by Rick Partlow
“I didn’t want to bother her.” Katy waved the idea off. “I guess I’m just feeling a bit useless out here.”
“We’re all getting restless,” Salvaggio commiserated. “I mean, this place is handy to have as a refuge, but it really sucks for long-term living. What I wouldn’t give to be in a five-star hotel on Makati, eating a nice steak and nursing a Mai-tai…”
“Satin sheets,” Bohardt agreed, sighing with the memory. “Nice, cool breeze coming off the ocean.”
“I’ve never been to Shang,” Katy admitted, her tone wistful. “Or Mbeki. I guess I should have volunteered to go on one of those diplomatic trips Nicolai took back right after we allied with them, but it seemed boring. Boring doesn’t seem as bad right about now.”
“I haven’t seen much of Mbeki,” Salvaggio said, wrinkling her nose. “They don’t let mercenaries operate in their systems. Too uptight and lawful for us kinds of ne’er-do-wells. I visited Kigali once when I was trying to negotiate a deal. The streets were nice and clean and the people were friendly, but the cops always seemed to be looking over your shoulder.”
“Anything’s better than Modi,” Bohardt opined.
“You said it,” she agreed. “Except this place.”
“Colonel Bohardt! Colonel Bohardt!”
The voice carried through the canyon, bouncing off the walls in a haunting echo as the one calling came closer. It was Captain Gaskin, originally one of Bohardt’s bastards and still in Bohardt’s battalion in Wholesale Slaughter. He was a tall man and his long legs ate up the meters as he ran, arms pumping and eyes wide and white.
“Sir!” he gasped, skidding to a halt just outside the edge of the shadow of the overhang. “Lt. Guarras sent me to tell you…” He had to suck in a breath before he could go on, sweat dripping from his nose and staining the underarms of his fatigues. “Chloe came back. She said the Jeuta are on the march, all of them, coming out of the city, and they’re heading this way, straight into the Run.”
“Is Lt. McGraw’s platoon still on sentinel duty?” Bohardt snapped, jumping up, fatigue and boredom and misery disappearing in a flood of adrenalin.
“Yes, sir,” Gaskin confirmed, straightening as he gathered himself.
“Get the rest of the pilots in their mecha and get them into a staggered defensive array.” Why do I sound so calm? We’re probably all going to die.
“Where’s General Constantine?” Katy asked Gaskin.
“He was there when Chloe brought the word in, ma’am. He’s helping her and Lt. Guarras get the vehicles lined up to evacuate the civilians.”
“Evacuate them where?” Katy wondered. “Where else is there to go?”
“I don’t know, ma’am,” Gaskin admitted.
“Katy,” Bohardt said to her over his shoulder as he strode purposefully toward his Valiant, “you need to get back to Constantine and the Rangers and get out of here now.”
“Just give me a damned rifle,” she said, squaring her shoulders. “There’s nowhere left to run.”
“Woman,” Salvaggio snapped, pausing as she moved to follow Bohardt back to the mecha, “there’s always hope until you’re dead. Now get going before I have to put you in handcuffs and get some Rangers to haul you off between them!”
Katy spat a curse, but finally turned and headed back up the canyon. Bohardt waited until Salvaggio reached their mecha before catching her arm and pulling her into a kiss.
“Thanks,” he said.
“For what?” Salvaggio cracked. “The best sex you’ve ever had?”
He surprised himself by laughing. She had that effect on him.
“That, too,” he admitted, “but I meant thanks for getting her going. I didn’t want to have to be the one to say it.”
“She’s not wrong, you know,” Salvaggio warned, taking his hand in hers and squeezing it.
“And neither were you. Where there’s life, there’s hope.” He let go of her and began yanking on the lines to pull the camouflage off of his mech. “Let’s go give the ugly fuckers a fight they won’t forget.”
Katy had to hug the side of the canyon to make way for the cargo trucks heading past her. Each one was laden down with civilians, driven by one of the Rangers with another usually in the back, armed and watching behind them carefully, as if they could already see the Jeuta coming. One after another passed her, and when one wasn’t already full, she saw it stop at one or another of the lean-to’s where the families taking refuge in the Run had lived these last few weeks and allow a few more people to pile on. They took only what they could carry, running again and leaving behind just a little more of themselves in the process.
Soon, there won’t be anything left.
She almost didn’t notice the groundcar until it stopped directly in front of her and Nicolai Constantine leaned out the passenger’s side front window and motioned urgently.
“Get in!” he yelled over the rumble of alcohol-fueled engines and tires scraping on the rock floor of the canyon. “Hurry!”
She pulled open the rear door and climbed in and the Ranger behind the controls hit the accelerator before she could even pull the door shut. She slumped against the seat but pushed herself upright long enough to give the door handle a yank and feel it close with a solid thump. Another Ranger was in the back seat with her, a buck sergeant named Adams, and she pushed a carbine toward her.
“You know how to use this, right?” Adams asked. She was a lean, hard-edged woman with flat, dark eyes. There was no fear in those eyes, just a determination Katy wished she could match at that moment.
“Yeah, I’m familiar with it,” she said, checking the weapon’s load and making sure it was on safe. “Do you have any spare mags for it?”
“If you need it at all, we’re fucked, ma’am,” Adams declared, barely moving despite the jerky motion of the car through the winding depths of the Run. “If you need a spare mag…” She shrugged, as if unwilling to state the obvious.
“Where the hell are we going, Nicolai?” Katy asked.
Constantine didn’t seem himself. He hadn’t since the invasion and it was worse now. His eyes darted back and forth from her to the path ahead of them, tracks of perspiration carving through the dust on his face from its source beneath his dark hair. He looked, she thought, like a man used to being in control who’d suddenly found himself in a situation that wouldn’t be controlled.
“The Run is deep and has a lot of side canyons,” he told her, a hollow artifice to his voice, as if he was trying to convince her of a hopeful lie even he didn’t believe. “If we all split up and find nooks and crannies in them, there’s a chance the Jeuta might not find us. Particularly if the mecha can whittle down their numbers, force them back to lick their wounds.”
“We’re buying time with their lives.” It wasn’t exactly an accusation, more a recognition, something she felt compelled to put into words, to acknowledge.
“Time is all we have left.” He didn’t bother to argue with her, she noted. “They all know that.” He nodded back toward the mecha moving away from their cover against the walls of the canyon, lumbering forward to meet the enemy. “They’ll give us as much as they can.”
“Alpha Company!” David Bohardt called, not bothering with comms silence now that their hiding place was blown. He was yelling the words, as if to show he wasn’t afraid of the Jeuta hearing anymore. “We’re going to hit them when they come through Choke Point Two. They’re already too close to set up at Position One. I want First Platoon up front all the way back by the numbers through Fifth in the drag position.”
His voice broke slightly every few words as his Valiant’s footpads struck the ground in a long-legged gallop and the mech shook with the impact. He was racing to the front, three of the five platoons behind him, two already in their places farther up the Run.
“You boys and girls know the drill. Hit them and fall back. We’re going for the Center Peel here, as our Ranger friends like to call it.”
“Never thought I’d be forced to fi
ght like a crunchie,” Salvaggio commented. She was still behind him, bringing up the rear with Fifth platoon.
The walls were narrowing as he ran. The stretch where the civilians and most of the mecha had been concealed was a wider spot in the canyon system, a place the locals called the Amphitheater, nearly a hundred meters across. Now, passing a hunched-over Golem assault mech, the left shoulder of Bohardt’s Valiant nearly scraped the left-hand wall of the canyon, and it drew even closer at the spot they’d designated Choke Point Two.
He reached it in another three minutes of all-out run, slowing down when he saw the angular, blocky back of an Agamemnon standing motionless and ready, its shoulder butting against the right-hand wall. The canyon was barely wide enough for a mech to clear the sides here, and the four assault mecha of First platoon were pushed up against alternating sides, leaving just enough room for the machine behind them to get a clear shot past them.
“McGraw, do we have drones out?” Bohardt asked.
“We did,” the First platoon leader told him, the man’s voice strained but not panicked. “They went dead about five minutes ago. The Jeuta must have their ECM jammers going.”
“Which means they’re close.”
Bohardt positioned himself just behind the last mech in First, which probably annoyed the Second platoon leader to no end, since it blocked her view and her shot, but Rank Hath Its Privileges.
Besides, a fighting withdrawal is about the toughest maneuver to pull off, successfully. It has a tendency to become a full-blown retreat, which would kill all of us even sooner. I need to be up front to control things.
Or that was what he told himself, anyway. Deep down, he knew he wanted to be up front because that was where the action was at and, truth be told, he’d missed leading from the front since Logan had stuck him as a battalion commander. If he’d wanted to be sitting on his ass with the brass, well, promotion was always fairly quick in the Clan Modi military.
Because they’re always getting themselves killed fighting better and bigger enemies.
He watched the thin patch of light shining through past McGraw’s Golem, not the end of the Run, but a wider spot where the sun had more gently sloped walls to reflect off, and waited. He wanted to say something inspirational, something useful, but everything he thought of sounded trite and meaningless. But he had to try, anyway. It was what an officer did.
A shadow flickered across the skinny streak of light, a motion far ahead.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” David Bohardt told them, hoping his tone didn’t sound too distracted from adjusting the aim on his mech’s laser, “it’s been a pleasure to serve with you. And if this is the last battle we fight together, let’s make it one our enemies will remember for the rest of their miserable lives.”
“We’re Wholesale Slaughter,” McGraw replied, with the bravado of someone young enough to still feel immortal. “Kicking ass is what we do.”
The words were still echoing in Bohardt’s cockpit when the show kicked off.
“Contact front!” Sub-Lieutenant Duchamp yelled, the panicked announcement nearly swallowed up in the thunderclap of his ETC cannon firing in the claustrophobic narrows of the canyon.
Tremors conducted through the rock and on into the metal of David Bohardt’s mech where its shoulder touched the side of the canyon, shaking him slightly in his gimbal-mounted “easy chair,” and a cloud of dust showered down from the rust-red walls. McGraw was just behind Duchamp, his Golem hugging the opposite wall, and the platoon leader fired a half-second later, his own Electro-Thermal Chemical cannon blast an echo of the first.
“Duchamp, go!” McGraw reminded the younger officer. “Peel off!”
Bohardt couldn’t even see what damage their shots had done, so thick was the cloud of dust and smoke. His thermal sensors were recording a huge plume of heat where the Jeuta mech had been and he didn’t think there was any way even a strike mech could have survived two ETC shots in that sort of enclosed space. It went against all their instincts and training to break off without making sure the opponent was down, but this wasn’t a conventional battle or conventional terrain.
Duchamp edged backward, squeezing past McGraw and the others, his mech’s broad, armored shoulder plastrons actually scraping against Bohardt’s with a squeal of metal on metal that set the battalion commander’s teeth on edge. His firing arc clear, McGraw fired off a flight of missiles from his shoulder pod into the same space where the enemy mech had been, though Bohardt was sure he couldn’t see past the flame and smoke and dust any better than the rest of them.
A chain of explosions erupted from deeper into the canyon, beyond the spot where the ETC cannon rounds had hit, and the billowing dust and smoke grew thicker yet, obscuring everything except the IFF transponders even on Bohardt’s sensor display. At least he could still see McGraw withdrawing past his position from his transponder signal, even if the view out his cockpit canopy was an impenetrable rust-colored cloud.
The blast from the laser of the Agamemnon was plainly visible, slicing through the dust and smoke like the fiery hand of Mithra, burning it all away for meters on either side of the high-powered pulse. Bohardt got the barest of glimpses of the enemy in the light of the laser’s static plasma discharge, a flash image of two mecha down, blackened and burning, and he was fairly sure the laser struck a third, farther back, but everything was swallowed up in another thermal plume and then his Valiant was jostled yet again from a glancing blow of the Agamemnon’s plastron. Bohardt clenched his teeth against his helmet’s mouthpiece and murmured a curse around it.
Gonna need a new paint job before this is over.
It had all taken the space of a few seconds, barely enough time to think, but the return fire came anyway, reflexive, uncontrolled. The Jeuta had their own mecha in their line of fire, but the hail of missiles spraying out of the narrows was evidence they didn’t give a damn. Bohardt felt an instinct to duck, but there was simply nowhere to go and by the time the urge hit him, the missiles were already past him. Their detonation was a storm surge of pressure battering his Valiant from behind, and the mech might have gone down from the sheer force of the concussion if it hadn’t been braced against the canyon wall.
Bohardt jerked the trigger on the Valiant’s control yoke and the laser mounted in his mech’s right arm speared out a burst of photons marching in coherent order and taking all the energy of his machine’s fusion reactor with them. He toggled over to the mech’s missile pod and fired off the volley loaded into the launch tubes, then began scooting back, not waiting to see whether they hit anything.
The idea was to bottle the enemy up, keep them confused and angry, reacting without acting. The Jeuta weren’t tactical geniuses and if he could keep them just blindly charging forward into the threat, not bothering to communicate the situation to higher authority, then his company had a damned good chance of tying them down and attenuating their numbers.
Not of winning. He’d already resigned himself to that. There were too many of them, too few Wholesale Slaughter mecha for that to be a real possibility. But maybe he could buy Katy and the civilians some space, let them get into a better hiding spot. The whole company would fire one at a time, then peel off and reform farther down the canyon and do it again. That was the plan, anyway.
He’d managed to scoot back nearly to the end of the narrows before that plan went out the window. The smoke wasn’t as thick back here, and he could plainly see the enemy assault mecha arcing away from the killing zone on the fiery columns of jump-jets, angling back behind them. Not all the Jeuta mecha would have jump capability, but enough for the enemy to try to pin his forces between them.
And his people couldn’t use the same maneuver. The second they jumped clear of the cover of the canyon, they’d be targets for the Jeuta assault shuttles and whatever armored assets they’d left on the canyon rims to guard the routes of egress. There was only one thing to do, the hardest military maneuver to execute under fire, and just as likely to get them all killed as t
o save anything.
“Alpha Company!” he yelled into his helmet mic, knowing he’d have to be loud to penetrate the fog of adrenalin fallen over their minds. “Fall back! Break contact front and charge through the rear! Retreat!”
10
How the hell did they find us?” Katy wondered, not even sure if she could be heard over the growl of the car’s engine or the rumble of its passage over the rock-strewn sand of the canyon’s floor. “The Run is huge. They had to know where we were.”
“That’s not for certain,” Constantine replied, twisting around in his seat to face her. “They’ve been scouring the surrounding areas for days now. They had to know we were in the Run, and it could just be they decided to start with the entrance closest to the city and advance from there.”
She regarded him with narrowed, skeptical eyes.
“Do you really believe that?”
“No,” he admitted. “I think they captured the Rangers who were with Chloe and forced it out of one of them.”
“Rangers don’t talk, sir,” the driver insisted with a mulish devotion to his unit.
“Trust me, son,” Constantine assured him, “everyone talks eventually.”
“You didn’t,” Katy reminded him.
“I had the benefit of two decades of counter-conditioning.”
“Shit!” the driver blurted and Katy was thrown forward against the seat in front of her, wishing with sudden, blinding hindsight that she’d put on her safety restraints.
Her shoulder hit the bench of the front seat hard enough to knock the breath from her and she nearly slid sideways into Adams before the Ranger caught her and helped her back into her seat. The line of cargo trucks in front of them had come to a sudden and inexplicable halt and she heard the bang of bumper on bumper from what sounded like one of the big vehicles trying to back up without waiting for the one behind it to do the same.