Terminus Cut

by Rick Partlow

  “Who the fuck opened fire?” Captain Jeffries demanded, his voice cracking with anger. Kuryakin had the sense he was angry at the thought of being embarrassed in front of a superior more than he was at the actual breach of discipline.

  “It was me, sir,” a woman’s voice replied without a trace of fear. Kuryakin didn’t recognize the voice but the Identification Friend or Foe transponder attached to her radio frequency told him it was a Sergeant Blasingame, one of the squad leaders. “I saw movement out by the lakeshore, at my two o’clock, about a hundred and fifty meters out.”

  “Are you sure you weren’t just jumping at shadows, sergeant?” Jeffries asked her, still sounding doubtful but not as enraged.

  “Negative, sir,” Blasingame told him without a hint of uncertainty. “There’s someone out there.”

  “All right,” Jeffries sighed. “Though I don’t know what the hell one person could…”

  The only reason Kuryakin had a clear idea of what happened next was that he was looking straight at the enemy drop-ship. He wasn’t sure what premonition, what sixth sense had drawn his eye to the bulbous lifting-body shape out of all the other aerospacecraft resting on the floor of the canyon a kilometer away. Perhaps it was his subconscious mind chewing the cud of the puzzle of the positioning of the thing. It had landed at an angle across the front of the lakeshore, forcing the Starkad drop-ships inward, closer to the entrance and he’d been wondering if there had been a strategy to its placement.

  He thought he’d finally come up with a reason thanks to the added data point of an enemy trooper somewhere out there between the Spartan craft and their own. The equation summed up the combination of an observer, perhaps with a remote detonator, and an aerospacecraft filled with extremely explosive fuel…

  “Get inside!” he screamed, his voice cracking with desperation, praying to Mithra he was in time.

  He wasn’t.

  The drop-ship exploded.

  “Patrick Bray. My name is Patrick Bray.” He tasted the words, savored them, just wanting to hear his name spoken aloud again a few more times before he died.

  It had been months since he’d heard it, months since he’d spoken it, and he was getting damn tired of being Francis Acosta. The guy was a wimp, bad at his job and no fun to be around. Bray had been undercover more than once in his career, and it was usually nondescript types no one would look at twice. It was difficult stepping into the role of an absolute cretin and not becoming one in the process.

  “Patrick Bray,” he said one last time.

  The back of the volcanic rock felt nice and solid and comfortable, just like his name. He wasn’t sure which he found more objectionable, leaving the cover of that rock or going back to being Francis Acosta. A few stray shots from the Starkad lines convinced him of the immediacy of the threat of leaving the rock, but he clutched the small transmitter in his hand and steeled himself.

  You volunteered for this, dumbass.

  The firing had stopped; they were probably trying to figure out if they’d really seen anything. He had to give them credit—he’d only been out from behind cover for a half a second, trying to get to a better position to transmit, but someone had spotted him.

  Spot this, assholes.

  He stood straight up, pointed the hand-held detonator at the drop-ship and pushed the trigger button. Then he tossed it down and ran like a son of a bitch.

  This was the part where it was just about a suicide mission, he reminded himself, all the plastic explosives they’d had left wrapped around the fuel lines to the drive and the five-second delay that was all the time he was going to have. He threw himself into the water, the bitter cold driving the breath from him; he ignored it and kicked away from shore, going deeper, hoping he could go deep enough before…

  The concussion slammed into him and everything went black.

  Aleksandr Kuryakin couldn’t see a damned thing and he wondered for just a moment if he was dying. When he realized his chin-strap had come loose and his neural helmet had slipped down over his face, he nearly chuckled with relief…until he pushed it up and remembered where he was and how he’d gotten there.

  His Scorpion was down on a knee, the pod-like torso tilted to the side, an indicator flashing yellow where something had slammed into the side of the mech’s left leg. He saw most of Singh’s reinforced mech company still arrayed around the entrance to the tunnel, some standing, some kneeling, a couple blown down onto their sides, but all of them moving and basically intact. Except for the Arbalests. She’d followed his instructions and left them separate, further away, ready to guard the external approach. The five missile-launcher mecha were down and wouldn’t be getting up, twisted, smoking metal marking the place where their launch pods had been before the warheads had cooked off in the blast. Of their cockpits, nothing was left.

  Nothing was left of the Wholesale Slaughter drop-ship, either. A mushroom cloud hung over the expanding cloud of burning gas where it had been, dust and debris hiding a crater at least a hundred meters across. The glow of the fireball lit up the night, rising into the sky like a funeral pyre. The words came to him before he realized the weight they carried. The Starkad drop-ship closest to the blast was a charred husk, its landing gear buckled, its hull fractured and burning. Ruth Laurent had been on that ramp.

  The ramp was gone. She was gone. The Marines who’d been at the far edge of the security perimeter were gone, what was left of them buried under hundreds of kilograms of soil, debris, and volcanic rock.

  Bastards. God-cursed bastards.

  He should have been calling for an immediate, detailed battle damage report, a collection of the wounded, a sober and level-headed reassessment of their plan of attack. He should have been collecting data from his subordinates and calming them down. Instead, rage burned inside his chest with a fire hotter and brighter than the one consuming the wreckage of the drop-ship, rage he hadn’t felt in decades, or thought himself capable of feeling anymore.

  He pushed his strike mech to its feet, aimed both plasma guns at the opening of the tunnel and fired. Heat washed over him, searing yet still not matching the burning inside. The twin gouts of hyper-ionized gas exploded in impotent fury where the tunnel curved downward, charring the rock and gouging out twin grooves in the ceiling, but otherwise accomplishing nothing.

  “Follow me!” he screamed, voice more frenzied and shrill than firm and commanding.

  They followed him anyway, and like the mouth of the Venus flytrap he’d envisioned, the tunnel swallowed them whole.

  17

  The darkness inside his cockpit was oppressive and claustrophobic, turning his thoughts inward. He found it increasingly difficult to think of himself as Jonathan Slaughter. It had been easier when he’d been playing the mercenary, schmoozing with clients, playing things fast and loose, and making it up as he went along. It had been comforting, even, when Marc Langella had died, almost as if he could pretend the loss had happened to someone else. This was different. This was the mission, the mission, and those troops outside were Starkad Supremacy Royal Armor.

  He squinted, trying to peer through the transparent aluminum of the Sentinel’s cockpit, trying to see without the active display from the cameras and sensors. The mech was powered down, still as a statue, lined up perfectly between two of the Imperial-era strike mecha. They dwarfed his Sentinel, but they also made good cover. He hoped.

  Had Acosta already set off the charges? It would be impossible to tell from down here; and, if he’d guessed wrong about how the Starkad forces would react to it, they might be wasting their time. If he hadn’t guessed wrong but they were spotted by the enemy despite hiding powered down, the seconds it would take for them to boot up their systems would be a fatal delay.

  So many things could go wrong, and if he screwed up, it wouldn’t be Wholesale Slaughter LLC suffering, it would be all of Sparta. The wrong move could start a war, not just between Starkad and Sparta but throughout the Five Dominions. Letting them have what was in Terminus surely
would.

  This was a time when he needed to be Logan Conner, Captain of the Spartan Guard, when he needed to be the son of the Lord Guardian. And yet…he was beginning to wonder if that man still called this soul home. It was a disturbing thought and he shoved it away into the darkness behind him.

  Out in the light ahead, he heard the thundering footfalls of the titans. The enemy was coming.

  Mithra and all the warrior angels, give me strength and wisdom.

  The Supremacy Marines should have come first—sending infantry ahead of armor was the tactically sound thing to do. When they didn’t, Jonathan felt a surge of hope. Kuryakin was scared and pissed off, just the way he’d intended; and if Acosta had died pulling it off, at least he hadn’t died for nothing. The very floor was shaking with the impact of a combined weight of hundreds of tons of heavy metal running hell-bent straight into the chamber, and at their head was the hunched-over, ostrich-legged mass of a Scorpion. Its camouflage was the grey-and-green tiger stripe of the Supremacy Royal Guard, but the grey was already charred to black at the muzzles of the twin plasma cannons, the emitters glowing white from firing at nothing.

  The huge machine slowed its break-neck pace as it emerged into the chamber, the bone-shaking gallop turning into a plodding, cautious walk, the torso pivoting back and forth, scanning for threats. Behind it, a Vindicator with the same paint job emerged, grinding to a stop so abruptly it almost collided with the back of the bigger mech. It would have almost been comical if Jonathan hadn’t been scared shitless.

  You don’t see us, he thought at the mech jocks. We’re just more empty armor. Keep looking for movement, keep looking for heat. We’re not here.

  One step forward, then two, the careful recon turning into a resolute advance as the hunchbacked giant led one machine after another into the mech storage area. Four of them, then ten, still coming…Holy fire of God, how many of them are there?

  The Scorpion passed by his position, so close he could see through the cockpit. He recognized the face beneath the neural helmet; this was Colonel Kuryakin himself. The man was no Customs officer, he was almost certainly military intelligence, and atop that, he was a mech jock. Jonathan thought of General Constantine and shuddered. One wrong glance, just a twitch of intuition and those twin plasma guns would swing around and he’d be dead. His father might never even discover what had happened to him unless Starkad tried to use his death for propaganda.

  Kuryakin moved on, footpads scraping across the grooved surface of the floor and Jonathan let himself breathe just a little. He tried to see further to his right, through the archway entrance. He’d counted twenty mecha now, stretched out almost the whole length of the chamber and they were still coming in. The last mech in his line was Kurtz’s Golem, and that was intentional; he had to trust the man not to power up until the whole force was inside, not to give away their positions unless it was necessary…but to be able to tell if things had gone to shit, if a change of plans was needed. It was a responsibility requiring more than just skill; it needed a steady hand, someone who wasn’t likely to go get nervy.

  He trusted Kurtz’s judgement after these last few months. Which was why he didn’t scream at the man when the fireball erupted from his Golem’s position between two massive Imperial mecha, the ETC cannon round taking a Starkad Agamemnon through its cockpit at nearly point-blank range. He didn’t panic, either, which almost surprised him. He surely wanted to panic and this seemed an opportune time for it. Instead, he simply hit the quick-start to boot up the Sentinel’s reactor and power systems and tapped his hand against the control sticks, waiting for the seconds to pass and watching his nightmare unfold.

  The enemy mecha seemed to be turning in slow motion, synchronous with the progress bar on his control display, crawling from red, through yellow and hesitating forever just before it reached green. Time jumped back into pace, flashing green and red and white and bracketed by a dozen chest-deep explosions. An enemy Golem had the poor luck to be standing directly in front of Jonathan’s Sentinel when the strike mech powered up, and he fired his plasma gun through its cockpit. The Golem froze in place, suddenly lacking a pilot, Jonathan stepped his mech out from between the Imperial machines, and the easy part of the battle was quite suddenly over.

  The Sentinel strike mech was the most advanced battle coordination platform in the Five Dominions, capable of handling the input from a full battalion of mecha and directing a battle on multiple fronts. If he could afford to pay attention to all that input, it would be invaluable; but wading into the middle of a knife fight, it was all just so much distraction and he shut it out and walked in swinging.

  Lyta had been teaching him infantry tactics in the dead time on the Shakak, and they worked better here than the armor techniques he’d learned at the Academy. In a gunfight, she’d told him over and over, movement was life and cover was everything. The dead Golem was cover, and a long, sliding step put it between him and the mecha on the far side of the chamber, cutting his firing arc in half.

  The bulk of his company was in front of him, surging far enough forward from their concealed positions to fire back toward the entrance, trying to avoid a circular firing squad. Lasers, plasma guns and ETC cannons streaked flashes of ionization and tracer rounds dotted their way between the two forces and Jonathan’s indicators were flashing yellow in three places before he even had a chance to fire. He ignored the vibrating impact of a dozen tungsten cannon rounds smacking into his chest and leg armor and carefully picked out a target, a Goliath strike mech only fifty meters away. The broad-shouldered, humanoid-shaped machine was trying to fight three battles at once with three different weapons, and doing far too well at it. It needed to be taken care of.

  Firing his missiles at this range would be close to lunacy, but the whole thing was lunacy and he doubted he’d have another chance to use them. And what was the old line?

  They don’t give you a bonus for bringing back unfired ordnance at the end of the battle.

  Smoke billowed out in waves, enveloping half the chamber, and the four warheads barely had time to arm themselves before they struck the Goliath at the juncture of its right arm and shoulder. Flames from the bowels of Hell itself swallowed the gigantic machine whole and, when they cleared, the arm was gone, along with half the shoulder joint, and the entire upper body was listing badly to the left, stumbling off balance.

  The frantic exchange of fire seemed to have paused for the barest of seconds in silent recognition of the inspired insanity of firing long-range missiles and the inertia of the heartbeat-long truce nearly froze him into inaction, but his hand acted on its own, squeezing off the go-to-hell shot with his mech’s plasma gun. The right shoulder armor was nearly gone and the plasmoid burned through what was left, obliterating the cockpit, and once again, all was chaos.

  He stepped forward, moved to the right, sliding past the burning hulk of a Golem, firing his twin 30mm Vulcans as he moved, subtly aware of a shift in the flux of the battle. Enemy mecha were flowing past him, moving to the other side of the chamber, fleeing the carnage and death of the ambush not back towards the exit but forward, further in. He realized he’d miscalculated, and Kuryakin wasn’t quite as thoughtlessly enraged as he’d seemed or else the man had recovered quickly from the momentary madness.

  The Colonel, Jonathan realized in a flash of insight, had realized his error and instead of doubling down on it and staying engaged with a neophyte’s conviction of superior numbers, had broken contact. The Starkad mecha flowed away like water, moving through the Wholesale Slaughter kill zone to an angle where the Spartan mecha couldn’t fire without fear of blue-on-blue casualties, leaving behind their own dead and disabled. It was cold-blooded and tactically brilliant.

  The bastard knows I have to go after him, and he’s right.

  Jonathan hesitated for the space of two seconds, staring at IFF transponders flashing red, knowing he had at least five mecha of his own disabled, their pilots possibly wounded or dead…and knowing his brother and K
aty, and Lyta’s Rangers were deeper inside, searching for their only hope of winning this fight and there was no other choice.

  “Get after them now!” he yelled, kicking his Sentinel into a gallop, the massive arms swinging with the long strides. “Before they have a chance to set up an ambush!”

  He charged ahead through the chamber exit, deeper into the unknown.

  “Just when I think I can’t be surprised anymore,” Katy murmured. “This place…”

  Terry nodded wordlessly but didn’t look away. He couldn’t. The image was mesmerizing. He dimly recalled from his distant youth his great-grandfather sitting in his study, building models of old, ocean-going ships in glass bottles. It had been, he assumed, a hobby, though he couldn’t figure out the entertainment value of it.

  Gramps would love this.

  It was a starship. Not a shuttle, not a drop-ship, a starship, nearly as big as the Shakak, and yet underground, nestled in a chamber even larger than the mecha armory, the largest indoor facility he’d ever seen in a life spent bouncing between military bases and university research labs. The ship was a monolith, a black and grey wedge of seamless armored hull nearly a kilometer long and somewhere over two hundred meters across, resting on—or more accurately, several meters off of—some sort of magnetic dry-dock skids, angled upward at somewhere just north of thirty degrees from level. The only way it had come to be in this chamber was if it had been assembled here, bit by bit. Not by some semi-retired military officer passing away his golden years, but by a team of Imperial researchers over months, bringing together the latest in cutting-edge technology.

  “Why would something like this be way down here?”

  Terry stared at Sgt. Montanez, wondering if he’d ever heard the man speak before. The Ranger NCO assigned to guard the research team usually did his job in silence and, if he hadn’t seen the man with his helmet off on board the ship, he might have thought him some experimental and highly-illegal battle robot.