by Rick Partlow
Valerie saw the mercenary guards drifting towards the front wall as the firing continued and considered for just a moment trying to make a break for it, but she knew she couldn’t move fast enough carrying Natalia. They knew it too, she realized bitterly, which was why they weren’t bothering to be more careful.
She cautiously peeked around the edge of the dividing wall between the kitchen and the living room and saw the three remaining guards trying to watch the action as best they could through the front window. None of the mercenaries wore full-face helmets, instead going with open-faced ones that gave them better peripheral vision and awareness, and that had allowed her to differentiate them in the few hours she’d been with them.
The ones who had remained in the cabin with her were a tall, bearded man with pale skin, a nervous look to his eyes and a face that reminded her of a Yorkie she’d had as a child; a shorter, Asian male with a rounded face and a scar that bisected his upper lip; and a baby-faced kid with mocha skin and a complex tattoo that ran across both cheeks and the bridge of his nose.
The nervous terrier kept glancing back and forth from the back door to the front, shifting weight from one foot to the other, while the other two men crowded around the edges of the left-handed window…until a stray burst of gunfire punched through it, sending them all scattering backwards, cursing loudly and looking for cover.
Valerie ducked back down, clutching Natalia closer to her as the little girl buried her head in her mother’s arms, which was why she was looking away when the rear windows burst inward and a pair of flash bang grenades exploded in the face of the three mercenaries. Valerie hadn’t been looking at the flash and her eyes had been closed, but it was still bright enough that she had spots in her vision. The sound and concussion had left her ears filled with a hollow whistling and her brain muddled and only semi-coherent. She couldn’t hear Natalia crying, but she could feel the little girl shaking spasmodically in her grasp and knew she was in pain as well.
She blinked her eyes and lifted her head, risking a look around just in time to see the tattooed mercenary jerk backwards as holes were punched through his chest armor by a burst of incoming rifle fire. She could see the pain and surprise in his eyes, as if until that very moment, he had been convinced of his own immortality. He toppled backwards to join the other two guards: they’d already been shot before she’d looked up, apparently, since the blood was pooling under their bodies before the tattooed one hit the floor. Through the haze that dragged at her thoughts, she struggled to grasp at what that meant and from somewhere she felt a thrill of hope.
The back door flew inward at the kick of an armored boot and three faceless figures of dark camouflaged bulk stamped inside, moving swiftly and efficiently through the cabin, looking for opposition and finding only her and her daughter. One of them stepped over to Val and crouched beside her, a gloved hand resting lightly on her shoulder.
There was a distorted buzzing and she sensed that the armored figure was trying to say something, but her hearing was still fried from the flash-bangs and she shook her head, touching her ear demonstratively with a hand. The man worked a latch on his faceplate and swung it upward; beneath it was the very familiar and very welcome face of Jason McKay. She felt an uncontrollable relief drain all the strength and resolve she’d stored up and she sobbed as she threw an arm around his neck and hugged him.
“Are you okay?” She could finally hear what he was saying as he yelled the question in her ear.
“We’re fine!” She yelled back, and her own voice sounded distant and distorted. I knew you would come for us, she wanted to say but didn’t. “Just get us out of here!”
“Sean, come get her!” McKay called into his helmet radio loud enough for her to hear before he closed and re-latched his faceplate.
Three more armored soldiers rushed into the cabin and one offered her a hand while the others stood guard. She hesitantly took it, letting him draw her to her feet with ease despite her holding her three-year-old daughter.
“Mommy!” she could hear Natalia shriek. “Who are dey?”
“They’re friends, honey,” she told the terrified little girl. “They’re going to take us home.” But this was home, she thought, surprised at the bitterness that welled up with it.
They were moving towards the ruined back door when she felt more than heard the massive, concussive impact from the front of the house, and the trooper guarding her pulled her and Natalia to the floor, covering them with his body.
“What the hell is that?” she heard the man ask from right next to her ear. But she had a horrible feeling she knew exactly what it was.
Crouching behind the cover of the flyer that he had arrived in, inputting targeting commands into his tablet, Xavier Dominguez tried to make himself feel rage at the attack, or glee at the carnage that he was about to unleash on the enemy…but he couldn’t. He couldn’t feel anything. It was as if a personality had flowed into him over the last few months and now just over the last few hours had flowed out, leaving him an empty shell just going through the motions. He was beginning to doubt his sanity, but his head hurt when he had thoughts like that and he wondered if he wasn’t being allowed to doubt anything…which only made his head hurt even worse.
Bullets punching into the hard carbon fiber of the other side of the flyer shook him out of his reverie and he sighed in resignation as he pressed the fire control. It took just a couple minutes, though it seemed longer with the gunfire and the occasional grenade explosion. He saw three of the biomechs down in the shadow of the large tiltrotor that had been their transport, and another fell as he watched, a rifle grenade blowing off one of its legs.
Then the first KE weapon struck like the hammer of a god, a streak of ionized air trailing behind it like a lightning bolt, a sonic boom echoing through the sky but drowned out by the explosion of liberated energy that uprooted trees and sent bits of wood and rock flying like shrapnel. The next tungsten rod followed only seconds later, then another, then another, until the whole wood line on the other side of the dirt road erupted in a constant drumbeat of rolling thunder and flashes of lightning that left afterimages in Dominguez’s vision even after he looked away.
It was a glorious, awe-inspiring display of power and it was in his hands. He should have felt god-like, but all he could think was that he hoped that none of them had got away. He waited until the last KE rod had impacted, then turned to Sergeant McElroy, the mercenary who was controlling the biomechs.
“Send them in and make sure they’re all dead,” he ordered her. “We don’t need any more surprises.”
“Yes, sir,” she said with a nod, typing commands into the control pad strapped to her left arm.
“Sir!” Dominguez turned and saw Captain Romero, the senior officer of the mercenaries trotting up to him, urgency in his tone and the look on his face. “I can’t raise the men we left with Senator O’Keefe-Mulrooney!”
“This was a fucking distraction!” Dominguez snarled in irritation, turning back to the cabin. “Get in there now!” He turned to McElroy. “Get me a dozen troops around the back of the cabin, block off the rear entrance! The rest get on line right here and back up Captain Romero.”
“How the hell did they get behind us?” McElroy muttered, not looking up from her control pad.
“Doesn’t matter,” Dominguez said, shaking his head. “They won’t be getting out.” He brought up his tablet. “Our hostages have outlived their usefulness.”
Jason McKay scrambled up from the cabin floor before the last sonic boom had ceased to echo, a cold, dead feeling in the pit of his stomach. Dominguez had done the unexpected: he’d gone outside to meet the attack instead of staying under cover…and taken the defense satellite controller with him.
“Lieutenant Bryant!” He radioed, trying to reach the Marine platoon leader. “Lt. Bryant, report!” Silence. “Any Marine personnel report!”
“No way they could have made it through that, sir,” Vinnie said from where he was crouching by t
he back door.
“Sean,” McKay said to the NCO, “they’re going to know we’re here. Get them out of here before…”
“Contact left!” Vinnie shouted, immediately opening fire.
McKay spun around and caught a glimpse of grey-armored biomechs coming around the corner of the house before incoming fire began cutting through the ruined door and windows, forcing him back. Vinnie emptied a magazine at the biomechs but then fell backwards heavily as a pair of rounds smacked into his chest armor. Jock surged forward, firing his carbine with one hand to suppress the enemy as he ducked in and grabbed his friend by the handle built into the back of his body armor, dragging him back behind the relative cover of an exterior wall.
McKay didn’t see any blood and Vinnie seemed to be moving, if gingerly. He moved to check on him when the front windows exploded inward with a withering barrage of gunfire that sent everyone flat to the floor. McKay cursed as he tried to watch the front and back simultaneously, swinging his carbine back and forth.
“Commander Villanueva,” he transmitted to the lander’s pilot. “This is General McKay, do you read?”
“Got you, sir,” he barely heard her voice in his earphones over the enemy gunfire. “What’s your situation?”
“Dominguez didn’t stay in the cabin,” he told her. “He went outside and took out the Marines with the KE satellites. We’re trapped inside the cabin with the Senator and her daughter.” He hesitated for a breath. “Launch the Bunker Buster, Commander.”
He waited for a reply, but none came. “Commander?” He called. “Commander Villanueva, do you read me?”
Nothing.
“Goddammit!” he hissed. He’d just have to hope she’d received the transmission. He switched to the general frequency. “Everyone load up a grenade,” he ordered. “We’re making a break out the back, making for the lake. Vinnie, are you okay?”
“I’ll be fine, sir,” he heard the man’s strained voice. “Armor stopped the shots…mostly.”
“I want you to take Val and Natalia and run for the lake while we provide suppressive fire,” he told the man, pulling a grenade from his vest pouches and loading into the launcher beneath his rifle barrel. “Once you get them to the water, grab a life jacket out of the boat and a line off the dock. You tow them across the lake and get them out of here.”
“Let Jock do it,” Vinnie argued. “He’s got muscle where his brains oughta’ be, he can get them across faster than me.”
“This isn’t a democracy, Major Mahoney,” McKay said with finality in his tone. “Follow your orders.” He turned to Valerie and keyed his external helmet speaker, turning the volume up to be heard over the gunfire. “Valerie, get ready to make a run for it! Vinnie’s going to take you and Natalia across the lake.”
She didn’t say anything, but McKay could see the terror in her eyes when she nodded to him in acknowledgement.
McKay raised his carbine and took the safety off the grenade launcher, trying to ignore the bullets tearing through the air all around them, smacking angrily into the furniture and the interior walls. He looked back at the other five in his squad and saw that Sean Watanabe was bleeding from a wound in his left arm, trying to bring up his grenade launcher one-handed, while one of the other two men in Sean’s team---he couldn’t tell if it was Brent or Timmons---was face-down and motionless, a pool of blood spreading beneath his shattered faceplate.
He tried to put that image and everything else aside as he aimed through the rear windows at the advancing biomechs.
“Fire…” he began to exclaim, but before the word was entirely out of his mouth, a burst of 8mm slugs tracked upward across his chest, not penetrating the hard armor there but slamming into his clavicle like a sledgehammer and snapping it, then slicing a line of fire across his neck before chewing a gouge in the side of his helmet and nearly ripping it off his head. His finger squeezed the trigger of the grenade launcher convulsively and the round actually fired true, hitting in the ground only a meter in front of a group of three biomechs and bursting with a brilliant fireball. McKay barely noticed it as he fell flat on his back, agony coursing through his right shoulder and stars flashing across his vision.
“Get them out!” He tried to yell the command, but it came out as a strained whisper instead. He still couldn’t see anything but the ceiling and the flashes from the blow to his head, but he heard the explosions and felt the concussion through the floor. For a moment, he thought that it was the others launching their rifle grenades, but then he felt the whole cabin shake and saw pieces of the front door flying over his head, blown out by a powerful shockwave that sent tongues of flame licking through the doorway and windows into the living room.
Gritting his teeth against the pain in his chest, neck and head, McKay rolled to his left and yanked aside his broken faceplate, trying to see what was happening. Smoke was drifting across the lake from over the cabin, where…whatever it was had happened, but through the smoke he could still see four of the biomechs moving, their rifle barrels swinging to and fro in confusion.
He heard the whine of turbines first, then saw the exhaust spraying ripples across the surface of the lake, as the sleekly angular grey bulk of the assault lander descended into his view from overhead, bristling with weapons’ hardpoints. The chin cannon swung around towards the surviving biomechs. The burst of fire was brief, just a “chuff” of smoke and a spark of muzzle blast that lasted an eyeblink, but the biomechs just…disappeared. There was an explosion of dirt and smoke and blood and the four artificial soldiers were gone, leaving in their place scattered armor and body parts.
The lander hung there in the air, its jets screaming in the night, then it lurched forward and swung back around towards the front of the house. There was the distinct sound of another burst from the chin cannon, then an explosion that made the roof timbers tremble.
Another missile, McKay realized. The explosions had been from ground-support missiles, he now understood. Son of a bitch, he thought with irrational irritation. Commander Villanueva had disobeyed his orders.
Still half in a daze, McKay pulled his damaged helmet the rest of the way off with his good arm, then tried to get his feet beneath him to stand. Jock Gregory was suddenly there by his side, carefully helping him up and then pressing a smart bandage to the side of his neck. McKay abruptly realized that his armor was stained with way too much blood and that the neck wound had been much closer to being fatal than he would have liked.
“Valerie…” McKay rasped, looking around.
She was half-under a table just a couple meters away, with Sean Watanabe draped over her and blood staining the floor around them. McKay stepped quickly over and grabbed the armored man by the shoulder, rolling him off her. Watanabe was clearly dead. He’d taken a burst through the neck and faceplate that had cut his jugular and taken off the left side of his head. Valerie and Natalia were lying motionless on the floor, covered in blood and McKay felt gorge rising in his throat…and then he saw her move, heard Natalia crying.
“Oh Jesus God,” he breathed, kneeling down beside her. “Are you all right? Is Natalia all right?”
Valerie didn’t answer immediately, her eyes blinking Sean Watanabe’s blood away. She seemed to have to pry her gaze away from his body to check on Natalia, slowly and lovingly patting at the little girl’s dress and making sure that she was unharmed. Natalia was sobbing, but seemed to calm down as she saw that her mother was all right. The little girl’s eyes went to McKay and got a bit wider.
I must be a sight, he thought.
“Are you okay, Natalia?” he asked her, trying to keep his voice light.
She nodded, thumb going towards her mouth before Valerie automatically pulled it away.
McKay let out a sigh of relief and nearly collapsed, since the worry had been about the only thing keeping him going. He rose slowly from the crouch, looking around. Jock was helping Vinnie up from the floor, while Sgt. Timmons had his carbine up and was keeping a watchful eye out the back entrance. S
o it’s Brent that got hit, McKay thought.
“Timmons, check on Brent,” he told the man. “Then keep an eye on the Senator and her daughter. Jock, Vinnie, with me.”
McKay’s carbine was tight against his chest, pulled there by its retractable sling after he’d let it loose, but he left it where it was rather than trying to wield it one-handed. Instead, he reached around with his left hand to his right hip and yanked his sidearm from its holster, letting it hang at his side. The painkillers in the smart bandage were starting to take effect, but he still didn’t want to try doing anything with his right arm just yet.
He didn’t so much walk out the front door as step through what was left of the front wall. Stepping outside, he found himself walking through a storm of swirling smoke still being stirred by the jets of the assault shuttle as it landed on the dirt road next to the burning wreckage of the flyer and the tiltrotor transport that had brought Dominguez and the biomechs to the cabin.
The dirt road was cratered and torn, littered with bodies and body parts barely discernible in the flickering shadows from the fires. The woods beyond the road simply didn’t exist anymore: a square acre of trees had been uprooted or blown apart by the KE barrage and a haze of black smoke and dust hung over them like a shroud.
“Over here, sir!” He heard Vinnie calling him from behind the wreckage of the small flyer and he turned and carefully made his way around it, trying not to step on anything squishy.
He found the Captain---no, the Major, he corrected himself---standing over a body. The corpse was charred almost beyond recognition, flash-burned by the explosion of the missile that had taken out the flyer, but half-concealed beneath it was a small tablet…
McKay shoved his pistol into his belt and pulled a flashlight out, then pushed the smoking remains aside with his boot, clenching his teeth at the sickly-sweet smell and the crunchy feel of the burned flesh under his foot. Kneeling down, he shone the flashlight beam on the tablet.