by Rick Partlow
The beach, I told him, another part of my mind contacting the Raven.
Yes, Captain Mitchell, the ship's AI replied dispassionately.
Take off with minimum thermal signature, I transmitted. Meet us about a hundred meters off the horn of the promontory. Come to a hover as close to the water as you can, and if attacked, defend.
Yes, sir.
We were only about thirty meters from the building when they dropped in almost on top of us: at least ten High Guard troops coming down on jets of isotope-heated steam in their bulky, powered battlesuits---they must have wanted us really bad. My suit "felt" the laser sights on it and Deke and I dove for cover behind a maintenance tractor. Crackling electron beams arced out of the darkness to blow divots out of the mud in gouts of steam; and tantalum needles gouged shallow craters in the side of the tractor with rhythmic pings of metal on metal.
Damn. This was a trap from the word go. They must have known exactly the sort of target the Boys go after and set this place up as bait. They probably didn't know when we'd be here, but they knew we'd come. Strangely, I wasn't afraid. The prospect of death didn't bother me anymore. I was a bit pissed. I'd always thought I'd die in some kind of significant manner, not like a damn rabbit in a snare.
Fuck this.
I took off, Deke following despite probably thinking I'd gone nuts, and I took the time to trigger a couple of blasts from my plasma gun at the sources of the laser sights that brushed me. The blasts seemed to rip at the fabric of reality, tearing the night apart with their ionizing fury and detonating at the edge of the jungle with a burst of liberated plasma energy. The battlesuits were armored with about three centimeters of tungsten alloy, but the multi megawatt pulses from my assault gun blew through it like it was plastic, dropping two of the troopers in their tracks, their torsos burning.
We were running in the dark across that rocky, uneven ground at something better than sixty klicks an hour in a zigzag route, and they were still coming too damn close with those electron beamers. I could see them out of the corner of my eye; looked like about two dozen armored shock troops coming out of the woods, closing in on us. We were over a hundred meters from the High Guard troopers, but if they could zero on us, they'd jet in on top of us in seconds, and there were some regular infantry moving up behind them. But on the bright side...
"...twenty-nine, thirty!" I pulled Deke to the ground just as one of the loudest explosions I'd ever heard in my life went off behind us. The big pile of chemical hyperexplosives produced a shock wave like a micro-nuke, consuming a few of our pursuers in its gigantic fireball and knocking the rest off their feet. The wave of heat passed over Deke and me, cooking us a little through our suits, but not seriously harming us.
Scrambling back to my feet, the blast still ringing in my ears and flaming debris raining down everywhere, I started running again, trusting Deke to keep up. There were no shots at our heels this time, with our attackers still trying to recover from the blast. Their thermal sights, at least, would useless now---the promontory was covered with burning shit, bathing everything in its flickering glow. They couldn't use surveillance drones, either; their own electromagnetic defenses prevented it.
We had to get out of here fast, or they were going to call in air support; there was nothing in orbit, but if this had been a setup, they were bound to have at least ground support fighters hidden somewhere nearby.
Raven, I called the ship's AI. Any aircraft in sensor range?
I'm picking up fighter-sized aircraft approaching from due east at twenty klicks, Captain.
Launch a spread of missiles, I instructed Raven, then jink into an anti-sensor avoidance course.
Launching now, Captain.
The Raven carried twelve antispacecraft missiles, specially designed for the team. Launched by an electromagnetic catapult, they shot out even further on compressed-gas jets before their main engines cut in; that kept the enemy's SAM sights from tracing them back to the ship. Linked to the ship's sensors, I saw the glowing darts that represented our missiles impact the sensor blobs that were their fighters, then watched the blobs flare up and disappear. That was one problem down, literally. If we could only make it to the beach...
Then my augment sensors picked up the missile streaking out of the forest.
"Down!" I screamed, diving as far forward as I could.
I hit on my chest, nearly knocking the wind out of me, and then the night lit up and a shockwave lifted me up again and deposited me a good five meters farther on. I landed on my back this time, feeling the rocks digging into my shoulder blades. If I'd still been a normal human, I'd have been dead right then, with my back broken by that fall; but my laminate-hardened spine and augment muscles saved me from that fate, and my Reflex armor hardened to deflect most of the warhead's shrapnel. The few of the tantalum needles that did penetrate peppered my left thigh and buttock, but I was running high on endorphins, and I hardly felt them.
What I did feel, as I struggled back to my feet, was a nagging insistence that something was very, very wrong. I spun around and saw Deke lying motionless behind me, his left leg blown off at the knee.
Jenna’s face seemed to float before my eyes, a vision of her from the picture, superimposed on the mangled body of my best friend. An inhuman howl came from somewhere far off and I only gradually realized that it was coming from me. I tried to talk, tried to move, but I felt like darkness was closing in on me and I couldn't outrun it anymore.
Then I saw the machine breaking through the tree line to the north. It was twelve-and-a-half meters tall and bipedal, powered by an anti-proton reactor and protected by electromagnetic deflectors and fifteen centimeters of molecularly-bonded armor. It was packing a proton accelerator, Gauss autocannons and a lot of missiles like the one that took off Deke's leg. It was a damned walking starship bearing down on us from the north while the remnants of the battlesuit troops were gaining from the west.
And me...I don't know what I was thinking. It was like there was this haze of red over my vision and all I wanted to do was kill. Part of me was standing there to the side, thinking all this through logically, knowing I should pick up Deke and run for the beach; that if I didn't, we'd die. But my headcomp was telling me a different story. Apparently, though I didn't remember doing it, I'd somehow picked up Deke's rifle, and I was standing there like a fucking moron, triggering electron beams and plasma fireballs at the oncoming Tahni troopers.
I manage to force enough reason into whatever part of my hindbrain that had taken over my body to fall into a crouch as the electron beams and hyper-accelerated tantalum needles from the ground troops and the wash of protons from the mecha ripped up the ground around me. God only knew why I hadn't been nailed yet---maybe it was all the burning metal fucking up their sights. Most of the battlesuits were down, but that mecha was still coming, and both weapons were running low.
And then a searing blast of coherent light speared the Tahni machine's upper chest, blowing through its armor in an explosion of sparks and metal fragments and suddenly killing its fuel containment field. I barely had time to throw myself down before the antimatter went up, the ignition shaking the ground, the roar rattling my bones; without the implant buffers, my eardrums would have been gone. The shock knocked me back to my senses, and I was finally able to take control of my actions again. Looking back, I saw the Raven coming to a hover above the beach, the obvious source of the shot that had saved us. But I hadn't told it to come in...
"Are you through?" I heard Deke's voice ask, and looked back to see him leaning on one arm, his left side covered with blood, the hair and skin burned off the left side of his head along with part of his hood.
"Deke..." I numbly dropped his beamer and ran back to him. "Are you all right?"
"Hell no, I'm not all right!" Deke yelled through clenched teeth, pulling off the tattered remnants of his face hood and angrily throwing it to the ground. He was pale and there was a lot of pain in his eyes. His biofeedback loop should have been shutting
a lot of it out, and the painkillers and coagulants from his pharmacy organ would be kicking in soon, but he looked bad: the bare, silvery bone was sticking out from his knee...Oh, God...
"My fucking leg is blown off, I'm right in the middle of a fucking Tahni ambush, and you look like you're hell-bent on getting us both killed! Any more fucking stupid questions? Or can we get the fuck out of here?"
Nodding silently, I grabbed him around the waist, hefted him up with one arm and carried him to the Raven. Its belly ramp was down and waiting for us about a meter off the ground, its belly jets kicking up a billowing cloud of dust and loose vegetation. I fairly threw Deke up the ramp, hoping the painkillers had taken effect, then leaped on board behind him.
Get us the hell out of here! I yelled mentally at the ship's AI, closing the ramp behind us and hauling Deke's barely-conscious form toward the cockpit. Maximum realspace speed.
I struggled to keep myself upright as the Raven fed power to the atmospheric jets, running scooped up air through the fusion reactor and expelling it at hypersonic speeds. We exploded through the upper atmosphere at over Mach seven, and I wished it were faster.
Deke was drifting in and out of consciousness, moaning softy, but his bleeding had stopped by the time we reached the equipment bay behind the cockpit and I pulled open the automed cabinet. I leaned him against the console and began stripping off his gear. He was all blood and burned flesh on his left side, down to the ragged stump where his left calf used to be. Gritting my teeth to fight back the nausea, I lifted him up and gently sat him inside the coffin-shaped device. I paused for just a moment to make sure I had the settings right, then I closed the lid, and headed for the cockpit.
Any pursuit? I asked the Raven, falling into the pilot's seat. We were out of the atmosphere, running off metallic hydrogen fuel until we could get far enough out of the gravity well to use the Teller-Fox warp units.
Sensors detect three enemy corvettes emerging from over the planet's horizon.
Bastards. I knew they'd have more ships. It wasn't a big problem, though: we had a jump on them, and this ship was built for speed as well as stealth. We were hauling around double banks of capacitors, one kept charged to let us jump at will and the other usually left cold so we could use the warp field as a defense shield. Once we got out of orbit, I could hit the warp units and get us to a safe distance to jump to Transition space. But there was that little voice again, whispering in my ear...it was too damned easy.
Active sensors forward! I snapped at Raven.
Active neutrino scans were risky in this situation, but...
Warning! Raven screamed at me. Enemy picket ship at three-six, ten thousand kilometers ahead.
Fuck!
They'd had her sitting out there, powered down, trying to run me right into her guns. With a thought, I assumed active control of the ship and pulled her into a vertical climb out of the system's elliptical plane at full thrust, our fusion flare standing out like a beacon behind us.
Enemy vessel is powering up his drives, Raven warned. Corvettes are altering course to follow.
How long to safe jump distance?
At present acceleration and course, five minutes and twenty-one seconds.
Still no problem. Those corvettes couldn't keep up, and although the picket ship had the power to outrun us, she'd only just activated her drives.
Picket ship is launching a missile. Neutrino signature is consistent with a shipkiller.
Oh, shit.
Why would they waste one of those on us? Those things were basically an overpowered starship with a quick-burnout antiproton drive that could shunt them up to relativistic speeds. We're talking AI guidance, twenty millimeters of bonded armor, its own defense shield and a 100-megaton fusion warhead.
Time till intercept?
Approximately two minutes and forty-eight seconds.
Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit!
Launch all remaining missiles, I ordered. Spread them out along the probable avoidance courses.
Launching.
Not that I actually thought they'd stop it.
And then what? If we tried to jump too close to that fucking mudball back there, the gravitational warping effect would distort our temporary wormhole and we'd wind up scattering our atoms through both dimensions like we'd never existed. And there was no way in hell we could outrun that missile in realspace.
I searched quickly through the ship's databanks, and found out that the closest to a planetary body anyone had ever successfully Transitioned was a bit less than eight planetary diameters away. In two minutes and forty-eight seconds, we'd be exactly seven diameters away. Recommended jump distance was ten diameters.
Our intercept missiles have detonated, Raven announced. I cannot accurately assess the damage they have done, but the shipkiller is still on course and accelerating at several hundred gravities.
Good to know Tahni quality control was holding up. No choice anymore. We'd have to risk a Close Jump. Oh, well. At least it'd be a painless death; not a bad way to go, just fading into oblivion. I wondered, if there was an afterlife, would I see Jenna there? Or maybe this was it; maybe this life was all we got. If that was true, I'd really fucked up. The center of my adult life had been killing people---not humans, but still people.
If my Dad was right, I was damned to Hell, and the last seven years of my life had been meaningless bullshit. If that was so, maybe it'd be better just to end it here. It was too bad Deke had to be here, though. If I knew him, he would have wanted to go out with a bang, or in bed...or both.
Sorry, Deke.
S'okay, Cal. I blinked. Had he really said that or was I imagining things? Maybe I didn't really want to know.
Ten seconds till Transition, Raven announced the results of my decision. Eighteen seconds till missile intercept.
Damn. I'd been sitting here thinking for a good two minutes. Almost missed the big moment.
Nine...
How'd that prayer go again? Oh, yeah. Our father who art in Heaven...
Eight...
Hallowed by thy name.
Seven...
Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven.
Six...
Give us this day our daily bread...
Five...
And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.
Four...
Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
Three...
For thine is the power and the glory...
Two...
Forever and ever...
One...
Amen.
The very air around me seemed to swirl as the computer fed the warp unit a capacitor charge, pushing the gravimetic field to overload in a fraction of a second and creating an artificial, temporary wormhole in front of the ship. The stars twisted into a distorted rainbow ring around us and then we were swallowed up by the living nothingness of Transition Space...and safety.
I sighed deeply, settling back in my seat and running a hand over my face. It was almost disappointing. And that was really frightening.
What's Captain Conner’s condition? I asked the ship.
He is stable. The automed has removed the fragments and sealed his wounds with synthskin. There should be no difficulty in cloning a replacement for his leg.
So, Deke was safe, I was safe, everybody was safe.
Except I didn't feel safe. I didn't feel safe at all.
Chapter Two
I'd always hated hospitals. Whether it was the medcenter back home at Mount Carmel, or the huge Fleet Medical Station here on Inferno, there was always this air of impersonality and claustrophobia. I guess it had to do with the idea of fixing a human body like it's a machine, but I'd always hated them. And I especially hated the reason I was there now.
It was hard to recognize Deke as the distorted form floating in a clear chamber of oxygenated biotic fluid that tinted everything a pale pink. The fluid was encouragi
ng the regrowth of severed nerves and blood vessels, preparing the stump of his lower left leg for the graft of the new one growing in the clone tanks. It'd be another day or so before he was ready for the graft, and another couple weeks after that before he'd be up and around, but he'd never been in any real danger...except from me.
I turned suddenly at the sound of the treatment room's door hissing open and two officers stepping inside. The first was a tall, broad-bodied man with a regal bearing and ebon skin. His eyes had the piercing intensity of a laser and he seemed to command respect without saying a word. Major Matthew M'voba: he'd been a natural leader among all of us who'd survived the fateful attack on the Academy training ship Thatcher, and that had carried over to his higher rank and position as second-in-command of the group.
The other...the other looked like a file clerk. He had an unremarkable face and the body to go with it, despite the age of body restruct that we lived in; and soft, almost weepy eyes. It was all a lie---a natural camouflage job. Colonel Antonin Murdock was as hard and dangerous as a burst of gamma rays. He was our commander---our creator in many ways---and one of Admiral Sato's Golden Boys. When President Jameson had put Sato in charge of Space Fleet, he'd swept a whole new generation of officers into command positions, including "Bulldog" Murdock. And it was the Bulldog who'd had this idea about a special, physically-augmented psychological operations team to put the fear of God into the Tahni.
"He's going to be okay." Mat's voice was a boulder crashing on a field of gravel.
"I know." I nodded gratefully.
"Let's take a walk," Murdock said without preamble, then turned and strode purposefully out of the room, leaving me with no choice but to follow.
We were silent as we walked quickly through the hospital corridors, all white walls and white uniforms, and finally emerged into the bright, mid-afternoon glare from too-near 82 Eridani. The medical center was right in the middle of the base, and there was activity all around us. The crackling roar of ascending spacecraft was underpinned by the whine of electric motors from the groundcars that filled the street. The spaceport was a white, blockish edifice that loomed above us, the upper control decks of cargo haulers poking up above its open bays.