Unfaithful Covenant

by Michael Anderle

  “I know,” snapped Sokov. “I didn’t trust them from the beginning, but could you easily betray your own people without solid proof of corruption?”

  Jia scoffed. “It’s rarely that simple. There are a lot of dark forces out there, but it’s not as simple to point at a particular company or the government and say they’re the evil ones responsible for everything. The truth is, bad people only looking out for their own interests are everywhere, and if you’re convinced you’re going to shape a perfect world, you’ll always be disappointed.”

  Sokov swerved to avoid a mound of rotting meat. “What about you? Don’t you fight for a perfect world?”

  “Not anymore.” Jia jumped on top of the mound and leaped from there, achieving jump thruster height before landing without losing any speed. “I’m fighting for a good-enough world. I learned the hard way that worrying about perfection blinds you to what you can actually do to make your world a better place.”

  Erik grunted in frustration. “There are forces out there who use people like you to undermine the UTC, not because they care about freedom, but because they want to increase their own power. I’m not going to blame you for having a cause you believe in, but that doesn’t mean you’re innocent in all this.”

  “I know.” Damir slowed the bike to let the exos catch up. “Once this is all over, I’m sure I’ll end up in prison, but first I have to make sure those mercs and their pet monsters don’t kill everyone I care about. I admit my mistake, and I admit the FSA’s mistakes. The only thing I can do now is try and make up for them.”

  A missile screamed through the sky and smacked into the top of the building in the distance, launching smoking debris all over. The massive explosion shook the ground even where they were. Two Army Dragon gunships converged near the burning building, their cannons looking like streams of light.

  “How are we doing, Malcolm?” Erik asked. “Go ahead and transmit to everybody.”

  “No threats within three kilometers,” he replied. “Most of what I’m picking up long-range looks like normal rebels taking on the Army. Some exoskeletons, but not a lot of Elites.”

  “Wonder if they used too many up in the first offensive,” Jia mused.

  Erik adjusted his comm to transmit only to Jia and Cabrina. “It’s good we made our move. If we’d waited much longer, we might have gotten caught up in all this.”

  They followed the scout bike down a wide road. Skeletons of buildings lined either side, and massive piles of debris blocked much of the road. Damir grunted in irritation and carefully guided the scout bike around the obstructions.

  “I hope this doesn’t end with me being court-martialed,” Cabrina muttered. “That would be a bad end for the Pena family tradition.”

  Erik laughed. “If you capture enemy nukes, they’ll probably promote you. Besides, you have authorization for a recon mission.”

  “But I didn’t pass the intel along because I knew they might tell me to stay put.”

  Erik climbed a debris pile in three quick jumps. “Learn to bend the rules a little now, and you’ll be much happier for the rest of your military career. Trust me.”

  Damir’s bike slowed to a crawl when a veritable mountain range of blackened rubble filled the street. The terrain favored the exos, who jumped or scampered over huge chunks that used to be buildings or parts of the roadbed. From the level of devastation, someone must have pounded the area with artillery, but the piles were too neat for them to have formed from explosions. Erik didn’t understand why anyone would clean up the area, only to block most of the roads instead of shoving everything to the sides.

  His confusion turned into concern following the abrupt disruption of drone feeds. “Jamming,” he shouted.

  The drones continued flying ahead. Malcolm had been smart enough to anticipate the situation and had programmed them to follow the scout bike, not that it did a lot of good. Damir was barely moving at this point.

  “Tighten up,” Cabrina bellowed. “Expand shields. Standard ring on me.”

  The eight exos expanded their shields with echoing whirs and clicks. By doing that, they temporarily sacrificed full mobility for defensive capability. Cabrina’s squad spun with practiced ease until they formed a rough circle that provided no safe angle of attack for enemies. Erik and Jia continued to face forward, along with Cabrina.

  Malcolm’s drones hovered in place, waiting for their target to continue moving, but the jamming made them nothing more than targets waiting to be shot. The same thing could be said about the squad. Erik couldn’t muster much surprise when gun barrels poked out the rubble piles and opened fire.

  “Ambush!” Cabrina screamed. “Go double-tri formation!”

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Controlled pessimism on the battlefield led to superior situational awareness. Jia had been thinking their trip to the mercenary encampment was going too easily and had been expecting something just like this ambush. She’d loaded and aimed her plasma grenade before Cabrina shouted her warning.

  Her grenade launcher flung the deadly explosive toward the closest pile of rubble, the explosion blasting away half the rubble and revealing a Torch Dragon Elite. The blast and the resulting spray of rubble obscured the enemy but also temporarily halted their attack.

  The moment of reprieve was short, then enemy guns came alive all around, rounds pelting the exos’ shields. Damir accelerated and spun the scout bike, leaning so far into the turn, his shoulder almost scraped the ground. His quick movement saved his life, helping him avoid autocannon rounds from a squat beetle-like Elite emerging from another pile. Six-legged almost-spiders pushed out of others.

  Erik and Jia both jumped to the side, out of the primary firing arc of most of the enemies. They sent another volley of plasma grenades into the Torch Dragon Jia had attacked, the explosion severing the head of the Elite and leaving the body a limp mess.

  Another Torch Dragon Elite scampered free of its cover, but when Erik and Jia tried a similar move, their grenades exploded before reaching it, victims of its tiny anti-grenade turret. It wasn’t as annoying as a shield, but it was frustrating enough.

  Cabrina’s squad’s machine guns fired together, the rattle shaking pieces off the remaining mounds. The squad had broken into two groups of three, Alpha Four through Six forming a small triangle and confronting two Elites wriggling out of mounds behind the main group. The Army exos opened fire, raking the Elites with machine gun rounds.

  “Die, insects,” shouted one of the spider Elites in a cold, metallic voice. He leapt from his pile, revealing a rocket launcher.

  His bravery and taunts didn’t count for much. Cabrina and the two soldiers from their sub-squad nailed it before it hit the ground with a mixed barrage of rockets and grenades, blasting huge chunks off its body. It managed to squeeze out another burst before Jia finished it with a plasma grenade.

  Erik raked the surface of a beetle Elite with his machine gun, leaving nasty gouges, but the Elite’s thick armor denied him the satisfying and sought-after Swiss cheese pattern. The beetle lumbered forward on stout legs. Its armor came at the cost of speed and agility. Like the earlier Torch Dragon, a point-defense turret sticking out of its back released its fury at the grenade. The premature explosion forced Erik to step back.

  One of the spider Elites jumped backward, angling itself up, along with its rocket launcher. With a hollow thump, it fired a round into the sky. The projectile exploded in a shower of hot fragments at the top of its arc, nowhere near any of the exos but downing two drones. It then hurried behind a mound to avoid the worst of the squad’s guns.

  Jia again appreciated the well-trained discipline of a true assault infantry squad. Despite the ambush by heavily armed and highly maneuverable cybernetic enemies, the men and women of Cabrina’s squad kept their tight formations while constantly moving and returning fire. Even discounting their training, these soldiers had been in the thick of the garrison’s response to the rebellion. They might know the enemy better than Erik and Jia
after so many battles in recent weeks.

  The lieutenant forced three of the Elites back with shallow rocket attacks, doing her best to add more and deeper holes to the destroyed road. Her distraction gave her squadmates, along with Erik and Jia, the time they needed. Converging AP rounds, supplemented by rockets and grenades, consumed two Torch Dragon Elites in clouds of lead and flame, leaving only burnt, perforated metal in the end.

  The anti-drone spider from before popped back up and brought down more drones. This time, Erik carved through it with a machine gun blast, staggering it. Jia’s follow-up shots took out the enemy’s launcher. They continued firing, not giving it a chance to dodge, and ripped more pieces off, dark fluids splattering until finally blood painted the ground and it collapsed.

  Alphas Four through Six had surrounded one of the rear enemies and shredded it with combined fire until it collapsed. Their remaining enemy, a spider, jumped on a building and skittered along what was left of it while managing to get off bursts that made it past the shields into the bodies and arms of the exos. Lacking the point-defense of his allies, he didn’t last long when the three Army exos pounded him with rockets.

  Damir leapt off his bike and rolled behind a mound, yanking two plasma grenades from his belt. He gritted his teeth and stayed low as machine gun and autocannon rounds continued to rip through the air and his loose barrier. Although the surviving Elites seemed more concerned about the armored threats than one rebel in a tactical vest, a lone stray round would be more than enough to blow his head off.

  He primed the two grenades and hurled them with sideways throws toward a beetle Elite. “For New Samarkand.”

  The beetle’s anti-grenade system might be a marvel of AI-driven defense, but it’d obviously been designed under the assumption that its main threats would come in from body level or above. Damir’s careful throws sent the grenades toward the legs of the Elite. It attempted to scamper away before white-blue explosions blasted a huge chunk out of the side and half-melted the AGS.

  Jia launched a plasma grenade and Erik followed her lead, then each took three shots, staggering them. Blast after blast rocked the beetle until it collapsed on its side, half-melted and missing a good portion of its body.

  With the rear guard destroyed, Cabrina’s squad reformed in a loose wedge, the soldiers’ converging streams of bullets ripping a Torch Dragon to pieces and quickly downing a spider bot. Two remaining enemies, both beetle Elites, scampered forward, their armor taking the punishment.

  “I’ll distract this one. Get ready to finish it,” Jia announced, charging toward a beetle with abrupt shifts from side to side. Her shield began to thin under its autocannon fire, sparks and pieces flying off. She jerked her launcher erratically, aiming not at the beetle but around it, alternating between plasma and frag grenades.

  The enemy took the bait for the initial rounds, firing at her and Erik with its AGS. The other exos took the opportunity to annihilate the last beetle, launching with rockets and grenades until the attacks combined in a blinding explosion that forced the light filters in their helmets’ faceplates to kick on. When the light ebbed, not much remained except the blackened legs of the beetle and a sizzling pile.

  Jia jumped back, sweeping back and forth, flipping through optical and thermal modes to seek any new enemies, but not finding any. Damir stood and dusted his pants, nodding with a satisfied look.

  “Stand down, squad,” Cabrina ordered, breathing heavily. She took a couple of deep breaths before she spoke next. “You and Jia are pretty damned impressive, Erik. I’d think she’d been in as long as you, given some of her moves.”

  “We spend a lot of time training,” Jia replied.

  “How are we situated going forward?” Erik asked.

  “Minor damage to my squad,” Cabrina admitted. “Down to about eighty percent ammo in main guns, two-thirds in the explosives. We were lucky those guys didn’t have air support.”

  Jia looked up. “See what I see? Or what I don’t see?”

  “I got so wrapped up in wasting Elites, I didn’t realize they’d finished off the rest of our drones,” Erik commented. “Damn.”

  “We’ve got microdrones in our exos,” Cabrina explained. “But I’m not sure how effective they will be, given the Elites’ jamming obsession.”

  “We need to keep going,” called Damir, picking up the scout bike and straddling it with a determined look. “They don’t know we’re coming for the camp. This is the one time they might be vulnerable, and as long as we’re a small group, we can make it there without them pulling the rest of their forces back. But we have to hurry.”

  “He’s right,” Jia offered.

  “Then let’s get going,” Cabrina ordered.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Damir slowed and stopped at an intersection. “About a kilometer down, there’s a huge wall made up of pieces of buildings, destroyed vehicles, and the like. It covers one side of the camp. The whole thing is surrounded by fences. There are natural hills on the other sides, along with anti-aircraft guns. If we took the long way, we could head straight to the gate and get cut down by the defenses there. The garage where they delivered the cargo is in the center, but that’s past all the defensive lines.”

  “Of course it is,” Cabrina muttered. “We wouldn’t want this to be easy.”

  Erik glanced at one of his status displays. “Huh, no evidence of jamming, but this far out with no satellite, LOS, or net connections, Malcolm might as well be back on Earth.”

  “We should use the microdrones,” Jia noted. “So we know what we’re getting into. If we charge straight toward the wall, they’ll probably see us coming, and we’ll lose surprise.”

  “Squad, stand by,” Cabrina announced, changing her comm to transmit only to Erik and Jia.

  “We need to know what we’re getting into,” Erik insisted. “We can do well with a trained squad and eight exos, but we’re still taking on an entire encampment by ourselves.”

  Cabrina frowned. “If it’s too much, we might have to pull back and request reinforcements after all. We were lucky in that last fight, but that doesn’t mean our luck’s going to hold.”

  “First things first,” Erik suggested. “Recon. Drone it.”

  Cabrina offered the barest hint of a grunt in response. A moment later, three tiny drones detached from the back of her exo and zoomed away, so close to the ground and walls that a heavy breath might crash them. She transmitted the feeds directly to Erik and Jia.

  The drones continued hovering over the ground. The hastily constructed sloping wall Damir had described lay ahead and there was no sign of enemies, but the tiny drones couldn’t see through it, and the thickness of the barrier made thermal imaging useless for detecting what lay on the opposite side.

  Cabrina continued maneuvering the drones forward. As they approached the wall, it became obvious it’d been built in the center of what had once been an intersection, suggesting the camp was taking advantage of preexisting structures. That made sense. There wasn’t a lot of wasted space beneath domes in mature colonies, and digging an underground base would have taken too long, given the nature of the conflict.

  Damir had been right about the offensive. Between the Fleet and the pirates, there couldn’t be many Elites making it onto the planet anymore, and there was no way they were building them on New Samarkand. The garrison had been pounded for over a month, but they’d made the Elites pay. There couldn’t be many left defending the encampment, and most of the remaining models seemed less advanced than what they’d fought on Alpha Centauri, suggesting resource limitations. After all, the Core had no reason to suspect Erik and Jia were already on-world and had decrypted their files.

  Erik frowned as he realized he had not taken the jump drive into account and had forgotten about normal transit times. Alpha Centauri was a lot closer to Earth and months away from Gliese 581. They weren’t fighting resource-limited Elites. They were fighting older models.

  Cabrina’s drones headed through th
e intersection and toward the line. The sensors didn’t show anything, but it was hard to miss the large Torch Dragon Elite standing at the edge of the intersection. The feeds died, along with their drone sources.

  “So much for surprise,” Cabrina grumbled.

  “Screw it, then,” Erik replied. “Launch all your microdrones and flood the zone. We need to have a clue what we’re dealing with before we go charging in there.”

  “Look at you being careful,” joked Jia.

  “It happens on occasion.”

  Cabrina considered it for a moment before nodding and changing back to full squad contact. “Everyone, send all your drones over the wall. Go, go, go.”

  The angry swarm of microdrones zoomed toward the wall, no one bothering to try to hide them. Erik had expected hidden turrets or more Elites, but instead, enemy drones rose above the edge of the wall. He didn’t know their sensor capabilities, but based on what he’d encountered during his time in the city, he doubted they could pick up the squad, given the distance and the number of buildings between them.

  It didn’t take long for microdrones to start exploding or crashing after being shot. The first drone to clear the wall fell, likely victim to a small mercenary squad right on the other side, ready with their rifles. Elites and fixed machine gun emplacements massacred the charging microdrones. Within ten seconds, there wasn’t a single active drone left.

  Those ten seconds had been all they needed. It confirmed both the defense forces and the question that had been weighing them down.

  Erik stared at a freeze-frame from one of the feeds, jaw tightening. Possibility had become reality. Cargo loaders were transferring unconcealed cargo into three different hovertrucks.

  “Looks like Omega-134s,” he announced.

  Cabrina growled, “Those animals.”

  “Decent strategic-yield fusion bombs,” Erik added for Jia’s benefit. “Fleet toys, not that they ever use them. They jokingly started referring to them as space-raptor warmers. If those go off, New Samarkand is done.”