Sansar looked at the first sergeant, and her eyes narrowed. “Mun?” she asked, clearly not believing the first sergeant’s earlier answer.
“Honestly, ma’am, that’s the first I’ve heard about it. Sure, I knew Sommerkorn beat Bull—I thought everyone did—but that’s the first time I heard what the stakes were. I tried to talk to Bull about it, but he didn’t want to discuss it. He was kind of embarrassed.”
“No doubt,” Sansar said. She shook her head. “There’s nothing we can do about it now, but this is why we only use Earth-made products.”
Sansar sighed and looked back to the tech. “Can you fix it?”
“This part of the programming? Yes, ma’am. No more than 15 minutes to take care of it. I would advise a quick run-through of the rest of the command-level programming, though, to make sure there aren’t any other surprises. But that isn’t the problem.”
“It’s not?” Sansar asked. “What’s the problem?”
“I’m not a mechanic, so I don’t know if this is true, but based on some notes here, it looks like the program killed the motor by causing a situation that crimped the fuel lines, starving the plant and causing it to go into an emergency shutdown.”
“How do you know that?” Walker asked. “I was in the damn thing, and I had no idea what was going on.”
“I know that because there is a note in the programming that says, ‘Try running your suits with the fuel lines crimped, bitches.’”
“Oh, shit,” Walker said under his breath.
“What?” Sansar asked.
“If someone left a note, they expected us to see it. I assumed when the suit went non-functional, it was meant to be destroyed. That’s obviously not the case if we were supposed to see this note.”
“So you think they wanted to capture us instead?”
“I don’t know…but they went to a lot of trouble to make sure the suits would still be functional—they could have made the plants blow up instead; that would have ruined our day.”
“So they wanted to capture the CASPers?” Mun asked.
“Unknown,” Walker replied. “Maybe they expected to be in close proximity to them and didn’t want a bunch of CASPers blowing up in their faces. Who knows? Hell, I don’t even know who ‘they’ are. Maybe it’s rogue Humans who want our suits. I don’t know. What I do know is it’s great sabotage.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. Unlike her,” Walker said, nodding to the tech, “I do know something about CASPer maintenance. Those fuel lines never break, so we probably don’t have many, if any, spares for them. Even if we do, or if we can fabricate some, replacing the fuel lines leading into the plant is a stone cold bitch that involves yanking the plant out to get to them. We’re not getting our suits back anytime soon.”
“So you’re saying we’re screwed,” Mun said.
“If we’re attacked any time soon, yeah, we are.” Walker shrugged. “Hell, we’ve got a better chance of seeing that broken MinSha fighter flying this week than a completely operational CASPer. That’s what I was coming to tell you in the first place; the fighter is back here at the base, and the CASPer retrievers are going back to pick up the suits.”
“Well, you better get on it then,” Sansar said.
“Get on what, ma’am? The retrievers don’t need my help bring in the suits.”
“That’s not what I was talking about,” Sansar said. “I’m saying you’re now our squadron maintenance officer. You are now in charge of fixing the MinSha fighter.”
“Ma’am, with all due respect, I’m a CASPer staff sergeant; aircraft maintenance isn’t in my job description.”
“Well, staff sergeant, you obviously missed the clause in your contract that says, ‘and any other duties as the commanding officer sees fit to assign.’ Right now, I’m assigning you aircraft maintenance. It comes with a pay raise and beats cleaning latrines, which is your other choice now that your CASPer is inop. So, what’s it going to be?”
“When you put it like that, ma’am, it looks like you just got a new squadron maintenance officer,” Walker said, snapping a salute.
Sansar returned the salute, then raised an eyebrow. “Well?” she asked.
“Well what, ma’am?”
“Your aircraft needs maintenance. What are you still doing here?”
“Oh, yes ma’am,” Walker said. He threw her another salute, turned, and hustled off.
Sansar turned back to Mun. “So, have you figured it out yet?”
“Why today?” Sansar nodded. “No idea, ma’am.”
“Me, either,” Sansar replied. “I checked all of the information we have; there’s nothing significant I can find.”
“So it must be something else.”
“It must be…but I have no idea what.” She sighed.
“Do you think Sommerkorn was responsible?” Mun asked.
“Beyond bringing it in?” Sansar asked. Mun nodded. “He obviously was the source of the new operating system, but I don’t think he would have been able to hide intentions like that from me. No, I think it’s more likely he was duped into doing it by the smugglers…and I keep coming back to them. That’s it! I remember where I heard of them. They were bringing in some sort of paint from off-world. Have we received any new paint recently?”
“Yes, ma’am, we got some, but I doubt it was from them.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because it was so beneficial. It reduced laser energy hitting a CASPer by 25 percent. Why would they give us that if they intended to…” Mun’s eyes widened. “They’d give us a great paint if they knew the CASPer painted with it was going to deadline as soon as it fired at them!”
“Exactly,” Sansar said, nodding. “They gave us the paint because they knew it wouldn’t matter. They probably used it to win his confidence, so they could pawn off the operating system on him, too.”
“But what else?” Corporal Enkh asked.
Sansar jumped, having forgotten the woman was there. “I’m sorry,” Sansar said; “what was that?”
“Sorry to interrupt, ma’am, but I asked, ‘What else?’” She tapped her slate. “Not only did this program kill our CASPers, but it also did it in a way they could be used again…but not soon. It makes me wonder, what was supposed to happen in between. Does the enemy come and scoop them up? What about us?”
“What do you mean?” Sansar asked.
“Are you going to let someone take your CASPer from you, ma’am?”
“Not while I’m alive!” the colonel exclaimed. “I would fight!”
“Exactly,” the tech replied with a smile. “They had a plan for the CASPers; it only makes sense they also have a plan for you.”
The air raid siren interrupted Sansar as the emergency lights began strobing.
“Emergency alert! Emergency alert! Man all defenses! Attack imminent!”
“Duty officer, Colonel Enkh,” Sansar called. “What’s going on?”
“One of our sensors detected a series of launches from the MinSha base. There were three rockets underneath the camouflage netting and all have launched toward us. Once the boosters burned out, an object separated from each of them and is headed our way. We just identified what the objects are, ma’am—it looks like they’re Xiq’tal drop pods.”
“Shit! They can land offshore and swim underwater right up to the base, then emerge to assault it. Get everyone to the walls and triple the strength of the side facing the water.”
“Yes ma’am. We’re on it!”
Sansar’s eyes came back to the tech. “Keep working,” she said. “If we can hold off the damn crabs, I’ll want to know what you find.”
Commander’s Conference, In Orbit over Uninhabited Planet
“So, that’s the plan,” General Peepo said. “All of the CASPer operators and maintainers will die, except for the ones who come over to our side and swear allegiance to us. We will save some of them—not many, admittedly—but we will get all of their equipment, which is the important thing. The peo
ple are of no importance; as hot-blooded as this race is, we can always breed and train more operators. Best of all, though, we will rid ourselves of The Golden Horde, which will make our future assaults much, much easier.”
* * * * *
Chapter 16
South Wall, Main Base, Trigar 2-A, Trigar System
Sergeant Loftis scanned the ocean, looking for movement. “On a hate scale of 1 to 10 for my job, today is somewhere between an 11 and a 12.”
“Really?” Sergeant Morgan asked. “Mine spiked a 14 when I heard the Xiq’tal were coming. I freaking hate those things.”
“Why’s that?” Private Vijayaraghavan asked. “What are the Xiq’tal?”
“They’re fucking crabs, man,” Morgan replied, “and no one likes a case of the crabs.”
“They don’t sound so bad,” VVR said. “I like all types of seafood.”
“Yeah, well, imagine a crab that’s six feet wide, with six legs, a pair of fighting arms ending in large claws, and a pair of manipulator arms that can hold weapons.”
“Okay, I may not like them quite so much.”
“That’s not all,” Loftis added. “They’re dumb. Really dumb. You point them at a target and say ‘go,’ and they do. They’re relentless and almost as good as Tortantulas as shock troops. The worst part is the front and top of their shells are almost laser-proof, so fighting them is kind of like fighting a mass of small armored vehicles that want to eat you.”
“Want to eat you?” VVR asked, looking around nervously to see if he was being made the butt of a joke.
“Yeah, eat you,” Morgan confirmed. “If a Xiq’tal catches your CASPer, it will rip the arms and legs off, pull you out, and eat you—kind of like the way you’d eat a crab, except the crab eats you.”
“They’re stupid, remember?” Loftis asked. “They keep the shock troopers underfed so they’ll fight like crazy, just to eat you.”
“Well, this sucks,” VVR noted, “I never expected to die like this.”
“What do you mean?” Mun asked as she passed by, checking the defenses. “There are worse ways to die than killing aliens with your buddies.”
“Really? On a no-name planet a bazillion light years from home? Without even a fully operational CASPer to give me a chance of surviving a race that wants to tear me apart and eat me?”
“Yeah, there are worse ways. Did you ever meet Justin Handley? No? Well, JR has the record for the worst death ever. He died while visiting a prostitute.”
“I don’t see how that’s worse. Seems to me, that’s actually a lot better.”
“It wasn’t the prostitute that killed him,” Mun said; “he died while taking a crap in a space outhouse. That ring of the station was pulling more Gs than the toilet was rated for, and part of the toilet came loose and crushed in his head.”
“Still...he did get to work out his issues before he died.”
“No, that’s the thing. He’d already paid, but he hadn’t completed the deal yet.”
“Oh,” VVR said. “Yeah, that sucks.” He paused, considering, then sighed. “You’re right; that’s worse.”
“Movement!” Sergeant Loftis called. “They’re coming out of the water!”
“See?” Mun asked, charging her handheld magnetic accelerator rifle. “By comparison, this isn’t so bad. Now let’s kill some of these fuckers and make mama some money.”
“Yes, Top!” VVR exclaimed.
“Mark your targets,” Mun transmitted to the group at large. “I don’t want anyone spraying their rounds all over the place or shooting at the same target as the trooper next to you. We’ve got to make them count or we’ll be overrun.”
The crabs burst out of the water and skittered toward the south wall in a massive wave. Each crab had a weapon mounted to its carapace and wired to its central nervous system, and the air was immediately filled with flechette and MAC rounds, as well as acid grenades which burst in the air and against the wall. The troopers fired back with lasers and MACs, but the hard, reflective carapaces of the Xiq’tal, aided by the water dripping and pooling on them, defeated most of the incoming laser fire. Some of them fell, but the majority advanced like a juggernaut toward the base.
As the crabs hit the fortifications, the ends of the assault wave lapped over to the east and west walls as well, and, before long, the base was nearly surrounded by the pseudo crustaceans.
“You weren’t kidding!” VVR exclaimed. “My laser just seems to be bouncing off them!”
“No shit,” Morgan said with a grunt. He leaned over the edge to fire at a crab trying to pull apart the wall beneath him then ducked back as a Xiq’tal fighting claw snapped shut on the space where he’d been a split-second prior. “Fuck, these crabs are hard to kill!”
“If my rifle doesn’t work, what am I supposed to do?”
“Keep firing…maybe you’ll get lucky,” Loftis said, firing into the gnashing jaw plates of a crab climbing over the wall in front of her. The shot bounced around inside the creature’s shell, scrambling its insides. It fell back off the wall into the mass of crabs, where it was disassembled by the next several ranks. “If one…of us falls,” Loftis continued, “grab our MAC and keep fighting.”
‘Squadron Maintenance,’ Main Base, Trigar 2-A, Trigar System
Walker arrived back at the improvised Maintenance Department to find Sergeant Major Price staring at the MinSha fighter. The spacecraft was up on jacks outside the CASPer maintenance building. One of the few structures to survive the MinSha attacks, the prefabricated structure’s entrance was too small to accommodate the fighter.
The damage to the horizontal stabilizer had been cut away, and the hole sealed by running duct tape across the cut.
Walker moved to stand next to the sergeant major. “So,” he asked; “what’s the prognosis?”
Sergeant Major Price turned and frowned at Walker. “What’s the—what the hell did you ask, Staff Sergeant?”
Vocabulary hadn’t been one of the sergeant major’s primary downloads, apparently. “I asked what it looked like, Sergeant Major.”
“What’s it look like? It looks like shit. I can’t believe this metal coffin actually flew.”
“Well, it did. I know, because it strafed the shit out of me.”
“We vacuumed the sand out of its intakes, but I don’t have any fucking idea what to do with it next.”
“C’mon, Sergeant Major, Colonel Enkh said you could fix anything.”
“Anything Human-made, perhaps, but I don’t have a clue as to how to make this thing fly again.” He turned and his eyes narrowed. “And what the hell are you doing here, anyway?”
“Colonel Enkh sent me to help.”
“So, are you going to actually help, or just stand around flapping your gums?”
“Well, the first thing I would do would be to apply power to it and see if its operating system was still intact. If it isn’t, we’re screwed.”
“Well, aren’t you just all sorts of fucking help, Staff Sergeant? I never would have fucking thought of that. Why don’t you go ahead and connect up power? Would you please?”
“Sure, Sergeant Major.” There was an external power cart nearby, so Walker went over to it, grabbed a power cable, and pulled it over to the fighter. After a few seconds’ thought, he popped open the access panel and tried to attach the cable to the external power receptacle. The configuration of the plug was incompatible with the receptacle.
“Uh, it won’t work, Sergeant Major,” Walker said.
“Well, no shit,” the senior enlisted said. “That was the first thing I tried. Apparently, our ‘universal plug’ ain’t from the same damn universe as theirs.”
“So what are we going to do?”
“That’s what I was contemplating when you walked up. See, I can use big words, too.” He glared at Walker. “What other great ideas do you have, Mr. Vocabulary?”
“Well, how about asking the pilot?”
“What? Why the hell would I do that? It ain’t like he’s gonna
help us with it.”
“You never know,” Walker said with a shrug. “The pilot’s a ‘she,’ and she’s a merc; maybe we can bribe her.”
“Well…shit. We aren’t getting anywhere staring at it; why not?”
Walker requested a connection with Colonel Enkh and was accepted immediately; whether it was one of the benefits of his former life or because she had a loose chain of command, he didn’t know. He didn’t care; he’d never been one to argue with success.
“Yes?” Sansar asked.
“Could you have the pilot we captured brought out to the fighter?” Walker asked. “We aren’t making much progress.”
“I’ll send her right out.”
Sansar was good to her word, and the pilot was escorted out two minutes later by two troopers from First Squad. “You guys wanted the pilot?” Staff Sergeant Enkh asked.
“Yes, thanks; I’ll take her from here,” Walker said, patting the holstered pistol on his left hip.
“You sure about that?” asked the other trooper, Private Enkh.
“Yeah, I’m good,” Walker replied with a nod.
“If you say so,” Staff Sergeant Enkh said. The troopers turned and left.
“You really think that little pistol could stop me from killing you if I wanted?” the MinSha asked once the troopers had left.
“I know it could not,” Walker replied, drawing the large kukri on his right hip, “that’s why I carry this.”
“Ha!” the pilot exclaimed; “I doubt that could do more than annoy me.”
“That’s what Colonel Flanayl thought, too,” Walker said. “But then I cut off one of her legs with it in single combat. Then I drove it through her chest, killing her, once she was down.”
“You are that Walker? Then you are also—”
“Yes, I am,” Walker said, waving a hand in dismissal. “We need help getting this fighter flying again.”
The Golden Horde (The Revelations Cycle Book 4) Page 21