For a Few Credits More: More Stories from the Four Horsemen Universe (The Revelations Cycle Book 7)

by Chris Kennedy

  No longer immediately deadly. Great, Sheila thought. For the last year they had been living on the alien equivalent of a New Jersey Superfund site, left behind by galactic Nazis from many millennia past. “So, what sort of chemicals are you bringing up? Anything we can use?”

  Burblann did the shrug-thing again. “Doubtful. Will get you list.”

  * * *

  “What do you see out there, Meyers?” LT Poretti asked. The new leadership of Bravo Company nestled at the base of a hill, just a half-mile from the Jeha-Zuul farm. The moons were down, and the darkness was so deep that a merc could not even make out the blacked-out CASPer next to him.

  LT Meyers nonetheless smiled, and it gave off the faintest glow through his open suit hatch. They were not risking radio comms this close. “What do I see? There is no Dana…”

  “Only Zuul,” several people answered back.

  “Har-dee-har-har, fucker,” Poretti hissed. “Now how about some intel instead of old movie references?”

  His smile dropped, and he referenced the IR drone footage transmitted via laser point-to-point comms to his pinplants. “Standard pup patrol platoon on duty. No plus-ups, no extra active sensors. Nothing to indicate they’re expecting an attack. It’s just after the midpoint of their nightly rotation, so likely the nadir of their awareness and focus. Attacking later during the shift change might leave them more confused…”

  “But they’d have twice as many guns on station. We do this now. All or nothin’.” Poretti turned to the NCOs, Sheila included, who had all become her de facto platoon leadership. “You’ve got your assignments. Radio silence. We hit in five mikes. Move it.”

  Sheila rolled away and fled to her platoon’s position on the right flank as quickly as possible, while still keeping as low and as quiet as a half-ton CASPer could. Overhead, the recon flyer was stealthed and at high altitude. The strike flyers were still below the horizon and not radiating any of their emitters. On the ground, the CASPers and tanks were also maintaining a total blackout, with all active search, targeting, and comms silent. In addition, the blacked-out shells of the CASPers were also masking their IR signatures, venting their waste heat over strap-on dry ice heat sinks. Those thermal suppressors would not last long and had a real tendency to back waste heat up into the cockpit, but while they were configured, the whole CASPer would radiate heat exactly at the background air temp—a good feature when going up against dogs who could see into the infrared.

  The plan was bold, violent, and textbook to perfection. Sneak in as close as possible, start with air strikes all around, but concentrating on the Zuul main access—a rookie move, hitting where the enemy was strongest, but that was what you got when you knocked out the pack alpha. Back up the naïve power play with an oversized frontal assault using the remains of First and Fourth Platoons against the strongest section of the Zuul defensive works. Once the Zuul committed to reinforcing their front, the Texans would spring the envelopment on both flanks. It could only be done if the Texans committed all their troops and operated without a reserve; it wasn’t something a force prepared for a long defensive siege would attempt. But they knew something the Zuul did not: their own home office had screwed them, making a protracted siege untenable.

  It was bold and reckless, but sound. The NCOs had signed off and not fragged the enthusiastic, young second lieutenant. So now Sheila waited, crouched with the rest of Second, poised to strike.

  Five minutes passed, and the strike flyers boosted to a nine-mile altitude and let loose with all their ordnance. Missiles with shaped-charge warheads, focused EMPs, and HVP carriers streaked to their targets in coordinated-time-on-top waves, followed by stream-raids of follow-up hits. Zuul compound MACs, particle weapons, and lasers snapped into action, taking a ruinous tithe on the human weapons, but they could not kill all of the incoming rounds, not once their targeting queues became overwhelmed.

  Every defense has a saturation point.

  Explosions blossomed around the Jeha farm compound, and several fixed-place defenses fell silent. An opening in the center could be seen! Poretti, Myers, Cuchinello, and Evanston stood and charged, along with the combined, armored might of two Terrible Texan platoons.

  Zuul mortars and direct-fire poured into their ranks, but these were not the sucker punches the unarmored humans had endured before. Most of the CASPers just shrugged off the light arms and shrapnel and kept firing, kept charging forward.

  The Zuul in the compound shifted, moving to reinforce their front, such that not even two platoons of assault-ready humans could penetrate it. It was what Sheila and the flank platoons had waited for. What did it matter that fewer Zuul than expected had rushed out to reinforce the defensive front? Were there fewer dogs within, or did they think what they had were sufficient numbers?

  Sheila stood and yelled, “Attack!” into her comm.

  And that’s when the heavy weapons that had been missing from the farm’s defense opened up from behind them. Unarmored Zuul rose from the mud or threw off multicolored grass roofs from their foxholes in the approaches the Texans had already passed through. How the hell long have those mutts been waiting there in the dirt? Sheila wondered, dismayed. They had seen nothing moving ever since the first mortar attack. Were the Zuul that sneaky, or that patient and prescient?

  MACs and heavy chemical lasers snapped and laid waste to First and Fourth. Screams and cries of anguish and confusion filled the comms channels where there had only been silence. In Sheila’s blue-force-tracker, the icon for LT Poretti winked out. Then Cuchinello, Evanston, and Meyers. And down the line, as if the pups had a sequential list of their hierarchy and followed it to a fault.

  Others were hit and died, of course, but it seemed as if the dogs only aimed at someone—anyone—who had their shit together and tried to rally the remains of the broken assault. The alien fire worked its way out to either side and into the flanks where Third Platoon had waited.

  And into her own Second Platoon.

  The plan gone to hell, Sheila yelled, “Retreat! Fall back by fire team to the south! Concentrate covering fire on the forces to our rear—we are abandoning the objective!”

  Second held their shit together, she noted proudly, and fell back away from both the Jeha farm and the mud-pups, though they would eventually have to curve around and head back for home. Fire teams and squads covered one another and poured bullets, rockets, and energy weapons into the now-exposed dogs. Going primitive might well have allowed the Zuul to sneak about and lie low better than the humans had anticipated, but it also meant they had virtually no armor to shrug off returning fire. The mutts were massacred…but the damage was already done.

  Eventually, the Zuuls’ leader-oriented focus turned its attention to Sheila herself. A heavy laser sliced through her CASPer’s left leg and left arm. She tried to compensate, picking up a hopping gait, but then a glancing HVP spun her about and planted her in the mud.

  Sheila blew the cockpit hatch and jumped out, landing in a clump of flowering grasses. She regained her footing just in time to stare down the distant maw of a magnetic accelerator cannon pointed straight at her.

  The enemy MAC fired, but the round failed to obliterate her. Instead, a lone CASPer dropped down on its jets right in front of her and took the coil gun round center of mass, directly through the cockpit. Sheila stumbled back and fell, and the mech collapsed, sprawling, where she had been. Through the shattered armor of the cockpit, she saw the lifeless face of a young merc whose name she had never bothered to learn.

  It was the fresh, young private who had hid out with her under the canapes during the battle at the Change of Command.

  * * *

  Back at the relative safety of the GenSha farm, Sheila took stock of what remained.

  It wasn’t a lot.

  Of the 212 mercs in the original complement of Bravo Company, 116 remained, scattered among four shattered combat platoons, the flyer sections, medical cadre, and catering/support. The headquarters element was all but gone, and
if she wanted to reform functional platoons, she would have to cut down from four to two, with a couple of orphan squads left over.

  But that was just numbers. The losses were much deeper than that. For her own part, Sheila could not un-see the faces of her compatriots, now forever lost. Each of the Texans’ Honored Dead—mercs she had served beside for years in some cases, along with a smattering of friends and frenemies, former lovers and major assholes alike—all of them looked back at Sheila in her mind’s eye. They glared at her, demanding vengeance for their restless souls—and she was now the only one who could give it to them.

  In regards to leadership, and with LT Smith in a state of shocked catatonia, Staff Sergeant Sheila Murphy was the senior Terrible Texan on this nameless hunk of paradise. And she had no idea what to do now.

  An alien harrumph sounded just behind Sheila. She turned around and cast a weary gaze at Burblann, waiting excitedly just beyond the crowd of her surviving mercs. Sheila nodded and the bisonoid alien rushed up.

  “How did the battle fare, Staff Sergeant? Has Lieutenant Poretti returned as well?”

  Sheila exaggeratedly looked around her, and then checked the bottom of her bloody boot. “Nope, no Lieutenant Poretti here!” she said, as sarcastically and as viciously as she could, hoping that some of it might make it through the GenSha’s translation algorithms. “Whups! Looks like we must have left her behind, along with the 56 other poor sods who died covering our retreat. The battle? It didn’t fare well, Burblann, not well at all.”

  She grabbed the alien by its elbow and led it away from her remaining men and women. Out of earshot, she turned to the GenSha. “We did a lot of damage to the Zuul and to the Jeha farm’s perimeter, but they pretty much ate our lunch. Bravo Company is less than half effective now, and I have no idea of how that compares to what the Zuul left in reserve. If I had to give you a firm answer though, it’s this: The Texans can no longer protect your farm. About all we can do now is provide cover for a retreat of personnel only to the planetary debarkation point.”

  “No transport crates?” the alien asked, carefully.

  Sheila shook her head. “I’m not even sure we can get away with that. We pull out now, leave everything behind, the Jeha and the Zuul have no reason to waste ammo on us. Try to retreat with everything in tow, they’ll attack us as the sole means to protect their investment.”

  Burblann appeared very distressed. “Failure to protect shipment amounts to breach of contract! GenSha will not pay! Will lodge complaint with mercenary guild and leave scathing review on GalNet!”

  Sheila roared and leapt into the GenSha’s face, knocking the top-heavy bisonoid down. “Do you think I give a shit about that? About this contract, about this farm, or about the goddamn Texans? I’d give anything to win, just once, but all I can offer you is a chance to survive. Do you not get that?”

  Behind them, all the mercs silently stared at her. She was in command of Bravo Company for now, but that might not last long if the survivors thought her erratic and decided to frag her.

  Being in charge was a terminal condition on this rock.

  Sheila reached down to grasp Burblann’s hoof-hand and hauled the massive alien to its feet. Looking down, she saw it had a sheet of paper crumpled there.

  Burblann saw her looking and held the paper out. “What you asked for. List of C117 harvested chemicals.”

  She took the sheet and read it over. It was a mix of complicated organic chemistry formulas, common names for compounds, and lists of rare elements and isotopes. Sheila recognized a number of aromatic hydrocarbons, some truly nasty heavy metal poisons, certain DNA analogs, and a number of things she had no idea what they were. The soil here, supposedly used in the processing of the ancient, terrifying Canavar, yielded a treasure trove of important chemicals, but there was nothing that could help them.

  It had been a pipe dream anyways, she supposed. After all, they had never received any warning about the pseudo-plant pods, nothing to tell them how nasty they were on the inside, or any alerts from their chemical sniffers.

  Sheila looked back at the sheet, giving it another once-over. There was one compound that raised the hackles on the back of her neck, but she couldn’t think of why. She pointed it out to Burblann. “This one here, this PABF. What is that? It sounds familiar.”

  Burblann told her.

  * * *

  “Are you in command of this garrison, human?”

  Sheila looked out the open hatch of her unarmed, borrowed CASPer at the battle-armored mutt standing before her. Behind the alpha, three heavy platoons of equally impressive canid Zuul mercs were lined up, all with weapons pointed at her, alone and very, very much afraid, standing before the GenSha farm’s main gate.

  In answer, Sheila shook her head. “Not really. It looks to me like you’re in command of everything.”

  “So, you surrender?”

  “We withdraw, as discussed. The GenSha farm team and my mercs walk out safely, with no arms larger than a sidearm. We leave behind the C117 harvest, all equipment, all live plants, etc. and declare you the rightful owners of the site, registered with the Merchants’ Guild on the GalNet, but set to automatically revert to the GenSha if we don’t make it back to Karma safely. You win, we live, everybody’s happy.”

  “All but the dead.”

  “Yeah. All but the dead.” She stared at the doglike alien, but it was hard to register how sincere the growling beast might be. Hell, she didn’t even know whether it was a bitch or a cur.

  Well, we’ll see in a minute who’s the bigger bitch here, Sheila thought.

  The Zuul alpha chuffed a bark and gestured her aside. She stepped over and motioned for her people to start. Slowly, a line of lightly-armed CASPers, uniformed humans, and dejected GenSha exited the compound, all under the guns of the victorious Zuul. As they trundled out, the mutts marched in, along with a contingent of millipede-like Jeha agricultural engineers.

  A security squad of Zuul guarded them as they walked past the ruined amphitheater, out of the valley, over the hills, and to their designated landing site. Looking back toward their valley, Sheila could well imagine the mood of the Zuul and Jeha in her old garrison/farm: cautious but ecstatic, their contract saved through the precise exercise of violence. They’d be looking over their haul, the abandoned weapons and supplies, and the transport crate upon transport crate full of near-priceless C117 pods. They’d be careful, as Sheila would have in their place, watchful for any booby traps or subterfuge, scanning continuously for the telltale chemical gas molecules of high explosives.

  But they would find nothing like that.

  Sheila also knew they would find piles upon piles of discarded military meals and mismatched CASPer spare parts. And they might notice that many of the transport crates were not full. Most, in fact, were empty, except for a few placed in strategic locales around the garrison, half full of C117 pods, C117 pods that had taken the highest percentage of PABF.

  Peraza Buckminster Fullerene.

  The explosion that knocked both the humans and their Zuul minders down was powerful enough to strip the tops of each and every intervening hill to bare granite, and shook the ground like the footfalls of the Canavar that had long ago been born here. A mushroom cloud worthy of a full-scale orbital bombardment or an old-school nuke roiled up into the heavens, carrying along with it the souls of every single Zuul and Jeha that had entered their camp or had stood guard well outside the compound.

  The Texans, desperate and forewarned of the apocalyptic blast, fell upon their Zuul guards and overwhelmed them, lack of weapons or not. When the dogs were down, Sheila looked upon her and her people’s works with grim satisfaction. “Okay, Bravo, we ain’t done yet! Let’s get back, kit up, and take this fight to them!”

  * * *

  “Peraza Buckminster Fullerene? I’m sorry, Staff Sergeant, you’ll have to elaborate. I know what fullerenes are, but I’m unfamiliar with that one.”

  Sheila, dressed in her Terrible Texans’ dress unif
orm, but conspicuously missing the bucking bronco patch of her old company, nodded and answered the question from the senior Mercenary Guild auditor in Bartertown on Karma. “PABF, otherwise known as N60, is a metastable allotrope of nitrogen. When I grew up in Midland-Odessa, Texas, chemistry was sort of everybody’s pastime, a holdover from the oil-field days. We learned all about the math and the chemistry of explosives. Most chemical explosives are nitrogenated organic hydrocarbons, with the carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen compounds forming a stable base for the energetic nitrogen bonds. That’s also what your chemical sniffers pick up to register the presence of explosives—aromatic hydrocarbon residue. But it’s the constrained nitrogen bonds that give explosives most of their boom factor. Increase the number of nitrogens, you increase the boom, but you also increase the instability. The biggest, most unstable booms come from pure nitrogen allotropes, like octaazacubane or N8.

  “Now take the single largest self-contained stable carbon molecule: C60,or buckyballs, and replace every carbon with a nitrogen azide. A ‘per-azide buckyball’…Peraza Buckminster Fullerene, the largest allotrope of nitrogen that could theoretically exist, with a yield just short of a tactical nuclear device.”

  “And the GenSha are farming this out of the ground there?” the Guild auditor asked.

  “Yes, sir, them and the Jeha. That and a whole bunch of useful chemicals that they theorize were by-products of ancient Canavar creation. PABF should be unstable as hell, but something about the centuries it spent soaked into the soil stabilized it enough for the C117 to extract it safely. And since allotropes don’t set off explosive sniffers, we never realized the GenSha were farming explosives. For that matter, neither did the Zuul. We loaded our weapons and most of the C117 pods into the shock-proof cases our misallocated supplies came in, then set up the transport pods with PABF-heavy C117s and an electrically initiated thermite grenade on a timer. After the farm blew up, we retrieved our surviving gear and took down the skeleton crew left behind at the Jeha/Zuul compound. The GenSha farm’s a total loss, but they were able to recover enough C117 to still turn a profit.”