by Rick Partlow
I saw one firing as we stood there, a crackling, searing white flash as the infrared beam ionized the atmosphere around it and lit up the clouds like a lightning storm. I wasn’t sure what it was firing at or whether it had hit, but the return volley was unmistakable: Gauss cannon rounds the size of groundcars that rained down from orbit pushing a wave of superheated air ahead of them, smashing buildings flat and sending mushroom clouds of debris rising up to meet the low clouds.
The laser didn’t cease its firing, though: its optics were shielded and it simply burned through any debris that blocked the way, as long as the power kept coming…which was why we were here.
Remind me again why they don’ t just pound the reactor with those Gauss cannons? Deke said as we ducked out from behind the drop pod and sprinted for the fence.
The same reason they don’t just nuke the city, I told him patiently, knowing he already knew the answer. We don’t want to kill thousands of civilians and make the whole area uninhabitable for the next couple decades.
Who’s “we?” Nobody asked my fuckin’ opinion.
I didn’t respond, concentrating on jumping over the three-meter fence. There were no guards around the outside of the fusion plant for multiple reasons: one, there were no saboteurs or criminals or vandals to worry about in this culture; two, they were supremely confident that their god-emperor would keep any invader from setting foot in their holy city; and three, our intelligence estimates said that they simply didn’t have the personnel to spare for that sort of mundane duty.
I landed with a shoulder roll, throwing up a spray of dirt and the local grass analog, and was running for the freight entrance to the reactor complex before I heard Deke touch down behind me. There was no one in sight, probably because of the bombardment; the technicians and maintenance workers would probably be in blast shelters, control rooms located deep underground. Which was fine; we didn’t need them, we needed unimpeded access to the control systems for the reactor, which were wisely non-networked to prevent us from remotely doing what we were about to manually do. Well, try to do.
The freight entrance had a double doorway thirty meters across and I could see the ruts worn in the packed and hardened dirt there from where a tractor or something had hauled heavy equipment in repeatedly over the decades. The main doors were shut, but a smaller personnel entrance set in the heavy, grey alloy of the right-hand door was yawning open invitingly. I didn’t slow down as I went through it, just plunged into the shadowy interior of the equipment dock, dodging plastic containers full of spare parts and spools of superconductive cable. Replacement parts gave way to a repair shop and a storage bay for maintenance drones, then we were at the far end of the chamber, an undecorated cement block wall.
There were three exits set evenly spaced apart in the far wall: the central one was for hauling equipment deeper into the plant and was almost as large as the freight door, leading down a broad passage two stories high, while the flanking doors were much smaller, the corridors they led to narrow and dark. I had a floorplan of the place loaded into my headcomp, furnished by DSI agents who’d captured a Tahni database intact on Demeter, and I let it guide me through the central door.
I felt obscenely exposed running down that wide hallway, even though I knew the electronic surveillance was theoretically being disrupted by the electromagnetic warfare drones, even though I knew there shouldn’t be any troops stationed here. This should be a cake-walk. We’d inject the system with the worm, then we’d set charges to disable the plasma injectors; that would keep them from trying an emergency manual reset. With the reactor down, the lasers would be offline and the Marines landers and assault shuttles could de-orbit…and hopefully give us a ride back up.
But I’d been doing this for nearly six years, and nothing was ever that easy.
Which was why I wasn’t exactly surprised when we arrived at the reactor control room and found the primary command station ripped to shreds.
What the fuck? Deke skidded to a halt just behind me. We’d followed the broad hallway to a connecting passage that ringed the guts of the reaction chamber, then taken that clockwise to the open control room. This close to the reactor, you could feel the power of the thing; the electromagnets from the tokamak did funny things to your head if you were around them long enough, even with the shielding. A subsonic hum seemed to radiate from every solid surface, a noise you couldn’t quite pin down that came from everywhere at once.
They were expecting something like this, I told him, eyeing smashed display screens, sparking cables hanging loose from panels ripped off of computer consoles and data ports yanked out of their sockets. They fragged the main command center before they retreated to their shelters.
So, we disable the plasma injectors, he said. And we blow the control conduits and the coolant lines for the electromagnets for good measure. That’ll teach ‘em to be smartasses.
Right, I replied without enthusiasm. I’ll get the injectors. You take the conduits and the coolant feeds. Remember, once we get out of line of sight, we won’t have comms because of the jamming from the drones.
Yes, mother.
I watched Deke head off down the curving passageway, towards where the plans said the liquid nitrogen coolant was piped into the building from the tanks outside. I accessed the blueprints myself and followed their directions counterclockwise around the path, keeping the gleaming mass of the thick alloy reactor shielding on my left and trying to open up my senses for any sign of habitation. The constant ambient hum made it hard to pick up any background noises, and the lines of sight were short in the narrow passage, but it was also vulnerable to attack from the maintenance catwalks above and the power conduits and cooling pipes that formed a maze around the reactor chamber.
It was a great spot for an ambush, and I fully expected one, intelligence estimates be damned. The Tahni had obviously anticipated this place was a target, so they wouldn’t have left it undefended. At least they couldn’t squeeze High Guard battlesuits into this tight of a space, so I expected a squad or two of Shock Troops at most. It was just a question of whether they’d detected us yet, and if we found them before they found us.
I rounded a curve and nearly ran smack into a maintenance drone standing inert in the middle of the corridor. I skidded to a halt, breathing hard, staring at the featureless grey metal face of the remotely controlled service drone. I’d nearly blasted it with my plasma gun, which wouldn’t have done either of us any good at this range. There was a power indicator light that ringed the thing’s upper right arm and it was blinking a color that was somewhere between blue and purple and I had no idea what that meant. My best guess was that it had lost signal from the auxiliary control room due to the electromagnetic jamming and had just frozen in place.
I sucked in a stale breath through my hood and moved cautiously past the thing. That was when he hit me.
I knew what had happened as if I’d been watching it unfold in a holotank, but that was an illusion created after the fact by my headcomp. He’d been on the catwalk above me, concealed from my thermal sensors by a fire suppression tank stored there, and he’d dropped onto me without a sound. His wrist blades had aimed for my throat but caught my plasma gun instead, slicing through its sling and ripping it out of my hands as the flat of his foot took me in the chest and launched me backwards three meters through the air.
Time caught up with my perceptions in mid-air and I saw the bland, expressionless Tahni visage, the tiger-stripe camouflage and the familiar thermal signature with the isotope reactor in its midsection. He wasn’t carrying a gun because, as near as our intelligence experts could figure, the Tahni were afraid to let them carry guns. A cold knot of fear clutched at my gut.
It was an Imperial Guard cyborg, and it had been waiting for us.
I hit the concrete wall opposite the reactor with my right shoulder, hard enough that I saw stars as I bounced off of it and slammed to the ground. The thing was on me almost before I landed, and only the Machine was able to jer
k my head to the side in time to avoid having it impaled by a pair of laser-honed duralloy sabers. The blades skittered off the concrete and I grabbed desperately at that arm with one hand and threw up my other to block the second set of sabers slicing in towards my throat, kicking out with both feet to try to take out his legs.
I felt my right boot connect with the cyborg’s knee and the thing collapsed down onto its free arm, his dead-eyed face only centimeters from mine; I could feel his breath against the surface of my face hood and I was surprised he actually did breathe. He tried to yank his arm free and I extended my talons, feeling the resistance as they pierced the cloned skin that encased his metal endoskeleton and snagged at the housing of the wrist sabers. Blood splashed as he jerked at the talons and ripped away his own flesh, and the sabers on his left arm clattered to the ground, their harness loosened and slashed.
Then his arm flashed free and a metal fist in a glove of flesh crashed into the side of my head. Stars lit up my vision again and I felt a flash of pain that my headcomp couldn’t quite shut out; I blocked the next blow coming in, then trapped the arm in the crook of mine and heaved with all the power the Reflex armor and my augmented muscles could manage. The cyborg flew across the passage and smashed through the insulation of a coolant line, sending a spray of liquid nitrogen erupting into a fog that clouded the air around us. I felt the frigid bite of the fog on the bare skin of my face and I realized that he’d ripped off my hood when he’d flown off me.
I leaped to my feet, pulling my Gauss pistol out of its holster, but the cyborg was ungodly fast and already coming back at me. He was grabbing at the gun even as I was squeezing the trigger, and I saw the 10mm tungsten slugs pass through his arm and shoulder in an explosion of red before his hands closed on my wrist and on the receiver of the pistol. I could see him now even through the ice-cold fog, could see the skin frozen and blackened on the side of his face where the liquid nitrogen had touched it, but no pain passed across that face. He was implacable, unfeeling, and as cold as the fog that was coating every surface around us with a thin layer of ice.
I punched my left-hand talons at his eye, hoping to penetrate through to the brain, but he blocked them with his right-hand wrist blades, the duralloy binding with a nerve-rattling screech right in front of my face. I could see the frost on the surface of the blades, see smears of blood congealing in the cold. And I could feel my foot slipping on the frozen condensate on the floor. I had to take a risk.
I abruptly let loose of the Gauss pistol and I could feel the cyborg go off-balance with the jerk of his arm backwards; I used the space to jump into a side kick that took the thing high in the chest. The cyborg weighed more than I did, and normally that kick would have done little more than send me flying away from him, but with the floor slick with ice…
The Tahni abomination slid backwards three meters before losing his balance and crashing to the ground. I slipped when I landed as well, but I had known it was going to happen and I turned the fall into a shoulder role towards where my plasma gun rested near the maintenance crawlway entrance. I could hear the scrape of metal blades on the concrete as the cyborg tried to get to his feet, but I didn’t turn to look and I didn’t worry about the Gauss pistol. It might only take him seconds to figure out how to shoot it, but that was longer than I needed.
I swept the plasma gun off the floor as I rolled, feeling the cold metal of a power conduit against my back as I turned to bring the muzzle to bear. The Imperial Guard cyborg had made it into a crouch, but he’d dropped the Gauss pistol and was in the middle of trying to lunge towards me. I squeezed my eyes shut and touched the trigger pad, and I felt the conduit casing push hard against my back as a sun exploded away from me. Even with my eyes closed, the flare washed out my vision, overwhelming my filters, washing out infrared and thermal, and for a long moment I couldn’t see a damn thing.
I pumped another round into the chamber, listening for any sign that the cyborg had survived and was still coming for me. But the only sound I could hear was the sizzling of burning concrete, sublimating where the plasma had touched the rear wall, accompanied by the unspeakable smell of things burning that shouldn’t burn.
When the blob of light across my vision finally dissipated, I could see that I’d hit him. The plasmoid had impacted high on his chest and there was nothing left above that. Charred black metal protruded obscenely from what was left of his torso, and I tried not to look too closely at what was inside. I felt my breath coming in short, desperate pants, like I’d saved up all the fear and panic to experience now that the cyborg was dead. Was dead even the right word?
Trying to get my breathing back under control, I picked up my Gauss pistol with a shaking hand and carefully re-holstered it, then shrugged off my backpack to get to the hyperexplosives inside. There was still a job to do.
***
I sat on a cargo container, sipping a bulb of water and watching Tahn-Khandranda burn. It was Summer on this half of the planet, and the star we called Wolf 1061---and the Tahni called something complicated that basically translated to “the sun”---beat down mercilessly through the yellow haze that hung over the city. It was close to mid-day and already as humid as I ever remembered it being on Inferno, despite the salt sea that simmered off the coast only a few kilometers away.
Marine landers had started coming down behind a screen of assault shuttles hours ago, just after the lasers had gone off-line, and I could still see them dropping all over the city from my perch at what had become the central supply depot. Kind of a grandiose name for what amounted to a bunch of cargo containers stacked in an open field next to the spaceport with a dozen battlesuits for security. About a hundred Fleet techs scurried around with power-loaders and cargo jacks trying to sort food, water, ammo and batteries into pallets for rotating squads of Marines.
I'd expected Deke and I to get sent out again once the landings started, but the only word from on high was to stand by at the supply depot. I wasn't going to argue, not after going toe-to-toe with a fucking Imperial Guard cyborg. Deke and I had requisitioned some hot food and then watched the airstrikes begin. Assault shuttles and orbital kinetic-energy weapons had silenced every attempt at anti-aircraft fire immediately and ruthlessly, and soon there were a couple dozen pillars of black smoke rising over the city.
The temples had gone next. I'd cringed as I'd watched the Gauss rounds spear into the beautifully crafted spheres, pounding them to smoking rubble in seconds, but I knew the rationale behind it. Their holy writ said that as long as those structures stood, no enemy could ever conquer them. After that had been…not much. One patrol after another of Marines had gone out and every attempt we made to contact any of the other Boys was rebuffed by a Communications Security Priority network's automated response to remain in place and wait for further orders.
I hadn't as much as seen a Tahni soldier here at the edge of the spaceport, and I'd been fine with that. Deke had gotten antsy after a couple hours and hitched a ride into the city with a medical support team, and I'd been alone for an hour now. I got a few curious glances, but most people were so insanely busy doing their jobs that they didn't have time to bother me.
I should have known that was too good to last.
The uniform was the first sign of trouble. Everyone else I'd seen down here had been in utility fatigues, usually stained from work; this guy was still wearing his shipboard finest, as spotless as when he'd pulled it out of the 'fresher before he'd boarded the shuttle down here. He even wore a dress cap, which looked ridiculous under the best of circumstances and doubly so in a war zone. I could read his IFF transponder and it informed me, as snidely and arrogantly as a computerized ID file could, that he was Commander Phillip Dierking, Fleet Logistics and Supply from the cruiser Leyte Gulf.
He stalked up to me, with not a stray hair sticking out from under that peaked cap, and stomped to a halt a meter away like he'd rehearsed it.
"Who are you and why am I not able to access your IFF transponder?" He demanded.
>
"My ID is classified," I told him, trying to keep the annoyed sigh out of my voice and not succeeding that well.
"Well, you're in my supply depot," Commander Dierking informed me, lip curling in a sneer that told me what he thought of intelligence spooks. "So, I'm going to need some kind of confirmation from higher that you're not just goldbricking."
"You ever wonder why the defense lasers stopped firing, sir?" I asked him, squinting up at the glare above us.
He snorted at that. "Yeah, I'm sure you did that all by yourself, son."
"I'm not your son, sir," I told him frostily, "and I can't show you orders because they're classified. I can't tell you who I am or who I'm with, because you don't need to know. If you're concerned, contact your superiors and have them ask. Maybe when they get told they don't have a need to know, you'll understand that I can't tell you anything."
Actually, I could have given him my cover ID, but he was being a dick, so...
"There's a damn war on," he snapped, his ruddy face turning even redder, "and I'm not going to bother the Captain of the Leyte Gulf with some lazy coward who thinks he can dodge combat by sitting around in the supply depot wearing a funny looking suit!"
I didn't have the energy to be angry with the man. He'd obviously topped out in his long career at a staff job and wasn't happy about it.
"Do what you have to do, sir," I said with a shrug, settling back down to ignore him. "I'm not going anywhere until I get orders from my chain of command."
He opened his mouth to reply but whatever he intended to say was interrupted by the screaming roar of turbojets and the shadow of a starship passing overhead behind me, at the spaceport. Something about the pitch of the jets, or maybe the angle of the shadow, or maybe the look of disbelief on Dierking's face made me glance around. The black, swept-wing shape of one of our Stealthships was descending on columns of fire at the very edge of the landing field, not fifty meters away.