Terminus Cut

by Rick Partlow

  The Jeuta weren’t using lasers, though, and she found out the hard way when something about the size of her arm, with enough metal in it to register on the radar, passed only a few meters from her cockpit, ... traveling at somewhere north of three thousand meters per second.

  “Shit!” she blurted, rolling her bird away from the line of fire.

  “They got a coil-gun on a damned shuttle?” Acosta said, eyes wide in disbelief. “That’s fucking insane!”

  It was risky, and she could see the chief downside of it already: the shuttle that had fired on them was burning maneuvering jets wildly, trying to course-correct after the recoil from the electromagnetic slug-shooter had propelled them onto a new trajectory. The upside, for the other team, was that it only took one hit and you were capital-D Dead. And if they got off one accurate shot at the drop-ships…

  “Lee!” she yelled into the pickup, opening the throttle and nudging the control stick over again, aiming her nose at the Jeuta bird. “They have coil-guns! Close with and intercept now, before they can get a shot at the drop-ships!”

  Boost pushed against her chest and she fought to settle the targeting reticle over Gomer Three before it could fire again. Keeping her course too stable was dangerous with the muzzle of the coil-gun yawning in wait, but she didn’t even consider the risk to herself. Protecting the drop-ships was the mission, and the mission came first.

  “He’s lined up on us,” Acosta warned her, but she saw the reticle light up green and her teeth showed in a predatory smile.

  “No,” she corrected him, “we’re lined up on him.”

  She touched the firing control and as far as her senses were concerned, nothing happened. The targeting computer knew better, though, and simulated the burst of laser pulses for her, connecting her shuttle with the Gomer Three for nearly a full second. The Jeuta shuttle was heavily armored and she didn’t expect to pierce all the way through to the cockpit or the drives, so she hadn’t tried to. Instead, she’d fired at the muzzle of the coil-gun and was rewarded with a rainbow flare of energy as the laser blew apart the electromagnetic coils and took a good portion of the shuttle’s belly armor with it.

  Gomer Three banked away with a flare of thrusters, turning its suddenly-vulnerable underside away from their guns. Katy ignored Three, confident it was out of the fight. It still had missiles, but they wouldn’t be effective against the drop-ships’ defenses, and, most importantly, it wasn’t going to be able to enter the atmosphere with its belly armor ruptured. She hoped Lee was holding his own with the other two enemy craft because she had enough problems of her own.

  She was low, too low, about to hit atmosphere, and way off her safe entry trajectory. This wasn’t going to be pleasant.

  “Hold on,” she advised Acosta, more a verbal tic than useful advice.

  She cut forward thrust long enough to yank the stick around, her world tilting on its side to the staccato beat of the maneuvering jets until the moon was behind them and the expanse of open space ahead. Nine gravities of deceleration hurt, even just for a minute’s duration. She’d been trying to keep an eye on the tactical display, to get a sense of how Lee was doing with the other two Jeuta shuttles, but tunnel vision and a very urgent need to pass out interfered.

  All she could concentrate on was tightening her stomach and legs, trying to force blood back to her brain. The only extraneous thought worming its way through was a sense of gratitude her flight suit could absorb pee.

  In the end, she cut the braking maneuver a few seconds short, willing to trade coming in just a little hot for a clear view of the enemy. The planet’s gravitational pull was stronger and more evident by now, fighting against her skew-flip maneuver as she turned the assault shuttle back into their direction of travel. Acosta was wheezing beside her, but she was too distracted to even make fun of him.

  The drop-ships were far ahead of her, already through the upper layer of the moon’s atmosphere and into the dark, roiling storm clouds lurking below as if in ambush. Lee was on the tail of one of the enemy shuttles, slicing into its portside wing with a laser-burst even as she watched; but the last, the one they’d designated Gomer Two, was burning hard after the drop-ships, firing shot after shot from its chin-mounted coil-gun.

  “Goddamn it, Lee,” she murmured, opening the throttle once more, the bird running superheated air through the reactor instead of metallic hydrogen for reaction mass.

  The man was a good pilot, but he was too slow, too careful, and sometimes you just needed to go balls-out—metaphorically—and rush after the bad guys with your ass on fire and murder in your eyes. If they’d had anyone else to pull from, she would have had him replaced, but beggars couldn’t be choosers, so she’d just have to take up the slack. Again.

  She didn’t have a target lock, but they were close enough—she fired the lasers and lightning flashed, the thickening air ionizing to plasma as the laser pulses superheated it, forks branching off the glowing trunk. She grinned, feeling like Zeus hurling thunderbolts from Mount Olympus. Zeus, of course, would have hit the enemy on the first try, while her shot missed narrowly. The turbulence from the heat of the ionized air passing only a few dozen meters away shook the enemy bird, though, sending it banking off to the left before the pilot could correct.

  She had to give the Jeuta pilot credit: he didn’t break off to fight her. He kept with his primary targets and stuck hard on the drop-ships, but just because she gave him credit didn’t mean she wouldn’t kill him. She’d had no problems killing human bandits since Ramman, and Jeuta were even easier.

  She frowned. The thought had started to bother her, and she wondered if it had something to do with Logan’s talk about the future. Jonathan, she chided herself. But then decided, no, the future was Logan, not Jonathan.

  The reverie floated over her head like thought-balloons in the manga she’d used to read as a child, disconnected from her actions, the tactical decisions made at an instinctive level. Her hands nudged the stick over, stroked the throttle like a lover, bringing her back onto Gomer Two’s tail. He was launching countermeasures, radar-spoofing chaff and flares and probably whatever passed for a toilet seat on a Jeuta shuttle. And it was working. Her radar and lidar were next to useless, thermal was screwed by the flares and even computer optical interpolation wasn’t showing much in the flitting, flickering bits of clear sky amid towering castle walls constructed from storm clouds.

  She let her finger dance toward the firing stud, but hesitated. The drop-ships were somewhere up there, as well, just as invisible due to the ECM machinations of the Jeuta assault shuttle. She couldn’t take the risk, but she knew a lack of visibility wouldn’t stop the Jeuta pilot from firing blindly. Cursing, she fed power to the jets, the acceleration, pounding her across the ring of the sky was as if she was sparring Lyta back in the gym in Argos.

  I could never lay a glove on that woman unless she let me, she admitted. She had better luck sparring with Jonathan in the Shakak’s gym, though he could have been taking it easy on her. He insisted he wasn’t, and she would have gotten even with him if he’d let on he was. But you just never know…

  “We’re gonna fly right up his fucking tailpipe,” Acosta croaked.

  “Shut up and watch the sensors,” she snapped. It was probably useless, but then so was he. At least it gave him something to do.

  She was using what Lyta liked the call her “Mk I Eyeball Sensors,” squinting at the darkness and wondering how much was honest cumulonimbus and how much was residue of the volcanos she’d seen on the planetary scans. Volcanic clouds could be dangerous, especially if the ash got into the intake turbines.

  It rains on the just and the unjust, she mused. If it was that bad, the Jeuta wouldn’t be able to fly in it either.

  There. A flash of engine flare, a different visual signature than a drop-ship, something she knew on a gut level. She couldn’t use a missile, not in this murky, sensor-fritzing rap. She fired a three-second burst with the lasers, using Kentucky Windage as one of her weap
ons instructors had called it—the other had been less charitable, referring to it as “shooting by Braille.”

  The laser pulses set the clouds on fire, lighting up the Jeuta shuttle with their actinic glow, just kissing the underside of the aerospacecraft. Armor sublimated in a halo of burning gas and Gomer Two pulled up with a jerky, desperate haste, not banking away but jinking and deking wildly. She felt a warmth settling over her, the realization that she had him, that he was one trigger-pull away from nonexistence.

  “Katy!” Acosta yelled practically in her ear, a grating desperation in his voice. “On our six!”

  She knew. She could see it in the rear camera display, Gomer One. They’d gotten past Lee, maybe taken him down or maybe just shaken the damned dithering bastard. They were right there, on her ass and ready to fire. She could break off, pull straight up, maybe split-S and try to get a shot at Gomer One…but then she’d lose Gomer Two, and he had a clear shot at the drop-ships. At Jonathan…Logan.

  “Sorry, Francis,” she whispered, pulling the trigger.

  She never saw the shot hit home.

  “Holy hell!”

  Jonathan Slaughter didn’t know who had cursed over the open company net, and couldn’t focus his vision well enough to read the name on his Vindicator’s HUD, but he agreed with the sentiment. The mecha were fastened into their cradles by magnetic grapples, which kept them nice and secure, but unfortunately also made them slaves to the maneuvers of the drop-ship, and the drop-ship was thrashing like a bass on the line.

  As commander, he had access to the shuttle’s sensors readouts, external camera feeds and pilot communications but following all that wasn’t as easy as it had sounded. It was like watching someone else play a video game in a virtual-reality neural halo while all you had was a two-dimensional flat-screen and you didn’t even know the rules. And two of your best friends shook you violently every three seconds, yelled in your ear, and occasionally kicked you in the nuts.

  “Can’t shake him,” Jonathan made out through the pilot’s abbreviated idiom.

  He knew the “him” the pilot was speaking of—he’d been able to make out that much in the rear camera feed. It was one of the Jeuta assault shuttles, as angular and ugly as a combat knife. They were firing coil-guns, he’d gathered, and understood why it upset the pilots so much. It didn’t make him feel warm and fuzzy, either. He’d seen what a tungsten slug could do to a mech or a shuttle. Sometimes he wished the researchers could figure out a way to make a coil-gun small enough to fit on a mech and still pack enough of a punch to make it worth channeling so much of the reactor’s power into one weapon.

  And then there’s the recoil…

  He shook off the debate he’d heard in mech-jock bars since he was in the Academy, not because he had anything better to do but mostly because he was certain they were all about to die. He didn’t want his last thoughts to be about something pointless. Instead, he thought about Katy.

  “We got a Cover bird behind us!”

  The copilot, her name was Jansen he thought. There was hope in her voice, infectious. Was it Katy? Or maybe the other guy, Lee?

  Come on, take that Jeuta fucker down, he urged.

  “Jamming’s bad,” the pilot, Lt. Vazquez said. Jonathan couldn’t see his face, but his voice sounded like he was chewing on a mouthful of lemons. “Can’t even read the damn IFF.”

  “Hell, I can’t even get a read on Drop-Ship Two.”

  “Shit!”

  The exclamation was synchronous with a spastic, jerking bank to the starboard and Jonathan’s restraints bit into his shoulders again, leaving him chafed and sore before he’d even had a chance to leave the damned drop-ship.

  “Fucking coil-gun!” the pilot grunted. “He’s gonna put a round right up our ass in a second! I’m taking us down hard! Warn ‘em back there, Chief!”

  “All personnel, secure for violent maneuvers and rapid descent.” Chief Nakamura delivered the warning deadpan, as if he were letting them know there was a thirty percent chance of rain and they might want to take a jacket along if they went outside.

  “Prepare for violent maneuvers?” Lt. Kurtz said. “What th’hell have they been doing?”

  “Let’s keep the chatter to a minimum,” Jonathan snapped. “Platoon leaders, prepare for deployment the second we reach survivable altitude. Ski,” he said to Lt. Paskowski, “your heavies are going to need a lower altitude with those strap-on jets. I need to stay with the forward platoons. I want you to link up with Ford and her Arabalests at Objective Alpha, cover her mecha while she lays down covering fire from the table rock we saw on the orbital scans.”

  “Roger that, sir,” Paskowski clipped off.

  “Got it, sir,” Ford acknowledged. Jonathan wondered if she resented being stuck in the rear with fire support. It was the life of an Arbalest jock but it would have driven him nuts.

  “Kurtz, you lead off when we hit the ground. I’ll be in-between you and Hernandez’s machines. Move fast but stay low unless I order. It’s hot as shit down there, so their sensors won’t be able to see a damn thing, but neither will ours. Let’s not give them a target they don’t need sensors to see.”

  “Gotcha, Cap.”

  Suddenly, talking was no longer an option. The drop-ship was huge, massive, ungainly, something that shouldn’t rightly have been able to stay in the air if it weren’t for the ability to pack two fusion reactors into the big lifting body. Raw power kept it airborne, but nothing in the universe could keep it stable in this caustic, roiling, volcanic hellscape of an atmosphere. He was pitching downward, rolling and yawing and even though he’d never had motion sickness a day in his life, he had to clench his teeth to keep his stomach contents inside. He couldn’t see anything, couldn’t bring himself to even open his eyes to look at the view from the cockpit screens for fear he’d lose his last meal. Was it breakfast? Lunch?

  He didn’t need to see to know they were low, dangerously low, recklessly low, and he wasn’t sure they’d be able to pull up. Clipped-off and abbreviated bits of back-and-forth between the pilot and copilot ran past his ears, not catching a firm purchase, until one sentence rang clear and hollow inside his head, the pronouncement of a judge, the slamming of a gavel.

  “The Cover bird is down…”

  Jonathan felt his blood curdling inside his veins and he fumbled for the commo controls to demand to know which bird was down and where, but something slammed into the drop-ship, sending it rolling back and forth, and very nearly tumbling forward in a death spiral before the pilots brought it back under control. A transmission from the crew chief blared in his ear, demanding attention, several degrees more urgent than anything he’d heard Nakamura say for the whole length of their voyage.

  “Attention all mech elements! Light and heavy, drop now! Emergency drop! Drop! Drop! Drop!”

  Oh, sweet Asha preserve us…

  They’d been hit and were jumping high and early and he was about to get them all killed.

  “All platoons, drop!” he echoed, finding the control for the magnetic locks and slapping it with the heel of his right hand.

  The world dropped out from beneath his feet and the wind immediately tried to take him, tried to send the Vindicator tumbling out of control. Jonathan slammed his heels into the jump-jet control pedals as if he were digging them into the fabric of spacetime. Fusion-fired jets roared in defiance of gravity and his stomach recoiled along with a sense of hard-won stability. The map in his HUD had him nearly three hundred meters up, still moving forward at nearly ten meters per second but slowing, coming down over what looked to be an old lava bed, rolling plains, way too open for his comfort.

  Between the background radiation, the flare of the storms, and the heat washing up from thermal features all around them, his sensors weren’t worth shit. He couldn’t even read the IFF signals from his own mecha, could barely see them even on infrared. They were coming down scattered across the lava beds, spread out like the pattern from an ancient bird-hunting shotgun; and from what
he remembered, they were at least fifteen kilometers from the objective. Well, some of them were, and the rest wouldn’t be getting lost easily, not with the big damned volcano sticking two kilometers up over the landscape as an unmissable landmark.

  Navigation wasn’t going to be the problem. At two hundred meters up, the overheat warnings began flashing and his jump-jets shut down automatically.

  “Shit, shit, shit,” he murmured to himself, knowing no one else could have heard even if he’d broadcast it on broadband.

  It was the background music for a desperate race against automated safety systems, a race he’d never had time to run in combat. Jumps in combat lasted a few seconds, maximum, and if overheating shut down your jets, they were down and so were you. A hundred and fifty meters up and several seconds of free-fall to spare were a luxury he’d never hoped to have, but here it was and happy Yalda to everyone, hope you enjoy the gift…

  Thanks be to Mithra he’d been trained by men and women who thought a mech jock should know everything about their machine, not just how to pilot it. The jump-jets were always the first system to overheat and getting them back up and running when you really needed them was one of the first officially-against-the-regs things instructors taught students who they thought could handle the knowledge without blowing themselves up. He’d felt pride at the time, pride in their trust, their faith he wouldn’t run his mouth to his father or Colonel Anders and get them written up. Later, he’d realized his father and Donnell Anders had probably been taught the same tricks, but there were certain official fictions that had to be maintained.

  All bureaucratic pretense aside, bypassing the heat safeties on the jump-jets could kill you; and the only time you cut that particular corner was when the risk of death by overheating or cockpit fire was secondary to death by crashing into, say, a bed of metamorphic rock. Like now, for instance.

  Red indicators flashed yellow, the best he was going to get for three seconds’ work, and he tried again, pressing tentatively at first and nearly shouting exultation when the jets reignited. The yellow indicator bars were still pushing towards red, and this time if they struck the crimson deadline there would be no going back, not in the time he had left. The ground was still approaching too fast, the upcoming impact too hard and he couldn’t afford to be crippled after he landed, not if he wanted to get to the objective quickly enough to rescue those hostages alive.