by Rick Partlow
Adams cursed and touched at a control on her wrist.
“Lt. Guarras, what the hell’s going on up there? Why are we stopped? Ma’am,” she added as an afterthought.
Katy couldn’t hear the reply, confined as it was to the woman’s earpiece, but she could see the results. Adams’ eyes widened just slightly, her jaw tightening, and she turned to the driver.
“Mulloy, get this thing turned around and get us down the nearest side canyon now!”
Katy was about to ask why the hell they’d be turning around, but she shut her mouth halfway to forming the words, understanding the only possible reason.
“They’re in front of us,” Adams confirmed, speaking to her and Constantine this time. “The Jeuta have armored forces down the Run about two kilometers from the front of our column. Everyone is going to try to split up, keep them chasing their tails.”
The car jerked gracelessly and gears ground at the driver’s desperate attempts to extricate them from the column at the same time as two dozen other vehicles. Katy had her restraints buckled this time, so when they slammed into the corner of one of the cargo trucks, it didn’t send her flying, just wrenched at her neck.
“Damn it, Mulloy!” Adams snapped.
“Sorry, Sergeant!”
Plastic and metal squealed, scraped, and ripped as the car pulled free of the cargo truck and they were skimming past the front bumper of a Ranger all-terrain rover trying to perform the same U-turn in the enclosed space. Three other, smaller vehicles passed by on the right side of the car as it picked up speed, bouncing and shimmying arrhythmically over the rough surface.
Katy’s borrowed rifle had slid to the floor of the backseat with their earlier abrupt halt and she leaned over to grab it, checking to make sure the safety hadn’t been knocked off in the fall.
“Sgt. Adams,” she said, gripping the rifle tightly as the driver swung into a turn into the next side canyon.
She knew this one, knew all the side tracks between their camp and the city. It went on for a few kilometers and then dead-ended.
“Yes, ma’am?” Adams replied, her voice strained but not panicked, as if she was putting all of her strength into keeping herself together.
“I think I want those spare magazines for the rifle now.”
“Josephine, are you up there?”
David Bohardt could have hunted down her IFF signal on the display instead of asking, but doing so would have pulled his eyes away from the threat icons and Mithra knew, there were too many of those to ignore. He fired the Valiant’s laser with an instinctive jerk on the control yoke to bring the weapon in line, his conscious mind barely registering the Golem jetting down from the canyon rim before he shot it.
The blast caught the enemy mech in mid-air, fifteen meters off the ground, blasting into its portside jet nozzle in a shower of sparks and a halo of metallic vapor. With one nozzle knocked out by the grazing shot, the Golem went off-kilter, cambering into a tilt to its left side before the pilot could correct or let off the jets. The mech slammed into the canyon wall at fifty kilometers an hour and metal crumpled at the impact, the cockpit crushed. The Golem slid to the ground, the remaining jet fizzling out, and the machine went motionless.
Bohardt was about to put a finishing round into it, but Duchamp, just twenty meters ahead of him, stepped on the cockpit with the full weight of his Golem pressing down through the right foot pad. Metal crunched, and something red squeezed out through the gaps. Bohardt looked away.
“I’m here, David,” Salvaggio told him. Static crackled across the connection, interference from the Jeuta’s ECM jammers killing the indirect radio signal and the cloud of particulates and occasionally intervening mech bodies interrupting their laser line-of-sight connection. “We have Jeuta armored forces dropping in along our line of egress.”
He knew she was stressed by her use of exact military language instead of the slang and invective she would ordinarily have resorted to. She got professional when she was scared, falling back on old habits. He supposed there were worse ways to react to fear.
“Push through. You’re on point, now. However many troops they have dropping in, it won’t be the number filing through the open end from the city. We have to get out of this trap.”
As if in punctuation, two more enemy assault mecha dropped into the canyon only twenty meters ahead of Bohardt, a Reaper and a Ravager. He had time to blink in surprise at the sight of the Ravager, a mech he’d only seen in tech sheets at the Academy. It was a Shang machine, not usually seen outside the insular Dominion, but how the hell the Jeuta had wound up with it was something he didn’t have the time to consider.
His laser wasn’t lined up for a shot at the Ravager, he was too close for missiles, and going too fast to stop. He barely had time to raise his Valiant’s articulated left hand before he rammed into the stolen Shang mech, all the force of thirty tons of metal travelling at thirty-five kilometers an hour focused on a clenched fist a meter across.
David Bohardt had raced off-road motorbikes as a youth, before shipping off to the Academy. It had been a dangerous sport, but like all teenagers, he’d been convinced accidents only happened to other people…until he’d flown off his bike and into a tree. He’d broken four vertebrae and dislocated his hip and spent a month in and out of the rehab clinic.
Slamming the Valiant’s fist into the Ravager felt very much like hitting that damned tree. Dull pain shook him in its teeth and tossed him aside and he nearly bit through the mouth guard as his chin touched his chest and whipped back against the padding behind him. His hands fell away from the control yokes and his feet slipped off the jump-jet pedals. Only his seat restraints held him place. The Valiant lost its forward momentum in a fraction of a second, transferring it through the Ravager’s cockpit canopy and into the firewall behind the pilot’s seat. The Jeuta pilot had the misfortune of being between those two barriers and abruptly ceased to exist.
Bohardt couldn’t give into the fog of concussion closing in over his thoughts, not with the Reaper only a dozen meters away. He planted his Valiant’s feet wide and pushed the Ravager away, swinging around his mech’s right arm and bringing the laser with it. The Reaper was facing away from him, though, and it had already fired its main gun…at Lt. McGraw’s back.
McGraw’s Golem tumbled forward, spinning with the impact of the cannon round, plasma fire flowing in a tornado funnel around the mech as its reactor flushed violently, superheating the air around the machine. Bohardt growled in frustration and fired his laser, seconds too late to do any good for the platoon leader. This close, the burst of hyper-energized photons sliced right through the Reaper’s armor and into the fusion plant beneath it. The enemy mech stayed on its feet, unmoved by the reactionless impact of the laser, plasma plumes escaping from gaps in the reactor core like fireworks set off in a closed room.
The superheated ionized gas vaporized the sandstone immediately beneath it, charring the next level down a stygian black and leaving a layer of glass beneath the ash. Bohardt didn’t stop to check on McGraw, already knowing what he’d find. The heat from a core rupture would have cooked her inside her cockpit, just as it had done to the Jeuta pilot, and he’d seen enough burned corpses for a dozen lifetimes.
And there just wasn’t time.
He kicked his Valiant back into motion, long strides taking him around and over the corpses of the three dead mecha. His cockpit was an oven, baking him the heat of burning metal, fusion plasma consuming BiPhase Carbide in the microseconds before it radiated away and leaving behind temperatures of over 120 degrees Centigrade, unsurvivable if he’d been outside of his mech.
Then he was past and his breath returned along with a wash of air from vents switched off automatically by the external heat, blowing hot for long seconds before the climate control in the cockpit could cool it back down.
He still didn’t let himself look at the IFF display. McGraw would be gone. Would Salvaggio still be there?
The walls narrowed again for thirty meters, so tight
he had to pull his mech’s arms in against its sides. Chokepoint Three. They’d planned on making this their fallback position, but there were all sorts of pithy sayings about how long plans lasted and how amusing God found them.
Past the chokepoint, the canyon gradually widened back out to the Amphitheater, the broadest spot in this part of the Run, where they’d been hiding these last two weeks.
It was a nightmare, a temple to chaos, a place for the dead and the dying. Mecha slumped in piles of burning metal, black smoke pouring off their titanic corpses, while, nearby, the bodies of men and women were scattered like broken dolls around them. They were the people who couldn’t get out in time, who’d still been packing things they figured they couldn’t live without when the Jeuta had come in over the rim. The three cargo trucks they’d never had the chance to load into burned wildly, the flames from their alcohol fuel nearly invisible, drowned out by the reds and yellows of the canvas and local wood of the cargo beds going up.
They knew exactly where to find us. Another thought crawled on creeping, insectoid feet up his spine behind that one, a realization that nearly made him stop in his tracks. They know who’s here. They’re after her.
Most of the fallen mecha were the enemy, but he recognized two of his own. A Golem with a subdued grey chevron along the right breastplate. Warrant Officer Roland Gerhard, one of his original Bastards. A man with a quick smile and a bawdy sense of humor. He had lost his family in a Starkad raid on a border colony. Across the Amphitheater was a Scorpion, one of only three strike mecha they’d been able to get out to the Run before the Jeuta landed. It had been piloted by Lt. Andrea Nissen, one of the Spartan military crew. He hadn’t known her well, but she’d never once lost her head, despite all the shit coming down around them these past two weeks.
He whispered a prayer for their souls and pushed through the charnel house. One of the Jeuta machines, an older model of the Vindicator, less sleek and polished than the one Logan piloted, was crashed onto its side near the burning trucks, one of its legs blown off at the knee. The canopy was twisted by shell fragments and would only open halfway, and a Jeuta was climbing out, pulling himself through the gap with difficulty.
Bohardt toggled his trigger to the machine-gun turret at his mech’s left hip and fired a long burst at the enemy pilot, walking ricochets up the chest of the Vindicator until they cut the Jeuta down in a spray of blood just as red as any human’s. It wasn’t necessary, but it felt so damned good.
He finally risked a glance at his IFF board as he stepped past the scene of the skirmish, and cursed reflexively. The jamming had finally claimed the transponder signals. The board was blank all the way across.
“Josephine!” he rasped into his helmet’s audio pickup. “Are you still there?”
Nothing. Static.
“This is Bohardt!” No use screwing around with call signs. The Jeuta couldn’t listen to their line-of-sight transmissions and nothing else was getting through. “Can anyone read me?”
The footsteps of his Valiant echoed hollow through the cockpit, a drumbeat to the background of static.
Dammit.
“Josephine!” he yelled. “Are you there?”
“I’m up here, David.”
He was a drowning man who’d been gifted a chunk of driftwood. The ocean of despair still threatened to claim him, but he clung to that one transient bit of hope with all his might, running breakneck between narrowing walls until he spotted Salvaggio’s mech. She’d exchanged her old Agamemnon for an Apollo, brand spanking new off the Starkad assembly lines when they’d stolen it. It was a bit worse for the wear now, covered in soot and charred black where it wasn’t coated with sand and dust, and he could see twisted metal near the left knee where it had taken a glancing shot from a Jeuta cannon. If the machine had been human, he would have expected it to be leaning against the canyon wall for support.
“Are you all right?” he asked her. “Can your Apollo keep moving?”
“If there’s anywhere to go,” she said, her voice forlorn. “I sent the rest of the company ahead, told them to scatter into the side canyons. There’s no way we can beat them.”
He let out a shuddering breath, realizing she was right.
“And we need to do the same. Let’s try to get ahead of the main force coming in from the city, get some distance between us before we ditch the mecha.”
“What about Katy?”
Bohardt winced at the pain in Salvaggio’s voice, an echo of his own. Logan had been counting on them.
“Constantine and the Rangers are with her,” he said. “If they can’t keep her safe, we can’t either. Come on, Josephine,” he urged her. “Let’s get out while we still can.”
11
The sun was Katy’s enemy, beating down with merciless fervor directly above, turning the narrow confines of the side canyon into an oven. The rocks were her enemy, coated with sand, turning each step into a struggle to keep from sliding. The canyon was definitely her enemy, narrowing with each ten meters or so, squeezing the path down from two meters across where they’d entered the side canyon down to a meter, which had forced them to abandon their car, and now about ten centimeters. One foot at a time, in front of the other, cat-stepping, keeping the rifle pointed outward as she tried to sneak looks back behind them, watching for the Jeuta.
Because the Jeuta were the ultimate enemy, the one more certain to end her life than the heat or the slippery, rock-strewn trail.
“There’s shade up ahead,” Adams said, waving down the canyon.
She was right, of course, but only because the walls were becoming so narrow not even the sun could get through. The path, such as it was, disappeared entirely in another few dozen meters, leaving only increasingly steep piles of slide rock on either side.
“How far do you think we can get through this shit?” Katy asked the Ranger NCO, her tone harsher than she’d intended, stress and weariness from repeated adrenalin dumps beginning to wear at her.
“We’re going to have to climb out onto the rim at the end,” Constantine told her. “I know it’s a risk with the Jeuta up there, but we can’t stay in here.”
“And go where once we’re up there?” she asked him.
“One of the upriver settlements,” he said. “They’re probably mostly burned to the ground, but we can get water from the river and maybe find livestock that took to the brush.”
Katy grunted noncommittally but didn’t bother to argue. It was as good a plan as she could have thought of.
“I think I saw something back behind us,” Mulloy called from the drag position, five or six meters to her rear.
He’d turned and was walking backwards, rifle just starting to come to his shoulder when something slammed into him hard enough to knock him backwards off his feet. Time slipped into slow motion for Katy and it seemed to take minutes for Mulloy’s body to flop to the ground, his blood fountaining up from the massive hole in his chest. Katy was frozen in place, her senses taking in every individual packet of information, each drop of blood another data point etched forever in her memory, but her body trapped in the glacial slowness of her altered perceptions.
Tachypsychia drew the thunderclap of the gunshot out into a rolling peal, impossibly long, the crescendo of an orchestra. The snap-crack of a round passing by her at supersonic speeds snapped time back into its normal pace, and she was lunging forward to the prone position as if she’d been pushed down rather than diving for cover of her own volition. Someone screamed in pain behind her but she couldn’t afford to look back.
Katy didn’t even see the enemy at first, just started firing blindly back the way they’d come, hoping to at least keep their heads down. One short burst, two, and finally she caught sight of movement, nearly two hundred meters behind them, three Jeuta infantry lumbering down the side canyon, their oversized rifles swinging back and forth with each step. She settled the red sighting reticle over the chest of the closest of them, let half a breath out and touched the trigger pad lightly.<
br />
She hadn’t felt the recoil before, had barely heard the report of her weapon. This time, the stock pushed at her in gentle reproof, as if trying to remind her she was a pilot, not a Ranger. The carbine was integrally suppressed, like all Ranger weapons, but it still hammered at her ears with each burst. The Jeuta soldier spun off to the side and she knew she’d aimed too far to the left. She felt a preternatural calm as she adjusted her sighting and fired again. This time, the trooper went down and stayed down.
And she fucked up. She knew it immediately, remembering the lesson she’d been taught in her head without the benefit of having practiced it in real life enough for it to be instinct. She didn’t roll off her shot. The thought had barely echoed from one side of her brain to another before the huge 20mm round slammed into a rock only three meters from her head and turned it into a fragmentation grenade.
The rifle tucked into her right shoulder saved her eyes, barely, deflecting the chunks of sandstone which might have claimed them, knocking the weapon out of her hands. The weapon didn’t do a thing to block the centimeter-wide fragment that grazed the left side of her temple. Pain exploded in a wash of blinding starbursts across her vision and she slumped onto her side, knowing she needed to move but unable to translate the loose, disconnected intent into a coherent thought or action.
She was moving, being dragged across the slick rock, and she had the frantic, desperate thought that it was one of the Jeuta dragging her away to kill her. She tried to resist, tried to grab at the rock for a few seconds before she heard the yelling in her ear and realized it was Nicolai Constantine.
“Get up!” he shouted. “Get on your feet now!”
Katy pushed with her left arm, rolling onto her side, her vision still clouded, her thoughts hazy, and managed to get to her feet, Constantine’s hand still held her right arm, guiding her to a destination she couldn’t see. She couldn’t hear any gunfire and wondered why Adams wasn’t shooting, wondered why the Jeuta weren’t still firing at them, but she couldn’t form the words to ask. She didn’t have the breath for it even if she could have held together the thoughts. She was gasping for air, her heart pounding against her chest and something warm and wet was flowing down the left side of her face.