Terminus Cut

by Rick Partlow

  Damn, Lyta thought in mild annoyance. They weren’t that far from the enemy base, or at least where the mapping program in her helmet thought the enemy base was, but if they were hung up here, the battle might be over before they arrived. And if any of her people died because she hadn’t arrived in time…

  “Ma’am,” Cobb called, startlingly loud in her helmet earphones. Lyta realized with a start she’d been woolgathering for a minute like some damned greenhorn.

  She found Cobb immediately, not least because the woman was standing up, her rifle held casually at her side, staring down into the creek bed. Her lips were forming a sharp rebuke when she realized what the private’s stance might signify and her heart beat quicker.

  “You need to come up here, ma’am,” Cobb told her.

  She pushed herself off the ground with the butt of her rifle and jogged up to the edge of the creek bed…and stopped short, eyes wide.

  Francis Acosta looked as if he’d been dragged behind an all-terrain vehicle for a kilometer and hit every rock along the way. His flight suit was torn in a dozen places, caked with ash and dust and dirt and blood, and more of it matted the hair on the right side of his head, and he still looked better than Kathren Margolis. She was draped over his right shoulder, a deep cut over her right eye, her eyelids fluttering in a semi-conscious stupor, blackened scorch-marks on the legs of her flight suit.

  Acosta slowly shook his head, his face sunken into utter exhaustion.

  “I am never,” he declared, “going to fly again.”

  7

  He knew he was going to die and wondered if it mattered if he died calling himself Terry Conner or Terrin Brannigan. Mom had always assured him Mithra knew what was in his heart no matter what he pretended on the outside, but he hadn’t believed in any of that for years. How could he believe in a beneficent deity when life had taken his mother from him?

  It would have shocked Dad if he’d known, though Logan probably suspected. He couldn’t concentrate enough to remember to call his brother “Jonathan,” even if he’d thought it mattered. He couldn’t feel the pain in his throat anymore, couldn’t feel anything. His vision had narrowed to a dark tunnel directly ahead of him, just wide enough to ensure the very last thing he saw was Wihtgar’s shark-black eyes.

  There was the sound of an impact, flesh on flesh, coming from far away, and yet somehow, he knew it had actually been close, that it was his fading consciousness making it sound distant. The pressure on his neck ceased and he was falling. He thought for just the briefest fraction of a second that the gravity was gone, that he was back in free-fall, until he realized he was only half-right. He was falling, but there was nothing free about it. The deck smacked him between the shoulder blades and all the pain he hadn’t been feeling from his throat returned in a rush of red-hot daggers driven into his windpipe.

  Stars filled his vision, but he shook them away, desperation battling fear and pain for control of his mind and body. He had to get up, had to see what was happening…

  And abruptly, he could.

  It was as if two titans of legend battled for possession of his soul, dim shadows bathing them in mystery, cloaking their motions in an illusion of inhuman speed that was more a function of his oxygen-starved thoughts than reality. Terry would have thought no human could take on a Jeuta hand-to-hand, that no human could match their size and strength and speed and ferocity. He’d never seen Kamehameha-Nui Johannsen fight.

  The man was huge, a giant who he’d initially thought of as pudgy, maybe even fat. He’d been wrong. The bulk was muscle, at least 130 kilograms of it, and Kammy knew how to use it. What came naturally to Wihtgar, scriven in his genes by Imperial scientists centuries ago, was the product of a lifetime of practice and work for the Shakak’s First Mate. Swipes from clawed Jeuta fingers that would have disemboweled had they struck home found only air, missing by millimeters as Kammy swayed like the most agile ballet dancer, turning the close confines of the engine room into his private studio. Fists the size of a cured ham pounded into the gap between the Jeuta’s ribs, seeking out weaknesses and punishing them with merciless precision.

  Sweat flickered away from Kammy’s brow, propelled by the hypnotic, metronome-swing of his dreadlocks, swaying with the movement of his massive shoulders, part of the dance. Wihtgar didn’t perspire, not like a human, but his mouth was hanging open, the only outward sign he was growing tired. Blood dripped fitfully from the claws at the tips of his fingers and Terry saw the matching tears on the sleeves of Kammy’s ship fatigues. The scratches were ugly and ragged, but only superficial.

  “Give it up,” Kammy said to Wihtgar. “You’re not getting off this ship.”

  “None of us are,” the Jeuta proclaimed, lunging for the big man.

  It was clumsy, even Terry could see that just from the little he’d learned in the gym sparring with Lyta these last few weeks. It was the move of someone with little training, someone who relied on their superior strength too much. Kammy seemed to glide out of the way of the attack, his plant leg hopping just a step, his front leg sliding smoothly in an organic, natural motion. Massive hands moved impossibly fast, catching the Jeuta behind the neck, pushing him forward along the direction of his motion and slamming him face-first into the bulkhead.

  Wihtgar wasn’t out, but he was stunned—too stunned to put up an effective defense when Kammy sank the rear naked choke into his throat. The Jeuta were hardier, stronger than humans, but there were things you just couldn’t change and remain a biped with stereoscopic hearing and vision: your brain had to be above your heart on a movable neck, and the blood had to get to the brain with the veins and arteries close enough to the surface to avoid overheating.

  If you were humanoid, you could be choked unconscious.

  Wihtgar thrashed impotently, tried to claw at Kammy’s arm but lacked the strength to do more than leave a few surface cuts. The Jeuta went slack, hands falling away from the big man’s arm, but Kammy kept the choke in for another ten or twenty seconds. In a normal human, it was probably long enough to do some permanent damage, but Terry had no idea what the effect would be on a Jeuta.

  Finally, Kammy let Wihtgar roll off him and scrambled to his feet.

  “Is he…?” Terry tried to say it out loud but his voice didn’t seem to want to work and the words came out in a whisper.

  “Can you fix what he did?” Kammy asked, his usual good humor lost in strained impatience. “Can you get the weapons back up?”

  Terry nodded, pushing away from the deck and stumbling over to the main control board. He tried not to look at the bodies in the corner. He wondered if the Jeuta had killed them with his bare hands or used a gun…

  “Terry!” Kammy’s sharp remonstration snapped him out of the fugue he’d been sinking into.

  He traced the fault on the power distribution display just the way Chief Duncan had shown him, finding it almost immediately. Wihtgar hadn’t tried anything fancy, probably because he was more of a strong back than a technician; he’d simply thrown the breakers for the power conduit from the reactor to the weapons systems. Kammy was watching him with one eye while he devoted most of his attention to securing Wihtgar’s hands behind him with a pair of heavy metal cuffs.

  “You just happened to be carrying those?” Terry asked, moving past him to a closed cabinet, using the code programmed into his ‘link to unlock it.

  “Naw,” Kammy admitted, keeping his full weight pressed against the Jeuta. “I had an itch between my shoulder blades when I heard about the power failure. And honestly, bro…” He shrugged. “I never completely trusted our buddy here.”

  Terry didn’t speak, concentrating on the job at hand. He pulled the breaker board open, counting down and across row upon row of physical fail-safe switches to the designator he’d seen on the display, H236. There it was, manually tripped. There was, he noticed with a twist of his guts, blood spattered on the flat grey surface of it. He gritted his teeth and closed the circuit. Red indicators flashed green and he nodded t
o Kammy.

  “Bridge,” the big man spoke into the pickup of his personal ‘link, holding the device between thumb and forefinger as if it were a toothpick in his meaty hand, the other pinning Wihtgar’s shoulders to the deck, “we’re up! You’re good to go!”

  “Roger that,” Osceola answered, his voice sounding tiny through the ‘link’s external speaker. “Good job.”

  “And get me a security detail and a medical team down here, boss,” Kammy added. “We got casualties.”

  “If you thought it was him,” Terry finally asked, gesturing toward the Jeuta, “then why didn’t you bring a gun?”

  “I don’t like shooting guns in the engine room.” Kammy grinned broadly, his reply as flippant and easy as if there weren’t three dead bodies lying in the corner.

  A rush of loathing filled Terry, an earnest wish he’d never met any of these people, never decided to come along. He pushed it down with effort, telling himself firmly it wasn’t that Kammy or any of the others were bad people, they were just in a life that hardened their souls.

  “Besides…” Kammy shrugged, seemingly unaware of the play of emotions behind Terry’s purposefully bland expression. “I knew I could take him.”

  Terry felt the deck shift beneath him as maneuvering thrusters fired and he knew Osceola was lining up the rail gun for another shot.

  “Go check on the Engineering crew.”

  He glanced up at Kammy, certain he’d misheard him.

  “They might not all be dead,” the big man insisted. “I can’t let this asshole go until the security team gets here and Mithra knows how long till we get the medics in here.”

  Terry nodded, acknowledging the reasoning and ethics of the situation if not the conclusion that he needed to be the one to check on the bodies. He cleared his throat, rubbing at the raw spots on his neck where Wihtgar’s fingers had abraded the flesh, receiving a very clear flash of how easily he could be just another one of the bodies dead on the floor. They were sprawled one atop the other, as if the Jeuta had discarded them casually, tossing them aside to make room for the work he had to do.

  He knew them. He worked with them every day for years.

  The body at the top of the heap was Duncan, pudgy, grey-haired, and unabashedly old. He’d told Terry he’d been a junior machinist’s mate for the Spartan Navy in the last of the Reconstruction Wars, which would have made him nearly two hundred. Terry wasn’t sure he’d believed the man, but it made a great story. Duncan’s neck was broken, his head lolling at an impossible angle, his eyes horribly open, staring in white accusation.

  Terry clenched his teeth and grabbed the old man’s arm, pulling him off the others. The arm was floppy, unnaturally loose as if he were a stuffed doll; Terry jerked away and wiped his hand on his leg instinctively. He cursed at his own stupidity and stepped forward again, checking the next victim.

  Cheryl Mendelson was her name. He almost couldn’t remember the last name because everyone called her Cheryl and the Shakak’s crew was fairly casual about rank. She had red hair and a pleasant, open face painted with freckles and barely came up to his shoulder. She’d reminded him of one of the nannies his father had employed after his mother’s death, but Cheryl had loved the Shakak like it was her own child. Her enthusiasm for the task of keeping a starship up and running had been as infectious as her schoolgirl giggle.

  Her throat had been crushed. The flesh there was purple, red welts marking where the Jeuta’s fingers had dug into it, and above them her face was blue, the veins in her eyes red and broken. His sight blurred and when he wiped the back of his hand across his eyes, he was surprised when it came away wet. He was crying. He hadn’t cried since Mom had died.

  “Fuck you, Kammy,” he said aloud, yanking on Cheryl’s sleeve, turning her over, turning her face away from him as he pulled her off the last of them.

  “I’m sorry, man,” Kammy said softly. It sounded as if he meant it. “I’d do it if I could.”

  The last body was Mwai Kenyatta. Terry had said two words to the man the whole time he’d been on the ship, didn’t know him beyond his name and the fact he liked to wear T-shirts with animated images of cats on them. His face was badly bruised, blood streaming from his nose and mouth…and he was breathing.

  “Kenyatta is alive,” he reported, the words flat and neutral.

  He had no idea what to do with the man, no sort of first aid training whatsoever, but he cleared the others off the engineering technician’s body and straightened him out.

  “He tried to fight me,” Wihtgar said, and Terry jumped at the words.

  Kammy leaned into the Jeuta as if he expected him to make a move, but Wihtgar stayed motionless, almost impassive, as if resigned to his fate.

  “I didn’t have the need to kill him after I had rendered him helpless,” he elaborated, almost as if he considered it a justification.

  “Why?” Terry wanted to know. He turned his eyes back toward Kenyatta, making sure the man’s airway was clear, making sure he had no broken bones but unsure of what else to do. “These people gave you a chance, took you in when no one else would have. Why would you do this to them?”

  “You are not Jeuta,” Wihtgar said, “or you would not ask that question.”

  Terry waited for him to expound, but the Jeuta said no more. Then security and medical stormed into the room and patient and prisoner were both quickly swept away, leaving him alone with Kammy and the two corpses. He stood there for what seemed like minutes, before Kammy put a hand on his arm and turned him around.

  “We should get back to the bridge,” the big man said, his rounded face unusually firm. “The fight’s not over.”

  Terry nodded, remembering what Wihtgar had said.

  “Yeah. I guess it’s not.”

  The world was exploding around him. The ground shifted beneath the foot-pads of the Vindicator, each impact of the missiles arcing over his head another earthquake, yet he kept it upright, kept her moving forward. Smoke and fire and debris blinded his optical and infrared cameras making thermal useless, but still he kept his laser designator pointed straight ahead, knowing the enemy strike mecha hadn’t had time to move.

  They were still there; he knew it because they were shooting at him. Not hitting, mostly, because they probably couldn’t see him any better than he could see them, but he caught the flare of a laser through the particulate cloud of darkness, saw a streaking cannon round pass by. It was all he could do to keep the Vindicator on its feet and keep the laser designator aligned and he made no attempt to fire back.

  He was only fifty meters away when the last missile hit, close enough for the heat to wash through his cockpit, squeezing the air from his lungs with a sudden, searing pain. Something struck the Vindicator’s chest plastron with enough force to throw the mech off its stride and he was barely able to maintain balance at the loss of hundreds of kilograms of armor on his right side.

  Someone yelled over the headphones in his helmet but the words couldn’t penetrate the roaring in his ears. Was it the concussion of the blast, he wondered, or the incipient heat exhaustion? He hadn’t decided between the two when he crashed the right shoulder of the Vindicator into the chest of one of the strike mecha at over thirty kilometers an hour.

  The straps of his safety harness bit into his chest and shoulders and his helmet pounded into the padded rest surrounding it, and he could feel his easy chair jerking against its moorings. Metal shrieked and roared then tore away, but both machines stayed upright. He had to act before the other pilot recovered enough to make use of the superior mass of his strike mech.

  The plasma cannon mounted in his mech’s right hand was jammed downward, trapped by the impact, but he was close enough to make out the right leg of the Nomad in the camera view on the gun mount, lined up with the targeting reticle. He fired. More heat, conducting through material designed to be insulating, and the soles of his feet blistered right through his boots. He wanted to scream but lacked the breath. Sun-bright light washed out the camera f
eed and polarized the coating of his canopy. He couldn’t see a damned thing, but he felt the mass of the Nomad falling away from the front of the Vindicator, freeing up its right arm.

  He stamped downward by instinct, the impulses going through his neural halo and into the motivator circuits of the mech, felt the crunch of metal beneath his right foot-pad. It was just the sort of feeling a mech’s cockpit made when it was crushed. The yellow warnings on his damage display began flashing red, but it was something else he couldn’t control and he ignored it.

  The swirling cloud of smoke and flame billowed angrily through the saddle between the hills, revealing fleeting glimpses of the carnage surrounding Jonathan. Through one of those teasing gaps in the blackness, he saw the charred wreckage of two of the other strike mecha, one of the Nomads and the Scorpion. They were out of commission, out of the fight, their pilots likely mangled corpses inside the twisted metal.

  One of the Sentinels was badly damaged but still on its feet, one arm hanging limp and useless. Its ETC cannon had broken off its mount on the right shoulder and hung down its back by a single power cable as if by a sling.

  The last Sentinel was running, and he would have bet a year’s pay Hardrada was inside it. He raised his plasma gun, trying to line up a shot on the fleeing Jeuta, but the other strike mech stepped into the line of fire and the blast of accelerated ionized gas took it in its functional arm, blowing it off in a shower of sparks and a halo of vaporized metal. The Sentinel staggered out of the way, pulled off to the side by the dead weight of its damaged arm, leaving him with a clear shot to the other mech. But…

  “Shit,” he rasped, his mouth full of cotton from the heat. He would have taken a sip from the water bladder built into his suit, but he was worried it might be hot enough to burn his tongue.

  The capacitor for the plasma gun would take seconds to recharge and the running strike mech would be out of sight by then, around the corner of the hill. He had one weapon that could stop the Jeuta, and he knew what might happen if he used it—the flashing red warning signal at his shoulder kept reminding him.