Threshold of Victory

by Stephen J. Orion

  Rease remained directly under the valve, casually dispatching three or four curious Maulers, while Twos made his way across. When he reached her side, she gave him the stand-off rifle in exchange for his more conventional assault rifle. While she didn’t trust his aim as much as her own, she was glad to be rid of the thing, the suppressor on it was as much a curse as it was a blessing. When they jammed, they tended to wreck the internal mechanisms beyond repair, and they had a notorious history of jamming, often after just a few dozen shots. Given Rease always seemed to find herself fighting more than a few dozen Maulers the weapon really wasn’t her style.

  “Cover me,” Rease instructed as she slung the rifle and slowly raised her arcom to its full height.

  The flood valve was remotely controlled and isolated from the rest of the base’s computer network. Specialist Herrera, the EWO from the Arcadia wouldn’t be opening it for her and, critically, she couldn’t close it if the Exodites decided now would be the right time to flood the room.

  But Rease had the ‘manual release’ for the valve, in the form of two half-ton explosive charges that she carefully forced into it. She heard Twos fire a couple of suppressed rounds and hoped he had things under control as she pulled out the remote detonators and stabbed one into each of the charges.

  That was when she heard Vickers’ scream and Barnes’ alarmed cry in response.

  “We’re out of time,” Rease shouted at Twos. “Back to the door, dead run, weapons free.”

  And they both ran, the platform shaking and ringing under their hammering footfalls. Rease primed a pair of grenades and tossed one off each side of the catwalk. Her timing was perfect, just as the Maulers noticed the commotion above, they were cast into confusion by the explosions in their midst.

  By the time they recovered, it was too late. Twos and Rease had reached the end of the gantry.

  But that was also when Twos turned around, and finally realised they hadn’t been running in the same direction. There were two exits to the catwalk, one back to the gate room corridor, and one that led on to what Tarek had called ‘Mauler Gestation’. Twos was at the gate room doorway, Rease was at the other, each just beyond the threshold of the Concourse pressure doors.

  “Hey, LT, whoa, think about this!” Twos cried. He couldn’t understand, he was wired for self-preservation.

  But Rease understood. She would never admit it, but she believed, truly believed, that Tarek could see the future. There was no plan he could imagine that would crack this facility. As surely as she knew that, she knew that he could never imagine a plan that didn’t see her coming back. A plan where she met the same fate as Vickers and everyone else from Barnes’ old unit. A plan where the ship didn’t come for her, the cavalry was sent elsewhere and she had to face the reality that every other soldier faces every day.

  She. Was. Expendable.

  Her hand, poised over the detonator tab, trembled in a way quite differently to how she’d imagined it would. She was supposed to be heroic, this was her moment and yet it choked her, it was bile in her mouth and shame on her face. She wanted to live. Damnit, but it wasn’t fair, she’d given them everything, every fucking thing she had.

  And now this.

  She checked her comm line was off and with a wail of frustration and anger she slammed on the button. Charges blew and the valve holding out seven hundred billion tonnes of seawater was compromised. Such was the pressure against it that even the force of the explosion could not drive the fragments outwards but the ceiling around the valve was riven with cracks and valve itself had been pulverised by the competing forces.

  Everything held its approximate shape for barely a heartbeat and then the domed roof smashed like an egg under a hammer.

  In that same moment, the pressure doors connecting the concourse to the rest of the base, to Rease and Twos and Barnes, slammed shut. Given time a Mauler could force even the heaviest pressure doors, but they didn’t have time. The water would be casting them to and fro like a frothy hurricane. The room would fill in less than a minute and the second greatest threat to the Constellation assault would be over.

  But Rease hadn’t isolated herself from her men to deal with the Maulers. According to Tarek, dealing with the Maulers had never really been in doubt. The impassable shield his visions could not defeat was not the frozen Maulers, it was twelve Exodite arcoms. Rease hadn’t fought another arcom since training, let alone twelve, and she held no illusions about her chances.

  “Twos,” Rease said, her voice cracked, her comm was off. She composed herself, set a private channel and spoke again. “Twos, lead them back. Tell Barnes to join the others, but I need you to hold the gate room. Weld the door shut, keep the Maulers and the water out. If everything goes wrong and someone has to take the codes and run: that’s you.”

  There was a long silence but for the background noise of his arcom moving back down the ramp. “Why me?”

  “Someone has to get out, Twos, and you have the drive. No matter what happens, I know you’ll escape.”

  “And you?”

  “Tell them I slew a dragon, found the treasure, and saved the princess.”

  “We’ll remember you Luperca.”

  “You’d better,” Rease answered and killed the comm, glad she’d done it, glad she’d managed to sound heroic.

  Glad he couldn’t see the ugly tears streaming down her face.

  Chapter XIV

  Expendable

  Outpost Origin

  Inimicus, Unknown System

  30 April 2315

  “Sir, that arcom force is not contained,” the Exodite tech reported to his commander.

  Commander Kanehira was sweating. He had not wanted to be made primary officer for what was secretly referred to as the nightmare factory. He had made great protests that such a thing should even exist, but ultimately, he’d been given the option of taking the ticket or receiving a bullet to the head for knowing too much.

  So he had played puppeteer, and the more nightmares he let loose in the galaxy, the more he found them waiting for him when he closed his eyes. His tasks were not complex. He received clear instructions and actioned them with aplomb, thinking of them as ‘deliveries’ and ‘remote coordination’ rather than assault and terror operations. He did not make war, he administered a base.

  And as administrator, he lacked the intellectual framework to fully process the assault on Inimicus. There were no established protocols and policies for dealing with a force of deadly intruders who had thrown themselves willingly into the lion’s den.

  “Not contained?” Kanehira dragged a hand down his face. “They are locked in the warehouse with eight crops of Maulers, how could they possibly not be contained?”

  “It is unclear, we are still having trouble with our camera network. Several staff reported seeing a platoon of arcoms advance through Product Storage, and now the entire section is flooding.”

  “Flooding?” That was a chilling word for anyone this far under the surface. “How much?”

  “Automated systems have sealed off Product Storage, but it looks like all six warehouses and the concourse are flooded.”

  And that was the end of eight crops of Maulers. It was a massive setback, and his instinct was to consider ways to make up time, but there were more immediate problems.

  “The arcoms have continued to advance into the Gestation Lab,” the tech reiterated

  “How many?”

  “That is also unclear. There is at least one, more judging by the speed they are proceeding through our defences.”

  “Show me their path.”

  The tech put an overlay onto the base map, a red line showing where the attackers had blasted through the Mauler warehouses and cut themselves off. That meant a suicide mission and they were now making a beeline through gestation to…

  His blood went cold, they were heading straight for the submarine hangar.

  The hangar was the only hope of escape if the base began to suffer a cascade failure. He didn’t
know how the enemy knew, but clearly their intention was to go out in spectacular fashion. Perhaps they were going to flood the base, perhaps nuke the reactor, but first they clearly intended to make sure Kanehira and his men went down with them.

  The Commander snatched his headset off the desk and set a channel while he fled to his office.

  “Musashi, go,” was the clipped response, impolite for an Exodite but then, he’d trained with the Constellation barbarians before rotating back to Solace and being assigned here.

  “Is your team ready to deploy, Captain?” Kanehira asked as he dug into his safe and pulled out a black folder. The folder was heavy with data discs and printed orders that he’d been instructed to destroy.

  “Buttoned up and about to move. Do you have an updated location on the foot dismounts?”

  “Let the security troopers handle the foot soldiers, I have a new target for you. Hostile arcoms are advancing on the submarine hangar. I need you to destroy them and above all protect our craft.”

  Musashi began to badger him for specifics he didn’t have about the composition of the enemy force, but Kanehira was already on the move. He passed through the command centre still talking on his headset, moving purposefully so as not to betray his intentions.

  As soon as he was out in the corridor, he began to quicken his pace, not quite running as he charted a course to the submarine hangar. He still had allies in the Constellation if he could just get in contact with them, and the black folder clutched across his chest contained everything he’d need to guarantee his safety.

  ****

  “Reloading!” the marine ahead of Felton called out.

  As soon as the soldier pulled away, the Lieutenant leaned out into the corridor and triggered three short bursts from his heavy carbine. The Exodites, in cover further up the corridor, kept their heads down, but they had weight of numbers and were advancing at every opportunity.

  “Fall back by teams,” Felton ordered into his headset. “Predator Two, this is Stingray. We’re coming back to you with guests. Estimate over seventy dismounted infantry.”

  There was no reply, the arcoms had been instructed to maintain radio silence if everything was going to plan. He didn’t like to remember that silence could equally mean that things were going so spectacularly wrong that no response was possible.

  Either way his sixteen-man unit had now encountered something like a company of Exodite soldiers, and just falling back in good order was going to be a mission. Fighting them would be impossible.

  Felton raised his rifle again to lay down covering fire as the marine who had reloaded peeled away from the wall and began to dash to a cover position further back.

  He really hoped the arcoms were just maintaining radio silence

  ****

  By the time Twos reached the corridor between the Gate room and the concourse, Barnes had already dismounted. The man was working with several marines, one of them a medic, to pry open Vickers’ cockpit.

  Twos left them to it. From the dead Maulers in the corridor and the spent shell casings carpeting the floor, he could see they’d had a hell of a fight, so the man had earned a reprieve. He also doubted they’d be able to save Vickers, there were too many holes in the arcom and many of them were in bad places. That was one thing about being a survivor, you got to see what a fatal hit looked like more than just the once.

  He checked the Mauler bodies to make certain they were dead and then returned to the gate room. Once he got there he just stopped. He knew he should be acting, but his brain was grinding in place.

  Rease had signed off like someone with no intention of returning, but that seemed somehow impossible. Twos had seen wannabe heroes martyr themselves before, he’d even benefited from it, but this was different. She was the Luperca, her death was an impossibility. Unless he saw her take a bullet himself, he knew some part of him would always expect her to wander in, blithe as anything.

  Yet the same part of his mind, the part that subconsciously unravelled patterns, had its own doubts. The Luperca never fought alone. She’d sometimes gone out with a company and come back with only one or two survivors, but she never came back solo. When he thought about it, ‘with me’ was what she said most often. Who was with her now?

  A voice blurting out of his comm disrupted his reverie: “Glider-Six-Seven, confirm presence.”

  It didn’t identify itself but the speaker was clearly an Exodite. More importantly it came through on a channel the Constellation didn’t use, a channel only Twos monitored. One he hadn’t expected to be called on, one he’d dearly hoped never to hear.

  Slowly he tabbed his own comm. “This is Glider-Six-Seven.”

  “Glider, standby for digital burst, map with marked rendezvous point to follow. Please proceed immediately.”

  Twos considered quickly. Rease had instructed him to stay, but Barnes could fulfil that roll just as well and, given what he’d just been through, it shouldn’t be too hard to convince him. The marines here could drag his arcom through to the Little Facility and then he just had to get to the meeting point without running into Predator Two.

  Yes, this could work, and then he’d be finally free of an old debt.

  ****

  High Orbit

  Inimicus, Unknown System

  30 April 2315

  “Missile out,” Razor announced, not pulling away from the Bug as the weapon homed in and finally exploded. “Clean kill.”

  “Thanks for the help,” Ringo, one of the Sabres newer pilots, responded. “Stupid thing just wouldn’t quit.”

  It was a sentiment they all shared. Uncharacteristically, the Mauler fighters had fought to the last, forcing the Cold Sabres to run every single ship to ground and destroy it. Even the Mauler destroyer, its primary engines crippled and on a decaying orbit towards the surface of Inimicus, had fired uselessly at the Arcadia long after they were beyond of effective range.

  “Hardsix, Razor just bagged that last Bug,” Odyssey’s voice announced. “We have clear screens.”

  “Bravo-Zulu, Razor,” Hardsix said, “Arcadia control, any word from the ground team yet?”

  “Negative Commander,” a comm tech responded. “The carrier is taking up position in front of the gate. Please proceed with the destruction of the Orbital Assembly and then take up reserve positions at our station.”

  “Willco Arcadia. I’m sending the Undying back for refuel and re-arm, while we handle the final target.” A caustic tone came into his voice as he broadcast on the squadron channel, “Assuming that’s okay with you, Silver.”

  “I am but your humble servant,” the pilot responded. “But if it makes you more comfortable: the Maulers have nothing else to throw at us at this point.”

  “So happy to hear that,” Hardsix said. “Undying, return to base. Sabres, Paveway, form up with me. We’re going to go deal with that assembly.”

  ****

  Outpost Origin

  Inimicus, Unknown System

  30 April 2315

  Maulers were monsters; Rease had never doubted that, but the ones that she faced going through the gestation labs were even worse. Abominations of wet, half-formed flesh and bone, they came at her one after another, grasping at her arcom with their flaccid fingertips as she butchered her way through them.

  Someone had apparently decided the best way to slow her down was to release all of the creatures from the gestation tanks at once. It was a grisly act of desperation on behalf of the base controllers, not just because half of the things they released died gasping and stillborn, but because the facility was still occupied. For the things that staggered blind, starving, and angry amid the machinery, there was no distinction between the intruder arcom and the Exodite technicians. Those white coat figures, the closest thing to parents the Maulers had, were snatched up at every opportunity and gobbled down like kibble.

  Rease spared them no sympathy. They’d bred horrors, and it was right that these horrors should turn against them. The only reason the development dis
turbed her was that it represented the lengths the base operators were willing to go to. Finding out that Exodites hated the Constellation enough to unleash the Maulers against them was understandable, hate was something she knew well.

  But as she grabbed the leering face of a half-formed monster and shattered its skull against the nearest bulk of machinery, she realised the people in control here were no longer driven by something as human as hate. They had given up their humanity completely, and now even their own people were acceptable losses for the barest chance that these unbeings might stop her. It wasn’t a cold and calculated response, it was a violent tantrum against something that frightened you.

  Still they had managed to slow her down, not through damage or injury, but through the sheer work presented by carving through their unfinished monsters. It took ammo and time to make her bloody way through any one of the many production lines separating her from the submarine hangar. She had made progress: clearing the finishing room where they were almost whole and ready for freezing and passing through several rooms of tanks where the Maulers had proofed like casks of alcohol, its floor now slick with embryotic gel and the blood of the Maulers and Exodites.

  Now it seemed she’d found the room where the vats were made. There were no Maulers here to release, nothing close enough to a solid form to be even worth opening. The room thrummed as huge pipes overhead brought in ocean water that was harvested in great howling machines for some kind of algae or plankton before being expelled out the other side of the facility.

  The thick fibrous sea mulch oozed down into a series of tanks that heated and cooled and churned to somehow render the myriad of organic matter into the bio-gel they grew the Maulers in. The whole process would have been wondrous if it had been conducted in pursuit of a less nightmarish endeavour.

  She was past the last of the tanks when the door on the far side of the room slid open to reveal an empty hall. Rease knew immediately what that meant, and she threw her arcom into the cover of the nearest rattling silo, her rifle sighted on the doorway.