Andy clawed to his feet and sprinted, pain from what might be a broken ankle slowing him down. He was nearly hopping on one foot when he reached the intersection and threw himself around the corner.
“We are taking fire,” Brit reported over the open channel. “Units Sykes and Ashford. Enemy is a reinforced battle mech with twenty millimeter cannons, and an electron beam. No further weapons systems observed at this time.”
When his breathing was under control, Andy asked, “You all right?”
Brit nodded. “It seemed to want to kill you first.”
“We’re going to need an external strike to take that thing out.”
“It’s not going to matter when those cannons tear a hole in the side of the station. What are they thinking? Whoever designed their defense plan must be suicidal.”
“Are you getting interference over your Link?” Andy asked. He slapped his helmet but the static in his ears didn’t abate. “I think my comm’s down.”
“No,” she said. “I hear it, too. The mech might have some kind of EM jamming measures. I guess it’s just as well there are only two of us.”
“Damn Arsel,” Andy said, blowing out a hard breath. “I didn’t like her much but I didn’t want her dead.”
Brit didn’t say anything. She checked her rifle and then made him turn around so she could examine his armor. His boot had filled with stabilization foam and numbing agents, easing the pain in his ankle to a dull ache. He’d be able to run on it for hours now until the medics had to peel his boot open.
“You took some good hits,” Brit said. “This armor’s shot. Don’t turn your back on anything anytime soon.”
“I’ll try to keep that in mind,” Andy said, wincing as he flexed his shoulders. He was bruised deeply if not truly injured.
The floor vibrated with the mech’s heavy movements. With each step, the white noise in Andy’s ears grew louder, making him think it was definitely using countermeasures against them. He checked through his four remaining grenades for anything with frequency hopping capabilities but all he had left were explosives.
“Hey,” he asked Brit. “You got anything that can cut off its jamming? It’s driving me crazy.”
“I’ve got one but it’s got a limited radius. I don’t think it’s worth trying to get close enough to use it.”
“Damn it. I’d take a painkiller but I don’t want it messing with my balance,” Andy said.
“Stay with me, tough guy,” Brit said, giving him a rare grin. “We’ll have this thing down soon enough.”
“What are your ideas?”
“Fall back to that last door you sealed. Pop it open and wait for the thing to pass or for reinforcements to show up. Pop out behind it and hit it with everything we’ve got,” Brit replied.
“I’m pretty sure that model of mech has passive detection scanning. We can’t hide from it.”
“We can’t take it,” Brit said. “Not just two of us. We’ll have to fall back to the rest of the team.”
Andy was about to answer her when the white noise in his ears rose like a wave, filling his head with static. He stared at Brit, her face outlined in green by his faceplate, but he couldn’t hear anything but the roiling noise.
Over his Link, he heard,
Brit’s expression twisted as it became obvious she had heard the same words as Andy. The sound of the approaching mech continued to grow louder, vibrating the smooth floor.
“There’s something in that mech,” Andy said.
“I heard it, too.”
“One of the kids, you think?”
“Maybe. We can’t stop it. If the kid can’t control it, we can’t help him.”
The static flared and Kylan’s voice rose from the white noise.
Kylan screamed.
The squealing cannon caught him by surprise. Brit yanked him further down the hallway as the intersection where they had just been filled with a storm of projectiles, cratering the opposite wall. Turning, they ran back the way they had come.
“Have we got reinforcements incoming?” Andy asked.
“They’re moving back as fast as they can. Apparently.”
They rounded a corner to find four of their squad mates set up with a crew-served railgun resting on a tripod and heavy CFT shields on either side of the corridor.
“I hope these damn things can hold up,” Brit gasped as they slid past. Behind them, the mech turned into the corridor, twenty meters between it and the railgun.
The air around them grew dry as the cannon’s capacitors charged and discharged, spewing a hail of one millimeter pellets—each travelling at over ten kilometers per second—down the corridor. The tiny pellets slammed into the mech, spinning its torso and knocking it into a wall. The fire continued to tear into its rear armor and leg joints.
Transon grumbled something Andy couldn’t hear that might have been irritation or condolences.
Andy suppressed a shiver.
Andy squinted to look through the smoke filling the corridor. The mech lay on its side, still trying to get into an upright position. The railgun had cut its legs and one cannon into ribbons. The other cannon, though, was swiveling into a firing position.
There was no answer. As the cannon spun to life, and another stream of rail-served pellets slammed into the mech, tearing through its body, the gunner continuing to fire until the mech was nothing more than a smoking ruin.
Transon said.
Andy sighed, remembering the fear in Kylan’s voice.
Andy nodded.
Walking back through cleared sections of the station, Andy let himself lean on Brit when she offered her shoulder, easing the growing pain in his ankle.
He didn’t know how much she had heard, but something about the little boy’s voice filled him with a sense of dread that he couldn’t shake. When they passed the lounge rooms again, he wanted to tear every one of the sleeping children out of the machine they had been plugged into. It was obvious they were being used for remote control of weapons systems but he couldn’t understand why anyone would want to use children? Why go to all this trouble? Weren’t there adults who would gladly sign up for this kind of work?
He could only shake his head, and later pour beer down his throat with the rest of the squad back on Aggression’s Cost. They traded their theories on what Fortress 8221 had truly been. When a sergeant from the intel section confirmed that 8221 wouldn’t be destroyed like any regular pirate outpost, the dread came back into Andy’s heart. He saw it settle down on everyone else in the squad. They didn’t like to feel like pawns. They wanted to believe Transon had been surprised just like they all had when they’d found the first lounge room. But that got harder to swallow as time went on.
Several nights later, when Brit came to his room sometime after midnight, she curled up against him and asked if he had ever wanted kids.
She whispered the question like a secret she was afraid to expose to anyone—her deepest desire.
“Yes,” Andy said. “I do.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
STELLAR DATE: 08.27.2981 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Sunny Skies
REGION: Near Cruithne Station, Terran Hegemony
There was a moment of weightlessness as Sunny Skies—Cara refused to think of the ship as Worry’s End—somersaulted over its midpoint to execute the braking burn. Her arms and legs floated free and her back slipped away from the chair until the harness held her in place.
Tim grinned at her, giggling. He nearly lost his poetry book until Cara caught it and handed it back.
“Turn complete,” Dad shouted. “Here we go.”
The force of the engines kicking to life drove them back into their seats. Cara did her best to face forward. Beside her, Tim made gurgling sounds, trying to be funny like usual.
The first hard burn lasted three minutes and made her eyes feel like fried eggs. “I don’t want to take us any slower than that,” her dad had told Fran. “If they’re accelerating, we won’t need to do much to get them to overshoot us.”
As he’d said before, the worry was that the Benevolent Hand would figure out what they were up to in time to match their new speed.
Her dad had transferred the channel from the Benevolent Hand to the overhead speakers, although there hadn’t been any interesting conversation since she’d overheard them talking about their drive system. The channel had been quiet for so long that she wanted to ask her dad to play some music instead. Piano was her favorite though she also liked electronic dance music or sometimes just the choir voices.
With her little speaker in her ear, she idly switched between other channels on the spectrum, wondering if she might pick up a passing signal. Every so often, Fran and her Dad talked using their Links and the sentences came through like they were talking underwater.
Fran’s voice was clear, while her dad’s kept warping in and out, interspersing blank spaces with
Listening, Cara nearly kicked herself. Of course, her dad felt bad about having sex with Fran while he was still thinking about their mom. Once she understood, she didn’t need to eavesdrop on their Link conversation to feel the tension between them.
Cara couldn’t help liking Petral for getting them from the apartment to the dock, even if all she’d done while they were in the apartment together was watch programs on the holo and clean her nails. When they’d asked to watch their own shows, she’d made them stay in the back room where it was ‘safer.’
Another braking maneuver pushed Cara down in her seat, making her dizzy this time as blood rushed out of her head.
Fran said.
If Cara hadn’t been able to listen in, she would have thought her dad was grinning at Fran for no reason.
The overhead speakers bled static and a voice said, “Brake? We brake now those assholes from Cruithne will catch up. We barely shut down that TSF team. Well if Cal Kraft wants to kill us all he might as well come around and do it himself. We know where they’re going. Why not just blow past them to Mars 1 and wait for them to come to us?”
A wave of static went through the speakers and the channel fell silent. Andy’s mouth fell open.
“I think you’ve saved the day, Cara,” he said.
“Did we slow down fast enough?” she asked, liking it when he complimented her.
He stared into his console and took a deep breath. “We did but that little bit of audio just confirmed something I was worried about but couldn’t be sure of. They’ve got a small armada coming after them. I thought they might be more Lowspin ships but it looks like they might be people who don’t like us much. Or don’t seem to, for some reason.”
“You sure?” Fran said. “They could all be Lowspin.”
“I don’t want to risk it. As much as we’ve slowed down, we can’t hope to outrun them at this point.”
Something in his display made him curse. He typed furiously, then pulled up a new holoprojection that showed the Benevolent Hand again, this time with a cloud of sparks rushing past it like it was standing still. He pointed at another dot just slightly ahead of the Benevolent Hand.
“That’s us,” he said. “They caught us. Damn it.”
“What are we going to do?” Cara said, wondering if he was going to tell them to go hide again. She hated that.
“We’re going to dive into the fray,” Andy said.
“You’re not serious,” Fran’s voice rose an octave.
“We can’t outrun them. We’ve got no cover. The only safe place right now is the middle of all those other ships. I can fight off Zanda’s smaller fighters if he realizes we’re in the mix. We might get lucky and have the Benevolent Hand take them out for us.
“I’m not excited about this plan,” Fran said.
“Honestly, it’s creating an opening for you to get out in the shuttle if that’s what you still want to do. Nobody’s going to notice you among all the other ships.”
Fran didn’t answer.
Ca
ra watched them, wondering why her dad was trying to push her away. It seemed obvious to her that Fran wanted to stay and would probably stay for a while if he asked.
“I thought Fran was staying with us until we got to Mars?” Tim asked.
Cara wanted to hug her little brother. He often surprised her by interjecting himself at the precisely correct moments. He asked in a matter-of-fact way that Cara didn’t think she would ever have been able to pull off. She didn’t know if Tim liked Fran, exactly, but she did know he didn’t like change. It wouldn’t make sense to him that someone who had been on the ship longer than anyone but their mom would need to leave so soon.
“Fran was always going to need to go back to Cruithne,” her dad said. “That’s where she lives. Why wouldn’t she go back there?”
Fran still didn’t answer. Her gaze had slid to the console in front of her so Cara couldn’t tell if she was stalling or had spotted something new to worry about.
“The Benevolent Hand has matched our delta-V,” Fran said. “The swarm is coming up fast. I’ve got registry pings. It’s most of the ships from Cruithne with what might be more TSF. I can’t read all the military transponders.”
Looking grateful for the distraction, Cara’s dad shifted the holodisplay and plotted a course that would take them past the Benevolent Hand into the middle of the new mass of ships. The icons kept shifting from red to yellow and green as he moved the display, which Cara guessed meant friendly vs bad guys.
“We’ll need to keep moving,” he said, talking more to himself than the rest of them. “Is anyone on the Lowspin battle net? We need to find out what their plan is.”
Fran listened for a minute and then shook her head. “Their plans appear to be keeping themselves alive long enough for more TSF reinforcements to arrive. They’re all terrified that the Benevolent Hand slowed down. They thought they were done with the fight until Mars.”
“Anybody mention us?”
“Well, as soon as I reappeared on the net, they knew what had happened.” Her face grew blank again as something else caught her attention. “Oh,” she said, listening.
Lyssa's Dream - A Hard Science Fiction AI Adventure (The Sentience Wars - Origins Book 1) Page 25