by Rick Partlow
He zoomed in with the mech’s optical cameras and saw some sort of control screen built into the surface of the wall, improbably active, glowing with what seemed like a holographic display. Holographic projectors were fiendishly expensive in the Dominions, usually found only in capital buildings and palaces as a curiosity, an ostentatious display of wealth and advancement. Argos had a public theater with a holographic projector for special occasions, but ViR goggles accomplished the same effect and were so much cheaper to produce, no one considered the projectors to be worth the expense. And certainly, no one used them for haptic control boards like this.
Terry was scrolling through page after page of text, diagrams, blueprints, still images and videos, pausing every few seconds to read something or play a video. He couldn’t pick up the sound from this far away, but he assumed some sort of narration went along with them, because he saw Terry nodding to something, then yelling for the rest of the research team to join him.
“There are another five chambers just as big as this one,” Terry said, transmitting again on the ‘link after several minutes of apparently forgetting he’d called his brother in the first place. “They’re stocked with experimental models of hovertanks, battlesuits…”
“What?” Jonathan demanded, the words all in a language he understood but not in those combinations.
“Wish you’d just come down here,” Terry grumbled. “Hold on…”
Because it’s fifteen meters up and down and I’m the only real security we have, he thought at his brother but didn’t bother to say.
A video display box popped up in a corner of the Sentinel’s communications screen, relayed from Terry’s ‘link. The picture flickered and flared, the holographic display meant to be viewed with the naked human eye rather than a video pickup, but Jonathan could make out the images in the holographic display between the crackles of static.
He knew what a tank was from military history class. They were still seen sometimes, in colonial militias, but their biggest problem was power production in relation to size. You could make a tank big enough to fit a small fusion core into it, one the size of a mech’s power plant, but once you squeezed in the power plant, the turbines, the weapons, and the drive train, you had something even bigger than a mech with less mobility. It was far too awkward to use jump-jets in a tank and all you accomplished in making a tracked vehicle that large was giving your enemy a huge, poorly-maneuverable target.
The power plants you could fit into a useful-sized tank weren’t enough to mount a laser large enough to take down a mech or an assault shuttle, so what you wound up with was a mobile artillery piece you could only drive on fairly flat, fairly open surfaces. These tanks were nothing like the ones he’d seen. They were flat and disc-shaped with an armored plenum and they reminded him of the hovercraft he’d seen in the swampy areas of some colonies, except none of those hovercraft mounted what looked like tons of heavy armor and some sort of weapons turret with either a barrel or a beam emitter four meters long.
“There are specs here,” Terry said, his hand straying into the image and scrolling away from the stills of the tanks to pages of text. “From what I can tell, these things can run over just about any surface and they have a top speed north of two hundred kilometers an hour.”
“Mithra, what the hell could power that? Can you even fit a fusion reactor into something that small?”
“Well, no, you can’t.” Terry’s face replaced the image of the tanks and the expression on it was grim. “You couldn’t fit it into one of these, either.”
Back to the shot of the holoprojector, only now the chamber it showed was full of what looked like nothing so much as a terracotta army in some ancient tomb, waiting to do the bidding of their emperor in the spiritual battles of the afterlife. It took Jonathan a moment to realize the scale of what he was seeing. When he did it was only because the computer system provided a handy, human-sized avatar beside the squat, bipedal shapes. If something three meters tall and two meters wide could be called, “squat.”
He intuited what they were without Terry having to explain it. Powered armor had been attempted in the last two centuries, as Dominion military research and development agencies had tried desperately for an edge against their neighbors, but those researchers had run into the same problem as they had with the conceptual, fusion-powered tanks. If you made the things big enough to hold a reactor, you had a mech. If you made them smaller, you had something without the possibility of jump-jets, without enough power to take down a mech and without the maneuverability and versatility of regular, unpowered infantry.
These had obviously solved the problem, or the Imperials wouldn’t have bothered to manufacture thousands of them.
“You’ve got one of those ‘good-news, bad news’ kind of looks, Terry. Give me the bad news.”
“You ever hear of antimatter?”
“Sure, it’s the shit they’re always using for power in those stupid movies about aliens.” Jonathan had rattled off the answer without thinking, but his eyes widened as he realized the implications of what Terry had said. “Wait a minute, these things are all powered by antimatter?”
“Yeah.” His brother hissed frustration. “And from what I can see here, there’s none of it stored in this installation.” He turned the ‘link’s video pickup back toward the holographic display and scrolled through a menu to what could have been a spreadsheet. “It looks as if they were scheduled to receive a new shipment when everything went to shit. What they had left, they used to power the ships they sent out looking for help, and most of those didn’t come back.”
Jonathan’s stomach began sinking through his body and down toward the center of the planet. All of the effort, all of the cost, the people who’d given their lives on this mission…
“You aren’t saying all this is useless, are you?”
The words came out anguished, hopeless and he knew he should have been trying to sound more stoic and commanding, but the fraud was harder to pull off with his brother. Hell, he couldn’t even keep repeating the lie about Terry being his cousin, not inside his head and not with the people who mattered.
“No, not useless,” Terry insisted. “They all represent incredible advances, but…”
He’d been scrolling absently through one spreadsheet after another as he spoke, but he stopped scrolling at the same moment he stopped speaking.
“Logan…,” he stumbled over his words, cursing softly, and turned the video pickup back towards his face, “…I mean, Jonathan, I think I have something here. It looks like one of the ships did come back, and it might still have fuel on board, maybe. I mean, assuming the containment didn’t fail after four centuries. But I think if it had, it would have taken half this base with it.”
“It wasn’t in orbit. We’d have detected it visually even if they had some sort of stealth material technology we don’t know about anymore.”
Terry wasn’t facing the video pickup anymore, but he hadn’t bothered to turn it back toward the display, just holding it askew and giving Jonathan a view of a particularly uninteresting part of the ceiling while his brother did something with the controls out of his view.
“I think I see something about…”
“Captain Slaughter!” Kurtz’s urgent call interrupted Terry, coming in via a passive relay between the platoon leader at the base’s entrance all the way down through the rest of his mecha stationed at visual range at intervals along the tunnel. “Captain Slaughter, do you read me?”
“I’m here, Valentine,” he told the man, trying to sound calm, or at least calmer than he had with his brother. “Report.”
“Sir, it’s Starkad! They just jumped a heavy cruiser in-system and they’re burning this way!”
Something almost physical hammered into Jonathan’s gut and only the easy chair kept him from rocking back on his heels. A million questions raced through his mind, starting with an inane “do they know we’re here?” to “how did they find us?” and finishing with somethi
ng useful: “do they know the base is here?”
The answer to the last one was almost certainly a yes. The broadcast was loud and clear from inside the system; they’d have to be blind and deaf to miss it. They knew about Terminus and if they’d followed the Shakak here, they might know Wholesale Slaughter was a cover for a Spartan operation. It was the worst-case scenario, the one military units always trained for and never actually expected, and the reality of it crashed over him. There was no way the Shakak could take on a ship that size.
“We need to get back to the lander,” he decided immediately.
“It’s too late,” Kurtz told him. “Major Randell is heading down with the rest of our troops in the other drop-ship and the assault shuttle. Osceola is taking the Shakak and going after the cruiser. Major Randell says we’re going to have to make our stand here.”
“What the hell?” he blurted. “Are they nuts?”
There was a shrug in Kurtz’s voice when he responded.
“You got me, sir. I’m just the messenger. But they’re on their way. All of them.”
The words poured out of him without thought, a decision made from an intuition he hadn’t been aware he’d amassed.
“We can’t fight them in the air,” he declared. “And the drop-ships would just be sitting ducks anyway. Get the crews inside and I want you and your mecha down here as well. We have probably a couple hours to set up a defense in depth.” And I’ve never done it before outside a training mission.
“Jonathan,” Terry interrupted, “what’s going on?” His brother’s ‘link wasn’t on the command frequency and he hadn’t caught any of Jonathan’s exchange with Kurtz.
“Do you know where that fucking ship is, Terry?” he asked, harsher than he’d intended. On the video pickup, he saw his brother blink in surprise at the demand but then collect himself and try to answer.
“I think I can find it. I saw what’s supposed to be a hangar on a level up from here, but it’s a long way inward…like five or six kilometers.” He shook his head. “I don’t know if I can get it to work, and I couldn’t fly it if we did. We’re going to need a pilot.”
“Yeah,” Jonathan agreed. “I can get us one. But she’s not going to like it.”
“What the hell do you mean you want me to land?” Katy demanded hotly, curving the assault shuttle around in a flat arc, her voice strained but her anger making it past the g-forces of the tight turn. “We have a freaking Starkad heavy cruiser inbound! Do you not understand the concept of aerospace cover?”
Francis Acosta wished he could see the expression on her face, but he’d learned months ago not to try any sudden movements while she was flying under combat conditions. He’d learned it the hard way, unfortunately, and paid for it with days of bedrest and muscle relaxants, so he just remained still and kept his eyes straight ahead, and his ears open.
“Katy,” Jonathan replied, the strain in his voice nearly as pronounced as hers, though not from the acceleration forces of a maneuvering shuttle, “it’s a heavy cruiser. They’re going to have four assault shuttles, minimum—real assault shuttles, not civilian landers rigged with a makeshift weapons package. You’re a damned good pilot, so let’s say you take down two of them before they get you. What does that gain us? Their drop-ships will still make it down and we’ll still have to deal with their ground forces down here in these tunnels where their air superiority won’t do them a bit of good.”
“So, we don’t try to take out their assault shuttles,” Katy insisted. “Lee’s already launched from the Shakak—together, we make a run straight at their drop-ships. We could take down one or two before they got us!”
And we’ll fucking get killed! Acosta wanted to scream at her, but he’d learned that lesson too. Katy Margolis didn’t make decisions based on fear, or on common sense, just on accomplishing the mission.
“Say you do that,” Jonathan Slaughter replied, making what Acosta considered a tactical error by trying to reason with her, “and you kill two of their drop-ships, we’re still fucked because there is no way the Shakak is going to take out the cruiser in a straight-up fight.”
“Well, damn it, Jonathan,” she raged, slamming a palm down on the control console of the pilot’s station, “what are we going to do, then? Just huddle inside the Imperial base and starve to death like they did?”
And she had a point there, Acosta realized. Given the choice between dying in a rather painless explosion out here or going slowly and painfully from malnutrition over a period of weeks, he knew which he’d pick.
“Katy, there’s a ship down here,” Slaughter confided, his voice low as if he somehow thought he could keep the enemy from overhearing by speaking softly. “It’s an Imperial ship with experimental weapons and a stardrive and it’s powered by antimatter. If we can find it and get it working, I’m going to need someone to fly it. It’s pretty much our only hope of keeping Starkad from getting their hands on the Imperial tech inside this base, not to mention any of us getting out of here alive.”
“Well, why the hell didn’t you lead with that?” she asked him. There was a subtle change in her tone, something that wouldn’t be noticed by someone who hadn’t known her for a while, the shift from “we’re going to argue this until you see I’m right” to “I understand you were right but I’m not happy about having to admit that.”
“If you don’t come down here and help us with this,” Jonathan pleaded with her, “I’m going to have to let Lt. Cordray do it.”
“Melissa?” Disbelief was strong in Katy’s voice. “She’s a damned taxi driver, Jonathan! You’re going to let her try to fly a 400-year-old experimental spacecraft?”
“Unless you land that shuttle and do it instead.”
Acosta wanted to keep quiet. He knew he should keep quiet. It was his job to keep quiet. But there’s just so much a man can put up with and keep his mouth shut, and even the strictest orders had to give a little leeway.
“Lt. Margolis,” he said, finally taking a risk and turning his upper body toward her, hoping against hope she wouldn’t throw the bird into a violent maneuver out of sheer perversity, “would you do me a personal favor and land this fucking shuttle?”
Her eyebrow cocked upward, an odd mixture of annoyance and curiosity writ across her face.
“You didn’t have to fly with me, Francis,” she reminded him. “Lee said he’d trade copilots…”
“My name is not Francis Acosta,” he declared. And I’d like to get ahold of the bastard who saddled me the name Francis. “I’m Major Patrick Bray, Military Intelligence.”
Telling the truth felt like tossing off a backpack after a twenty-kilometer hike…or maybe more like finally hitting the bathroom after holding it in for three hours, if he was being honest with himself.
Kathren Margolis’ mouth dropped open, her eyes narrowed in suspicion.
“Why the…” she began, but he cut her off.
“Did you really think General Constantine was going to send an intelligence operation into enemy space with the Guardian’s son along, without sending one of his own people along to keep an eye on things?” He shook his head, slashing his hand sideways to forestall any attempt at an answer. “Forget it, the right answer is ‘no, he wouldn’t.’ And since it’s my job to both report back and to make sure this mission succeeds, I’d like you to make both of those possible by setting aside your remarkable and often admirable stubbornness and pride and setting this fucking shuttle down before the Supremacy shoots us out of the air.”
She seemed nonplussed and he really wished he had the time to really appreciate the silence, but matters were pressing. He made a motion downward with his hand.
“Please? I technically outrank you, but I’d rather not make it an order.” He grinned with perhaps more malice than he should have. “Orders require all sorts of reports and records and some things would just be better kept off the record.”
“All right, all right,” she conceded, pushing the control stick down fast enough for it to fe
el as if she were pulling the rug out from under his feet. “I should have known,” she lamented, half to herself. She glanced over him and sniffed with disdain. “You suck as a copilot.”
15
“I do not remember this suit being so tight the last time I wore it.”
Aleksandr Kuryakin tugged at the wrist of the body sleeve, lip curling in distaste. He looked ridiculous in the skin-tight outfit, but it was necessary for the neural helmet to intercept the movement commands his brain was sending to his muscles before they actually made it. Otherwise, he would have flailed around the cockpit of the mech like he was having a seizure.
“I know I’m being insubordinate, sir,” Ruth Laurent said, staring at him in obvious disapproval, arms crossed over her tactical vest, “but I think this is a very bad idea. How long has it been since you were in the cockpit of a mech?”
“I’ll have you know, young Captain,” he informed her with a self-righteous sniff, “I spend four hours every week in a simulator and two weekends every month in mandatory training with the Supremacy Guard. I am totally qualified to pilot a Scorpion strike mech.”
He didn’t mention the Mbeki War or the half-dozen other minor uprisings and engagements he’d fought in before transferring to Intelligence. If she was slack enough not to have researched her boss’s record, she shouldn’t be working for him.
“Yes, sir,” she acknowledged, “but you’re the commander of this operation. Wouldn’t it be wiser for you to remain with one of the drop-ships while the mecha and the Marine troops clear the enemy out of the installation?”
He paused in pulling on his fatigues over the body sleeve, eyeing her balefully.
“Captain Laurent, consider this a professional development session.” He snuck a glance around the nicely-appointed flag officers’ locker room. It was supposed to be empty but for the two of them, but old and paranoid instincts died hard.