half, unless they say we don’t merit it because the Rhysalani intervened.”

  “They probably won’t cut it altogether,” Pitt said. “At least I hope not.”