by Rick Partlow
“They’re up there, all right,” he told the others. “If they launch on us, hug the sides of the streets but keep going. They’ll have everything they can scrape up and our only chance is to keep them distracted until Val and his platoon arrive for support.”
“Roger that, sir.” That was Captain Figueroa, the nominal company commander, though Kurtz had preempted his command for this mission. “We’ve seen what these bastards did on Revelation. We’ll give ‘em what they deserve.”
About a kilometer now, give or take a hundred meters. Best to get this over with.
“On the double-time,” Logan barked. “Wholesale Slaughter, follow me!”
Running in the Vindicator was liberating after piloting the Sentinel, the difference between taking his motorcycle up a mountain road and driving a cargo truck through a swamp. Ten meters flew by with each step in a bounding gait very unlike the Sentinel’s pounding drumbeat. The rest of the mecha followed, nearly as fast. He longed to use the jump-jets, but remembered the lesson the Jeuta mech pilots had learned. They wouldn’t function for more than a few seconds, maximum, before they fouled with ash.
He was still six or seven hundred meters away from the intersection when a single cannon round streaked by his cockpit about ten meters to his left, crashing into a building. There was the slightest of hesitations and he knew someone had screwed up. Some young warrior, unblooded, getting his or her first taste of combat here, and already rattled by what must have seemed like the fist of God striking down into Mount Tatius and wiping out half the city. They’d fired too early, probably going on how far they thought they could shoot from a live-fire range.
But this was urban combat, enclosed spaces, a limited firing arc and restricted visibility. If he knew Alvar, the Jeuta commander would have wanted to wait until they were nearly at point-blank range, until the first few mecha in the Wholesale Slaughter column could be caught in a crossfire.
Too late now.
Once the first shot had been fired, the Jeuta opened up in a ragged chorus, cannon rounds and laser fire burning incandescent lines through the haze and smoke, a cross-hatch of destruction so thick Logan was sure he couldn’t avoid it. He threw the Vindicator to the right, scraping the shoulders pauldron against the side of a building and caving in a section of wall, hardly noticing the teeth-rattling concussion, too focused on the crackling plasma of the laser seeking him out.
He jerked the mech farther to the right and crashed through the wall completely, wincing in sympathy with each impact through reinforced cement block already weakened by the shockwave from the volcano strike. The Vindicator burst through the other side, warning indicators flashing yellow from the collision, and Logan kicked the mech back to top speed, curving out onto the street once again, shedding bits of shattered concrete and twisted rebar.
He was close now, less than two hundred meters, close enough to make out the enemy…close enough for the targeting reticle to glow red with computer confirmation. He snarled in feral joy and pulled the trigger. The plasma gun’s discharge rocked the assault mech back in its tracks, tendrils of static discharge arcing away from the coherent packet of hyper-ionized gas. The mech in his sights was a tall, long-limbed Agamemnon, standing half behind the notional cover of the rear end of a flatbed cargo truck, which might have protected it from a groin shot but did nothing to stop the plasmoid from ripping through its cockpit. A halo of sublimated metal glowed sun-bright, lighting up the grey haze like a spotlight, casting a golden glow on the line of mecha running up and down the cross street.
There was a company’s worth, and that was just what he could see. Twenty mecha, arranged slapdash, lined up quickly and firing without much cohesion or synchronization but quantity, as Lyta used to quote to him, had a quality all its own. Yellow and red flashed on his IFF transponder list, three of the mecha following him in the charge already taking serious damage. Return fire raked the enemy lines, ETC cannon rounds and lasers ripping into the enemy armor.
“Missiles!” Logan ordered.
They were close now, closer than the weapons were conventionally launched, right at the edge of arming range. Targeting would be difficult, but the enemy was tightly packed. Logan triggered off a flight from his shoulder pod and the warheads struck and ignited in barely more than a second, two of them blowing apart the half-collapsed façade of some sort of office building, while the others struck the flatbed truck three of the Jeuta mecha were using for cover. The double-blast flipped the vehicle over in a spray of shattered pavement, sending the mecha stumbling backwards.
Logan gave into a predatory urge to follow through with the strike, but the capacitors for the plasma gun had seconds left to recharge and he was too close now for the missiles to arm, so he toggled to his Vulcan cannon. 30mm armor-piercing slugs hosed across the three enemy mecha in a long, profligate burst and armor plating flaked and spalled and he thought he saw the center machine’s canopy crack under the impact of a tungsten penetrator.
There was an art to observation in a mech battle, something similar to what Katy had told him about aerial combat. Despite a pressing need to focus on the target to the front, a mech pilot had to let the data of the battlespace wash over them, had to absorb the big picture on an instinctive level without focusing on any one piece of it to the exclusion of any other. Katy had described it as akin to letting her eyes go slightly out of focus except with her thoughts rather than her senses, and he supposed that was an accurate way of putting it.
Even as he was delivering the coup de grace to the enemy machines with his Vulcan, Logan was absorbing sensor data, camera displays, IFF transponder signals and mapping overlays, trying to paint a landscape of his surroundings. The picture wasn’t a pretty one. There were three companies of enemy mecha, enough that if they’d been coordinating cohesively, his whole force would have been dead already. Kurtz and his platoon were already hitting them from the opposite side, drawing off a whole company in response, and one mecha after another was blinking damage in their IFF telemetry.
An Agamemnon was barreling straight at him as if he owed it money, ignoring the deadly crossfire from three sides to cut across from the other side of the street. He wasn’t sure how he knew, but he had an intuition it had to be Alvar. No one else would be so intent on killing him specifically, and the Jeuta commander would have no trouble deducing who he was. His Vindicator still retained the paint job Wholesale Slaughter had given it during the civil war, with the colors and royal seal of the Guardian across its chest plastrons.
Thanks guys.
His intuition was confirmed when the external speakers of the Agamemnon blared at him, filled with the static and feedback of a guttural yell.
“You left the Challenge Pit too soon, human!” Alvar’s voice echoed off the buildings, drowning out even the cannon-fire and the explosions of bursting shells. “You should have killed me!”
“When you’re right, you’re right,” Logan admitted, not bothering to broadcast the words over his own PA system. Alvar would get the idea soon enough.
The Agamemnon’s primary weapon was a laser affixed to its right arm, and the focusing crystal was already aimed straight at Logan’s canopy. He slammed his heels into the jump-jet pedals, just for a moment, enough to send him twenty meters into the air and fifty forward before the intakes fouled and flashing red warned him of immediate shutdown. Enough for him not to be there when the eye-searing flash of the laser burst cut through the particulate-laden air.
He came down just ten meters to the right and five behind the Agamemnon, landing hard as the jets cut out but swiveling in place already, the capacitor display showing green. His plasma gun was at nearly point blank when he fired it into the side of the Agamemnon’s chest.
The assault mech’s right arm blew off in a shower of burning metal and sparking power conduits, and the machine wavered, suddenly off balance, stumbling to the left. Logan wanted to put a burst of 30mm into the cockpit, but he was still off to the side and slightly to the rear and fired
the Vulcan into the assault mech’s right knee instead, sawing through the joint with a long burst, finally sending the machine crashing to the street.
He took a step forward to stamp down into the cockpit and finally put an end to the Jeuta commander when all the confusion of the nightmarish battlefield caught up with him in the form of a laser slicing through the left arm of his Vindicator. He knew immediately what had happened. The blinding flash of actinic light, the wash of sizzling heat that made even his control yoke painful to the touch were all ample evidence of what had hit him, and the damage display told the rest of the story. The left arm had passed from red to dead black, limp and useless, a dead weight dragging down the Vindicator’s shoulder.
Logan kept his head, not succumbing to the natural panic clawing its way up out of his gut, and stepped backwards ten quick meters, then to the side, changing his profile, changing the point of aim. He pivoted towards the shooter, bringing up his recharged plasma gun. It was an old Reaper, well-maintained and freshly painted but dating back to the days just after the Fall, a thing of desperation and spare parts.
It wasn’t looking at him, though, wasn’t paying attention to any of the dozen individual battles raging around it. It was tilted backwards, looking up. Logan followed its gaze, followed the insistent, echoing roar finally penetrating the sounds of the battle, to a pair of massive lifting bodies passing just above them, misty and ghostlike in the low, angry clouds, trailing the searing sunfire of plasma drives.
Man-shaped figures fell out of the aerospacecraft, at first seeming like armored humans alarmingly close until perspective forced its way into the picture and he realized they were mecha and the drop-ships were hundreds of meters up. Logan’s stomach twisted with the idea the mech pilots would try to use their jump-jets, wind up fouling them with ash and plummeting to their deaths. But the flare of single-use, solid-fuel drop harnesses burned a harsh red, rather than the almost-clear exhaust of jump-jets, and Logan realized someone had thought ahead.
He recognized Sentinels, Scorpions, Nomads, Goliaths…all strike mecha, heavy and thickly-armored and bristling with weapons, falling into the midst of the chaotic battle like a judge’s gavel declaring order. They were firing before they hit the ground, ETC cannons and plasma guns and lasers seeking out dozens of targets even as they touched down and their drop harnesses fell away.
Logan forced himself to look away from the spectacle, back to the Reaper only fifty meters away from him. The Jeuta was raising its laser toward the new force of invaders when Logan put a plasmoid through the Agamemnon’s reactor shield, rupturing it in a dazzling plume of ionized hydrogen as the fusion reactor dumped catastrophically.
Logan looked around for another target, but there were none. The strike mecha were mopping up the last of the resistance, cutting down one Jeuta machine after another with ruthless efficiency. Afterimages of plasma and lasers and explosions danced in Logan’s vision, and he tried to blink them away, tried to make his mind work.
If they were dropping more troops from orbit, that had to mean…
“You all right there, boss?” The voice was familiar enough Logan didn’t need to check the IFF board to identify it.
“Much better now, Colonel McKenzie,” he told the battalion commander. “So, am I right in assuming we have the space around Tarpeia pacified?”
“With a little help from our friends.”
Logan was about to ask him what the hell that meant, but something smacked off the transparent aluminum of his canopy, hard enough to leave a pockmarked crater. Someone was shooting at him.
He swiveled the Vindicator’s torso toward the shot, toward the downed and helpless Agamemnon he’d disabled earlier. It was Alvar. The Jeuta had climbed out of his cockpit and retrieved a rifle from somewhere, one of the huge personal artillery pieces Jeuta soldiers carried. Had he actually been storing one of those monstrosities in the cockpit of a mech? He fired again and another shallow crater appeared in Logan’s canopy.
Good aim.
Logan toggled his weapons selector to the machine-gun turret built into the left side of the torso and set the aiming reticle over Alvar’s chest. His finger hesitated on the trigger. He chewed on his lip and hit the external PA speakers.
“Surrender and I’ll let you live,” he told Alvar. “You kept my wife alive and I owe you that much. Your people here will need help evacuating. We’ll give it to them, get you out of here.”
“Why?” The Jeuta was yelling, bellowing at the top of his lungs from the look of him, but Logan still wouldn’t have heard him but for the audio pickups built into the exterior of the mech. “Why would a human do anything to help us?”
“Because otherwise, the only way this is going to end is when the last of us kills the last of you. Is that what your Purpose wants?”
Alvar stared at him for a long moment from under ridged brows, his eyes hidden and unreadable. When he spoke again, the words were quiet, barely audible even with the amplification of the mech’s sonic detectors.
“So be it.”
Alvar raised the rifle to his shoulder and Logan touched the trigger on his control yoke. The chatter of the machine-guns was almost an afterthought, a buzzing coda to the cacophony of the battle. The Jeuta dropped to his knees, the rifle falling away from strengthless hands, and he stayed there for a lingering heartbeat as his blood pumped out onto the grey, ash-covered ground. He looked as if he might be trying to speak, might have one final valediction, but whatever it was, it died with him. Alvar slumped face first into the ash and his purpose died with him.
31
The Supremacy is uncomfortable with the current situation,” Ruth Laurent declared, hands flat on the table in front of her as she leaned in toward Donnell Anders. “As am I, personally.”
Kathren Margolis appreciated the sentiment. She’d rarely been less comfortable, including when she’d been hanging half-out of an ejection pod, on fire, her leg broken in two places, coming down into the middle of a losing battle on Revelation. It wasn’t just the fact that she was very pregnant, though it certainly wasn’t helping matters much.
She’d always hated being called into the command offices, sitting among the polished brass of generals and admirals, and even being married to the son of a Guardian hadn’t changed that. And the Executive Conference Center of the Palace of the Guardian was so full of brass, both literal and figurative…most of whom she didn’t know and the ones she did know, she didn’t care for. She couldn’t stop glaring at Ruth Laurent, despite the fact that the woman had saved their asses at Tarpeia. Laurent had killed Lyta Randell and Katy couldn’t put it out of her mind.
“I agree,” Anders said, “that there’s much to be uncomfortable about. Believe me when I say, this is not how I envisioned things. I never wanted to be Guardian and I would be happy to abdicate the position in favor of Logan Brannigan right now, if the Council is amenable.”
“The Council is not amenable,” Derek Shupert growled, jumping up from his seat and pacing back and forth on the polished marble tile of the conference room, a caged animal. He hadn’t been incredibly happy at Logan’s return, she knew that full well, and seemed even less happy to discover Anders had let him go to begin with. “We choose our Guardian, not the other way around, and we will certainly not be blackmailed into it by a nation who has historically been our worst enemy!”
“Derek,” Chief Councilor Janis Tarzarian said softly and evenly, “sit down and shut up.”
Shupert looked as if he wanted to argue, but he did as the older woman ordered and slumped back into his seat, face still screwed up in anger.
Katy was ready to be furious at the whole lot of them, ready to take out months of hormone-soaked rage on the faithless, disloyal bastards who’d thrown their lot behind the traitor and regicide Rhianna Hale and were now betraying Logan after he’d risked everything for them…and for her. The only thing stopping her was how incredibly calm and silent Logan had been. He sat back in his chair, elbows on the armrests, hands steep
led together, the tips of his forefingers tapping as if he was watching a performance. It wasn’t like him.
She’d tried to discuss the whole situation with him on the voyage back from Tarpeia, but he’d put it off as much as possible and she’d been in and out of one medical exam after another, exhausted most of the time and ravenous the rest. She felt as if she’d consumed her body weight in food during the trip, and might have eaten the ship clean of fresh meat and vegetables if they’d been on a conventional cruiser rather than the Shakak and taken the full three weeks to travel the distance rather than half that time using the stardrive.
Logan wasn’t a poker player, and if he were as pissed off as Katy was, she would have expected him to show it. He wasn’t, so she kept her mouth shut and watched it play out.
“Colonel Laurent,” Tarzarian continued, “I want you to know that our decision to replace Mr. Brannigan…”
“Colonel Brannigan,” Katy corrected the woman, finally pushed beyond her ability to stay silent. Tarzarian looked over at her, cocking an eyebrow in what could have been fascination or perhaps annoyance. Katy didn’t give a damn either way. “He held a rank in the Spartan military of colonel, and still holds it in Wholesale Slaughter as far as I or any of the other heavily armed and highly-trained people in that organization are concerned.”
“My apologies,” Tarzarian offered in tight civility. “Our decision to replace Colonel Brannigan as Guardian was based solely on his decision, understandable as it was, to leave his rightful place on Sparta to rescue his wife from captivity. While this was, undoubtedly, a horrible decision to have to make, it is a situation where we would expect a Guardian to put his people’s needs above his own.” She spread her hands as if pleading. “We certainly did not mean this in any way to be a repudiation of the agreement Starkad and Sparta had come to on Punica.”