by Mel Odom
The bashhound holding the cannon fired another round as a bullet struck the side of his head. The HUD tracked the trajectory of the round back to Kiwanuka and Sage saw the group there was under attack as well. The cannon round struck the ground in front of the out-of-control crawler, creating a crater that the vehicle dropped into.
Through the ParaSights’ view, Sage saw Zhoh standing his ground and firing particle beam blasts into the last crawler’s windshield. Holes appeared in the transplas, and one of the blasts killed the bashhound in the passenger seat, but the driver remained hunkered down behind the wheel.
Stepping aside calmly, Zhoh avoided the crawler by centimeters, then flicked his tail out with blinding speed. Sage only just managed to see the tail pierce the thinner armor under the driver’s chin. The venom acted immediately, causing the man to scream in agony and reach for his face.
Zhoh and Sage stood for a moment in the roiling dust cloud. The survivors of the second vehicle climbed from the crater. Sage pulled a lethal tangler grenade from his ammo rack and threw it at the men. When it struck the ground, buckyball strands erupted from the grenade, threaded around the bashhounds, then collapsed, pulling through the armor and bodies. The sec guards hit the ground in pieces.
On the run, Zhoh picked up the squat mobile cannon that had landed only a few meters away. The Phrenorian swept the weapon up in his arms and aimed it at the crawler whose driver he’d slain. Demonstrating more than a familiarity with the weapon, Zhoh opened fire and sent a miniature sun streaking for the crawler as the bashhounds struggled to crawl from it.
The plasma charge hammered the crawler and turned it into a glowing pile of radiation and heat. The concussive wave blew Sage off his feet and knocked him back several meters.
You are losing consciousness, Sergeant, the near-AI said. Taking steps now to alleviate stressors. You have no debilitating injuries.
Sage tried to speak, tried to take a breath, then felt the new stimpak soaring through his system, reconnecting all the synapses in an Arctic rush. A headache dawned in the back of his skull and his jaw muscles quivered for a moment. Getting to his feet, he ignored the headache as his jaw unclenched. He still gripped the Roley and he brought it up into the ready position.
Zhoh lay a few meters away. The Phrenorian had been closer to the blast.
“Captain,” Sage said when he approached the Phrenorian. Zhoh lay silent and still. Sage wasn’t even sure if the captain was still alive. “Do you require—”
The sword came up in a blur and the segmented tail tip hurtled toward Sage’s faceshield.
6259 Akej (Phrenorian Prime)
Rising up through the blackness that engulfed him, Zhoh felt like he was returning from lannig. Then he felt an iron hand gripping his primary arm and his tail tip slamming against something.
Vision returned to him and he saw the Terran sergeant leaning down over him. Memory returned to Zhoh in a flash, ripping away the paralysis that gripped his mind and senses. He had attacked Sage while unconscious, but he couldn’t apologize, not even with the truce behind them. He gazed at Sage’s faceshield, trying to see the being’s features and perhaps guess at what he was thinking.
Knowing the tension between them had to be broken, Zhoh drew a leg between him and Sage and shoved the human from him. From the way the sergeant’s body shifted, Zhoh knew Sage had contemplated an attack, but he allowed himself to be disengaged. He held the assault rifle at the ready, but did not point it at Zhoh. However, it would only take a moment to bring it to bear.
Conscious of continued firing going on around him, Zhoh rolled backward and rose to his feet. He held the Vesokan portable plasma cannon in his lesser hands.
Bowing slightly, Zhoh spread his primary arms in a peaceful gesture. “I was not in my right mind.”
“Copy that,” Sage replied, pulling the Roley aside. “I had my bell rung too. Whatever that thing is, it packs a punch.”
“It is very powerful for a single warrior to carry.”
A small aerial vehicle rose out on the tarmac and sailed at them with cannon blazing. The rounds ripped into the surrounding terrain. Four powersuits approached at a run from nearby aisles through the storage buildings.
“We’ve got to get gone,” Sage said.
Zhoh’s mind churned, thinking of the storage bay and of Ellen Hodgkins and of General Rangha. He wasn’t sure what had brought the sergeant and his team to the storage bay, but there had been far too much interest shown in the contents of that place. Despite his desire to prove General Rangha as unfit to command the action on Makaum, Zhoh couldn’t let the general’s complicity in the weapons black market be discovered.
So there was only one thing to be done.
Swinging the Vesokan plasma cannon toward the storage bay, Zhoh fired three times as quickly as he could. The miniature suns burned through the fortified plascrete walls and set off some of the munitions within.
The storage bay became a raging inferno as the ammo contained therein cooked off in quicker and quicker detonations. Some of the debris hit the aerial vehicle and knocked it off course. Before the pilot could recover, the aircraft struck the ground only forty meters from Zhoh and Sage and blew up, showering them in metallic and ceramic fragments.
The explosions continued to spread, throwing fire in all directions. The approaching powersuits held back as chunks of the buildings blew over them.
“Now we go,” Zhoh told Sage.
Together, they ran toward the Terran soldiers and Phrenorian warriors. And as they ran, an idea of how Zhoh could use the Terran sergeant to get to Ellen Hodgkins occurred to him. He knew he would have to be sly, but it could be done.
0311 Hours Zulu Time
With the starport now in flames and still more explosions rocking the area, Sage and his group ran toward the river. The Green Dragon sec teams would cover the two entrances, thinking them the weakest and most logical points for invaders to escape by. And they would cover the aircraft because those would be a temptation for someone needing a quick getaway.
They covered the 1,452 meters to the wall in a short time while running flat out and only met minimal resistance, but the Green Dragons had vectored in on their escape path and knew which way they were headed. Crawlers, powersuits, and aircraft led the chase ahead of the foot soldiers.
“Corporal Dundee,” Sage called over the comm.
“Here, Top, and I see you’re bringing a crowd with you.”
“That I am. I hope you’re ready for them.”
“Party favors are all assembled. Just give me the word.”
“Drop the wall.” Sage noted that they were 106.7 meters from the barrier, and should have been well out of the blast radius.
Bright orange flames showed through fracture lines that suddenly appeared in the wall. The cracks grew larger and the fire grew brighter. Then the wall fell into a jumble of fragments and the plasma charges died out. There was hardly any sound.
Dundee was an artist with explosives.
Noojin and Jahup led the way through the jungle, skirting flora and fauna that Sage knew he would have never seen. Strof, bloodsucking vines with limited intelligence, trembled restlessly from tree branches. Jahup blasted an oskelo, a flying snake, while on the run. There were more they narrowly avoided, but Sage didn’t have time to identify them.
Detonations lit up the night with fire and thunder behind them. Through the ParaSights’ views, Sage saw that the first line of Green Dragon sec had reached the hole in the barrier. The claymores knocked the lead powersuit down, but it recovered quickly.
“Figured on ground troops coming through first,” Dundee admitted, “but I got something for the powersuits coming up next.”
The powersuit muscled through the opening in the barrier and started down the gradual slope leading to the river. Three steps out, a munition exploded and unleashed a buckyball tangler that
wrapped around the powersuit’s legs and cut through them above the knees. Unable to stand, the powersuit went down.
The pilot of the second powersuit evidently thought the way would be clear and hurried past. A second tangler erupted from a tree and wrapped around the unit’s chest. Man and machine were sliced in half.
That gave the rest of the sec team pause, but they fired their weapons from where they gathered. Craters erupted around Sage and his team as they hunkered down with Zhoh and his warriors.
The river was only 22.3 meters away, but fording the water would be impossible.
“Sergeant Sage, this is Blue Jay Twelve. Blue Jay Fourteen and myself are going to clear the way for you.”
Sage looked up into the sky amid the lightning and the thunder that suddenly cut loose again. He magnified his view and spotted the two jumpcopters streaking toward them from Makaum.
“Copy that, Blue Jay Twelve. Any time you’re ready.” Sage relayed the information to Zhoh and his warriors.
Ten seconds later, air-to-ground missiles hammered the broken barrier.
“Go!” Sage urged.
The soldiers walked along the ground and the Phrenorians took to the water like they were born to it.
As Sage came back up on the other side, he spotted three sec crawlers on the retractable bridge. One of the jumpcopters swooped down and unleashed another flurry of missiles. The bridge blew into pieces and scattered across the river.
One of the aerial vehicles from the starport locked on to one of the jumpcopters and strafed cannon rounds interspersed with green tracers. The jumpcopter pilot tilted the nose down to avoid the barrage and to let the aircraft pass. Then the jumpcopter wheeled around and fired its cannons, catching the Green Dragon aircraft squarely.
Doomed, out of control, the sec aircraft crashed into open jungle. Flames jetted up from the trees, catching in some of the canopy and spreading briefly before settling into a steady burn.
On the riverbank, the Terran soldiers and the Phrenorian warriors unconsciously separated into groups, each to their own.
Sage studied his people and was glad they were all alive. Some of the Phrenorian warriors looked worse for the wear.
“Well,” Zhoh said as they headed back toward the Offworlders’ Bazaar, “it appears our brief détente on this world has accomplished some good. The Green Dragon slionunt have been set back here, and the damage surely runs into millions of credits.”
Sage decided the Phrenorian captain sounded happy, and realized that he’d never heard that particular emotion from them before. “I’ll settle for that, Captain.”
“We work well together, Sergeant. It is a shame that we find ourselves on different sides in this war.”
“You can always surrender, sir,” Sage suggested.
One of the Phrenorian warriors started toward Sage, but Zhoh held up a primary and waved the Sting-Tail back into position.
“Perhaps there is a way we can continue our association for a bit longer.”
“I appreciate the help back there, sir, but I don’t see that happening.” Sage watched the Phrenorian captain and remembered how Zhoh had been shamed on his own world and assigned to Makaum. They were both blooded fighters, both deserving of duty out on the front line where the war was hottest. Yet they were both stuck here.
“You were at Cheapdock for a reason, Sergeant. As was I. We ran afoul of the Green Dragons during our investigation of the same storage bay you were so interested in.” Zhoh shrugged a little. “Perhaps you would allow me to buy you and your soldiers a drink and we could talk about that.”
Sage flipped over to the comm channel he shared with Colonel Halladay. “What do you think, sir?”
“I think that you and I are buried so far in drek once General Whitford has us in his office regarding a ‘semi-authorized’ probe into Green Dragon business that went this badly we won’t see sunlight for a month.”
“The information Vekaby’s men gave us led to that storage bay, sir,” Sage reminded. “We were working on the ambush, shutting down illegal weapons, and I can guarantee from the way that storage bay exploded, weapons were kept there.”
“I agree, but the general isn’t going to like the fact that we’ve rocked his boat, and I don’t think the locals are going to be happy with us either.”
Sage studied the burning starport in the HUD. “That’s probably true, sir.”
“Do you think you can trust Zhoh?”
“No. He’s after something. I just don’t know what it is.”
“I’m thinking we should try to find out.”
“Yes sir.”
“If you take him up on the offer of a drink, do you think you can keep yourself and your people alive?”
“That will definitely be on the agenda, sir.”
“Then get it done, Top. If we’re invited to go down the rabbit hole, we’ve got to follow it out.”
“Yes sir.”
“Be careful, Top.”
“Copy that, sir.” Sage swiveled his helmet back to the Phrenorian captain who waited patiently.
“Well, Sergeant?” Zhoh asked.
“If we’re still talking after the first round, Captain, the second round is on me.”
THIRTY-TWO
Outside Cheapdock
North of Makaum Sprawl
0359 Hours Zulu Time
The bar was on the east side of New Makaum, distant from Zorg’s Weeping Onion, but news of the Terran Army police action that had taken place in the bar and spilled over onto the street was on holo on the display at the back of the bar. The establishment was called Venom of the Ightskel and was operated by an independent company that was associated with Huang the noodle maker. Sage thought he remembered the men were cousins or something, but they didn’t favor each other. Huang’s family tended to be large and varied, and Sage suspected that kinship wasn’t always by blood.
Only minutes before Sage and the others had reached the bar, the sky opened up and unleashed a monsoon. They’d ended up walking through mud the last kilometer and a half, and now part of that was tracked into the bar. Two of the servers worked to clean the floor with scoops and mops.
Sage had apologized for the mess, but Cai, the owner, shrugged and asked them what they wanted to drink. Judging from the prices he charged, he was making up for the janitorial inconvenience.
By the time Sage looked for a table amid what appeared to be a fusion of South Sea Isles décor and seventeenth-century Terran pirate Jolly Rogers flags and antique compasses, cutlasses, and sailcloth, the scattered clientele had deserted the bar, braving the rain and the wind.
Sage pointed to a table in the back corner. “Does that table suit, Captain?”
“It does.”
Sage led the way, but even in his armor he felt vulnerable with his back exposed to the Phrenorian. The whole meeting felt wrong, but he wanted to know what was so important about the storage bay that Zhoh felt compelled to talk to him about it.
The soldiers and the warriors scattered around other tables, but they didn’t fraternize. Sage thought that the mere fact they weren’t shooting at each other was about the best they could expect even under the circumstances. A lot of blood had been spilled on both sides during the war. All of the individuals in the bar, except for Noojin and Jahup, were veterans and had lost fellow soldiers and warriors.
The chairs hadn’t been made to a Phrenorian’s scale, but Zhoh made do. The captain reached into a pouch on his thorax armor and took out a small flat black device in one of his lesser hands. The instrument was devoid of controls except for a small button.
“This is a white noise generator,” Zhoh said. “I thought it best that we speak in private. This place is known to associate with Huang the noodle maker, and he can be a foseby if left unfettered.” The Phrenorian term most closely translated into “busybody” in Te
rran.
“Yes sir.”
“At this range, once I activate it, your soldiers will not be able to hear us, and you won’t have any access to your comm.”
“Copy that, Top. We’re not going anywhere.” Kiwanuka sat closest to Sage, only two tables away. She drank with her left hand and her right was beneath the table. Sage had no doubt that she was holding a weapon. If he had been her, he would have been holding one.
“All right,” Sage agreed.
Zhoh pressed the button on the device and placed it on the table between them.
Sergeant, all comm access outside this unit has been severed, the near-AI said. Suggest—
“Cancel that,” Sage interrupted. “Suspend comm links until I tell you to reconnect.”
Affirmative.
Sage removed his helmet and set it on the floor beside him. Switching from the 360-degree view to only what he could see in front of him and peripherally was disturbing. He felt limited in a dangerous situation. He ignored the feeling and picked up his glass. “What are we drinking to, Captain?”
“A successful joint venture.” Zhoh lifted his glass in one of his lesser hands.
“Past or present, sir?”
“This one to the past, and the next—if you are willing to proceed with what I am about to suggest—to the present.”
“All right.” Sage tossed back the sake, felt it burn his throat, then explode in his stomach, reminding him of how long it had been since he’d sat down to have a real meal. Drinking on an empty stomach wasn’t a good idea.
Zhoh finished his drink and set his glass back down. “According to the holo in back of the bar, you had an encounter with the beings who attacked your fort yesterday morning.”
“It’s not my fort,” Sage corrected.
“As you say.” Zhoh dismissed that with a wave. “Since you have arrived here, you have had a great impact on Terran Army operations, so I associate you with the new measures I have seen.”