by Rick Partlow
“Do I have time to take a shower?”
* * *
Admiral Patel, Jason McKay reflected, looked like hell.
“Wait outside,” McKay told the security guard as he stepped into the Admiral’s cabin, which had become his prison since they’d emerged from g-sleep a few hours ago. The guard nodded and stepped back into the corridor, allowing the door to slide shut.
Patel didn’t even look at him as he entered the room; he just sat motionless on the edge of his bunk, staring at the photo on the wall across from him. It was a hologram of the Admiral with his teenage son, who was a freshman at the Fleet Academy. The Admiral’s first marriage had fallen apart for the predictable reasons of being a starship captain, but he’d maintained a close relationship with his son. McKay had met him once, when the boy was just a freshman in High School.
The Arvid Patel in that photo looked a million years younger than the man sitting on the bunk. His uniform jacket was unfastened, his face grey and his eyes sunken and lifeless, and there was a tremor in his lip: he looked as if he’d been weeping and as if he might start again at any moment.
“Admiral,” McKay said quietly. Patel didn’t answer, didn’t move.
McKay grabbed the Admiral’s desk chair, disengaging its magnets and moving it in front of the bunk, then reengaging them and sitting down across from Patel.
“Arvid,” he said, putting a hand on the man’s shoulder.
The Admiral seemed to wake up from his stupor then, and his eyes narrowed.
“’Arvid?’” he repeated hoarsely, a little shocked.
McKay shrugged, grinning lopsidedly. “Sorry, just trying it on for size…I got promoted to General while we were gone.”
”Of course you did,” Patel muttered with a humorless chuckle. “You know, for a while there, Jason, I hated you. I loathed myself for shunting the responsibility of command onto you there on Pallas, and since you can’t hate yourself for very long and still stay sane, I started resenting you instead. I especially resented you for the way everything kept going your way…even though that meant we won the war and a saved millions of innocent people.” He shook his head. “It was crazy, and I knew it; but after the war when you kept insisting we search for Antonov, I thought you were a huge pain in the ass. I only started to warm to you…after I returned from that mission to Aphrodite.”
He paused to let that sink in and McKay’s eyes went wide. “That’s right, Jason. I don’t even know if we were really friends…or if the fucking Russians put the idea in my head. I don’t know if my marriage fell apart because I was a shitty husband, or because the conditioning they gave me made me a shitty husband.” He let his head sag, his hands massaging the back of his neck.
“Arvid,” McKay said, squeezing the man’s shoulder, “we will be able to undo what they did to you. Everything we will be back to the way it was.”
“You can’t be serious,” Patel murmured, almost too faintly to be heard, face toward the floor. “Nothing will ever be the way it was. I was the senior officer in the Fleet, McKay. They’ll never trust me to hold that position, not now.”
“Maybe not,” McKay admitted. “I promise you that I will do my best to make sure they do, and I have quite a bit of pull with the President, but maybe not. But I’ll give you my word: if you can’t keep your current position, I will do my damnedest to make sure you get whatever else you want besides that. The Senate has to approve the Fleet Admiral, but you can still captain a starship, if that’s what you want. Or you can finish your doctorate and get a teaching position at the Academy…hell, you can run the Academy, if you like. The point is, your life is not over.”
Patel took a deep, shuddering breath and nodded, straightening up. “You’re right. God knows, now’s not the best time for self-pity, anyway.” He looked up, his eyes visible to McKay for the first time since he’d come in the room, something of the old Arvid Patel coming into their glint. “What are you really doing here? I know you don’t have time to sit here and listen to me bitch about my problems.”
“Things are pretty fucked up at home,” McKay told him, leaning back in his chair. “Worse than we could have imagined.” He quickly laid out the situation for Patel, finishing with Dominguez holding Valerie O’Keefe hostage.
“Bloody hell,” Patel swore softly, a hint of his London accent coming through---it was usually undetectable. “What are we going to do?”
“I’m going to be leaving the ship,” McKay told him. “Commander Nunez is a good officer, but he doesn’t have much combat experience. He wants you on the bridge with him.”
Patel’s eyebrow arched. “He’d trust me on the bridge?”
“There’ll be an armed security guard on the bridge with you,” McKay told him frankly. “If you do anything…hinky, he’ll stun you and throw you in a g-sleep tank. But he wants you there.” McKay grinned. “You can jostle his elbow the way I did yours. If you agree.”
“It will be very strange,” Patel said, shaking his head. “Very awkward. But as I said, this isn’t a time to be feeling sorry for myself.”
“Good,” McKay said, standing. “I’ll let him know before I go gear up.” He hesitated by the door. “Good luck, Arvid.”
Patel stood, extending a hand. McKay took it and the two men shook hands warmly.
“You will need the luck, I think,” the Admiral said. “As a General, shouldn’t you be leaving this sort of thing to your junior officers?”
McKay shrugged. “I’ve always been a lead-from-the-front kind of guy.”
“Really?” Patel barked a laugh. “I never noticed…”
Chapter Forty-Two
“Fire!” Ari swatted the CeeGee trooper on the shoulder and ducked aside.
The woman---she was technically a 2nd Lieutenant, as she had just graduated the Officers Candidate School---touched the trigger on the missile launcher and the projectile kicked free of the front of the launcher with a hiss of coldgas, then fishtailed as the main motor lit. It streaked across the 500 meters of open field in less than a second and slammed into one of the lead APC’s in the Protectorate convoy, striking it just beneath the forward gun turret. Three more smoke trails joined it within a heartbeat of each other and the lead rank in the column disappeared in a huge fireball of hyperexplosives that stretched from one edge of the bridge to the other, lighting up the night.
The short bridge forded a dry ditch where a shallow stream used to run, and the slope was too sleep for even the Marine APCs to take it without flipping over. Ari sprinted forward to the front of the defensive perimeter, taking a knee and bringing his carbine to his shoulder as the line of vehicles crawled to a halt barely 200 meters away. From so close, he could smell the chemical tang of the burning fuel cells and hear the loud, random bangs as ammunition cooked off or tires exploded. Billows of black smoke were already beginning to climb into the evening sky, sending a haze across the moon.
Roza moved quickly from where she had been giving instructions to a small team of missile-launcher-equipped soldiers to crouch next to him. In the gathering darkness, he could only tell it was her from the IFF signal in his helmet’s Heads-Up Display.
“They will either have to try to go off-road,” she said, a hand resting on his shoulder, “and try to find another crossing, or send troops out on foot to clear the wreckage.”
“Targets of opportunity, independent fire,” Ari intoned to the Colonial Guard troops around him. “Only use your grenades if they cluster together.” He turned back to the missile-launcher team. “If they try to turn and go off-road, be ready to hit them at the choke points.”
Roza punched him in the arm lightly. “I already told them that,” she admonished him. He grinned, though she couldn’t see it through his helmet. Even in this huge clusterfuck, with imminent death staring him in the face, he was glad he was with her.
Then he heard turbines whining shrilly as the APCs in the rank behind the burning wreckage began to power back up…and slam directly into the burning hulks blocking the
road.
“Oh, shit,” Ari muttered.
The first impact didn’t move the wreckage more than a few centimeters, so the vehicles backed up and rammed them again, the squeal of tearing metal and the grinding of the charred wheel rims against the pavement echoing down into the gulch and across the fields.
“Missile team up!” Roza was already yelling, waving them forward. “Get ready to hit the next row of vehicles as they come through!”
The first APCs to batter through the flaming hulks were on fire themselves, their grey metal hulls charred black and smoking, and Ari knew that the heat inside them had to be unbearable…for a human. The first group through stalled for a moment, and Ari thought the heat might have caused the wheels to seize up; but then the line of APCs behind them pushed hard and shoved them off to the side, two of the armored vehicles actually flipping over the side of the bridge to crash into the ditch ten meters below;
“Now!” Ari and Roza shouted together as the third lines of armored vehicles emerged from the line of wreckage, the firelight throwing menacing shadows off their dull grey surfaces.
The missile team let loose with another barrage and a half-dozen projectiles streaked out to strike the vehicles coming through the gap in the line. Six fireballs merged into one and the end of the bridge was consumed in an inferno with a wash of heat that Ari could feel through his armor even 200 meters away.
“I think that did it!” Roza said over their private comm channel. “They can’t just ram through that!”
“No,” Ari agreed grimly. “Now’s when the fun starts.”
The thermal lenses in his helmet were useless because of the flames, but by the light of the fire, he could see the armored figures clambering out of the hatches of the foremost vehicles in the jammed up convoy while the APCs behind them spread out on either side of the bridge. He knew what was coming next.
“Everyone get down!” He yelled over the general comm channel. “Get to cover!”
Taking his own advice, Ari flattened himself behind a berm that had formed where a low dividing wall had once stood, just as a rank of the Protectorate vehicles opened up with their autocannon. All around, the ground began to erupt as explosive shells ripped into the midst of them, targeted at the spots from which the missiles had been fired. Most of the team had moved, but Ari saw one trooper flying backwards in a rain of dirt and sod.
“Heads up!” He heard Roza’s voice on the net as the incoming fire began to slack off. “They’re coming up the ditch!”
Ari lunged up over the berm, bracing his carbine on the hard dirt, linking the weapon’s optics with his helmet’s targeting system. The Protectorate troops were barely visible, their grey armor dampening their thermal and IR signature, but the helmet’s targeting computer enhanced the picture using their movements and Ari focused on the closest of them, a shadowy figure clambering up the side of the ditch. A steady press on the trigger sent a three-round burst of 8mm slugs screaming from the carbine’s barrel and punching into the biomech’s head, sending it sprawling back into the dry creek bed. He shifted aim to the one just behind it and took it down as well, then took a moment to roll over to the other side of the berm, vacating the spot just as a cannon round hit not a meter from where he’d been.
Ari ignored the explosion and the clods of dirt that spattered against his side and picked out his next target…
“There are not enough of us,” General Kage told Shannon Stark over the command channel, not looking up from the barrel of his rifle as he put another round downrange, blowing the head off of an armored biomech. “They will overrun us when we run low on ammunition.”
He didn’t flinch as a cannon round struck near their position and a CeeGee trooper fell back, writhing and clutching at his side, where shards of shrapnel had penetrated his armor. “We must pull back and regroup at a more advantageous spot.”
“There is no more advantageous spot,” Shannon reminded him, squeezing off a burst from her carbine. “If we seek hardened cover, Dominguez will drop kinetic weapons on us and kill us even faster.”
“Then we will be forced to retreat and strike at them from the roadsides after they clear the bridge,” Kage said. “Or we will die where we stand. We can’t win without the defense satellites or air support.”
Shannon grunted, jerking back as an enemy bullet grazed the side of her helmet, setting her ears ringing and filling her vision with stars. She ducked down below the cover of the low, rock wall, hearing bullets punch into it from the other side. Cursing softly, she shook her head to clear it, then checked the time on her helmet display.
“We have to hold out a bit longer,” she told Kage, climbing back to a knee and bringing her weapon to her shoulder again. “I’m hoping for some good news on both fronts.”
“I recall one of your American sayings,” Kage growled. “Hope in one hand and shit in the other and see which fills up first.”
“I personally am Irish, born and bred, General,” she corrected him absently, most of her brain working on ranging a rifle grenade. “But as we seem to have a double-handful of shit right now,” she went on, launching the grenade into a clump of biomech troops coming over the bank of the dried-up stream, “we really don’t have much to lose by hoping.”
* * *
“Prepare to drop the drive field,” Nunez said, trying to make his voice sound calm and self-assured…but Patel noticed that his eyes kept darting back toward the main viewscreen, where the image of Earth continued to get larger and closer. “Commander Pirelli, we’re only going to have one shot at this before they target us with the lasers, so make it count.”
“You won’t be able to access the feed from the defense satellites,” Patel reminded her, feeling like he was backseat driving sitting in the acceleration couch behind the command station. “But you might try the news net sats. Their resolution is nearly as good.”
“I’ll cross-reference Colonel Stark’s comm signal,” Pirelli said, nodding sharply, “and drop the shots across the bridge from their position.” Her eyes flickered towards the countdown on her station’s display. “Ten seconds till we’re in range.”
“Lt. Sweeny,” Nunez said, “drop the field.”
Sweeny’s hand played over the control projection and the one g deceleration ceased abruptly, leaving them all in zero gravity. “Commander Pirelli, do you have a target lock?”
“Give me a few seconds, sir,” she said in a distracted voice, drawing a line from her sensor projection to the glowing avatar of a news net satellite, then tracing another from the satellite to the glowing signal from Shannon Stark’s communications ‘link.
I’ll give you all the time you want, Patel thought but didn’t say, but the Protectorates might not be so patient. But that was something the ship’s Captain would say, he reflected bitterly, and that was no longer his job.
Patel could see Nunez starting to fidget as nearly a minute passed, but then a satellite image came up on the Tactical display, showing a thermal/infrared rendering of the battlefield far below them on the darkened circle of a sundown Western hemisphere. Dim yellow-green humanoid shapes scurried here and there, and swarmed across the black gap of the dry creek bed, and here and there flares of white and red erupted where chemical hyperexplosives unleashed their fury. But what shown brighter were the ruddy glowing turbines inside the appropriated Marine armored vehicles that the Protectorates were using, arrayed in a semicircle on the other side of the bridge.
“Targeting the vehicles closest to the bridge and working outward,” Pirelli announced clinically, tracing the intended arc of fire across the image projected in front of her. “Firing Gauss cannons…now.”
Patel started to say something to Nunez, but forced himself to wait, and just as he thought he would have to step on the man’s toes…
“Mandel,” Nunez said to the Communications officer as they all felt the far-away jolts of the electromagnetic coilguns opening up. “Tell McKay it’s time to launch.”
“Once more unto
the breach, dear friends, once more,” Jason McKay muttered as the assault lander kicked free of the Sheridan’s hangar bay with the sharp bang of maneuvering thrusters.
“Not too crazy about the idea of closing the wall up with our English dead,” Jock commented drily from the row of seats behind him. More loud, abrupt bangs echoed through the packed rows of the lander as the maneuvering rockets shifted their attitude, swinging the drive bells parallel to the course of the Sheridan.
“You know your Shakespeare, Jock,” McKay said, raising an eyebrow in slight surprise as he glanced back at the NCO.
The big, blond Aussie looked even bulkier than usual in the full battle armor and HALO parachute rig they all wore, his battle rattle overflowing the edges of his acceleration couch and the safety harness straps pulled to their maximum extension. “Not too many buggers in the military that don’t know Henry V,” he said, shrugging it off.
“Don’t let him fool you, sir,” Vinnie said with a snorting laugh. “Jock was lead in a high school production of Henry V that got picked up by Republic HoloNet Entertainment’s Asia Talent Search. He was a minor celebrity in Sydney for weeks.”
“Oh my God,” Sergeant Watanabe spoke up from the seat on the other side of Jock Mahoney, his normally morose face breaking into a smile. “I saw that broadcast! That was you?”
“Hold onto your butts, ladies and gentlemen,” Commander Villanueva’s voice sounded over the speakers from the cockpit. “We’re going in.”
“The wardrobe girl was a smokin’ hot Sheila,” Jock muttered, half to himself.
Then the lander’s drive ignited and the two dozen Special Ops and Marine troops were pushed back into their seats as it moved from behind the shelter of the monolithic star cruiser and headed for the atmosphere below.