“No kidding, Einstein,” Shinoda shouted back. “But where the fuck to?”
“I was hoping you’d tell me,” Michael muttered. Since it was only a matter of time before the Hammers got lucky anyway, he decided to not to worry about all the crap they were sending his way. He ignored the incoming fire and pushed himself back up so he could work his rifle along the lines of advancing men. “You scumsuckers!” he shouted. He dropped a Hammer, then another. “We’re not dead yet!”
His abuse sparked off another furious response. The air in front of Michael’s position filled with bullets and the black shapes of microgrenades. One headed right for him, and time slowed to a crawl. He watched in horrified fascination as the grenade grew bigger, a gray blur against the evening sky.
Exactly what provoked Michael to do what he did, he would never know, but without a moment’s thought he burst out of cover. That was what he tried to do, but his left arm refused to play along. He ended up half rolling, half staggering down the short, dusty slope in front of the boulder only a heartbeat before the microgrenade flew over his head. It buried itself in the loose dirt and exploded with a shattering crack.
It was the dirt that saved him. It absorbed the microgrenade’s lethal gift of shrapnel. That and the blast; it blasted a ball of dust outward, forcing the Hammers to fire blind. Bullets plucked at Michael’s body as he wriggled and squirmed to get away in a frantic, floundering scramble toward a fragmentary image lodged in his memory, the image of an opening between two boulders somewhere in the confusion to his left.
His hand felt the hole before he saw it; without a second’s thought, he rammed his body into the opening, chased into safety by wayward bullets. One, its energy almost spent ricocheting off rock, slashed his forehead open. The cut sent blood curtaining down across his face, hot and sticky. He rolled into the back wall of the hole and lay there, wiping the blood out of his eyes.
Shinoda popped into his neuronics. “Where the fuck did you go?” she said, her voice overlaid by the methodical double tap of her rifle.
“Five meters to your right, I think,” Michael said. He wormed his way around to peer out of the hole. “Had to move; a Hammer grenade had my name on it.”
“I’m not sure what they’re up to,” Shinoda said. “They seem to have fallen back …”
Now that Shinoda mentioned it, Michael realized that nobody was shooting at him anymore.
“… which means they’re regrouping. I think they’ll bring the lander in to give us another dose of cannon fire.” Michael swore under his breath; for an instant he had allowed himself to think the Hammers might have had enough. “Then they’ll move in again.”
“Can we move?”
“No point. They’ll have us covered.”
“Shit.”
“Shit is right. Keep your head down until the lander’s gone, then just do the best you can.”
“Will do.” Michael checked Shinoda’s biostats. “You okay?” he asked. “Your blood pressure’s a bit low.”
“Losing a shitload of blood does that to you. Bastards got me in the right arm. But I’ll be fine. I’ve got woundfoam and a dressing on it. Brace yourself. I think I see the lander, and the son of a bitch is coming right for us.”
Michael slithered to the back of his hole and curled himself into a ball. He tried not to think what even a single 30-millleter hypersonic cannon shell would do to his body. Then the attack was on them, and Michael’s world dissolved into more noise and dust and pain as a rock splinters sliced into him. And when he thought it could get no worse, the air turned a blinding white. An instant later, the ground rammed him bodily upward—he swore the rock he was huddled up against moved as well—and then there was silence, a strange, flat quiet broken only by the skittering of pebbles falling around him. “Sergeant! What—”
Something hard, something unseen, something silent smashed into him and battered his body into unconsciousness.
• • •
“Colonel, come on. Wake up, Colonel! Hey! Come on.”
Colonel? Michael wondered. What colonel?
“Talk to me, you overpromoted asswipe.”
Overpromoted asswipe? Michael thought. That does it. With an effort, he forced his blood-encrusted eyes open and looked up into Shinoda’s face. “I’m going to have you court-martialed for insolence,” he rasped.
Shinoda pulled Michael upright and pushed a water tube into his mouth. “Be my guest,” she said with a lopsided grin, “but what makes you think we’re going to live long enough?”
“How long was I out?”
“Couple of minutes.”
“What the hell just happened?”
“Juggernaut, that’s what. I think the good guys just took out Gwalia.”
“Gwalia?” Michael frowned. He shook his head to try to clear the mush from his brain. “But the missile base wasn’t on the target list. It’s too far north to be a priority.”
“Maybe Admiral Moussawi changed his mind about that. Anyway, I don’t give a rat’s ass. Whatever it was, it didn’t do the bad guys any favors.”
“They’re gone?”
“Not gone, dead. I don’t think they’ll bother us anymore. Anyway, it’s time we moved on. Can you stand?”
“Get me free of this damn hole and I will.”
Michael’s mouth dropped open when he saw the damage the blast had done. In every direction, the sparse vegetation had been stripped. The ground was littered with shattered trunks and shrubs piled in haphazard heaps along the foot of the reef wall. A body lay wrapped around a tree stump. More were scattered across the dirt. “What the hell,” he whispered, awestruck by the devastation.
“No time for sightseeing,” Shinoda said. She pulled Michael to his feet. He stood, swaying and unsteady. “The Hammers will be mighty pissed by all this, and I don’t want to be here when they arrive to see what the hell just happened.”
“Wait one,” Michael said. He pointed to an object, a white splash in his neuronics-boosted infrared vision, something hot against the cool of the ground. “There; what’s that?”
“Does it matter? We do need to go.”
“Bear with me, sergeant. I’ve a got a bad feeling about this.”
“Five minutes.”
“Two will be plenty.” Michael walked over to where the object lay. It was a jagged piece of flame-seared metal. He tried to lift it; it refused to move. “Shit, that is heavy,” he said. “Ceramsteel armor, I’d say.”
Shinoda frowned. “Ceramsteel armor?” she said. “Where the hell did that come from?”
“A warship, I think.” Michael straightened up and scanned the area around the piece of armor. “There,” he said. He set off through the debris. He stopped alongside a second piece of metal. “Damn them all to hell,” he said softly a moment later.
“What’s up?”
“See those?” Michael pointed to a meter-square cluster of holes punched into the metal fragment. “Those are pinchspace vortex generator ports.”
“So?”
“Hammer ports are hexagonal; ours are circular.’
“Oh!” Shinoda breathed in sharply. “One of ours?”
“From the size of the array, I’d say a deepspace heavy cruiser. Fucking Hammer bastards. Have a quick look around. It’d be good to identify her if we can.”
“Here,” Shinoda called out a minute later. She waved Michael over.
“What … Oh, no,” Michael said when he spotted the distinctive shape of a skinsuited body. “Who is it?”
Shinoda bent down to turn the body over. Michael was thankful that the helmet visor was so scorched and scarred that he could not see the face. “Chief Petty Officer … N … g … u … Nguyen,” she said, reading the name woven into the suit with some difficulty. “Poor bastard. Let me see if I can access the ID. Okay, she was Chief Petty Officer Maddi Nguyen, female, thirty-seven years old, posted to the Recognizant two years ago.”
Michael’s head snapped up in disbelief. “Did you say Recognizant?”
“I did.”
Michael shook his head in despair. “Recognizant was Admiral Moussawi’s ship.” He took a deep breath to fight back a sudden rush of anger. “Let’s go, sergeant. There’s nothing more we can do for any of them.”
They set off without another word, a pair of smoke-blackened, blood-soaked wrecks. What a sight we must be, Michael thought. And how will we stay out of the Hammer’s hands? We’ll be lucky to get ten klicks …
He stopped. “Sergeant, hold on.”
Shinoda looked around. “What’s up?” she asked.
“Look at the blast pattern,” Michael said. “The way the trees are lying, I’d say the Recognizant blew up somewhere to the northwest and was close to the ground when she did. That means the reef will have deflected some of the blast wave. Our mobibot was in a gully. It might still be there.”
“There’s only one way to find out,” Shinoda said. “Let’s go see.”
• • •
The approaches to Gwalia were a sprawling master class in mindless devastation; the town itself was not much better.
“This’ll teach the bastards to fuck with us,” was all Shinoda said as they were waved through a DocSec security point without so much as a cursory ID check. They rolled on through the Grand Plaza. It was a rubble- and rubbish-strewn wasteland lit with clusters of arc lights. The temple to the might and power of the Hammer of Kraa had been reduced to a mound of debris, and everywhere emergency services teams were crawling over the ruins looking for survivors. Michael felt like cheering at the sight.
Just past the edge of the town, the mobibot came to a stop behind a line of mobibots drawn up at another DocSec checkpoint. The troopers were visible only as black cutouts against their mobibots’ headlights.
“Looking for looters?” Michael said.
“I reckon,” Shinoda said. “Some people can’t help themselves. Hey, what’s happening?”
“I don’t believe it,” Michael said.
Three DocSec troopers were laying into the occupants of the first bot with boots and truncheons. It was a merciless attack. Deep inside Michael something snapped. “Screw this,” he snarled. He reached for his rifle with his good arm and climbed out of the bot. He tucked the butt of the rifle under his armpit. I hope those DocSec pigs don’t fight back, he thought. We’d have trouble dealing with a bunch of schoolkids. “You coming?” he asked Shinoda.
“Just try to stop me,” the sergeant replied.
Faces stared open-mouthed at the two blood-soaked apparitions. Michael and Shinoda walked down the line of bots to where the DocSec troopers were kicking the life out of the three people on the ground.
“Hey, assholes!” Michael shouted. He lifted the barrel of his rifle to cover the men.
The troopers stopped and looked around. “Who the fuck are you?” one of them snarled.
“We’re NRA,” Michael said, his voice flat, “and you’re dead.”
The troopers reached for their pistols. They were three seconds too slow. With clinical efficiency, Michael and Shinoda shot the men. The impact toppled the troopers away and onto their backs. Shinoda walked over. She took a pistol from a dead fist. She checked each man in turn and dispatched the two who were still alive with single shots to the head.
She stood back and spit on the ground. “DocSec scum,” she said flatly.
Michael turned. “Go,” he shouted at the line of bots. “You weren’t here, but never forget that the NRA is your best and only hope of destroying Doctrinal Security. Now go!”
For a moment nobody moved. Then, one after another, the bots accelerated away. Their occupants, wide-eyed with fear, stared back at the specters standing over the dead troopers.
Michael looked around once the last bot had disappeared. “Maybe this wasn’t the smartest thing we could have done,” he said. “What the hell do we do with this lot?”
“We’ll dump the bodies into their bot, then put it on auto and send it to McNair,” Shinoda said. “We’ll be long gone by the time anybody pulls it over.”
Ten backbreaking minutes later, the DocSec vehicle had been dispatched with its grisly load, though not before Michael had stripped the sunburst insignia from their collars, and they were on their way north to Martinsen.
Shinoda’s plan was simple. They would head for the hills, and if DocSec tried to arrest them, they’d blow them aside and keep going. That was one hell of a plan, Michael had said: short, sharp, and simple enough for even the dumbest marine. “That’d be you, sergeant,” he’d added, dodging a halfhearted kick from Shinoda.
The mobibot hummed on into the night. “You look like you’ve had it,” Shinoda said. “I’ll keep an eye on things.”
Michael wanted to argue but could not. He was utterly exhausted. “I’ll take over in two hours, sergeant,” he said.
“Roger that.”
Ten seconds later, Michael was asleep.
Thursday, July 15, 2404, UD
Sector Kilo, Velmar Mountains base, Commitment
It would be a long time before Michael forgot the weeklong trek to safety: uphill and across rough country, with hours wasted dodging around Hammer positions or hiding from resupply convoys, foot patrols, and drones. To add to their misery, the rain set in early and heavy, and all the time his shoulder protested the abuse it was being given.
But they had made it, though Michael had no idea how. All he could remember of the last few days was a blur of pain, hunger, and exhaustion. Now he was content to sit back and nurse his shoulder—it had been cleaned, stitched, and bandaged, and the pain had subsided to a grumbling ache—as a battered buggy carried them through the tangled network of caves and tunnels that made up the NRA’s Velmar base.
“Kilo-5,” he said to Shinoda as the buggy slowed to a halt, its aged brakes screeching in protest. “This is us.”
What a pair of old crocks, Michael thought as he looked around. He tried but failed to massage the ache out of his legs. He pointed at a doorway cut out of the rock wall under a sign that read “3/120 Bn HQ.” “That’s it,” he said.
“No doubt about it,” Shinoda said as they walked over. “I’d know that ugly scumsucker anywhere. Hey! Lance Corporal T’zavara, you useless maggot!” she shouted at the marine manning the security post.
The woman’s heavily bandaged head snapped around. Her mouth sagged open when she saw who was calling her. “Sergeant Shinoda!” she said. “We weren’t expecting you.”
“I’m sure you weren’t. Don’t you NRA types stand up in front of a senior officer?”
“Senior off—”
“This is Colonel Helfort,” Shinoda said.
“No, it’s not. Oh, that Helfort. Sorry, sir,” T’zavara gabbled, shooting to her feet. “I wasn’t paying attention. I thought you … but now you’re a … I had—”
Michael put up his hand to stop the flow of words. “Shut up, Corporal.” He had to force himself to keep a straight face as T’zavara struggled to work out what was happening. “Now go tell your commanding officer that Colonel Helfort is here to see her,” he said.
“Hancock!” T’zavara said, turning to the marine beside her, “what are you waiting for? Go!”
“Yes, Corporal,” the man said before bolting down the passageway.
“What happened to your head?” Michael asked T’zavara while they waited.
“Shrapnel from a Hammer air burst, sir,” she replied. “Nothing serious.”
“The Amokran operation?”
“Yes, sir. It was a bitch.”
“Lot of casualties?”
“Too many, sir. But we gave those Hammer bastards one hell of a kicking. There were a lot of them, but … I don’t know, they didn’t fight hard.” She shook her head. “Not as hard as they used to.”
Shinoda put her mouth to Michael’s ear. “If you don’t ask her, I will, sir,” she whispered, “so get on with it.”
“Ah, right,” Michael mumbled, mortified that he had been so obvious. “Colonel Helfort,” he said. “Did s
he come through okay?”
“She did, sir. The Hammers sent a special forces unit to attack battalion headquarters. It was touch and go for a while, but we kicked them back to where they came from. Don’t think they’ll try that stunt again in a hurry.”
Sheer euphoria kicked Michael’s heart into overdrive. “Good to hear,” he said. “When—”
“Michael.”
His head snapped around. “Anna,” he said.
“You big lump,” Anna sighed. “What have you done to yourself? Come with me. And you can close your mouth now, Lance Corporal T’zavara.”
• • •
Michael lay back beside Anna, exhausted by the animal ferocity of their reunion. “I don’t suppose I need to say how glad I am to be back,” he whispered.
“I can’t say I’m totally convinced, spacer boy.”
Michael rolled his eyes. “Give me strength,” he muttered.
“You’ll need it,” Anna said, “so shut up and come here.”
• • •
“… and so here I am,” Michael said.
Tucked away in a quiet corner of the canteen, it had taken him a good hour to finish his account of all that had happened. Leave nothing out, he had been instructed, not even the smallest detail, and he hadn’t.
Anna looked at him for a long time before she pushed her bowl away and sat back. “I should hate you, you know,” she said breaking the long silence that followed. “I really thought you were dead.”
“I know, but … things just happened. Truth is, once Jaruzelska turned me in, I wasn’t in control of things anymore.’
“It was bad enough for me.” Anna’s voice was soft. “I can’t imagine what it was like for you.”
“It wasn’t the best time of my life, I’d have to say, but I’m here now, and that’s all that matters.”
“It is,” Anna whispered; she took his hand in hers.
The silence that followed was a long one. “Hey, drink your coffee,” Anna said much later, “or it’ll get cold.”
Michael took a sip and screwed up his face. “Ugh!” he said. “It already is.”
“That’s good, because my mug’s empty, so you can get us both a refill.”
Michael shook his head in despair. “You are so manipulative,” he muttered. “I’m a wounded trooper with only one working arm. It’s you who should get me a fresh brew.”
The Final Battle Page 19