Duty, Honor, Planet: 01

by Rick Partlow

  "Find the lights," he told Val, leaving her to feel around on the inner wall left of the door while he went to the front wall to search for the cabinet that would hold the key-cards to the vehicles. He moved slowly along the wall, feeling along the surface of a worktable, yet still managed to slam his shin into a floor jack. "Sonofabitch," he hissed to himself, rubbing at the leg gingerly.

  "Got them!" Val announced, followed immediately by the illumination of the overhead strip lights that ran the length of the ceiling.

  Naturally, Jason thought to himself, moving over to the now-visible key cabinet. She finds the lights after I smash my shin.

  The cabinet was locked, but it only took him a moment with a handy prybar to remedy that situation, and he soon found himself staring at rows of labelled hooks, each supporting a computer card for one the handful of vehicles that packed the building. The two limos he rejected immediately: too high profile and not rough enough for off-road use. Likewise, he shook off the scout cycle propped in a corner: too exposed and no room for supplies. He briefly entertained the idea of taking the one Ground-Effects Vehicle present, but decided that the floater was too fragile and high-maintenance if they had to take to the brush.

  Which left the two all-terrain utility rovers, one of which was parked close to the main door. They were electric-powered vehicles, with collector panels that could be unfolded on the roof to recharge the batteries in case of emergency. Jason grabbed the appropriate key-card and went to check the car, sliding into the driver's seat and discovering with a cursory inspection of the instrument panel that the rover was fully-charged.

  "Get the door," he called to Valerie, powering up the rover's motor, its flywheel humming softly to life. She moved up to the front wall and punched the fist-sized red button beneath the key cabinet, sending the garage door rolling up into the ceiling with a rattle of drive trains. The noise from it made Jason wince: if there were any of the invaders within a couple acres, they'd have to be blind and deaf not to notice.

  Val barely had time to jump into the passenger-side seat before McKay tore out of the garage with a squeal of oversized tires on slick plasticrete, the motor whining shrilly in protest. He fought with the control yoke to keep the car from fishtailing as the wheels hit the packed dirt of the drive at maximum acceleration, spitting out a spray of sand and gravel in their wake. McKay didn't bother sticking to the long, curving path carved out to give visitors a full view of the mansion; he cut straight across the lawn and headed directly for the main road---and directly into the middle of a firefight.

  Glowing tracers crosshatched the front lawn, connecting a grounded enemy drop pod with a handful of security guards on the landing pad, sheltered beneath and behind the governor's flitter. And their landrover was heading at top speed right down the center of it all.

  "Hang on!" Jason shouted, pushing the rover's accelerator to the floor.

  The vehicle shot through the gap between the two forces at over a hundred and fifty kilometers per hour, the ringing ricochets of slugs off of the rover's body sending Valerie slouching deeper into her seat, her eyes squeezed shut. One of the invaders launched what Jason thought had to be either a rocket grenade or a shoulder-fired missile at them, but the fiery streak passed just over their hood and rammed into the side of the grounded flitter. The shock of the blast only ten meters to their left shook the rover, scorching its driver's side and spider-webbing the high-impact transplas of Jason's window, but McKay ignored the bone-wrenching jolt and kept the accelerator down.

  A haze of smoke from the rover's smoldering paint haloed the car as Jason muscled the control yoke to the left, cutting around the end of the landing pad, trying to put the wreckage of the ducted-fan hovercraft between them and the invaders. Transplas shattered in the rear window with a crack of impacting slugs, and Jason felt the hot knife of a graze score across his right bicep on its way to blasting out the windshield. He bit back an exclamation and kept the steering handle shoved as far to the left as he could. The rover tilted up on its right tires for a gut-wrenching moment, and then it was around the wreckage and back on all four wheels.

  McKay heard Valerie gasp in relief as they exploded out onto the paved road and away from the mansion. He felt a similar shudder of relief pass over him.

  "That," he said softly, half to himself, "was too damned close." That was when he heard an odd sort of scraping noise on the rover's roof.

  "What is that?" Valerie wondered.

  "Maybe shrapnel," Jason shrugged, too happy to be clear of the attack to care. "We need to..." His statement was rudely interrupted by the camo-clad arm that crashed through the remnants of the driver’s side window and grabbed him around the throat.

  Valerie shrieked in terror, staring wide-eyed at the visored helmet that peered down at her from the windshield: somehow, one of the invader troops had clung to the rear of their vehicle as they passed by the enemy position, and had climbed across the roof. Jason fought with one hand to keep the rover from crashing into the trees that lined the road, while his other pried futilely at the steel-strong fingers that had wrapped themselves around his windpipe. The invader's hand squeezed like a mechanical press, as inhuman and cold as the faceless visor that stared dispassionately into his eyes from outside the windshield. McKay knew that his trachea had another few seconds before the thing ripped it completely out of his body, so he braced against the dashboard with both hands and stomped the brake pedal to the floor.

  The landrover jerked to an abrupt halt on its front tires with a squeal of synthetic rubber on plasticrete. He could hear Valerie cry out as she was rolled out of her seat, and the invader was thrown quite a bit further. Jason thought his throat would go with the armored figure as it flew off the roof of the vehicle and sailed into the street thirty meters in front of them with a clatter of alloy plating, but he found as he felt at his neck that he had only lost a little skin to the iron hand.

  Incredibly, the invader, despite being thrown to the concrete at over a hundred and fifty klicks an hour, was struggling to its feet, apparently unhurt. A snarl coming to his lips, McKay punched the accelerator and felt the rover lurch forward as the flywheel whistled with the sudden burst of power. The rover slammed into the armored invader at over seventy klicks an hour, sending the creature flying onto the hood and crashing into the already-cracked windshield. One of the creature's hands clamped onto the edge of the hood and it held itself in place with desperate strength, despite the clearly-visible section of crushed and bloody armor at its hip---red blood, too, a part of Jason's mind noted.

  Keeping his right hand on the control stick and the accelerator pushed down, McKay pulled his pistol from its shoulder holster left-handed and fired through the windshield at the invader's head. The powerful 10mm sounded like a nuclear blast inside the enclosed cab of the rover, setting Jason's ears to ringing, as the hypersonic ceramic projectile grazed the invader across the side of the helmet, tearing the armored headgear off.

  "Oh, my God," Valerie murmured, clambering back into her seat, eyes glued to the face before her.

  It was humanoid, to be sure: two eyes, a mouth, two ears and two nostrils. But it was definitely not human. The eyes were protected by a bony ridge that extended down over the wide, flattened nose; and the whole face seemed blockier and larger-boned than any human could be. And then there was the fact that it had blue skin. Jason had seen cases of cyanosis before, both in vacuum training and as the result of riot-control masers, and this creature's skin had the same, pale-blue, sickly look as a human who'd been breathing too-thin air for most of his life.

  But the most alien thing about the invader was its eyes. On the surface, they seemed almost human, with the normal combination of iris and cornea; but they were dead and unfeeling somehow, like a shark's---black, cold and emotionless. Staring at the thing's eyes, Jason almost found himself hypnotized. But not quite. He squeezed the handgun's trigger again and felt it buck as the heavy slug punched through the alien's forehead and blew off a large section
of skull in a spray of blood, bone and brain. The invader's grip finally came loose and it tumbled off the hood to bounce lifelessly onto the pavement as they accelerated away.

  "Oh Jesus, oh Jesus," Valerie was whispering over and over to herself.

  "It's all right," McKay assured her, putting a hand on her shoulder and wincing as the movement brought new feeling to the grazing wound on his right arm. "We're all right."

  "They're not human," she moaned, not looking at him. "I can't believe it...they're not human..."

  "So much for 'where are they?'" Jason muttered. "They're here."

  "What are we going to do?" she asked him, seeming to come out of the daze she'd fallen into. "Where are we going?"

  "Into Kennedy," he told her. "The Marine Reaction Force is quartered at the CeeGee armory---if anyplace could hold, that would be it."

  "You're hurt," she noticed for the first time, staring at the bloody line across his bicep.

  "Just a scratch," Jason said with a shrug, but had to wince as she gently probed at it with her fingers.

  "Let me bandage it," Val insisted, reaching for the tail of his shirt to tear off a strip.

  "No," he said, raising a hand quickly. "Wait until we get somewhere we can clean it off. Till then, it's better to leave it alone. Could you do me a favor and check in the back and see if there's water or blankets or anything useful back there?"

  "Sure." She unbelted from her safety harness and climbed over the seat into the back of the rover. McKay heard her rummaging around in the storage compartment and took the opportunity to allow himself to slip from the controlled face he'd put on to keep both of them calm. The air went out of him in a gust and he felt the blood drain from his face.

  This was, he concluded, entirely too much. Most people, even in the active military, experienced perhaps thirty seconds of actual danger in their life, and most of them only realized it after it was over. He must be making up the average, he reasoned, for all the cloistered accountants and librarians in the universe.

  "Hey!" Valerie called from the rear of the vehicle, "There's a couple cans full of water back here. And I think this is some kind of emergency survival pack. Maybe there's a first-aid kit."

  "Good," he sighed, bringing his breathing back under control. "We'll need the water, if we can't stay in the city."

  "Jason," Valerie interrupted him, eyes fixed on something off to the right. "What's that glow?"

  He followed her gaze, noticing as he did that it followed the rightward curve of the road around a hill. In the distance, he could see a glow reminiscent of the halo of distant city lights, but colored a much deeper, reddish hue. It was a sight he'd seen before, and he was very much afraid he did know what it meant.

  "That's Kennedy City," he told her grimly. "It's on fire."

  Jason slowed the car as they rounded the gentle curve, and Kennedy came into view, laid out before them in the valley below. It wasn’t an encouraging sight. The perimeter of the city, where the wealthier immigrants had built their own businesses and residences from native materials, was engulfed in a ferocious blaze. From over two kilometers away, neither of them could see if there was anyone left alive in those streets, but there was surely activity near the center of town, where the Colonial Guard armory squatted in ugly blackness.

  Tracer rounds crisscrossed from the building to the invader troops Jason knew must be surrounding it, but the ratio of outgoing to incoming fire seemed pretty even, which was a positive. With the advantage of the armory's protection and at least even odds, the defending forces should be able to hold out indefinitely.

  Suddenly, from somewhere beyond their line of sight, an incandescent trail of fire shot out of the streets around the armory and slammed into the building with enough impact to shake the ground under the rover. A huge cloud of black smoke rose in a mushroom above the structure, and the firing from the armory died abruptly, along with Jason's hopes of finding asylum there.

  "My God," Valerie murmured, her voice filled with awe at the explosion. "They couldn't have survived that, could they?"

  "No," he answered, voice catching in his throat. It wasn't the thought of the deaths of all those men and women that so affected him---he'd been numbed to that aspect since accepting the idea that Shannon and the others were dead. No, it was the fact that the two of them were very much alone, both for now and the foreseeable future---more alone than McKay had ever felt.

  Jason pulled back on the steering yoke and pushed the accelerator, sending the rover jerking backwards into a three-point U-turn and heading them back the way they had come. At the curve where the road twisted toward the mansion, he kept the car headed straight, off the pavement and onto a barely-existent dirt trail northward. The car's suspension creaked with the effort as the surface beneath them changed from plasticrete to rough and rutted soil and rock, and a cloud of dust rose to mark their passage.

  "Where do we go now?" Valerie's voice held the full load of hopelessness and despair that he felt.

  "Away," was all he could come up with by way of an answer. "Away."

  Chapter Seven

  "And seas and rocks and skies rebound,

  To arms, to arms, to arms!"---Alexander Pope,

  "Ode for Music on St. Cecelia's Day."

  Shannon Stark was sleeping peacefully when something shook the building with enough force to throw her out of bed. She hit the floor catlike, on the balls of her feet and the heels of her hands, her head swivelling back and forth in startled shock as a crunching, rending crash reverberated through the walls.

  An eerie silence trailed the cacophony for a long moment, and Shannon almost believed she'd merely awakened from some bad dream...until she heard a string of distinct but subdued bangs from somewhere down the hall, accompanied by a shriek of rending metal. She lunged back toward the nightstand, sweeping her sidearm off the table and rolling to the side of the bed opposite the door. Then, there was...nothing.

  "Well, hell," she muttered, starting to feel silly.

  She was beginning to rise from behind the bed when her door slammed inward from the kick of a heavy boot, and a tall figure in head-to-toe armor stepped through behind a burst of full-auto rifle fire. A dozen slugs tore into her bed, kicking up a rain of foam stuffing before she aligned the red dot of her pistol's pop-up sight on the invader's center-mass and double-tapped it in the chest.

  The 9mm caseless rounds her weapon fired were frangible ceramic surrounding a trio of tantalum flechettes travelling at well over 500 meters per second, so it was no surprise that the slugs penetrated the armor over the intruder's chest, sending it staggering into the wall. What did surprise her was when the armored figure regained its footing and advanced on her unfazed, seemingly oblivious to the holes in its chest.

  Before it had a chance to swing the barrel of its rifle around, Shannon retargeted her sights at the invader's darkened faceplate and fired another two shots, punching through the visor without shattering the high-impact plastic. Blood sprayed from the two bulletholes as the armored intruder jerked backwards and crashed to the floor with a clatter of alloy plating.

  Stark dropped her handgun and threw herself over the bed, grabbing the intruder's fallen rifle and rolling into a crouch only a split-second before a second invader appeared in the doorway. She squeezed the rifle's trigger---in a comfortingly familiar place on the weapon's pistol grip---and felt it buck against her hip as it spat out a stream of surprisingly old-fashioned spent brass cases. The heavy slugs punched through the newcomer's armor with ease, sending it reeling as she walked the long burst from its chest to its helm. The last two rounds pierced it through the forehead and it collapsed like a stringless marionette even as the bolt locked open on her last round out of the magazine. Once the ringing in her ears began to slowly fade, she suddenly became aware of the distant wailing of alarms somewhere outside the walls.

  Seeing a shadow advancing down the hallway, she fumbled desperately at the rifle's receiver to find the magazine release, cursing under her bre
ath. She almost had the spent clip free when the shadow swelled into the imposing image of Jock Gregory, his broad, shirtless shoulders filling the doorway, his grenade launcher held at the ready.

  "You all right, ma'am?" he asked, eyes dancing between her and the dead invaders. Seeing him there in only fatigue pants, she suddenly remembered that she'd been sleeping in nothing but her shorts. Oh, well, no time for modesty.

  "What’s happening?" she asked him, feeding a fresh magazine from the dead intruder's chest pack into the rifle and pulling back on the bolt handle to chamber a round.

  "Something really big smashed through the roof down that way"---he motioned down the hall to the left---"and I guess it's good bet that these blokes"---he angled his launcher's muzzle at the dead attackers---"popped out of it. When me and Vinnie heard the shooting, I came to check on you and he went down to look in on Ms. O'Keefe."

  "Where's Lieutenant McKay?" Shannon asked, pulling her boots out from under the bed and strapping them down while Gregory watched the door.

  Jock shook his head. "Haven't seen him."

  An eruption of gunfire from somewhere below them interrupted Shannon's visual hunt for her shirt.

  "That was outside," she decided, yanking a bandoleer of magazines off of one of the invader corpses and slinging it over her shoulder. Before she could rise from the task, however, another burst of autoweapons chatter erupted much closer, reverberating off the corridor beyond her door.

  "That wasn't," Jock commented wryly, ducking out into the hallway with Stark on his heels.

  The corridor was a smoke-filled, murky vision of hell, tinged red by the flames licking off the splintered walls around the intrusive pod. Shannon didn't have the time to debate in her mind if the fire had begun from the thing's ambient heat, left over from orbital friction, or from the invaders' weapons; she and Jock were too busy thinking with their feet, racing toward the section of the guest wing that housed Valerie O'Keefe and her party.