by Rick Partlow
Muttering a prayer to a God he didn’t think should be bothered with trivialities, he shoved the control pedals to their stops. Turbines screamed, tortured beyond endurance, wailing their death cries and then coming apart, their blades heated past the breaking point, blowing out the back of their housings like shaped charges, the front protected by the reactor shielding, as was the cockpit. The thrust disappeared, and the Vindicator’s footpads slammed into the ground less than a second later.
The mech sank into a crouch, the last bit of momentum driving its knees nearly into its chest, its articulated left-hand smacking into the jagged, razor-edged lava rock. And Jonathan Slaughter was down.
He let the mech rest in place for a long moment, assessing his own damage before he examined the harm he’d caused to the machine. Blood ran down his chin, the taste of copper in his mouth, and he ran his tongue over his teeth carefully, not finding anything missing but feeling a cut in the side of his mouth. That was going to hurt like a son of a bitch when he had time to think about it. His back was sore, and that would hurt later, too. No broken bones, no torn muscles or ligaments as far as he could tell.
The damage to the machine was easier to read, the injuries highlighted in red and flashing yellow. The jump-jets were a total loss and there was a problematic yellow flash from his missile launch pod. He didn’t have an external camera monitor back there anymore, but he’d have been willing to bet the same shrapnel which had taken out the viewer had damaged the launcher.
The Vindicator’s hip, knee and ankle actuators were all flashing yellow, but he was confident they’d hold. It wasn’t as if he’d be putting them through another jump…
The rest seemed good to go, and he pushed the machine to its feet, feeling the slight sluggishness of the hip motivators but compensating for it automatically. If this had been a planet with standard gravity, he’d have been dead and the mech would have been so much shattered junk, but it was a moon—a damned big moon, but still a moon, and had less than half standard pull.
He looked around, first inside his cockpit and then at the exterior camera views. There was no guidance by satellite, none by signals from orbital ships, or from other mecha. His commo board showed nothing but static and his IFF display was a blank stretch of blue. He had the dead-reckoning map and nothing else.
Outside was nearly total darkness but for the far-away glow, dull red and foreboding, of the active volcano. Infrared showed nothing but barren wasteland for kilometers around him, devoid of life…except for the flares of jump-jets and strap-on landing rigs, flickering fitfully in the night, a swarm of hesitant fireflies in the low-slung clouds.
He pointed himself at the nearest one and started running.
5
“You realize this is probably the stupidest thing you’ve ever done, right?” Kammy asked, eyes frozen on the screen and the incoming flight of anti-ship missiles.
“Not even in the top five,” Donner Osceola assured him, leaning forward in his seat.
That was the great thing about ship-to-ship combat: it was carried out under boost the whole time, not dicking around in free-fall. He was a spacer—he didn’t mind microgravity, but it was easier to think when your head wasn’t stuffed up and you could swallow your own spit without straining and… Damn, I sound like a groundpounder.
“Countermeasures launching,” Tara reported, not even bothering to tell him what a bad idea she thought this was. She’d gotten it out of her system while the Spartan troops were still launching their shuttles. Kammy, on the other hand, wouldn’t shut up.
We might as well be married.
“I’m not worried ‘bout the missiles,” he mused, more to himself than the bridge crew.
“You’re not?” Nance asked, looking back from a Commo station that was next to useless at the moment, eyes going wide.
“These things ain’t gonna be Dominion tech,” he explained, trying not to get impatient with the Spartan. “Not even your ordinary Jeuta military tech. It’ll just be whatever they could whip up from black-market parts and the Shakak could have taken those down even before you Spartan boys and girls gave us some extra goodies.”
As if to prove out his words, one of the Jeuta missiles detonated in a flash of fusing hydrogen, a globe of thermonuclear fire expanding rapidly and fading just as quickly. Another followed, and a third, others simply drifting off into space, their guidance or propulsion systems damaged by the barrage of simple steel ball bearings expelled by chemical propellants from the warheads of the Shakak’s missile defense arsenal. The anti-missile defense rockets were cheap and easy to make, and a ship this size could carry hundreds of them. Any real military anti-ship missile worth its salt would have an on-board reactor with its own electromagnetic deflector shield, reactive armor, radar shielding and a dozen other countermeasures to fool the countermeasures, but those were all complicated and expensive and hard to get.
“Then what are you worried about?” Nance wondered, staring at him as if he were one of the Spenta Mainyu, the beneficent spirits, just for having some concept of the enemy’s tactical strengths.
What the hell kind of dumbass commanders does the Spartan Navy put out nowadays?
“Ship as big as theirs,” he told her, emphasizing the destroyer with a nod, “has enough space for a dedicated reactor to power her weapons. She puts a laser into our flank, it’s gonna burn right through our armor.”
“She’d have to be pretty close for that.” Terry, the kid. He hadn’t said a word in nearly a half an hour, having buried his nose in the small readout screen for the tactical files the Spartans had brought aboard, searching for any intelligence on the enemy ship. “Even with a fusion reactor powering them, their lasers would have a fairly short range.”
“And if we were running from her, like nice, sane spacers,” Osceola shot back, a bit of anger still in his words even though he’d been the one to make the final decision, “maybe that could save our asses. But in case you hadn’t noticed, genius, we’re heading that way.” He jabbed a finger at the image of the destroyer. “So please tell me you’ve fucking found something!”
“It’s Mbeki,” Terry confirmed. “Early Reconstruction War era. There are some old records about a Mbeki destroyer called the Durban that went missing at a battle with Shang near the Jeuta-held worlds. I think this is the Durban.”
Osceola tried to find patience, but he hadn’t used it in so long, he’d forgotten where he he’d last seen it.
“That’s all fucking interesting, kid,” he snapped, “but I wasn’t asking for a history lesson, I was looking for something I could use to kill those assholes!”
The kid dithered for a second, playing for time Osceola thought, using a verbal tic he’d learned in school when a professor asked him a question he wasn’t sure about. Shit like that was fine in academia, but he’d have to break the kid of the habit if he was going to be useful out here.
“Listen, genius, when I ask you a question, you either tell me the answer or admit you don’t have one so I stop wasting time! You got that?”
He was being hard on the kid, and it felt like hitting a puppy in the nose with a broom, right down to the weepy, brown eyes, but some things had to be done. The kid looked gobsmacked and Osceola had resigned himself to the idea it had been a waste of time when the puppy-dog face finally firmed up.
“There’s one thing I saw,” Terry said, obviously trying to sound more confident and decisive. He actually seemed more like a little kid pretending to be a grown-up, but at least it was an improvement. “The destroyer was designed and built during the later parts of the Fall, early in the Reconstruction Wars, and they were trying to duplicate an old Imperial design, the Konigsberg.”
He was talking faster now, as if he were afraid Osceola was about to cut him off.
Not an unreasonable fear.
“But the Konigsberg’s design was predicated on using the old Alanson-McCleary stardrive. We don’t have any idea how to manufacture the stardrive anymore, but we have a gener
al idea of the physics of it, and one of the effects of the drive is that it warps spacetime around it and that makes it into a sort of energy shield.”
Osceola was perhaps half a second away from tossing the kid off the bridge when the implications of the last sentence finally hit him.
“There’s gaps in the armor.” It wasn’t a question, it was a reasonable assumption.
“A few small ones,” Terry agreed, an eager grin splitting his face. “And one big one, right where the drive propagation disc was mounted on the original. It’s right over the primary power trunk from the reactor to the weapons.” The kid’s smile faded a bit. “They replaced the disc with one for their electromagnetic deflectors though, so it’s not vulnerable to a missile or a railgun shot. You’ll have to use a laser.”
“Shit,” Kammy moaned. “So, all we gotta’ do is make them sit still while we circle around them at close range and shoot out their deflector dish. I’m sure they ain’t got no lasers of their own over there to defend the thing, and we won’t be able to use our own laser defenses or we’ll attenuate our own beam.”
“You’re always such a damned ray of sunshine,” Osceola told him. He rubbed his palms together, then cracked his knuckles as if he were about to get started on a big job. “Okay, we need them to have a reason to point their deflector dish straight at us and I can think of a damn good one. Kammy, take us to three gravities and aim straight at her. Tara, arm the main gun and prepare to fire when I give the word.”
“I love it when you get all aggressive, boss,” Tara croaked a laugh. “Gets me all worked up.”
“I hope we don’t get killed,” Osceola said grimly. “Because that is not the image I want to take with me to the afterlife.”
The woman was laughing as acceleration pushed them back into their seats and the Shakak leapt into battle.
All we need is a fife and a drum, Jonathan mused, thinking of the reproduction he’d seen in the museum in Argos of a painting from the ancient, pre-Imperial days.
The mecha shuffling slowly and painfully through the lava beds reminded him of those wounded foot-soldiers in the picture, slogging on into battle because there just wasn’t any other choice. They were a rag-tag lot: besides his Vindicator, there were three Golems including Lt. Kurtz’s, two Arbalests though not Lt. Ford’s, and ironically enough, Paskowski’s full platoon of strike mechs, all four of them as perfect as if they’d stepped right off the production line.
The damn strap-on jump kits don’t overheat as quick as the integral kind, he thought with a rueful sigh. Of course, they were only good for one aerial insertion and then they were junk to be recycled, which made them too expensive to use on every mission.
“Sir,” Kurtz said over their private channel, “do you think Hernandez and the others will be okay back there?”
Jonathan winced at the question, mostly because he’d been asking himself the same thing for nearly twenty minutes. He’d made the call to leave the mecha too badly damaged to walk or fight with their pilots under the command of Lt. Aliyah Hernandez, whose Spartacus had suffered a catastrophic left knee joint failure. There were four of them, half her platoon and half Kurtz’s, plus an Arbalest pilot who’d wandered in, her mech too far away and too badly damaged to reach the others. Lt. Ford was still missing.
“I think they’ll be fine,” he told Kurtz, trying to sound more confident than he felt. “As long as we win this thing,” he amended.
And as long as the drop-ships make it down safely, and as long as Osceola somehow beats that destroyer and is still around to pick us up if we do win down here, he added to himself but not to Kurtz.
He shoved those worries aside and concentrated on the things he could actually control. He didn’t like their formation—it was too bunched up, less than fifty meters between mecha. It was a necessary evil, at least in his opinion, because of the terrain. The lava beds had curled into a canyon, carved back at a time when there’d been a river running through there, before the volcanic uplift had changed its course. The walls were less than a hundred meters apart at their widest, the footing rocky and uneven and the visibility beyond those walls almost nil. If they’d had functioning jump-jets, he would have bypassed the whole mess, but doing it all on foot with gimpy mecha along would have added hours to the route. He didn’t think they had that kind of time. At least they were close enough they could all communicate with laser-line-of-sight relay, which was reliable even with the background radiation and jamming, and secure as well.
Kurtz was in the lead with the combined platoon from his and Hernandez’s mecha while the strike platoon brought up the rear and he stayed in the center with the two Arbalests. He knew it was the right thing to do, but he chafed at the confinement, at the lack of maneuverability. Without the jump-jets, the rocks seemed to drag at the mech’s footpads with more gravitational pull than the moon actually possessed and the walls felt as if they were closing in.
“It’s widening out up here,” Kurtz reported from around two hundred meters ahead and Jonathan fought an instinct to rush up to see with his own eyes.
Instead, he tied into Kurtz’s camera feed and saw what the platoon leader was seeing: the end of the canyon and the end of the lava beds. Ahead, the ground was softer, older and much more alive. A polychromatic moss seemed to grow on every rock, every bare stretch of soil, what was probably a mutation of the original terraforming algae the Empire had dropped on the moon a thousand years or more ago, designed to bond with anything and produce arable soil.
It had done its job, even on this volcanic, radioactive hellhole. Short, twisted trees with scaly bark clumped together in thickets, the branches of each so intricately woven with those of the others it was impossible to tell where one left off and the other began. Broad-leaf grasses and thorn bushes filled in the gaps and it seemed as if wherever something could grow, something did.
There had to be insects, animals, and maybe birds out there, somewhere in the rolling hills stretching out towards the mountains, and the glow of the volcano, though they were probably genetically altered to survive the conditions. They wouldn’t be showing their faces on a night like this, not with the scream of turbojets and the thunder of mech footpads and the smell of blood and death in the air. Animals had more sense than that.
He recognized the terrain from the mission brief and his mapping software matched it even closer. The Jeuta outpost was on the other side of the hills, three kilometers farther, in a river valley with actual flowing water, something rare and valuable in a place like this. The Jeuta under Hardrada had a fusion reactor and a cleared-out landing zone and at least one prefab, quick-setup warehouse/workshop/fabrication center big enough to reflect a lidar from orbit, and that was the sum total of their pre-launch intelligence.
Things were going to go wrong. He knew it, he had faith in it, he wasn’t a bit surprised.
When the ambush came, the only thing that saved them was the bad hip actuator in the point-man’s Golem. Warrant Officer Joy Patel was her name, right there on Jonathan’s IFF display but he knew her already, knew them all. Her Golem’s left leg dragged, slowing her turn into the curve of the path as it turned around the first hill, and the cannon round passed less than a meter ahead of her chest plastron, a streak of light in the pitch-black erupting into a starburst explosion against a stand of trees and setting them afire.
Jonathan knew what it was immediately, knew it from thousands of simulations, a dozen a day sometimes against men and women from all over Sparta, the best the military had to offer. It was someone young, someone eager, someone who just couldn’t wait to pull the trigger. A training NCO would have ripped the kid a new asshole, but he had the feeling Hardrada wouldn’t be so merciful. He’d put a bullet through the pilot’s head, if he had the chance. He wouldn’t have the chance.
Valentine Kurtz was a hunter, a good ol’ boy and one hell of a snap shot. He fired the ETC like a gunfighter from the old stories, from the hip, and put a hypersonic round into the center of the Jeuta mech�
��s chest. The design was old, as old as the destroyer the Jeuta had sailed in on, early Reconstruction War but obviously made from what materials they could scrounge on fabricators in their local shop. The ETC round cored through the cockpit and on into the fusion reactor, blowing a spray of star-hot plasma out the back as the magnetic containment failed and the reactor flushed.
The rising sun of the core flush lit up the sheltered glade to the west of the trail, spread out over the slow rise heading up the next hill to their right, burnt bare at some point in the recent past. The artificial sun glinted off the grey armor of half a dozen other mecha, crouched down as low as their joints could handle, arrayed in an inverted V formation.
It was an ambush, and there was only two ways to handle an ambush: fire and break contact, or assault through. Jonathan Slaughter made the same decision Logan Conner would have, except maybe a microsecond faster.
“Assault through!” he yelled into his audio pickup, spurring his machine into a bone-jarring run. “Lay down suppressive fire! Arbalests, get to the high ground!”
The Golems charged ahead of him, a line of blockers clearing the way for the quarterback, and absorbing some of the hits in the process. Explosive cannon rounds chewed up the soil, ripped into clusters of the short, scaly trees and paused mecha in their stride, scraping off tons of armor in a single hit. None went down; they seemed to push through on sheer will and momentum, crashing through the lines of the ambush.
Time seemed to slip into slow motion, as if his sprint around the curve of the hill took minutes instead of seconds, as if the incoming streaks of fire wormed forward a centimeter at a time, passing so close he could see the waves of heat distorting the air around them. The enemy positions were obvious, searchlights on thermal since they’d opened fire; he could even count them. Seven mecha in the ambush, all of them assault class, all of them fabricated from designs centuries old and fitted mostly with what looked to be 50mm auto-cannons and 25mm chain guns. If they had missiles, they hadn’t launched any, probably because they were too close and couldn’t count on the warheads arming in time.