by Rick Partlow
Then we were rushing the main entrance, while two of Tom’s platoon hit the rear, the shouts and unmistakable sounds of firing weapons reaching our ears even as we took up covering positions around the duralloy double-doors of the main entrance. I hung back while Pete and Tom McCrey burst through the doors---I wanted to be the first one in, but I was the only one who could penetrate the control systems.
The pair of technicians at their stations spun around, surprise evident on their eerily human faces, and one clutched futilely at the pistol strapped to his chest. Pete and Tom pumped both of them with tungsten slugs before either could rise from their seats, then fanned out to cover the rest of the room.
"Clear," Pete called, bringing the rest of us rushing in.
I pulled one of the techs from his seat, noticing how, up close, their broad noses, pancake ears, and ridged brows belied their superficial resemblance to humans. The Tahni's blood was just as red as ours, though, and it stained the chair from the gaping wound in his chest. I ignored it, fell into the seat, leaned my plasma gun against the console, and pulled a computer penetration module from my belt, plugging it into an accessory port to tie my neurolink into the computer net.
The Tahni had added their own safety measures to augment the ones Space Fleet had left in place, but I had little trouble penetrating them---my headcomp had a lot of practice at this. Then it was just a matter of injecting the virus programmed into my headcomp and making sure it got past the system's safeguards.
"Cal." Pete shook my shoulder, breaking my link with the net. "We've got a counterattack coming in from the garrison---fifty dismounts and at least some of the High Guard troopers. They've already overrun Carlotta's listening post, and they're gonna' be on this building in less than a minute."
Shit. I felt a pain clenching in my gut. That probably meant Isaac and his force were gone. I forced the thought down; there wasn’t time for it.
"The virus is in." I shrugged, standing from the station and retrieving my assault gun. I looked around at the people guarding the doors, the people who had been my friends and neighbors. They were the same people who had ostracized me for joining the military, and for having Jason Chen, an Offworlder, as my friend. Now, Jason was risking his career and I was risking my life to save them. "Let's get out there," I said quietly.
The battle was already raging by the time we reached its front lines. The one advantage we had was that the Tahni couldn't afford to destroy the control center---they needed those defense satellites to maintain their hold on the planet. That meant they wouldn't be using air support or heavy weapons, but God knew their High Guard troops were bad enough. I only hoped they didn't have any Imperial Guard cyborgs.
Sizzling, crackling electron beams stabbed out of the night around us as we fell into positions around the building, the sizzling cracks of their beamers and the whipping passage of their tantalum KE darts intermixed with the sharp hum-snaps of the rebels' Gauss rifles and the hissing whine of their lasers. Brush burst into flames and dirt exploded in great chunks as the multikilojoule bursts of charged particles touched it, but our men and women steadily pumped round after round into the night without flinching.
The Tahni ground troops had been called out hastily and with little organization, and their advance showed it. They were massed in the open with no overwatch formation or suppressive fire, and it took a heavy toll on them as my neighbors, most of whom had been hunters all their lives, picked them off one by one. The conventional soldiers’ battle armor was a good defense against beam weapons, but the high-caliber Gauss rifles I'd brought in spat out tungsten slugs at more than 3,000 meters per second, passing through even their ceramic weave breastplates like they weren't there.
But then there was the High Guard…
Those among us firing the lasers went quickly. The Tahni battlesuits backtracked the laserbursts on infrared and focused their fire on the sources. A half a dozen people I had known since my childhood took electron beam hits and blew apart in bloody explosions of flash-boiled bodily fluids.
“Concentrate your fire on the dismounts!” I bellowed, standing and reloading my plasma gun. “Leave the High Guard to me!”
I blasted a round into the closest of them as he lumbered forward, only thirty meters away, and the plasmoid struck him at the juncture of his right arm and shoulder. His armor was thick, but not thick enough to turn away that much concentrated energy; his arm blew off in a spray of vaporized blood and metal and he stumbled backwards in shock before I put a second round into the same weakened section of armor and turned the man inside it into bloody ashes.
I leaped ten meters to the left just as a blast of electrons blew a crater into the ground where I’d just stood. I could feel the heat wash over me, felt the hair on the right side of my head curl away in a haze of smoke, but I kept moving. I knew there were only four of the battlesuits left; I couldn’t have told you exactly what set of data my headcomp had used to decide that, but I knew it as I knew my right from my left. I knew the closest was forty meters away to the West and the farthest was seventy meters to the Northeast, I knew which direction they were facing and what they were targeting with their beamers.
I ran between their fields of fire, making sure they couldn’t fire at me without hitting each other; they loomed dark and massive, their matte finish drinking in the light as if they fed off it. I fired from the hip, one-handed, and the recoil nearly tore the plasma gun from my hand. A sun rose for just a moment, bathing the shadowy giants in light for the microsecond it took the plasmoid to strike the knee joint of the closest battlesuit.
Molten metal splashed outward and the Tahni’s armor-sheathed lower leg blew away on a jet of vaporized blood and plastic. That was when two of them panicked and opened fire. I was already gone, moving faster than they could follow, but I knew what was happening. Electron beams sliced into the wounded trooper before he had the chance to fall and his armor exploded from the inside as metal was heated to its sublimation point in milliseconds.
They were scared. I could feel it as sure as if I were in the armored suit next to them, and I pressed it home, using my speed and their clumsiness against them. I was at the center of the uneven triangle the three of them formed for the space of a heartbeat and I fired again from only ten meters away. Molten metal splashed back at me and burned into my Reflex armor and I bit back an instinctive scream even as it resealed, but I couldn’t stand still. I’d shot one of them in the hip joint and he was collapsing, but the one next to him was already firing and I was already jumping.
His blast of high-energy electrons burned through where I’d been an eyeblink earlier, but I was passing a meter over his head, pumping the action of my plasma gun in mid-air and then firing. The round went straight down through the armored dome over the Tahni’s head and the blast of superheated air tossed me off-balance. I hit the ground on my shoulder, feeling the breath go out of me in a whoosh, only the iron grip of my byomer muscle augments keeping the plasma gun in my hand.
The battlesuit I’d caught in the hip was struggling to stay upright, the Tahni inside probably fighting against shock from his injuries but certainly not in any shape to fight. The one I’d headshot stood stock-still, its gyros keeping it upright but the suit just as brain dead as the fried corpse that occupied it.
Unfortunately, in that instant, the last remaining High Guard trooper got the idea to un-ass the area fast and hit his suit’s jets. It blasted off on twin columns of steam and I jacked a fresh round into the chamber and fired one last, desperate shot. The battlesuit was thirty meters up, almost directly over me, still close enough that I could feel the blast of hot wind from its jets. I put the ball of concentrated star-fire right into the suit’s left-hand exhaust port and straight up through its reactor.
The suit pinwheeled out of control as harsh, red flames spewed from its exhaust port like blood. It nosed in from fifty meters up and slammed into the ground head-first only meters away from me with enough force to throw me into the air and dig a
crater a meter deep in the dirt. I dimly began to realize that there was still shooting going on all around me and I rolled to my feet and sprinted back to our lines, sliding in next to Pete behind the shelter of a concrete vehicle barrier.
He stared at me with eyes wide, disbelieving what he’d seen, ignoring the tantalum needles still cracking fitfully against the side of the building until one hit the barrier in front of us in a spray of particulate grains of cement. He ducked instinctively before raising his rifle to his shoulder and taking up the fight again. I pulled my Gauss pistol and opened fire on the conventional soldiers still advancing slowly across the plain from the spaceport.
But the fire from the KE guns of the Tahni conventional troops seemed to taper off and they gradually began to withdraw, leaving a score of their number laying on the open field. Hearing a handful of whooping cheers come from the perimeter, I squashed a desire to yell out that it was too early to celebrate. They'd find out soon enough, I figured.
The worst part about it was that we wouldn't even know when the fleet arrived. We could hold for days, dying in place, and it would all be for nothing if Jason hadn't been able to convince the brass to go through with the plan. But there was nothing else to do. We had nowhere to run to anymore.
It didn't take more than about thirty seconds before we felt the ground begin to shake beneath us. I felt an empty hollow in my gut as I realized what it was. It quickly came into view, towering a good ten meters over us as it lumbered over the rise, a bulkily humanoid shape wrapped in thick armor and bristling with weapons. Isaac and the others hadn’t been able to stop it, hadn’t been able to distract it.
I had faced Tahni mecha once before, and the only thing that had saved my ass was the timely arrival of my spaceship. Since my ship was in pieces on the opposite side of the planet, that didn't seem too likely. What seemed very likely was that we were all about to die.
Yeah...all of this would be for nothing. My parents and my sister were dead, me and Rachel and my brothers were about to die, and it was all for nothing. I had come here and given these people hope---told them that if they stuck together we could win. Now I was going to get all of them killed, and it would be all for nothing.
Fuck that.
With a yell that was higher in pitch and less dramatic than I would have liked, I jumped up from my position, grabbing my plasma gun. If we were all going to hell, I was going to lead the way.
In the seconds between the time I sprang from cover and the time I closed the distance to the machine, I let my headcomp run all the possible attack patterns against a Tahni mech. Besides telling me I was fucking nuts, the computer let me know that the only weakness the big machine had was a maintenance hatch between the legs that led all the way up to the cockpit. Not being stupid, the Tahni engineers had given it full armor plating, but if you aimed in just the right spot, you could spring the catch and open the door.
Typical Tahni thinking---building big and brutal, but not considering the more intricate details. Still, as the hits from the mech's proton cannons blew up several square meters of dirt around me, it was easy to appreciate big and brutal. A blast impacted only a couple of meters away and threw me forward head over heels, jolting my gun free of my hands and filling my vision with stars.
I shook my head clear just in time to see the spiked underside of a rounded footpad coming straight down at me. I rolled clear and felt the ground shake as it crashed down only about a half a meter from me. Springing to my feet, I scooped up the fallen plasma gun, and ran between the mecha's pillar-like legs.
Scanning the thick, duralloy plating that covered the articulated leg joints, I spotted the lines of the maintenance hatch and raised the muzzle of my assault gun. It was a bit tricky trying to keep the weapon steady while dodging those huge feet, but I finally got one clear shot.
No matter how big a guy is, I thought to myself as my finger tightened on the trigger, you give him a shot to the 'nads and he's going down...
The gun bucked against my shoulder and a star-bright ball of plasma shot out of it, splashing over the machine's groin. The metal blackened, several layers of it burning away, but there was no noticeable effect on the mecha---until the maintenance port fell open, its catches incinerated.
I dropped the plasma gun and jumped for all I was worth, barely catching hold of the edge of the opening with my fingertips. I hung there for a moment, my feet dangling a couple meters off the ground, then pulled myself up onto the first rung of the access ladder. I didn't pause for breath, just scrambled up the ladder, past the forest of superconducting power trunks leading from the machine's reactor. Above me, I saw, was the rounded hatch that separated me from the pilot's compartment, an ejectable pod not actually built into the rest of the machine.
Unlike the outer port, this one wasn't locked---it was only secured by a hand-cranked lever. I drew my Gauss pistol, braced myself against one wall with a leg, and reached up to undog the hatch. The heavy portal fell open with a bang that was much too loud, and I was suddenly standing between the legs of the Tahni mechjock, his "easy chair" situated just behind the hatch opening. He looked down at me, his face hidden behind the visor of his neural interface helmet, and began clawing frantically at the pistol holstered across his chest.
I emptied the magazine of my sidearm through the opening, the heavy slugs punching into the mechjock's groin and tunneling upward to blow his brains out through the top of his helmet. The cockpit was suddenly splattered with blood, the Tahni's body going limp against his harness, and I could feel the whole mecha begin to lurch forward.
I had time to think a shot to the nads...before the machine totally lost its bearings and crashed nose-first into the dirt. I was thrown through the hatch into the cockpit, slamming my shoulder into the bulkhead. The crash shook me like a bone in a dog’s teeth, and I felt for a moment like I'd broken every bone in my body, but my headcomp told me that I was basically undamaged.
Slowly, gingerly, I pulled myself up from where I was pressed against the bulkhead, retrieving and holstering my sidearm. This, I told myself, was it. If the damn Tahni had anything else to throw at me, I was going to sit down and cry.
It was a bit easier to crawl out of the access tunnel horizontally than it had been to climb it vertically, and I quickly emerged into the night to the sound of uncontrollable cheering. I felt a bit like taking a bow, until I looked around and realized the rejoicing wasn't for my little act of heroics---it was for the light grey Commonwealth assault shuttles descending on pillars of fire, their proton cannons stabbing out at targets on the landing field, splitting the Night with claps of thunder.
"Holy shit," I breathed, just staring at the landers. All I could think was how close we had cut it; the Fleet ships had to have been converting from Transition Space before we even hit the control center. A few minutes the other way and...
"Cal!" I heard Isaac's voice behind me, turned and saw him running up to me, a huge smile splitting his face. I laughed at the sight of him, laughed from sheer joy at the fact he’d made it out of the spaceport alive, that we’d both somehow made it out of this whole thing alive.
Then, suddenly, the joy in his eyes turned to horror, and I saw the warning coming to his lips. I started to turn, started to draw my gun to deal with the threat I knew was there, but he threw a body block into me, knocking me backwards off balance. As I stumbled, I could see the slugs impacting across Isaac's chest, penetrating the tactical vest that was all the armor he’d had. He jerked, dancing backward as the tantalum darts tracked upward, one finally taking off the left side of his skull in a spray of red.
There was a scream welling up inside me, but my headcomp realized the danger behind me and forced me into action. I somersaulted forward, scooping up Isaac's Gauss rifle, and tumbled into a crouch, searching for a target. Standing there, struggling to reload his rifle, was a Tahni tech officer, dressed in their characteristic light armor and dress cap. He’d hidden somewhere inside the complex and we’d missed him when we swept it,
that was the only way he could have slipped through our lines.
Something savage welled up in my chest and I dropped Isaac’s rifle and pounced on the Tahni officer, ripping the empty KE gun from his hands and tossing it away with enough force that the stock broke into pieces against the side of the control building. He flailed at me with his fists, but I batted the blows aside, breaking both his arms with an almost trivial effort. He screamed like an animal being eaten alive by a predator. I stared down into his hooded, shrouded eyes and saw terror, saw abject fear and the certainty of impending death. I saw reflected in his eyes everything that I’d become over the last four years, everything I’d let them turn me into.
I grabbed his head in both my hands and twisted it around away from me, snapping his neck like a chicken. He went limp, one last gasp leaving him before he was still forever.
Rising up from his body, I reflexively scanned the area for other threats, but found none. No one was around; I stood alone in a field of the dead, their blood turning the muddy, saturated soil an inky black. I turned back to where Isaac lay face-down, stumbling blindly over to him, my eyes veiled over with tears. I fell to my knees beside him and started to turn him over, but stopped myself---I knew I shouldn't. I wouldn't like what I saw.
I felt my breath tighten in my throat and didn’t even have the energy to scream it out. It left me in a weak hiss, and when the breath was gone, it was as if all the emotion was gone out of me as well, as if I had become a statue, staring down at the body of my older brother. I’d never really known him, and now I never would. It was several more seconds before I noticed Pete standing beside me, wide-eyed. I realized with a stab of pain in my chest that I was all he had left.
“He…” Pete trailed off, almost as if he’d forgotten he’d began to speak. Then his mouth worked soundlessly for a moment and he tried again, his voice broken and halting. “He called me just before the mecha attacked. He said they’d held it off as long as they could, but they had a lot of people killed and he told the rest to scatter. He said he was coming to help…”