Threshold of Victory

by Stephen J. Orion

  Two arcoms entered with practiced military precision, sweeping in from each side of the doorway and raising their weapons in the same motion. Conveniently, following such a procedure walked the one on the left straight into Rease’s sight, and she struck low with a pair of HEAT rounds. Her shots pierced through the armour and unleashed their explosive payload into the machines ion drive. As the drive’s containment failed, the machine jolted and jerked like it was being electrocuted which, in a sense, it was.

  Riding the recoil, Rease aimed higher on the arcom to the right, delivering a burst of three rounds into the middle torso where the pilot resided. Its arms went limp. The second arcom fell to its knees and then slumped to the side.

  But another pair of arcoms came in right behind the first, and they were already firing, shredding the decking and ripping open the tank that Rease lurked behind. A turquois stew splattered and coughed onto the floor in steaming fetid puddles, and Rease faded back into the pipe work.

  The two were quick to obtain their own cover, but they never stopped firing on her position. That they didn’t advance to further press the advantage confirmed for Rease that their colleagues wouldn’t be far away. According to Tarek, the facility had a unit of twelve arcoms protecting it, any one of which presented a far greater threat than a lumbering Mauler.

  She passed into their sight a couple more times before she reached the door back to the proofing chamber. They continued to fire on her, but without a direct hit, the shrapnel and explosive wash of their weapons was little more than a distraction. She did not fire back until she made the final dash for the threshold.

  Her rounds were sent to supress rather than eliminate, she’d killed two of them already, and a near-miss was enough to send them into full cover. She kept sending occasional bursts their way as she bolted across the last open metres and they obligingly stayed down. As soon as she reached the threshold, she turned her aim up and held down the trigger.

  The last rounds of her last rifle magazine chewed hungrily through the ferrocement wall of the huge pipes overhead. The moment the first rivulets of water appeared, the pipe exploded under the pressure of its own contents, and a wall of ocean was forced into the room by the powerful pumps.

  As before, some automatic system slammed the doors to the quickly flooding room. Two more arcoms down and, for now at least, she had a wall between her and their colleagues.

  A three and a half-fingered hand snagged her arcoms shoulder, and in a whip-like motion, she embedded the butt of the now empty rifle in its owner’s skull. Pulling her knife and sidearm she began to back through the proofing room. She wasn’t retreating, she couldn’t run, or the arcoms would return to the command centre and destroy her colleagues.

  So, she would swing around through another production line and punch through, keeping ever present the threat of destroying their hopes for escape. Threatening the one thing more valuable than the command centre itself.

  ****

  Kanehira looked up as the arcom entered the corridor where he’d parked the four-wheeled personnel transporter. It checked both directions and then advanced rapidly towards him. The Constellation Armed Forces badge on the machine’s shoulder should have sent him scrambling for cover, but he’d seen a more important, and subtler marking. It was a single blue stripe on the front of the left leg, still glistening with wet paint.

  “You took your time,” the base commander snapped as it came to a halt just a couple of steps away.

  “My apologies sir, but I figured you’d prefer that I detached from my unit in such a way as to ensure they didn’t come looking for me,” the arcom pilot responded. Whether his tone was contrite or not was lost in the poor quality of the machines external speakers.

  Still, if the pilot wasn’t apologetic at least he knew his craft. “Your name?”

  “Call me Twos,” he answered simply.

  The name matched one in Kanehira’s folder, the one he’d expected to show up. All of the real agents they had on the Arcadia had been killed in the failed mutiny, Twos was classified as an ‘uncommitted agent’. It was a polite way of saying that he wasn’t likely to care which side he served, as long as he benefited.

  “The Constellation intruders are closing in on the submarine hangar. I believe my guards will be sufficient to stop them, but I do not want to wander through a war zone unprotected. Can you get me past your people and to one of the subs?”

  “Of course,” the pilot responded. “Provided you can get us past your people.”

  Kanehira smiled, this was going to work out after all. Between the two of them, they could convince both sides to let them pass unmolested, and in ten minutes he would be on a sub to the emergency escape ship at Muira Atoll.

  ****

  Captain Nakamura was in command of the dismounted security personnel who made up the bulk of Outpost Origin’s security force. On paper, they numbered two companies, but in the chaos of the attacks and flooding, she’d only been able to rally half that force.

  Still, that left her with almost a hundred men which she’d spread out into a two-layered dragnet. They were sweeping forward through the parallel corridors to wipe out the intruders, and it was only a matter of time. Her troops had encountered two separate squads of Constellation marines, and they had sensibly fallen back in the face of her numbers. They left booby traps to slow her advance, and they covered one another well, but they were going to run out of base soon.

  And then they made a critical error. Three junctions ago, the Constellation soldiers made a wrong turn, instead of heading back towards the gate room they began literally cornering themselves. With tactical precision, they were leap-frogging their way into a section of the base that contained only dead-end supply rooms.

  “Captain! We—”

  The voice that burst into her headset was full of desperation but cut out almost as soon as it came on. She had no idea who it was, but to have lost contact so immediately suggested something had gone quite wrong, perhaps they’d triggered a mine?

  Nakamura thumbed her radio. “All squads report in.”

  She needn’t have bothered, the squad leaders were in the process of sounding off according to their regimented order when a new voice exploded over the top. “Arcoms! Coming in from—”

  It cut off just as quickly, but not before Nakamura could recognise the voice. It was a unit off her left flank. She ignored the call-ins from the rest of her squads as she rapidly gestured for the command element to redeploy, wheeling the formation to face this new threat. She ordered the heavy weapons section, with its two critical rocket launches, to cover positions in the back.

  Everyone was still in motion when the unit at the next junction was struck by an explosive shell. In the tight corridors, she felt the pressure wave keenly, but the deadly shrapnel was just a rattling noise accompanying the screams of the soldiers dismembered by it. A few brave souls attempted a meagre return-fire, but the majority of the squad broke and came running back towards Nakamura’s position.

  Around her, the veterans of the command squad adjusted their grip on their weapons as smoke overtook the junction ahead. In the swirling dark, the throaty rattle of machinegun fire silenced the last of the resistance.

  They heard the arcom before they saw it; even with its rubberised treading, the steel feet resounded off the deck with each footfall. Only the missile team’s IR sensors could penetrate the smoke, and when one of them fired, Nakamura knew the arcom had emerged into the oily mists of the junction.

  Even as the rocket shot down the corridor on a pillar of fire, the enemy unleashed their Mauler scaled rifles. The walls around Nakamura’s position seemed to come apart in smoke and fire, spraying shards of metal in all directions like deadly confetti. The rocket struck its target and detonated, momentarily silhouetting three arcoms, half stooped in the service corridor with their weapons blazing.

  Competing pressure waves tore Nakamura’s legs out from under her, threw her face-first towards the wall and then to the floor
. Her ankle was alive with pain, and her left arm felt disturbingly cold and wet. Her rifle was gone and so were her men, either dead or scattered by the ferocity of the explosion.

  They couldn’t afford to run, couldn’t afford to lose. What the Constellation had discovered here, if it got back to Earth, would result in a war of extermination against her people.

  The Captain looked around for a weapon, for one of the rocket launchers. She saw instead one of the rockets, cast loose on the floor by its loader, but somehow undetonated in the burning wreckage of the intersection. In one motion, Nakamura lunged forward and grabbed it by the fin. It was heavier than she thought, but she was able to roll it back towards her.

  She heard the arcom’s antipersonnel guns open up again and expected to feel her ribs cracked open beneath their deadly force, but the hailstone sound of lead hitting metal floor came from further up the corridor. Desperately she scrambled backwards, taking her prize with her into the cover of an uprooted deck plate.

  The safeties on the missile would prevent it from arming unless it was fired from a launcher, and she had neither the skills or the time to dismantle the fuse. Instead she pulled a grenade from her belt and quickly strapped it to the projectile with a field dressing, then she held the pin and waited. It was a long shot – maybe the grenade wouldn’t detonate the warhead, maybe it would disrupt the shaped charge and fail to penetrate the arcom’s armour.

  But as the enemy strode into view, there was no more time for maybes, no time to do anything but pull the pin and launch herself at the top of its knee as it swung past her foxhole. She misjudged. Its steel calf struck her with dazing force, and she slid down it, desperately clawing at the smooth surface the whole way. She came to a halt, half-curled around its ankle, the missile sandwiched between her abdomen and the joint.

  As it pivoted forward on its foot, the metal plates closed on her like jaws. She screamed, but her scream was lost beneath the dual explosion of her improvised weapon.

  ****

  Constellation Carrier CNS Arcadia

  High Orbit

  Inimicus, Unknown System

  30 April 2315

  Captain Pierman had long ago stopped paying attention to the damage reports. The damage control crews were still fighting fires and supressing hull breaches, but there’d been no crisis level threats since they’d cleared an unexploded Mauler shell from the portside missile bay. Now there was only one channel that the Captain had piped to the CIC, and it had been silent for a long time.

  As always, he only realised how heavy his anxiety had become when he finally heard the eagerly awaited report.

  “Arcadia control this is task force Vendetta,” the voice was Lieutenant Felton’s, relayed via the gate. “We’ve secured the command centre and recovered the codes for four gateships, not including the one destroyed at Bryson. You should receive them by burst transmission shortly.”

  Pierman caught the eye of the communications section chief through the glass and the man nodded the affirmative.

  “There’s one catch,” Felton continued. “The first eight digits of the code are from a token key, updating every ten seconds. We have secured one of the keys, but the only communicator we can use to reach you is here in the command centre. We can fortify our position and send you token codes each time, or we can bring the token back to the gate.”

  “Understood Vendetta.” The responding voice was one of Arcadia’s own operators. “Please send your force status.”

  “Four marines dead, five wounded. One arcom lost, one crippled, two are out of contact. We’ve encountered and destroyed approximately sixty percent of the expected enemy infantry. Their arcom detachment was drawn away in a divisionary attack by Predator One-One but their present status is unknown.”

  “Please clarify, Vendetta, did you say Predator One or Predator One-dash-One?

  “The second one Arcadia. She was on the other side of Mauler Storage when the valve blew and is now out of contact.”

  The Luperca being the Luperca again, Pierman thought.

  “Copy all Vendetta, please standby,” the operator signed off.

  Pierman thumbed the comm light on the holo-stage as soon as it appeared. “I was listening, Chief,” he said before the section lead could repeat the exchange. “Have them hold the command centre: either the enemy has enough force left to destroy them or they don’t. If they do it’s better we get at least some of these gateships. Protecting the token and comm equipment is now Vendetta’s sole function.”

  “Sir,” the chief replied and through the glass Pierman saw him quickly relay the news to the comm officer.

  “Vendetta this is Arcadia control,” the officer relayed. “Entrench your position and send token codes as requested. Hold at all costs.”

  “Understood control.” There was a short pause. “Arcadia, Arc Corporal Dryden is requesting permission to lead a party to re-establish contact with Predator One-One.”

  Of course, he is, Pierman thought. It seemed half the armed forces would gladly give their lives just to bring that woman an almond croissant. He saw the chief glance up at him through the glass and he shook his head.

  ****

  Mauler Gateship Codename Silverback

  Powered orbit

  Palishar III, Palishar System

  30 April 2315

  Three Mauler destroyers and a battleship had gathered around the Gateship Silverback in response to an emergency recall order. Uncharacteristically, that recall was received through the Constellation’s own communications network, though the significance of that was lost on the automated system. That the gate remained closed for two days did not concern the warships, their programming imparted neither a sense of urgency nor impatience, simply a requirement to act when able.

  When the gate finally did open, the ships remained in formation, awaiting the deployment orders that would follow. They were completely unprepared for the barrage of nuclear missiles that slipped through the portal in a hurried cluster. The moment the weapons cleared the gate they peeled apart, each choosing its target for maximum effect.

  One Mauler destroyer was struck in the centre of its engine block, its primary drives disabled in hellfire. Another had its portside magazine ignited, gutting the ship and throwing it into a flat spin away from its fellows. The battleship weathered two bracing impacts to its heavily armoured hull before a third found a crater wrought by an earlier engagement with the Constellation Fleet; striking deep and vaporising a score of internal decks in a wave of plasma.

  The last three missiles curved around in delicate arcs to strike the gateship itself, ripping open its lightly protected hull like tinfoil and spilling out burned and melted Maulers still locked in their stasis tanks. A support strut for the rapidly spinning ring was severed by one of the blasts, and the portal disappeared as the rings centripetal energy tore it free of its remaining struts. In a billow of giant metal fragments, the ring impaled the ship and bore its way deep within. Its trailing arcs snapped into a dozen pieces and flung out into space

  As the debris continued to drift out from the carnage, only a single destroyer remained intact. It patiently held its formation with the corpse of the gateship and waited for the follow up orders that would never come.

  ****

  Outpost Origin

  Inimicus, Unknown System

  30 April 2315

  Musashi had all but failed. He’d lost half his force in a running battle through the gestation chambers only to end up chasing his prey back to the submarine hangar he’d been supposed to be protecting in the first place. With unerring efficiency, their quarry had used a single round to disable every watercraft they had, from the mini-subs to the cargo hauler, the barbarian had butchered their motive drives, or worse. Every watercraft but one.

  “The dog bot is in cover behind the last sub,” Manticore Three advised a moment after his sensor boom was blasted off by an arcom pistol round.

  “What about the others?” Manticore Seven asked.


  “There are no others,” Musashi snapped as the realisation hit. “It is just this one. It is a diversion.”

  “Impossible,” Three asserted. “One arcom could not have done this much damage. There must be at least one other, ghosting us while we focus on their leader.”

  “Not so,” Musashi assured. “but it is irrelevant. This one is too dangerous to turn our backs on, so we must deal with it and then re-establish contact with command. We will treat it as single foe, rush and focus fire. Do not worry about the sub, I am certain we can repair at least one of the vehicles, but if we are dead it will not matter. Are you illuminated?”

  There was a chorus of affirmatives, and then Musashi waved them in with a bellow of raw aggression. In a different circumstance, he’d have led the way, but he knew the first arcom through that door was likely dead. He was perfectly willing to lay down his life in the service of Solace, but he believed his own accuracy and reflexes would be necessary to finally claim this foe.

  As he brought his arcom through the doorway and drew his bead on the last intact sub, he saw Manticore Two drop. Ahead his target was alive with the explosions of supressing fire from his colleagues, but there was no sign of the shooter, and he immediately realised he’d underestimated their quarry once again. Using the vital asset as cover was such a brilliant tactic that he couldn’t imagine the dog not using it.

  Which was why the damn thing hadn’t.

  Manticore Seven was hit next, taking a trio of impacts before sagging to the ground. Musashi watched closely for the angle described by the impact craters, thanking his sister silently for her sacrifice. He threw his arcom shoulder first towards the deck, bringing his rifle sweeping up and to the left. His machine rocked before it even hit the ground, something smashed through the cabin with a wave of heat and pain. He was injured, badly he knew, for time had slowed to a stately pace as a rare and final chemistry brought hyper-awareness to his brain.