by Rick Partlow
Alvar sighed deeply. He would almost rather have heard about more casualties.
“Give me ten seconds.”
He could have made her wait longer, could have pretended to be farther away from his cockpit, but it just would have been putting off the inevitable. And despite the constant status checks and complaints, he still required her support. He forced calm down over himself like a smothering blanket and climbed back into the cockpit, finding the visual signal being retransmitted down from the Annihilator by the shuttle and pulling it up on his communications display.
Magnus’ severe visage filled the screen like the sacred carvings of Romulus and Remus in the Temple of the Purpose, larger than life in a display meant to show the tactical situation for a battalion of mecha.
“Primus Pilus,” she said, acknowledging his position with an almost disrespectfully slight tilt of her head. “I have concerns.”
And when do you not? He couldn’t put the thoughts to words, not unless he was prepared to challenge her and have her replaced.
“Share them with me, Praefectus,” he invited her instead. “Perhaps I can assuage them.”
“My concern is the amount of time you have devoted to this outpost. Utilizing a Ship-Killer I could understand, even support, despite the seeming wastefulness of using such a weapon on a ground target. It was worth the risk to rid us of Wholesale Slaughter and one of the contenders to the Spartan throne. But one of the key elements of this strategy was speed and surprise. I am concerned that the excess time we are expending trying to root out the dead-enders on this colony is adversely affecting the viability of the plan the Legatus approved.”
“I understand,” he said. “Yet one of the chief goals of the attack on this world was to dispose of Logan Brannigan. I don’t feel comfortable leaving without knowing if we accomplished our objective. I would feel derelict in my duty if I didn’t at least acquire solid intelligence before we moved on.”
“Then why have you not moved your forces into the canyon system?” she demanded. “You’ve acknowledged it’s the likeliest place for the humans to have taken shelter. Why do you waste time in the caves and the settlements along the coast and the rivers when you know where they must be?”
“I suspect, Praefectus, I do not know. And I will act on those suspicions, but not until I ensure we won’t be ambushed from the rear when I do.”
“Primus Pilus, the Legatus’ trust and forbearance will only stretch so far. You need to produce results or there will be consequences.”
He carefully searched the words for a hint of a threat, but didn’t find any. Perhaps she was honestly worried.
“If that happens, Praefectus,” he assured her, “the responsibility and the blame for any failure will be on my head. I’ll insist on it. And if our labors produce success, then we will share in the glory, you have my word.”
Magnus nodded, holding the motion for just a moment longer than she had to, perhaps as an acknowledgement of her earlier disrespect and an apology for it.
“Very well, Alvar. But if you value my opinion and my advice, then you’ll finish this place quickly.”
“Trust me, Magnus, I do, indeed value your wisdom.” He cut the transmission and snarled at the blank screen. “But by the Purpose, why do you feel the need to constantly share it with me?”
It was maddening. All he needed was one prisoner, just one human taken alive who actually knew where Logan Brannigan was. Then this would all be over.
“You guys need to hurry the fuck up!”
Chloe Carpenter set the plastic food container on the tailgate of the battered ground car and glared back over her shoulder at the Ranger sergeant. He was standing in the middle of the gravel road, practically dancing from foot to foot, staring down the curving length of the road as it followed the river around the next bend before parting ways to head up into the hills.
“If you want it done any faster, Sergeant Lang,” she snapped at him, “then get your ass over here and help!”
Mithra knew the Cavendish family wasn’t being much help, though she couldn’t blame them. Fin, the family matriarch, wasn’t exactly ancient, but she was on the downhill side of a century and had, according to her, raised three generations of Cavendish children on their cattle ranch on the river.
“And I ain’t gonna let these hairless, flat-faced bastards chase us away!” she’d insisted about twenty times before they’d finally convinced her to evacuate to the Run, mostly by appealing to her great-granddaughter, Peyton.
Peyton was trying to keep her two small children entertained in the back seat of the car while Chloe and the two enlisted Rangers carried supplies from the low-slung ranch house out to their vehicle. Fin was “supervising,” which mostly meant telling the others when they were loading the cargo compartment less efficiently than she thought they should.
“We’ll be done in a couple minutes, Sergeant,” the younger of the two Rangers told the sergeant. “I don’t know how much more we could pack into this damned car anyway.”
“If you’d listen to me,” Fin objected, her voice as harsh as ripping metal, “we could have fit another three cases of food! Damn it all, I can’t believe I let you talk me into this! We’ll lose our herd! How are we going to make a living without those cows?”
“Mama,” Peyton chided her softly through the open door to the back of the vehicle. “They’re trying to help us.”
The older of her two children, a little girl Chloe thought she’d heard Peyton call Shannon, grabbed at her mother’s arm and started shaking it, trying to get her attention. She looked about three years old and when she spoke, it was with the plaintive, whiney voice Chloe expected from a toddler.
“Mommy, what about Jonesy?”
“Honey, we can’t take the time to go find him right now. I’m sure he’ll be okay.”
Chloe paused in grabbing the next box of food to look back to the ranch house and the green fields beyond it, where skinny, raw-boned cattle chewed at the grass in languorous incomprehension.
“Who’s Jonesy?” she wondered, hoping they didn’t have a hired hand out tending the cows.
“He’s our cat,” Fin said, spitting tobacco juice to the side. “Don’t you worry none about him, Shannon, he’s a smart old Tom. Hell, he got spooked by your bikes.” She waved at the trio of electric motorbikes resting on their kickstands near the end of the drive to the ranch house. “He sees a bunch of damned Jeuta tooling up this road, he’ll head for the hills and live off rats.”
Shannon didn’t seem convinced, but she settled into an annoying whimpering. Chloe didn’t like kids, couldn’t imagine ever having any of her own. She knew Katy was pregnant and seemed happy about it before the Jeuta had come, but she couldn’t comprehend being chained to a squalling brat for years before they were remotely interesting to talk to. How had her mom done it?
Her breath caught in her throat at the thought of her mother. She’d mostly managed to put the death of her parents out of her head for the last few days, let herself be caught up in the emergency, in the urgency of just surviving. It would hit her at the most unexpected times, though, a blow from the blindside, and she’d find herself close to tears.
“There’s no one else here, then?” she asked Fin, trying to push past the sting of the memory. “What about the kids’ father?”
“No,” Peyton told her, her long and horsey face growing even longer. “He…he passed a year ago, when Starkad landed here. He was in town, you see, and…” She trailed off, dabbing at something in her eye.
“Sorry,” Chloe told her.
“I think I’m seeing something out there over the hill,” Sgt. Lang told them. He was a nervous type. She would have expected a Ranger NCO to be a bit steadier, but maybe anyone had a right to be nervous after what had happened. “Let’s get moving now.”
Chloe shoved the last box into place in the cargo compartment of the car and swung the hatch shut, slapping a palm against the metal in punctuation.
“All loaded up,�
�� she said. “You want to do the same thing we did last time, Sarge?” she asked the NCO. It was a bit of a dig at the man, who quite obviously didn’t like being called “Sarge.” “Maybe send your corporal here with the Cavendish family back to the Run while you and I move on to the next settlement?”
They’d started out with three Rangers and her, but they’d come across a group of about twenty survivors hiding out in a rendering plant a few kilometers up the road. They’d sent the other corporal, a woman named Rogan, back with that group, leading their cargo trucks with her motorcycle. She’d been sorry to see Rogan go. The woman was about Chloe’s age and had been fun to talk to when they’d been able to ride close enough to each other for it to be practical, or during rest breaks. Lang and the other corporal, Shamir, were older, and all they wanted to talk about was whether help was coming or they’d be stuck here. She didn’t want to think about that.
“No, not yet,” Lang decided, eyes still locked on the road back up into the hills, searching for whatever he thought he’d seen. “Let’s get out of this area first. We can take them with us to the next settlement and then…”
He trailed off as he spotted it. Chloe caught sight of the movement and shielded her eyes from the afternoon sun with the blade of her hand, trying to get a better look. At first, she thought it was just a car traversing the road across the hill, a vague, dark shape moving sideways with just a slight jerkiness to its motion as if going over a series of bumps. Then it swayed pendulously back and forth, the sort of movement that was all too familiar to her, the sort that could only come from one thing.
“It’s a mech,” Lang said, so softly she nearly didn’t hear it. Then he turned, motioning them back, his jaw square with determination but abject fear in his eyes. “Go! Get in that fucking car and drive! Chloe, you lead them!”
Fin Cavendish didn’t need to be told twice. She jumped into the driver’s seat with an agility that belied her age and yanked the door shut without another word, starting the old alcohol-fueled engine with the push of a button and shifting it into gear. Chloe nearly slipped on the gravel as she ran to her bike, catching herself against the handlebars and turning her stumble into a vault, swinging a leg over the seat. She popped up the kickstand and was about to pull away from the split-rail fence where she’d parked the cycle when she saw the two Rangers still standing in the road, checking their carbines. Lang was loading a grenade into the launcher beneath his rifle’s barrel, not making any move toward his ride.
“What the hell are you doing?” she demanded, yelling to be heard over the rumble of the ancient, locally-fabricated internal combustion engine in the Cavendish vehicle. “Get on your bikes!”
“They’re too close,” Lang explained, his voice unnaturally calm, his expression bleak. “Shamir and I will distract them. You get the Cavendish family back to the canyons.”
“We can still get out of here!” she insisted. “That mech is a couple kilometers away, maybe three or four!”
“They’ll have sent out infantry in vehicles first,” Shamir explained to her, looking down at his own chest as he fished through the pouches in his tactical vest, trying to find just the right grenade. Once he’d selected it, he broke open the launcher attached to his carbine and fed the round into it. “They’d be on us in minutes and we wouldn’t be able to shake them with that big piece of shit car.”
“I promised Lt. Guarras you’d make it back, Chloe,” Lang told her, trying to smile. She took back every insulting thought she’d had about the man in that instant. “Don’t make me a liar.”
Chloe squeezed her eyes shut for just a heartbeat and whispered a prayer for the men, then did what she knew she had to do. She twisted the accelerator on the bike, the rear tire spinning in the gravel for a second before it bit and took her down the road after the car, away from the approaching enemy. She wanted to think of their destination as safety, salvation, but she couldn’t abide the lie.
None of them were safe, and she was becoming dolorously certain with each passing day that none of them would be saved.
Centurion Teemu braced himself against the roll bar, steadying himself as the armored assault vehicle skidded to a halt on the loose gravel. He let the lower ranked soldiers pile out first, deploying from the open sides of the car with rifles at their shoulders.
Allowing subordinates to soak up incoming bullets was a proven method of living long enough to advance, although Teemu knew he had to be cautious about such things. Lose too many soldiers and live to tell too many tales and his reputation could suffer. If it suffered enough, one of those bullet-sponges could challenge him in the Pit and perhaps have enough support to take his position.
He sighed and stepped out behind his troops, the gravel crunching beneath the soles of his boots, and pretended not to notice the spiteful chatter of the incoming fire. There were only two of them. The mech pilot had reported other vehicles a few kilometers ahead, but these two were the infantry soldiers the Spartans called “Rangers,” and Primus Pilus Alvar had stressed to them the importance of capturing military personnel rather than civilians.
The Rangers had opened fire with grenades at extreme distance and still managed to take out one of their assault vehicles, one of the anti-armor rounds breaking its front axle with a lucky shot. They’d decamped the area on motorcycles and forced the Jeuta to chase them, and Teemu had ordered his troops to do just that. But not too far, or for too long. A single cannon round from the mech had taken down both of the two-wheeled electric bikes and forced the Rangers behind the cover of a cluster of rocks beside the dirt road, the remains of an old slide.
Teemu’s troops were crouched in the shadow of the assault vehicle, waiting out the whining ricochets of bullets off rock, and impatience flared inside his chest. He was about to snarl a command to advance at the troops, but he bit down on it, recognizing that a demonstration of bold leadership was necessary. He stood upright, pulling the buttstock of his rifle to his shoulder and sighting in on the cluster of rocks where the enemy hid.
“When I open fire,” he said, pitching his voice to carry to the others, “advance and take the humans alive. I don’t care if you have to die to do it.”
There was no response to his command. He’d have to hope they followed his orders, or his next target would be the squad leader.
Ah well, one thing at a time.
He waited, letting his sights drift at the edges of the rocks, the nooks and crannies where someone might pop up from behind cover to fire. And there it was. A flash of dark-camouflaged armor, the hard edges of one of those tiny, wimpy human weapons over on the left edge of the slide. Teemu didn’t try to hit the man, aiming instead for the rock only centimeters away. He touched the trigger and felt the recoil pound into his shoulder but didn’t let it move him.
The 20mm round hammered into the rock, cratering the outer surface and sending a network of cracks spider-webbing outward from the point of impact microseconds ahead of a cloud of dust and fragments. The Ranger ducked back down and Teemu followed the shot with a second into the same spot, sending up another spray of rock chips and, finally, his troops sprang up and charged forward. Just over a hundred meters of open ground separated them from the humans, not any great distance except when someone was shooting at you.
Teemu scanned the rocks, waiting for the enemy to pop out again. He knew they would. To stay put was suicide, to run pointless. Their only play was to try to take as many of their enemy with them as possible before they died, to force the Jeuta to kill them.
He missed their next emergence, his aim on one end of the rocks while they ducked out from another and triggered off a long burst of rifle-fire. Two of Teemu’s troops went down, one collapsing with a cut-string finality while the other cried out and clutched at his left leg, but more than his own casualties, the centurion feared for the lives of the humans. He had to have at least one of them alive. Not chancing the restraint of his troopers, Teemu fired again, three rounds in quick succession into the rocks below the hu
mans’ firing position.
They took cover again and this time, he ran in himself, his stride long and powerful, eating up the meters. The remainder of the squad was moving up as well and he didn’t rein them in, much as he wanted to. There were also the losses on this mission to balance against what he had to gain. Too many dead and wounded wouldn’t be forgotten, even if he achieved his objective. They were close now, the male at the point of the formation only twenty-five or thirty meters from the rockslide. He was firing as he went, close enough that Teemu could have sworn he saw fragments from the male’s own shots ricocheting back off his chest armor.
Teemu was hoping the male would slow, would be cautious, would give him time to catch up. Instead, the warrior climbed right up the rockpile, hopping from one stone to another, determined to be a hero. One of the humans fired at him and the Jeuta soldier fired back before jumping down and disappearing from sight on the other side.
Teemu cursed aloud, putting on an extra burst of speed and passing through the lines of his own troops. If that miserable, worthless cretin had killed them, he’d crush the bastard’s skull for him. One of the males in the front rank tried to scrabble up the cluster of boulders, but Teemu grabbed his shoulder and yanked him backwards, determined not to give anyone else the chance to screw this up for him.
He cursed even louder when he topped the rise and saw the male standing over a dead human Ranger. The man had a hole in his chest nearly as large as Teemu’s fist, his blood soaking into the dry, thirsty ground beneath him, limbs askew at unnatural angles only a corpse could manage.
The other one, though…He was injured, that much was clear. The left leg of his fatigue pants was torn and blood spattered the pale skin beneath it. Another abrasion on his forehead oozed red at an even faster rate, and he seemed to be too stunned to make a move for his fallen weapon, but he was breathing and his eyes were open. It would have to be enough.