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

by Chris Kennedy

  Most of my officers at that time, all of whom got killed on Denar (except for you, Tom), were vets...and really non-coms from other companies. I made ‘em officers, and they made good leaders. But we all saw something in you. So we made you a Lieutenant. In charge of a mech platoon.

  And we sent you to Denar.

  And everyone got slaughtered. At Denar.

  And you got religion.

  That’s the last note in the record from Captain Hull, your CO. Captain Hull got immolated inside his mech when a HEAT round punched through his belly armor and ignited the internal magazines. But before Captain Hull could get killed at Hastings Ridge on Denar, he made that note in your jacket.

  It says...

  “LT Kyle reports he has become saved by Jesus. Questioned if that would somehow affect his ability to lead his platoon, he replied, “negative.” He merely felt command needed to be apprised of his religious status in the event he was killed. So Kyle got religion. I’ll have to keep an eye on him.”

  And then two days later you all went to Hastings Ridge on the contract to pacify the war-like Kara so the colony operation could expand their sphere of influence on Denar, and about 10 seconds after that everything turned into a full-scale battle.

  One mech company, mine, Secure Horizons, against satellite estimates of up to 40,000 insurgents. It seemed all the tribes had gotten together to react badly, and this is putting it mildly, to the outside influence. We shouldn’t have been faulted for our loss by the guild.

  Repeat.

  We should not...but hell, we were.

  I wasn’t there. Shoulda been. But I wasn’t, Tom.

  And so no one knows anything.

  I sit and look at your file, reading all the notes, not because, and I’m being honest with myself here because that’s all I have left, not because I want to know about you, Tom, but because I’m trying to see where I went wrong as I sit here and drink myself to death in the heat of an anonymous storage locker in a sea of anonymous storage lockers. Going over the past...one record’s jacket at a time. No one knows anything.

  I just know you were bright, gifted, and a real killer. And you got religion.

  And you were the only one who survived Hasting’s Ridge.

  I know we failed to fulfill the contract and lost our licensing. I know I had to sell everything, and so I sold your mech. Along with the recovered scrap that comprised the rest. Weapons removed, of course.

  I sold your badly shot up mech to you, Tom, and told you where you could get some illegal weapons to hire out. You just smiled. You always were a quiet kid. You just smiled and said you didn’t need weapons anymore.

  I was already drinking heavily. I barely heard you. After the trial, and during really, I became a full-fledged alcoholic. The insurance hearings. The licensing hearings. The divorce. I should’ve asked why a kid would want a mech he didn’t have the weapons for. I should’ve, Tom. That seems very interesting to me right now on this afternoon, as I sit, drinking myself to death somewhere in San Bernardino.

  I’d like to know, Tom.

  I’d like to know what a kid needs a mech with no weapons for.

  But I don’t. And so...no one knows anything. Really. No one does.

  * * * * *

  Part Two - Last Message of Tom Kyle

  Tom Kyle, system logfile...assign under personal notes. This is for anyone who wants to know what happened to me. Why...why I did what I’m doing.

  After Denar, I took a freighter headed out deep along the Spiral Arm. I asked the captain if he was going by any relatively habitable and yet unexplored worlds.

  “Lot of ‘em out there along the way,” he mumbled. “All of ‘em dangerous.”

  Dangerous to most spacers means any planet. Spacers tend to like space and space alone. And the truth is he’s right. Every planet is dangerous, some more than others. But life is dangerous.

  I’ve known that since I was a kid.

  There was this one day when I realized life was indeed dangerous. When I was kid. Fifteen. And my dad was taken away to prison for murder.

  Everyone in our small community, a relatively upscale military industrial complex tech enclave where every other family was probably sitting on some patent keeping everyone in the best clothes and latest kicks, a brand new car for your sixteenth, knew about the murder.

  Happened at the golf club. One summer night. Mrs. Summers. There was an end-of-summer ball that night. All the parents had gone to it and gotten drunk. We kids were down by the lake until midnight. It was warm and hot, and we went swimming in the dark. I had sex with her daughter that night. Mrs. Summers. And then she was murdered sometime between the hours of eleven p.m. and one a.m.

  And three days later they arrested my dad.

  And I never saw him again because he was killed in prison about two weeks after he was sentenced. I know he didn’t kill her. Mrs. Summers. But doesn’t every kid think that?

  The freighter captain dropped me, literally, over an uncharted world called Tessarah.

  “You realize this is a one-way ticket, son?” he asked me as they cycled the aft airlock. The ship was skimming atmosphere and I could hear a hard whistle beyond the fuselage. It was like the keening moan of some unconsidered ghost we all knew about and weren’t scared of. I’d done orbital insertion before. The company I’d worked for had paid for the advanced training. But I’d never really done it other than training. So I was scared.

  But not of any ghosts.

  Just the two hundred thousand-foot fall in a one-ton mech.

  “Got it. Kick me.” I told the captain and his crew. If they would’ve gone over exactly what the realities of what was coming next, what I’d signed myself up for, I’d would’ve backed out.

  Getting dropped on a planet sounds like something out of movie. And surely there’d be pirates and treasure and a beautiful girl. If it were a movie.

  But this wasn’t.

  Starvation and death were at the bottom of my fall. That’s how life really is. It’s nothing like a movie.

  The reality was there would be no services. No food to find, kill, and prepare. Maybe not even water that wouldn’t make me deathly ill. No medical. No nothing of all the things we take for granted. Everything I thought I might need I’d stowed on the mech.

  I didn’t even have any weapons.

  Wait...Not true. I had a knife.

  And the truth was...I mean...the truth is I might have been hoping to get killed in the drop. Now that I think about it. I hadn’t slept much since Denar. Since Hasting’s Ridge, I try, tried, and was trying not to think about what happened. My company was like my family...and they all got killed, too.

  Except for me.

  It was like losing my dad all over again.

  Captain Hull taught me how to drink.

  My dad taught me how to fish.

  After my dad’s trial, I’d felt like an outcast around Viejo Verde. The enclave where I’d grown up. Chelsea, Mrs. Summer’s daughter and my first real girlfriend, well...that relationship was over three days later. When your dad murders her mom it puts a damper on the future you’d promised each other.

  Sometimes I wonder what happened to Chelsea. If she ever recovered. Moved on. Had a whole new life and never thought about the past. Like me.

  Or had she died too, that night. Like my mom. Except still walking around and watching TV all day. There, and not really there.

  Of course it was a sex crime.

  Mrs. Summers had been raped and strangled on the Thirteenth Hole. Just beyond the lights of the clubhouse. Where all the rest of the parents were drinking and groping each other to old music by some band called Nirvana.

  Chelsea and I promised stuff to each other that night. All that dumb stuff you think is the shape of things. And then you end up at Hasting’s Ridge and find out it was all a lie.

  The next morning all the promises we’d made were gone. Like the mist that had come up in the night when I’d walked her home from the Lake...and her mom was alrea
dy dead and wouldn’t be found until morning.

  My mom died that night too.

  She just kept walking around.

  But she was dead.

  I think I was thinking about all that when they cycled the outer lock and blew me out into high atmo. That’s basically a two hundred thousand-foot drop. Theoretically, it was possible; I’d just never done one from that high. But this was as close as the freighter Cat’s Paw was willing to come. So a two hundred K drop it was.

  I was thinking about that night when everything I thought was real came apart at the seams, and not Denar, when I began to fall away from the ship in a heavy mech. A one-ton mech. My old mech from Denar.

  It had been shot to pieces on Denar. The Kara used ancient slug throwers. Big bore weapons and rockets that could punch mech-skin. Second Platoon, my men, had the left flank when they came over the ridge. We were fighting a reverse slope defense, trying to protect the Caldera City colony. Our intel said the tribes had been massing for weeks before they began the assault.

  They came over the ridge that day, and they kept coming and coming at us. Cyclic barrels melted down. Rocket launchers overheated and warped. Indirect rounds began to prematurely cook-off as the bodies of the Kara stacked higher and higher across the ridgeline.

  You know what got everyone killed, I think as I drop through a hundred and fifty thousand feet with the wind howling beyond the thin-patched skin of the old mech. Sheer numbers and heat.

  Barrels started melting down because of overuse.

  We ran low on missiles but that didn’t matter because the launchers could only fire so fast before they warped the tubes.

  High gain lasers never were any good. Secure Horizons, the merc company I worked for, bought ‘em cheap, and it showed that day. The rain and the damp played hell with them on Denar. You get a good high-intensity burst and then an overheat shut down warning on the board.

  Against forty thousand, one shot at a time adds up to not making much of a difference.

  That was what got us all killed. All the “what’s” got together that day and conspired against us.

  And then I remember I lived. I remember as I fall toward this green alien world of no oceans.

  Captain Hull with First and Third as the anchor at center of the line got killed when they fragged his mech with homemade explosives they’d strapped to themselves. They’d rushed him with so many strapped explosives that literally they’d cratered the ground where he’d been fighting. Killed most of Third Squad along with him.

  One hundred thousand and falling. I hoped the parachute system I’d rigged would hold when the time came. But half of me hoped it didn’t. And that half didn’t mind much.

  I could die here. On Tennarah. Same as a golf course’s Thirteenth Hole. Same as Hasting’s Ridge on Denar.

  I counterattacked on Denar. Counterattacked my own line to seal the gap the Kara were rushing through. Took the crater that was once Captain Hull and fought like the devil was on my six for three hours.

  Ran dry on ammo 30 minutes in.

  Used the big machete Secure Horizons made all their mechs carry as a backup. A big carbon-forged blade about 10 feet long. Then it was all jump juice and hack and slash.

  Three hours later I came out of the crater and the Kara were running back into the jungle. There were corpses everywhere.

  Everywhere.

  And mechs that looked like pieces of Swiss cheese.

  My unit roster inside my HUD was grayed out. Every line. Every call sign. Everyone dead.

  Except me.

  I popped out of my mech and took my rifle back to where Second Squad had been.

  Sergeant Kloos was dead.

  He was a few years older than me.

  And my best friend.

  He’d taken me to a whore house on leave out on Alataur. That was the first girl I’d been with since Chelsea. And she wasn’t even human.

  Kloos was dead.

  Later the tech and maintenance guys, or what passed for search and rescue courtesy of Secure Horizons, came out once the drones told ‘em it was safe to show their faces.

  The 1st Hoplytes of Secure Horizons Private Military Options were no more. Unless you counted me. I was pulled off Denar, and I have no idea what happened there afterwards. I went back to Earth and gave my testimony and...and...and...

  PULL.

  PULL.

  PULL.

  This word flashes in my HUD, and I have no idea why.

  In that moment of what seemed some eternal fall I’d forgotten I was jumping onto Tennarah. There was heavy cloud cover all the way down to twenty thousand. And so it seemed like I wasn’t even falling. Until I got an altitude alert in my HUD.

  I deployed the chute and prayed it would work.

  Yeah.

  I wasn’t split on the question of survival in that moment.

  I prayed it would pop open. I prayed to the God Kloos introduced me to that I would not crater also.

  And it did.

  I’d started praying on Denar. Three days before the battle.

  I prayed now, and the chute deployed, and I drifted down into some lush mountains. Titanic rocks the size of mountains themselves lay scattered and tumbled across one another. There wasn’t a flat landing space anywhere. And if the rest of Tennarah was like this then I understood why the corporations hadn’t bothered colonizing it. It was nothing but a lush forest of twisted small trees, and some occasional giants, and massive mountain-sized rocks tumbled atop one another. And fog. Fog like a blanket that never moved.

  I maneuvered for landing onto a massive rock and tried to land on its upslope. Which I did. Then the mech, whose original gyro stabilizers had been sold for parts after the trial to pay Secure Horizon’s creditors, fell over onto its back and started sliding back downslope toward the edge of the rock, and about a five thousand-foot fall into a mist-shrouded canyon below.

  Don’t worry. I stopped with 100 feet to go before I passed the edge into nothingness.

  I had arrived on Tennarah.

  I lay there in my mech, panting. And realizing I was praying all over again. Praying to someone I didn’t know existed. But praying because I needed for Him to exist. Otherwise life was a little too bleak.

  Kloos had taught me that.

  He’d gotten “saved” as he called it on our last leave. Some hooker. Later he told me all about it on Denar. He told me after we butchered a whole village of Kara.

  He said, “All life is sacred, LT.”

  We were watching the smoke of their huts burn. Their dead warriors burned on the loamy ground all around us also. They were humanoid flightless birds. Hooked beaks. Talons. Spindly legs.

  But life.

  And we’d come upon them at dawn and murdered the whole village. Not for a reprisal. Not because war is hell. None of that movie stuff about how war is hard, and noble.

  Nope.

  We just murdered them because that was our job.

  History is filled with that sorta thing.

  Life taking other life’s stuff.

  That’s all we were doing.

  The Kara didn’t want to play in the big picture, and so this was their reward.

  “All life is sacred,” began Kloos that day when I felt about as empty as one can possibly feel when one stares at burning corpses and homes. Kloos was a big man. Dutch. Built like a tank.

  I laughed at him.

  Because I could.

  Because I’d had enough death to think I was its master.

  Because looking at those birds roasting in front of their huts, their homes, was what it must’ve looked like when they found my dad’s body in the prison shower.

  So I laughed.

  Because I couldn’t cry in front of my men.

  Later when we were cleaning and servicing our mechs, in load-out, and after the after action report, I found Kloos reading.

  He was reading a Bible on a slate.

  “How?” I asked. He had a guilty look on his face. But he smiled no
netheless.

  “Whore. I told her everything. Told her how I wanted to die when I thought about how meaningless life was. Told her if I wasn’t having sex then I wanted to die. And that’s why I spent my entire leave in whore houses. I told her that, and I’d never told myself. I just realized it there at that moment. Like some sudden clarity had opened my eyes as I lay there next to her. And I was willing to be honest because I was paying her and of course...do whores care?”

  I just stared at him.

  “I told her about all the people I’d killed, and how I didn’t feel anything anymore, and that was somehow scarier than feeling something. And you know what she said?”

  I didn’t even move. I just waited. Like it was something I wanted, and needed, to hear. Even though I didn’t know it at the time. I’d been waiting since the night of the Lake and the Thirteenth Hole for someone to explain the madness to me.

  “She told,” said Kloos. “She told me that the problem in this life wasn’t pain. It was pleasure. And she was right, Tom. She was bloody right. The problem isn’t the pain...it’s the never-ending quest for pleasure. And do you know why?”

  I didn’t.

  I was twenty-three years old.

  My life had been a series of reactions to the actions of others.

  “Because pleasure’s meaningless. And our whole life is lived in pursuit of it.”

  And then he said, “All life is sacred. And that’s what gives it meaning. Or rather who...who gives it meaning, is what she was trying to tell me at the time. She didn’t speak very good English. Or Dutch for that matter. But basically because there is a God, and life comes from him, then...there’s meaning. Even though we do our damned best to make it meaningless with mechs and porn. And greed. And all the other stuff...”

  I didn’t know if I bought that. So I told him so.

  He laughed. And it was a good laugh. A different laugh. A kind and gentle laugh that was the opposite of the hardcore killing machine I’d known. The guy with a tattoo that said, “Love is a good sight picture.” The opposite of a guy who’d I once heard over the comm laugh himself silly when an enemy mech’s rounds started to cook off inside its launchers. Not to mention there was a life riding just above all those explosives suddenly exploding. The opposite of laughing in the face of horror.